- AT&T
To keep up with network complexity, contain costs and comply with
governance procedures, many organizations are centralizing application
management and reporting. This white paper explains how effective
management and upkeep of enterprise applications, such as customer
relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP),
may broaden capabilities of how they can be used and provide more value
to the enterprise. Larger and more complex application environments will
need a skilled pool of resources to manage both the application itself
and its performance across the network.
Download paper
Download paper

As IT budgets keep getting squeezed tighter and tighter, "routine" tasks - such as management of key applications - become yet another area of extreme pressure on the management/operations team. Not only is the application itself in need of upkeep, but there are also increasingly time-consuming tasks such as making sure that the application is compliant with various regulations.
In this paper, AT&T does a great job of outlining the relevant tasks and demonstrating how using an application management service can help off-load some of the tasks.