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Squeezing IT Dollars Without Squashing Service

Do more with what you have: Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft, talks about smart ways businesses of all sizes can control IT costs in tough economic times.  The global business downturn has left many IT decision-makers scrambling to figure out how they can reduce or restrain spending without sacrificing quality of service or falling behind competitors. For most, that means squeezing more value out of their existing IT resources, and limiting new IT purchases to technology that will pay for itself in lower operating costs or increased strategic capabilities.  That’s why Microsoft Corp.’s Server and Tools Business sees its primary mission today as delivering innovative solutions that will help its customers thrive in the new economy. To that end, the company continues to invest in new and enhanced server operating systems, virtualization technologies, security solutions and cloud computing.    “Rather than decreasing their IT spend in challenging times, some companies are choosing to recalibrate their budgets and invest in technical solutions that deliver savings over the long run,” says Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. “For example, many of our customers that have virtualized their datacenters are already seeing significant savings resulting from server consolidation, faster resource deployment and IT process automation.”  The virtues of virtualization  Other companies are upgrading to Microsoft’s latest server operating system with enhanced management tools, migrating specific workloads to cloud-based services and adopting systems management best practices as part of a long-term cost-savings strategy, according to Muglia.  With a price that’s about two-thirds less than the leading competitive solution, Microsoft’s virtualization platform proves to be more cost-effective than other options. In addition, Microsoft’s management toolset spans the physical and the virtual worlds, which simplifies the job of maintaining a typically heterogeneous datacenter.  The Slough Borough Council, the governing authority for the Borough of Slough in southeastern England, took advantage of the savings potential of the Microsoft virtualization platform when the borough needed to expand its municipal services but faced datacenter space and power constraints. Converting physical servers to virtual machines solved both the space and power problems, but it also generated significant financial rewards as well. “We’ve achieved hardware savings of $148,000 (U.S.), and we expect to reduce server deployment costs by $23,700 (U.S.) annually, based on rolling out 20 servers a year,” says Chris Wintermute, technical infrastructure manager for Slough Borough Council.   Virtualizing a datacenter also lays the foundation for service-based IT. Since virtualization enables workloads to move between on-site datacenter software and the cloud, IT managers don’t have to choose between running applications in the cloud or on-site; it can be a combination of both. “For example, a business might move an application that’s well-suited for the cloud, such as e-mail, from their datacenter to a hosted cloud service, but they may keep more sensitive applications, such as their payroll system, on-premises,” says Muglia.  Invest Today for Returns Tomorrow  When selecting server software and upgrades, Muglia recommends that IT professionals maintain a long-term view. “The important question isn’t how much you pay for a platform upfront, but what a system will cost your organization year after year, and if the company providing the platform will be there for you in the long run.”   Microsoft infrastructure products generally provide excellent return on investment (ROI). For example, when researchers at consulting agency Capgemini looked at companies and institutions in the financial services, education, retail and high-technology industries that had begun using Windows Server 2008, they found that IT costs were reduced by an average of $124,000 per year. These cost reductions resulted from a wide range of areas, including the recovery of five IT staff hours per server and a 91 percent reduction in downtime. A white paper detailing usage scenarios and providing more data on the impact of deploying Windows Server 2008 is available here.   More here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/mar09/03-30ReducingITcosts.mspx
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