Gartner encourages organizations to further rationalize their infrastructure!

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We’ve all seen (and probably even looked for) articles that offer tips on “how to save money”, “how to reduce our monthly household budgets”, “how to free up extra cash”.  Anyone with a mortgage, kids’ college funds, revolving debt and a goal of retiring someday has surely searched the internet for these tips and tricks at least once or twice – myself included.

We’re quick to listen to the advice of so called experts when it comes to saving a few bucks a month on a personal front…but I think enterprises are a little more reluctant to take the advice when looking for ways to save money within their organizations.  Why?  Have your IT leaders recently searched the Web for IT-related cost saving tips? Maybe…but they may not admit to it.  But, if not…perhaps they should…because Gartner is offering up some pretty good advice on this front. 

What are the fastest ways to trim some money from your 2013 IT budget?  Just read a recent Gartner report called “Ten Key Actions to Reduce IT Infrastructure and Operations Costs”.  They say the time is now to cut costs from your data center IT budgets – even if you’ve previously achieved savings from transformation projects.  Though there is no silver bullet solution…they claim that the best results can be achieved by implementing 10 key cost reduction actions as fully as possible…and that waiting to take action may only make matters worse and costs higher.

Of Gartner’s 10 key cost reduction actions, a few of their suggestions were focused on the infrastructure within the data center.  Supporting Data Center Services, those obviously stood out to me.  A few of them were…

• Consolidate Infrastructure and Operations...with a potential cost reduction of 10%.
• Virtualize Infrastructure and Operations...with a potential cost reduction of 10%.
• Contain Storage Growth...with a potential cost reduction of 5%, and virtually no customer or organizational impact.
• Reduce Power and cooling needs...with a potential cost reduction of 5%, and virtually no customer or organizational impact.

Of their key cost reduction recommendations…seven key initiatives were specific to Infrastructure and Operations, and Gartner offered up a little extra advice for each of them.  Being focused on the Data Center Services space, two Gartner statements stood out to me.  They said…”from a cost reduction perspective, we advise” that…

• “Delaying modernization can result in disproportionately higher support costs for the legacy systems involved.”
• “Virtualization — especially server virtualization — should be accelerated unless you are nearing 70% virtualized.”

So…if you’re looking for some advice from the experts on IT savings…this report is worth a read! 

And once you’ve decided you’re ready to get started…Gartner says you’ll need to start by understanding your current costs.  And…to do that… I’m pretty sure you have to know what all you have, where it is running, how systems relate to each other, and more.  Our HP Infrastructure Modernization teams specialize in helping our client’s inventory, assess and rationalize their data center infrastructure environments.  We can create an infrastructure rationalization plan that you can implement yourself, or that we can implement for you. 

We offer a wide range of transformation assessments, workshops and project-based professional services to help our clients at various points during their IT transformation journeys.  Ask your account team for information on the HP Infrastructure Rationalization Assessment.  It’s the perfect tool to help your organization identify and exploit the opportunities Gartner is talking about within your organizations – even if you’ve been down that road before.

At HP Discover we’ll have Infrastructure and Applications Modernization experts on hand to run some Transformation Experience Workshops that will help you get the ball rolling.  To register or learn more, visit our HP Discover 2012 website.