The application portfolio management (APM) discipline monitors the business, technical and cost fitness of the application portfolio. It uses factual information and analysis, allowing objective and transparent decisions. Its main objective is to identify, prioritize and propose opportunities to improve the portfolio. Opportunities include replacements, migration, modernization, consolidation and decommissioning. APM tools support the people, processes and information of the APM IT discipline to discover, monitor, analyze and visualize the fitness of the application portfolio and provide recommendations for improvement.
Gartner defines the market for enterprise architecture (EA) tools as tools that allow users to capture the interrelationships and interdependencies within and across the ecosystem of partners, operating models, capabilities, people, processes, information, applications and technologies. EA tools provide a central repository to capture data and metadata about artifacts that describe the enterprise. Models can be built to represent the relationships between these artifacts that help describe and shape the future of the enterprise. Through modeling features, EA tools enable scenario analysis of trends and disruptions and other drivers of enterprise change, to deliver realistic roadmaps.