Cost of Missed Opportunities when Stuck on Legacy Platforms

Falling Behind Customer Expectations

A constant theme in every industry is that customers learn and their expectations evolve. Five years ago customers may not have cared that the checkout process was slow but, now, they have a preconfigured idea of what a checkout experience should be. Customers expect checkout to work that way, companies want their checkout to work that way, but commerce platforms built 10 years ago don’t always support checkout in that way. 

One way to solve this is to supplement a legacy platform with in-house development to fill the gaps, but this means spending a lot of time and resources on just keeping pace with the competition. 

Alternatively, moving to a platform with modern features and functionality can free up internal developers from reinventing the wheel and allow them to focus on more unique, differentiating parts of the customer experience. 

Of course, a new platform isn’t magic, it’s still possible to build a terrible customer experience with modern platforms. The platform just provides the capabilities needed to build a good experience and, because many of them were built for iterations and rapid release cycles, the customer feedback loop can happen faster. So instead of months-long customer experience projects that are already out of data by the time they launch, companies can continuously build, test, and optimize the experience to keep ahead of evolving customer expectations

Missing Out on Innovation

The most innovative software vendors a few years ago likely aren’t the same companies leading their space today, and it’s worth examining the rate of innovation happening on your core platforms. Some service providers make big leaps early on, grab a large part of the market, and gradually slow down the development of the platform while still keeping many long-term customers that were acquired during their more innovative days. 

For the software or platform vendor, according to Boston Consulting Group’s still popular and relevant Growth-Share Matrix, these platforms are a “cash cow” that the company can milk to reinvest in other areas of their business. For the businesses stuck on these platforms, it’s a case of feeding money into a company that’s no longer innovating in a relevant way. 

Moving to a new platform is a chance to look at the market and see what innovations are out there. This includes looking at the 3rd-party solution providers you already partner with to see if they are innovating in ways you weren’t aware of. In a nutshell, platform migration is a great opportunity to evaluate your integrated internal and external services and make strategic changes.

Locked Into Legacy Ways of Working

Traditional, monolith platforms can be so ingrained in business processes that companies feel locked into legacy contracts. Many modern technologies, on the other hand, are designed to be modular and support a composable enterprise approach that is more able to adapt to change. 

Composable platform providers, like those in the MACH Alliance, have begun to provide a way for companies to mix-and-match the services in their tech stack. We’ve only seen a glimpse of what opportunities this modular approach will open for businesses, and companies starting their transition to composable technology now are laying the groundwork for even more flexibility in the future. 

A modular approach also means that companies don’t have to leave their legacy platforms in one big-bang replacement, but can gradually step off and replace the legacy platform services with modern ones in stages. This approach has been made popular by Martin Fowler and is entitled “Strangler Fig Application”. This flexibility means that businesses are no longer locked into behemoth solutions that previously felt too hard to change, and that they now have the negotiating power to make more strategic decisions about the platforms they want to work with.

The question to answer is a straightforward one: continue to pour resources into an existing platform that gets obsolete short- to mid-term or invest into a new platform that offers an appealing roadmap and flexibility? At first glance, it seems like an easy question, but the right answer needs a base of thorough analysis and expertise – and the experience and guts to deliver it. 

Mindcurv has helped many businesses accelerate the transition from monolith to modular, and we invite you to get in touch and work with us to uncover the opportunities that a modern platform could bring to your business.