Pure Play Maintenance Costs Consuming IT Budgets?

ContractualObligatio asks: "The Register asks the question of whether businesses are at risk of having no budget to develop code, from maintaining too many 'pure play' applications. What has the experience been among Slashdot readers? Are people spending too much time maintaining code and integrations because the business is adopting too many applications? Do IT teams have the time and money to actually improve and innovate the way their companies do business?"

pure play?

[tepples]

The article doesn't define "pure play" applications. Is this a common term of art in IT? Google shows "pure play" defined on investing sites as a firm that concentrates on one type of product.

text is too large - OMG!

[Nataku564]

Because it affects a good chunk of us at work. At least, from my experience, it does.

I work at a pretty decent sized hedge fund. We have been growing since before I arrived, and continue to do so at what I feel is a fairly rapid pace. In order to seem "current" and keep up with the market, our trading desk has been expanding into unholy amounts of new investment strategies. Lots of fun OTC derivatives, energy markets, weather, pollution trading, etc.

This is all well and good on the face of it, but in order to support these new strategies as quickly as they claim they need to, we need to purchase outside software instead of developing it in house. So a good portion of the IT staff (myself included) has been entirely devoted to figuring out how to integrate these new applications with our existing structure. Basically - theres no time for new code, and its frustrating most individuals involved, since we kind of like to write code, and not attend multi-day training sessions on how to support some lame half-engineered application that does all its work in stored procs from a single threaded windows form based server. No joke on that last one either, that app bites hard - yay for me being in the department in charge of that monstrosity.

So, its a common problem - or, at least I think it is. I guess this article is supposed to foster discussion on that idea. Of course, its not actually a problem with the IT staff, but we still have to deal with it. The staff in my area alone has doubled in about a year's time in order to try and keep up.

Oh yes

[mwvdlee]

As somebody who has worked on a multi-million dollar project that would bring in about $20,000 each year for a product that would be phased out in about 10 years and could have just as easily been replaced by a paper form... yes, too many "pure play" applications.