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The Challenge

The retailer had developed software solutions to enhance the Point of Sale (POS) systems for team members, as well as, creating dozens of back-office integrated systems. The software platform was originally developed using the Microsoft .NET/ASP.NET language and framework.

To keep pace and parity with the broader marketplace, the retailer sought to transform and modernize the ASP.NET applications and to reduce the costs of operation and maintenance.

The retailer wanted to be become product-centric and Agile with delivery and improve platform deployment, scaling, and access to Cloud tools. The retailer had a vision and target architecture and preferred frameworks to modern upon to enable better developer and team member experience and prepare for and support the company’s digital transformation.

The requirements were to shift to a prescribed web-based user interface that had been designed by the client, assist with module and domain design and functional layout to further cloud, microservices, and agility.

A manual rewrite was the direction originally pursued by the retailer, however long system delivery timelines, team size, budget constraints, cloud adoption maturity, and market place demands shaped a different approach.

Cost to Transition

Tool based modernization saves over 85% over a direct rewrite.

Cost to Operate

Adoption of cloud-native architectures and tooling improves scalability, performance, and functionality while maintaining similar costs.

Cloud tooling and resulting process improvements alone estimated to save over 9 weeks of developer time per year.

Timeline

Manual rewrite and client migration were estimated to take 2 – 3 years.
Tool based modernization 6 months to complete all products. Intermediate deployments throughout.

Customer Experience

No change to user experience.

Reduce deployment complexity with modern cloud and DevOps models of infrastructure management.

Architecture

Cloud-ready and scalable application.

Modernized .NET application with a modern Javascript web-based UI framework.

REST, XHR (Ajax), message/event-driven capabilities.

Microlith segregation and cloud-native architecture speed digital transformation

Intangible Benefits

Increase in the speed of new feature delivery.

Modern, best practices realized in new system architecture.

No wasted years recreating business processes, systems, and data.
Improved developer experience; attract wider market of developer talent

Before
Slow manual development and deployment models
Approximately 1.5 million lines of .NET/ASP.NET code
SQL Server (limited scalability)
100% manual testing

After
.NET Core with modern Javascript UI framework
Scalable SQL Server
DevOps end-to-end automation
Supports modern cloud-native architectures