Why enterprises will modernize their enterprise apps this year

Sapho and IDG Communications have released the results of a survey targeting 160 IT Directors and Chief Information and Technology Officers at enterprise companies with more than 1,000 employees. The results show an overwhelming number (78%) of respondents planning to upgrade their organization’s enterprise applications this year in an effort to provide employees with better user experiences, improve employee productivity, and better secure sensitive data.

"As the survey points out, there is a desperate need to modernize the employee experience of enterprise applications,” says Sapho CEO and co-founder Fouad ElNaggar. “Enterprises have spent trillions of dollars on applications to increase employee productivity and satisfaction, and yet employees avoid them due to their complex workflows and hard-to-use interfaces, which haven’t changed in 20 years. The lack of application usage is now starting to impact bottom lines which gives CIOs and IT departments a window to strategically impact their business."

The survey also points out that these modernization efforts are being driven largely by an inability to move to cloud-based apps for security and compliance reasons as well as the fact that legacy, on-premises applications are so deeply ingrained in daily business processes that they cannot be replaced. A deeper look further validates these findings, as less than 5% of the overall enterprise application portfolio will move to the cloud in the next 12 months, while the percentage of apps that run on-premises are projected to drop only 3% in the next 12 months. Thus, it is no surprise that almost half of respondents say that their on-premises applications are here to stay and applications that touch critical data and systems must remain on-premises.

When looking at tools to modernize these enterprise applications and systems, survey respondents prioritize tools that can integrate with existing systems and offer the ability to leverage existing infrastructure, security practices, and tools. Respondents also cite how omnichannel support for enterprise applications is essential, so that employees can access their applications on desktops, mobile devices, intranets, and messenger clients. In fact, 88% of respondents said desktop application access is more important than mobile access, putting aside the notion that mobile apps are the top priority for enterprise application modernization efforts. Beyond that, as employee intranets quickly become the hub of the digital workplace, a majority of respondents said their organizations will make significant efforts towards upgrading or enhancing their employee intranet.

“Business users don't really care where their apps are hosted, they just want them to work. However, IT decision-makers prefer to modernize with on-premises, or their private cloud equivalents, to ensure that corporate data stays fully in control and behind the firewall,” says Sapho CTO and co-founder Peter Yared. “The survey makes it clear that the most important factors when choosing tools to modernize enterprise applications are their ability to integrate with existing apps and systems and the ability to leverage existing infrastructure and security tools - this is where on-premises tools excel.”

“Smart enterprises are taking note of three key trends and modernizing their apps around them,” says Aran Bride, Director of Research Intelligence for IDG Communications, Inc. “First, the apparent tapering-off of cloud application migrations indicates that on-premises applications and data are here to stay. Secondly, desktop application and intranet upgrades are proving just as important as mobile, if not more so, as companies realize that they need to invest where their workers do most of their work. And finally, the consumerization of applications means that enterprise applications must be hyper focused on delivering the optimal user-experience or workers will simply ignore them - a scenario enterprises are trying to get themselves out of.”