Top Reasons to Upgrade your IT Systems

We live in a connected and automated world of alphabet soup systems - ERP, SOA, CRM, etc - fueled by innovations in software and hardware of an unprecedent scale.

We want to beat our competion by leveraging technology, and technology vendors want our business, which in turn drives investment into better systems that we can leverage.

As your business changes, your IT systems need to be kept aligned with your processes to support your business objectives. In the same way, your business will benefit from taking advantages of improvements in technology. So you may be sitting on software that is a few years old and under pressure to upgrade. Here are 3 good reasons to upgrade your software:

1. Taking advantage of new functionality offered. Sticking to older version means needing to build custom code for desired features that were not incorporated into a product. The newer releases may have the desired functionality built in. While converting to a newer release is a painful experience because of the modifications, it reduces risk. Your code no longer has to be tested each time a patch comes out for the language you used or the operating system changes.


2. Maintenance costs increasing, or hard to find skilled resources in the older versions. So needs to get on the upgrade bandwagon. Often it is difficult to find support staff to support older versions of software. Most people want to stay at or near to the current releases. Finding someone that is competent to work with an old release can be difficult and expensive.


3. Older versions are not compatible with newer hardware and you are locked into old technology. The hardware or operating system is no longer supported by the software vendor. I've seen this one bite companies severely over the years. Software companies shed low sales volume operating systems and hardware platforms to reduce support costs.