Old products don’t easily solve new problems. Yet, today we see hundreds of thousands of customers using an extensive portfolio of legacy products while expecting new-age user experiences and a steady improvement in scalability, security, and reliability.
Legacy systems are familiar, but have their drawbacks
Legacy products shift focus away from innovation and can burden your bottom line
With an increasingly unsustainable amount of resources allocated to legacy product maintenance and customer support, it is hard for software companies to keep their focus on innovation and stay competitive.
In addition, supporting product lines that don’t fit into a company’s strategic plans or with declining revenues lead to low-profit margins and drag on valuation.
Dusty, redundant stacks and expired UX
Once leading-edge technology stacks quickly become obsolete and non-compliant. Outdated UX, together with feature sets that are non-compliant with government regulations, make obsolescence inevitable for these stacks. Another factor that makes them increasingly difficult to maintain is the growing scarcity of skilled resources in the market.
In addition, there are a lot of redundancies and overlap brought on by M&A, as merger and acquisition activity by software companies often leaves them with redundant product lines and variants of products that do essentially the same thing.
They can dent your brand experience
With a wide portfolio of legacy products, maintaining the brand experience becomes challenging. Long-term customers of legacy products expect continued support and upgrades. A poorly executed sustenance strategy can be detrimental to a carefully cultivated brand experience.
Also, functionally, certain products are intended to support only a few niche customers, with no up versioning, upgrading, or refreshing requirement. These products quickly become a nightmare for the product engineering team.
Legacy’s lure and likeability
Even with all the issues that have been highlighted, legacy products have tremendous untapped value. With the right technology infusions, there is tremendous potential to delight loyal customers while extending revenue pipelines and improving the bottom line.
A portfolio of legacy products comes with an enviable set of loyal customers, a ready base of customers can dovetail into newer product lines and fuel growth for software businesses.
Lengthening the legacy
From chatbot-driven customer support to AI/ML-based operations, several options can help improve user experience and stickiness while reducing spends on legacy products.
Leveraging new-age AI/ML-based tools to identify code hotspots, churn, and complexity can improve overall product robustness and cut sustenance team efforts by half. With the right infusions of technology, legacy products can surpass their expected lifespan and continue to be profitable.
The legacy lives on: Lengthening the legacy
Persistent’s ExtenSURE, a first of its kind framework in the software industry, leverages our Software 4.0 methodology in addressing the age-old problem of product sustenance. It takes a data-driven approach to product transition and transformation, giving software companies the actionable insights they require to extend the life of their legacy products.
Read more about this in our latest whitepaper – Legacy Lives On: An Insights-driven approach to Modernizing Legacy Products
