PALO ALTO, Calif., – HP today unveiled global research that demonstrates the critical role applications play in enabling innovation to drive business growth.

The research, conducted by Coleman Parkes Research on behalf of HP Enterprise Services, reveals that adding new value and being more innovative are increasingly important to enhance market competitiveness, meet changing customer or citizen needs, and increase productivity. According to the survey, 68 percent of enterprises and 73 percent of U.S. public sector organizations agree that innovation will become more critical over the next two years.

To deliver innovation and drive growth, enterprises need to gain control over aging applications and inflexible processes that govern their responsiveness to change.

The study examined the issues that organizations are focused on and looked at how rearchitecting business applications can help accelerate business results. According to the survey, two of the primary ways organizations are adding new value or innovation are integrating applications and supporting mobility.

Driving innovation with application integration

For the purposes of this research, application integration includes integration of applications within a single business process as well as across different business processes within an enterprise. According to the survey:

• Sixty-nine percent of enterprises and 67 percent of U.S. public sector organizations are focused on integrating applications to deliver innovation.
• Two-thirds of all private sector firms and 70 percent of U.S. public sector agencies believe applications integration will become more important in the next two years.
• A majority of organizations (59 percent of all private sector firms and 53 percent of U.S. public sector agencies) are focusing more on how applications across different business processes need to work together. The rest are focusing more on how applications within the same business process need to work together.

Both private sector and U.S. public sector organizations rank developing integrated applications and enhancing existing applications to be better integrated as the most difficult areas within the application life cycle.

Adding new value with mobility

Organizations anticipate an increase during the next year in the importance of mobile devices or information needed by users when mobile. According to the survey:

• Fifty-eight percent of enterprises and 66 percent of U.S. public sector organizations are supporting mobility to add new value.
• Thirty percent of private sector firms and 40 percent of U.S. public sector agencies report that they see an increase in the importance of mobile devices or information needed for mobility within their organizations.

Modernizing some or all applications is a top activity to support mobility according to 62 percent of enterprises and 72 percent of U.S. public sector organizations. Additionally, the adaptation of agile development techniques to respond more quickly to future changes and needs is being adopted by 49 percent of enterprises and 64 percent of U.S. public sector organizations. Other activities include applications transformation initiatives, changing applications management processes and changing testing procedures.

The results show that in the critical areas of mobility and integration, less than half the organizations surveyed believed that they had the skill sets and resources to fully support these areas on their own. The implication is that they need a partner to help them; however, less than a quarter of them are making use of a partner as needed.

In this age of "instant" expectations, enterprises and governments need applications that enable them to respond quickly and effectively to changing customer and citizen needs. The Instant-On Enterprise embeds technology in everything it does to serve customers, employees, partners and citizens with everything they need, instantly.

Learn more about how organizations can get started on an Instant-On Enterprise journey at HP's premier client event, HP DISCOVER, Nov. 29 - Dec. 1 in Vienna, Austria.

Methodology

Coleman Parkes Research conducted the HP-commissioned survey by performing interviews with executives in the public sector in the United States and in private sector organizations across the globe. Interviews were conducted via telephone during March and April 2011. Respondents were 400 chief information officers, heads of IT, IT directors and senior IT managers. Regions included: North America (United States), Europe (Germany, Spain and United Kingdom) and Asia Pacific (Australia and Japan).