HP have made big announcements over the past few weeks about consolidating their many data centres and operational locations into a far smaller number. One has to wonder why HP, among others, are centralising all their infrastructure?
Clearly it makes financial sense to reduce overhead while maintaining or improving performance - which is the goal of these types of infrastructure consolidation.
The fact that HP, one of the largest IT companies in the world, is embracing this strategy, is an endorsement of one of our key messages - hosted applications.
Take a standard business with a couple of in-house servers as an example. The servers probably act as a file store and email platform. There is most likely a tape backup solution that the MD or resident IT-guru (who is full-time in a sales or admin role!) manually runs the backup, rotates the tapes and brings one home every evening; and there is a maintenance contract in place which guarantees repair / replacement SLA’s.
The consolidation strategy is one of reducing un-needed infrastructure. For a small business to have their own servers and most likely no full-time IT staff is lunacy. For starters the capital cost of hardware and software licenses is a lot, as well as the maintenance contracts and internal labour required for bug fixes and software patching.
We are trying to educate the market to the hosted application alternative. In this scenario, an Internet Infrastructure Provider supplies the machines, software licenses (hurray for SPLA!), power and IP connectivity. The IIP also guarantees better uptime and repair SLA’s than is possible in-house. Furthermore the backup can be automated and sync’d to an off-site (another data centre) location. The real carrot of this solution then is not only that it is demonstrably far superior, it is also massively cheaper - as there is no capital outlay, and only a minimal monthly spend (our Financial Controller - Ken Pierce - has a good Cost-Benefit comparision analysis on this … which we’ll hopefully make into a web-enabled tool soon).
Clearly the industry believes hosted applications (Software as a Service - SaaS - some call it) are the way forward - with Microsoft (whom long derided anything not based on a local PC) embracing it with their SPLA licensing scheme.
The greatest challenge is in educating the market - moving visibly equipment off-site has a perception of risk, even though it’s actually being moved to a better facility!
Tags: hostedapplications, hosting, hosting365, exchange, email, iip,
