The $10B opportunity hidden in legacy ETL migrations

Legacy ETL migrations are a billion-dollar opportunity. 

If you’re a partner helping enterprises adopt a modern data platform such as Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, or BigQuery, legacy ETL is your biggest opportunity and your biggest risk. Get it right, and you build trust, unlock budgets, and clear the path for cloud-native innovation. Get it wrong, and you introduce years of friction, rework, and worse, undermine confidence in the entire modernization effort.

What’s really slowing down cloud migrations

As enterprises push toward modern data platforms, they consistently hit the same wall: decades-old ETL pipelines still powering executive dashboards, regulatory reports, and mission-critical workflows. 

These projects rarely get scoped because they’re seen as too risky, too expensive, and too hard to estimate. That’s a missed opportunity. Legacy ETL often contains the most brittle and business-critical logic in the system, and unlocking it can accelerate the entire modernization effort.

Everyone understands the challenge. The question is: who can credibly take it on? If you want to win those deals—if you want to be trusted with the riskiest, most embedded layer of your client’s data stack, you need to show up with the tools to handle it. Clients won’t scope ETL migrations without confidence in the outcome. Services partners who come prepared with the right technology will be the ones who get to lead that transformation work.

ETL was how people did data in the ‘90s, and it shows

Before cloud warehouses and dbt, ETL pipelines were built in desktop GUIs. They ran in memory, stored logic in config panels, and were stitched together in proprietary black-box systems.

We’ve seen hundreds of these pipelines up close, and I can tell you that they weren’t built to survive the modern stack. Filters, joins, and expressions are hidden in graphical flows, stored in XML files, or locked behind custom config panels. There’s no version control, automated tests, or documentation, and yet they’re still powering production workloads at major enterprises.

These systems made sense at the time, but today, they actively block modernization. They slow adoption of modern data platforms, delay AI and analytics initiatives, and inflate the cost of every migration.

Legacy ETL breaks every principle of good engineering

Modern data teams ship pipelines like software: versioned, testable, observable, and modular. 

Today’s composable architectures allow enterprises to scale storage and compute as needed while integrating components like BI, data integration, and ML.

ETL tools, especially legacy ones, break every principle of modern data engineering with their all-in-one, vertically integrated, and GUI-focused architecture. Those patterns were effective 30 years ago, but today they have become blockers to enterprise data adoption.

This is where I believe most cloud platform migrations fall short. You modernize your warehouse and rebuild your orchestration layer, but if your transformation logic is still trapped in a 2000s-era GUI, you’ve just moved your bottleneck. 

But this is precisely where partners can create value. Helping customers unlock, extract, and validate these pipelines is a strategic wedge into broader architecture, analytics, and governance engagements. 

It’s hard work. That’s why it’s worth doing

Legacy ETL logic wasn’t designed to move. And, there’s no straightforward way to validate that the new system behaves like the old one. You have to rebuild these pipelines piece by piece and test as you go.

The answer isn’t just rewriting pipelines but also proving they still work. That’s the breakthrough. At Datafold, we’ve built automated translation and validation to give partners speed and confidence.

Our Data Migration Agent can ingest legacy pipelines of any complexity, translate them into modern code and patterns, and automatically validate that the data outputs match.

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It doesn’t just accelerate migrations. It also gives your clients confidence that nothing got lost in translation.

Get a head start on the next wave of modernization

This is high-stakes work, but it’s also high-impact. Want to lead your clients through the hardest part of modernization with confidence? Book a demo to see how Datafold helps partners deliver faster, safer ETL migrations without the guesswork.