Do More With What You Have
by Hu Yoshida on Feb 23, 2012
Chris Trotman/Getty Images
I am sitting here in Asia—in-between customer events in Bangkok and Jakarta—and the biggest news on international and regional TV is Jeremy Lin and New York Knicks basketball. What a fantastic story! This is a great example of achieving success by doing more with what you have.
CNN had a report on how the revenue and profits for the Knick franchise has gone through the roof since the #17 point guard came off the bench and helped bring the team together for 7 straight wins.
Tickets to games are sold out with prices over $700 per ticket. Knicks merchandising is skyrocketing, especially for Lin’s jersey. Blacked-out TV games are now on the schedule attracting advertising sponsors.
The Knicks are achieving all this success, not by cutting costs or investing in another over paid star, but by utilizing what they already had sitting on their bench.
In IT, the most often used term is “do more with less”. This is not a term I like to hear because it puts the focus on cutting costs and not on generating business value. It characterizes IT as a cost center. What we should be focused on is “do more with what we have”.
Data center managers know they have a lot of underutilized assets that are already bought and paid for, leading to:
- Silos of stranded resources that are not being shared
- Talented administrators buried under workloads that should be offloaded to newer, intelligent systems
- Power and space wasted on systems that are often just idling.
The key enabler for doing more with what you have is virtualization—specifically the virtualization of storage as well as servers, and applications. Virtualization is like that quiet kid with a business degree from Harvard sitting on the bench, just waiting for an opportunity to take IT to the next level.
The focus should be on doing more with what you have rather than doing more with less.
David Merrill advises that you start with an audit. http://blogs.hds.com/david/2012/02/getting-your-budget-consumed.html#more-2491
Find out what you already have on your bench and use virtualization to enable its business value. It just may be the next virtuaLinsanity.
