Software Modernization Services
Mactores is the agent-native AWS modernization firm and an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner. Our software modernization services move legacy applications and databases to cloud-native AWS on a committed date, for a fixed fee. Agents carry the repetitive work: code analysis, dependency mapping, schema conversion, test generation and regression validation. Forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) own the refactoring judgment, the risk trade-offs, the cutover and the delivery commitment itself. When a delay is ours, Mactores absorbs the overage.
The date is fixed. The fee is fixed. The legacy system is retired on a schedule agreed at signature, not kept running indefinitely as a safety net.
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%
of engagement hours carried by agents rather than billed as analyst time
21
public case studies with named customers
200+
AWS-certified engineers
17
AWS Service Validations
18 yrs
building on AWS
Top Mactores Clients
What Stops a Core Banking Modernization Program From Reaching Production?
The industry-level cost figures are real. Research by Pega and Savanta estimates the average global enterprise loses nearly $134 million a year to slow, resource-heavy legacy transformation work, and another $58 million a year to transformation initiatives that fail. What those averages can't do is locate the problem inside your program.
That takes a closer look. In scoping conversations, stalled programs rarely trace back to "poor planning" in general. They trace back to one of three moments where the plan and the actual system stopped agreeing.
The schema conversion that passes review and fails under load.
A conversion tool maps a stored procedure, trigger or sequence generator to its cloud-native equivalent. The result compiles, passes its unit test and gets marked complete in the tracker. None of that proves the object behaves the same way under production concurrency, isolation levels or the undocumented locking behavior the old system depended on. With luck, the gap shows up in a load test. Without it, the gap shows up as a production incident.
The tell
Your regression plan covers functional tests, but nobody has load-tested the converted schema against production-shaped traffic.
The dependency map that stops at the systems people remember.
Architecture reviews capture the integrations that appear on a diagram, the ones with an owner and a ticket queue. They regularly miss the 2 a.m. batch job, the finance report that queries the production database directly, and the script someone wrote years ago that nobody has opened since. These surface at cutover rehearsal, or at cutover itself.
The tell
Your dependency inventory came from diagrams and interviews rather than from query logs and network traffic on the production database.
The cutover rehearsed without a named decision-maker.
The runbook has a rollback plan. What it lacks is one named person with the authority to trigger it, available at the hour cutover is scheduled, who doesn't need a committee's approval to act. Without that person, rollback turns from a procedure into an argument.
The tell
Ask who, by name, can call a rollback at 2 a.m. on cutover night without anyone else signing off. If the answer takes more than one sentence, this is the gap.
Of the three, the incomplete dependency map is the one most likely to change an estimate mid-engagement, because it only surfaces when someone checks production evidence, which a sales conversation never does.
Scope around the real risk
Three moments where the plan and the actual system stop agreeing — surfaced during scoping, not at cutover.
You leave knowing whether the date is reachable and what the work actually involves.
Is This Engagement Built for You?
This is built for you if
- A legacy application or database already has a modernization decision behind it, but execution has stalled and nobody has owned the plan since.
- A hard external date is attached to the move, such as a license renewal, a data-center exit or a regulatory deadline.
- A previous modernization effort ran well over budget or timeline, or never reached production, and your leadership won't approve another open-ended one.
- Your compliance or audit function needs evidence produced during delivery, not a progress report assembled at the end.
This isn't the right fit if
- You haven't yet decided whether to modernize, or which target architecture to pursue. That is an architecture assessment, scoped and priced separately from a fixed-date build.
- You're looking for staff augmentation with no committed production date.
- Environment and data access can't be granted within a few weeks of scoping. Access has to come first.
- You need a multi-year, multi-system transformation program rather than one committed outcome on one date.
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.
What Our Software Modernization Services Ship
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01
Discovery grounded in production traffic. Agents map code, schema and integration dependencies directly from query logs and live network traffic on the production database. This is the evidence that catches the hidden dependencies described above. FDEs validate what the agents surface and make the calls that need human judgment.
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02
Schema conversion and refactoring. AWS Schema Conversion Tool and AWS Database Migration Service handle the mechanical conversion, for example Oracle or SQL Server to Amazon Aurora. FDEs decide what gets rewritten, what gets wrapped and what gets retired outright.
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03
A regression and load harness that runs before cutover, while there is still time to act on what it finds. Converted schema objects are tested against production-shaped concurrency and traffic volume, the check a functional test can't perform.
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04
A named rollback owner, agreed before cutover night. The SOW names who holds the authority to invoke rollback, so that decision is settled before the pressure arrives.
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05
Production cutover, owned personally by the FDE and closed only on customer-signed acceptance.
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06
Legacy retirement on a scheduled date, set at signature and tracked against the baseline agreed at scoping, not whenever things start to feel stable.
Illustrative phase ranges for a moderate-complexity engagement. Your own ranges are fixed only in the signed SOW after scoping.
Where this fits
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 Does the Track Record Look Like?
Three engagements from Mactores' named reference set that map directly to this work. Each describes one engagement, not a promise about yours, but together they give the claims above something more specific to stand on than an industry average.
Software Modernization · Manufacturing
Synaptics
On date
Cutover landed on the committed contract date
1
Oracle license renewal became budget for the next initiative
Oracle to Amazon RDS, cut over on the contract date
Synaptics' analytics workloads had to leave Oracle, but its own team was fully committed to product work. Mactores ran the schema analysis, code conversion and validation without borrowing Synaptics' staff, cut over on the committed date, and the upcoming Oracle license renewal became budget for the company's next initiative.
Read the case studySoftware Modernization · Payments
A Branded Payments leader
Zero
Audit incidents during cutover
2 → 1
Two prior attempts stalled before cutover. One engagement reached production.
Modernization that reached production after two stalled attempts
Years of accumulated technical debt had already stopped two earlier modernization efforts short of cutover. This engagement got there, moving mainframe-era payments logic to cloud-native AWS with PCI-DSS alignment built in during delivery and zero audit incidents during cutover.
Read the case studySoftware Modernization · Payments
Tilia
Both
Transaction security and operational efficiency, one engagement
0
Platform swaps — both delivered on the existing platform
Transaction security and operational efficiency, on the same platform
Earlier partners had told Tilia it would have to choose between stronger transaction security and better operational efficiency. Mactores analyzed both layers together and delivered both improvements without a platform swap.
Read the case studyThe complete case study library, including work outside software 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.
How Mactores Compares With Other Modernization Partners
Choosing a modernization partner usually means choosing between four kinds of team, and each one breaks down in a different place:
| Alternative | Where it's strong | Where the risk sits |
|---|---|---|
| Big 4 / global advisory | Executive alignment, governance models, a transformation story the board accepts. | The consultants who win the work are rarely the ones who build it, and hourly billing means a late project costs the firm nothing. |
| Tier-1 systems integrator | Large benches and the capacity to run many systems in parallel over several years. | Teams arrive sized for a program, so a single-system migration tends to grow until it matches the headcount. |
| AWS ProServe or another AWS partner | Strong platform knowledge and a close view of where AWS is heading. | Work is usually framed around estate-wide migration, not one legacy system held to one fixed cutover date. |
| In-house team | Knows the system, the data and the organization better than any outsider. | Schema conversion and production load testing are occasional tasks for most internal teams, so the know-how is often being assembled during the cutover it is meant to protect. |
Mactores sits in a different spot: one legacy system, one committed date, and a firm that pays when it misses a date it caused. The team is agent-native by structure and sized to the system in front of it, not to a program that doesn't exist yet.
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 Mactores Won’t Take On
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A modernization with no committed retirement date for the legacy system.
Running old and new systems side by side with no end date isn't an outcome. It is a postponed decision paid for twice.
-
A build that starts before a customer-side owner signs off on the dependency map.
An unowned map is exactly where hidden dependencies slip through.
-
A cutover with no named rollback authority.
Mactores won't set a cutover date around a decision nobody has been assigned to make.
Who This Is For
Application owners and enterprise technology leaders modernizing legacy systems on AWS, most often at companies with $500M to $5B in revenue. These organizations typically have active AWS spend or a migration already underway, carry enterprise-grade complexity without unlimited room to absorb an overrun, and have seen a modernization project, their own or a close peer's, run over budget, run late or stall before production.
The commitment, in writing
A committed date, a fixed fee, and Mactores-absorbed overage when the delay is ours.
Read the clause that carries the date, the fee and the overage before any conversation about scope.
Verticals We Serve
Financial Services
Core banking, trading and payments applications and their databases refactored to AWS, with audit trail and data lineage generated by the migration itself.
Financial servicesHealthcare & Life Sciences
Claims processing and clinical data applications modernized with HIPAA-aligned validation at each phase, and PHI handling designed into the cutover plan from the first architecture review.
HealthcareInternet & Software
Modernization timed to your product release cadence, with FDEs working inside your delivery workflow rather than around it.
Internet & SoftwareManufacturing
Application and database refactoring planned for operational continuity, with cutover rehearsed so plant operations run straight through it.
ManufacturingTelco, Media, Entertainment, Gaming, and Sports (TMEGS)
High-throughput transaction and content applications validated at peak load before cutover, instead of discovering limits afterward.
TMEGSThe delivery model stays the same in every vertical. What changes is emphasis: governance for regulated data, continuity for operational systems, speed for product-led teams.
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.
Compliance and Governance: The Mechanism Behind Each Framework
Listing frameworks proves little. What matters is the specific control that makes each claim hold. Here is the mechanism behind each framework this practice supports:
Compliance artifacts come out of the same tooling that runs the regression harness and are signed by the customer at each phase exit.
Audit-ready by default
Compliance artifacts are a byproduct of the same tooling that runs the regression harness.
Bring the scope your examiner cares about and we will map it to the phase exits that produce the evidence.
Which AWS Credentials Back This Work?
Mactores is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, the highest tier in the AWS Partner Network services path. It also holds the AWS Agentic AI Specialization, awarded for agent-based delivery and a separate bar from standard consulting partner status. Alongside those sit 7 AWS Consulting Competencies (Migration and Modernization, DevOps, Data and Analytics, Machine Learning, AI Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing and Industrial Services) and 17 AWS Service Validations.
AWS grants each of these only after its own technical review. Unlike the rest of this page, they don't depend on Mactores' description: any buyer can confirm them in the AWS Partner Solutions Finder.
The AWS services behind a typical software modernization engagement: AWS Database Migration Service and AWS Schema Conversion Tool for conversion, Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS as common targets, AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda for migration orchestration and validation automation, Amazon CloudWatch for cutover monitoring, and AWS KMS and AWS CloudTrail for the encryption and audit logging described above.
- 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
- 18 years
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 Drives the Fixed Fee
| Cost driver | What pushes it up | Where it's confirmed |
|---|---|---|
| Size of the legacy estate | More schema objects, more stored procedures and triggers with nonstandard logic, and larger data volumes to validate. | Fixed at the end of discovery and named in the SOW. |
| Number of dependent systems | Each integration the dependency map uncovers, particularly undocumented ones, adds its own validation and cutover coordination. | Mapped from production query logs during discovery and documented in the architecture proposal. |
| Compliance requirements | Regulated data adds classification, evidence generation and validation beyond a standard regression pass. | Identified during discovery and priced as a separate line item in the SOW. |
| Cutover complexity | Downtime tolerance, the number of systems cutting over together, and the depth of load testing required against production-shaped traffic. | Confirmed at the validation phase exit, before the cutover date is set. |
Where the funding comes from
One illustrative way to think about funding
One illustrative way to think about funding, not a claim about your numbers: renewing an Oracle Enterprise Edition license and support on a mid-sized production database commonly costs in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Redirecting a single renewal cycle can cover a meaningful share of a fixed-fee migration, and unlike the license, the fee doesn't come back next year. Finance can model this against a renewal invoice already on the books.
Pricing disclaimer
Any pricing mentioned in sales conversations, proposals or elsewhere on this site is directional until scope is defined and signed. The fee that governs your engagement is the one in your signed SOW.
Make the numbers yours
Put your own license, integration and capacity lines against the four drivers above.
Half an hour with the engineer who would scope the work, and the fixed fee stops being a range.
A Few Terms Worth Defining
- Agent-native
- How Mactores is built: agents absorb most engagement hours, and the firm’s team, delivery practice and commercial model are designed around that.
- Forward-deployed engineer (FDE)
- An agentic AI specialist who works inside the customer’s team, makes the architecture and cutover decisions, and is personally accountable for the delivery date.
- Regression and load harness
- Automated validation run at production-level concurrency and traffic before cutover, proving the migrated system behaves like the one it replaces.
- Statement of Work (SOW)
- The signed contract that sets scope, the fixed date, the fixed fee, the named rollback authority, and how delay costs are handled on either side.
- Overage
- Cost beyond the fixed fee caused by delay, which Mactores absorbs contractually when the delay is its own.
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.