Within customer issues, meeting the technology requirements of customers (22%) and maintaining customer loyalty (21%) are the most often noted factors behind investment. From a competitive standpoint, time-to-market improvements (29%) and growing market share (23%) are the key factors, followed closely by keeping up with competition.
Unfortunately, these business issues collide head on with IT organizations’ current challenges: diverse application landscapes that are often poorly integrated which results in inflexibility and high cost to change and maintain. In fact, we conducted a survey late last year in which we asked respondents about their biggest challenges managing systems (see Figure 2). Integration issues (25%), pace of change (24%), and cost of change (21%) are the barriers that organizations face when trying to meet customer and competitive demands.
