Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
Who’s making the deal for the business? And how does that impact IT? Historically, corporate finance and procurement have held the reins for vendor and contract management; not surprising given its responsibility for the corporate bottom line. While this seems reasonable on the surface, the results for IT have been mixed. Financial management teams typically…
The economic downturn forced deep cuts in IT budgets. Now, as CIO’s plan for the recovery, they are facing unprecedented demand for IT services from the business. At the same time, organizations are still keeping spending tightly under control. As CIOs prepare for next year’s budget cycle, it is unrealistic to assume that they can…
The economy may be improving but there is still a dark cloud over IT spending, according to the annual IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks study by Computer Economics released Wednesday. The research firm frames the IT spending outlook for this year as in a recession based on its coverage of the field since 1990. Computer…
For many organizations, a good deal is defined at the bargaining table: Did you get the price concessions you wanted? Did you get service add-ons thrown in for free? Are extra features included in the base package? Yes? Well, then it’s a good deal. Software vendors love this line of thinking. It’s lazy and it…
In the Details While BATNA is essentially your walk-away point, many technology deals are so complicated that it’s hard to come up with an apples-to-apples comparisons. James C. Roberts III, managing partner at The Global Capital Law Group, counsels his clients to understand wiggle room and horse swapping. “We try to go through the major…
TCO Analysis Conducting a TCO analysis is a great way to uncover the cost of your current storage equipment or help you to identify the lifecycle cost of a new storage system. To help you uncover the TCO of your storage system here is an easy rule-of-thumb guide for reference. So, to wrap up, following…
In today’s economic environment, it’s critically important to make sure that any data storage system an organization purchases has an optimally low total cost of ownership (TCO) over its lifetime. Many storage buyers today use capital expenditure (CapEx) as the sole factor for determining the value of a storage purchase. In doing so, they overlook…
The up-front cost of storage can also be reduced by implementing a tiered storage strategy. By purchasing storage capacity at a variety of price points you’ll have the flexibility to tailor the system’s capacity to your budget, with more expensive, high-performance storage for transaction processing systems, or value storage for disk backup. Additionally, you may…
Helping their businesses run more productively, efficiently and improving agility are the main concerns of CIOs today. Most also believe we are seeing the light at the end of the recession tunnel but few will commit to spending, except on safe bets. CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives cite business productivity and cost reduction as…
Similar results were found when CIOs were asked about staff salaries. Eighty-one percent (81%) of respondents said staff salaries stayed the same or increased in 2009, while 91% expect salaries to stay level or increase in 2010. Again, back to pre-recession levels. “Here’s what’s happening: overall, budgets are the same or down for this year,”…