Companies Wasting Money on Unneeded Applications

22 Mar 2011

European and US Companies are wasting millions of pounds supporting applications they do not need and 85 per cent of global IT chiefs say the excess needs to be cut.

In Capgemini's first annual report on the state of corporate application portfolios comes from interviews with about 100 IT bosses in Europe and the US.

The research found that, on average, companies could cut 20 per cent of their business applications without any impact on their performance. Half of the companies interviewed said 50 per cent of applications need to be retired.

The need to cut applications will increase as businesses transfer applications to the cloud, says Capgemini.

Ron Tolido, CTO at Capgemini for application services in continental Europe, said application retirement does not rank high on corporate agenda despite the fact it can result in significant cost savings, process efficiencies and increased agility.

Other findings:

* 60 per cent of enterprise companies say they currently support "more" or "far more" applications than necessary

* 4 per cent say every IT system they use is business-critical

* 61 per cent say they keep all data beyond its expiration date "just in case"

* 56 per cent of large companies and enterprises say half or more of their applications are custom-built

* 13 per cent say their application development and maintenance teams are aligned

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