How to Attack or Defend an Installed Base by Understanding How to Qualify the Success of Legacy Applications
On Day One of a new fiscal year, most of the IT budget is spoken for by the cost of legacy applications. Constellation estimates that between 67 percent and 75 percent of the IT budget typically is allocated at the beginning of a year to keep existing applications running.
Although the criteria for evaluating new software can be complex, the criteria for evaluating legacy systems are simple - business fit, system stability and cost. How closely an application supports the business, how often it fails and how much it costs determine if it has been a successful application or not. Oddly enough, though, the success or failure of an application does not itself determine if it will be replaced or not.
Three other factors - the tenure of the business executive, changes in the way business is done and changes in technology - must be present as well for an application to be converted. Unsuccessful applications are often never converted, while successful ones are changed out. The success or failure of an application determines how easy or difficult and how much it will cost to convert. Applications fall into three categories – the good, the bad and the ugly. By asking only a few questions, a good sales representative should be able to determine if an application is highly likely to be converted or is not a candidate for conversion at all. The most difficult category is made up of applications that fall in the middle and can consume the most sales resources with the highest uncertainty of return.
This report helps sales representatives determine how likely a legacy implementation is to be converted so they can qualify opportunities and threats more quickly.