Everyone wants to build a killer application these days, something so convenient and seductive to their customers that they’ll forget all about the competition. With DevOps, containers, and all the as-a-service-software, more and more folks are becoming amateur application developers.

This may sound great, but the reality, according to Laurence Dudson, product portfolio lead at EY, is that a lot of companies are now glutted with apps that aren’t pulling their weight.

EY is working with ServiceNow, Inc. to offer IT financial consulting and solutions to customers. Dudson told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, “It’s easier to give than to take away.” In other words, people tend to be trigger happy when adopting an application but reluctant to part with one — that is until they see the numbers.

Doing the math

EY provides a cost benefit analysis for IT, and Dudson said people are shocked by what they find “every time you do it.”

“The biggest light bulb moment is typically application cost,” he explained, “You’ll take servers and storage and network and professional services, and you’ll roll it up into a TCO-total cost of ownership.”

They then compare the TCO with the value the company is getting from the app. “When you look at the two together — an incredibly expensive application, not many users, not a lot of business value — you immediately think, ‘Why have I got this?'”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by SiliconANGLE