White Papers

The consolidation of IT assets, particularly databases, has garnered considerable interest in recent years, and the general concept of IT consolidation – migrating multiple, heterogeneous systems to run on a single hardware and/or software instance – is relatively well-understood in the market. The typical rationales for IT consolidation, largely centered around cost reduction, improved operational efficiency, and the development of more responsive, dynamic, and customer-centric IT systems, are also familiar in the literature, and are fairly well-understood.

In the vast majority of cases, IT consolidation – and in particular database consolidation – while providing some value, falls far short of its potential to positively impact the business side of the enterprise.

According to research carried out by Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC), most examples of database consolidation focus only on the benefits of the technical aspects of consolidation: With the consolidation of database licenses, a reduction in personnel and hardware costs are the predominant results. These examples ignore the benefits of a business consolidation – one that goes beyond typical technical consolidations by consolidating current and historical data and business processes – that could deliver significant value to the business side of the enterprise as well.