IDEAS for IT Users

Ideas International (IDEAS) has been servicing enterprise-class IT users for more than 10 years with unique industry-leading research capabilities that provide powerful outcomes for two main constituencies: IT infrastructure planning professionals and IT purchasing and sourcing professionals.

Our discussions with infrastructure specialists at some of the leading global IT user companies have lead us to conclude that they typically have two main objectives:

1. To reduce the cost and complexity of the IT infrastructure (thereby creating greater flexibility and responsiveness to change)
2. To provide an enhanced level of service back to the business (thereby producing greater return on investment of IT resources/assets and demonstrating enhanced utilization of IT infrastructure components).

We have witnessed a number of different responses to these objectives. In particular, capacity and infrastructure planners have been tasked with:

• Consolidating servers and systems
• Deploying virtualization technologies
• Upgrading older systems/storage platforms to take advantage of newer functions (typically driven by perceived cost and resource savings and low utilization rates of IT infrastructure)
• “Implementing” new approaches

Such initiatives are not without their challenges however, which include:

• Inability to “model” the current state to the desired state (planners cannot easily quantify whether requirements can be met in future state)
• Difficulty assessing the performance capabilities of older versus new platforms
• Difficulty comparing capabilities of different offerings from competing vendors
• Lack of industry-standard measurements and benchmarks (no standard unit of measure for server performance and no historical data to refer to)
• Confusing and biased information from vendors (different benchmarks and different nomenclature used)

IDEAS believes meeting these challenges requires the following:

• Consistent methods of comparing competing offerings
• Comparable representations of computing performance
• Historical data on performance of older platforms
• Deep technical understanding of vendor offerings
• Mechanism to communicate the benefits of a project and how concerns on capacity and performance can be alleviated
• Independent perspectives – a non-aligned “sounding board”