Old age slowing 'em down: A combined 70% of IT execs admit to running apps as old or even older than their kids

Application modernization is companies' top priority for 2011 as they reach a consensus that the costs, resources and time required updating and maintaining legacy applications negatively impacts their ability to quickly deliver new services, according to a new survey conducted fon behalf of HP.

The survey revealed that nearly 60 percent of senior technology executives surveyed continue to use legacy applications that have been running for more than eight years; within that group, more than 10 percent are running applications that are more than 16 years old. One out of two senior technology executives also said that more than 20 percent of their applications could be described as legacy.

With companies' increasing reliance on applications to run their business, it can be said that IT has now become an integral part of company operations. 86 percent of senior business and government executives believe that to better serve customers and citizens they must rapidly adapt the enterprise to meet changes in consumer expectations. Furthermore, 78 percent of these respondents believe that technology is the key to business and government innovation. Eighty-five percent of business and government executives indicated that in order to be successful, technology needs to be embedded in the business or government service. This data outlines a shift in the role of IT from chiefly being the administrator of the enterprise, to becoming one in the same with the enterprise.

"To respond to new enterprise drivers and motivators, organizations need to fundamentally change how they operate," said Thomas E. Hogan, executive vice president, Enterprise Sales, Marketing and Strategy, HP.

Additional Findings

• Senior technology executives say that 19 percent of their organization’s workloads today are on mainframes and almost 20 percent of them are designated to be moved off of them.Furthermore, 31 percent of workloads are virtualized today and that number will increase by 20 percent in the next two years. Only 21 percent of senior technology executives, however, strongly agreed that their infrastructure is optimized and aligned to meet current enterprise demands; only 13 percent of senior business and government execs strongly agreed.

• 76 percent of senior business, government and technology executives overall believe that storage assets will grow at least 20 percent over the next two years. More than half of the people in that group believe growth will be more than 30 percent. Only 12 percent of senior business and government executives, however,  agreed that IT provides the information they need to do their jobs all of the time, in contrast to 20 percent of senior technology executives.

• By 2015, senior business, government and technology executives believe that 18 percent of their IT delivery will be via the public cloud and 28 percent by private cloud. The remainder will be in-house or outsourced