A new report from cloud application lifecycle management (CALM) platform Opkey shows enterprise application leaders are coping with the increased complexity of implementing and managing the cloud technology needed to power today’s business operations.
It identifies six major pressure points impacting enterprise IT leaders and QA teams: rising integration management costs, the inability to keep pace with rapid cloud updates, persistent production issues, managing external consultants costs post-implementation, mounting expectations around agentic AI, and how teams hope to reinvest newfound efficiency gains into business innovation.
A full 61 percent of respondents say integrations are their single largest cost driver, well ahead of testing (34 percent), configuration (34 percent) and support (29 percent). Integration sprawl is now the primary source of budget overruns in enterprise application programs.
Rapid release cycles are overwhelming IT teams too, with 42 percent saying they struggle to allocate sufficient staff time to keep up with updates, and 51 percent saying their top challenge is configuring new features.
“Enterprises are moving to the cloud to accelerate innovation, with a particular focus on tapping into new AI capabilities across their myriad of business applications,” says Pankaj Goel, CEO, and co-founder of Opkey. “The promise of faster, smarter business is real, but slow, manual cloud app management processes and complex integrations hold teams back. This report gives a glimpse into how companies are starting to rethink their approach to IT operations, leveraging automation and AI in new ways to unlock the transformative potential of their cloud-based applications.”
Among other findings 53 percent of respondents say they face ‘significant to severe’ annual costs due to failed changes in production. Only 12 percent say such issues have minimal impact, underscoring the risk to business continuity.
There’s currently a 70/30 split between in-house teams and external consultants, but leaders expect automation to shift this toward an 80/20 model. Intent to adopt agentic AI is clearly strong too, with 83 percent saying they would adopt agentic AI, and 69 percent expecting adoption to save between 5,000 and 30,000-plus hours annually. More than 40 percent of respondents say they would reinvest these newfound efficiency gains in employee experience and business innovation.
The full report is available from the Opkey site.
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