Lean and Green vs. Gregarious Java Application Platform

There are 2 competing goals for our Java Application Platform (JAP), which I am trying to understand on balance:

One is the goal of on-boarding great numbers of applications onto JAP

The other is the goal of engendering best practices and standards across our firm.

I had a conversation with a group that is in the process of migrating to JAP and they told a tear-jerker of a 3-month ordeal before the Project Review Board.

Basically, had this group not inaugurated the JAP migration, they would not have been called before the inquisitioners to account for their use of shared databases, http (no “s”) calls, Hibernate (not a firm standard) not JPA, JavaScript, ehCache, and other technologies that we label as “non-standard” or “non-best-practices”.

Their complaint was – “we have been doing this successfully for 8 years, why should we need to build a new solution that adds no business value, just because we are migrating to JAP?”

At first, their argument made perfect sense to me and I was ready to take up their case. But then I started wondering if the thinking is more future-centric – that perhaps as a firm we should prefer a JAP that is leaner but greener – that only admits applications that comply with best practices; or should we prefer a more gregarious JAP that enjoys great traction, but admits applications that use old practices.

In other words, do we forfeit the numbers for the sake of fostering best practices and firm standards? Or are these orthogonal considerations and so do we allow people to do a direct port to JAP, then allow them to manage the evolution of their changes as their business sees value?