Can you really justify capacity management? – 1/5

As a supplier of capacity management (CM) software and services, we often get asked to help with justifying investment in the area.  Typically this is justifying buying our software.  

In this series I’ll consider this, but the principles apply equally to justifying the discipline itself, even if no software is involved.  I’ll offer my views of how I think CM pays for itself, but I’d be very interested to hear your views so feel free to set me right or offer things I’ve overlooked.

Of course, if you’re looking to work out a proper Return on Investment (ROI), you need to consider the cost side of things as well.  I’ll offer a few thoughts about that side of the equation too – my thoughts on what you should include, software and non-software. 

On my side of the industry, I like to think that the savings will always easily outweigh the costs – our Athene software is always worth the money!

The equation is simple for the CIO:

(Savings from CM software) – (Money spent on CM software) > zero, pretty quickly

If that equation isn’t true, why should he spend the money?

On the justification side, we’re always looking to find ways that we can say that CM saves money.  The ‘zero, pretty quickly’ part of that equation is important.  One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that the payback period that a CIO wants to see from capacity management has dropped from 5 years to 3 years to well under a year over the course of the last twenty years.  A sign of the economic times!

So, to summarize what I’ll cover in my blogs are some areas where CM should pay dividends for your business:

·         Less outage due to capacity issues

·         Less time when service levels are poor

·         More productive CM staff

·         Fewer performance and capacity crises needing fixing

·         Deferring hardware purchase, including things such as accelerating virtualization

·         Consolidating CM software products

Balanced against this the cost areas needing to be included if you are buying a CM product are:

·         Costs of CM software, including on-going maintenance

·         CM team resources needed to use that software

·         Initial training for the new software

·         Implementation and on-going services required

·         Other personnel resources that are needed to help with the implementation and on-going usage of the software

In my next blog on Wednesday I’ll look at the savings side of this equation in a bit more detail.

Andrew Smith

Chief Sales & Marketing Officer