Cloud Technology Partners is shifting its emphasis from migrating applications to the cloud to making them cloud-ready through modernization, culminating in today’s release of version 2.5 of its PaaSLane application platform.

“Companies are moving the simplest, least important apps [to the cloud] to see how they can make the cloud work for them,” said Ben Grubin, director of product management and marketing at Cloud Technology Partners. “Those applications are the test bed. No organizations are moving their mission-critical apps to the cloud, but they want to make them cloud-ready to avoid having to do another modernization effort in five years. We found a well of need of people picking applications that are a little old and a little crusty and wanting to modernize them.”

(Related: Making apps ready for the cloud)

The costs of maintaining applications is crowding out the ability of development to transform business and innovate, Grubin said, citing a 2013 report by the analysis firm Gartner that shows application development as an increasing share of total IT budgets, with much of that spent on maintaining apps, not developing new ones.

Traditionally, modernization had been thought of as a way to lower the costs of development and ownership, and to increase agility. Today, Grubin said, it’s about reducing complexity, and gaining elasticity and flexibility while lowering capital expenses.

To address this need to modernize older applications, two pieces of PaaSLane have been broken out: PaaSLane Assess and PaaSLane Optimize. Assess analyzes source code using a rich set of rules to detect potential issues around scalability, security, design patterns, performance and maintenance; identifies modernization opportunities; offers code remediation; and identifies applications that already are cloud-ready.

Optimize, when integrated into the development life cycle, optimizes applications for specific cloud platforms; modernizes applications; and can be used to create optimized cloud applications from square one, Grubin explained.

The tools, he said, “look at high-level architectural best practices that are portable across platforms.” PaaSLane 2.5 supports Apprenda, AWS, Cloud Foundry, Google Compute, OpenStack and Windows Azure.

Among the new features in version 2.5 are local profiling for organizations that won’t upload proprietary code the cloud; enhanced .NET profiling, with more than 50 new rules for C# and .NET applications; a complete set of rules for optimizing applications for Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine; and rule- and report-management improvements.

Grubin said the company is adding new rules at the rate of one per day, reflecting updates to outside cloud platforms within the PaaSLane platform.