Migration contracts · Remote & on-site · Germany & Europe

Your legacy system, migrated — without stopping the business

PHP 4 to 8. SuSE to Red Hat. No version control to full CI/CD. The messy, high-stakes migrations that in-house teams don’t have the bandwidth for.

PHP 4 Oldest stack migrated
0 Big-bang rewrites
Zero Downtime during migration
HPE / BMW Reference clients

Does this sound familiar?

A system that has been running for ten or fifteen years. It works — mostly. But nobody dares touch it. The person who built it left years ago. The dependencies were compiled by hand on a server that has since been decommissioned. Shell scripts hold critical processes together, and nobody is entirely sure what they do.

Then a deadline appears. A client contract requires a platform change. A regulator demands a supported OS. An internal audit flags end-of-life software. The in-house team doesn’t have the bandwidth, and a consultancy that needs three months of onboarding isn’t an option.

What the migration delivers

A system your team can change

Version control, CI/CD, documented decisions. After the migration, deployments are predictable and your team is no longer afraid to touch the codebase.

No disruption to the business

Incremental delivery. The existing system stays live throughout. No big-bang cutover, no surprise downtime, no broken deploys on a Friday evening.

Compliance and audit readiness

Supported OS, supported PHP, current dependencies. The kind of state that satisfies vendor contracts, security audits, and internal governance requirements.

This has been done before

At Hewlett Packard Enterprise, embedded at a German automotive OEM: a full infrastructure and software migration of a system running SuSE Linux with self-compiled PHP 4, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, shell scripts and CheckMK integrations — no version control, no deployment pipeline. The entire stack was migrated to Red Hat, Git and CI/CD were introduced, all components upgraded. The migration prevented contractual penalties and left the system in a state the team could finally maintain.

  • PHP 4 → PHP 8
  • Python
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • SuSE Linux → Red Hat
  • CheckMK
  • Shell scripting
  • Git
  • CI/CD

How to engage

Migration audit (fixed price)

A written assessment of the existing system: risk areas, dependencies, migration sequence, effort estimate. Useful before committing to a full project.

Full migration project (Werkvertrag)

End-to-end delivery. Fixed scope, defined milestones, formal sign-off on completion.

Embedded engineer (Dienstvertrag)

Working inside your team for the duration of the project, with knowledge transfer throughout.

Not sure where your system stands?

Before scoping a migration, it helps to know exactly what you are dealing with. This checklist covers the areas that most often block or delay a project.

Legacy System Migration Readiness Checklist

PHP & OS EOL status, version control, CI/CD, dependencies, test coverage, monitoring — with a risk rating for each item. Print it, fill it in, share it with your team.

View the checklist →

Let’s talk about your migration

Describe the system, the deadline, and the constraint. A response usually comes the same day.