What Can IT Do to Make Lemonade in a Sour Economy? (Part 1)

You’ve heard the phrase, “When life gives you lemons – make lemonade.” In the last few months the economy has been in upheaval, with many companies delaying their spending, cutting back on staff or worse, filing for bankruptcy protection. With a sour economy and a mood to match, what can IT organizations do to take advantage of the situation?

At C/D/H we have been busy this past year helping clients leverage their IT investments and prioritize their spending to get the most out of reduced resources. Here are two things we suggest that will help to stretch your IT budget while also helping the business stay competitive. I’ll have two more in February’s Knowledge Transfer.

1) Virtualize:

Many IT organizations face a recurring hardware upgrade lifecycle. Maintaining dedicated hardware for business critical applications is not always necessary. Stop adding, upgrading and maintaining existing hardware and virtualize your applications using one of the virtualization technologies: VMware (current leader), Microsoft Hyper-V (strong contender) or Citrix Xen (a rising force). Many of our clients have reduced their hardware footprint this past year by migrating aging hardware to one of those virtual platforms. Our own data center has reduced its hardware footprint by 78% - from 14 servers down to just 3 Microsoft Hyper-V servers. Cost savings include maintenance on 3 servers instead of 14, licensing costs (Windows Server Enterprise Edition allows up to 4 additional server licenses on the virtual server), power, cooling and space savings. As a result of our virtualization effort, we have a cooler running data center and were able to repurpose the reclaimed space to a new conference room!

2) Reduce Travel – Collaborate More Using Computer-based Video and Voice Technologies:

Improvements in Internet bandwidth, video and voice compression technologies and the software that brings it all together now enable you to conduct many meetings remotely with as much effectiveness and at great cost savings. Consider this real world scenario: we frequently meet with our Microsoft partner account managers in Southfield – historically, in person. Recently we sent only local sales staff to the meetings and then conferenced in the others using our Microsoft RoundTable (a 360° video and phone device) with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS) at a cost savings of $140 - $300 and 4 hours travel time per meeting! When you expand this scenario to the 20+ meetings we typically conduct per month, you can begin to realize some real savings.

To be continued….