Application modernisation is a certain way in which IT savings can be realised. Although this may sound simple, compliance mandates, data retention policies, and end-user access issues create challenges for even the most experienced organisations.
Gartner estimates that "on average, 10% of applications running in an unoptimised portfolio are candidates for retirement. And an additional one-third require migration or rationalisation." These include obsolescent applications that are no longer delivering any business value or have been replaced but not yet shut down; applications on mainframes slated for replacement with less expensive servers; and applications with duplicate functionality that have accumulated in the environment through mergers and acquisitions.
"Experts agree that as much as 80% of data in enterprise production databases for core applications, such as ERP, CRM and corporate financials, is no longer in active use and slows application performance by as much as 50%. As a result, many IT organisations are experiencing explosive data growth, forcing them to spend scarce capex funds on expensive Tier 1 storage and larger servers, harming application performance, and blocking effective data governance and application portfolio management and retirement of obsolescent applications, which is a key to efficient IT operations," says Gerald Naidoo, CEO of Logikal Consulting.
The key that unlocks the data growth problem, Naidoo believes, is data archiving. Data archiving is, however, not just a matter of removing all data before the occurrence of a specific date, copying it to tape and deleting it from the production database. Data divorced from its metadata and context often becomes meaningless, particularly with datasets from complex applications such as CRM and ERP systems.
Data that may not be in daily use still needs to be accessible. It cannot simply be copied to tape and forgotten; it must be archived to appropriate tiers in the storage architecture, which for some data may be a Tier 2 disk, and even after it moves onto inactive media, it still needs to be managed to ensure it can be recovered when needed.
"Obviously, retiring legacy applications would create a major savings on the IT operating budget by freeing staff for more important assignments, eliminating licensing and maintenance fees, and allowing IT to shut down the hardware they run on, saving power and heating costs immediately. But shutting down applications is more complex than it might first appear," adds Mahesh Chavan, Logikal Consulting's CTO. "The prospect of these savings is a major driver in establishing application portfolio management and application rationalisation in large IT environments."
Naidoo explains that it was Logikal Consulting's understanding of these drivers that led it to add the Solix suite to its range of products. Solix offers data governance and management, and application portfolio management, as well as the retirement of obsolescent applications.
"The Solix suite provides a highly automated, secure answer to application retirement, data migration, and legacy data access. However, the star in the range is Solix ExAPPS, the industry's first application retirement appliance, which optimises storage to improve application performance by as much as 50% or more, helping IT to meet SLAs while decreasing total cost," says Naidoo. "Our business is all about improving our clients' business agility, improving operational efficiency, and reducing costs. With Solix, we offer a whole new level of effectiveness in their business."
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