Welcome to the final chapter of my VB6 Modernization trilogy!
If you’re just tuning in, this is a three-part series where I take an in-depth look at the three paths you can take when it comes to modernizing your VB6 apps. As with most things in life, each one brings with it differing levels of risk, required investment, and potential returns.
Path #1 is rewriting from the ground up. You can read it here.
Path #2 is all about porting. You can dive into that here.
All of this leads us to Path #3, which is incremental migration.
When we’re called in to do some due diligence for a PE fund or a 360 Tech Assessment for a client wanting to modernize their VB6 Apps, we often recommend an incremental approach to modernization. Experience shows it’s a low-risk, lower-cost, incremental path to modernization that can, if done carefully and correctly, become self-funding (eventually).
Let me walk you through what this can look like.
The first thing you want to do is put lipstick on the pig—invest a few week working with a UX designer and your current VB6 developers to freshen up your app. It’s amazing what changing colors, fonts, icons, graphics, and some visual controls can do for how users will perceive your product. After a few weeks of effort, users may not even be able to tell that your app is built in VB6.
Next, make a commitment to reduce the amount of new VB6 code you create. As the saying goes, when you find yourself stuck in a hole, stop digging.
Instead, build your new features outside of VB6 in modern desktop, web, and cloud technologies. Remember, you don’t need to be a purist! You can easily embed those newly built features and services into your existing VB6 apps. This will give your customers the modern components and experiences they want without having to wait for a “NextGen” product that might never arrive. Plus, your team will love the opportunity to build in, and take advantage of, the latest development tools and platforms.
That’s what I call a win-win!
Finally, do some brainstorming with your sales team and identify roles or personas in your current customer base that you aren’t currently targeting with your products. Very often, the users who are actually touching and using your VB6 products aren’t the ones signing the checks.
What web or mobile experiences can you provide that might surprise and delight the executives, field reps, and other users who aren’t directly touching your products? You have the domain expertise to figure out what they would want, and even more importantly, what they would pay for.
You have a solid VB6 product that contains the data they need. What’s missing are the modern user experiences that will unlock and unleash that data. We call these Systems of Engagement, and your legacy product should be thought of as the System of Record. Examples of Systems of Engagement include: mobile apps, web portals, dashboards, and even RESTful APIs.
If you can, you should build these Systems of Engagement as cloud-first, single-source, multi-tenant SaaS solutions that are linked in real time to your customer’s on-premise deployments of your VB6 apps.
Honestly, this is the best of both worlds! Think about it: you’re building on the strength of your current systems, extending them through the cloud and offering modern experiences to the people paying your invoices. Combined with a light refresh of your VB6 user interface, customers will quickly start thinking of your offerings as more modern and competitive, and your investments in multi-tenant cloud solutions will certainly increase your valuation.
As you continue to invest in these new revenue-generating Systems of Engagement, the overall footprint of your VB6 code will diminish. Over time, you can retire pieces of your VB6 apps. After a few years, you could retire your VB6 code entirely, or at least significantly reduce the amount of remaining VB6 code that you need to port to modern tech. This will greatly reduce the cost and risk of this porting effort.
And by that time, you’ll be in a stronger financial position because of your investments in revenue-generating Systems of Engagement.
Sound too good to be true? We know to some, this is going to sound like pie-in-the-sky dreaming. It’s not! We’ve helped several customers build exactly these kinds of solutions and they’ve helped generate net new revenue while taking a smarter approach to legacy app modernization.
If you are serious about strategically modernizing your VB6 app, shoot me a note and we’ll talk about a personalized modernization strategy to meet your business goals.
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