Intelligently Managing Real IT Costs

Intelligent Workload Management Virtualization

Categories:
Intelligent Workload Management: Cloud Computing, Data Center, Intelligent Workload Management, Security, Virtualization
Companies : Google, IBM, Novell, SAP
  1. Intelligently Managing Real IT Costs

    I always thought I was pretty good about controlling costs in my department—until I started getting my group’s monthly cell phone bills. That was certainly eye opening. It gave me an opportunity to see usage costs and better control our budget.

    People often think a large business has an infinite supply of money to spend and it’s easy to lose sight of the real costs. That’s particularly so in virtual IT environments where it’s easy to spin up services with a few clicks of a button. But those costs are real. To run a business intelligently, why not give business users the power to see the actual cost of these services. They could then weigh real costs against needs.

    In the physical IT work, it was too difficult to separate out these real costs. Individual departments might have been charged back based on a portion of the cost of servers, electricity and so forth, but simply splitting costs across departments didn’t reveal individual consumption and associated costs.

    As intelligent workload management progresses, we’ll begin to see tools emerge that provide greater visibility into real usage costs. That’s a huge advantage for any business looking to manage costs more intelligently.

    A major apparel brand is already doing just that. With extremely slim profit margins, they needed innovative ways to control costs. Instead of users blithely requesting a service without understanding the costs, they see actual numbers before they submit a request, and can make adjustments accordingly to stay within budget. Each department is charged for actual usage, regardless of whether their workloads are managed in a physical or virtual environment.

    Other businesses in commoditized markets will began to leverage these same resources to wring additional costs out of running their business.

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