Spending money wisely is an investment

http://virtualization.com/news/2008/03/17/microsoft-to-cios-virtualization-is-too-expensive/

At the European CIO summit, Barbara Gordon, Microsoft’s EMEA VP for Enterprise Sales stated that Microsoft sees price as a differentiator in the virtualization market.

The debate about the cost of virtualization is going to continue for the near future, whether we’re talking about licensing or the ‘cost’ of hardware.  What I think people could not be considering is the following money and please not I mean this politely.

You can either spend £2 million a year providing a desktop to every person in the organization with the related overheads, access rights, deployment lead time, asset allocation and software licensing. Or you can spend the same (hopefully less dependent on the set up), by switching to a virtual infrastructure which is more aligned to your business.

What do I mean by this? Let me put it this way, say Mike joins as a new developers, the following events happen:

• Mike is allocated asset 48796
• Asset 48796 is collected from stores and organization image loaded
• User account created
• List of software allocated to user and charged back accordingly
• Monitor/keyboard and mouse requested (if not already there)
• Asset 48796 is then sent to users desk and configured
• User logs in and applications are then dropped to his profile, like say Microsoft Visual Studio.

The process above might take anything from days (if you chase the call) or up to weeks, think of the cost of having Mike not able to work?

We have to examine the big picture, the work flow, what affect your IT will have not only in reducing operational costs but in empowerment. That I can move virtual machines around, means that the trade desks can be moved around to meet business requirements and with less disruption than the physical move process you might have currently.

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