Long digital transformation projects fail. They are expensive, high risk and rarely achieve their objectives. The issue is not the platforms, infrastructure or the move to cloud. Applications continue to slow progress. They are often treated as the final step yet are typically the most complex and time-consuming part of the process.
The way application packaging has been handled for years is part of the problem. The sheer volume of applications to repackage compels organisations to rely on external repackaging services. Yet this industry has propagated a labour-intensive approach that is manual and difficult to scale and a commercial model predicated on time and effort rather than outcomes. Application packaging services represent a valuable revenue stream for providers, yet with organisations facing increasing pressure from security risks, regulation and the need to move away from legacy formats, what is the alternative?
The gap between what modern platforms promise in theory and what organisations can actually deliver in practice is adding cost and risk. It is time to address the application delivery problem and deliver application repackaging at industrial scale, says Steve Horne (pictured), CEO, appCURE...
High Risk and High Cost
Whether it is competitive advantage, a shift to AI or an urgent need to eradicate legacy platforms to improve regulatory compliance and security, digital transformation projects are vital. Yet far too many of these projects fail to deliver. Based on outdated, pre-cloud development models, transformation projects have failed to embrace modern automation and cloud led innovation. Inevitably, costs are high. Projects run for years. And often leave organisations with the burden of running new infrastructure alongside old because core applications have yet to be repackaged for the new platform.
The fundamental flaw is that transformation projects concentrate on the infrastructure. The priority is to deliver the platform, the operating system, the desktop. It is only once these components are in place that the focus shifts to the applications, at which point the project flounders due to the cost and time associated with application migration. Yet applications are the foundation for business operations. Their accessibility and usability define the day-to-day experience not only of staff but also customers and suppliers. Ensuring application availability should be the priority for any digital transformation project.
Instead, organisations are held hostage by traditional manual models for migration that are both are painfully slow and, depending on the age or bespoke nature of the application, extremely expensive.
Broken Model
Where does that leave an NHS trust with 800 legacy applications and a packaging team of two people? Or the financial services’ firm’s regulatory compliance strategy when it is locked into Windows 7-era LOB software with no time to repackage it safely? How is the manufacturing company going to modernise when the entire production floor depends on a 15-year-old application without the original source code? These are the vital applications that businesses depend upon every single day. They may be old and designed for technologies now perceived as legacy; but they are functionally rich and fundamental to continued operations.
For those with budget, the response is to turn to expensive consultancy services to undertake this work. Despite the fact that in most IT estates around 80% of applications are modern and do not demand complex engineering skills to repackage, the persistent reliance upon outdated manual models adds unnecessary cost and risk to the process.
Furthermore, this model demands organisations make their infrastructure choices – most notably the desktop platform choice – before any migration work commences because the manual approach demands each application is repackaged for a specific platform. The inevitable result is that infrastructure choices continue to take priority over application requirements. This model is fundamentally broken.
Industrial Scale
If organisations are to achieve digital transformation objectives, the industry needs to achieve application packaging at scale. It needs to stop insisting that application packaging models are platform specific and leverage proven tools that not only deliver migration at industrial scale but allow applications to be spun up onto any preferred platform – virtual or physical – at any time, now and in the future.
And the tools are available and proven. Innovations such as Microsoft’s MSIX format can support the concept of application packaging at scale. The ability to repackage existing desktop applications – including EXE, MSI and APP-V – into the MSIX format without requiring access to the source code transforms the application deployment process.
Combined with a delivery mechanism that works on physical devices and virtual sessions, cloud-mounted and locally executed and a platform that transforms every application type from every era, delivers to every Windows endpoint, and maintains it automatically, the concept of manually managing each application repackage separately is now obsolete.
Eradicating Bottlenecks
In an era of agentic AI, this is just the start for a new application packaging paradigm. The addition of agentic AI to this process is the final component in delivering platform agnostic repackaging at a scale that will truly enable digital transformation at pace. The premise is straightforward: within most enterprises, 80% of applications are not complex. They are standard, with known formats and dependency structures that an agentic intelligent automation pipeline can capture, transform, package, test, and deliver without any human interaction.
This frees up engineers to concentrate on the 20% that demand skilled interaction; the applications that are complex, with ancient codebases and custom configurations that demand expertise and nuanced judgement. With this approach, the application packaging process fundamentally shifts from one application every one to three days, to 100 applications every 90 minutes.
And while AI will continuously learn, further increasing the proportion of applications it can repackage, this will never be an ‘automate everything’ solution. There will always be applications that require manual intervention and the expertise of dedicated software engineers. But by packaging, securing, delivering and updating applications continuously and intelligently, AI can remove the human bottleneck from the digital transformation process.
Conclusion
Slow, expensive application packaging services that derail essential transformation projects is not a new problem. Waves of IT evolution and innovation have been hijacked by the persistent challenges associated with application migration. From the ASP models of the last century to Data as a Service (DaaS), multiple iterations of the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) concept have not been realised.
Until now. By shifting the focus away from infrastructure towards applications, organisations prioritise the core aspect of business success. Critically, by embracing a model predicated on a single repackaging process, every application can be made available on any Windows environment, anywhere, at any time, delivering unprecedented infrastructure agility. Adding intelligent AI automation to undertake upwards of 90% of the applications and leaving skilled staff to handle the inevitable complex and different applications enables industrial scale repackaging.
With this approach to application packaging, there is no need for a three-year migration project that never delivers. The entire process can be completed in weeks. Transformation goals can be achieved and, critically, by adopting a ‘repackage once, deploy anywhere’ model, there are no barriers to future business change.
