Retailers have been frequently overwhelmed with the challenge of making their Legacy infrastructures keep us with their business expectations. Legacy infrastructures have been associated with huge licensing and maintenance costs, risks of obsolescence, erosion of knowledge base as well as a high amount of inertia involved in making any significant process change. The imperative is to free business of the legacy cost and capability leashes, so that business derives optimal ROI value out of its IT investments.

Cognizant has helped retailers gear up their legacy infrastructure and manage legacy risks involved in implementing business decisions. The key success factor for such an exercise is to know what the best foot forward is, and identify the option that is best suited to resolve transformational issues related to Legacy IT.

The effort to turn around legacy IT infrastructures and make them work has to align with the long term business and IT strategy, and needs to manage investments, deadlines, technology, and business logic. Most importantly, it needs to manage user expectations and people perceptions. That's why Cognizant provides an end - to - end spectrum of offerings in retail legacy transformation -- from the upstream analysis and decision making to the downstream execution of the transformation roadmap defined.

The options to legacy turnaround essentially lead to one of the following activities or a mix of them, depending upon the AS IS state of the legacy and the goals: