Retain, retire or replace? Application rationalization gives the answer.
April 22, 2025 / Parag Baweja
Short on time? Read the key takeaways:
- Application rationalization offers a comprehensive assessment of your entire application portfolio.
- Moving to the cloud as part of digital transformation is a major incentive for application rationalization and modernizing applications is the first step.
- Application rationalization helps you simplify your application portfolio and maximize its value.
- Paring down your applications lowers your total cost of ownership and better aligns your applications with business initiatives.
If your business applications could talk, what story would they tell? Application rationalization is your way to find out.
Application rationalization can deepen your understanding of your applications. This comprehensive assessment involves evaluating all your business applications and identifying optimization opportunities. Based on the findings, you determine whether it’s best to retain, retire, replace, rehost, replatform or refactor each application.
An assessment gives you the insight to handle each application appropriately. After a technical evaluation, you get recommendations based on the data about the applications in your environment.
The biggest driver for application rationalization
You may be driven to application rationalization by a desire to align your applications with your business needs. You can reduce maintenance, licensing and support costs by optimizing business applications, typically a significant part of your IT budget.
The common motivation for application rationalization is to gain agility and speed and improve the user experience by migrating to the cloud. As organizations undergo digital transformation, optimizing the application landscape becomes crucial to unlocking the cloud’s full potential.
In addition to the increased performance common with cloud initiatives, optimizing your application portfolio offers benefits like:
- Greater security because reducing the number of applications narrows your risk from cyber threats. So does replacing legacy applications with modern ones that are typically more secure.
- Simplified compliance since auditing hundreds of applications is tricky as you must track ownership and manage their use.
- Enhanced user experience as employees use more modern applications, juggle fewer applications and avoid switching between multiple systems.
Application rationalization helps you identify and overcome common application stumbling blocks like scalability challenges, performance bottlenecks, integration issues and security vulnerabilities.
Prioritizing modern applications that propel your initiatives
Legacy applications are often more vulnerable to security risks and less likely to serve innovation. Application rationalization lets you identify legacy apps and modern applications that serve a similar purpose more efficiently. This often leads organizations to prioritize applications and modernize their portfolio.
Streamlining your application portfolio can reduce operational overhead and signal you’re ready for digital transformation.
Application rationalization advantage: Modernizing applications can reduce technical debt and improve the user experience.
Retiring redundant applications and eliminating overlap
Organizations accumulate numerous applications and may not have a proper count of those implemented. Some may have been introduced by former employees or implemented to support a project wrapped up months or years before. Mergers and acquisitions can also result in overlapping applications.
Other organizations have multiple applications that do the same thing, adding unnecessary licensing fees and management complexity. Application rationalization gives you a complete picture of your application portfolio so you can retire applications that no longer serve your needs or are redundant.
Application rationalization advantage: Simplifying your application portfolio lets you derive maximum value from the right mix of applications.
Eliminating or replacing applications that no longer meet business needs
Applications can outlive their purpose. Over time, you’ve probably acquired applications that no one still uses. Or perhaps an application is being used by just a few employees while most have switched to a more efficient app.
Application rationalization can identify how often an application is used and how many people use it. This helps you detect underused or unused apps. You can leverage AI and machine learning to streamline this process with automation.
Application rationalization advantage: You lower your total cost of ownership and energy consumption by gaining insight into infrequently used applications.
Make your applications more effective
Application rationalization benefits any organization undertaking digital transformation. It’s impossible to optimize your application portfolio without taking this step. Plus, modernizing applications based on your findings improves the user experience, increasing user engagement, satisfaction and productivity.
Unisys offers application portfolio management, modernization, migration and managed services to support these efforts. We tailor our Unisys Application Assessment solution to each client, whether you could benefit from design workshops, best-of-breed platforms, AI-infused automated assessment or structured methodologies.
Read how Unisys application services can deliver modern, secure applications and reach out to learn how an assessment can help you reduce overall IT spend. And explore our whitepaper for success strategies for your application modernization initiative.
