What You Need To Know

As CIOs and other corporate leaders adapt to serve customers in ever-changing markets, large-scale technology decisions are becoming increasingly difficult to make. Shifting demands of the market (and customers) are often pitted against the pressure to decrease costs and optimize portfolios.  Many tech leaders end up in a reactionary mode, attempting to support their business partners’ shifting needs – the IT-equivalent of swinging at every pitch, or every IT project that comes up for review.

While there is no shortage of Dell offerings to solve the wide range of problems CIOs face, it may not always be obvious why, or if, these offerings are optimal for your company at this point in time.  So what are the sorts of things to consider as you contemplate a significant investment in technology –- and how can you recognize a hitter’s pitch?

A good first step is to identify your underlying issue(s) and plan investment around them. Is your business suffering from lack of agility and/or high operating costs?  Low customer satisfaction and/or shaky sales pipeline?  Prioritizing pain points by theme will allow you to focus your largest investments in high-value areas, and reap the rewards of a targeted tech investment strategy.

For example, if cost savings are of utmost importance, you’ll look for levers that can be pulled in the short term and strategies to be adopted in the long term to achieve notable cost savings.  Depending on your short- and long-term goals, you might focus on quick-wins like server consolidation projects, adoption of cheaper/smarter storage solutions, consumption of services that can roll-out quickly and provide immediate cost relief and customer value, and the like. Or you might focus on foundational investments like green IT initiatives, data center optimizations, event-driven architectures, data-driven analysis, and so on.

I read an article on ZDNet-Asia that quotes a Gartner analyst (Andy Rowsell-Jones, Gartner's vice president and research director) in which he suggests a company's CIO should learn to "speak the CFO's language" in order to get approval for IT projects.  Great suggestion – but with all due respect to Mr. Rowsell-Jones, I'd suggest that CIOs, and all IT people for that matter, need to focus on understanding and contributing to the business objectives of the company rather than focusing on getting IT projects approved.  Although there is much more to Mr. Rowsell-Jones’ position on the matter, this article is a great illustration of how our IT colleagues can easily get absorbed navigating the system rather than embracing our calling to be an asset to our companies.

In a series of blog entries, we’ll explore a few investment themes that emerge in response to common business challenges, and we’ll review approaches to connecting the dots between available technology solutions (Dell and otherwise) and your area of investment focus and desired timeline. 

For now, I'd encourage you to start thinking about the underlying themes in your business that must be addressed - this will help you isolate areas for investment and know when to swing or take a pitch.

If you have specific pain points you'd like me to discuss, let me know.

You can't read an issue of BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal or other major business publications without reading about "green IT." The same goes for IT-oriented outlets like Cnet, InformationWeek and eWeek.

The industry has come to realize that not only is consuming less energy good for the environment but it is also good for your company's bottom line. But how do you select an IT vendor while keeping an eye on these issues?

Dell recently commissioned Forrester Research to produce a study devoted to helping IT organizations improve one of their cornerstone processes — IT procurement. They researched and analyzed the state of green IT procurement, focusing on criteria to evaluate suppliers' overall sustainability policies and practices. While Forrester drew upon their years of extensive research in green IT, they also conducted 30 in-depth interviews with industry consortia, environmental NGOs, and a several internal stakeholders at Dell. Additionally, they conducted in-depth interviews with enterprise-class customers in North America and Europe (note that none of these companies were identified or selected by Dell and are not necessarily Dell customers.). Forrester spoke with IT practitioners at these organizations to understand if and how they are incorporating green criteria into their evaluations and selections of IT systems and IT suppliers.

The study shows that IT procurement will be a significant point of leverage for companies looking to improve the sustainability of their computing infrastructures. Forrester points out in the study that "Buyers struggle with this in part because there are no standard metrics and decision criteria that enable IT organizations to assess the green credentials of IT vendors."

From the report, I've pulled five suggestions on how companies can structure their request-for-proposal (RFP) documents. The report goes into great detail on suggested weighting for each of these areas and how to assess them.

1. Corporate environmental governance. These criteria are designed to illuminate a tech vendor’s overall commitment to sustainability by examining its goals and the broad processes it has in place for measuring and reporting progress toward those goals.
2. Corporate operations. These criteria focus on how aggressively a supplier is tackling the environmental impact of its own internal facilities and operations.
3. Supply chain. This includes a couple of crucial criteria that examine how a vendor is managing the environmental practices of its suppliers.
4. Stakeholder engagement. These criteria look at how proactive and participatory a vendor’s environmental programs are. They ask about a company’s engagement with important stakeholders, including customers, employees, and the rest of the IT industry.
5. Design for environment. This section focuses on how the supplier translates its sustainability practices into the products and services that it delivers to customers.

You can read a summary of the report here or if you'd like to download as a .pdf to send to your procurement teams, click here.

There have been several recent posts in this blog about the new viability of blade servers for virtualization.

Dell believes that virtualization should be simple, so we’ve designed our systems from the ground up for virtualization performance. We specifically designed our PowerEdge servers to take advantage of the virtualization features AMD has built into its chips, like the new Quad Core AMD Opteron processor, code-named Shanghai. That close collaboration has paid off with record-breaking virtualization performance for the PowerEdge R905, R805, M905 and M805, plus a design that simplifies virtualization for our customers. Check out our VMmark Scores – PowerEdge with AMD holds no. 1 spots for two- and four-socket systems!

The point is, “Simplify and Save” isn’t just a slogan here at Dell. We’re deeply involved with technology – down to the chip level – to make it a reality.

Here’s a link where you can find more information on our new PowerEdge servers and blades. You can check out details on AMD’s new processor here.

Global economic challenges are unquestionably putting increased pressure on corporate revenues – and that includes IT budgets. Analysts from Gartner, Forrester and IDC are predicting anywhere from a 2% to 4% average decline in those budgets, and economic reality may bring far deeper cuts. If you’re running an IT organization, you’re in for some tough decisions. Faced with budget challenges, do you cut uniformly across the board, or make more strategic choices?

Since the fundamental function of IT is to support the business, most CIOs will protect their “run the business” spend first. This means keeping the lights on and funding those programs that are most critical to the business. Typically, that’s the maintenance of existing applications.

But the money to protect those programs has to come from somewhere else – and the usual victims of a declining IT budget are innovation spend and infrastructure refresh. That’s because businesses are more tolerant of giving up planned features and functions than they are of losing current ones, and deferring new or refreshed infrastructure until later – often much later. The result? Dangerous stagnation in your IT capability, not just in terms of business functionality, but also in terms of IT efficiency and raw compute capacity.

Dell believes there is a better way: Simplify and save with a “smart refresh” of your infrastructure. Rather than sacrificing innovation and the latest technology in favor of short-term budget relief, you can make smart investments in your IT infrastructure that can quickly free as much as 8X your initial capital investment. For example, if your data center is currently on a five-year refresh cycle (pretty typical in the industry), then accelerating to a two-year refresh cycle generates some pretty surprising benefits. After two years, you'll see raw performance per watt across the data center that's 1,200% higher than you have today – allowing you to reduce physical servers through virtualization and consolidation by more than 80%. And 80% fewer servers means you'll save at least 80% (and probably more) on power and cooling costs in your data center. The net result? A complete refresh of your data center that literally pays for itself.

And if you're wondering if this strategy works in the real world, just ask Dell's internal IT organization. Just a couple of years ago, Dell itself was on the cusp of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in new data centers around the globe because we had maxed out our capacity. But by making strategic investments in the latest servers and storage – instead of in buildings – we were able to significantly reduce the physical footprint of our infrastructure while still adding capacity. And we continue to grow without having to add a single new data center.

Actually, the potential savings go far beyond the data center. By taking advantage of the latest client technologies, coupled with Dell’s unique managed-services capabilities, you can take as much as 90% out of the lifetime TCO of each client system you own. Done properly, you might even see an ROI period as short as 12-18 months, meaning that you’ll accrue savings that will actually exceed the depreciation stream on your capital investment.

The bottom line, quite literally, is that taking the “obvious” strategy of protecting your application space at the expense of infrastructure is probably not the best choice. In fact, if you protect your infrastructure investments and spend those dollars smartly to simplify your IT and drive real savings, you can free up all the dollars you need to maintain your current investment in business functionality – and it’s likely that you’ll have money left over to deliver true innovation for your business.

It’s hard to imagine a product category that fits the mantra of “Simplify and Save” better than blade servers. And now, with new, third generation technology, they make more sense than ever – even for companies that operate as few as six servers.

The ideas behind the first generation of blade servers make obvious sense. With blades, you deal with fewer racks, which means you get better use of limited data center floor space. (You may even be able to put off building a new data center - at an average cost of over $1000 per square foot!) With blades, you also deal with fewer chassis, which means you reduce extra connections while maintaining redundancy - making management easier. And finally, blades eliminate a lot of cable sprawl issues, and can save significant money with port aggregation.

The third generation of blade servers, as represented by our industry-leading PowerEdge M-Series Blades, make even more sense. In a word, we’ve simplified.

For starters, M-Series blades come pre-assembled right out of the box. With FlexIO, customers get flexibility allowing them to scale with I/O demands without creating change in network infrastructure. Additionally, FlexAddress limits downtime by maintaining persistence of network identity and easily integrates with existing network management tools.

Those are some examples of the “simplify” part of the equation. The “save” part is just as compelling, with dramatic improvements in performance per watt. Our M-Series blades consume up to 19% less power and get up to 25% better performance per watt than other blade systems on the market. So if you’re concerned about rising energy costs, blade servers can certainly be part of the solution.

Ziff-Davis just released a terrific new eSeminar on second generation blade servers, with plenty of detail. Whether you’re running 6 stand-alone servers or 6,000, it’s worth watching.