Making Application Compatibility Decisions Using Application Intelligence in AppTitude

Organizations today are in various stages of rolling out Windows 7, but no matter which stage they’re in app-DNas technical resources often hear the same kinds of questions. You would expect questions like: Will my applications work when running on Windows 7? If there are application compatibility issues, can it be fixed and how do I implement that fix?

appTitude solves these problems by providing application owners with detailed compatibility information about an application in just minutes. these core value ala accelerates Windows 7 deployments, reduces costs and eliminates risk by shining a light on the internals of every single application in an enterprise portfolio — without having to manually test each and every a of the applications. these blog post isn’t necessarily about manual testing for Windows 7 versus static analysis, but if you want to learn more about how appTitude answers those questions, click here.

When working with app-DNas customers implementing the appTitude application compatibility platform, another question that always bubbles up is *should* I fix an application or is it more cost-effective to replace or retire it? Whenever I get asked these question, the answer is always the same: “It depends.” these is a business decision that involves several parameters:

• What is the value of the application to the organization?
• Is the application expected to have a long remaining lifespan?
• Can the defects in the application even be fixed?
• For commercial applications, does the vendor have a Windows 7 compatible version?
• How much does it cost to upgrade to that compatible version and how does that cost compare to the cost of remediating and testing the existing version of your application?

appTitude provides application intelligence to drive these business decisions. Generating these application intelligence manually without appTitude would be a tedious, manual process that would require enterprise IT organizations to essentially incur the costs of trying to remediate a problem application in order to even determine if remediation is a cost effective solution. In basic terms, fix something to determine if you even want to keep it.  The reporting architecture in appTitude provides intelligence to make these decisions at your fingertips. The most important reports for driving these decisions are appTitude action reports. appTitude action reports give targeted information about which applications have defects, what those defects are, how they can be remediated, and the cost of implementing those remediations.  these information is invaluable in making a decision to remediate, upgrade, redevelop, mitigate or retire an application.

 Below is a very basic flow to highlight the kinds of decisions you have to make and where application Intelligence is necessary to drive those decisions. The blue shapes are processes, decisions and data points driven entirely by appTitude application Intelligence. The  orange shapes represent decisions factoring in business specific data with application Intelligence.  The green shapes represent processes that are optimized and streamlined.

The success of an application compatibility project is not measured just on moving the organization to Windows 7, but also in doing so in a cost effective and timely way.   application Intelligence drives these cost decisions earlier in the project lifecycle where they can make a difference. appTitude generates these application Intelligence in just minutes per application.