Systems Integration & Application Modernisation
Replace the engine without stopping the car.
Legacy systems are rarely replaced in one move, and the attempts that try usually fail. We build the new alongside the old, move one capability at a time, and keep a way back at every step.
What people come to us with
The situation before the solution
The same data typed into two systems
An order is entered in one place and re-entered in another. It is slow, it drifts out of step, and the discrepancies surface at the worst moment.
An application nobody dares to change
It runs the business, it works, and the last person who understood it left. Every proposal to replace it has been judged too risky to start.
A server under someone's desk
Critical, unbacked, and reliant on one machine continuing to boot. Everyone knows; nobody has had a safe moment to move it.
A supplier with no API
A system you depend on exposes nothing, so the integration is assumed impossible and the manual process continues.
Capabilities
What the work covers
API design and development
Building the interface your systems should have had — versioned, documented, authenticated, and stable enough to depend on.
Third-party integration
Connecting payment, logistics, accounting, messaging and supplier systems, including the awkward ones where the integration has to be built around the gaps.
Incremental modernisation
Moving capability out of a legacy system piece by piece while it keeps running, rather than a rewrite that must land perfectly on one date.
Database migration
Moving and reshaping data between systems, rehearsed against production copies until the outcome is predictable.
Cloud deployment
Getting systems off fragile single machines and onto infrastructure that can be rebuilt from a script.
Workflow integration
Joining the tools your team already uses so a step in one triggers the next in another, without a person being the connector.
How we approach it
The order we do things in, and why
- 01
Map the real flows
Including the undocumented ones — the exports, the shared drive, the person who forwards an email every morning. Those are integrations too.
- 02
Find the seam
The one capability that can move first with the least risk and the clearest benefit. Modernisation succeeds or fails on this choice.
- 03
Build alongside, never big-bang
New and old run together, traffic shifts gradually, and the old path stays available until the new one has proved itself in production.
- 04
Rehearse the data move
Dry runs against real volumes until timings and edge cases are known. Surprises belong in rehearsal, not cutover.
- 05
Cut over with a way back
A planned window, a tested rollback, and someone watching. Then the old system is retired deliberately rather than just abandoned.
Technologies
What we typically build this with
Questions
Things people ask first
Often yes, by running systems in parallel and shifting over gradually. Where a short window is genuinely unavoidable we plan it with you for the quietest period, with a rehearsed rollback.
Modernise incrementally, in almost every case. Full rewrites need the business to stand still while two systems are maintained, and that rarely survives contact with a real year. We will make the case for a rewrite only where the alternative is genuinely worse.
There is usually still a route — a database view, a scheduled export, a file drop, sometimes careful automation of the interface. Less elegant, and far better than a person retyping. We will tell you which option applies and what it costs to maintain.
Reconciliation against your own figures, record counts and totals you recognise, checked before cutover. You sign off against numbers you already trust rather than taking our word for it.
It should not. Standard interfaces, documentation and code you own. Integration work in particular is easy to make opaque, and we think that is a bad way to keep a client.
Start a project
Have a problem that looks like this?
Tell us what it costs you today.
Two fields to start. We will come back with an approach and an honest view of what it takes — not an instant quote.