"Application Bloat" is a significant and growing problem, according a Harris Interactive survey, commissioned by Quest Software to reveal the financial and operational impact that managing massive numbers of applications have on enterprise IT environments.

While CIOs understand the critical role that applications play in driving business transactions and processing revenue goals, they have been slow to respond to “application bloat” — the accumulation of applications that consume resources and can cost their companies millions of dollars if left unchecked.

According to the survey - conducted in June 2012 of 150 senior IT decision-makers from organizations with more than 500 applications and $500 million-plus in revenue - it is common for an organization to have thousands of unused or little-used apps, which translate to software overload and often poor application performance.

According to the survey, 52 percent of respondents estimate that slow, crashed or unresponsive applications cost their business at least hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

- Tens of thousands of dollars: 31 percent

- Hundreds of thousands of dollars: 22 percent

- Millions of dollars: 22 percent

- Tens of millions of dollars or more: 7 percent

In a typical day, a majority (57 percent) use less than 249 applications (half of total apps), while 28 percent said they use less than 50 apps and, of those accessed daily, 76 percent say they access less than half more than five times a day.

Respondents indicate that only 21 percent have deployed cloud-based applications, while 79 percent of apps are currently run on-premise.

58 percent of respondents say the performance of applications has a major impact on the performance of their business.

77 percent of respondents would choose IT efficiency over reducing staff or outsourcing if told to reduce IT related operating costs.

According to Quest, better application performance monitoring (APM) tools can help IT managers fully grasp how well all applications are performing, and negate the effects of application bloat.