You know how you keep saying you’re going to go to your computer’s control panel and uninstall all the applications you’re not using, but you keep forgetting? Well, a lot of enterprise managers are just like that with the applications they run for their businesses — only the cost of not taking inventory is higher — a lot higher, according to Paul Sundquist, content management director at Paragon Solutions, Inc.

Paragon is an EMC partner consulting with companies that may be confused about whether their technology products are earning their keep. Sundquist said one of the best procedures the company performs for clients is “application decommissioning.” He told John Walls and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that companies need to know if they are getting value from their applications, and why or why not.

“One of our customers has 1,000 applications that they don’t currently put new data into. What are they going to do with them?” he asked.

Hoarders: The IT episode

A lot of companies are like pack rats holding onto zombie applications that aren’t delivering value. Sundquist said people need to decide what they’re going to do with them; sometimes chucking an app is the answer, sometimes not. Employees may tell you an application is useless to them, “but in the meantime, you have all that other value associated with it,” such as legal compliance or emergency rescue use, he said.

Sundquist said application decommissioning is as much about rediscovering the value of applications as it is about archiving them. Paragon aims to take the zombie apps and at least catalog them in a better way so they are easily stored and retrieved if needed.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by  SiliconANGLE