As the years tick by, enterprise businesses invest enormous amounts of money in software and the deployment solutions needed to get applications onto end-user devices. Many of these investments are made with the best of intentions, such as to enhance workplace productivity, facilitate innovation, and deliver on IT project objectives. However, these investment decisions are also often made without an overview of the bigger, enterprise-wide picture.
The end result is often a sprawling application estate made up of multiple deployment platforms and even more packaging formats. Anyone involved in application management will know this is an unwieldy, inefficient, and costly situation to be in.
The question is, how do you get out of it? How do you rationalise your application estate and consolidate both packaging formats and deployment platforms? And when should you go through this process?
In this blog, we explain why 2025 is the year of application package format and deployment platform choice. We’ll also outline how you can do it efficiently and cost-effectively.
Why 2025 is the Year to Decide on App Package Formats and Deployment Platforms for the Future
Broadly speaking, both application package formats and deployment platforms can be split into two categories:
- Legacy application packaging formats (MSI, EXE, AppX, etc) and deployment platforms (such as SCCM).
- Modern application packaging formats (AppV, MSIX, app attach, App Volumes, Cloudpaging, and FlexApp) and deployment platforms (Intune).
Many enterprise businesses will use a mixture of everything, including multiple legacy and modern application packaging formats and two or more deployment platforms. Consolidating your application management technologies brings a range of benefits.
Application Rationalisation
The process of consolidating app packaging formats and deployment platforms will typically start with a discovery process. This will produce an application inventory that can then be analysed to identify applications that can be removed because they are no longer needed or there is an alternative option. This reduces both application management complexity and the cost of software licences.
Improved Standardisation
Standardising application packaging formats and how you deploy applications to end users reduces compatibility and performance issues, while also enhancing the user experience. Standardisation can also streamline the workflows used by your IT teams.
Improved Cybersecurity and Compliance
The process of consolidating app packaging formats and deployment platforms will also involve ensuring application versions are up to date across the organisation. This can deliver performance and functionality enhancements, but there are even bigger advantages in cybersecurity and compliance.
Improved Efficiency
Centralising application deployment on specific platforms and reducing app format complexity reduces the time and effort required to ensure users have up-to-date software installed and running on their devices.
Compelling Advantages, But How?
The section above highlights the technical, productivity, financial, and security benefits of consolidating application packaging formats and deployment platforms in your organisation. The process involves investing time and resources into the packaging formats and deployment platforms you are going to move forward with, while divesting in those you are going to discard.
The big question is how. Or more specifically, how can you reduce the number of application packaging formats used by your organisation without allocating significant resources to time-consuming repackaging, testing, and publishing tasks? And how do you switch to modern deployment platforms without causing operational and user disruption, especially in relation to legacy apps and technologies?
An Application Packaging Format and Deployment Consolidation Pathway
The solution is application management automation. Our product, Access Capture, automates the most resource-intensive and time-consuming aspects of application packaging, testing, and publishing. It is compatible with all modern application packaging formats, and it’s compatible with modern deployment platforms, including Intune.
As a result, the whole process to consolidate app packaging formats and deployment platforms is streamlined and simplified. Here’s an example of the steps involved to achieve this goal:
- Use Access Capture to scan your application estate to give you an accurate picture of your current position.
- Make decisions on applications to discard.
- Decide on a consolidated list of application packaging formats.
- Decide on a main application deployment platform.
- Use Access Capture to automate the repackaging, testing, and publishing of the applications in your estate.
- Allocate resources to repackage and test the small number of applications not suitable for automation.
- Configure your selected deployment platform for operational efficiency and maximised user experience.
Whether you use a Windows 11 or VDI migration project or a project specifically designed to consolidate and improve application management, you can achieve your goals with fewer resources, fewer errors, and lower costs using automation tools. Impressive returns on investment are there for the taking now, in 2025 – get in touch with us at Access IT Automation today.
