£10.6bn of European businesses' IT spend is "wasted"

European companies are wasting over £10.6bn a year servicing and supporting IT applications that deliver little or no value, according to recent research.

The research, conducted by Coleman Parkes on behalf of HP, also said that 74 per cent of CIOs consider the number of applications used in their organisation to be too many and that this was a problem.

The research questioned 100 CIOs from five European countries.

Overall, the CIOs reported that, on average, almost 15 per cent of applications in use across the business were not providing real business benefits; with a third putting this figure higher at more than 20 per cent.

Servicing and supporting applications that deliver little or no value to the business leads to unnecessary maintenance costs, resulting in a 5.8 per cent overspend on annual technology budgets.

This spend equates to over £10.6bn across European organisations of all sizes, based on IDC's estimation of average enterprise IT spend in Western Europe, and more than £5bn for enterprises with 1,000 employees and above.