Transforming application portfolios can yield substantial advantages for an organization's IT strategic vision, encompassing:

•    Streamlined operations and simplified upkeep
•    Heightened business adaptability and creativity
•    Cost-effectiveness and optimization


To achieve these goals, InCycle provides a purpose-built approach and strategy. Engagements focus on leveraging portfolio management and application rationalization to drive tangible business value for your organization. We understand that in today's dynamic business environment, optimizing your technology portfolio is critical to achieving strategic objectives, improving operational efficiency, and maximizing return on investment. Through a comprehensive approach, we will help you align your portfolio with business priorities, eliminate redundancy, reduce costs, and ensure optimal resource allocation.

Enabling Modernization at Scale

Migrating and modernizing applications at scale requires advanced skills and expertise, along with careful considerations to achieve a successful and timely positive business ROI. The optimal approach for modernization will depend on various factors such as the applications, technologies, business objectives, and complexity involved. At InCycle, we excel in navigating the challenges of modernization, distinguishing between fact and fiction, and identifying immediate and future business opportunities.

Portfolio Modernization Objectives

• Strategic Alignment: We will assess your current portfolio to identify the alignment of applications with your organization's strategic goals and objectives. By understanding your business priorities, we can help prioritize investments and ensure that your technology landscape supports your long-term vision.
• Application Rationalization: Our team will conduct a thorough analysis of your application landscape, identifying redundancies, outdated systems, and underperforming applications. We will evaluate their business value, technical feasibility, and cost implications, providing actionable recommendations for rationalization and consolidation.
• Cost Optimization: By identifying and eliminating unnecessary applications and infrastructure, we will help you optimize your IT spending. Our experts will assess the total cost of ownership (TCO) for each application and provide insights on potential cost savings through consolidation, cloud migration, or retirement of redundant applications.
• Risk Mitigation: We will assess the risk exposure associated with your current portfolio, including security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and dependencies on unsupported technologies. Our team will provide risk mitigation strategies and ensure that your portfolio aligns with industry best practices, regulatory requirements, and emerging technologies.
• Resource Optimization: Through application rationalization, we will help you free up valuable resources, enabling your IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives and innovation. By streamlining your portfolio, you can enhance productivity, reduce maintenance efforts, and reallocate resources to high-impact projects.
  
  

Project Deliverables

• Portfolio Assessment Report: A comprehensive analysis of your current application portfolio, including strategic alignment, business value, technical feasibility, and cost considerations.
• Rationalization Roadmap: A detailed plan outlining the steps to rationalize your application portfolio, including prioritization, consolidation, retirement, and migration strategies.
• Cost Optimization Recommendations: Actionable insights on reducing IT costs through application consolidation, cloud migration, and infrastructure optimization.
• Risk Mitigation Strategy: A comprehensive approach to mitigate risks associated with your portfolio, ensuring compliance, security, and resilience.
• Resource Optimization Plan: Recommendations to optimize resource allocation, streamline processes, and enhance efficiency within your IT organization.
  
  

Project Approach

Application & Workload Inventory
If you have already compiled a thorough collection of application-related data for your portfolio, such as a spreadsheet or database, we will seamlessly integrate it into our process. This integration not only expedites the initial application analysis but also ensures its accuracy. On the other hand, if you currently lack this information, rest assured that we have numerous effective strategies to swiftly and precisely gather it for you.

Preparation & Planning
To achieve the best results in modernization initiatives, it is essential to analyze applications from various perspectives, taking into account their contextual relevance and strategic influence. While cost reduction is often a primary consideration, it is equally important to evaluate the business value and potential opportunities associated with each application in order to build a strong ROI/business case.

Given the extensive range of applications in your portfolio, conducting a detailed analysis of each workload or app may not be the most efficient approach initially. Instead, we suggest starting with a comprehensive portfolio analysis that provides a high-level overview, allowing for an initial categorization triage and inventory. This analysis takes into consideration both subjective business factors and objective technical factors, ultimately guiding the prioritization process and creating four distinct quadrants.

• Probably
• Definitely
• Possibly
• Unlikely

The X and Y axis of the graph represents the modernization potential and business value as percentages. The size of the bubbles indicates the estimated effort required for modernization, while the color represents the preliminary categories and technologies of the platforms.

After the initial analysis, the top candidates for modernization become evident, leading to a more in-depth evaluation of their technical aspects and potential opportunities. This includes considering factors such as the business context, technologies and skills involved, and different modernization options (such as scenario A versus scenario B). Additionally, we provide a preliminary estimation of the return on investment (ROI). With the help of our portfolio analysis, customers can quickly and easily identify and filter the applications that would be the easiest and have the greatest impact when migrating to Azure. Next, we assess each individual workload based on various key scoring factors.

Strategy & ROI

With a focus on your business goals, we work together to create a comprehensive strategy and roadmap for each application and workload. We understand the importance of effectively managing your workloads and applications to drive operational efficiency, foster innovation, and achieve your strategic objectives. Through collaboration, we will refine your modernization strategy, ensuring it aligns with your priorities and enabling you to unlock the full potential of your applications with a roadmap tailored to your needs.

• Modernization Strategy (based on selected scenario and approach).

When it comes to return on investment (ROI), we typically suggest an application-based approach. This enables customers to swiftly identify opportunities within their application portfolio and immediately begin reaping the business advantages of modernization.

• ROI/Financial Analysis

1. Current state costs
2. Target state costs
3. Modernization costs (internal/external effort)

SUCCESS FACTOR!
An essential aspect of developing a strategy and achieving a positive return on investment (ROI) is exploring various scenarios. There are typically multiple ways to achieve a desired objective, and the best path forward depends on factors such as business opportunities, team skills, urgency of modernization, and effort required. The ability to rapidly analyze different scenarios is crucial in making informed decisions. With InCycle's modernization project delivery platform, customers can analyze different scenarios and outcomes in real-time, empowering them to choose the most effective approach.

• Cloud Application Architecture (AI Assisted)

1. Cloud Application Patterns
2. Architecture Design
3. Cloud Services
4. Security & Governance

PRO TIP!
When we embark on the modernization journey of multiple applications, it presents a golden opportunity to establish unified modernization themes, strategies, preferred technologies, and team practices. By doing so, we unlock the potential for economies of scale and simplify various aspects such as resources, skills, and tools. This holistic approach will pave the way for enhanced efficiency and streamlined processes.

Modernization & Implementation

At InCycle, we firmly believe there is always "a better way", and our most successful clients are companies that are eager to enhance innovation and competitiveness. We go beyond just modernizing applications and infrastructure; we also optimize processes. Our hands-on professional services, which can be customized to fit your needs, accelerate every aspect of your modernization initiative. With cutting-edge technologies like InCycle's AI-assisted Modern Application Modeler, Roadmap Designer, DevOps Accelerators, and Pattern Blueprints, our expert consultants empower you to achieve projects months, and sometimes even years, ahead of schedule. It's like cheating time and unlocking your full potential.

• Automatic backlog generation (AI assisted)
• Automatic landing zone generation (Azure etc.)
• Architecture as code
• Infrastructure as Code
• Governance as code
• Application delivery pipeline(s)
• Disaster recovery and readiness

Modernization Monitoring and Reporting

Monitoring the progress of application modernization is crucial for ensuring the success of your efforts to update and enhance your software applications. As your modernization initiatives gain momentum, InCycle provides targeted key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to monitor the progress of modernization and plan future iterations. InCycle's application modernization engagements offer comprehensive project visibility across various initiatives and workloads, equipping management with valuable success metrics, modernization velocity, and immediate identification of areas that may require additional attention.

At the application level, our monitoring tools, including cloud-native monitoring services, play a crucial role in identifying and resolving issues and performance bottlenecks in real-time. By collecting valuable data through monitoring, we empower data-driven decision-making to drive continuous improvements. Key monitoring elements encompass the following:

• Application Monitoring
• Alerts & Notifications
• Performance Testing
• Cost Analysis
• Iterate and Optimize

Keep in mind that monitoring the modernization of applications is an ongoing journey. By consistently monitoring performance, user satisfaction, and other important metrics, clients can make informed decisions to enhance and optimize their modernized applications, ensuring they align with their business objectives.

SUCCESS FACTOR!
To achieve maximum speed in development and project velocity, our most successful clients leverage continuous deployment and DevOps methodologies to continually improve their applications and promptly address user demands.

PRO TIP! 
Platform engineering, also known as PE, offers significant benefits to large portfolio customers by streamlining processes and automating tasks. In the context of application modernization, we understand the importance of having a strong and scalable technology platform that drives innovation, reduces time-to-market, and improves operational efficiency. At InCycle, we take a business-focused approach to design, build, and optimize a platform that aligns perfectly with your strategic objectives. To discover how PE can accelerate your IT modernization initiative and learn more about our services, InCycle offers a Platform Engineering Accelerator.

By incorporating platform engineering and upgrading engineering capabilities, clients can eliminate obstacles and expensive delays that occur between infrastructure, operations, and development teams. For instance, teams can utilize a comprehensive library of validated templates that align with specific categories and technology preferences, guaranteeing the automatic application of consistency, security, and governance objectives.