In this article, Charath Ranganathan, CTO of Crowdbotics, presents an AI-native approach to legacy application modernization built on Microsoft Azure, illustrating how AI-driven analysis and automation can transform enterprise modernization projects.

Reinventing Legacy App Modernization: Crowdbotics’ AI-Native Platform on Azure

Author: Charath Ranganathan, CTO, Crowdbotics

Modernizing legacy applications is a major challenge for enterprises. Many core systems, originally built with technologies such as COBOL on mainframes, still power crucial business functions but are difficult and expensive to update. Traditionally, these modernization efforts require labor-intensive manual analysis, making the process slow, error-prone, and costly—especially when documentation is scarce or missing.

The Challenge: Drowning in Legacy Complexity

Conventional modernization practices start with static analysis tools that highlight code dependencies and structures. However, these tools rarely uncover true application functionality. Business analysts and managers must spend extensive time reverse-engineering logic, interviewing subject matter experts, and assembling incomplete requirements. Legacy systems are often a collection of interconnected, loosely coupled components, further increasing the complexity of understanding and updating them.

Crowdbotics: From Code to Specification with AI

Crowdbotics offers a fundamentally different, AI-native solution designed specifically for legacy application modernization. Instead of only examining structural aspects, the Crowdbotics platform ingests legacy codebases—along with any related documentation—and uses advanced AI models to analyze and understand the application’s business logic, workflows, and data interactions. Key capabilities include:

  1. Deep Analysis: Crowdbotics examines code, comments, and related artifacts to infer an application’s logic and workflows beyond basic structural analysis.
  2. Functional Decomposition: The platform recognizes and groups related functions into logical components—identifying elements such as “Transaction Processing,” “Reporting,” or “User Authentication.”
  3. Requirements Generation: Based on its analysis, Crowdbotics automatically generates detailed requirements documentation, similar to a Product Requirements Document (PRD). This includes:
    • Inferred functionality descriptions
    • Logical grouping of functions
    • User types associated with each component
    • Acceptance criteria based on logic
    • System relationship diagrams and dependencies (e.g., using the C4 model)

This approach allows organizations to quickly generate new software scaffolds, efficiently maintain and enhance legacy applications, and reduce the risk and manual effort typically associated with modernization projects.

Natively Built and Powered by Azure

Crowdbotics’ platform is built entirely on Microsoft Azure, taking advantage of Azure’s comprehensive range of compute, AI, and application services:

  • Azure OpenAI Service: Used at the platform’s core for code analysis, inference, and automatic requirements generation.
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) & Azure App Service: The platform’s agent-based AI ensemble and compute-heavy workloads run on AKS and App Service, benefiting from Azure’s scalable container orchestration features.
  • Azure Functions: Key components of the analysis pipeline are implemented as microservices, which are executed efficiently and at scale using Azure Functions.
  • Model Fine-Tuning: The team is exploring model fine-tuning on Azure to tackle hard-to-analyze legacy code bases or domain-specific languages.

Azure’s scalability, security, and AI services are fundamental to handling the complexities of large and varied legacy systems.

Benefits and Getting Started

Crowdbotics, running natively on Azure, enables organizations to:

  • Quickly understand and document obscure, undocumented legacy code
  • Automatically generate specifications and requirements
  • Accelerate the modernization of core business applications
  • Improve developer productivity and reduce manual analysis

Additional Resources:

Stop struggling with inefficient, manual modernization processes. Leveraging AI and Azure services, Crowdbotics bridges the gap between legacy and modern applications, enabling smarter, faster, and safer modernization.

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