'Cheshire Puss, ... would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
'I don't much care where--' said Alice.`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,'
said the Cat. 
                                                ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

IT applications have been a crucial element of businesses for many years. Companies expand or decline based on the quality of their applications. As a result, there is an ongoing demand for application enhancement and innovation. The process of modernization is an ongoing task and companies can take different paths to modernize their application landscape.

If an application provides only standard functionality, a COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) solution or packaged application could be an alternative. If an application no longer meets business needs or the cost of adaptation and enhancement is too high, there is the option … although costly and risky … to do a complete re-write. At the other end of the time-risk-complexity spectrum, minor changes or "face lifting" (screen scraping, for instance) can be applied to legacy applications.

Modernizing existing mainframe applications by reusing current application assets has become an accepted practice that has proved its worth.

Legacy modernization leverages existing application assets and enhances them by incorporating modern technologies. There is no need to re-invent key business and IT processes that have remained unchanged just because technology has advanced. Modernization preserves the company's past investment and the associated risks are typically lower. Risks associated with business and IT process changes and with implementing new processes do not exist.

Application modernization has a compelling financial driver. Legacy systems are expensive to maintain and the human resources that support them are in short supply and usually expensive. Many companies take a step-by-step approach to legacy modernization by analyzing their application landscape and modernizing applications based on the expected return on investment, risk, and urgency.

MOST Technologies uses automatic tools for converting legacy applications from languages such as Natural, COBOL, PL/1, Fortran and Assembler to alternative languages such as COBOL and Java.

MOST's toolkit includes tools that automate database migration to Relational Database systems – providing fully normalized data models for the new RDBMS – and utilities that migrate data from an old e.g. Adabas to a new DBMS. Other tools reengineer applications into a 3-layer architecture (with Presentation, Business and Data Access layers) and ensure maintainability of converted code.