Application Portfolio Management (APM) is the practice of governing and optimizing inventories of software applications to achieve precise business objectives. This is accomplished by creating transparent overviews of IT application landscapes to evaluate IT costs, standardize software throughout business units and promote agility and innovation.
In recent years, the practice of APM has largely evolved to help manage mixed portfolios of on-premises and cloud-based IT applications.
By generating clear, actionable metrics on decentralized applications and monitoring rapid software development cycles, enterprise architects and cloud architects perform APM via increasingly automated means to evaluate enterprise-wide services and ensure the availability of diverse supporting technologies.
APM in large-scale enterprises typically involves the following:
Application portfolio management is like taking a proactive approach to managing your wardrobe. That t-shirt you bought on impulse before arriving home and realizing it doesn't match anything you already have? Chances are it’s still gathering dust in the back of a drawer. Things would have worked out better had you taken a more methodical approach.
For example, you could have looked at your existing clothes before you went shopping, identified the gaps, and selected items to fill them.
Coincidentally, it’s the same story with enterprise applications. As organizations grow, IT departments and even individual employees buy applications to solve urgent problems without giving any (or at least enough) thought to the implications.
As a result, unmanaged apps pile up that are difficult or impossible to integrate with existing apps or other systems. Similar apps for completing the same tasks are purchased multiple times. Others fall out of favor and are no longer used, but are still paid for, and never uninstalled or canceled. And still, others are bought and never used at all!
The methodical approach to avoiding these scenarios looks like this:
Now imagine that this process has to cover hundreds or even thousands of apps at a time, especially with the SaaS growth. For many organizations, that sounds like such a big job, they simply never get around to doing it!
That’s a problem.
Failing to keep your application portfolio up to date means organizations are spending money unnecessarily on apps that don’t add value, leaving less money and fewer resources to spend on the software and services that could add value and boost organizational competitiveness. It also leaves them open to potential and compliance and security breaches.
This is where Application Portfolio Management solutions come in.
