- Need for moving out of Legacy Platform
Most retailers across the globe are facing a situation wherein they must move out of their legacy eCommerce platform for various reasons such as:
- Platform reaching its end of life
- Legacy platforms have high total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Involve high maintenance, patches & upgrades, and keeps IT busy rather then allowing them to focus on supporting business initiatives
- Legacy platforms are becoming obsolete! It is difficult to find resources who can continue to maintain them
- It is slow to develop, involve longer time to market (TTM), creating a competitive disadvantage
- They are unable to leverage latest technology advancements, again creating a competitive disadvantage
Lift & Shift eCommerce Projects
A “Lift & Shift” involves moving an existing solution from a Legacy platform to a NextGen platform, generally leveraging the new platforms capabilities but retaining existing business features. Expectations from the Lift & Shift initiative usually are that:
- The new solution must retain parity in terms of functionality
- The new platform should “do more for less” by leveraging advancements in technology
- The migration should not result in any data loss or inconvenience to end-users
- Business tooling should be friendly and not result in large transition times for Business Users
- The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) should typically be lower as compared to the previous platform
The Reality
Unfortunately, achieving “Lift & Shift” is not an easy task and involves several pitfalls:
- Most of the times, businesses tend to put platform choices before business requirements. Every business is unique and has a certain way of operating itself. It takes experience and in-depth knowledge to understand these details
- Many platforms make it easy to initially set up stores. However, in the long run, these tend to do more harm than good to your business as the solutions are commoditized to a large extent and the flexibility of customization is limited or convoluted
- Unavailability of customer SMEs as some key people might have moved on and the Development Partner does not have the sufficient eCommerce domain experience. This at times leads to situations wherein platform limitations from the older platform are carried into the new platform
- Most implementation partners do not have robust, flexible SDLC processes, and models which can be leveraged to put together a detailed project plan which can manage changes and run parallel to in-flight projects
AIE’s approach towards Lift & Shift Projects
- Envisioning the re-platform Solution - this phase focuses on the high-level requirements, goals, architecture of the project and most importantly fitment of the platform to the goals. It also includes consulting and advisory services focusing on solution optimization and how to avoid carrying forward platform limitations of previous platform to the new implementation
- Planning - this phase focuses on detailed planning activities for a re-platform project. It defines what will be built and deployed, as well as how and when it will be built
- Development - this phases deals with the actual development steps necessary to re-platform including Best Development Practices, Steps of Doneness, Checklists etc. This phase is structured into Agile Sprints with regular Demo’s to the customer
- Deployment - this phase focuses on approaches and techniques related to the cutover to the new platform including mature CICD approaches and leveraging Cloud infrastructures. To a large extent, it involves managing the existing legacy platform alongside the new platform
- Stabilizing the re-platform Solution - this phase focuses on stabilizing the builds of the re-platform project and includes Stress/Load/Endurance testing, ADA testing, integration testing, Security testing etc.
- Operating and Maintaining the New Platform - this phase focuses on the operation and maintenance of the new platform, and involves activities like telemetry, monitoring, jobs which ensure that the end-to-end operations run seamlessly, performance tuning
Why AIE?
How can AIE Help?
AI Enterprise Inc. is a Delaware Corporation helping organizations redefine engaging customer experiences and delivering frictionless commercial and consumer commerce solutions for retailers and manufacturers. Our Solutionists bring over two decades of expertise in leading Commerce and Content platforms to help our clients blend cloud and on-premise solutions, mature their DevOps, enhance engagement with machine intelligence and embrace modern architectures in a strategic and adaptable fashion
If you are interested in developing Headless solutions, then contact us for a free consultation and quote