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 March 2007. In the past, IT consolidation was largely viewed as a tactical project designed to lower IT costs. Today, IT consolidation is often a strategic business initiative that encompasses the entire IT enterprise. For many organizations, it’s about streamlining assets and processes, reducing complexity, enhancing business agility, and increasing the speed of execution. It’s about freeing human resources from spending hours maintaining an environment, so they can focus on driving competitive IT innovation instead. It’s about enabling IT to add more value to the business.
To reach optimal consolidation goals, organizations need a strategic partner who can help them evaluate, design and implement end-to-end enterprise consolidation solutions. If this describes your situation or needs, please consider the following:
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Fact 1: Take a strategic end-to-end enterprise view |
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Before beginning any consolidation project, you should fully understand your unique organizational needs and the potential business and financial advantages of consolidating. HP helps you focus on all aspects of your IT environment – the technology, people and processes – that are crucial to the success of a strategic enterprise-wide consolidation initiative.
You’ll need to move beyond point solutions to address complete infrastructure opportunities. We help you do this through lifecycle services that deliver end-to-end enterprise analysis and strategy development, architecture validation, design and implementation, and ongoing management and evolution of your solution.1 For example, HP offers collaborative storage services where we can be involved in the entire consolidation process, or just a portion of that process. 2
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Fact 2: Consider vendors that can deliver a full portfolio of enterprise technology, including servers, storage and software |
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To gain the most from consolidation, consider streamlining your whole infrastructure. That means evaluating possibilities including servers, storage, networks, management software, access devices, printers and clients in a staged approach, with the intention of maximizing your biggest ROI early on. HP has one of the broadest product portfolios in the industry, backed by a world-class services organization that has delivered thousands of consolidation projects around the world. (For more information about HP technology, check out HP product technology )
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Fact 3: Unified infrastructure management can simplify your environment and reduce costs |
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The ongoing administration and maintenance of an existing infrastructure consumes the lion's share of most IT budgets today. In fact, hardware and software acquisition costs can account for as little as 20 percent of overall expenditures. You can redirect some of the administration costs used for maintaining an existing infrastructure and respond more quickly to business demands by implementing a robust server, storage and application management software solution that consolidates IT infrastructure management capabilities.3 HP Systems Insight Manager and optional Essentials software plug-ins deliver comprehensive offerings that can help your organization achieve these goals.
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Fact 4: Consolidation is not just about hardware, but also applications and data |
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Application and database consolidation can improve performance and streamline resources by eliminating redundancies and combining multiple applications and databases into a cohesive IT environment. HP has long-established partnerships with industry leaders such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft, as well as experience installing and consolidating thousands of software-based solutions across a broad range of industries. 4 ,5
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Fact 5: Experience in consolidation offers significant value |
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HP has more than 65,000 service professionals in over 170 countries with the expertise to help you successfully develop and deploy an enterprise consolidation solution. HP delivers more than 5,000 IT consolidation projects annually, working from our proven ITSM reference model that utilizes the best service practices as defined by the de facto industry standard for IT management, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).6 Add to this over 100,000 HP Partners around the globe—and we have you covered.
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Fact 6: Leverage best practice methodologies |
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You’ll want to work with a partner that has experience delivering consolidation projects which produce positive business outcomes. HP is using the same resources, methodology and technology we provide our customers to complete one of the largest IT consolidation projects in the industry – our own.
HP is in the process of consolidating 85 worldwide global data centers down to just 6 locations, and refocusing 80 percent of our IT workforce to development and 20 percent to support. We’re also consolidating our applications and databases into a single enterprise data warehouse that provides a single source of accurate information to enable rapid business decisions, and we expect considerable benefits to accrue from these efforts.
To learn more about what HP can do for you, please visit: hp.com/go/itconsolidation
Also see what Enterprise Management Associates has to say about the value of consolidating the number of IT vendors you work with: Vendor Consolidation
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