IT Leaders Struggle to Meet Demand for App Testing

CIO Survey Reveals IT Leaders Struggle to Meet Big Demand for Enterprise App Testing, Development and Rollouts Next Year

With "healthcare Y2K" looming and accelerated demand, seven out of 10 CIOs are rolling out more enterprise apps during 2013 (46 on average) to keep pace with frontline business needs

October 16, 2012, Menlo Park, Calif. -- Delphix, the leader in agile data management, today announced the results of a survey of corporate IT leaders fielded by IDG Research for Delphix to garner insights about plans, IT budgets and business goals for enterprise application development initiatives during the next twelve months. The survey polled 108 top-level IT executives at large global enterprises between August 30 and September 28, 2012. It exposes a growing problem for IT organizations struggling to keep pace with demand for an increasing number of enterprise application projects during the next 12 months.

The vast majority of IT leaders (86 percent) view enterprise app projects as a critical or strategic priority. On average, $173 million per enterprise has been allocated specifically for application projects in 2013, which equates to 41 percent of the average $432 million budget of the IT leaders surveyed. Yet, two thirds of respondents indicate that it's extremely or very challenging to deliver these applications on time or on budget. In fact, for the enterprise apps currently in development, an average of 28 projects are delayed and/or over budget.

"Managing so many new applications and associated data is tough in any industry, but it's particularly difficult for healthcare with the upcoming cutover of all systems to the ICD-10 classification system," says Rick Caccia, VP for Delphix. "Some of our customers refer to it as 'Y2K for healthcare,' due to the significant work and deadline pressure involved. No one wants insurance providers to decline treatments because of inaccurate data codes. Gartner forecasts that the bulk of healthcare IT reform transition costs, some 60-70 percent, will be used for testing apps and the related data. Delphix can help."

"Database environments are constantly getting bigger and bigger, and they're increasingly the bottleneck," said Tim Campos, CIO of Facebook. "If you have multiple projects going on, you have multiple copies of an environment you need to maintain. What ends up happening is you get an absolute sprawl in the database environment. Scaling that is particularly expensive for IT organizations. We have high expectations about how quickly new initiatives are rolled out and needed new technology to facilitate rollouts and support more projects simultaneously. With database virtualization, we get better use of hardware and our people. It can accelerate our enterprise application development projects significantly in the same time frame."

Enterprise App Development Project Challenges

With about 41 percent of their IT budget to spend and an average of 46 new enterprise apps to deploy, 94 percent of IT executives survey admitted their organization finds it challenging to deliver these projects on time and on budget. About 76 percent of IT executives note that this high difficulty of staying on time and on budget has remained largely the same or gotten worse; only 24 percent indicate that it's become easier.

Often the difficulty lies in the earlier stages of deployment. Roughly one-half (48 percent) indicated their toughest stage is development, while another 38 percent said their toughest stage is testing. Nearly half of IT executives believe this is because of the length of time required to test apps, the resistance they encounter from end users, and the limited skill-sets of their IT employees. Pile these on top of budget constraints and the result is 65 percent of IT executives who find deploying enterprise applications to be extremely or very challenging.

Survey Respondent Profile

100 percent are the primary decision maker or a key influencer/contributor in setting strategies and budgets related to enterprise application initiatives.
Average overall IT budget for 2013 (including business spending): $423 million.
The average company size of respondent organizations is 27,659 employees.
Within the organization, 52 percent hold a CIO/CTO title, 38 percent have titles of Executive VP, SVP, VP or General Manager, and 10 percent have a CSO or CISO title.
Top industries represented: 22 percent banking/financial services/insurance; 14 percent healthcare; nine percent technology; eight percent public sector/nonprofit (including government and education); seven percent information, media and entertainment; seven percent manufacturing/auto/industrial.

To view a full summary of the CIO survey results, please visit: http://www2.delphix.com/cio-outlook-2013

About Delphix

Delphix enables agile data, transforming the economics of database and application management. Delphix software addresses the single largest source of inefficiency and inflexibility in the modern datacenter--provisioning, managing and refreshing databases for business-critical applications. Leading global organizations use Delphix to dramatically reduce the time, cost and risk of application rollouts, simplifying database operations by 100x, while consolidating redundant hardware by 10x. Delphix is located in Menlo Park, California.

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