For decades, enterprises have been locked in a costly relationship with their legacy applications. Recent research reveals the staggering price tag: the average global enterprise wastes more than $370 million annually on technical debt. Despite this enormous burden, the majority of modernization projects fail, often taking years and costing millions before they deliver underwhelming results or are abandoned altogether.
The reason? Legacy modernization has always been incredibly difficult. These systems lack proper documentation, with millions of lines of code and minimal documentation. Business logic is tightly coupled with user interfaces and data structures, making it nearly impossible to understand what the application actually does without extensive manual analysis. Data schemas are complex and often plagued with quality issues trapped in proprietary formats. By the time enterprises finish documenting their legacy estate and aligning stakeholders on a path forward, they've already spent months and significant resources—and they haven't even started building anything new.
Accenture’s latest Digital Core report confirms that tech debt is a massive and growing challenge. In the US alone, tech debt costs $2.41 trillion a year and would require $1.52 trillion to fix. Leading companies allocate an average of 15% of their IT budget toward tech debt remediation, striking a “sweet spot” that balances debt reduction with future investments. Notably, companies with lower-than-average tech debt have outperformed their peers in revenue growth and expect even better performance over the next three years (5.3% vs. 4.4% from 2024–2026).
“At Accenture, we believe legacy modernization is more than a technical upgrade—it’s a strategic initiative that unlocks agility, innovation, and long-term value for our clients. By combining Accenture’s deep industry expertise, AWS’s Transform and Pega’s AI-powered automation, we’re accelerating the journey from legacy systems to modern, cloud-native platforms for our customers rapidly.”
The power of three: A blueprint for modernization
To help solve this problem, Accenture and AWS have partnered with Pega to create a unified solution that fundamentally changes the legacy modernization equation by integrating three distinct technological capabilities into a single, AI-driven journey.
The process begins by deconstructing complex legacy applications. Accenture GenWizard™ provides AI-powered analysis for over 30 programming languages like Java and .NET, while AWS Transform adds specialized, agentic analysis for the unique complexities of IBM Mainframe environments. This comprehensive analysis flows directly into Pega Blueprint™, where AI helps design new, cloud-native workflows in a collaborative environment where business and IT teams can refine the application using not just the code analysis, but also process diagrams, data structures, and even videos of the old system in action.
Finally, the resulting application blueprint is deployed on the Pega Infinity platform, hosted on the AWS Cloud, allowing for the rapid launch of a minimum viable product (MVP). Native AWS integrations facilitate the migration of data to modern data stores like Amazon RDS and Redshift. This end-to-end solution—now available on the AWS Marketplace—enables enterprises to transform legacy systems in weeks instead of years, dramatically accelerating time to value.
Beyond theory: Results from the field
The power of this three-party technology collaboration is already proving itself in real-world scenarios. In recent workshops using this integrated methodology, organizations achieved remarkable results that demonstrate the speed and efficiency of the combined approach.
During one discovery phase, Accenture GenWizard™ generated 75% of the baseline analysis automatically, with subject matter experts enhancing the remaining 25% with domain-specific insights. This dramatic acceleration meant enterprises could understand their legacy applications in days rather than months.
This speed continued into the design phase. Because teams weren’t starting from scratch, they were able to more easily and quickly reach a high-fidelity Blueprint through collaborative workshops and SME input. This close collaboration was critical, with stakeholders noting that it enabled them to move from analysis to a functional prototype in weeks.
These metrics translate into tangible business impact. Organizations report dramatically reduced time to market and faster realization of value. The integrated approach enables enterprises to build a high-fidelity Blueprint™ that serve as powerful starting points for getting live applications built on the Pega platform, deployed on AWS infrastructure, and going live fast.
More than a fix: Architecting for the future
This partnership's true significance lies in preparing enterprises for an AI-driven future. Legacy systems create fundamental barriers to this goal by trapping data, inhibiting automation, and preventing the personalization modern customers expect. Moving to a low-code, scalable platform like Pega Infinity is what allows organizations to finally break free from these constraints.
This modern architecture lays the necessary foundation to infuse AI and automation across end-to-end business processes. It ultimately enables the complete self-service outcomes and deeply personalized interactions that are required to compete and win in the modern market.
From years to weeks: De-risking the modernization gamble
This AI-led approach fundamentally de-risks modernization projects by eliminating the enormous time and cost associated with traditional methods. The transformation timeline is compressed from years to mere weeks, with a go-live for a minimum viable product (MVP) possible in just 90 days.
This acceleration replaces the uncertainty of multi-year commitments with a tangible, hands-on approach. Now, thanks to these AI-led advancements, enterprises can participate in a focused engagement over just a few weeks to analyze legacy code and prototype a new application, gaining a real-life view of their future state without before making a long-term investment.
A new model for enterprise transformation
"Perhaps the biggest issue for many organizations is that when they look to modernize, they often have no sense of where to start. This collaboration will simplify the process, providing faster time to deployment and increased customer satisfaction.”
The Accenture-Pega-AWS partnership represents more than just an incremental improvement; it reimagines what’s possible. For enterprises struggling with technical debt and the imperative to modernize for the AI era, this three-way collaboration offers a proven path forward that delivers results in weeks, not years—making the whole truly greater than the sum of its parts.