As pressure from the current economic downturn continues to build, IT organizations are coming under increasing pressure to speed up internal reorganizations that are designed to reduce the cost of labor associated with running IT.
Like it or not, the single biggest expense associated with IT is the cost of the people needed to run all the gear. The reason this situation exists is two fold. The first issue is that the complexity of the products we use today in the enterprise require any number of networking, storage and security specialists. The second issue is that the system management tools we have today for the most part are designed to monitor systems rather than automate tasks.
But as IT organizations continue to embrace higher levels of abstractions using any number of virtualization technologies, the need to have as much labor available to manage specific classes of devices should be reduced. Until recently, this was a trend that was naturally evolving as virtualization technologies matured. But as the economy continues to stagnate, a lot of IT organizations are going to find that they will need to accelerate the adoption of virtualization to not only reduce hardware costs but also to reduce the costs of labor associated with running IT today.
The second part of this equation concerns the quality of the systems management tools available to IT. Truth be told, a lot of these tools left a lot to be desired when it came to automating tasks. But following acquisitions of companies such as Opsware by Hewlett-Packard or Bladelogic by BMC, it's pretty clear there is a race on between HP, BMC, CA and IBM to provide the next generation systems management tools that truly do reduce the cost of running IT operations by automating tasks as opposed to just providing a lot of pretty pictures of what systems are running and which ones are down. As part of that equation, they also need to look at accelerating the convergence of networking and storage management to reduce the number of bodies required to run those functions.
What all this means is that senior IT management has to wrap its mind around the fact that if it really wants to change the rules around the costs associated with running IT, they need to first make some strategic investments in virtualization and systems management. Of course, one of the harder things to do in economic downturn is to convince executive management that they need to spend money to save money. But for far too many IT organizations, inertia has always won out over technical advancement. But with a major recession staring everybody in the face, everybody that has been taking an evolutionary approach towards advancing the state of the IT systems management needs to get on the fast track now.