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When Broadcom completed its $69 billion acquisition of VMware in November 2023, most customers assumed the initial disruption would settle. Licensing models would stabilise. Partner programmes would find a new equilibrium. Pricing would normalise. Two years in, it’s clear that didn’t happen.

Most application migration projects fail the same way: someone picks a single strategy for the entire portfolio, then tries to force every workload into it. Lift-and-shift everything to meet a data centre exit deadline. Refactor everything because someone read a cloud-native manifesto. Retire nothing because no one wants to make the decision. AWS’s 7 Rs framework exists to prevent that.

Technical debt costs US enterprises an estimated $2.41 trillion per year, according to Accenture research cited by AWS. For most organisations, roughly 30% of engineering time gets absorbed by maintaining legacy systems – work that’s necessary, but produces no new business value. That’s the problem AWS has been trying to solve with AWS Transform, its agentic AI service for enterprise application modernization.

The debate over lift and shift versus refactoring is one of the most persistent in cloud migration planning. It’s also frequently framed as a binary choice when it shouldn’t be. Most organizations will do both — the question is which approach applies to which workload, and in what order. Getting this decision wrong is expensive. Over-refactoring adds months to migration timelines and cost that’s difficult to justify.

Opti9 recently announced it has been approved as an authorized reseller for Anthropic models through Amazon Bedrock, further strengthening its ability to deliver secure, enterprise-grade AI solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In October, AWS enabled its Solution Provider Partners to resell Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that provides access to a wide range of leading foundation models from top providers.

Cloud migrations have a reputation for running over budget and behind schedule. That reputation isn’t entirely undeserved — migrations done without structure often do. But AWS has invested heavily in programs that give businesses a faster, cheaper path to the cloud, and most organizations don’t know they exist or how to access them. The AWS Accelerator Program is one of the more practical frameworks available for SMBs and mid-market companies planning a move to AWS.