Advanced has today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire legacy modernization leader Modern Systems, a move which will accelerate its growth plans in the booming application modernization market. Under the terms of the agreement, Advanced will acquire all outstanding shares.
The acquisition will boost the company’s position within the global application modernization market, presenting an extended market opportunity from $6.87bn to an estimated $16.67bn. It is anticipated that the deal will see Advanced grow its application modernization revenue immediately by approximately one third, taking its revenues to in excess of £30 million.
Advanced has partnered with Modern Systems since 2016, collaborating together on a number of projects, including the Department for Work and Pensions. As a global provider of modernization solutions for legacy application source code, data and platform transformations, Modern Systems brings 30 years of experience to Advanced, having completed 200-plus modernization projects, with 1.5 billion lines of code processed.
Modern Systems focuses on assessments and automated conversions of true legacy environments, transforming applications to modern environments, including leveraging its Modernization Platform as a Service (ModPaaS™) solution to pave a path for customers to cloud ready, cloud optimized and cloud native states. Once applications are converted, Modern Systems has the ability to rearchitect applications in order to take advantage of macro and microservices architectures. Additionally, Modern Systems brings an established US and global presence to Advanced, and a range of successful transformation projects for Fortune 1000 customers.
Application modernization is a core area of growth for Advanced and adding Modern Systems underscores that objective. This positioning was boosted in March 2018 with the acquisition of Information Balance, a developer of IT solutions to enable large scale application development and migration across mainstream technology platforms. Advanced is already working with large corporations around the world on major modernization projects, such as ProRail in the Netherlands.
“The acquisition of Modern Systems is incredibly complementary to our current focus in the application modernization market. The combination of Advanced and Modern Systems will fast-track our ability to deliver a broader set of solutions, expand our footprint in the US and globally, and help us further infiltrate the legacy mainframe market. Our companies share a ‘customer-first’ passion and commitment to the modernization market.”Gordon Wilson, CEO at Advanced
Tim Jones, Managing Director, Application Modernization at Advanced, says: ”We know that the integration of, and migration from, legacy mainframe environments to modern technology platforms is a growing challenge for many organizations around the globe. Modern Systems is an additive force to our already strong modernization group, allowing us to jointly provide a broader range of organizations with best-in-class solutions.”
Brandon Edenfield, President and CEO at Modern Systems, says: “Monolithic legacy systems have been the workhorses of business computing for decades, with nearly 80% of the world’s corporate data residing on mainframes running technology more than half a century old. While legacy systems provide power and stability, they lack the ability to adjust to newer, elastic forms of IT. Modern Systems has focused on providing leadership to customers to address this very challenge, leveraging proven technologies and processes that decrease risk and cost, while increasing competitive advantage. Together, as part of the Advanced family, we will be able to accelerate the delivery of our solutions to more customers globally.”
