The choices you make today will help determine whether your enterprise emerges from this downturn lean and competitive or emaciated and weak—a winner or a loser.
HP recommends you adopt three strategies that can help you cut costs and conserve cash in the short-term, while building competitive advantage for the long-term:
This year, global IT spending is expected to shrink rather than grow for the first time in six years, according to Goldman Sachs.1 Although opinions on the precise impact vary, the reality on the ground is the same: If your IT department hasn't been told to do more with less, then it soon will be.
Cutting costs and conserving cash are top priorities, but that doesn't mean that every investment should be cancelled, leaving existing, inefficient infrastructure in place. Instead, make focused investments to increase the efficiency of technology. An infrastructure that uses modular blades components, management and automation tools in a virtualized environment can deliver significantly lower operating costs.
Virtualized resources, including servers, storage and networking connections can boost resource utilization. In fact, independent analyst firm IDC estimates some virtualization projects can break even in four to seven months, and some can return anywhere from 472 percent to 769 percent on investment over a longer period of time.2
HP BladeSystem's innovations in virtualization, power and cooling and system management can cut operational and capital expenditures by up to 42 percent compared to traditional servers3 HP management tools like Insight Control, when fully implemented, can yield more than 500 percent return on investment with payback in under one year.4
HP ProCurve Networking delivers a choice of networking solutions, including new offerings for the data center. ProCurve networking products reduce network total cost of ownership through lower energy costs (up to 45 percent lower than the industry average)5 and a lifetime warranty that eliminates expensive maintenance contracts.
With data volumes growing, HP storage solutions allow you to cut time configuring, provisioning and babysitting storage, backup and recovery. You can automate high-performance backup and recovery from disk or tape with HP Data Protector software at a total cost of ownership that's 70 percent lower than competing products.6 Likewise, the HP EVA Family of SAN disk arrays offer virtualized storage with a low entry price and can save up to 50 percent of storage administrative costs compared to competitive arrays.7
Analyze the costs of your existing business systems to determine whether you can increase their effectiveness with alternate sourcing. A trusted outsourcing partner can be an important partner for success in uncertain economic times.
Through outsourcing services from EDS, an HP company, you can lower operating costs and keep critical projects moving forward, without increasing capital spending. With EDS, you can outsource everything from non-core back-office functions to application development to managed print services or even your entire technology infrastructure.
Use HP Financial Services to invest in new initiatives that deliver tangible returns without overextending your business’s core capital. And don’t forget about HP's software as a service (SaaS), Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service and Utility Ready Storage. These services allow you to better align technology costs to use.
It's impossible to intelligently streamline technology without a 360-degree view of how infrastructure, people and assets support the business. HP’s portfolio management and business service management tools let you take an in-depth assessment of your business services. They can help you make the best investment choices and keep projects running on time. According to a new study, HP’s Project and Portfolio Management Center can save up to 6.5 percent of total IT budget through better investment choices.8
The financial crisis offers the perfect opportunity to conduct a critical evaluation of your technology services to optimize their value. Making focused investments now can lower your costs while preserving your key operations. This will enhance your technology foundation and give you confidence for the future, as the economy recovers.
