When Henry Ford started to produce Model T in 1908, the cost was equivalent to $27,000 in today’s terms. Fifteen years later, the prices had been reduced with almost 75%. A more modern example is Tesla that over the years have been able to produce with less cost, with constantly improved quality and been able to introduce less expensive models that wouldn’t have been possible in the early years.
When you gain experience over the years, you understand how to build your products better and more efficient. Things that weren’t possible at the beginning, suddenly becomes possible because you know more today that when you started your journey.
It’s the same with running your IT. Over time, you will be able to do more with less (remember the old Microsoft slogan!).
It all starts with having experienced people that you empower to make decisions. Then you need the right processes for every major ‘flow’ that is then supported with SOPs (Standard Operational Procedures). Quality in managing IT comes out of having a structured approach so that everything is automatically documented, and tasks are performed according to your processes and SOPs. You don’t reinvent the wheel every time, instead you know what to do based on your experience and you always follow processes and protocol.
Last but not least, you need to use the right tools for managing your IT, and your people need to know how to use them. Management tools evolve over time, and you need to embrace new tools that makes your work more efficient. Gone are the days when everything is manually handled and today lots of mundane tasks are either automated or you do it for many at the same time and that not only makes it more efficient but also improves quality.
Volume matters
Besides experience and having the right tools, it’s also a volume game. The more VMs, containers and applications you manage, the easier it will be to gain efficiencies. And a large volume helps you tocontinuously build your knowledge and improve your skillsets. You will also find that several of your customers are running the same specialized applications or heavily customized standard applications, and the knowledge of how to take care of them benefits everyone. We always thoroughly document how to deal with an application that is new to us so that we know how to best manage it.
Customers expect IT to be up and running 24/7 365 so you will need a team of skilled people on duty every hour of the year. That means not just 1st line but also 2nd and 3rd line people on duty. You will need a competent Incident Response Team that is always ready to engage which drives cost and will become a big burden for any corporation. But if you have a large volume of resources and customers to manage, the cost per customer will be shared and not become significant for each customer – and incidents during night are few but when they happen you will need to address them correctly.
A large volume under our wings helps to reduce cost and increase quality because it feeds us with a broader experience related to applications.
Constantly improving
Yesterday’s way of managing IT is no good today. You need to always embrace new technologies and methods so that you stay on top of the game. We’ve chosen to be a very close partner to Microsoft, and we will always be on the brink of testing new tools and services – and once they’re ready for the general public, we’ll implement them in our day-to-day work with customers’ environments. As we always want to attract the best engineers we can possibly find, it helps to be in the frontline of new technologies and constantly evolving. Building a strong reputation for embracing new technologies is not bad when you’re recruiting!
What have we done before?
Previously, our team have helped a major North European airline to reduce their cost for running and managing mission-critical applications. Savings have been between 75% to 85% depending on the application.
We have also helped a market-leading ISV in the CRM space to reduce the cost for customers running their application. Savings have been approx. 30% to 40% but even more important, it became so much easier for their customers to buy the application when there was a bundle that gave them a SaaS-ified experience, so their account managers were able to close more deals.
And we have helped several public sector entities to reduce cost with 50% to 70% for running their public websites. Sometimes it’s really low-hanging fruit reducing cost for the public sector but we’re proud having done it on several occasions.
Another example are three real estate companies that reduced their cost between 40% to 45%. When you have several customers in the same industry, or vertical, it really helps everyone to reduce cost.
Conclusion
Most partners can save money for their customers and that often translates into access to funding for new projects without having to increase IT budgets. We can’t promise how much you will save but we can promise you that we’re going to do a thorough analysis under NDA of how to make it happen and then you make the decision to move forward or not.
You can save cost by reducing quality of service and face angry stakeholders, or you can save cost by having a blackbelt partner taking care of running your customers’ IT.
Like Henry Ford discovered, the experience of how to do things gives you a better and more efficient output. And we all know that today’s Tesla cars are more capable and more efficient than their predecessors because experience matters.
Let us show you what we can do for your customers!