C-suites across verticals and company sizes are looking to modernize their IT environment to meet their three core business goals: business innovation with AI, legacy transformation, and ensuring resilience and control.

Application migration and data readiness, followed by AI readiness are the backbone to meet these business objectives. But only a handful of organisations admit that their migration and modernization strategies have been fully successful and is yielding expected results, according to IDC’s research. The reasons c-suites share for modernisation failures are not just about technology. Often times, it is operational challenges, infrastructure complexities, skills shortages, misalignment with business needs, change management, and legacy processes. Platform engineering is emerging as the essential architectural foundation for scaling modern software delivery, particularly as organisations navigate the complexities of cloud migration, application modernisation, and the integration of AI.

The shift toward platform engineering represents a move from manual, fragmented operations to a product-centric approach to infrastructure, essential for success in the AI era.

Combining AI and platform engineering brings a fresh, risk-mitigated approach to legacy transformation. IDC predicts that by 2029, enterprises will be able to produce and modernise applications 400% faster through the use of agentic AI software development tools. Developers need self-service access to infrastructure that is pre-configured with security and compliance guardrails. This abstracts the complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments, allowing faster application modernisation.

IDC predicts that by 2030, 70% of organisations will embed AI agents in DevOps and DevSecOps pipelines to execute development and security workflows, as platform engineering enables standardisation at scale.

Only 12% of organisations IDC surveyed in September 2025 (IDC Multicloud Strategies Survey, EMEA) identified themselves as having an IT architecture that is mature, optimised and tightly aligned to business value or innovation.

In 2026, IT modernisation and cloud migration is consistently among top areas where organisations are increasing IT budgets despite economic and geopolitical uncertainties, according to IDC research.

In fact, workload modernisation has become a high or top priority for 7 out of every 10 organizations, our survey shows. The key question is how to make the transformation and migration strategy a success. How to mitigate the risks, how to shift from a big-bang approach to continuous and incremental transformation strategy (such as decomposing large applications to microservices architecture for continuous business value), how to deliver business value throughout the project? How to prepare to capitalise on data and AI opportunities?

Hosted and moderated by IDC, and sponsored by AWS & SoftServe, at One Aldwych.
On Thursday 2nd July, this roundtable offers a unique opportunity to engage with industry experts, exchange perspectives, and, most importantly, share your own experiences and challenges for a confident way forward to meeting business objectives.