Millions of apps within global organisations are either obsolete or don’t deliver full business value, according to a new report by Capgemini.

The Application Landscape report, published with HP, revealed that millions of applications within European and American businesses urgently need app rationalise and retirement as organisations spend resources needed to drive innovation and future growth on maintaining unnecessary and outdated systems.

The report was based on interviews with global CIOs and IT leaders in companies across the US and Europe revealed that 85% of participants said that their app portfolios are in need of rationalisation.

Sixty per cent of enterprise companies said they currently support ‘more’ or ‘far more’ apps than are necessary to run their business while only 4% said that every IT system they use is considered to be business-critical.

Half of the participants agreed that up to 50% of their app portfolio needed to be retired; 61% said they keep all data beyond its expiration date ‘just in case’; 56% of large companies and enterprises said that half or more of their apps are custom-built, increasing the technical complexity of required platforms and technologies.

Only 13% said their application development and maintenance teams are aligned and half (48%) said their teams are only in synch for 50% of the time or even less.

Capgemini application services continental Europe chief technology officer Ron Tolido said their research reveals that despite the fact that data archiving and application retirement can result in significant cost savings, process efficiencies and increased agility, it still does not rank high enough on the CIOs agenda.