Companies are struggling to innovate because nobody has priced the cost
Companies are struggling to innovate because nobody has priced the cost of keeping legacy systems.
More than 70% of Fortune 500 companies still rely on mainframes. Banks like JPMorganChase, insurers like MetLife, airlines like American Airlines, and government agencies such as the IRS still run critical workloads on mainframes because they remain reliable for high-volume transaction processing.
The problem starts when every new product, integration, or customer request has to negotiate with decisions made decades ago.
The same pattern shows up in smaller companies.
A manufacturer still running an on-premise Microsoft Dynamics NAV deployment from a decade ago. A distributor with heavily customized SAP Business One that nobody wants to touch. A growing company whose operations still depend on an aging Windows Server, SQL Server, and Excel-based reporting stack.
A founder asks for a new customer portal. The answer is, “We can do it, but first we need to work around the ERP, update three custom integrations, and test the reporting pipeline.”
The feature wasn’t expensive.
The environment made it expensive.
Too many businesses treat technology assessments as infrastructure hygiene. They’re strategic work. If you haven’t looked at your technology setup in five years, you’re probably making commercial decisions around constraints that no longer deserve to exist.
Instead of killing a business overnight legacy technology quietly raises the cost of every decision until competitors can experiment faster, ship sooner, and learn while you’re still estimating the project.