Pure Play Maintenance Costs Consuming IT Budgets?

ContractualObligatio asks: "The Register asks the question of whether businesses are at risk of having no budget to develop code, from maintaining too many 'pure play' applications. What has the experience been among Slashdot readers? Are people spending too much time maintaining code and integrations because the business is adopting too many applications? Do IT teams have the time and money to actually improve and innovate the way their companies do business?"

Comments

pure play?

[tepples]

The article doesn't define "pure play" applications. Is this a common term of art in IT? Google shows "pure play" defined on investing sites as a firm that concentrates on one type of product.

Re:Too much to do to get work done? What?

[afidel]

Only true if you can make an application design that can scale arbitrarily with the business and can meet all current and future business needs. Since that's impossible there will always be some level of maintenance and replacement of software systems. Then there's the hardware platform on which the application runs, and unless it's something basic like OS/360 nee Z/OS then you might have to redisign the app every so often to keep up with the changing OS platform. The goal of IT is to meet the businesses needs at the minimal cost necessary to maintain that position and meet ongoing business growth.

Oh yes

[mwvdlee]

As somebody who has worked on a multi-million dollar project that would bring in about $20,000 each year for a product that would be phased out in about 10 years and could have just as easily been replaced by a paper form... yes, too many "pure play" applications.