Back from a customer tour in the US, Philippe Lazare gives us his observations about enterprise architecture trends and requirements.
Do you see any differences between customers in the US, Europe, or Asia regarding enterprise architecture trends?
Actually, I don’t see major differences between customers, no matter where they are located. Enterprise architects working within large companies, such as those that I met with recently, all expressed the same challenges and objectives.
What strikes me is how all customers seem to be focused now on application portfolio management (APM) initiatives and how these are an integral part of their current enterprise architecture programs.
All of those large organizations are under enormous pressure because of financial constraints to reduce operating costs while maintaining services at the same high level. Because of globalization, mergers and acquisitions have created very large and complex information systems, combining hundreds of duplicate applications. The first need is to decrease this number significantly. Many of our customers are using application portfolio rationalization
to reduce the number of applications by more than 40%. One company is currently consolidating from 850 to 500 applications. Beyond eliminating redundant, unnecessary, and outdated applications, their objective is to organize the governance of their application portfolio, so they can drive IT transformations in an effective and efficient way. Our customers are seeing real benefits from well planned and carefully executed APM programs.