Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

The continuation of centralizing, sharing, cost saving with the commodity IT.  These are short term savings that improve the bottom, however, do not improve the top line.  These are required and must always be on the agenda, balanced with growth initiatives.

The article mentions while providing higher performance and availability or quality of service.  These initiatives work to drive the top line in customer retention and new services for the business.  It is all a balancing act, but the key is not to lose sight of the long term growth for the short term save.

Michele

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Cloud and virtualisation also on the agenda

CIOs across Europe have identified IT consolidation as a key near term initiative as they look for ways to maintain or improve performances despite the economic situation.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Consolidation can have short term gains and costs with longer term gains when approached as Arthur describes in his post.  Its all about balancing operating and growing the business and business service management practices.

Many approach consolidation much like new technology, virtualization, for the short term cost saving to remove hardware and software licenses from the equation.  However, when done right it with investments and spending upfront, there are greater gains in the longer term.  Arthur mentions SIRVA and how they spent to consolidate and gain and ends with a reduction in staff by a third.

Who really removes people?  It is possible and generally is why IT does not turn inward to automate and drive efficiencies in their own organization as they do when applying technology for automating other parts of the organization.  As was noted in today’s earlier news commentary, the roles in IT start to shift as service managers and analysts applying technology to the business – not “bulb monitors” watching the commodity operate.

These are interesting times and it will be interesting to keep this years Fortune 500 edition and compare it to 2012 and 2013 and see who takes over each industry and is leading with the use of technology.

Michele

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It isn’t often that the phrase “do more with less” is literally true, but that is exactly what’s happening with the latest round of data center consolidation.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Back to basics balanced with growth opportunities.  Doing more with less and getting the most out of the bottom of the data center food chain and layering in the value add for future growth needs to be the theme for 2011.

I’ve spoken to many recently that are looking at consolidation projects as replacement projects too.  Replacing the commodity monitoring with lower cost open source options, ITSM SaaS offerings, adding value in the instrumentation of their next generation infrastructure (cloud, virtualization) and then the topic turns to integration platforms to stitch together the fabric for real-time visibility.

I believe we have all learned waiting for an uber framework that can do it all is just a dream.  Taking the best, most cost effective feeds into an integrated view that can be twisted like a Rubik’s cube depending upon the viewer is the fastest route to injecting run-time monitoring, management and measuring into the infrastructure of the future.

Michele

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Fifty-one percent of data center managers and decision makers at large organizations see technology refreshes as the top data center priority for 2011, according to a survey from IT infrastructure specialist SANpulse. This finding highlights the fact that mean time to migrate (MTTM) is critical for rapid adoption of new technologies and fast execution of these operations.  (Read Full Article…)