The Curious Case of Longtail Apps

…Long tail apps

??? ????

?

?

? ?????

?? ??

??

?

The curious case of…

Popularity

No. of applications

ERP

SCM

CRM

Core business

apps are ITFavorites!

Core Biz Apps, on central infrastructure

Then, there are the

supporting apps

HRMS

ESS

Audits

Popularity

No. of applications

Supporting Apps/Systems, Somewhat peripheral &

distributed

Supporting & Situational Apps

Scattered and distributed In hundreds & thousands

…and more! supporting

& situational.

Popularity

No. of applications

• Visitor

Management

• Local Asset

Requests

• Physical Security

These Peripheral, Scattered &

distributed Apps have always been area of concern for

IT Managers !

!

These Peripheral, Scattered &

distributed Apps have always been area of concern for

IT Managers !

WHY?

These Apps start in pockets and grow all across

the organization over time within

their own pockets

Built by end-users or sub-organizations,

using whatever quick tools are

available at disposal

MS – Access, MS - Excel

Lotus Notes

Oracle Forms

Visual Basic

They are often used to keep the business going, to keep up with KTLO

routine

They are often used to keep the business going, to keep up with KTLO

routine

Keep The Lights On

But they are locally built, hundreds of them, many of them for the same purpose

In all the unwanted places

?

?

?

?

$$$

Growing in uncontrollable

manner, bleeding

money, time & effort

…while all

central IT efforts

are focused on core

systems.

Long Tail Apps are thus born !!

Pop

ula

rity

/ U

sag

e

# of Applications

Supporting Apps

• Mission critical• Tracked by CIOs• Enterprise wide usage

Situational Apps

Long tail Apps

• Non-Mission critical, but important• 200+ Small / medium apps• Approx. 10 to 50 users per app

• Non-mission critical, less important • Developed by power end users• Short lifetime – weeks or months

These Apps continue to

use outdated

technology…!

They use multiple

and mutually

inconsistent

approaches for the

same problem

They are

difficult to

monitor

They are heterogeneous

They are scattered

They end up on non-uniform platforms or architecture

And there are simply too many of them!!!

We see the problem!

Why not do something

About it??!!

We see the problem!

Cost Per application has been too high for

centralization

Head Body Long tailNo. of apps

Popularity

Why not do something

About it??!!Costs of providing the

traditional central infrastructure for these

applications has been too high, and there are too many of them making it difficult to

do that.

1.

It doesn’t seem worth all the effort!

Why not do something

About it??!!The scattered and

heterogeneity of long tail apps doesn’t seem all worth the effort in

absence of a pragmatic approach.

2.

Central IT Infrastructure notconducive for “continuous

innovation”

Why not do something

About it??!!Inherent Business

Innovation characteristics are hampered by the

difficulty of development & accessibility problems of

traditional IT infrastructure

3.

We didn’t have an alternative cost effective platform

Why not do something

About it??!!

?

The available set of target platform options do not provide the cost-effective migration path

and sustenance.

4.

We had to live with

these problems

!Costs Per application too high for centralization

It doesn’t seem worth all the effort!

Central Infrastructure not too conducive for continuous innovation

We don’t have an alternative cost effective platform

We had to live with

these problems

! Until

We had to live with

these problems

! !Cloud

happened!!!

We had to live with

these problems

!…enables long tail Apps Management

www.orangescape.comwww.twitter.com/orangescapewww.slideshare.net/orangescapeVisual

PaaS

!!!!

We had to live with

these problems

!…enables long tail Apps Management

www.orangescape.comwww.twitter.com/orangescapewww.slideshare.net/orangescapeVisual

PaaS

!!!!