The company had built solid technology in its time. Its fiber-optic network mapping software served real needs in the telecom industry and had earned a legitimate customer base. But years of adding features under deadline pressure, without corresponding investment in architecture or automation, had created a system the team could barely manage. Most of the engineering capacity went to support. Very little went to anything new.
Customer satisfaction was falling. Revenue was under pressure. The company was, by its leadership’s own assessment, approaching bankruptcy.
The challenge was not simply to modernize the system. It was to do so while keeping the existing product running and the existing customers retained, all without the luxury of time or a large budget for rework.
A Strategy Built Around Capacity
The first priority was the engineering team itself. No modernization effort succeeds when the people responsible for it are spending most of their time keeping a legacy system from falling over. VergeOps worked with leadership to develop a deliberate strategy for reducing the support burden: identifying which categories of support requests could be addressed through targeted fixes, which could be handled with workarounds or configuration changes, and which were symptoms of deeper architectural problems that the new platform needed to solve properly.
This triage work is unglamorous. It rarely appears in project plans. But it is almost always the most important early step in a legacy modernization engagement, because without it, the team building the future is perpetually interrupted by the past.
Once the support burden was brought under control, the team had the capacity to focus forward. The strategy framed this clearly: stop managing the legacy system’s decline and start building the platform that would replace it.
Cloud SaaS Architecture Alongside Legacy
The new platform was designed as a cloud-native SaaS product built on Azure fully managed services. Critically, the architecture accounted for integration with the existing legacy system throughout the transition period using the strangler fig pattern. Customers would not face a hard cutover. The new product would extend functionality and eventually replace the legacy system incrementally, which reduced risk significantly for both the company and its clients.
This parallel-path architecture requires more careful design than a greenfield build. The seams between old and new need to be explicit, well-tested, and versioned. VergeOps brought experience with this pattern from other modernization engagements, which shortened the time needed to get the architecture right.
Container orchestration through Kubernetes simplified operations from day one. Whereas cloud resources were previous created and managed by hand, everything was migrated to Terraform. Deployment became reproducible and automated rather than environment-specific and manual. The same configuration that ran in dev and QA ran in staging and production. An entire class of environment-related defects disappeared.
What We Built
Cloud SaaS Platform
A new cloud-native product built on fully managed services, designed to integrate with legacy systems throughout the transition and deliver new capabilities to market rapidly without a disruptive customer cutover.
Container Orchestration
Kubernetes-based infrastructure that replaced manual, environment-specific deployments with automated, reproducible builds, freeing the operations team from routine deployment toil and eliminating environment-driven defects.
DevSecOps and Team Enablement
Security, testing, and automation built into the development workflow from the start. The team was trained throughout the engagement, not handed a set of tools at the end. By the time the engagement concluded, the practices were theirs to sustain and extend independently.
The Outcome
Within 90 days of beginning the new platform build, a product was in market. The speed was not accidental. It was the result of architecture decisions made deliberately at the start, an engineering team that had been given capacity to work forward, and deployment automation that made shipping fast and low-risk.
Nine months after the engagement began, the company was acquired. The turnaround had been decisive enough to attract a buyer, and the financial pressure that had threatened the company’s existence had been replaced by a competitive position worth acquiring.
In the post-acquisition period, this organization was recognized as the technology powerhouse of the new company. What had been the weakest link in the portfolio became the model that other business units were asked to follow.
Facing a Similar Challenge?
If your organization is carrying technical debt that has grown into a strategic liability, or your engineering team is spending more time keeping legacy systems alive than building for the future, VergeOps can help. We have deep experience in modernization programs that deliver results without disrupting what is working today.