# Best Enterprise Application Portfolio Management Software *By [Tian Lin](https://research.g2.com/insights/author/tian-lin)* Products classified in the overall Application Portfolio Management category are similar in many regards and help companies of all sizes solve their business problems. However, enterprise business features, pricing, setup, and installation differ from businesses of other sizes, which is why we match buyers to the right Enterprise Business Application Portfolio Management to fit their needs. Compare product ratings based on reviews from enterprise users or connect with one of G2's buying advisors to find the right solutions within the Enterprise Business Application Portfolio Management category. In addition to qualifying for inclusion in the Application Portfolio Management Software category, to qualify for inclusion in the Enterprise Business Application Portfolio Management Software category, a product must have at least 10 reviews left by a reviewer from an enterprise business. ## Top-Rated Products (Ranked by G2 Score) ### 1. [SAP LeanIX](https://www.g2.com/products/sap-leanix/reviews) SAP LeanIX is a leading provider of enterprise architecture solutions that help organizations drive IT modernization and continuous business transformation, regardless of the underlying technology mix. Trusted by leading brands around the globe, SAP LeanIX offers AI-enhanced, software-as-a-service solutions enabling organizations to visualize, evaluate, and evolve their enterprise architecture for maximum business impact. From optimizing your current IT landscape to envisioning, designing, and guiding the creation of your future landscape, SAP LeanIX gives you the insight, flexibility, and foresight you need to ensure success. - SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management provides a real-time, comprehensive overview of your IT and business capability landscape - SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance helps you proactively identify and address technology obsolescence risk at scale - SAP LeanIX Architecture and Road Map Planning helps define your target architecture and create actionable road maps to get there **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 176 **User Satisfaction Scores:** - **Quality of Support:** 8.9/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Ease of Use:** 8.5/10 (Category avg: 8.7/10) - **Ease of Admin:** 8.7/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Has the product been a good partner in doing business?:** 9.1/10 (Category avg: 9.2/10) **Seller Details:** - **Seller:** [SAP](https://www.g2.com/sellers/sap) - **Company Website:** https://www.sap.com/ - **Year Founded:** 1972 - **HQ Location:** Walldorf - **Twitter:** @SAP (297,024 Twitter followers) - **LinkedIn® Page:** https://www.linkedin.com/company/sap/ (141,341 employees on LinkedIn®) **Reviewer Demographics:** - **Who Uses This:** Enterprise Architect - **Top Industries:** Financial Services, Retail - **Company Size:** 62% Enterprise, 20% Mid-Market #### Pros & Cons **Pros:** - Ease of Use (9 reviews) - Integrations (8 reviews) - User Interface (6 reviews) - Easy Integrations (4 reviews) - Reliability (4 reviews) **Cons:** - Integration Issues (3 reviews) - Limited Customization (3 reviews) - Difficulty (2 reviews) - Learning Curve (2 reviews) - Missing Features (2 reviews) ### 2. [ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management](https://www.g2.com/products/servicenow-strategic-portfolio-management/reviews) ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) is a comprehensive solution designed to align organizational strategies with business outcomes by integrating planning, execution, and delivery processes on a unified platform. It enables organizations to prioritize investments, optimize resources, and accelerate value delivery, ensuring that all initiatives are strategically aligned and effectively managed. Key Features and Functionality: - Portfolio Management: Provides complete visibility into project, program, and portfolio performance, allowing organizations to prioritize and align investments with strategic goals. - Demand Management: Captures, evaluates, and prioritizes demands across the organization, automating the intake process with workflows for assessment and approval. - Resource Management: Optimizes resource allocation with advanced planning and scheduling tools, monitoring utilization and capacity to ensure project success. - Financial Management: Tracks budgets, forecasts, and expenses to ensure financial alignment with business objectives, offering insights into portfolio ROI for informed decision-making. - Scenario Planning: Models and analyzes various scenarios to evaluate potential outcomes, enabling dynamic strategy adjustments based on real-time data and shifting priorities. - Roadmap Planning: Visualizes and communicates project timelines, dependencies, and milestones with intuitive roadmaps, aligning stakeholders with clear views of priorities and progress. - Risk and Compliance Management: Identifies, assesses, and mitigates risks across projects and portfolios, ensuring compliance with industry standards and organizational policies. - Integration with IT and Business Tools: Seamlessly integrates with ServiceNow ITSM, ITOM, and other business applications for unified operations. - Performance Analytics and Dashboards: Provides actionable insights with real-time dashboards and performance metrics, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success and identify areas for improvement. - Collaboration and Workflows: Enables cross-functional collaboration with automated workflows and task management, facilitating updates and alignment among teams. Primary Value and Solutions Provided: ServiceNow SPM empowers organizations to make informed, data-driven decisions by providing real-time insights into project and portfolio performance. It ensures that all work is strategically aligned, resources are optimally utilized, and financial investments are effectively managed. By consolidating processes and increasing visibility on a single platform, SPM enhances efficiency, accelerates value delivery, and fosters cross-team collaboration. Ultimately, it enables organizations to achieve their strategic objectives with agility and precision, adapting to changing business needs and market dynamics. **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 167 **User Satisfaction Scores:** - **Quality of Support:** 8.3/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Ease of Use:** 7.8/10 (Category avg: 8.7/10) - **Ease of Admin:** 8.0/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Has the product been a good partner in doing business?:** 8.7/10 (Category avg: 9.2/10) **Seller Details:** - **Seller:** [ServiceNow](https://www.g2.com/sellers/servicenow) - **Company Website:** https://www.servicenow.com/ - **Year Founded:** 2004 - **HQ Location:** Santa Clara, CA - **Twitter:** @servicenow (53,880 Twitter followers) - **LinkedIn® Page:** https://www.linkedin.com/company/29352/ (32,701 employees on LinkedIn®) **Reviewer Demographics:** - **Who Uses This:** ServiceNow Developer - **Top Industries:** Information Technology and Services, Hospital & Health Care - **Company Size:** 55% Enterprise, 28% Mid-Market #### Pros & Cons **Pros:** - Project Management (37 reviews) - Ease of Use (30 reviews) - Visibility (23 reviews) - Project Tracking (22 reviews) - Features (18 reviews) **Cons:** - Learning Curve (24 reviews) - Learning Difficulty (22 reviews) - Not Intuitive (16 reviews) - Overwhelming (14 reviews) - Complexity (13 reviews) ### 3. [CAST Highlight](https://www.g2.com/products/cast-highlight/reviews) By scanning the source code of your applications, CAST Highlight instantly maps your software, generating the insights to understand, improve, and transform it. CIOs, CTOs, Enterprise Architects use CAST to: - Get the true view of all technologies and frameworks - Quantify technical debt and the ways to pay it down - See what’s going to break next, and how best to fix it - Drive cloud adoption faster, knowing what to move and optimize - Prove progress to the board with facts and industry benchmarks Businesses move faster using CAST technology to understand, improve, and transform their software. Through semantic analysis of source code, CAST produces 3D maps and dashboards to navigate inside individual applications and across entire portfolios. This intelligence empowers executives and technology leaders to steer, speed, and report on initiatives such as technical debt, GenAI, modernization, and cloud. As the pioneer of the software intelligence field, CAST is trusted by the world’s leading companies and governments, their consultancies and cloud providers. See it all at castsoftware.com. **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 85 **User Satisfaction Scores:** - **Quality of Support:** 9.1/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Ease of Use:** 8.7/10 (Category avg: 8.7/10) - **Ease of Admin:** 8.8/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Has the product been a good partner in doing business?:** 9.2/10 (Category avg: 9.2/10) **Seller Details:** - **Seller:** [CAST](https://www.g2.com/sellers/cast) - **Company Website:** https://www.castsoftware.com - **Year Founded:** 1990 - **HQ Location:** New York - **Twitter:** @SW_Intelligence (1,893 Twitter followers) - **LinkedIn® Page:** https://www.linkedin.com/company/cast/ (1,259 employees on LinkedIn®) **Reviewer Demographics:** - **Top Industries:** Information Technology and Services, Computer Software - **Company Size:** 57% Enterprise, 24% Small-Business #### Pros & Cons **Pros:** - Ease of Use (8 reviews) - Easy Setup (4 reviews) - Cloud Services (3 reviews) - Efficiency (3 reviews) - Real-time Monitoring (3 reviews) **Cons:** - Complex Navigation (1 reviews) - Dashboard Issues (1 reviews) - Delayed Detection (1 reviews) - Difficulty (1 reviews) - Expensive (1 reviews) ### 4. [Oracle IT Analytics Cloud Service](https://www.g2.com/products/oracle-it-analytics-cloud-service/reviews) Oracle IT Analytics Cloud Service provides 360-degree insight into the performance, availability, and capacity of applications and infrastructure investments, enabling line-of-business and IT executives, analysts, and administrators to make critical decisions about their IT estate. This service is built on Oracle Management Cloud's secure, unified big data platform. **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 21 **User Satisfaction Scores:** - **Quality of Support:** 8.7/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Ease of Use:** 9.5/10 (Category avg: 8.7/10) - **Ease of Admin:** 7.8/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Has the product been a good partner in doing business?:** 7.8/10 (Category avg: 9.2/10) **Seller Details:** - **Seller:** [Oracle](https://www.g2.com/sellers/oracle) - **Year Founded:** 1977 - **HQ Location:** Austin, TX - **Twitter:** @Oracle (826,383 Twitter followers) - **LinkedIn® Page:** https://www.linkedin.com/company/1028/ (199,301 employees on LinkedIn®) - **Ownership:** NYSE:ORCL **Reviewer Demographics:** - **Company Size:** 52% Enterprise, 26% Mid-Market ### 5. [Orbus Software](https://www.g2.com/products/orbus-software/reviews) Founded in 2004, Orbus Software is a global leader in enterprise transformation technology, supporting more than 500 organizations and 60,000 users across 48 countries. With teams located worldwide, our technology helps enterprises navigate complex operational and technical environments, giving leaders clear visibility, greater control, and the confidence to make competitive decisions. OrbusInfinity, our cloud‑based enterprise transformation platform, enables strategy and architecture teams to break down data silos and model a unified view of the IT landscape and operating model. With unobstructed visibility, architects, project managers, and business leaders can align strategy with the data, solutions, and technologies required to achieve successful execution, reducing transformation risk, cost, and delays. This clarity supports major transformation programs, enables successful M&A, reduces technical debt, strengthens security and compliance, accelerates AI integration, and more. Powerful AI capabilities integrated into the platform’s centralized repository unify teams and accelerate collaboration. Templated intake forms, workflow automations, governed data, flexible visualizations, and on‑demand reporting streamline architectural processes and keep every stakeholder aligned. With ready‑to‑use toolkits and comprehensive support for a wide range of use cases, OrbusInfinity empowers architects to deliver the insights leaders need to understand business priorities and make confident decisions. For local, state, and federal government departments looking to upgrade to a cloud‑based enterprise architecture platform, FedRAMP and IRAP authorized versions of OrbusInfinity are available. **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 18 **User Satisfaction Scores:** - **Quality of Support:** 9.7/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Ease of Use:** 8.3/10 (Category avg: 8.7/10) - **Ease of Admin:** 8.7/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Has the product been a good partner in doing business?:** 8.9/10 (Category avg: 9.2/10) **Seller Details:** - **Seller:** [Orbus](https://www.g2.com/sellers/orbus) - **Company Website:** https://www.orbussoftware.com - **Year Founded:** 2004 - **HQ Location:** London, England - **LinkedIn® Page:** https://www.linkedin.com/company/1245913 (226 employees on LinkedIn®) **Reviewer Demographics:** - **Company Size:** 89% Enterprise, 6% Mid-Market ### 6. [Planview Portfolios](https://www.g2.com/products/planview-portfolios/reviews) Planview Portfolios is an enterprise strategic portfolio management software solution that helps PMO leaders, portfolio managers, and project teams connect organizational strategy to day-to-day work delivery across programs, resources, and investment decisions from a single platform. Formerly known as Planview Enterprise One, it sits within the strategic portfolio management and project portfolio management software categories and is built for large organizations managing complex, cross-functional initiative portfolios across multiple business units and delivery methodologies simultaneously. For practitioners, the platform provides a structured environment where incoming demand can be evaluated against available capacity, work can be planned and tracked across waterfall, agile, and hybrid approaches, and financial performance can be monitored at both the project and portfolio level. Role-based dashboards surface relevant data to each user type — from team members logging time to portfolio leaders reviewing investment performance — without requiring manual report assembly. Key features practitioners interact with regularly include: • Demand and investment management tools that allow teams to collect project and program requests, score them against business objectives, and model prioritization decisions before resources are committed • Scenario planning and what-if analysis capabilities that let portfolio managers compare alternative staffing, timing, and funding configurations to assess trade-offs and adapt plans when strategic priorities shift • Hybrid work delivery support that accommodates waterfall project schedules, agile team planning, and lean portfolio management approaches within the same governance framework — reducing the need for separate tools across delivery teams • Integrated financial tracking including budgeting, forecasting, cost actuals, and agile costing that connect planned spend to actual delivery activity across the full portfolio • Embedded AI capabilities including natural language querying, automated workflow triggers, and sentiment analysis on project status updates that surface emerging risks and reduce manual oversight effort Planview Portfolios connects to enterprise systems including SAP, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and Microsoft tools, and includes more than 200 out-of-the-box reports and visualizations. Planview’s strategic portfolio management solution empowers enterprise PMOs, EPMOs, transformation leaders, and product portfolio organizations at organizations including FedEx, Dow Chemical, Endress+Hauser, and UPS to navigate their transformation journey, adapt with change, and accelerate on-strategy delivery. **Average Rating:** 3.6/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 41 **User Satisfaction Scores:** - **Quality of Support:** 7.4/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Ease of Use:** 7.2/10 (Category avg: 8.7/10) - **Ease of Admin:** 7.1/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Has the product been a good partner in doing business?:** 7.7/10 (Category avg: 9.2/10) **Seller Details:** - **Seller:** [Planview](https://www.g2.com/sellers/planview) - **Company Website:** https://www.planview.com - **Year Founded:** 1989 - **HQ Location:** Austin, TX - **Twitter:** @Planview (3,054 Twitter followers) - **LinkedIn® Page:** https://www.linkedin.com/company/7268/ (1,872 employees on LinkedIn®) **Reviewer Demographics:** - **Top Industries:** Information Technology and Services, Insurance - **Company Size:** 88% Enterprise, 22% Mid-Market #### Pros & Cons **Pros:** - Project Management (2 reviews) - Project Tracking (2 reviews) - Automation (1 reviews) - Custom Fields (1 reviews) - Customizability (1 reviews) **Cons:** - Learning Curve (1 reviews) - Missing Features (1 reviews) - Poor Design (1 reviews) - Poor Layout Design (1 reviews) - Poor UI (1 reviews) ### 7. [Ardoq](https://www.g2.com/products/ardoq/reviews) Ardoq is the smarter way to EA, enabling organizations to automatically visualize their entire IT landscape by connecting live data from applications, systems, and business processes. Unlike traditional EA tools, Ardoq replaces static diagrams with connected, dynamic, and data-driven insights, helping teams map dependencies, model future-state scenarios, and align strategy with execution. By integrating real-time system data and crowdsourcing intelligence from stakeholders, Ardoq ensures architecture remains accurate, actionable, and accessible across the enterprise. Whether rationalizing applications, planning transformation, or optimizing IT spend, Ardoq helps teams make smarter decisions with confidence. **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 31 **User Satisfaction Scores:** - **Quality of Support:** 8.9/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Ease of Use:** 8.1/10 (Category avg: 8.7/10) - **Ease of Admin:** 8.3/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Has the product been a good partner in doing business?:** 8.8/10 (Category avg: 9.2/10) **Seller Details:** - **Seller:** [Ardoq](https://www.g2.com/sellers/ardoq) - **Year Founded:** 2013 - **HQ Location:** Oslo, Oslo - **LinkedIn® Page:** https://www.linkedin.com/company/ardoq/ (281 employees on LinkedIn®) **Reviewer Demographics:** - **Top Industries:** Retail - **Company Size:** 41% Enterprise, 31% Mid-Market #### Pros & Cons **Pros:** - Ease of Use (4 reviews) - User Interface (3 reviews) - Collaborative Sharing (2 reviews) - Features (2 reviews) - Flexibility (2 reviews) **Cons:** - Learning Curve (3 reviews) - Expensive (2 reviews) - Learning Difficulty (2 reviews) - Complexity (1 reviews) - Expensive Pricing (1 reviews) ### 8. [Bizzdesign Horizzon](https://www.g2.com/products/bizzdesign-horizzon/reviews) Architect Your Change with Clarity. Leverage a flexible and versatile Enterprise Architecture SaaS platform to accelerate transformation. Start small, scale as you grow, and deliver value across your business. Bizzdesign Horizzon helps you: • Understand dependencies and map change with architecture insights • Align transformation initiatives with enterprise roadmaps • Design future state architectures with connected models • Discuss transformation scenarios with stakeholders • Drive faster decisions across teams and departments Core Capabilities: • Native, open-standards-based modeling (ArchiMate, C4, BPMN, ERD, UML) • AI-powered architecture design • Executive-ready presentations • Enterprise architecture governance • Enterprise-wide collaboration • Tailored dashboards and analytics Recognized Leadership • Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Strategic Portfolio Management • Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Architecture Tools **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 57 **User Satisfaction Scores:** - **Quality of Support:** 8.5/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Ease of Use:** 7.5/10 (Category avg: 8.7/10) - **Ease of Admin:** 8.3/10 (Category avg: 8.9/10) - **Has the product been a good partner in doing business?:** 8.9/10 (Category avg: 9.2/10) **Seller Details:** - **Seller:** [Bizzdesign](https://www.g2.com/sellers/bizzdesign) - **Year Founded:** 2000 - **HQ Location:** Enschede, NL - **Twitter:** @BiZZdesign (2,300 Twitter followers) - **LinkedIn® Page:** https://www.linkedin.com/company/bizzdesign (391 employees on LinkedIn®) **Reviewer Demographics:** - **Who Uses This:** Management Consultant - **Top Industries:** Oil & Energy, Financial Services - **Company Size:** 66% Enterprise, 19% Mid-Market ## Parent Category [IT Management Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/it-management) ## Related Categories - [Enterprise Architecture Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/enterprise-architecture-tools) --- ## Buyer Guide ### What You Should Know About Application Portfolio Management Software ### What is Application Portfolio Management Software? Application portfolio management software allows companies to see what kinds of software applications are in their enterprise architecture to reduce redundancy and cost. Companies use a collection of software to optimize their business capabilities such as improving operational efficiency, winning key markets, or streamlining costs. Application portfolio management is the practice of identifying, monitoring, and managing the application lifecycle to achieve business objectives and maximize return on investment (ROI) for the IT budget.  The term application portfolio management, also known as IT portfolio management, is very similar to investment portfolio management. Financial firms actively manage their investment portfolio so they reduce the risk of huge financial losses. Similarly, companies need to actively manage their business application portfolio to avoid software cost overrun and resource wastage. It is important to build and maintain a cost-saving technology portfolio that actively contributes to the business objectives. As software demand continues to increase, application portfolio management software helps companies to remove underutilized software and prioritize mission-critical applications. ### What are the Common Features of Application Portfolio Management Software? The following are some core features within IT portfolio management that can help users manage their software inventory: **Software discovery:** Application portfolio management solutions need to automatically discover every software on all devices and the cloud. This includes on-premises software and SaaS applications. Manual entry of software is inefficient and doesn’t reflect real-time data.  **Software categorization:** While the user can categorize software manually, application portfolio management tools should auto tag software into different categories. This allows businesses to identify redundancy and gaps for each type of software.  **Software mapping:** There is no better way to understand IT stacks than mapping out all software and connecting to projects and teams. Visualization allows IT managers to see which software is used, who is using the software, and for what purpose.  **Software utilization:** IT managers need to understand how each software is being used and for how much time it is being used. Underused software might be outdated or not enough training is provided to use the software. Overused software may risk license compliance issues. These issues can’t be managed without utilization data.  **Software benchmark:** Advanced application portfolio management software collects comparison data and sends surveys to users to rank all software based on user satisfaction, performance, and contribution to the business objectives. This allows IT managers to see which software is important and which one is not. **Financial analysis:** Some solutions have software asset management capabilities that account for the total cost of ownership (TCO). This is the sum of all direct and indirect costs incurred by that software and is a critical part of the ROI calculation. Companies can identify the true cost of software by analyzing starting cost (software, hardware, migration, training, implementation, license, customization), operating costs (maintenance, upgrades, depreciation, downtime, support, security), and retirement cost (data export, data archiving, inactive licenses). A successful digital transformation must have risk management to prevent cost overruns.  **Opportunity identification:** After collecting and analyzing all the data, technology portfolio management software will provide reports with areas where companies can save money, reinvest in existing software, or buy new software that fills the capability gap. The ultimate goal is to align the software stack to the business objectives, not just getting chargeback and cutting the underutilized software. ### What are the Benefits of Application Portfolio Management Software? **Increase visibility:** Decision makers have immediate access to real-time data on the IT landscape from a single source of truth. Most solutions also have prebuilt reports and diagrams on a central dashboard to show the current status of all the software. This not only speeds up the decision-making process but allows for clear communication.  **Reduce risk:** IT portfolio management solutions reduce transformational risks by understanding when, where, how, and why to make changes in the software portfolio. Visual mapping and dependency reports allow consistent and transparent changes. **Lower IT costs:** A well-established application portfolio management practice will align IT spending to business strategy, maintain required capabilities, and discover new demands. By avoiding investing in redundant systems and software, IT managers free up resources that can be used to acquire new capabilities. ### Who Uses Application Portfolio Management Software? **IT managers:** The team that uses the application portfolio management solution the most would be the IT team since they manage software inventory. They will know which software to purchase, retire, and reinvest in. Also, they can use the IT portfolio management reports to better communicate software inventory status with other stakeholders.  **Purchasing team:** Purchasing team use application portfolio management software for software purchase negotiation. For example, by understanding which software is underused, the purchasing team can negotiate for the chargeback or lower price.  #### Software Related to Application Portfolio Management Software Related solutions that can be used together with technology portfolio management tools include: **Software asset management (SAM) software:** This type of software documents and manages on-premises software licenses used by a business. Companies use SAM software to complement application portfolio management for contract management and license management. **SaaS operations management software:** SaaS operations management software manages SaaS products to provide businesses with greater control and visibility over their SaaS portfolios. ### Challenges with Application Portfolio Management Software Software solutions can come with their own set of challenges.  **Long-term management:** IT portfolio management is not a one-shot application rationalization that focuses on cost and short-term technical problems. Cleaning up the software landscape just once and then forgetting about it will result in the same problems reappearing in the future. Companies need to take a lifecycle approach. Regular monitoring of technical and business use of applications and assessing future options are necessary to align the portfolio to business goals.  **Understanding dependencies:** Applications should not be judged as standalone but as a landscape. IT managers need to consider dependencies between applications and businesses they support. Dependency analysis will show the complexity, risks, and business value of the application landscape. Replacing or retiring an application in isolation results in unintended consequences that impact other teams and applications. **Determining objective metrics:** There is no one strategy or metric that can accurately reflect the value of every application. But on the other end, asking the users how valuable each application is extremely biased. Instead, IT managers need to study use cases that identify the value chains and workflows of the application. This shows how the applications support business and technical functionalities for products and customers. Then the IT team can assess the application with proper metrics that are relevant to these functionalities and may also discover new potential uses. ### How to Buy Application Portfolio Management Software Buying an application portfolio management solution can be complicated based on existing infrastructure and software compatibility. Many times when buying application portfolio management solutions, companies have encountered software cost overrun problems, so the desire to make a quick purchase while there is corporate interest and pressure can be strong. However, enterprise software purchasing requires dedication and time. If the company doesn’t like the software after the purchase, changing to another software is costly and time-consuming.  #### Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Application Portfolio Management Software Companies should have a good understanding of why they need IT portfolio management solutions. Other than simple reasons such as gaining visibility into the application landscape, there are usually deeper reasons why the company needs this capability.  An application portfolio management solution dedicated to the finance team could be much different than the one dedicated to the purchasing team—and their assumption as to why they need this capability could be wrong too. The finance team may think that an application portfolio management tool would help significantly with their messy budgeting process for new software, but the software can do much more than that, so the value and budget of the application should be higher than before. The best way to see a clear picture of the situation is to work with all the stakeholders for use cases to answer who wants to do what, and why is that important for the business.  With use cases, buyers can formulate desired features requirements and rank them objectively. Buyers should make a ranked list of the application portfolio management features that most directly address the problems they’re trying to solve, then reference that in the RFP. Prioritizing the desired feature set can help narrow down the potential pool of technology portfolio management tools, allowing teams to then apply further considerations for budget, ease of integration with other systems, security requirements, and more. This holistic approach empowers buyers to move forward with a focused checklist, which can be used in conjunction with G2 scores to select the best application portfolio management product for the business. #### Compare Application Portfolio Management Software Products **Create a long list** Buyers should start with a large pool of application portfolio management software vendors and inform the desired must-have features and budget, so they can respond if they are a good fit or not at the start. The goal is to have at least 5 to 10 vendors that fit the general criteria.  **Create a shortlist** Now is the time to cross reference the results of initial vendor evaluations with G2 reviews from other buyers, the combination of which will help to narrow in on a short three to five product list. From there, buyers can compare pricing and features to determine the best fit. **Conduct demos** Demos are the most important part of the RFP process because the buyer must make sure that their software is compatible with the vendor’s application portfolio management solution. Companies must inform vendors upfront that they need to see the data in their system and understand how that will work. Sometimes, vendors may take the buyer’s data and work quickly in the background and then come back with results for the buyer to explore. This is a mini implementation so not all the issues and capabilities are addressed in this type of demo. So, buyers must be sure to discuss the limitation with key stakeholders. Then the buyer should have the selected data ready to give to the vendor. Giving the vendors raw data is time-consuming and risky so it is not recommended.  During demos, buyers should ask specific questions related to the functionalities they care most about; for example, one might ask to be walked through an application dependency analysis by building an application landscape map to determine the value of the whole landscape.  #### Selection of Application Portfolio Management Software **Choose a selection team** Regardless of a company’s size, it’s important to involve the most relevant personas when beginning the application portfolio management software selection process. Larger companies may include individual team members to fill roles such as project manager, decision maker, system owner, and IT professionals and developers who will be working with the software most closely. Smaller companies with fewer employees might overlap roles.  **Negotiation** It is very likely that the buyer will choose SaaS-based technology portfolio management software. In this case, buyers must determine what kind of relationship the buyer and the vendor might have. SaaS vendors will be installing, configuring, upgrading, and interacting with the buyer in the long term, whereas with on-premises software vendors, it is more likely to be a one-time interaction. The buyer needs to determine the SaaS vendor’s customer service’s domain knowledge level, quality of support, and fitment to the stakeholders. There are also specific functionality and packages that the buyer might not need. These can all be negotiated.  **Final decision** After this stage, it is important to perform a trial run if possible with the stakeholder team. If the application portfolio management tool is well liked and well utilized, the buyer can take that as a sign that their selection is the right one. If not, reevaluation of the options may be necessary.  Before the final purchase, the buyer should also know what happens if the contract ends early. Application portfolio management solutions are evolving very fast so players are changing every year with new functionalities. The perfect fit may be the case for today but not for the next three to five years. Since the buyer will bring valuable data to the vendor, the buyer needs to know how the data will be handled if the contract ends early. What process and format will the data be extracted from? What rules do both parties have to follow? What are the costs and penalties? It is best to have clarity on these topics at the early stages of the buying process than when things go unplanned.