The landscape for IT departments has changed. We are now in an era where data is deemed to be a major currency. However some organisations are still looking at IT as a cost centre, rather than an opportunity for business leaders to empower sales, HR or IT security by choosing their own technical destiny.
Increasingly the conversation is shifting from a technical perspective which concentrates on processor speeds, I/O cycles and disk capacity, to one which considers business-aligned outcomes.
If you look at how organisations now perceive technology, you can see a shift toward discretionary IT spending – with line of business leaders in areas like Marketing selecting outcome-enabling technologies, independent of the CIO.
Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement
When discussing the future of IT, the management thinker Geoffrey Moore coined the phrase ‘systems of engagement’ to describe a more flexible and adaptable form of IT infrastructure that’s based on collaboration. It builds on the traditional IT ‘systems of record’ that were simply used to store information or crunch the numbers. Today, with enhanced availability, speed, and analytic capability, they can help business retain profitable customers by improving service and customer experience.
On a personal level, I recently contacted my media provider with a view to changing my contract and was immediately passed to the loyalty department who offered me a 50 per cent discount. If the customer service agent had real-time access to detailed information about me and my past buying behaviour, they could have realised that I was a loyal customer and they need not have offered such a high level of discount to keep me — not that I’m complaining!
A changing industry
Let’s consider how the technology industry serves its customers. When a business says it’s thinking about cloud, we as product providers need to understand what that customer means – or more importantly, what they need.
Is it just a way of moving to a different operational cost model for IT, or is it because they want to enable the business to react more quickly to customer demands? Our IT conversation needs to change to capture and address the underlying customer needs.
Our proposition must be both commercially as well as technically, fit for purpose.
IBM can afford to take a wider view of the customer situation, knowing that its extensive range of server and storage options can be tailored to best meet the evolving needs of customers.
For example, IBM has made a significant investment in its Linux on Power solutions, the success of which has been primarily driven by organisations’ increasing need for analytics.
“Today there is much more flexibility built into pricing models with the benefits of a private cloud with operational expenditure, as opposed to CapEx”
For more general-purpose non-analytics requirements, IBM and Cisco launched VersaStack, an exciting combination of Cisco blades, networking and IBM Storwize, a family of software-defined storage.
This solution offers rapid deployment and easy management, and addresses concerns over whether the technology can meet the changing needs of the business over the lifespan of the infrastructure.
In my view, the IT industry also needs to challenge the role of an IT partner and what we can bring to the discussion.
Recently, I spoke with a customer who needed to fix application performance issues and thought his only option was a software development project that could take six months (with all of the related costs that would involve), and no guarantee of actually addressing the problems at the end.
Instead, through a collaborative process with the customer, and an encouraging openness to the art of the possible, we realised that introducing IBM flash technology brought near-instant results, immediately alleviating the pressure on the business – and at a fraction of the cost and risk of rewriting the app.
Flexible costs delivering consistent benefits
I would also challenge the idea that investing in infrastructure is always the most expensive option.
Depending on the challenge, the right platform could be cloud, or on-premise or a hybrid, and the choice the customer makes can have a material difference on the overall running costs.
Today there is much more flexibility built into pricing models with the benefits of a private cloud with operational expenditure as opposed to CapEx. As an example, IBM Power systems running AIX offer capacity on demand, so customers can scale up for high-intensity workloads and pay only for what they use.
Many businesses experience peaks such as a month-end payment run, a sales promotion or HR batch processing. Not all of these spikes in computing demand are predictable. Nor indeed is your end customers’ ability to access your systems of engagement (web sites, apps etc.) any time of the day or night. Again the line of business leaders are saying to IT: ‘we would like our infrastructure to be more scalable, but we don’t know how much we will need or when we will need it’.
With IBM enterprise-class servers and storage, businesses have the freedom to scale up quickly to meet higher workloads, and then scale back down for more routine operations.
This cost-effective way of using IT contrasts sharply with the traditional model of Intel servers running VMware, because of how that model can massively escalate software costs. Whenever traditional hypervisors are involved, the related database licences can dramatically inflate the real cost of bursting to the cloud with Intel™ servers. Straight away, many of the expected savings disappear. This is why it is so important to look at the total solution for the business and calculate the running costs accordingly.
IBM is one of the few vendors who offer true sub-capacity licensing so, for example, customers can use eligible software on just one core in a multi-core system – resulting in a lack of exposure from a software audit perspective.
The ability to ramp up or down according to need creates many scenarios where IT delivers real value. Instead of waiting four or five days to process month-end sales, imagine being able to reduce batch runs to a matter of minutes. The morning after signing off the books, the CMO can lead a business discussion based on the most accurate data. That’s often 10 per cent or more of the month recovered, resulting in faster time to make better decisions.
There is always more than one way to look at a problem, and sometimes it’s best to leave our preconceived ideas to one side. Let’s challenge assumptions and ensure IT can be the proactive, flexible and responsive partner business needs.
Stephen Kelly is systems and technology group manager with IBM Ireland
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