Established German companies don't need a Silicon-Valley-style ground-up rebuild — they need a phased modernisation that keeps the business running. We replace load-bearing parts of legacy stacks while operations stay live.
Modernisation work usually starts with one of these four engagements:
We're a fit when:
Not a fit if you're greenfield with no existing system, or if leadership has already committed to a full rip-and-replace under fixed timeline.
We've sat through enough modernisations to know which decisions burn the budget and lose the board's trust. These are the five patterns we see most often.
Four phases, predictable cadence, nothing happens behind closed doors. You see weekly progress — and you can stop any phase without affecting production.
We document what's there, identify domain boundaries, and name the risks — before writing code or asking leadership to commit budget.
New modules grow beside the legacy system. Nothing in production changes yet — you can review the work at any point with zero risk to operations.
Module by module, feature flag by feature flag, the new system takes load. Rollback stays one switch away at every step — cut-over is not a risk, it's a setting.
Once new modules carry 100%, legacy paths are removed and runbooks handed to your team. Maintenance contracts with us are explicitly optional.
These aren't logos on a wall. Each row is one engagement: what was broken when we walked in, what we changed, and what shipped.
Digital Experience & Brand SystemsResearch-grant workflow on a brittle legacy app — every new application field made the team slower.
Phased replacement of the operator surface while the data layer stayed in place. No data migration before the UI stabilised.
Team unblocked without a freeze. Application processing runs on the new surface; back-end migration is a separate, plannable step.
Digital Experience & Brand SystemsPrecision-measurement product line on an aging stack — the measurement engine cannot be touched, but the customer-facing layer blocks every release.
Modernised the customer-facing layer while the measurement engine was preserved untouched. Clear contract drawn between measurement and application planes.
Faster release cadence on the customer side, no regression on the precision side. Both planes can now plan independently.
Enterprise-Grade FoundationsEvent-management platform with growing tenant numbers — old architecture couldn't onboard new customers without degrading existing ones.
Re-architected the multi-tenant boundary, moved hot paths to a new service, kept old code for cold paths — gradual replacement, not a rip-out.
Scaled to new customers without a re-platforming project. Existing customers saw no impact because the cut-over ran behind feature flags.
Enterprise-Grade FoundationsFacility-management software locked into a legacy desktop flow — operators could only work on-site, mobile use wasn't possible.
Built a web operator surface beside the legacy core, shifted traffic module by module, verified data integrity at each step.
Operators on the new system — no production freeze during the cut-over. The legacy desktop flow is decommissioned without a missing day.
The decisions we expect to discuss with your team and your leadership — and the questions a board will ask before sign-off.
The new system grows beside the old. The old shrinks. Both run in parallel until functional parity is reached — there is no single cut-over.
When splitting helps — and when it just adds operational cost for a 30-person team. For most Mittelstand companies, the modular monolith is the right answer.
Dual-write, ETL or change-data-capture — each trades complexity for safety. Which one fits depends on your cut-over window and your tolerance for inconsistency.
Lift-and-shift hides cost and latency surprises that show only after go-live. What you refactor first determines the next five years of TCO.
When production-floor systems and IT systems must talk — without coupling release cycles. No OT system should depend on the IT release cadence.
Feature flags, traffic shifting, rollback paths, parity testing — what 'no production freeze' actually requires. These four are non-negotiable.
If your question isn't here, it's almost certainly the first thing we'll discuss in a 30-minute call.
Different situation? We answer the actual question, not the brochure version.
Ask directly→Yes — that's the explicit constraint we plan around. Strangler-fig means the legacy system keeps running while the new one grows beside it. Cut-over happens module by module via feature flags. There is no big-bang and no production freeze. If a step misbehaves, the routing layer falls back — seconds, not hours.
From the architecture audit to legacy decommissioning: typically 9–18 months, depending on scope and how many modules can migrate in parallel. The architecture audit alone takes 2–4 weeks and is the basis for any defensible timeline. Quoting before that is irresponsible.
No — and that's the point. Strangler-fig only replaces modules where replacement makes economic sense. Stable, working cores (measurement engines, booking engines, regulator-validated components) are often kept. We almost never recommend full rewrites — the risks rarely justify it.
Data migration is its own workstream, not a side effect of module migration. We use dual-write or change-data-capture, depending on your tolerance for downtime. Before every cut-over, parity tests compare old and new on the same inputs. The new system takes load only after parity is confirmed.
We hunt them in the architecture audit: static code analysis, production trace logs, interviews with the engineers who built the system. What can't be found statically, we catch with a routing layer that initially calls both systems in parallel — hidden dependencies surface before the legacy is decommissioned.
We work with them. Our job is to make your team stronger — not dependent. We hand off responsibility step by step, document explicitly for internal takeover, and write runbooks that your engineers run, not us. By the end of the modernisation, the system runs on your on-call rotation, not on a maintenance contract with us.
