Patni leverages its Enterprise Application Rationalization framework to ease IT integration during an acquisition.

The Client
The client is a billion dollar organization headquartered in the US. It operates in more than 50 countries globally, with a leading presence in the Integrated Enterprise Mobility Solutions industry.

The Challenge
Having been acquired by a global communications leader, the client faced the daunting task of preparing to integrate its IT department with that of the acquiring company.

Some of the key challenges included:

• Reviewing and streamlining application portfolio and IT assets to prepare for integration process
• Lack of clear visibility in the application portfolio because of decentralized and ad-hoc buying, made more complex due to poor documentation
• Inability to assess the capability or measure the adequacy and value of current application support structure
• Inability to track dependencies of business processes on applications.

The Solution
To streamline its diverse application portfolio, and align it to suit the business objectives of the acquiring company, the client decided to seek the expertise of Patni. A detailed assessment exercise conducted by Patni revealed a serious lack of defined processes to update and maintain the application inventory. Patni also identified that key decisions around applications and business processes were taken without adequate insight into their dependencies.

For identifying the key attributes of each application, Patni conducted detailed oneon- one sessions with service function leads and application owners. Patni's consultants identified and documented specific anomalies for applications under consideration. In addition, interviews with service function leads were designed to focus on understanding the priorities, limitations and strategic considerations according to business expectations.

Based on the analysis of the information collected as a result of the interviews, and assessment of the application portfolio, Patni gave a detailed application portfolio rationalization roadmap. Patni consultants assessed the customer's Application Portfolio to arrive at recommendations.

The following activities were performed by Patni:

• Validating and updating report of the existing application inventory
• Presenting various views of the application portfolio - vendor-wise, application criticality by functional groups, FTE utilization by application criticality
• Documenting enterprise reference model describing each business process and the corresponding supporting applications
• Documenting interface diagram which described all interfacing applications and their interfaces
• Proposed recommendations for Application Portfolio Rationalization for each functional group
• Proposed a refined application inventory model.

Additional key recommendations to reduce and optimize the application portfolio included:

• Reduce dependency on third party applications by bringing down the 70 odd applications to a more manageable number
• Consolidate database related to marketing functions
• Standardize on a single application for global travel and expense reporting
• Consolidate various third party HR applications in SAP HR Standardize on a single records and document management system
• Migrate critical ColdFusion applications to .NET framework for better integration with SAP Enterprise Portal
• Extend SAP BW implementation to cover enterprise-wide reporting.

The Benefits
The following activities were performed by Patni:

• Improved visibility of the organization's application portfolio and a mechanism to extract various views of the same. This was crucial for the integration with acquiring company
• Identified list of opportunities to reduce application portfolio by tagging applications which were redundant or which could be consolidated
• Identified areas to scale up/scale down FTE requirements based on application criticality.

The Technology

• IT Governance application: Clarity 7.5.3 on Weblogic 8.0
• Operating System: Unix
• Database: Oracle 10g.