Executive Summary: Application upgrades are disrupting business priorities and consuming critical developer resources. New automation tools are helping enterprises reduce upgrade complexity while maintaining security and business continuity.
The Strategic Challenge Every CTO Faces
Your development teams are spending weeks—sometimes months—coordinating Spring framework upgrades across multiple repositories, teams, and dependencies. Meanwhile, critical business features sit in the backlog, waiting for resources that are tied up in manual upgrade processes.
Recent State of Spring industry data reveal a concerning trend: 65% of developers are still manually upgrading Spring applications, resulting in coordination bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and delayed feature delivery that directly impact business outcomes.
The Real Business Impact of Complex Upgrades
During our recent live webinar from Spring IO Barcelona, we surveyed enterprise development teams about their biggest Spring upgrade challenges. The results were telling:
- 47% identified “keeping upgrades continuous and on track” as their primary pain point
- Over 70% rely on manual planning and coordination across multiple teams for major releases
- Upgrade cycles that should take days are stretching into weeks or months
This isn’t just a technical problem—it’s a business continuity issue. When Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4 release later this year, organizations need a strategy that doesn’t disrupt their delivery pipeline.
Update: Following our webinar, we have expanded Application Advisor to include enterprise recipes for:
- Spring Boot 3.4. x and 3.5. x
- Spring Security 6.4.x
- Spring Data 3.4.x
- Spring Integration 3.4.x
From Weeks to Days: The ROI of Automated Spring Upgrades
Our analysis shows that enterprise teams can achieve up to 50% time savings on Spring upgrades through intelligent automation:
Simple Applications
- Manual Process: ~1 week (upgrade + testing + deployment)
- With Automation: 1-2 days (primarily code review)
- Time Saved: 60-80%
Complex Multi-Repository Projects
- Manual Process: ~1 month (coordination + sequential upgrades + testing)
- With Automation: ~2 weeks (automated orchestration + review)
- Time Saved: 50%
High-Risk Migrations
- Manual Process: Multiple months (research + custom migration + testing)
- With Automation: Weeks (guided migration + automated best practices)
- Time Saved: 40-60%
Simple Applications
Manual upgrades typically require a full week for implementation, testing, and deployment. With automation, this compresses to 1-2 days focused primarily on code review and validation. For example, a Spring Boot 2.x to 3.x upgrade that normally takes 3-5 days of sequential work can be reduced to automated changes plus review time—delivering up to 80% time savings.
Complex Multi-Repository Projects
Multi-repository upgrades involve significant coordination overhead, often stretching to a month with sequential upgrades and cross-team dependencies. Automation provides orchestrated workflows that handle dependencies intelligently, reducing timelines to approximately two weeks—an up to 50% improvement by eliminating coordination bottlenecks.
High-Risk Migrations
Complex migrations like transitioning from deprecated technologies (such as Tiles in Spring Framework 6.0.x) traditionally require months of research, custom development, and extensive testing. While automation cannot eliminate all complexity, it provides guided migration pathways and proven patterns, compressing multi-month projects into manageable weeks with up to 60% time savings.
These improvements represent more than efficiency gains—they enable more frequent upgrade cycles, better security posture, and reduced technical debt accumulation across the technology stack.
Strategic Advantages Beyond Time Savings
Risk Mitigation: Automated upgrade paths reduce the possibility of human error and enable consistent application of security patches across your entire application portfolio.
Team Productivity: Development teams can focus on high-value business features instead of routine maintenance tasks.
Compliance & Security: Continuous, incremental upgrades enable your applications to stay current with security patches without major disruption cycles.
Scalability: As your application portfolio grows, automated processes can scale without proportional increases in engineering overhead.
The Technology Behind the Transformation
Application Advisor represents a new approach to enterprise upgrade management. Unlike simple dependency management tools, it understands the complex interdependencies between internal frameworks, manages upgrade sequencing across teams, and applies enterprise-grade recipes that help to maintain application stability.
Key capabilities include:
- Intelligent upgrade planning that maps dependencies across your entire application ecosystem
- Automated coordination between teams with dependent applications
- Enterprise recipes that go beyond open-source solutions
- CI/CD integration for continuous, low-risk upgrades
What Enterprise Leaders Are Saying
Application Advisor is trusted by Fortune 100 companies across highly regulated sectors including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and telecommunications. Our client base spans major financial institutions, insurance companies, retail organizations, technology firms, and healthcare systems, demonstrating the versatility in enablingmeeting compliance and operational requirements across diverse industry verticals.
Raquel Pau can you add anything from your design partners we can use something general without outing the logo i.e SAP (instead of calling out SAP we say it is a multi-national software corp — horizonal software solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning) or for Boeing we refer to that as manufacturing company.
Strategic Implementation Considerations
Start with Assessment: Understanding your current upgrade complexity and dependency relationships is crucial for ROI planning.
Pilot Program: Begin with non-critical applications to validate the approach and build internal confidence.
Team Training: While the tool automates much of the process, your teams need to understand the new workflow and best practices.
Integration Planning: Consider how automated upgrades fit into your existing CI/CD pipeline and release management processes.
Looking Ahead: Preparing for Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4
With major Spring releases planned for later this year, now is the optimal time to establish automated upgrade processes. Organizations that implement these capabilities before the next major release cycle will be better positioned to adopt new features rapidly while maintaining stability.
Next Steps for Technology Leaders
The question isn’t whether to automate your application upgrades—it’s how quickly you can implement a solution that reduces risk while accelerating delivery.
Ready to Transform Your Application Upgrade Strategy?
Watch the Full Technical Deep Dive: Our webinar provides detailed technical demonstrations and real-world implementation examples. See exactly how enterprise teams are achieving up to 50% time savings on Spring upgrades.
Watch the Complete Webinar Recording → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_llP9fsnyU
Schedule a Strategic Assessment: Our team can analyze your current Java and Spring application portfolio and provide specific ROI projections for your organization.
Request Executive Briefing → https://go-vmware.broadcom.com/contact-us
Application Advisor is part of VMware Tanzu’s comprehensive application modernization platform, designed specifically for managing enterprise-scale Spring and Java applications.