Visual Basic 6 Remains the Dominant Hurdle in Legacy Modernization

The data, covering the period from August 2025 to August 2026, highlights a persistent reliance on aging infrastructure. While VB6 dominates the raw volume of inquiries, the report warns that counting organizations can obscure the true complexity of enterprise software. When measuring by code volume rather than inquiry count, the significance of VB6 drops to 30%, while larger, more complex systems—such as PowerBuilder and Clarion—account for a combined 32% of the modernization burden.

Darryl Worsham, General Manager at GAPVelocity AI, notes that these figures reflect systems often buried within operations or finance departments rather than central IT. This creates a challenge for AI-driven modernization, as these legacy environments are heavily coupled with proprietary UI frameworks and lack the training data found in more modern architectures. Microsoft Access inquiries also saw a notable surge, growing 6.3 times year-over-year. The report explicitly acknowledges that its findings skew toward Microsoft-centric stacks due to the company’s history with migration tools, suggesting that mainframes and other specialized languages remain underrepresented in this specific dataset.