AG has announced the availability of Portfolios Live at its global user’s conference Innovation World 2013 in San Francisco. Portfolios Live is a new cloud-based service that provides CIOs with the ability to manage and transform IT landscapes based on comprehensive and accurate budget, regulatory, legal and technical information.
Portfolios Live offers a set of pre-configured solutions for specific tasks that enterprise architects and portfolio managers undertake on a day-to-day basis. This new solution combines best practices and guidance to collect, connect and assess available IT assets and support both the IT and business decision-making needed to transform an organisation into a Digital Enterprise.
Portfolios Live provides the transparency required for comprehensive and accurate IT planning. It enables portfolio owners to gather and maintain high-quality data concerning their full application landscape. Based on this, it provides step-by-step guidance and ultimately the visualisation and reports that make the basis and justification for IT investment decisions apparent. It identifies candidates for consolidation or transition into the cloud, assesses the cost structure of the application portfolio, the underlying technological risk and contractual obligations.
For the first time, organisations have a ready-to-use infrastructure to collect their IT data, without upfront investment or installation bottlenecks and have it connected and assessed in pre-configured portfolio views that are readily applicable to their businesses.
“Identifying the cost and strategic business support of your IT assets is a fundamental first step on the road to the Digital Enterprise,” said Software AG CTO Wolfram Jost. “Having this service available in the cloud enables organisations to start well-informed IT planning at a project level and scale up on demand.”
Enterprises must increasingly address new business opportunities through information technology against a background of flat IT budgets. Therefore a closer assessment of the costs of maintaining IT systems can free budget for new, innovative solutions. However, freeing budget without impacting the operational business requires transparency.
Research by IDG, among financial IT investment decision-makers, shows that almost 60 per cent cannot oversee the impact of IT budget cuts on business performance and risk exposure. Boston- based Nucleus Research, which specialises in ROI studies, found that most organisations are struggling to have reliable data at hand when it comes to their digital assets. The study shows that enterprise IT decision makers have to rely on information that is, on average, 14 months old and is only 55 per cent accurate.
Portfolios Live is part of Software AG Live, a cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) suite. It addresses today’s business needs with unmatched speed, ease-of-use and full support for social and mobile collaboration. Subject matter experts and IT professionals alike across organisations can design and develop agile applications while easily integrating existing systems.