Millions of applications are not used: Application Landscape Report

By siliconindia   |   Saturday, 30 April 2011, 00:57 IST
Printer Print Email Email
Capgemini India, one of the foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services has released its first annual Application Landscape Report conducted with HP . This report collates CIO comments from nearly 100 companies across U.S., Benelux, France, Germany, Spain and the UK which reveals that millions of applications within European and American businesses are obsolete and no longer deliver full business value. This report is designed to help companies understand the current state of IT applications and review emerging trends in application transformation and modernization. Some of the highlights of the report revealed that 85 percent say their application portfolios are in need of rationalization. Almost 60percent of enterprise companies say they currently support 'more' or 'far more' applications than are necessary to run their business.Only 4 percent say that every IT system they use is considered to be business-critical. Half agree that up to 50 percent of their application portfolio needs to be retired. 61 percent say they keep all data beyond its expiration date 'just in case'. 56 percent of large companies and enterprises say that half or more of their applications are custom-built, increasing the technical complexity of required platforms and technologies. Only 13 percent say their application development and maintenance teams are aligned. The report further talks about how organizations spend valuable resources on maintaining unnecessary and outdated systems instead of spending it on innovation and future growth. Applications comprise a core part of any IT strategy. However, a closer look reveals that the current state of applications is far from perfect. All respondents agree that application landscapes are generally very complex and poorly structured. Outdated legacy technologies, lack of adequate skills to support existing systems, duplicate applications resulting from acquisitions, and a mismatch between global and local systems creates problems for corporate IT.
Nearly 60 percent of enterprise respondents say that they support 'more' or 'far more' applications than is necessary to run the business, nearly three-quarters of small business IT executives say that they have just the right number of applications, with a further 23 percent suggesting that they do not have enough IT systems to support the business. In smaller companies, 84 percent of surveyed respondents indicate that they support less than 50 applications in their IT portfolio ' compared to up to 10,000 applications in the Enterprise category.

next new