Cost savings through application rationalization
Many CIOs are being drawn into meetings with CFOs these days. On the agenda is cost control and management. In challenging times, that’s only natural especially when you consider how IT investments had surged in the last few years.
In many ways, that’s a great place to start because the cure and the malady are interconnected. Most enterprise CIOs will be willing to admit that they have let their application portfolio get out of control. Point systems have added up. Other enterprise systems have scaled. Many of these are SaaS solutions, some use tools that reside in the cloud, and others have substantial amounts of data on the cloud. Inevitably, cloud costs have exploded, bringing the IT landscape into the sights of the CFO.
As a company focused on application support services, when we are called into these discussions, we often end up suggesting an overhaul of the application portfolio. A careful survey of the application landscape will almost always show areas of substantial overlap and significant sets of applications and features that are under-utilized. There’s great value to be had in conducting a careful exercise of rationalization and standardization of applications across the enterprise application portfolio. Would that work? Gartner says that CIOs who can undertake such rationalization and standardization could save between 15-25% of their application budget. That’s besides the time, effort, and money that can be saved through easier management.