The term “replatforming” is more than a trendy buzzword, it’s become a strategic imperative for most businesses as they work to compete in an ever more digital era.

All businesses rely on their digital foundation.  However, for most businesses, the challenge is that these foundations have been around for too long.  They are cracking, hard to maintain, and not ready to support the growth and change required to remain responsive in an always accelerating business environment.

Replatforming is also one of those terms that is easy to say, much harder to define, and always a challenge to undertake.  There isn’t one agreed upon definition of what constitutes a replatform program.  It can vary from a straightforward “lift and shift” migration to a new environment to a complete architectural rewrite, a renovation or simple modernization facelift.  Usually, a pragmatic approach to replatforming for most businesses lies somewhere amongst all of these options.   In practice though, your replatforming strategy will be specific to your organization’s unique challenges and opportunities.

At Intelliware, we’ve undertaken dozens of successful replatforming projects, and are working on several right now.  Our clients look to us for advice on how to approach replatforming, and their questions come from any number of different angles.  We thought it was a good time to get our thoughts down in writing, to help give people some perspective on the issues they’ll need to consider when deciding to take on a replatforming program, pitfalls to avoid, and provide recommendations on how to undertake a systems modernization, regardless of scale.

Just like the ill-advised “big-bang” approach to most projects, rather than try to get this all down in one prescriptive document, we felt it was more appropriate to take an Agile approach by publishing a series of smaller whitepapers that look at replatforming from a host of different perspectives.  So, over the course of the coming weeks and months, we are committed to covering the topic with regular whitepaper releases that we hope will help guide your approach to undertaking any replatforming efforts necessary to repair or replace your cracking digital foundation.

To get started, and offer an introductory background on the topic, we’re releasing this paper discussing “What is replatforming?”.  Why bother? How should you think about the project?  What is the historical context for replatforming programs?

This first introductory paper sets the groundwork on how we think about replatforming.  We hope you enjoy it and find it helpful. Click here to read our paper.