Marilize Redelinghuys, head of retail modernisation, Mr Price Group.
Application modernisation and consolidation is a journey many established organisations need to undertake, but the path is not always as easy as some might expect.
Mr Price Group has made significant progress on its modernisation journey, having rationalised from approximately 330 applications to 120, according to Marilize Redelinghuys, head of retail modernisation at Mr Price Group. Further consolidation lies ahead, with that number set to roughly halve in the coming months.
She offers several lessons from that experience.
When modernising a legacy application, various considerations must be made upfront. “You have to understand the application itself, the data, the architecture and the business process; all of them work together,” she says. “But your prioritisation should probably start by determining what your burning issues are, and that will help set the tone for what you need to tackle first.”
Questions should also be asked whether to retire an application – which Redelinghuys says is quite an easy choice if it no longer serves the business – or to re-host, refactor or rebuild. Business and technology strategies help determine the answer, she says, as do considerations around resources, time and funding.
“The decision shouldn’t just be for the sake of moving to cloud.”
There are often misconceptions about moving legacy applications to the cloud, Redelinghuys adds.
The first is that a transition can be completed “without much effort”.
“Just because an application is operating on-premises doesn’t mean it’s ready for the cloud,” she says, adding that business maturity, change management, organisational processes and internal technical capabilities all need to be considered.
“You have to take a ‘horses for courses’ approach,” she says.
If an application aligns to standard business processes that are followed by other organisations, that might push the decision towards a commercially available software as a service (SaaS) solution. However, if it is key to the business’s competitive advantage, that would tend to lead to homegrown solutions, which are more likely to rely on infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
Cloud models such as IaaS and platform as a service offer greater freedom for developers to match the nuances of a company’s unique business processes and to work around real-life challenges, such as manually adjusting back-end records to ease operational bottlenecks. This is not always possible in a templated SaaS environment.
One phrase that often triggers caution in Redelinghuys is “lift and shift”.
“Whenever your internal teams or consultants or external partners drop that line, there’s always going to be a high risk that you’ll end up just shifting your technical debt into the cloud,” she says.
While technical debt often has a negative connotation, it does not have to. “Several times, I’ve continued to move technical debt into the cloud because we were trying to meet a deadline or a set of objectives, or we knew this was part of a bigger piece that we would address at a later stage,” she says. “As long as that is done with intent and is surfaced and documented, and you go back and resolve that at a later stage, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
Asked what the biggest risks are of modernising too quickly, Redelinghuys says business disruption is probably the most significant, adding that change fatigue will play a major role.
“You want to get in, get through the change and then move out and let the team settle,” she says. “If they’re going through multiple changes in the same environments, they don’t really know whether they are strategically on track, because they don’t know what data they can trust yet. So you want to let that trust of the new system settle in first before you start to make changes again.”
Redelinghuys will be on stage later this month at the ITWeb Cloud Summit 2026, sharing practical lessons on modernising legacy applications to benefit from cloud-based infrastructure environments.
