It should come as no surprise, if the typical server runs at 20% utilization, that most IT organizations spend over 75% of their discretionary budget simply maintaining current operations. As IT becomes increasingly strategic to businesses in every industry, the cost of downtime- of applications not being available to customers, employees or partners- becomes more and more severe. So IT cannot afford to let these servers and applications fail, and to let their service levels degrade.

But at the same time, organizations are increasingly looking to IT to facilitate and support their growth initiatives. Mergers, acquisitions, new product releases and vertical integrations are just some examples of the growth and innovation projects that are becoming top of mind for leading businesses.

How can IT find the balance? It’s impossible to take budget out of current system maintenance or take infrastructure offline to reduce costs without introducing significant risk to the continuity of the business. But neither is doing nothing an option; the business needs IT to be a facilitator for new sources of revenue, growth and profitability. To stay competitive, organizations need IT to find the balance.

The Challenge:  Finding the Balance

While IT can’t make investment decisions in a vacuum, nor can the organization under-invest in IT support for growth and innovation. But the challenge is not budget; as Gartner has shown, excess infrastructure exists today, which means there are costs that can be cut and spend that can be redirected.

The challenge, then, is to make informed decisions; a reduction in investment in one area in the interest of increased investment elsewhere cannot result in lower levels of IT service to the enterprise. But making informed decisions about consolidation or virtualization candidates, or the relative value of outsourcing IT operations, requires insight. Insight into current operations and capacity, current budget, and the business objectives of the organization.

Predictive IT Management Capabilities

The unique Predictive IT Management capabilities from HyPerformix enable IT organizations to manage the risk inherent in consolidation projects and in rebalancing IT portfolio investments.  By turning technical information about current and future performance, workload and service level requirements into business insights, HyPerformix provides exceptional, accurate, forward looking decision support for IT portfolio investments.

HyPerformix provides unique modeling and simulation capabilities with step-by-step guides, extensive pre-configured integrations with data sources such as Tivoli, HP (Mercury) LoadRunner and HP OpenView, a methodology and best practices to derive the business insights required to make informed business decisions. Specific support for virtualized environments, data center consolidations and outsourcing decision support make HyPerformix unique in the market.

Examples of insights facilitated by HyPerformix include:

• “Time to live” for current applications, and capital expenditures required to extend it
• Carrying costs of current overcapacity
• Ability of current infrastructure to handle increased business volume, and critical point at which additional investment is required to support the growth
• IT budget (cap-ex and op-ex) required to support new business initiatives or seasonal peaks in volume
• Consolidation and virtualization candidates in current infrastructure
• Specific configuration changes to improve performance and capacity from current infrastructure and cut costs

These are a small sample of the business insights that Predictive IT Management from HyPerformix provides. HyPerformix can extrapolate business insights from virtually any current or planned infrastructure and applications, bringing risk under control and facilitating informed business decisions.

The Value

Reliably and accurately identifying overprovisioned applications, underutilized servers and opportunities for enhanced performance mean that costs- both hard and soft- can be removed from IT, and real ROI can be realized and identified from consolidation initiatives.

Some areas of savings that Predictive IT Management identifies include:   Decreased operations costs Reduced personnel required to manage infrastructure components Reduced software licensing fees Lower facilities expenses Reduced power consumption Reduced cooling requirements Reduced hardware spend Smaller carbon footprint

Informed business decisions in  IT mean that IT spend can be reallocated from maintenance to support for growth initiatives, while maintaining current support levels for mission critical business applications.

Insight allows IT organizations to reduce the risk of consolidating infrastructure, find the spend balance between maintenance and growth, and identify the value of virtualization and consolidation projects. HyPerformix is the leading provider of Predictive IT Management in the market today; capabilities that provide insight from IT Operations.