Application Modernization Consulting on AWS
Legacy applications rarely fail with a bang. They fail slowly — in a license renewal nobody wants to sign again, a stored-procedure layer nobody fully understands, an integration tier that bills hours just to stay alive. Modernizing that stack is usually the right call, and usually the thing that gets postponed, because most application modernization consulting engagements start with a scope, drift past it, and stall before production.
Mactores is an agent-native firm and an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner. For legacy applications and the databases underneath them, our Application & Database Modernization practice commits to a ship date, a fixed fee, and Mactores covering the overage on any delay we cause — written into the statement of work before work starts, not a range that turns into a change order once discovery finds the first surprise.
Talk to us
Legacy applications and databases on cloud-native AWS, on a committed date, for a fixed fee.
You leave knowing whether the date is reachable and what the work actually involves.
- AWS Services Partner
- Premier Tier
- AWS Specialization
- Agentic AI
- Incl. Migration & Modernization
- 7 Competencies
- AWS Service Validations
- 17 Validations
60–70%
Engagement hours carried by agents instead of billed as analyst time
12 wks
Median time to production across Mactores engagements
21
Public case studies with named customers
200+
AWS-certified engineers
2008
Building on AWS since, with 18 years of production migrations
Top Mactores Clients
Where Application Modernization Actually Stalls
Most write-ups on this topic open with a handful of borrowed survey stats and a soft conclusion that the problem is "delivery." Any competitor can quote the same three numbers. What's harder to fake is naming the exact points where these programs die, because that takes having run enough of them to see the pattern repeat.
There are four, and they usually show up in this order.
Discovery eats the budget before cutover gets funded.
A traditional proposal spends the first third of the engagement mapping code and dependencies by hand, billed at the same rate as everything after it. By the time discovery closes, the budget for cutover risk management — the part that decides whether a regulated system ships cleanly — is thin or gone. A branded-payments platform hit this twice before its third attempt landed and cleared the debt with zero audit incidents.
Your own engineers don't have the cycles to co-staff it.
Everyone agrees the migration should happen. It doesn't, because the traditional path pulls senior engineers off product to babysit schema analysis for weeks. A semiconductor company's Oracle-bound analytics workload sat on the roadmap for exactly this reason, until discovery and schema conversion no longer needed that co-staffing.
A budget constraint gets mistaken for a technical one.
Two prior partners told a payments platform that better security and better efficiency were mutually exclusive, so it had to pick one. That wasn't an architecture limit. It was a delivery model that could only afford one workstream at a time. Tilia got both improvements, on the same platform, in the same engagement, once the analysis work stopped running in sequence.
Cutover becomes a single high-risk weekend instead of a rehearsed, reversible event.
Programs that survive discovery and budget often stall here. Rollback criteria get defined after go-live instead of before it, and the first real regression surfaces in production instead of in a parallel-run comparison. If you recognize your program in the first three, the fix is a delivery model that doesn't underfund cutover; if it's the fourth, the fix is procedural — and the process section below covers it.
Scope around the real risk
Four moments where the plan and the actual system stop agreeing — named during scoping, not discovered at cutover.
You leave knowing whether the date is reachable and what the work actually involves.
What Makes This Different From a Standard AWS Modernization Firm?
Most application modernization consulting is sold as time and materials against a scope that's really an estimate. Every week of drift becomes another invoice, and the overrun risk sits with the buyer. Mactores moves that risk onto itself. The commitment has three parts.
The ship date
Set in the statement of work before work starts, and it holds when real complexity appears instead of sliding with it.
The fixed fee
Fixed for a defined scope — application count, database targets, integration surface — confirmed after a scoping call.
The overage
If a delay originates on Mactores' side, the overage is Mactores' to pay under the standard SOW clause. A customer-side delay — a blocked environment, a late approval, an added scope item — converts to time-and-materials at rates disclosed up front.
Why a fixed fee holds up commercially
By our estimate, agents carry 60–70% of the hours an analyst-staffed proposal of the same size would bill: code analysis, dependency mapping, Oracle or SQL Server schema conversion to Amazon Aurora or Amazon RDS, test generation, and parallel-run validation. That ratio is benchmarked against our own closed engagements, compared with what a same-scope conventional proposal would have charged.
It's an internal figure, not a published industry statistic, and we stand behind it. Because that volume of work isn't running on a billable-hours meter, the price holds without the padding a T&M firm adds to protect its margin from its own estimate.
Forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), whose day job is agentic AI and AWS production systems, own the parts agents can't: refactoring judgment — what gets rewritten, wrapped or retired — risk-weighted cutover sequencing, and the production sign-off. They embed with your team for the length of the engagement and carry the delivery commitment personally.
What we won't do
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Quote a fixed fee before scoping.
A firm that does is pricing off a guess, and “fixed” stops meaning anything once reality disagrees.
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Refactor a system that should be rehosted.
Matching the approach to the actual risk, not to the hours it could bill, is part of the judgment you're paying for.
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Schedule a cutover without signed-off rollback criteria.
A cutover with no agreed way back isn't a rehearsed event. It's a bet.
The commitment, in writing
A committed date, a fixed fee, and Mactores-absorbed overage when the delay is ours.
The commitment page carries the delay clause in full.
How a Fixed-Date Engagement Runs
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01
Scope and sign.
Agents run discovery against your codebase and database — dependency mapping, schema analysis, and a read of what is most likely to break under load, including anything a previous vendor left unfinished. FDEs turn that into a target architecture and a migration plan. Scope, ship date and fee go into a signed SOW as a single number, not a range.Phase exit
Signed SOW with scope, ship date and fixed fee.
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02
Refactor and convert.
Application code and database schemas move to cloud-native AWS patterns, including Oracle and SQL Server conversions to Amazon Aurora or Amazon RDS where that's the target. Agents handle the conversion volume; FDEs make the calls that carry consequences.Phase exit
Converted components accepted by your team.
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03
Validate in parallel.
Every refactored path runs through a validation harness that compares its output with the legacy system's, against live or production-representative traffic, while the build is still underway. This stage separates “it technically runs” from “it provably matches what it replaced,” and it decides whether cutover is rehearsed or a single-weekend bet.Phase exit
Customer-signed validation results.
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04
Cut over and retire.
Cutover is rehearsed before it's executed, with rollback criteria your team has signed off on in advance. Once the modernized system is live, the legacy system is formally decommissioned rather than left running “just in case,” and performance is measured against the pre-modernization baseline.Phase exit
Legacy system decommissioned and performance baseline reported.
Check your migration path
Tell us the application and the source database, and we will show you where that path has already run.
Oracle or SQL Server to Amazon Aurora are the routes with the most case history behind them.
What Mactores Has Shipped in Application Modernization
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Application Modernization · Manufacturing
On date
Cutover landed on the committed contract date
1
Oracle renewal became budget for the next initiative
Synaptics: Oracle to Amazon RDS, cut over on the contract date
Synaptics had an Oracle renewal approaching on its design-analytics workload and an engineering team whose time was spoken for by product work. Mactores handled schema analysis and conversion without borrowing that team, hit the cutover date named in the contract, and the money set aside for the Oracle renewal went to the customer's next initiative instead.
Read the case study -
Application Modernization · Payments
Zero
Audit incidents during cutover
2 → 1
Two prior attempts stalled before cutover. One reached production.
A branded-payments leader: technical debt retired after two stalled attempts
Two earlier modernization attempts had stalled short of cutover — a familiar pattern in regulated payments, where discovery uses up the budget that cutover risk management needs. The third attempt reached production as a cloud-native, PCI-DSS aligned payments platform on AWS, with zero audit incidents during cutover.
Read the case study -
Application Modernization · Payments
Both
Transaction security and operational efficiency, one engagement
0
Platform swaps — both delivered on the existing platform
Tilia: security and efficiency, without the trade-off
Tilia had been told by two earlier partners that it could improve transaction security or operational efficiency on its current platform, but not both. Mactores worked on both layers at the same time and delivered both gains on the same platform in one engagement, PCI-DSS aligned, with the validation work generating evidence a regulator can review.
Read the case study
The complete case study library, including work outside application modernization, is at mactores.com/stories.
Ask for the closest reference
We will name the engagement nearest your stack, not the category.
Named accounts and audited figures are shared under NDA during commercial discussions.
Which AWS Credentials Back This Work?
Mactores is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, the top of AWS's partner hierarchy. The credential most closely tied to agent-native delivery is the AWS Agentic AI Specialization — a narrower and more recently defined bar than the general partner status most modernization firms carry, and the one that reflects how this practice is staffed.
Alongside those sit seven AWS Consulting Competencies (Migration and Modernization, DevOps, Data and Analytics, Machine Learning, AI Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing and Industrial Services) and seventeen AWS Service Validations, each reviewed by AWS rather than self-declared. The validations that apply directly to this work: Amazon RDS and AWS DMS for database migration, AWS Glue for data-pipeline conversion, Amazon Redshift where a modernized application feeds analytics at scale, and AWS Lambda for the event-driven services a decomposed monolith often lands on.
For healthcare and life-sciences engagements, clinical data workflows use AWS HealthLake and Amazon Comprehend Medical where they fit, instead of pushing PHI through a generic data pipeline. Every credential in this section is granted by AWS and listed in the AWS Partner Solutions Finder — the one part of this page you don't have to take our word for.
- Specialization
- AWS Agentic AI Specialization
- Partner tier
- AWS Premier Tier Services
- Applies to this page
- Migration & Modernization
- Service validations
- 17 Service Validations
- Team
- 200+ AWS-certified engineers
- Building on AWS
- Since 2008
7 Consulting Competencies
- Migration and Modernization
- DevOps
- Data and Analytics
- Machine Learning
- AI Services
- Healthcare
- Manufacturing and Industrial Services
Verified by AWS
Every credential here is granted by AWS, so you can check it without us.
The tier, the specialization and every competency are listed on our partnership page and in the AWS Partner Solutions Finder.
What "Built for Compliance" Means in Practice
Application and database modernization touches systems already inside a compliance perimeter, so the modernized version has to clear the same bar the legacy one did, not a lower one. The validation harness stores its comparison output as an audit artifact, and each phase-exit sign-off is a customer-signed record rather than a status slide. Neither is produced after the fact for an examiner — both exist because the delivery process creates them.
PCI-DSS
Card and transaction data stays inside existing PCI scope while payment platforms are refactored and cut over.
HIPAA
PHI handling rules are carried through schema conversion for healthcare and life-sciences applications.
FFIEC guidance and SEC alignment
Validation output is kept in a form examiners of financial-services applications can review.
SOC 2
Delivery infrastructure operates under documented data-governance and access controls.
Audit-ready by default
Compliance artifacts are a byproduct of the same tooling that runs the validation harness.
Bring the scope your examiner cares about and we will map it to the phase exits that produce the evidence.
Does This Work for Your Industry?
The fixed-date, fixed-fee commitment is the same in every vertical Mactores serves. What changes is which risk gets named first in scoping.
Financial Services
Passing testing isn't enough; the system has to survive an audit. Validation evidence and data lineage are delivered as outputs of the engagement, in a form a regulator can review.
Financial servicesHealthcare & Life Sciences
Clinical and regulatory validation comes before go-live. HIPAA and PHI handling are carried through refactoring and cutover, using AWS HealthLake and Amazon Comprehend Medical where clinical data workflows need them.
HealthcareInternet & Software
Here the modernization decision is strategic, not just operational. A SaaS product either becomes something agents can call as a tool, or gets replaced by a competitor that exposed itself that way first. The work is scheduled around your release cadence rather than interrupting it.
AI Agents for AppsManufacturing
Plant operations keep running. SCADA and OT dependencies are mapped during scoping, and cutover is rehearsed and validated against live operational data before the switch.
ManufacturingTelco, Media, Entertainment, Gaming, and Sports (TMEGS)
These audiences don't accept maintenance windows. Peak-load behavior is measured inside the validation harness before cutover, so your operations team sees capacity figures before a launch depends on them.
TMEGS
Scoped to your sector
The delivery model holds across industries. What changes is which risk gets emphasized in scoping.
Governance for regulated data, continuity for operational systems, speed for product-led teams.
How This Compares to a Big 4 Program, AWS ProServe, or In-House
Buyers evaluating application modernization consulting usually choose between four kinds of vendor. Here's where Mactores sits against each, by category rather than by name.
| Alternative | Where it's strong | Where the risk sits |
|---|---|---|
| Big 4 firm or Tier-1 systems integrator | Governance rigor and a name procurement recognizes. | An analyst pyramid billed by the hour, and a handoff between the team that scopes the work and the team that ships it — where most of the drift in the failure analysis above begins. |
| AWS Professional Services | A strong fit for greenfield, AWS-native builds. | Legacy Oracle or SQL Server systems with years of undocumented stored-procedure logic are a narrower part of that scope, and refactoring inherited debt takes different judgment than designing from a blank page. |
| Doing it in-house | Keeps the judgment where it already lives. | The engineers who understand the system best are the ones your product roadmap needs most, so the migration stays unfunded in time rather than money. |
| A boutique offshore shop | Can look cheapest on hourly rate. | The estimate is still an estimate, and on a system this undocumented, the change order tends to arrive around the same point discovery breaks down in the failure analysis above. |
None of these is the wrong choice in the right situation. A Big 4 signature matters when procurement requires one regardless of delivery model, and that's a valid reason to choose one. This practice is built for the buyer who has already lived through one of the four failure patterns and wants the commercial structure to make a repeat someone else's risk.
Agent-native by structure
One legacy system, one committed date, and a firm that pays when it misses a date it caused.
How that delivery model works across every engagement is set out on the how we work page.
What Drives the Price of an Application Modernization Engagement?
Mactores doesn't sell application modernization off a price list. Every fixed fee is confirmed after a scoping call and written into the statement of work. The table below shows what determines that number, not what the number is.
| What drives cost | What pushes it up | Where it's confirmed |
|---|---|---|
| Application and database scope | More applications in scope, deeper cross-system dependencies, thinner existing documentation. | Discovery phase of scoping. |
| Schema and data complexity | Larger data volumes, heavier stored-procedure logic, multiple source database engines in one program. | Schema analysis during scoping. |
| Compliance and audit requirements | Regulated data under PCI-DSS, HIPAA or FFIEC/SEC that adds validation and evidence steps. | Compliance scope review. |
| Cutover risk | More dependent downstream systems, less acceptable downtime, more complex rollback. | Cutover planning session. |
Where the funding usually comes from
Redirected, not net-new
A modernization program rarely needs a fresh budget request. The money is typically already committed elsewhere in IT: a database license that renews every year by default, an integration layer that costs money to maintain even though no team clearly owns it, and servers sized for traffic peaks that seldom happen. Once the legacy line item is retired, modernization becomes a redirection of money you're already spending.
On the TCO figure
Migration studies published with AWS have reported total cost of ownership falling by as much as 40%, mainly because most on-premises workloads use far less capacity than they were provisioned for. Read that as a best case rather than a forecast — but the overprovisioning it describes is what our discovery work finds in most environments.
Make the numbers yours
Put your own license, integration and capacity lines against the four drivers above.
Half an hour with the FDE who would scope the work, and the fixed fee stops being a range.
When This Practice Isn't the Right Fit
This isn't built for every buyer, and it's worth naming who should look elsewhere as clearly as who should call.
This is built for you if
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You've already lived through one of the four failure patterns above and want the commercial structure to make a repeat someone else's risk.
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A hard trigger is driving the move — a license renewal, an end-of-support deadline, an audit finding, or a modernization that has already stalled once.
- You're at $500M–$5B in revenue, or a business unit inside a larger enterprise at similar scope: enterprise complexity without a Fortune-100 budget cushion to absorb an overrun.
- You can grant the access a validation harness needs to run against live or production-representative traffic during the build.
This isn't the right fit if
- You're a procurement-driven buyer who values a brand-name logo on the SOW over delivery outcomes. That's a legitimate requirement — this practice isn't optimized for it.
- You want a team of juniors to direct personally. The engagement is staffed by senior FDEs, not a pyramid you manage.
- Your environment can't tolerate a validation harness running in parallel against live production traffic during the build. The phased cutover model here isn't the right shape.
Application & Database Modernization
A fixed-date build, not an open-ended assessment. See where this practice sits inside the wider pillar.
The commitment page carries the delay clause in full.
Key Terms Worth Defining
- Agent-native
- How Mactores is structured: agents carry most engagement hours, the people are agentic AI specialists, and contracts commit to a delivery date. Without the agents, the fixed-fee model wouldn't hold.
- Forward-deployed engineer (FDE)
- A senior Mactores engineer embedded with your team who owns refactoring and cutover decisions and is personally accountable for the ship date.
- Fixed-date, fixed-fee
- A contract where the ship date and total fee are set in the SOW after scoping. Mactores pays the overage for delays it causes; customer-side delays move to time-and-materials at pre-agreed rates.
- Statement of work (SOW)
- The signed document containing scope, ship date, fee, rollback terms and delay terms.
- Rehost, replatform, refactor
- Three levels of change: moving an application as it is, adjusting it to use managed services, or restructuring its architecture to be cloud-native.
- Schema conversion
- Translating database structures, stored procedures and data types from one engine, such as Oracle or SQL Server, to another, such as Amazon Aurora or Amazon RDS.
- Validation harness
- Automated tooling that runs the modernized and legacy systems against the same traffic and compares their results before cutover.
- Phase exit
- The customer-signed acceptance record that closes each engagement phase.
- Cutover
The switch of production traffic from the legacy system to the modernized one, run against rehearsed steps and agreed rollback criteria.
- Legacy decommissioning
- Shutting down the old application, database and infrastructure after the new system is proven in production, including ending the associated licenses.
- Technical debt
- The build-up of shortcuts, outdated components and undocumented logic that makes every future change slower and riskier.
The commitment in full
Read exactly what Mactores is on the hook for.
The ship date, the total fee, and who carries the cost if that date moves — set out in contract language you can check line by line.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does "application modernization consulting" mean at Mactores?
How long does an engagement take?
Who owns the code, the IP, and the architecture after the engagement ends?
Can our own team actually maintain this once you leave?
Are we locked into Mactores for the next phase of work, or for support afterward?
Where does our data physically run, and does that change by region?
Do you work with Oracle and SQL Server migrations specifically?
Is Mactores an AWS Premier Tier partner?
What size company is this built for?
Ask us directly
Holding a question this page didn't answer? That is the one worth a call.
Thirty minutes with the forward-deployed engineer who would run the engagement.