As I said on Friday it's not always about the cash.
Running software
in-house means more than just buying a product, then sitting back and watching
it do your Capacity Management on its own.
If only the world were that simple!
Other factors are needed in place and working well to make Capacity
Management successful.
Resources
are needed to run in-house software.
These include machine resources such as servers, disks and network to
run the chosen or developed products.
Typically today, time is needed from many teams within an IT
infrastructure division to get a product up and running. This can include desktop support, systems
administrators, network support, database administrators and more. A good installation will need Capacity
Management to be integrated at a process level with other functions such as
Change, Incident and Problem Management.
Getting all the right resources in place to implement and run a product,
with effective processes to make sure it runs to the benefit of the business,
can be a complex and time consuming task.
It all adds to the cost of that product and the risk of it taking too
long see a return on investment. The
costs and involvement of resources and people doesn’t cease with
implementation. On-going support and
resources, both IT infrastructure and people, are needed to keep a product delivering
what it is intended to deliver. Done
well, it presents an excellent technical solution. You have a Capacity Management product picked
specifically to suit your needs. You
have a team of people, equipped with the right resources, to make the function
a successful contributor to the business.
SaaS
for your Capacity Management offers benefits that contrast with the software
ownership model. By paying for a service
hosted by another supplier in the Cloud, you move so many of those costs on to
your supplier. Which will be the right
model for you then becomes an equation. One has to compare the cost for providing
those in-house resources against the charges from your SaaS supplier, assuming
the end product from the two is the same.
Probably
the most common assumption is that you retain the skilled Capacity Management
personnel in-house. They can apply their knowledge of your business and its
needs to the Capacity Management data managed by the SaaS provider. Essentially this model transfers the administrative
costs of providing a Capacity Management service to the provider. It becomes their job to ensure there are
sufficient processing resources to store and manage your capacity data. It is their job to make sure the environment
in which the software is running and the software itself, with any supporting
products, is up to date, maintained and managed effectively. The costs of providing the infrastructure
are passed to the SaaS provider. This
leaves you with zero cost for creating and maintaining your Capacity Management
infrastructure and zero cost on other teams within your organization to support
it.
Costs
are rarely absolutely zero however. There
can be many variations on this basic scenario and each organization will need
to decide what suits them best if outsourcing to the Cloud. The key is usually to define the boundaries where
responsibilities meet. If capacity data
is to be captured within your organization and sent to your SaaS provider in
the Cloud, one needs to define who has the responsibility for data capture. There will be agents or agentless software to
implement and manage to enable this.
There is the software and network issue of how that data gets to the
SaaS provider. Someone needs to own each
part of the process and bear the cost of providing that part of the
service. Who is best placed to do that
will vary with each set of needs and resources available. All this assumes of course that your own
in-house security is happy with whatever mechanism is used to pass data outside
your organization, and that it’s management outside your organization meets
your business standards.
Another
key decision in terms of the division of responsibility is who will do the
‘value add’ Capacity Management work. If
your decision to use SaaS is purely to move the cost of maintaining an in-house
infrastructure on to someone else, then you will be retaining skilled Capacity
Management staff. They will need access
to the Capacity Management software in the Cloud. Their usage of it will be as if it was an
in-house owned and managed product. They
will take the raw data and transform it into the information the business
requires. This can be an efficient and
effective model. Your experienced
Capacity Management team are able to leverage their specialist skills to best
effect, not lose time doing work that can be better and more cost effectively
done by others.
An
alternative is for your SaaS provider to carry out some or all of the skilled Capacity
Management work as well as maintaining the environment. This could provide cheaper labor costs for
your organization. On the flip side, it
means you no longer retain that Capacity Management knowledge in-house. Both its formal and informal value to your
business is lost. In this scenario, what
is delivered by the outside organization tends to be highly defined and variations
usually mean additional cost. Aside from
the financial concerns, some Capacity Management information cannot be
effectively delivered without intimate knowledge of your own organization. There is always the chance that something is
lost if information is delivered by those who don’t have this level of
interaction within your business. It is
of course a decision that needs to be right from the start. Once you lose staff with experience, that
knowledge is often gone for good.
So
where does this leave you? I'll conclude by taking a look at this on Wednesday.
Andrew Smith
Chief Executive Office
