"Legacy modernization" gets sold as one service category, but porting a VB6 desktop app to .NET, translating a Sybase ASE database's SQL dialect to PostgreSQL, and replatforming a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 9 are three unrelated engineering problems with almost no shared tooling. A vendor who's spent a decade on UI framework ports doesn't automatically know how to handle stored-procedure syntax that doesn't exist in the target database. Ten years of "modernization experience" is a services-page phrase. The actual question is which specific migration type a vendor has done repeatedly, because that's the only kind of experience that transfers.

Five signals that separate real evidence from a services page

Published modernization evidence: case studies naming the specific legacy system replaced, not a generic "outdated platform."

Modernization review depth: what fraction of a vendor's client reviews actually describe modernization work, versus new builds counted under the same rating?

Declared modernization…