With the myriad of vendors providing IT solutions and the velocity of change in Technology it could start to feel like sharks circling a stranded swimmer. Security threats seems to evolve and increase every 6 months and new hardware devices become available almost along the same schedule I thought it made sense to do a brief Q&A session with a Technology Adviser as these questions seem to come up on a regular basis. Thanks for Jeff Armant @jeffarmant for taking the time to respond in detail to each of these!
How have you seen your role transition from systems integrator (VAR) to Trusted Technology Adviser?
IT has evolved so rapidly; most clients don’t have the time to keep up with new technologies and practices. We learn so much from the exposure we have to our vast client base and vendors, the knowledge that we can pass on to others is invaluable.
What are the top challenges you see your customers struggling with?
Ever evolving SECURITY threats / INTEGRATION challenges across various platforms / APPLICATION MIGRATIONS / BUDGET constraints and ROI alignment.
How do you help your customer bridge the gap between various vendor solutions that were never designed to work well together?
Good question. Most commonly, some decisions and purchases are made on a now basis versus “how is this going to work with our IT roadmap and vision?”. As an example, we find many companies buy a monitoring tool for one specific application, then another tool for a different application and another and another… Typically, the larger the company, the more siloed the divisions and of course they don’t communicate with each other. If they only took the time to learn the tools better and leverage the full feature set, they can accomplish what they need. It gets expensive to buy, train and support so many tools and it’s very inefficient.
What are your thoughts on traditional projects moving from IT centric to business process / business centric / CFO led initiatives?
If a company is not leveraging the advantages a well thought out IT strategy can provide, their business will suffer and their competitors with crush them. Most C Level executives know this and measure their IT employees on business results. It’s important for us to know their business drivers, challenges and understand their initiatives. Then we can help architect solutions around that, business first, IT second.
How do you help customers deal with all the on premise legacy hardware / systems once they decide to move the cloud?
In most cases a hybrid solution is best. What to migrate is on an application by application basis. When hardware becomes end of life or needs a refresh, we architect solutions that are best suited for those workloads, maybe it’s traditional SAN storage they need to add capacity or maybe now is a good time to consider a hyperconverged solution. There are some extraordinary costs to move particular applications to the cloud and it’s important to calculate those costs first.
Typically, customers move applications off legacy hardware when that hardware has either:
1. Been fully depreciated.
2. Reached end of life.
3. They repurpose the hardware for existing applications remaining on premise.
We help by understanding the performance needs of the applications and aligning them with the appropriate hardware. Any remaining hardware not needed, we work with multiple vendors on a buy back program.
How do you help customers build proper governance around a Cloud centric enterprise to keep costs aligned and inhibit unnecessary spend / growth?
There are tools in the marketplace that we leverage to estimate the costs for a particular application to run in any of the various cloud providers or even whether an on-premise or hybrid solution would be more cost effective. Various cloud providers can run a particular application, but one may do it for a lower cost or provide better performance. With the proper tool set, you can provision and orchestrate computing cycles in any cloud and can reduce costs considerably by leveraging excess capacity
Who is your favorite customer and why?
A customer that engages their CXO level directly with us. They see the value we bring so we are able to collaborate and align, and as a result are very successful
We have an online advertisement network that values our partnership. It’s a win/win when you become a trusted advisor to a customer. We engage with them from the CXO level down and they are transparent with what they need for their business outcomes which provides significant savings by allowing us to take a holistic view. Also, we know their budget going in, which enables us to efficiently present various solutions and value to all parties. We value the partnership as much as they do, and maintaining openness and responsiveness produces results.
Most challenging customer and why?
Lack of planning / Everything is an emergency / No perceived value in a partnership / Everything is rushed and cost driven. Would rather focus on a 2% uplift for annual support on aged hardware rather than planning for a better solution that could drop Total Cost of Ownership TCO overall.
A non-profit whose primary business driver is cost. There is no value placed on people’s time. Our number one focus is to deliver value, best practices, solutions and ROI. Why spend exorbitant costs for aged technology support costs on fully depreciated hardware, when a new solution could provide extremely better performance and reduce administrative and operational expenses? We must always focus on long term client success and relationships. A cheaper singular solution is not always best when viewed across the entire enterprise, and likely has greater long-term costs. If there is no value, there is no partnership.