Numecent Customers Can Reduce Application Packaging Times and Costs up to 50%
Over the years, application packaging has been treated as a necessary cost of doing business at medium to large sized enterprises, something to optimise, offshore, and industrialise.
The reality is that application updates are now required so frequently that the factory models of the past are not fit for purpose for standard consumer off the shelf applications. As a result, some organizations have enabled auto-updates for some select applications; others have turned to package managers/simply wrapping vendor installation media or the use of patching services.
This is an interesting transformation.
Reviewing applications in an intake process, followed by packaging the applications to set standards then performing user acceptance testing surely leads to a reduction in support costs by preventing problems from arising at deployment or execution time but it slows down the turnaround time which is crucial for day-to-day application management but it comes at an upfront cost. In an ideal world, packaging of applications by experts would continue but the costs, particularly with the current rate of change and the time required are just no longer feasible for day-to-day operations.
And that’s where the real economics start to break down.
The Traditional Cost Model: Time Equals Money
In traditional packaging models (MSI/EXE repackaging) which helps reduce support costs, the operational cost is directly tied to the effort required to packaging a given application:
Even with offshore delivery, these timelines persist because packaging is not just engineering, it involves queue management, application discovery, QA, UAT and going through change control processes.
20 years ago the turnaround time was longer and the SLAs presented to customers was typically represented in time to build rather than time to delivery. In part because there was less urgency to perform the delivery part of the process compared to today. While effort has decreased over time, elapsed delivery time remains measured in days or weeks at scale.
When you multiply that across hundreds or thousands of applications, the numbers become significant:
1,000 applications = months of effort and 6–12 months of delivery timelines
The Shortcut: Patching Services and Package Managers
To reduce this cost, many organisations have turned to patching services and package managers like WinGet. Rather than do formal application intake, package applications and do rigorous QA and testing, enterprises opting for these types of services ingest vendor installers, automate a wrapping process and automate the staging of the application updates for deployment. This reduces packaging effort and overheads for overall lifecycle management.
And on paper, it works.
You might save €200 to €500 per application in packaging costs.
The Hidden Cost: What Happens at Update Time
The problem is that these approaches shift risk, not eliminate it.
When applications are deployed using these solutions, they merely wrap the vendor installation media which are still predominantly made up of EXE/MSI installers. Most enterprise applications are installed elevated with components installed in locations where there is system wide visibility which puts organizations at risk of both known and unreported vulnerabilities. Aside from that risk there is also operational risk due to how traditional installers handle updates. Updates occur in-place on the OS. Updates that rely on traditional package formats used by vendors are prone to failures, rollbacks are manual and sometimes not possible with the native installers alone.
So, when something goes wrong and it inevitably does you get application failures across large user groups or potentially company wide. This leads to emergency support incidents, delayed patching due to fear of breakage and increased exposure to vulnerabilities. It also increases burnout of Administrators and hurts morale.
Saving €200 per app upfront can cost thousands per incident later.
Recent examples of catastrophic issues caused by auto-updates include the CrowdStrike Falcon sensor update which reportedly cost millions to various organizations around the world but more recently, the Samsung Galaxy Connect app in the Microsoft Store lead to major problems that required many steps to remediate. This latter example was not felt as much in enterprises but does shine a further spotlight on the risk of accepting auto-updates.
The Real Economic Problem: Packaging vs Operations
This is the core issue:
Packaging an application is a one-time cost. Operational instability is a recurring cost.
Most organizations optimize for the former while underestimating the latter. I have stated this in the past at events and in other blog posts but: I worked on a project in a previous role where I performed an extensive deep dive into support tickets in a new environment and discovered a worrying trend. Application issues were not being tracked accurately. It turned out the support teams would spend 15 minutes or so troubleshooting a ticket about an error or failure encountered and then re-image the person’s desktop. It would resolve the problem but lead to 60+ minutes of downtime and prolonged degraded desktop performance for the people who reported the problem which had the knock-on effect of leading to a loss in productivity that was not being accurately reported. Worst still, since no root cause was being identified or even attempted to be identified the issue could reoccur for someone else.
And this is why a different model changes the equation entirely.
Cloudpaging: Reducing Managed App Delivery Time and Support Cost at the Source
Application containerisation with Cloudpaging fundamentally changes how applications are delivered.
Instead of rebuilding installers or modifying applications:
- Applications are captured and isolated as needed
- They are delivered as pages from Cloudpaging Server or via the Cloudpaging CDN
- Run without altering the underlying OS
Application updates occur seamlessly and application updates can be rolled back rapidly when needed. Cloudpaging application containers eliminate the need for install related reboots and can eliminate application conflicts. Removing Cloudpaging application containers are consistently clean and all of this reduces support tickets and loss of employee productivity. Cloudpaging application containers modernize Windows application management, reducing support requirements and making application updates low risk.
How application packaging times differ between traditional MSI methodologies and Cloudpaging containers
While the traditional process of application intake, packaging, testing etc. Was time consuming and cumbersome with traditional package formats, Cloudpaging application containers help reduce overall packaging time.
What this means for turnaround
- Same-day delivery becomes achievable
- Reduced dependency on queues and rework
- Faster throughput across large estates
From days per app to hours and in some cases, minutes
Introducing AI Packaging: From Hours to Minutes
Now factor in artificial intelligence.
With Cloudpager’s AI Packaging capabilities, you can further accelerate the process by automating the packaging of standard MSI installers, as well as COTS apps available within WinGet. This enables on-demand packaging of many applications, minimizing human intervention for standard apps and provides the ability to focus engineering effort only where needed. AI Packaging can help IT teams get to grips with ever frequent application updates without a need to enable auto-updates and without the risks associated with the wrapped vendor installs provided by package managers and packaging services. Containers created by AI reduce the risk of human error in the packaging process, accelerate application turnaround times and lead to lower risk application updates.
The result
What used to take weeks across a portfolio can now be achieved in minutes per application
Eliminating the Secondary Cost
The real advantage isn’t just speed. It’s what happens after deployment. With Cloudpaging application containers and Cloudpager Workpods, Administrators have a best-in-class application container format and a cloud-native container management platform which can help orchestrate application updates which can optionally be performed incrementally and version controlled with rapid rollbacks in just a few clicks. Application delivery is also performed with the scale of the cloud but with tremendous speed.
A Shift in Thinking
The industry has spent years trying to reduce the cost of packaging.
But the real opportunity is bigger:
Reduce the cost of delivering, updating, and maintaining applications over time whilst reducing risk
AI Packaging combined with application containerisation doesn’t just make packaging faster. It changes the economics entirely from effort-driven to outcome-driven, from risk-heavy to controlled, from weeks of delay to minutes of delivery.
Final Thought
The question is no longer “How cheaply can we package applications?”
It’s “How quickly and safely can we deliver and maintain them?”
Because in modern IT environments, speed without control creates risk.
And control without speed creates friction.
AI Packaging delivers both.
Join the Movement to Containerize Everything
For all things applications, stick with Numecent. Want to learn more? Request a demo with our technical solutions team and sign up for our newsletter below: