IT managers in large UK companies are struggling to put effective application management in place, according to research released today.

A survey commissioned by enterprise systems management vendor Quest Software found that in-house development and a fragmented applications market are partly to blame for the difficulties.

The limited use of third-party application management software was also cited as a factor.

A poll of 100 senior IT decision makers in large companies found that the most awkward application is Custom Java, complained about by 48 per cent of respondents.

This was followed by other sector specific apps at 43 per cent, Microsoft .Net at 32 per cent and home grown technologies at 30 per cent.

Conversely the two easiest applications to manage were Oracle at 17 per cent and SAP at 18 per cent.

The research suggests that two-thirds of organisations do not use third-party application performance management tools for critical applications.

One in five cannot afford to run such tools, and a further 17 per cent do not realise that such tools exist.

Nine out of 10 IT managers want to provide different views of the same performance management data sets to different users, yet almost two thirds said that their application performance management software could not deliver this key requirement.