Unisys Corporation has announced the findings of a year-long study with 50 enterprise CIOs.

According to the findings, there are seven key obstacles commonly faced by organisations when attempting to modernise legacy IT systems and applications using current leading-edge tools.

In 2007, Unisys met with CIOs and IT executives from 50 private, public and government institutions. The discussions revealed seven key challenges facing IT executives in getting modernisation projects off the ground. These include, cost, risk, inertia, time, information, balance and quality of service.

Despite these barriers, organisations also recognise the business imperative of proactively upgrading and evolving their IT infrastructure and applications to take advantage of the speed, flexibility, and cost advantages of modern technologies such as open source software and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Unisys has also announced its Application Portfolio Management (APM) and Knowledge-Based Management (KBM) services.

"The Application Services we're highlighting today are a natural extension of the experience and success we've had with our enterprise clients," said Cem Tanyel, vice president, Application Services, Unisys. "After listening to our customers define what they believe are the common barriers to modernisation, and then pulling from our proven best practices, we feel that our application modernisation suite creates a new direction where the relationships between organisational strategy, operations, processes, and applications are embedded and traceable."