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One of my CIO friends phoned me up and asked,

“Is it me or have we changed the wording on the sales literature from we’re faster and better, to ours is more energy efficient?

I want energy efficient equipment, but that’s not my core concern, my core concerns are:

• Getting through the day
• Perception of delivery and costs  – without the end users/sponsors understanding our operational constraints
• Support costs in terms of the complexity of the infrastructure, the cross charging system having to absorb high costs without necessarily making the end user pay it
• Ongoing discussions about cross charging costs, capex and now opex – you spend how much on on-call staff?
• Issues relating to comparison – everything is compared – they build servers in 19 minutes, why can’t we?
• The ‘you mean we don’t have that already’ scenarios

Energy efficiency is one part, but people forget that I still need to deal with the day to day issues of running a several thousand server estate, cross platform, cross business line and cross geographical lines.”

With that, anyone who phones Tom, or meets him and asks him if he’d like to have a discussion about lowering his data center costs will find they get an uninterested response.

As a vendor, a service provider, I can’t necessarily tell you how to run your IT, or make your costs disappear, however with the right investment combined with process we can start to move away from ‘box selling’ and support, to a service delivery business line. This doesn’t mean that we dissolve who we are, that we loose sight of the technology, it means establishing a dialogue with the user community, putting together with vendors (if required) the business case for investment, ensuring that we have the pre-answers defined, the costs put together and the business case justified.

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