UK businesses are wasting £2.57 billion every year on unnecessary apps due to poor IT decision making.
The expense comes from maintaining and supporting the apps, which suggests that enterprise application estates could be rationalised by between 60-80%, according to app migration company Camwood.
These findings contrast with the fact that IT departments are working more closely with CFOs and finance directors to make sure that the IT infrastructure doesn’t break the bank.
Adrian Foxall, CEO, Camwood, said: "Application management appears to be an area that is being overlooked, but more often than not this is simply down to a lack of awareness.
"When purchased over such a long period of time, individual application and licensing spends don’t seem particularly important, yet when they are added together, businesses typically find that they’ve been throwing away hundreds of thousands of pounds a year."
According to the company, this waste comes as a result of poor IT decision making, with many IT departments failing to virtualise and rationalise their apps.
Colin Rowland, VP EMEA, Apptio, said: "What is most important is not the quality of data, but having the sufficient volume of it to make meaningful IT budgeting decisions. Apptio calls this "Garbage In, Gospel Out".
"When businesses are using Technology Business Management (TBM) applications, they should have built in capabilities for cleaning and refining raw data.
"As a result, there’s no need to let imperfect or incomplete data bog down the adoption of TBM or technology rationalisation and it removes data remediation projects as a hurdle to better decision making in IT."
IT departments should be able to address this problem by using the refined data to undertake an application audit. This will help to identify the apps that don’t get used and to make more strategic use of app virtualisation platforms.
