It is common cause that enterprise IT shops are under increasing strain to optimise current infrastructures to reduce costs, improve quality of service (QoS), and to prepare for the new demands of real-time business. IT shops are responding by reinventing themselves, and vendors need to ensure they are on the right path to delivering on customer needs and supporting this approach.
Some have already begun changing the outlook for IT departments, and analyst firm Software Strategies believes Unisys is one of those leading the pack.
It says that since Unisys has turned its business around it has "one of the most successful professional services and technology consulting practices", from "the longest established mainframe/enterprise system vendor".
In tough economic climates, problems IT departments face are exacerbated, as is pressure on vendors to deliver better solutions.
"Business is tough," says Bernard Donnelly, consultancy services manager at Unisys Africa, "and in a weak climate, shocks dent confidence and fierce new pressures are brought to bear on companies."
Software Strategies underlines this in a review of key business priorities, trends and needs, while previewing the emerging real-time business sphere of dynamic e-business, which offers opportunities for new business models and greater efficiencies.
For many IT groups, supporting existing infrastructures and applications soaks up between 70% and 90% of budget and staff resources.
The key is strategic infrastructure optimisation, but with many possible approaches to achieving it quickly and safely, which does a company choose? Software Strategies offers a brief history as a means of understanding.
The greatest opportunity for improvement
Wintel-distributed computing environments, which proliferated widely across most large companies from the mid-1990s, are shown to be the greatest single area requiring such infrastructure optimisation, and thus the greatest opportunity area for major IT improvements.
The return on investment (ROI) for well planned and properly implemented Wintel infrastructure optimisation projects can often exceed 75%-100%, with payback in a year, according to Software Strategies.
"Optimisation is a highly specialised area, demanding extensive experience, scarce skills, deep knowledge and proven methods and tools, all of which are crucial for best results, and which few IT user organisations have available in-house," says Donnelly.
The economic downturn, fierce competition and numerous shocks have reduced business and investment confidence and growth from the boom days of 2000 all across the globe. For three years beginning 1997, e-business and the Internet were viewed as the key business-transforming technologies that would revolutionise industries almost overnight. The bubble burst mid-2000, leading many analysts to greatly downgrade the impact of e-business and the Internet.
Since then, following rationalisation, e-business has actually made progress over the past three years. Those businesses that have fully and successfully embraced e-business, and progressed upwards with more sophisticated, better integrated, and more advanced new business processes and models, are reporting business gains and advantage.
A new business era
Analysts and commentators are now generally predicting a new, more volatile, unpredictable business era, in which successful companies must be adaptable and respond instantly to rapidly changing demand. Business processes must be optimised and integrated, not only in the company, but also across the whole value network of customers, suppliers and partners, and costs must be driven down through process improvement and advanced automation. Along with this comes a plethora of new terms such as: real-time business, the adaptive enterprise, dynamic e-business and e-business on-demand.
While all this is occurring, IT teams in most major organisations find their daily chores burdensome enough. Between 70% and 90% of IT staff, and total IT budget, is used supporting and maintaining complex, distributed, multi-tier environments.
Consultants find that server workloads in these environments for distributed, mid-tier, Wintel and RISC Unix systems, are very low, and 10% to 25% prime shift loads are typical.
This waste of capacity, associated support costs, the difficulty in maintaining QoS and of managing widely distributed, midrange server populations has come sharply into focus over the past three years, as many studies have shown their high costs and weaknesses. These systems are attractive in terms of cost of acquisition, but their overall cost of ownership is prohibitive.
IT infrastructures, in their current form, generally cannot support or respond to the new needs of real-time business. In these, Wintel environments are by far the most numerous. Accordingly, rationalisation and optimisation have become key imperatives and a high priority for CIOs across the world.
Technologies have advanced rapidly on scale-up and scale-out Intel server system options; on the Microsoft Windows software platform: in middleware integration software; through the spread of open standards, and now Web services; in virtualisation; and in the automation for IT infrastructures. This means there are now strong, proven options for consolidating, rationalising and centralising distributed Microsoft/Intel infrastructures, to remove capacity wastage, cut costs, improve QoS, and improve manageability.
RISC Unix outperformed
Large RISC Unix enterprise servers, notably those from Sun and HP, which were heavily hyped as high-performance commercial systems in the late 1990s, have been far outperformed on online transaction processing (OLTP) capability and price/performance by rejuvenated, modern mainframe-class Wintel servers, from vendors such as Unisys. They are also sharply undercut on price for other common workloads by scaled-up and increasingly powerful Intel-powered enterprise servers, such as the Unisys ES7000.
Few IT users have the depth of knowledge, expertise, skills and spare staff capacity to undertake infrastructure optimisation projects alone, so choosing an experienced services partner, which can bring strengths, experience and specialised techniques to the process, is the key alternative.
How does a firm choose a partner? Software Strategies lists key criteria that companies should seek in successful partners:
- Company strength
- Enterprise systems skills
- Enterprise Windows/Intel skills
- Service offerings
- Methods and tools
- Customer references
- Quality of staff
- Industry expertise
- Pricing
- Partners
Software Strategies believes Unisys, with its keener focus on consulting services, from which it now derives 76% of its global revenues, is ideally positioned locally to deliver on the criteria listed above.
Some of the key offerings that make this possible are:
- Windows infrastructure consolidation and optimisation
- Windows migration and optimisation
- Windows protection - disaster recovery and business continuity
- Windows integration
- Windows management and control
Software Strategies states: "TCS is the successful professional services and technology consulting practice of Unisys, the longest established mainframe/enterprise system vendor. TCS has developed arguably the strongest `optimising Microsoft/Intel infrastructure` consulting capability in the industry, refined and honed over hundreds of engagements for many years, all around the world."
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