A third of senior of the IT senior decision makers surveyd by Quest believed that databases required the most code to turn vanilla packaged applications into workable in-house software, far more than for newer CRM, ERP and middleware applications.
Despite a lot of focus on newer software, databases are at the heart of every application, said Graeme Nash, UK compliance program manager at Quest Software.
Nash said that the danger of making changes to products was that it introduced errors into the code. The situation was made worse because senior IT people tended to focus on the impact of changes to the applications on users rather than the quality of the code itself.
Financial firms were likely to make the most changes to software to suit their business, while firms in retail and distribution deviated least from the vanilla product.
