Happy New Year from everyone at Metron

Here’s hoping that everyone has had an enjoyable holiday season and is looking forward to the start of a new year.  Happy New Year to everyone from all the team at Metron.

I’m not a great one for New Year resolutions, so I won’t offer any of those.  There are things that I know I should be getting around to – my conscience regularly tells me I need to update my LinkedIn profile, but this is just part of an on-going ‘to do’ list, whatever the time of year.

I’ll leave others to make the big predictions about what the big themes will be in IT.  We’ve probably all seen plenty of information about this anyway.  Cloud is getting bigger and bigger such that it isn’t something new or special, it’s just how we do things. Software as a Service is more and more part of our day to day life – many things that used to be internal to Metron such as email and CRM are now externally hosted.  The same is happening elsewhere, with what are considered critical applications now being put in the Cloud by some organizations. 

Big data is going to be, well, BIG, so storage will continue to spread faster than anything.  Note to self: must learn what comes after ‘petabyte’, as this already seems to be a common capacity term.  Are exabytes, zettabytes, yottabytes and so on real terms, or is someone having fun at my expense?  Time will tell, all too quickly.  For those of us involved in capacity management, we need to find out sooner rather than later.

I guess our area at Metron is capacity management, and so I should be most concerned with that.  Here are three things I would like to see in the New Year.  They are randomly picked personal items – there are many others I could have selected.   I’d be interested to hear your alternatives – at least for the capacity management items(J):

-          As we still battle to come out of the recession, I’d like to see every cent valued by organizations.  Too often I hear that ‘we don’t need capacity management because servers/virtual servers/Cloud resources are cheap’ or ‘we don’t need capacity management because we’ve bought enough resource to see us through the next 3 years’ – the latter being a genuine quote from a Deputy CIO to me.  Nothing is cheap if you buy more than you need.  The cost is not the unit cost of the item, it’s what value that money could have bought your business used elsewhere.

-          I’d like to see the Capacity Management Group (www.cmg.org) resurgent.  Capacity management should be seen as vital to cost effective IT service delivery, too often it is not.  CMG offers a superb forum for exchange of ideas and free education to enable you to allow capacity management achieve its potential for your organization.  Restrictions on travel and an increasing internal focus by management in response to the recession have seen attendance at conferences such as CMG diminish due to their ‘cost’, rather than be considered for their ‘value’.  Developments in the IT world such as virtualization and Cloud will make it ever easier to spend money ineffectively on IT infrastructure – capacity management offers a route to avoid that.  Participating in CMG can help any organization realize that benefit.

-          I’d like to see the New York Jets and Sheffield Wednesday Football Club conquer all before them...... Oh well, you can’t have everything.

By all means send me your capacity management wishes for the New Year and I will pass them on through our blog.  In the meantime, have a happy, healthy and successful 2013.

Andrew Smith

Chief Sales & Marketing Officer