While IT modernization is an absolutely essential step for businesses undergoing AI transformation, traditional approaches have been centered on eye-glazing discussions of tactical point solutions that alienate business executives because they cannot be tied to strategic outcomes and ROI.
Google Cloud is taking a radically different approach by bundling a number of deeply technical solutions into a strategically cohesive portfolio that embraces clarity even in its name — Google Cloud Modernize — and will likely spur similar unified approaches from every vendor in the modernization space.
The key differentiator here is that Google Cloud is willing to disrupt its internal development and product teams — something its done repeatedly with its long list of market-leading AI innovations — rather than expecting customers to shoulder the endless chore of integrating new stuff into existing operations.
This is critically important here at the dawn of the AI Economy, where the pace of innovation, the pace of change, and the pace of opportunity have become head-spinning.
And it’s not that Google Cloud is trying to dumb-down the essential technologies, all of which involve highly complex tools and code that span everything from mainframes and other closed systems to virtual machines and storage and Kubernetes and more.
Rather, the breakthrough is that Google Cloud is saying that customers can now tap into a single AI-powered end-to-end solution with a unified architecture rather than having to evaluate, procure, integrate, test, reconfigure, and manage a host of devilishly complex technologies that were not originally designed to work together.
Google Cloud describes its new Modernize solution as “an end-to-end transformation portfolio to help enterprises collapse multi-year roadmaps with the power of AI.”
Incorporating purpose-built agentic AI for infrastructure assessment, platform modernization, and application modernization, the unified solution brings together several of Google Cloud’s existing migration and modernization tools:
- Migration Center,
- VMware Engine,
- Google Cloud Mainframe Modernization, and the new
- EKS-to-GKE Migration Agent.
One example of the new focus on business outcomes rather than disparate tech details is what Google Cloud describes as a reduction from weeks to minutes in creating a business case:
Every transformation begins with an accurate assessment. With new Gemini capabilities in Migration Center, the Agentic Quick Estimator (GA) converts VMware inventory exports (such as RVTools) and infrastructure inputs into total cost of ownership (TCO) projections for your Compute Engine environment.
Using an interactive chat interface, teams can test real-time modeling assumptions, such as evaluating multi-region footprints or comparing BYOL licensing against pay-as-you-go, to discover contextual cost optimizations. This condenses weeks of spreadsheet modeling into a defensible business case in minutes (emphasis added).
Final Thought
For businesses in every industry, AI transformation is an existential imperative. And for every mid-sized or large corporation that’s more than 25 years old, a huge step in that transformation is the modernization of legacy technology that was never intended to operate in today’s wildly demanding business environment.
By flipping that essential task from one centered on arcane technologies to one that turns old tech stacks into AI engine — and achieving all that in a fraction of the time traditional approaches would require —Google Cloud has added another example to the growing list of reasons why it is #1 on the Cloud Wars Top 10.
