Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits
  • Email this page E-mail this page
  • |  Print Print this page
  • |   Bookmark and Share
  • |  icon
  • | 

With Applications, Less Is More


Companies consolidate, replace, or rewrite apps to improve efficiencies

By Steve Konicki
InformationWeek
February 4, 2002 12:00 AM (From the February 4, 2002 issue)

Economic pressures gave Remy Corp. the impetus it needed to consolidate its enterprise applications. The $22 million professional-services firm decided to jettison its five standalone applications in June when principal executive officer Andrew Albarelle realized that the old IT infrastructure was preventing his company from moving forward.

Albarelle decided to start over with PeopleSoft Inc., because consolidating the company's business processes on a single platform would make it easy to take its business to the Internet. "We tried to Webify what we had, and couldn't. What we had wasn't designed to run a multimillion-dollar company," he says.

More Business Intelligence Insights

White Papers

Webcasts

Reports

Videos


Mark Armstrong, president of WhamTech, discusses how the company helps customers such as the government integrate their disparate data sources. Eric Rubin, CEO of Dreamfactory, talks about the company's Business Essentials, a suite of software services, including project management and business intelligence, that runs on the Salesforce.com AppExchange platform. Roger Boyce, CEO of Evident Software, discusses application virtualization. As companies take many servers and make them look like one, it's very difficult to measure the changes. Evident provides unique insights into the operation of those new appli
Eric Rubin, CEO of Dreamfactory, talks about the company's Business Essentials, a suite of software services, including project management and business intelligence, that runs on the Salesforce.com AppExchange platform.
Remy's decision to consolidate business processes by replacing outdated software is increasingly common as CIOs and other business-technology professionals decide how to tackle the business problems they face.

Fifty-five percent of companies are reducing the number of applications they're running, an InformationWeek/ Morgan Stanley survey of 350 IT professionals released last week shows. More than a third are switching to off-the-shelf applications, and nearly 20% are rewriting the apps they have.

Washington hops producer John I. Haas Inc. upgraded to Oracle's 11i E-business Suite so it could add Web tools for customers and suppliers. "The recession set the priority for us," says Kyle Lambert, VP of information solutions. "We had to get closer to our customers and suppliers."

Remy, in Denver, needed its front-office applications to more easily integrate with its back-office systems and decided that a single suite, rather than a best-of-breed strategy, would eliminate potential integration headaches, a serious consideration for 73% of those surveyed. Remy picked PeopleSoft's Financial and Enterprise Service Automation applications.

Almost half of those surveyed are deploying or plan to deploy enterprise resource planning applications this year. Of those, more than 40% plan to increase the number of ERP apps they use.



Subscribe to RSS


Advertisement

CAREER CENTER
Ready to take that job and shove it?



TechCareers

SEARCH
Function:

Keyword(s):

State:
SPONSOR
RECENT JOB POSTINGS
CAREER NEWS
10 Search Engines You Don't Know About
Go beyond Google and get vertical. These specialized search sites will help you find the business information you need -- fast.

Yahoo Profits Fall 23%, Cuts 1,000 Jobs
Ari Balogh was named to the post of chief technology officer as the companys for a "realignment" of employees.

More articles from our career center





Subscription Info
Apply for a free 52-week subscription to InformationWeek (a $199 value)

Last Name:

First Name:

Title:

Company Name:

City:

Business Address:

Zip:

State:

Email Address:

NOTE: Offer valid for U.S., U.S. possessions, & Canada only

            

Join economist Chris Cornell and 3 CIOs in an Exclusive Online Exchange for Senior IT Executives: Using IT to Drive Value in a Turbulent Economy. November 5th only.