2009 has started with earnest, and -- by now -- I've had enough of a chance to visit with customers and prospects to get a sense of what people are thinking about.
Efficiency.
It's always been a popular topic in IT infrastructure. Now it's entirely dominating the discussion, almost like Y2K did back in 1999.
I wanted to share with you my observations of how people are thinking about the topic, and what they're doing. And, no, I'm not going to use this as another opportunity to flog any particular product.
Well, maybe just a little .. :-)
Don't You Hate Being Put In A Category?
You know the old joke about there being two kinds of people in the world -- those that put people in two categories, and those that don't?
My first category (call them Type I) thinks of efficiency as doing pretty much what they've done in the past, but either do less of it, do it cheaper or a little bit of both.
If they can delay a project, they do. If they have to buy something, they do so as cheaply as possible -- sometimes a bit too cheap, in my opinion.
They're not changing the essence or nature of what they're doing; they're just going slow and sweating every budget dollar. Nothing wrong with that.
As an example, I recently had a chance to meet f2f with Mike Linett from Zerowait. Great people with a great business. One of the better storage blogs, too. They do third-party extended maintenance and refurb storage for NetApp environments.
He says business has gotten really, really good lately.
As another example, I have recently met storage admins that have (finally) made a map of all those huge storage globs running on their arrays, and have left the safe environs of the IT offices to track down the responsible owners for an honest discussion. I think that's a good thing.
And, of course, there are IT projects being delayed or deferred all over the place. As a matter of fact, one of my opening questions with customers these days is "given the new economic environment, what are you working on, and what are you postponing?".
And I always get an interesting answer -- because it reflects the projects that just can't be deferred -- and, thus, the priorities of the business.
Type II Thinking Is Different
The second category of people (creatively labeled Type II) are somewhat fewer in nature, and have a decidedly different view of the current situation.
They think of the term "efficiency" in a richer and broader manner than is the norm.
Not to oversimplify, but they see the current conditions as an excellent opportunity to change the way things are done, rather than what is being done.
They're interested in process and organizational change. Or taking entirely new views of existing challenges. They're investing time, effort and resources to re-engineer and re-structure, not simply reduce.
And they're really fun to talk to.
They realize that they can tap into broader organizational thinking and current economic anxieties to drive fundamental change in IT. They smell an opportunity.
Some Great Examples of Type II Thinking
I met one IT leader whose company was planning to take a big restructuring charge to achieve a more efficient run rate. He put his hand up and asked for a surprisingly large sum to do the same for his IT operation. He got it.
I met another one who was trying to virtualize as much of the environment as possible with the goal of 100% virtualization. Of course, he ran into all sorts of unjustified friction and obstacles as he tried to do this. He did note that, in the current economic environment, nobody had much of an objection any more, so he was racing ahead while the wind was at his back, so to speak.
A third person was overhauling most of the IT org chart, moving people in and out, as well as setting up an entirely new organizational structure that reflected where the business was going, rather than where it had been.
There's more, but I think you get the picture -- these people are builders -- they're taking a broader (and more opportunistic!) perspective of things.
Hot Projects
So, all sorts of interesting customer activity is bubbling up at EMC as a result of this sort of thinking. Let me give you an unofficial rundown of some of the hot topics:
- Accelerating VMware adoption
No surprise here. And, given our success in 2008 in running some pretty beefy applications in virtual containers, there's a big tranche of work to get after -- not to mention the associated infrastructure to backup, remotely replication, manage, secure, etc.
I consider this a Type II project -- you're fundamentally changing the way you're doing something.
- Building A Storage Service Catalog
This kind of project has been around for many years, but it's become newly popular again.
The idea is simple: build a business-facing catalog of storage services, associated costs for each, and let the business choose the service/cost tradeoff they want for their information.
Going a bit farther, align the storage infrastructure and processes around defining, delivering and improving how those services are delivered. If you haven't done this yet in your organization, it's pretty much guaranteed to take a mind-bending hunk out of your storage spend, as well as result in much happier business users.
Again, another Type II project if you haven't done it already.
- Getting After Backup, Restore and Archiving
By now, everyone pretty much gets that archiving stale data can dramatically reduce your backup footprint. And people generally get that data deduplication can squeeze another sizable chunk out of the backup stream.
On the technology side, capacious disks are getting ever-cheaper, and they spin down these days. And thse tape vendors are looking decidedly tired and a little long in the tooth.
So -- as a result -- we're seeing all sorts of projects around these topics. I consider this an excellent example of Type II thinking.
- Growing The Data Warehouse Environment
This one suprised me initially, but now I get it.
In tough economic times, people are starving for all sorts of analytical information -- and they want it in realtime. As a result, we've seen big spike of interest in IT shops who want to revist their DW/BI environment, and take it to the next level.
They need to store more data, serve it up faster than ever, and do more to keep it operationally available 24x7. Good thing we've been busy on that one for a while ...
In several cases, IT teams are re-engineering their approach to providing scalable and manageable DW/BI infrastructure, rather than just doing more of the same. I'd consider this Type II thinking.
- Investing In Automation
Yes, we're seeing all sorts of renewed interest in new frameworks that automate ITIL workflows, do real-time root cause analysis, assure IT infrastructure compliance, and so on.
The problems aren't new, but the situation is: the organization can afford far fewer IT operations people, but still has to deliver at 100% -- hence strong interest in these newer frameworks.
These cases are great examples of Type II thinking, IMHO.
- Buying Enterprise Flash Drives
OK, this is sort of a product plug, but it's legit.
Imagine a big, revenue-generating application at a large enterprise. The faster the application runs, the more money the business makes. And, if you look around, you can find these everywhere -- etailing apps, billing apps, etc.
Today, these usually run on very wide stripes of short-stroked high performance FC drives. Take an app that runs on 80 15k drives, and put it on 4 or 8 EFD drives.
The application runs like a bat out of hell, and the storage costs (media, software, power/cooling, etc.) drop like a rock. More and more IT people are connecting the dots on this one.
No wonder every other storage vendor is racing to put these in their product line.
There's More ...
... but I hope I've been able to illustrate my point.
As vendors, I think we have to be prepared to accomodate and support both kinds of "efficient thinking".
There will be many people who don't really want to change what they're doing -- they just need to s-t-r-e-t-c-h their budgets. We've got to help them use what they already have more efficiently (regardless of who they got it from), as well as get very creative on anything they need to purchase.
And (thankfully) there seem to be plenty of people who are using the current situation to get ahead of the curve, so to speak. They see an opportunity to invest to create an improved and sustainable run rate in their IT shops.
I hope the vendor community can collectively resist the temptation to tout one technology or another as the magic cure-all for what ails the IT budget these days. As an industry, my opinion is that we haven't done well in this regard lately.
But maybe we can improve ...
Hi Chuck,
I kind of agree and disagree with some aspects of this post. As you point out there being two categories of thinkers, in terms people that want to save money (not by choice) and the ones that want to spend money for operational efficiencies (seldom see these days).
As we all talk to customers today, one thing that echoes out of all of them is cost cutting or cost savings, IT in most cases being a support organization to the core of the business, tends to get effected in terms of budget and information delivery cost.
During the peak years of IT growth, like 1998/1999, 2005/2006/2007, people (IT managers, CIO's) fall into category II thinking, where money is not an issue to obtain realtime information using BI and workflow for operational efficiency.
Things do change as we get into years 2000, 2001, 2008 and now especially 2009. When IT budgets are being cut, how can any customer or CIO be ready to throw another 5 Mil into IT spending to gain further efficiency (because that is what they did during the peak years). All operational inefficiencies that were accumulated during the boom years, while have to change to efficiencies during these downturn years, in terms of infrastructure and resources.
These days talking to customers, it seems like all want to somehow manage to get through 2009 without any major IT spending and that even includes somehow managing to extend the life of the equipment they have on the floor. In this respect the data that is gathered from applications, users, etc is not decreasing, the run rate of data is likely to increase, but the pressure is on the IT managers to delivery without spending money, in essence go through re-org of their existing IT equipment (through reclamation, redeployment and operational changes).
Example (Just taking about storage): We have all heard about this, where a SYS Admin would ask the storage admins that he needs 5TB of Tier 1 storage. While his database currently sits at a size of 2TB, he projects that over the next 3 years the size of the database will be 5TB. Those days of operations inefficiencies are long gone now, but the problem is these allocations that were done several years ago and currently is unused. These are the hot spots the IT managers have to manage to locate and redeploy.
There are tons of these examples, we run across everyday, but these days with IT budgets shrinking, IT mangers and Operational Directors have no choice but to look at alternatives. I believe that is one of the reasons, EMC after a long straight 21 quarters fell below 2 digit growth (do not get me wrong, it is great staying profitable during these times and its great that EMC has been able to deliver on it), but the times are hard and all vendors realize it.
We will real quickly see a shift of Category II thinkers moving into Category I, not by choice but under pressure to delivery without IT spending.
Posted by: Devang Panchigar | February 01, 2009 at 12:59 PM