Innovation, Maintenance and Open Source

A NetworkWorld article quotes Google's GM of Enterprise Business as saying:

"insane complexity of technology is leading companies to spend 75% to 80% of IT budgets simply maintaining the systems they have already."

The 75%-80% figure is a little higher than the 60%-70% figure I'd seen in customer research we did a few years back. But the issue I have with the quote is the suggestion that spending on systems you have already is a waste of money or time. Very few companies have the luxury of implementing SOA or loosely coupled web services are the answer. I'll agree, to a a certain degree. But now, instead of modifying existing app "XYZ", you're going to modify existing component/service "YZA". On the topic of innovation, here's a We found that customers that adopted WAS Community Edition (WAS CE) were seeking to save money and build a platform that allowed their developers to write and deploy applications faster and with more flexibility. Often, they were using Apache Geronimo or WAS CE for a specific project that needed to get rolled out ASAP. But, these customers cared about how "this stuff will work with the stuff I already have". They wanted to know what options they had if the app transformed from "a quick and dirty request to something that users relied on, would be less productive without and wanted more out of". Cost savings, a platform for innovation and future flexibility and choice were all considerations. Most IT folks know that applications seldom fade away quickly, they just get integrated and maintained with all the other "legacy stuff". The pic is from over at Flickr blog about enterprise open source topics.