Rescuing Legacy Systems Without a Rewrite 

Somewhere out there, a CIO is signing off on a €2 million complete system rewrite — for a problem that could’ve been fixed with a €200K patch and six weeks of work.

That’s not a hypothetical. It’s a weekly occurrence in enterprise IT. The only thing more predictable than an over-engineered “digital transformation” is the post-mortem that starts with: “We probably didn’t need to rebuild everything.”

One Reddit thread captured it perfectly: “After installing a new hyper-converged infrastructure… we contact the vendor support team and after 3 weeks of back-and-forth… an engineer restores our cluster in about 2 hours.”

That’s what happens when “replace it all” becomes the default answer. You wait weeks for the cavalry when all you needed was one senior engineer with the proper wrench.

We’ve seen this movie. One Kaunas High Tech Cluster team walked into a retail chain’s “too old to touch” e-commerce backend. The incumbent vendor’s fix? A 9-month, €1.2M complete rebuild. The Kaunas engineers’ counterproposal? Wrap a modern API layer around the legacy stack, refactor the worst-performing modules, and keep 90% of the system in place. Six weeks later, the company was processing record orders — and hadn’t burned a hole through its budget.

The dirty secret: most “legacy” systems aren’t dying. They’re just misunderstood.

Why this happens (and why vendors won’t stop it)

Big vendors sell certainty. Rewrites are neat, scoping is predictable, and invoices are large. But beneath that veneer of “strategic transformation” lies what Gartner politely calls information overload paralysis. Teams drown in documentation and sales decks, mistaking activity for progress.

According to recent buyer behaviour studies, 86% of B2B buyers already have a “Day One” list of preferred suppliers — and 92% will buy from it. Once you’re in, it’s easy to pitch a rewrite. After all, who wants to be the consultant saying, “Actually, we can just fix this”? There’s no hero story in maintenance.

The buyers aren’t blameless either. Complex buying committees (17 stakeholders on average) mean nobody wants to take the political risk of patching the old thing. Rebuilds sound bold. Patches sound cheap. And no one wants to be cheap.

The smarter modernisation play

At Kaunas High Tech Cluster, we’ve seen what happens when clients skip the hype cycle and focus on outcomes. Not buzzwords. Not “AI-powered transformation roadmaps.” Actual fixes.