About 17.5% of IT decision makers in Australia have committed to reviewing existing IT assets to align with the business strategy within the next 12 months, according to a latest report by IDC.
IDC’s Forecast for Management Survey, 2011, reveals that IT departments in Australia now have greater choice in delivering software to end users.
There is a shift in sentiment of IT decision makers from cost reduction to alignment of IT and business and business units are now working with IT departments in realising this objective.
The report notes it will become increasingly important for organisations to support these new delivery models as well as maintain existing application portfolios.
The outcomes of these conversations will help articulate the direction and appetite for the new breed of enterprise applications based on service oriented and multi-tiered architectures.
Multi-tiering breaks the application down into core components of the presentation layer, application processing layer and the data management layer and enables the application to be ‘built for the web’.
About 21.3% of organisations in Australia have already deployed new business applications based on Web 2.0 platforms, with an additional 17.2% planning to do so in the next 12 months, reveals the report.
The report notes the challenge for the organisations will be integrating existing application environments with software-as-a-service applications, as requirements are often aligned to business priorities and one size fits all application will not fit to all lines of business.
Though the legacy applications are often timely and complex to change but Software-as-a-Service applications, like file sharing services and online business suite functionality can be delivered with little intervention from the IT department.
