June 20, 2012 - MEGA, noted industry leader in enterprise architecture (EA) and business process analysis (BPA), has released a new software solution for application portfolio management (APM).

The new MEGA Application Portfolio Management solution supports IT application rationalization and modernization to help companies provide better and more cost-effective IT resources to business groups within the organization.

As companies grow larger and more dispersed globally, whether through business success, merger, or acquisition, they accumulate a substantial and diverse group of applications. After many years, the company's detailed knowledge about these applications is often imprecise. As a result, many applications are redundant, underutilized, outdated or unnecessary for current business needs. Organizations with a large, complex mix of legacy, packaged, and home-grown or custom applications find them time-consuming and expensive to maintain and difficult to modernize.

"CIOs are under great pressure to deliver up-to-date IT services to business units. This is a difficult challenge if they don't have a clear picture of the entire infrastructure, as well as how each application serves specific business groups and needs," explained Lucio de Risi, CEO, MEGA. "CIOs tell us constantly that, as they are asked to provide more services with lower budgets, managing the application portfolio is at the top of their priority list."

The MEGA APM solution is the first of many new options that will be added to the MEGA Suite in the fall, when the company will introduce a new platform that will provide innovative capabilities to help companies manage business transformation and governance issues.

The new solution can:

• Create an organized, consistent view of the application portfolio to aid in relevant, cost-effective decisions on application retirement or upgrades
• Organize a decentralized collection of descriptive metrics to drive better rationalization and business decisions
• Store all application information (functions, relationships, dependencies) in one "single source of truth" repository
• Analyze scenarios for portfolio change, including cost evaluation and effects on business units
• Define roadmaps to plan portfolio transformation

"Customers want APM to simplify the outrageous complexity that has built up over time in their application and technology portfolios, and they are looking to tools that can help them. The portfolio manager at a global chemical company told us, 'We have a lot of the information we need, but it is lying around everywhere; we need one place to keep it where we all have access to it.'" according to Phil Murphy, principal analyst, Forrester Research, Inc., in Application Portfolio Tools Miss the Mark, April 2011.

"Customers seek transparency in two forms — technical transparency articulates the state of the applications; linking that information with business transparency shows the who, where, why, and when of IT resource consumption," Forrester's report continued.

Recently, Universal Music Group, the world's largest music content company, said it selected MEGA to help streamline IT operations to meet industry and market challenges. The company chose MEGA to implement the method and tools for its APM program, based on a common, shared information repository.

Organizations use APM tools to accomplish business transformation through the evolution and improvement of the IT landscape. Measuring the cost and the business value of the company's complete application portfolio helps business and IT groups optimize application and service quality, reduce risks and complexity, and create more value in IT assets. With an ongoing APM plan and consistent analysis facilitated by the right tools, APM is a means for companies to leverage past investments and fuel future innovation and growth.

MEGA APM will be available on July 31.