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Removing complexity and cost to drive return on innovation the new ROI

There is no such thing as an information recession however there the realities of economic challenges in IT data centers also known as information factories.

Likewise, people and data are living longer with increased dependency on information being available and reliable when needed. Hence the need for data infrastructures that protect, preserve and serve information in a cost-effective productive way.

Driving return on innovation (the new ROI) to support growth

A common challenge for organizations of all size is how to support business and data growth while working within budget constraints without compromising on customer service expectations. Simply cutting cost at the price of reliability, availability, serviceability or performance is not an option for most environments.

Driving data center and data infrastructure sustainability

The solution is to find and remove complexity and thus remove costs. How to carry out the above goal is to leverage various tools and techniques to streamline IT and data infrastructures in creative ways.

Core IT building blocks (servers, storage and networking, hardware and software)

With data storage along with servers, networks and associated software management tools being the fundamental building blocks for traditional, virtual and cloud environments, it makes sense to apply some focus there.

How you use different tools and technologies to address various challenges while enabling your organization to be more effective and productive will decide your return on innovation, the new ROI. The new ROI is a companion reflecting qualitative business benefits vs. traditional black and white quantitative spreadsheet numbers based indicators.

Watch out for Garbage In, Garbage Out ROI and TCO analysis

Return on innovation reflects how various tools and technologies, joined with different processes, procedures, and best practices and people skills are combined to address a problem or challenge and enable some benefit. An example is deploying storage optimization techniques to support growth by finding and removing complexities, boosting effectiveness (as well as efficiency) without negatively affecting productivity.

Where financial based ROI looks at a number that may show impacts to customer service, return on innovation highlights the business benefit (e.g. perhaps non-financial) such as getting more work done in same amount of time or keeping customers satisfied.

Keep in mind, that when you can find and remove complexity, cost savings are the usual benefit vs. finding and moving or masking problems that end up costing more over time.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

greg