49% of UK IT decision makers believe that over half the apps in their business are unnecessary

Over half the apps currently sat on the IT infrastructures of UK organisations are either obsolete or redundant, according to Application Management specialists Camwood. These redundant apps represent a staggering drain on the resources of UK businesses, and may slow down the speed at which they can take advantage of the improving economic climate.

From an independent survey of 250 IT decision makers in companies of over 2,000 seats, Camwood found that 49% of respondents agreed that up to 60% of the apps in their portfolio were superfluous. These unnecessary apps are a drain on resource, costly to maintain and could have a negative long-term impact on business innovation if IT departments do not take action now.

“In our experience, mergers and acquisitions, rapid company growth and lack of IT planning are the root causes of bloated IT infrastructures,” commented Adrian Foxall, CEO, Camwood. “Many organisations waste time, money and resource on maintaining legacy apps that they simply don’t need.

“It’s understandable that, with a plethora of software requirements, and the growth in trends such as BYOD and BYOA, large, busy organisations can lose track of their app portfolio. But the costs of doing so can be high. Many companies do not have a true picture of all the apps provisioned on their estate, and as such are unaware of the negative impact that these are having on the smooth running of their IT infrastructure.”

‘App Chaos’ can prevent businesses from innovating and reacting to business transformation requests in an agile manner. A business cannot consider the ROI on a corporate app store project, for example, or roll out a Java upgrade, OS migration or device-type remediation, without first knowing how many applications it has.

Unnecessary apps lead to excessive licensing and support spend, as well as overuse of system resources such as disk space, memory and network bandwidth. What’s more, it is impossible to negotiate with software vendors in an informed way without knowing the true extent of your app use, deployment and spend.

“Businesses are keen to take advantage of improving economic conditions, but in almost every example the app is the critical blocker,” added Foxall. “Apart from the cost implications, legacy estates are frequently incompatible with the emerging needs of the workforce; agile solutions like BYOD, BYOA, corporate app stores, cloud services and access via mobile devices are increasingly expected. These innovative types of projects cannot be delivered with this degree of app chaos.”

Camwood uses a combination of expertise, software tools and methodology to identify and remove all unnecessary apps. By retiring all apps that are no longer needed or used, Camwood can deliver a fully rationalised estate that can better support the needs of the business now and in the future.