Technical leaders have wrestled with the challenge of migrating these legacy systems for years, knowing the immense value locked within them is matched only by the difficulty of extracting it.
But the landscape is fundamentally changing. With the rapid development of Generative AI, unraveling these complexities is now within reach. We are officially in the era of AI-led and AI-assisted modernization. What was once a multi-year, high-risk endeavor can now be an accelerated, value-driven strategic initiative.
Four pillars of accelerated modernization
Through our partnership with Google Cloud, we leverage an AI toolkit that’s a catalyst for transformation. It provides a powerful set of capabilities that directly addresses the following modernization hurdles and turns blockers into accelerators.
Pillar 1. Automated discovery and understanding
The first challenge in any modernization project is understanding what you have. Application logic and business rules are often poorly documented and locked within millions of lines of legacy code like COBOL, PL/I, JCL, PowerBuilder and ICEfaces.
GenAI-powered tools can now perform digital archeology on your codebase, automatically analyzing dependencies, identifying dead code and translating archaic business logic into plain language. This dramatically reduces the assessment phase from years to months, providing a clear, data-driven roadmap for what comes next.
Pillar 2. Intelligent code conversion and refactoring
Manually rewriting legacy code is slow, error-prone and risks losing the critical business logic that runs your company.
GenAI models like Gemini, trained on vast datasets of code, can automate the conversion of languages like COBOL to modern, cloud-native languages like Java — doing so faster and more consistently than human effort alone. This accelerates the core migration process, reduces human error and lays the groundwork for a more agile, service-oriented architecture.
Pillar 3. Autonomous test generation
Testing is often the single biggest bottleneck in a modernization project. Ensuring functional equivalence between the legacy and modernized application is paramount to de-risking the cutover.
Instead of creating tests manually, GenAI can analyze both the source and the newly generated code to create comprehensive test suites automatically. This validates all logic paths, achieving higher test coverage in a fraction of the time and building critical business confidence.
Pillar 4. AIOps for optimized cloud operations
The work doesn’t end when migration is complete. The goal is to run workloads more efficiently and cost-effectively in the cloud.
AIOps automates your new cloud environment, enabling intelligent workload placement, proactive monitoring, anomaly detection and performance tuning. This lowers your total cost of ownership (TCO) and ensures your modernized environment delivers on the promise of greater efficiency and reliability from day one.
The AI-driven RaMP journey: Supercharging a proven framework
This powerful AI toolkit is the engine, but our clients need a map and a vehicle for their journey. That's why we've built our modernization practice around Google Cloud and its Rapid Assessment & Migration Program (RaMP).
It’s the vehicle that gets our clients to their destination faster and safer. To understand the program's essence, we turn to our partner, Mike Craigen, Customer Engineer at Google.
Google Cloud's Rapid Migration & Modernization Program (RAMP) is a comprehensive, end-to-end framework designed to accelerate and de-risk your cloud journey. RAMP provides a structured approach, bringing together prescriptive methodologies, best practices, curated tools, and a strong partner ecosystem. It guides you through assessing your current environment, planning your foundation, and executing your migration and modernization, while also addressing the critical people, process, and cultural shifts necessary for a successful transformation to Google Cloud.
At Valtech, we use RaMP as a proven methodology, supercharged by AI, to deliver results for our clients. We help you navigate and maximize the powerful resources the program offers:
- Investments and Incentives: We help our clients access funding based on committed spend, which can support foundations, migration services and training credits.
- Google Cloud Migration Center: This self-service platform is your command center, offering prescriptive guidance, accurate TCO reports and technical fit analysis. Google Cloud's AI-powered discovery tools feed directly into the Migration Center, giving us a rich, accurate inventory to plan your large-scale migration effectively.
- Google Cloud Well-Architected Framework: This framework provides best practices to build secure, efficient and cost-effective cloud architectures. The AIOps capabilities in Google Cloud's AI toolkit ensure that once migrated, your architecture continually aligns with these principles for ongoing excellence.
The human element: 5 best practices for success
Technology alone isn’t enough. In our experience guiding clients through these transformations, we’ve seen five best practices prove crucial for success:
- Alignment: Secure top-down executive support with a compelling business case.
- Objectives and key results (OKRs): Create clear, measurable goals to unify teams.
- Governance: Establish a strong program management team to track progress and proactively address risks.
- Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE): Develop a dedicated cloud team to drive adoption and best practices.
- Learning: Implement a broad training plan to empower your existing talent for the future.
Start your AI-accelerated RaMP journey with Valtech
AI has transformed mainframe and datacenter modernization from a high-risk necessity into a strategic, value-driven opportunity. By combining Google Cloud's leading LLMs and RaMP with our deep AI expertise, you have a complete blueprint for success that combines groundbreaking technology with a proven, holistic methodology.
Are you ready to unlock the full potential of your legacy systems on Google Cloud? Then start your assessment with us at Valtech.
We are a dedicated RaMP partner, and we will work with you to leverage every available resource — from investment incentives to the Migration Center — to build a clear, AI-accelerated roadmap for your most critical applications.
