August 25, 2008 (Network World) — When asked recently about the priorities and challenges involved with managing applications, senior IT professionals had a lot to say.

A July 2008 survey of 286 senior IT professionals conducted by automated configuration management vendor mValent revealed that IT managers have cost cutting, productivity and high availability for business-critical applications on their minds. The survey revealed that while nearly 50% of those surveyed felt compelled to reduce costs in 2008, 44% are also tasked with ensuring high availability for applications and business services.

That job is proving to be more difficult than in the past and requires more staff than before as applications and the infrastructure supporting them grow ever more complex. According to the survey, 46% of Fortune 1000 IT pros use 11 or more people to manage configure changes to application infrastructure assets, which can include anything from application and Web servers to middleware, databases and operating systems. And 22% of those polled use between six and 10 staffers to tackle application configuration management.

All the effort is probably based on the fact that one-third of survey respondents estimate an hour of application downtime can subtract up to $100,000 from the company's bottom line. And some are turning to automation technologies to help with the task of managing application complexity. Nearly 40% are looking at automation tools to enforce configuration consistency across several environments including development, staging and production. More than one-third want to improve staff productivity and 30% want to speed troubleshooting efforts around poor application performance.

"By automating core areas of application infrastructure maintenance/support such as configuration, change and release management, IT organizations can gain significantly more time and effort to focus on the development and deployment of applications designed to drive competitive advantage," according to mValent's report including the survey results.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.