It can seem easier for an IT department to ‘throw new boxes’ at applications, business units, and users, rather than take on the technical, commercial and political battles of sharing physical resources. This tendency, fuelled by the number of e-business applications entering the mainstream and a dramatic decrease in the cost of hardware components, has led to what is sometimes called 'infrastructure sprawl'.
This growth of servers and associated infrastructure wastes millions of pounds for companies, with ICT managers struggling to support a vast and ever-increasing number of physical network devices. Such devices also consume huge amounts of power, and floor and rack space, while IT staff fire-fight with software patches, security updates, storage, network connectivity, and disaster recovery planning for hundreds of separate machines and platforms. And with the growth in physical resources comes a proportional pressure to ensure these systems comply with legal, regulatory and business requirements.
But organisations can combat infrastructure sprawl and its attendant costs and inefficiencies. Skilled analysis of their technical and business environments can deliver commercial models, technical designs, and ultimately a compelling business case for the benefits of infrastructure optimisation – from data centre consolidation to more modest ICT redesign and tuning.
Industry feedback, reinforced by the experience of our IT infrastructure practice, is that total cost of ownership (TCO) can typically be reduced by 30 to 50% depending on the scale of the undertaking and the quality of the execution.
But these projects should only be undertaken with a detailed understanding of the likely impact on ICT infrastructure, people, processes and management. Figure 1 illustrates the potential benefits of virtualisation and consolidation of core business applications with many applications being delivered on a reduced server/infrastructure inventory.
Figure 1: From an inefficient 'per-box' architecture to an optimised multi-application infrastructure
Similar problems are being experienced in the call/contact centre space, where the benefits of consolidation and virtualisation are equally compelling. The telecoms and IT infrastructure is often fragmented and widely distributed – often to facilitate multiple branches and cater for location-based knowledge services – but the following measures show how the infrastructure can be cut back:
- Extent/number of core PBXs can be reduced, possibly to a single unit
- Disparate automatic call distribution (ACD) units are replaced, possibly with a single, central unit
- Network routing components are reduced/eliminated, with calls handled through fewer ACD units
- Remaining contact centre components (e.g. computer telephony integration, interactive voice response, workforce management) are centralised and consolidated with shared infrastructure serving multiple centres.
This centralised and virtualised model of the contact centre can be further enhanced by the adoption of IP telephony, combining separate voice and data networks into a single converged infrastructure. IP-based call centre environments also allow for possible integration into standard hardware in a data centre, for still further consolidation benefits across a company.
But incorrect or inadequate analysis, planning and design can actually make matters worse, reducing performance, exacerbating business continuity vulnerabilities, and ultimately increasing costs rather than reducing them.
Analysys Mason's recent support of key projects, in major public and private sector organisations, has provided the expertise and assurance to ensure successful outcomes with multi-million-pound savings and improved business performance.