Application currency is the ongoing process of determining how current an application is, compared to the latest available version. Application currency is an emerging concept and is closely related to the concept of application compatibility. Application compatibility testing typically refers to the one-time review of whether or not applications are compatible with a targeted operating system and is how organizations get their application to be current. Application currency refers to the ongoing monitoring of applications to ensure they are always kept up to date with application vendor upgrades as well as operating system upgrades.

Why does an organization need to worry about application currency?
As a result of tighter IT budgets over the last decade, and growing demand by the business for new functionality, many IT organizations have had to focus their efforts on supporting the business at the expense of IT maintenance. This deferred maintenance has resulted in a growing backlog of out-of-date, and often unsupported, applications.  The costs to bring these applications up-to-date have been referred to as "IT debt" by Gartner. Gartner estimated that IT debt was $500 billion in 2010, and could potentially reach $1 trillion by 2015.

As organizations continue to add new applications, and application vendors continue to upgrade to keep in step with the newest operating systems, organizations are facing escalating business-critical risks.

Business risks
The risks of out-of-date applications for IT departments include:

• Running unsupported software
• Inability to embrace new technology (such as Windows 7)
• Potential application failure
• Diminished productivity due to downtime
• Loss of competitive edge
• Non-compliance

The biggest concern that organizations are facing is that they have no real understanding of their risk exposure.

How can application currency help?
An organization typically carries out an application compatibility exercise every 3-4 years, due to efforts required. Typically 2-3 days are required to conduct manual tests and verify each application against new operating system. An organization that has 100 applications can be dedicating 200-300 man days of testing efforts to determine state of compatibility.

Application currency allows an organization to automate that process, assess the state of each application on an ongoing basis, thereby reduce risk, reduce cost, and increase application performance.

Organizations are beginning to include application currency as part of their business continuity strategy.