IT budgets under pressure

As the slowdown continues IT managers and directors are under pressure to curtail spending.

Industry-wide IT budgets are being slashed, resulting in aggressive cost cutting, painful project delays and a rethink of key strategic IT initiatives.

Looking for less painful savings

But how implement cuts in a way that won’t impact on service levels, or unravel progress in key areas?

For many companies the answer the targeting of savings from an unlikely source – Under-used, Over-licensed, or Redundant software and hardware. Although previously hidden and traditionally overlooked in IT inventories and budgets, these areas can deliver annual savings of up to 20% of IT expenditure.

Moreover, these savings are by in large painless and can be achieved without curtailing service levels, cutting head count, or curtailing important initiatives.

The key sources of savings

The new savings are being acheived in 4 key areas:

1.   Slashing bloated software budgets and cutting the surprising volume of under-used and over-licensed software to be found in every organization.

2. Equipment costs, in particular machines that :
-  Have been retired, or are redundant, but on which leases, software and support is being paid
-  Are under-utilized, require an upgrade, can be virtualized, or can be re-deployed

3. Support costs :
- Reconciling charges with an actual inventory, as opposed to estimated, number of PCs, servers, etc. to
-  Reduce the cost of support contracts
-  Capture all revenue in respect of internal billing
-  Reducing support call handling times
-  Identifying unsupported software and hardware on the network

4. The cost of major IT projects and transformations, including: Virtualization, Consolidation, Software migrations, etc.

How to identify the savings?

Exploiting these opportunities to cut costs requires a more accurate inventory of  hardware and software.  In particular, the use of tools that enable managers to identify that 10-20% of under-utilised, over-licensed, or redundant hardware and software that is often hidden on the network.