Today's fast-paced business environment has put pressure on organizations to
develop and maintain applications at an unsurpassed rate to drive increased
employee productivity, company revenue, and customer satisfaction. The
ultimate goal is to improve operational efficiencies while lowering total
cost of ownership (TCO) and increase return on investment. However, this
effort poses its own risks and challenges that must be addressed, including
how to maintain and manage applications as both end-user and business
requirements change. These changes can quickly and decisively alter the
competitive landscape, rendering certain applications obsolete.
The complex tasks of maintaining and managing applications in production
accounts for up to two-thirds of an application's TCO. This means that two
dollars will be spent maintaining applications that only cost one dollar to
... (more)
As software development teams and solutions become more distributed,
visibility into systems has given way to isolated pockets of component
knowledge. This "silo" approach to application development, where different
teams work in isolation from each other, means that developers may no longer
have knowledge of, or access to, the code with which their component
interacts. This results in duplication of efforts and incomplete solutions
due to a lack of information sharing.
Compounding the problem is the fact that the numerous distributed components
and Web services that make up the... (more)