Managing the enterprise application explosion
A MuleSoft survey of over 1000 IT leaders of global enterprises earlier this year said that on average these enterprises were using a staggering 1060 applications! This was a growth of over 10% over the previous survey from the year before. That’s an extraordinarily large, complex, and involved application ecosystem. But the amazing finding there is that over 70% of these applications work in individual silos because they are not integrated into an overarching ecosystem. Not surprisingly, better than 1 in 3 IT managers in these enterprises cited the lack of integration as the biggest obstacle to their digital transformation efforts. Wearing the hat of an application support and maintenance expert, I can confirm that this is a nightmare scenario. On the one hand, managing, supporting, and maintaining this huge array of applications is a massive effort. In most cases, problems in individual apps are prone to overflow into the operations of other apps, in an unfortunate domino effect. It’s hard for a service provider like us to provide meaningful support in a scenario like this where apps are being added at such a rate, often without being part of the overall enterprise strategy. There are obvious risks of data leakage and security breaches. Apart from that, this is also a barrier to enterprise-wide automation strategies. Your workflows would have to span multiple applications and draw data from many disparate sources. Every integration adds complexity, creates an additional point of failure, and introduces delays and adds effort. One of the most important tasks when we come into an engagement is mapping the application landscape and trying to create some order out of the chaos. If we don’t do that, chances are we are setting ourselves for an extremely tedious effort.