As a preliminary matter, the present invention such as, for example, the intelligent application management system 430 of FIG. 4, enables searching one or more related databases and may identify and rank related data files/records regarding a degree of relatedness and data files/records importance in relation to software applications. That is, the intelligent application management system 430 of FIG. 4, may connect those software components having a degree of relatedness and/or degree of importance to many various and different data sources (e.g., internal and/or external data sources) such as, for example, computer system backups, computer system scanning, computer system monitoring, availability, patch management and problem management, and the like. Those software components may each be ranked according to the degree of relatedness and/or degree of importance. Those software components having a ranking less than a defined threshold or percentage may be tagged, returned, marked, and/or identified as potential software decommission candidates.

As illustrated in FIGS. 5A-5B, consider now the various operations involving intelligent application management system 430 of FIG. 4. First, a query may be submitted or provided to determine and identify potential software decommission candidates such as, for example, “Can we decommission Db2 enterprise server edition on Hostname: ABC123 for account ACME?” The key search terms (with aliases) may include “DB2 Enterprise Server Edition” and “ACME.”