There’s an appeal among companies to do more with less without stripping away the bells and whistles. It’s about finding smarter ways to do what needs to be done and focus on core competencies. One such focus has been on IT operations as they are expensive cost centers: organizations have been looking at alternative solutions to the large, costly departments. Such solutions include virtualization, Software as a Service (SaaS), grid computing, and Green IT like cloud-based computing.
Automate What You Can
Automation is big. Companies – small, medium and large – are now making a beeline to invest in technology that leads to automation. A Robert Half Technology survey reports that about 40% of CIOs interviewed expressed interest in technologies that help with automation such as virtualization, consolidated event management, configuration management, etc. Further, adopting technologies such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure help to bring down the costs by a large extent.
Get on to the cloud
Cloud computing isn’t hype; it a reality: a very cost effective, efficient reality. Take the example of Google Product Suite: the typical cost of using email per user in a company is around $300; using Google’s email solution – Gmail – the cost can be axed down to $50 per user, according to Rajen Seth who also known as the Father of “Google Apps” and is presently the Group Product Manager for Chrome OS for Business. Cloud computing lowers the cost to run a business: for example, we shared at least 10 benefits of cloud computing for businesses earlier. Perhaps, you’d also like to see how it helps you serve your customers better?.
Migrate to open source software
Commercial software also has costs – the price of the license or specialized staff adept in working with this piece of commercial software. It’s a pretty obvious cost-saver but many companies worry about the shift in costs from actual software to training manpower in open source software. Your open source software choice, however, should be based on the strength of the community behind the open source code rather than the feature set (which is usually the norm as far as commercial software is concerned), according to J. Schwan – Founder and President of Solstice Consulting.
Would you like to talk to one of us regarding your IT problems? Would you be interested in moving to the cloud? How about automating (or semi-automating) parts of your business? We, at Sererra, have been consulting clients on virtualizing, cloud computing, making your enterprise mobile, etc.
