Legacy applications hogging IT skills, power and data center space says new research

91 per cent of IT execs worried about the cost and complexity of retiring legacy systems

IT executives know they can free up key resources....

by retiring legacy applications, but the majority are concerned about the cost and complexity involved, according to new research.

In a survey of IT executives by Macro 4, 42 per cent admitted to keeping older applications alive simply to retain access to historical data. 87 per cent agreed that this ties up resources that could be redeployed elsewhere, with 91 per cent acknowledging that decommissioning legacy systems was complex and costly.

IT expertize and support, mentioned by 69 per cent of those questioned, came joint top of the list of resources that executives wanted to reallocate away from legacy applications. Other areas included data center space (52 per cent), electricity (40 per cent), hardware (37 per cent) and software licenses (37 per cent).

“Older applications can be a real support headache because they require different skill sets and tend to be harder to pick apart when things go wrong. And in many cases companies are incurring extra overheads because they need to keep old hardware and software solely for a legacy application to run on,” said Jeremy Harpham, Document Management Systems product manager at Macro 4, which provides Application Decommissioning solutions for migrating data from legacy systems.

Many respondents were unsatisfied with having to use legacy applications, with 61 per cent saying end users find it complex and time consuming trying to access data from them. 

“Organizations often feel forced to keep legacy systems running because they need to refer to historical data they hold for operational reasons or for compliance or legal purposes. Like Customer Service teams needing access to old customer bills, or engineers needing access to old plans and design descriptions,” said Harpham.

But decommissioning legacy systems and finding alternative ways of keeping the data alive does not have to be complicated, according to Macro 4, which surveyed 119 UK IT executives as part of the research.

“One of the worries with any project which involves migrating data is that you might lose the data.  But there are reliable alternatives out there that can take the data, index it, compress it and make it readily accessible in a number of viewing formats. For example, we helped npower decommission several legacy billing systems inherited through mergers and acquisitions. All the billing information for 5 million customers can now be accessed across the company very easily, from npower’s centralized customer service and billing system,” concluded Harpham.

About the Research

Macro 4’s research consisted of an online survey of 119 UK IT executives working in IT operations, project management and IT development.  The survey, part of a wider study, was conducted during October 2008.


About Macro 4

Macro 4 is a global software company that helps organizations to improve the performance of their critical business applications by making the complex simple. Macro 4’s solutions for application performance, document management and application availability are easy to use, fast to implement and deliver value quickly in even the most complex IT environments.

US and European subsidiaries and a network of international business partners represent the company in every major market worldwide. Macro 4 is headquartered in the UK and listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Macro 4’s Document Management solutions capture, store, present and deliver business-critical documents electronically and physically in the most appropriate way to increase the efficiency of key processes such as SAP™ ERP, application decommissioning and customer service via the Internet or call centers.