Over the course of time, highly complex application landscapes develop, especially in large companies. Managing them ­efficiently and effectively is one of the great challenges facing the CIO. The complexity of the application landscape causes two problems. One is that it drives up costs because by far the largest part of the IT budget (60% to 80% on the average) goes for operation, maintenance, and upkeep of the applications. The other is that it often hinders necessary modifications of the architecture; in particular, it can extend the “time to market” of urgently required functions. This in turn can certainly have negative implications for the commercial success of the ­company. So the critical examination of the application landscape in terms of consolidation potential can be rewarding for a number of reasons.

Savings potential in application environment is often ­overlooked   

This type of examination is especially beneficial in situations in which the rise in complexity of the landscape is a consequence of company acquisitions or in which the lack of flexibility of existing IT applications has forced implementation of new business requirements in the form of by-passes in the IT landscape. As a rule, functional redundancies can be identified in these cases relatively quickly – a sure sign for the existence of consolidation potential.

However, most of the published approaches for cutting costs in the operation of the applications are directed at the infrastructure level. The goal of these approaches is to save money by making better use of the available capacities in the hardware. While the potential for cutting costs can undoubtedly, and very quickly, be exploited in this way, the enormous potential inherent in an application consolidation is not considered during this process.