Surely cloud could solve this migration problem

A survey released this week highlights a massive problem that still besets much of the general user-base of IT, particularly amongst business using Windows on the desktop. As a direct by-product, it also poses an important question: do the results identify a massive opportunity that cloud services and applications vendors are missing, even though it stares them in the face? 

The Application Usage Management Survey comes from Flexera Software, which it prepared jointly with research company, IDC. The first of its kind, the report surveyed more than 750 respondents from software ISVs, intelligent device manufacturers and end-user enterprises on all aspects of managing the software licence lifecycle. 

It focuses on application migrations and application readiness, revealing that even while massive migration projects, such as the move from Windows XP to Windows 7, are still under way, the next wave, virtualisation, is gaining momentum. This places the user community at higher risk due to increased costs, reduced funding, errors and delays.

It also demonstrates the significant lag that exists in the reality of IT utilisation for many businesses. As Microsoft awaits a rush of users to the latest, 8.1, version of Windows 8, many users have still to even start migrating their valuable business applications from Windows XP to Windows 7. And this is despite the long-standing warnings from the company that it will cease support for XP come next April.

And to listen to many of the virtualisation vendors one would be forgiven for assuming that virtualisation was a `done deal’ and prevalent everywhere, even when the subject is virtualising desktop systems. Indeed, there will be many users of cloud services – and especially SaaS services like Netsuite and Salesforce – where staff have no idea that they are using virtualised environments. Yet the survey shows that, for many of the survey sample, they haven’t even started on that road yet.

It would seem reasonable to suggest that here is an opportunity for cloud services and applications providers that is going begging. Moving users from where they are now to some form of cloud service delivery – be that SaaS or some variation on managed services – could remove from their shoulders much of the issues surrounding migration and upgrade as much of this would become the responsibility of the service provider.

Yes, the costs probably remain about the same for the end user, but the freedom from having to undertake and manage the job would be a significant bonus for them, even if they don’t then exploit the time and resources saved to add something of value to the business.

The results of this survey do seem to suggest and ISVs, for example, should now be beating down customer doors and asking: “do these results represent your business?” If the answer is yes, then offer them a cloud service of some kind. And if the ISVs haven’t got a cloud service they should get one organised as soon as possible.

And yes, it is easy enough to spout such advice, but many loyal customers have been generated by a business that helped them dig themselves out of the clag. And the clag, from these survey results, looks startling, especially the trend is, as Flexera points out, towards a world where migration is `continual’.        

According to the survey, enterprises are still racing to implement Windows 7 ahead of the April 8, 2014 Microsoft Windows XP end of support date.  Some 28 percent of respondents still must migrate more than half of their application estates to Windows 7.  Only 3.7 percent plan on migrating directly to Windows 8.

Simultaneously, organisations are also beginning to take on projects to migrate their desktops and applications to virtual environments.  According to the report Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) projects are starting to pick up, with 20 percent of organisations virtualising between 26-100 percent of their desktops over the coming 12-24 months.  An additional 23 percent will be virtualising between11-25 percent of their desktops over that same time period.

Data from the research relating to mobile applications, to be announced shortly, suggests that mobile application migration is also gaining tremendous momentum and will likely tax current IT efforts around Application Readiness even while Windows 7 and virtualisation efforts continue.

Application Readiness best practice dictates that organisations follow these six steps: identify applications being used, rationalise applications to eliminate unused software prior to migration, assess compatibility with the target environment, plan the migration, fix compatibility issues & package, and hand off the app to a deployment system or enterprise app store for deployment.

According to the Application Usage Management report, while enterprises have made progress implementing Application Readiness automation, many have not yet done so or do not plan it.  Only around 30 percent of organisations are either plan to implement automation for each of the six Application Readiness best practice processes, or are currently doing so. 

In many forms of managed services environment, these tasks become the responsibility of the service provider, working with a team of staff that are – or certainly should be – more skilled in such processes than the average business IT department. And most of them will have implemented whatever automation tools they consider necessary to make these tasks easier and slicker.

“Many IT organisations inundated with managing complex systems and services are operating within tight budget constraints. As a result, relying on manual processes to ensure proper software utilisation often adds unnecessary workloads and increased costs for already overwhelmed IT organisations,” said Robert Young, Research Manager, Enterprise System Management Software at IDC.

“In addition, manual processes for software asset management can be highly error prone resulting in application miss-utilisation, over/under procurement, and failure to comply with auditory and/or regulatory compliance. These oversights can have significant impacts on user productivity as well as the organisation's bottom line. Therefore, by automating the Application Lifecycle processes, IT organisations can decrease the risks and costs associated with ineffective software asset management programs and increase its focus on implementing applications that drive efficiencies across the enterprise.”