Halloween specialThe Legacy is haunted at midnight!

Transformation, technology and the long shadow of the past.

1. the moment of shock – it started in the depths of the data center

The strategy was clear: the future was to lie in the cloud. The management had decided to risk the change. Away from the classic on-premise model and towards a modern, scalable SaaS offering. After all, the competition had shown how it’s done.

But then it happened, when they tried to prepare the existing code base for cloud deployment for the first time, something stirred. Old dependencies emerged like shadows from the depths. Modules that no one had touched for years began to spit out error messages. Specialist knowledge? Long since retired. Documentation? Outdated or disappeared.

The system collapsed during the first cloud test run. What remained was silence. And the bitter realization: the core of the product, grown over two decades, was a monolith. A living colossus, difficult to control, whose shadow rises again and again at night in the call-out.

2. the tension – when systems whisper and processes are silent

The effects became more noticeable with each passing week:

Sales could not explain cloud offers, any price logic had disappeared into the fog.
Support was bombarded with questions for which there were still no answers.
Engineering was caught between bug fixes for the on-prem version and building a new architecture, with growing pressure from the darkness.
And customers? Unsettled. Annoyed. Wandering around like zombies.

Monitoring, logging, alerting – everything you would expect in modern SaaS setups simply didn’t exist. And every attempt to create order resulted in new “phantoms” in the code. What was once planned as a technological innovation threatened to become an operational nightmare.

3. the turnaround – the interim manager enters the system.

At this moment, when chaos had almost completely taken hold of the company, an interim manager with deep tech and product expertise was brought in. No show, no buzzword bingo. Instead, a cool head and a clear plan as super power!

First: a complete reality check. What is really there? What works? What are just nice slides? Which functions are really used by top customers and which belong in the graveyard?

Then: pragmatic bridge building. Instead of immediately developing everything from scratch, an AWS-based single-tenant solution was established. Powerful, secure, controllable and, above all, quick to implement. Monitoring, logging, alerting? Done. Infrastructure transparency? Finally available!

And finally: looking to the future. Parallel to stabilization, the architecture of the future began: a microservice-based cloud platform, designed for true SaaS – modular, scalable, customer-oriented. The fog is clearing!

4. the solution – the haunting loses its terror.

Piece by piece, the legacy was driven out. No system is inherently “evil”, but without clarity, processes and prioritization, even the most stable system becomes obsessive.

Customers were migrated in groups based on the functions they really needed.
The migration processes were standardized and later automated.
The team was able to focus again, support was relieved, sales received viable offers and product development had a clear direction.

The shadows of the past disappeared and made way for scalable growth.

5. the doctrineIf you want to get into the cloud, you have to go through the fog

Transformation is not a sure-fire success. It confronts companies with old decisions, technical debts and sometimes even the ghosts of previous strategies. But this is exactly what interim managers with operational depth and change expertise are there for.

F&P Executive Solutions brings experienced leaders to where the systems are haunted. Whether product, IT, transformation or operations: We help when complexity paralyzes, structures fail and speed is required.