Consolidation
Application Consolidation
Application Consolidation Offers Significant Benefits
To support business operations, organizations rely on multiple applications. Managing and maintaining those applications can take a big chunk of the IT budget.
As more and more organizations virtualize and consolidate their datacenters, they are also evaluating, consolidating, and eliminating many software applications that facilitate financial, sales, and other management systems. These applications are reviewed in response to the need for software flexibility and the demands of new network architecture from fewer data centers.
In addition, many companies are running legacy applications, programs more than 10 years old and either home-built or purchased from a vendor who is no longer in business or supporting the product. Many enterprise IT teams are managing hundreds and even thousands of applications.
You can streamline your resources by combining multiple applications into a cohesive IT environment while at the same time eliminating the complexity of managing multiple applications. Application consolidation helps organizations improve application integration by consolidating multiple applications and application instances.
Application consolidation, running multiple, heterogeneous applications simultaneously on a single instance of the operating system, offers significant benefits:
- Increased server utilization
- Simplified management of the IT infrastructure
- Improved application reliability
- Increased performance
- Reduced maintenance costs
- Reduced cost, time, and risk with application upgrades
Key Objectives in the Application Consolidation Process
In the application consolidation process the emphasis needs to focus on:
- Identifying applications that are duplicated, obsolete, or can be outsourced
- Reducing the number of application instances and databases
- Migrating multiple instances of applications from disparate platforms
- Standardizing on best-of-breed applications and database solutions
The process involves substantial analysis and planning, comparing the cost of supporting each system with its business value. Both applications and databases are assessed, evaluating:
- Business drivers
- Impact of change
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- Return on Investment (ROI)
Because many applications are directly employee-facing, business managers must also consider training programs and learning curves with the implementation of substantial changes in the business process applications.
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Overcoming the Challenges of Application Consolidation
COMPATIBILITY & STANDARDIZATION
First, it is important to determine which applications to consolidate and how to consolidate them, which requires a logical and systematic approach. Compatibility of applications with each other as well as the best way to deploy the applications should be considered. There is also the issue of guaranteed service levels between applications.
Standardization with one vendor in a particular area can ensure business processes are well aligned across applications. Multiple modules from a single vendor can also significantly reduce integration headaches.
Standardization makes it easier to audit, manage, and secure software applications and enforce compliance. However, replacing home-grown applications with a suite may mean sacrificing some functionality and those options need to be considered.
Reviewing and streamlining business processes can also allow elimination of certain applications and redundancies altogether.
APPLICATION ISOLATION AND RESOURCE UTILIZATION
The need to achieve the right balance between application isolation and resource utilization is a critical success factor. However, these are two objectives whose goals are inversely proportional to one another. It requires more than just a passing consideration and each side of the balance needs to be carefully weighed. Other issues include:
- How to prevent one errant application from affecting other applications.
- Reconcile differing needs for operating system patch levels between applications.
EMPLOYEE BUY-IN AND ADJUSTMENT
Management generally considers application consolidation part of a business process optimization initiative. But the reality is that users must relearn their jobs when IT software and processes change. Employee adoption can be a major stumbling block and the result can be decreased morale with less productivity yielding a poor ROI.
It is important for any organization undertaking an application consolidation process to also include planning for employee training and support systems.
Performance Support Systems (PSS), which make knowledge of new systems and processes easily available for immediate use, can be an invaluable component of the project. A PSS provides self-service guidance specific to the application, process, and job role without interrupting work-flow. It also reduces training time and costs by focusing group training on concepts and skills, rather than specific details pertinent to individual tasks.
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Best Practices for Application Consolidation
Application consolidation is a very methodical process requiring careful planning and analysis. ENS-Inc engineers and developers, experienced and certified, employ industry-proven best practices as we work with you to optimize your IT infrastructure processes.
Established application consolidation best practices address the areas of:
- Standardized and mainstream operating systems and databases that will run as large a percentage of your application set as possible.
- Portable APIs and generic scripting languages.
- Modular and three-tier application preferences.
- Single sign-on and distributed directories.
- Design for high availability with well-thought-out failover systems and disaster recovery plans.
- Scalability and price/performance ratio for consolidation.
- Delegation of administrative domains.
ENS-Inc delivers proven reliable and scalable application consolidation technology solutions. We assure that your projects will be on time, on budget, and within scope.
ENS-Inc works with you to develop and deploy your application consolidation solution and then provides your IT team with the onsite training and knowledge transfer to empower success.
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