Portfolio Management in the cloud

As businesses expand their use of cloud services, both through porting existing applications and by adding new cloud applications and services, managing that growing portfolio of resources can become an issue.

That is the issue Software AG is aiming to solve with its announcement, at the company’s global user’s conference in San Francisco, of Portfolios Live. This is a new cloud-based service that provides CIOs the ability to manage and transform IT landscapes based on comprehensive and accurate budget, regulatory, legal and technical information.

It is a new part of Software AG Live, a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) suite, which is designed to equip IT professionals alike across organisations design and develop agile applications while easily integrating existing systems, and providing full support for social and mobile collaboration.

Portfolios Live offers a set of pre-configured solutions for specific tasks that enterprise architects and portfolio managers manage on a day-to-day basis. This new solution combines best practices and guidance to collect, connect and assess available IT assets and support both the IT and business decision making needed to transform an organisation into a Digital Enterprise.

 “Having this service available in the cloud enables organizations to start well informed IT planning at a project level and scale up on demand.”

It provides the transparency required for comprehensive and accurate IT planning and equips portfolio owners to gather and maintain data concerning their full application landscape. Based on this, it provides step-by-step guidance and ultimately the visualisations and reports that justify – or not - IT investment decisions. It identifies candidate applications for consolidation or transition into the cloud, assesses the cost structure of the application portfolio, the underlying technological risk and contractual obligations.

The company claims this is the first time that organisations have had access to a ready-to-use infrastructure to collect their IT data without upfront investment or installation bottlenecks, and have it connected and assessed in pre-configured portfolio views that are readily applicable to their businesses.

“Identifying the cost and strategic business support of your IT assets is a fundamental first step on the road to the Digital Enterprise,” said Software AG CTO Wolfram Jost. “Having this service available in the cloud enables organizations to start well informed IT planning at a project level and scale up on demand.”

Enterprises must increasingly address new business opportunities through information technology against a background of flat IT budgets. Therefore a closer assessment of the costs of maintaining IT systems can free budget for new, innovative solutions. But freeing budget without impacting the operational business requires transparency.

Research by IDG among financial IT investment decision makers shows that almost 60 percent of financial decision makers have no real oversight over the impact of IT budget cuts on business performance and risk exposure. Nucleus Research, which specialises in ROI studies, found that most organisations are struggling to have reliable data at hand when it comes to their digital assets.

The study shows that enterprise IT decision makers have to rely on information that is, on average, 14 months old and is only 55 percent accurate.