IT Cost Management

Mocha Data uses deduplication extensively with its clients because of the excellent return on investment. John Conlin, a partner at the company, says that a client that used to store 10 terabytes of data will often find itself with only three.

“It depends on the product we use, but the ROI for this kind of infrastructure is always less than three years,” he says. “Usually, it’s less than 12 months.”

Lindblom explains that a conservative number for powering and cooling a server for a year is $3,000. So if deduplication allows a company to remove, say, 94 servers . . . well, it’s enough to make the finance department click its heels.

4. Better Employee Management

As we’ve seen, deduplication and cloud computing both can reduce IT staffing needs. That may mean companies can avoid additional hiring during growth periods. But Lindblom says it doesn’t usually mean they can lay off existing personnel. Most IT departments are operating at about 125 percent of capacity, he says. If there are fewer servers to monitor, it just means that the IT manager works a slightly less ridiculous amount of overtime.

So staff-related savings must come from other corners.

Genesis10, a business and technology consulting firm based in Woodbury, offers a consulting service designed to help clients make the most of their IT employees.

“We go in and review an IT department’s overall team and identify where certain resources are over-skilled,” explains business development executive Varda Nauen. “We find alternative growth opportunities for the more senior people. Then we look to identify more junior talent that would be a cost-effective way to help build their next-generation work force. As an example, on a large ERP [enterprise resource planning] project, they might have a very senior person or an expensive consultant working on basic project-coordination duties. Those are things that could be done by somebody less experienced.”

The cross-training portion of the program is vital, especially when companies are trying to avoid layoffs. “We see this a lot,” Nauen says. “There’s a lot of movement internally. People who are not subject-matter experts in a certain area are getting that training so that they can preserve their jobs. Rather than replacing people, companies are redistributing the work.”

The big outsourcing wave has mostly come to an end, O’Konski says. Outsourcing was good at eliminating human resources costs, but it was inflexible. Any changes to the IT environment tended to be costly.