With Applications, Less Is More

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.

Remy's decision to consolidate business processes by replacing outdated software is increasingly common as CIOs and other business-technology professionals decide how to tackle the business problems they face.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.