In today’s fast-moving digital world, closing customer experience gaps, creating internal efficiencies, and staying ahead of the market matters.

For many digital enterprises, legacy technology hinders progress more than it helps. Years of integrations and customizations can turn a once best-of-breed commerce system into a tangled architecture of half-solutions, patches, and hacks. Developers have come and gone, and documentation is out of date if it ever existed at all. Some areas of the platform haven’t been touched in a decade, and technical debt haunts the whole system. This makes new feature delivery slow or impossible.

Business leaders are under pressure to innovate, delight customers, and hit revenue targets, while IT must balance new code delivery with keeping the platform up and running. Development teams must be aware and mindful not to compromise each other’s work — breaking the build can take days to fix. Every change must go through extensive regression testing or be released at great risk. Releases happen monthly or quarterly, and in some cases annually.

Both IT and business teams want to remove friction in the process and be more agile in releasing new code and bringing new features to the market. Often, this means a fresh start — a migration to a new commerce platform. But experienced business and IT leaders know ripping and replacing an enterprise commerce system isn’t easy and doesn’t guarantee greener pastures. Many want to avoid a replatform project at all costs!

The good news is there’s an alternative to both the pain of monolithic legacy architecture and Big Bang replatforming. Migrating to a modern, modular architecture that supports more agile delivery can be achieved with the Strangler Pattern, a systematic replacement of monolithic components over time with microservices. This incremental migration delivers critical functionality faster with minimal disruption to existing systems. The end result is not a new, heavy monolith that will ultimately suffer the same pains as the legacy platform but a flexible and scalable architecture that supports agility and innovation.

Download the whitepaper to learn more about how enterprises can implement the strangler pattern to upgrade to a modern and scalable e-commerce platform to stay ahead of the curve in delivering the ever-evolving customer expectations.