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As we approach the end of 2023, our focus turns to reflection — a look back on the past year’s activities, challenges, and accomplishments, but also a forward view of our goals and aspirations for the New Year.
Within the enterprise IT community, 2023 has seen momentous change, including new M&A activity within the infrastructure software market, the growing popularity of AI for consumer and business use cases, as well as greater adoption of multi-cloud strategies targeting mission-critical workloads.
While these are just a few of the many tech highlights from this past year, Ed Airey, VP of Marketing at AveriSource, caught up with a few colleagues to capture their views and predictions for 2024 — and what the New Year may offer for the application modernization market. Here is a snapshot of his recent discussion with the AveriSource team, including:
- Emmett Hynous, VP of Global Sales
- Stephanie Walter, Head of Product
- Stephen Hodges, Director of Solutions
- Ed Airey, VP of Marketing
Ed posed the following questions to the team: “What are your predictions for 2024 and do you have any thoughts on how the New Year will shape the application modernization market?” Below are their responses and fascinating insights into the future of application modernization in 2024.
David Gutzman
“I see exciting changes coming in 2024. As the macroenvironment begins to shift, including a stabilization of interest rates and a cooling housing market, the resulting climate for IT investment starts to take a new shape. I see a renewed interest in IT spending fueling innovation, where prior budgets were more focused on ‘keeping the lights on’ for the business. This new investment appetite I see is transforming how IT leaders go to market and where they invest for growth and differentiation.
The advent of AI has driven new consumer interest, new vendor offerings, and strong private equity investment. I would expect to see this trend continue as the modernization market continues to heat up, fueled by customer motivation to act, and continual cloud vendor momentum. The timing is now optimal for market acceleration in 2024 and all the pieces are in place to realize significant growth. Today is the time to modernize legacy applications.
At AveriSource, we are ready to meet that opportunity with industry-leading, innovative technology — the AveriSource Platform™ enabling our customers and partners to accelerate mainframe and midrange modernization — from mainframe to cloud. You will be hearing a lot more about the latest release of the AveriSource Platform 2.0 in the New Year. It is an exciting time to be in this market and many new opportunities are on the horizon.”
Emmett Hynous
“I see 2024 as the year where there’s even greater focus on the value of application documentation in support of successful modernization projects. Understanding your application environment is critically important to both a successful project start and its outcome. Modernization roadmaps require deeper insight into your application estate, source environment, codebase, target architecture, skillsets, and resources.
Only the AveriSource Platform enables you to start, stop, and continue your modernization journey at a pace that best suits the business strategy — both now and in the future. As we have learned from over 30 years of successful customer projects, deeper application knowledge enables better decisions, faster time to market, and higher levels of IT efficiency. Our unique application modernization platform enables you to start strong with a focus on application assessment, discovery, planning, and documentation. Build on that knowledge gained through deeper insights into the application codebase and then modernize what matters most, leaving behind the technical debt.
Application documentation is the starting point from which a successful modernization journey begins. Whether your need is to replace lost subject matter expertise, onboard new IT staff, or meet compliance and regulation requirements, the importance of documentation remains high in 2024. My advice for the New Year? Build a digital transformation plan that delivers an end-to-end solution — from documentation to transformation.”
Stephanie Walter
“As my colleagues have shared, you cannot ignore the influence and impact of AI in 2024, as it is sure to be a significant force for change, innovation, and growth. But in my experience, the true impact and customer benefit of artificial intelligence will happen incrementally. AI is a big buzzword right now and a market trend that every company wants to leverage, but getting value out of this new phenomenon today may be another story altogether.
For the application modernization market, I believe that we will see many organizations start to use AI to assist with tasks such as generating modernized code. A good example of this application is the AveriSource Transform™ technology. Other related examples may include popular code assistant tools such as AWS CodeWhisperer and Microsoft CoPilot. AI is certainly going to play a strong role in automating the code transformation space in 2024.
I also predict that many modernization platforms will become much smarter in 2024. Organizations have been converting legacy code for a while now using a wide range of best practices, patterns, and anti-patterns as it applies to their specific modernization journey. I predict that these popular tools and platforms will become more intelligent and start to make recommendations as well as provide contextual guidance within modernization projects. The goal for this new form of intelligence is to enable a smarter and more efficient modernization journey, especially helpful as legacy skillsets needed for these modernization projects are difficult to find.
The AveriSource Platform enables this approach today through its AveriSource Scan™ offering providing instant insight into your complete codebase along with risk assessments and additional modernization package recommendations. This is just the beginning as we are at the very forefront of AI taking a larger role in application transformation and legacy modernization. 2024 will be a big year for both AI and AveriSource.”
Stephen Hodges
“I believe the future of programming will begin to change in 2024. Led by the growing adoption of AI and popular tools such as ChatGPT, programming will be the next frontier to benefit from the influence of natural language processing. Machine learning models are the next evolution in this journey where AI assists in the auto typing of language identification, parsing code syntax, conducting automated analysis, code generation, and application interfacing.
I see an opportunity to transform traditional software development by building AI models to learn any programming language — an idea that is not only possible but probable. The benefit to IT would be tremendous enabling organizations to shift from legacy environments to modern tech by instantly converting programming languages. This ‘any-to-any’ AI language model could help organizations address future skill gaps, as well as align existing technology stacks to the current talent pool. This is just one example of how AI could benefit the programming landscape by improving efficiency, time to market, and usability.
I also see from the past, that many software vendors have just been ‘getting the job done,’ but now the focus will begin moving towards workflow and usability, catering more to the user, and accelerating more tasks. 2024 is poised to be an interesting year and I cannot wait to see how AI and our planned future AveriSource Platform releases will continue to shape the future of programming, analysis, and application transformation.”
Ed Airey
“As my colleagues outlined above, 2024 is positioned to be another banner year for technological innovation and progress, led by new advances in artificial intelligence. For the application modernization market, I also see the continued influence of AI, but with a stronger focus on addressing the legacy SME skills issue, as well. Post-pandemic, the challenge of locating skilled talent with legacy expertise is becoming even more challenging for today’s IT leaders. Securing that seasoned IT talent is also quite expensive, challenging organizations to look at alternatives for needed skills and technical knowledge. These pressures, coupled with the availability of AI-powered code assist tools, will drive IT leaders to modernize legacy applications and align their technology stacks to today’s talent pool.
For example, moving from COBOL or RPG to Java or C# is very possible using the AveriSource Platform. Java or C# skills are readily available in the marketplace and at a more competitive price point as compared to premium legacy skills. Although a full modernization of IT will take time, 2024 will be the year that many IT leaders begin aligning their tech stacks to their future talent profile. We have already seen these skills conversations accelerate many modernization initiatives and I anticipate this topic fueling even more legacy code transformation projects in 2024. It will be an exciting year!”
Final Thoughts
We live in interesting times, especially for those who crave continual change and technological innovation. This past year showed us a glimpse of what is possible from artificial intelligence and virtual reality. We can expect much more in 2024 as these technology markets evolve and IT budgets rebound. For those planning or progressing their application modernization journey, there’s even more exciting news just around the corner.
The AveriSource Platform™ 2.0 release is nearly here and will challenge how organizations plan, assess, discover, analyze, and transform legacy applications. Powered by AI, this unified platform enables an end-to-end journey to IT transformation — but with the onboard controls needed to guide one’s individual roadmap. Start, stop, pause, and accelerate your IT transformation projects at a speed that meets your business strategy and core objectives. Designed for efficiency and ease of use, the AveriSource Platform UX transforms the practitioner experience and delivers instant insight and knowledge for modernization planning.
The year 2024 is poised to be a year of acceleration, growth, and innovation. For our team at AveriSource, along with our strategic partners, it is an exciting time to be supporting this rapid change and IT transformation for our customers and a journey that we cannot wait to accelerate as we race into 2024.
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