New Research: Visual Basic 6 Drives Two-Thirds of Legacy Modernization Demand

GAP analyzes 1,105 inquiries from 120+ countries and publishes the full counts and methodology

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- GAPVelocity AI, the AI modernization business of Growth Acceleration Partners, today published The State of Legacy Modernization Demand 2026. The report analyzes the self-reported source technologies of 1,105 organizations that inquired about modernizing a legacy application between August 2025 and August 2026.

Visual Basic 6 accounted for 67.6% of those inquiries. First released in 1998 and out of extended support since 2008, VB6 appeared 12 times as often as the next single technology. Overall, 83% of identified workloads run on technology first released before 2000.

Unlike estimates based on surveys, the report uses first-party demand data and publishes its full counts, methodology and sample limitations.

Key findings

• Visual Basic 6 accounted for 67.6% of demand (747 of 1,105 organizations).
• Technologies released before 2000 represented 83% of demand; the Visual Basic family accounted for 73.4%.
• 58% of demand came from outside the United States, across 120+ countries (N = 9,636 inbound contacts).
• Microsoft Access inquiries grew 6.3x year over year, while total identified workloads grew 3.3x.
• Among 467 scoped applications, median PowerBuilder and Clarion codebases were 8x and more than 10x larger than VB6 codebases, respectively.

Counting buyers and counting code give different answers

A second dataset covering 467 opportunities scoped from 2023 to 2026 shows why inquiry count can mislead. The median VB6 application was 124,000 lines of code, compared with 1 million for PowerBuilder and 1.3 million for Clarion. Weighted by code volume, VB6 fell from 68% of organizations to about 30%. PowerBuilder and Clarion together rose from less than 8% of organizations to about 32%.

"Counting organizations alone understates the largest enterprise systems, many of which were built outside IT," said Darryl Worsham, General Manager, GAPVelocity AI. "Discovery has to reach operations, finance and manufacturing, not just the applications central IT already knows about."

A benchmark for AI modernization claims

The report says AI modernization claims should be tested against the stacks buyers need to move, not the easiest demo targets. These systems challenge large language models because training data is limited, business logic is coupled to proprietary user-interface frameworks, and no standard mapping to a modern architecture exists.

Methodology and limitations

Source technology was self-reported and not independently verified against source code. The sample skews toward Microsoft-adjacent technologies, especially VB6, because GAPVelocity AI's predecessors built widely used VB6 migration tools. The 67.6% figure is an upper bound for the wider market, not a neutral estimate. Mainframe COBOL, SAP ABAP and related 4GLs are likely underrepresented.

Availability

The State of Legacy Modernization Demand 2026 is available at https://www.gapvelocity.ai/research-modernization-demand-2026. The full counts may be quoted or reproduced with attribution.

See it VB6 modernization live

GAPVelocity AI will demonstrate end-to-end modernization of a Visual Basic 6 application to Blazor on Azure with VELO on September 16, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. ET. Registration for the webinar is open now.

About GAPVelocity AI

GAPVelocity AI is the AI modernization business of Growth Acceleration Partners. Its lineage includes ArtinSoft and Mobilize.Net, developers of widely used Visual Basic migration tools. Its VELO platform uses agentic AI built on Microsoft Foundry to modernize Visual Basic 6, PowerBuilder, Microsoft Access, VB.NET, WebForms, WinForms and other legacy stacks. More at https://www.gapvelocity.ai/velo.

Media contact

DeeDee Walsh, [email protected], 1-512-243-5754

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SOURCE Growth Acceleration Partners