In the scene setting post of this series I mapped out a set of 3 Microsoft technology areas where we are helping our customers – Reducing Cost, Getting Agile and Efficient, and coping with Growth.
In this post, I’m going to cover ‘Step One’ on the path to an effective and optimized technology platform – reducing Cost. Repurposing the ‘De-invest to Re-invest’ mantra, this first post is all about ‘De-investing’.
And by De-investing, what I mean is, reducing the amount you are spending on technology when you don’t need to.
So lets take a look at the solution areas that fit into this category.
Unified Communications
The primary business case for UC comes from savings based on travel, and audio/video conferencing. These are the cost savings at UC brings.
Travel – say you have 10 people that travel once per week between Auckland and Wellington. If you could save just one of those trips for each person per month, that’s 120 trips per year you have saved. Average return flight cost is say $300. So you’ve just saved $36,000. Add on taxi fares, say another $100 per trip per person. That’s another $12,000. Now add on general expenses of say $50 per person per trip, that’s another $6,000. So with just 10 people travelling once a week, you’ve saved $54,000.
Audio/Video conferencing – standard audio conferencing costs 60c per minute per attendee. Again, lets take those 10 people and assume they have one conference call per week each. The conference call lasts on average 20 minutes. That’s 200 minutes per week, or about 10,000 minutes per year, or about $6,000. So now you’ve saved $60,000. Add on video conferencing which is easily 3 times the price of video conferencing, so add on another $15,000 so a grand total of $75,000 per year.
Now these are clearly just round numbers, but you get the idea on how quickly both the costs of these services adds up, and how short the ROI can be.
The hardest thing for most customers to understand is where these costs actually lie. Audio/Video conferencing is typically not a centrally controlled and billed service, so the amount actually spent on these is often not understood.
SharePoint
There are 2 key things to know about SharePoint. It’s a platform not just a solution, and you should take an implementation in small quantifiable chunks.
From document management, workflow and version control, through Search, Business Intelligence and Electronic Forms through to role based portals. A correctly scoped, designed and implemented SharePoint platform will save you money and allow you to remove expensive point solutions.
Systems Management
I am always amazed at how many customers have a poorly managed desktop and server environment, and then wonder why it costs so much to do, well just about anything.
It’s just not that hard!
An optimized desktop includes not only a modern base OS, but also a clean deployment process, role based access to applications, an automated patch management mechanism, and a way to stop users breaking stuff.
I believe the days of the locked down desktop are gone, for about 90% of all organizations. Stopping the user from breaking base components that will prevent the device from functioning, that’s OK. But the time and effort required to provide the user with everything they need and nothing else, well that’s just wasted time and effort.
You can also reduce cost by reducing risk. This includes asset and inventory management – knowing what you actually have in place will prevent you having an unexpected and un-budgeted compliance bill!
Another risk reduction is in the smart monitoring of your environment. Knowing what’s going on, and being able to act proactively in the event of an unexpected change will save you downtime and therefore cost.
Virtualization
A hot topic at the moment, in many different forms. I’m looking at platform virtualization here. So here’s a question for the people paying for VMware – what are you paying for again?
I’ll state the obvious responses – credibility, maturity, that 1 feature that you think you need but you don’t actually use, protecting a sunk investment.
So, at what point do you sit down and take a hard look at what your requirements and outcomes actually are, and then compare against available solutions?
I’ve done quite a few Hyper-V PoC’s recently, and the unanimous feedback has been ‘wow’.
Open your eyes. De-invest, use what you already have, migrate over time, Re-invest the savings.
Security
If you take a look at the feature list of most desktop and server security solutions on the market, most of these ‘features’ are now part of the base OS and are completely irrelevant in a modern platform.
All platforms require anti-virus and anti-malware. There is no OS that is immune. Windows used to be vulnerable, but take a look at the changes in Vista and now Windows 7 (and Server 2008 and 2008 R2) and compare against other platforms.
System Integration
One of the most expensive technology solutions has traditionally being in getting different systems to talk to each other.
BizTalk changes this with a wide range of integration capabilities across many systems, as well as the ability to integrate with your development environments so you can run iterations as part of your lifecycle.
SQL Server
Pound for pound, SQL Server stacks up against it’s competitors and in many ways outweighs them.
SQL Server has an all-in-the-box approach. You buy the edition that meets your needs, and a processor license (there is server/cal but that never makes sense in the Enterprise) and away you go. No extra’s, no surprises, not unexpected compliance bills.
And take something like SAP, where we have support notes and a close partnership, add on a significant performance gain, reduced storage footprint and you get a whole lot of Cost Reduction.
Cloud Services
This one is a little more problematic, because moving to ‘the cloud’ may or not make sense. So for this section lets focus on an easy one to save money – mail filtering.
Hosted Exchange Filtering is in essence a car wash scenario. Point your MX record at the opening, mail goes through, the dirt gets left behind, and the clean shiny mail goes on into your on-premise systems.
Not only is the cost of this a lot lower than running an on-premise solution, you will also reduce the bandwidth used and the disk space for the storage of junk mail.
Summary
So, how much money are you spending on things you don’t need to? How much can you De-invest so you can spend it on something actually worthwhile, something that will help you build an Agile business and hey, maybe even Grow!
In Part 2, I’ll take a look at how to Get Agile!
