How a Financial Services Firm Cut Migration Cost by 50% Modernizing a Java/Struts Monolith
Industry
Financial Services | Legacy Stack: Java/Struts Monolith | Target: Cloud-Native Microservices
Sanciti AI Agents: RGEN, CodeGen, TestAI | Orchestrated by: LEGMOD
50% lower modernization cost | 25% faster time-to-market | 5x faster documentation
Client
A mid-to-large financial services company operating a core business platform built on a legacy Java/Struts monolith with significant business logic embedded in the database layer and stored procedures.
Challenge
- An aging Java/Struts monolith with sparse documentation and tribal knowledge concentrated in a shrinking team. The stored procedures and database layer contained business logic invisible to standard application-level code analysis, meaning no team had a complete picture of what the system actually did.
- Tight coupling and shared state across the application made independent deployment of any component impossible. Every release was a full-system deployment with regression risk touching every module.
- Manual release cycles running weeks from code-complete to production, with peer reviews consuming 35%+ of senior developer time because reviewers lacked confidence in what changes would affect downstream.
- Struts-era Java skills increasingly difficult to hire for, making even routine maintenance expensive and slow. The talent bottleneck was as much a business risk as the technical debt.
Solution: Orchestrated by Sanciti AI LEGMOD
Sanciti AI’s LEGMOD orchestrated the full modernization, coordinating RGEN, CodeGen, and TestAI through a governed execution with human oversight at every stage.
RGEN: Codebase Comprehension and DB-Layer Extraction
RGEN ingested the full codebase including the database layer and stored procedures. It reverse-engineered business logic, mapped application-to-database dependencies, and produced a complete structured specification. Documentation that would have taken months of manual analyst work was generated 5x faster, and for the first time the organization had a traceable map of logic that lived in stored procedures, not just in application code.
CodeGen: Microservices Generation
CodeGen generated independently deployable microservices with clean API boundaries from RGEN’s structured output. Business logic previously locked in stored procedures was extracted and implemented in application code. All generated code was OWASP/NIST quality-scored with SAST and SCA scans, reducing peer review time by 35% because reviewers received pre-scored, standards-compliant code instead of unvalidated output.
TestAI: Functional Equivalence Validation
TestAI generated automated test suites validating functional equivalence across every decomposed service, achieving 90% test coverage at first-time delivery, with specific focus on DB-layer logic migration. Tests confirmed that business rules extracted from stored procedures behaved identically in their new application-layer implementation. LEGMOD governed wave sequencing based on coupling risk and business criticality, with human approval gates at every phase. All agent interactions passed through Sanciti AI’s guardrails with complete audit trails.
Results
- 50% lower modernization cost versus the manual re-platform estimate that had been scoped for a large blended team of Struts and modern Java specialists.
- 25% faster time-to-market for new feature delivery post-modernization. Independent service deployment replaced full-system releases.
- 5x faster documentation through RGEN’s automated reverse-engineering, replacing months of manual stored procedure analysis that had blocked previous modernization attempts.
- 35% reduction in peer review time through CodeGen’s pre-scored, OWASP/NIST-compliant output, freeing senior developers from line-by-line review of every change.
Impact
The monolith is decomposed into independently deployable services. Releases that took weeks now ship in days. The codebase is accessible to the broader modern Java engineering market, eliminating the Struts-era talent bottleneck.
Every business rule extracted from stored procedures is traceable from its legacy source to its modernized implementation to its validated test case.
Sanciti AI agents: RGEN, CodeGen, TestAI. Orchestrated by LEGMOD.
