Application Rationalisation: From 1,847 Apps to 186 in 90 Days

One estate. Three tenants. 1,847 applications. 90 days to transform it.

This is an account of what happens when ALICE connects to an enterprise application estate that has grown beyond anyone’s ability to manage it manually and what becomes possible once the estate is rationalised, governed, and automated.

The organisation: a multinational defence contractor operating across three Microsoft 365 tenants following a series of acquisitions. Approximately 3,400 devices. Application discovery had been attempted manually, producing an estimate of around 1,200 applications. The actual number, once ALICE connected and normalised the estate, was 1,847.

The Estate Before ALICE

The organisation’s IT leadership had three problems they had been unable to solve without a complete, normalised estate view:

No unified view across tenants. Each of the three tenants had its own partial application inventory in its own Intune environment. There was no consolidated view, no cross-tenant deduplication, and no way to establish which applications existed in all three tenants versus which were unique to each.

Compliance risk they could not quantify. The organisation operated under stringent security requirements. They needed to evidence their application estate for compliance audits, but the raw Intune output was insufficiently detailed to produce the required documentation. An audit was approaching.

A packaging backlog that had stopped the migration programme. A Windows 11 migration programme was 14 weeks in and stalled. The packaging team had cleared 58 applications from a required list of 300+. At the current rate, the migration would not complete within the financial year.

Day 1: What ALICE Found

ALICE connected to all three Intune tenants via Graph API. Within 4 hours, the normalised estate view was available.

Raw inventory: 1,847 distinct application entries across the three tenants.

After normalisation into application families: 412 unique application families.

After rationalisation analysis:

186 application families requiring active management
226 flagged as candidates for removal, consolidation, or retirement
Of the 1,435 entries that did not become managed application families: 684 were system components, drivers, or runtimes requiring no active management; 392 were duplicate entries of the same application across tenants; 248 were version duplicates within the same tenant; 111 were end-of-life or deprecated with zero active usage.

The IT Director’s response, on reviewing the normalised view: ‘We knew it was bigger than we thought. We did not know it was this much bigger.’

The Rationalisation Outcome

1,847 applications. 186 requiring active management. A 90% reduction in managed estate complexity.

But the reduction was not 90% by deletion. It was 90% by clarity.

Of the 1,661 applications that did not become managed families:

684 were system components that required no active lifecycle management they were present across the estate but did not need to be packaged, tested, governed, or patched as distinct entities
392 were duplicate entries the same application installed on devices in different tenants under different installer names
248 were version duplicates within the same tenant an older version and a newer version both present, both counted as separate applications
111 were confirmed end-of-life with active vulnerabilities or zero usage these were candidates for immediate removal from the estate
226 remained as consolidation candidates applications providing functionality already covered by another application in the estate

The practical effect: instead of managing 1,847 applications, the IT team managed 186. The packaging backlog, the governance overhead, and the compliance reporting scope all shrank by 90%.

Governance in 72 Hours

With 186 managed application families identified, the governance setup was completed in 72 hours.

Ownership was assigned to each application family a business owner for each, drawn from the IT Director’s team and the respective business units. Lifecycle status was documented for each family: current, deprecated, under review, or scheduled for retirement. Approved version exclusions were configured for three applications requiring version pinning for operational reasons.

For the first time, the compliance audit question ‘show me your application estate’ had a complete, current, auditable answer available in minutes.

The Packaging Programme: 300 Applications in the Time Manual Would Have Done 60

With the estate rationalised to 186 managed families, the packaging programme restarted.

Before ALICE, the team’s manual packaging throughput was approximately 4 applications per week for a two-person packaging team consistent with the 4–8 hours per application manual benchmark.

With ALICE’s automated packaging pipeline:

Standard applications: 30–45 minutes end-to-end
Complex applications: 2–4 hours (vs 1–3 days manually)
Weekly throughput: increased from 4 applications to 30+

All 186 managed application families were packaged, tested, and approved within 11 weeks. The migration programme, which had been 14 weeks in and had completed 58 of 300+ required applications manually, completed the remaining 242 applications in 11 weeks.

Financial Outcome

Payback period on ALICE implementation: under 3 months.

What the Organisation Can Now Do That It Could Not Before

The financial outcomes are significant. But the structural transformation is what the IT Director described as the lasting value.

Continuous estate visibility. The estate is continuously synced with Intune. New applications appear, are normalised, and are surfaced for governance review without a discovery project.

Auto-update pipeline running. For 142 of the 186 managed application families, the auto-update toggle is enabled. When a new version is released, it is automatically detected, repackaged, routed through the same test group, and deployed through the phased rollout. The packaging team manages exceptions, not the entire pipeline.

Audit-ready reporting on demand. The compliance audit that had been a source of significant preparation effort was resolved with a report generated directly from ALICE in under an hour. No manual compilation. Current data.

Migration programme on track. The Windows 11 migration completed on schedule. ESU costs were avoided.

See What ALICE Finds in Your Estate

Every enterprise estate has a version of this story. The numbers vary the pattern does not.

The gap between the application count your Intune shows and the application estate you actually need to manage is consistently larger than IT teams expect. Establishing that gap is the first step. ALICE does it within hours of connection.

Book a Demo → See your estate normalised and your rationalisation potential identified in 30 minutes. beyondapplications.io/demo

ALICE is Camwood’s platform for Autonomous Application Lifecycle Management. This case study is drawn from a real customer engagement. Financial figures are representative of outcomes achieved.