Blade Watch

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/07/17/Study_predicts_IT_staff_reductions_in_09_1.html

IT staff jobs are at increasing risk — both for contractors and in-house workers — according to a survey of top CIOs by Goldman, Sachs & Co released last week. Global services companies will also feel the pinch because of the slowing economy.

A second survey showed that basic PC and network hardware, as well as professional services providers, would bear the largest proportion of spending cuts. It also showed that CIOs planned to emphasize economizing measures over investments new technologies, with cloud computing emerging as the last item on their priority lists, despite the hype around it.

It will be interesting to see what impact the recent trading conditions will have on employment, what key technologies will be in demand, what areas might be the first ones facing cuts. It’s going to be dependent on your role, trading conditions and many other things, in the meantime, life and business continues, focus on you and your business. Check out the article though, it raises some interesting points.

A few thoughts whilst I was reading this on the train home. The focus might be on:

• Reduction on operating costs – doing more with less – how many servers do we have, and how many do we need – what are the cost drivers and why
• Containment of data center costs/requirements – seeking to avoid acquiring another data center if possible – use what we have more efficiently – we might choose to upgrade the existing data center for example to maintain its lifespan
• Focus on revenue per watt/return on investment – don’t forget that there will be those applications where I’m happy to keep investment, my online presence might be a component part of my marketing, my revenue generation; my grid application might cost millions to deploy, but if the payback, the return on investment is six months or less, I might well continue acquiring more capacity, investing more in the application.
• Business as usual investment/activities – Windows 2008 is out, application storage and performance requirements continue, new users get brought on to the system, all requiring business as usual investment, replacing that DL580G2 with a DL585, a blade or a virtual machine.
• Keeping everything online – the concept of upgrading those legacy emulex cards, plugging in that extra storage, bringing online that new network capacity, or rolling out service or driver packs to keep in line with vendor support etc.

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