Does your CFO manage your company’s financials on a spreadsheet, or does he use a financial planning module as part of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package like most companies do? Does your VP of sales and her sales team manage customer relations on a spreadsheet?  Or do they use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system?

I am pretty sure 99% of you reading this article answered that your companies are not using spreadsheets for either of these functions.  So, why is your company still using spreadsheets to manage a critical facility like the data center?

‘Shock and awe’, or logic – choose your style

There are two main approaches that we have seen companies use for justifying the purchase of DCIM software: we will call them the “emotional approach” and the “logical approach”. The most effective justification for companies that have purchased DCIM is the emotional approach, the “shock and awe” in your pitch to the management.

The question isn’t why should you buy DCIM, but how can you continue to risk running a mission-critical facility on a spreadsheet? This is some companies’ main justification for DCIM. Others need more logical arguments for investing into DCIM. This includes process improvement and energy savings, DCIM as part of a larger project (like a consolidation or migration), and risk reduction.

I know that a lot of DCIM literature focuses on energy savings as a big value proposition for DCIM.  However, those savings are much harder to prove ahead of time, because there are so many unknown variables involved.  So, when it comes to cost savings, the easiest savings to find and prove to your manager are those that are related to process savings as those save time while also reduce risk. So, justifying the purchase using process savings alone is an easier approach if you can do it.

Leading Companies Don’t Manage Their Data Center Physical Assets Using Spreadsheets

I recently spoke with the senior director of data center operations at a large telecommunications-handset manufacturing company.  When I asked him to explain his company’s justification for purchasing a DCIM solution, he made the following comments:

·         “I work for a US$50bn company,y and we manage our data center using frigg’n spreadsheets!” 

·         “We increased the complexity of our environment, but our tools are not keeping pace.” 

·         “If we want to be among the market leaders’ IT best practices, we have to use DCIM.”

DCIM for them was a must-have, and its emotional appeal was backed up by the logic of needing appropriate management tools for the complex environment.  

The top-two emotional justifications around DCIM tend to be:

·         The rest of the organization is run with professional software, and it is inconceivable that a mission-critical facility like the data center isn’t also using enterprise software.

·         Our top competitors are running the data center using a DCIM solution, and we need to be among industry leaders.

It is not always this easy for most organizations, which is why the data center manager needs to back their pitch up with a logical explanation. Note that this does not mean you should not try to get your management emotionally excited about DCIM. You should.

I know that a lot of DCIM literature focuses on energy savings as a big value proposition for DCIM.  However, those savings are much harder to prove ahead of time, because there are so many unknown variables involved.  So, when it comes to cost savings, the easiest savings to find and prove to your manager are those that are related to process savings as those save time while also reduce risk. So, justifying the purchase using process savings alone is an easier approach if you can do it.

Here are some of the most effective cost justifications for DCIM to help the logical argument:

Process-automation savings:

·         Reduce time and cost of Move-Add-Change (MAC) Initiatives. The automation of what-if analysis and intelligent capacity planning improves MAC processes can reduce time and cost of planned maintenance by 60%. Also, unplanned downtime and mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) is cut by 50%.

·         Reduce cost of creating operational, forecast and management reports. If you are spending time at the end of each week or each quarter manipulating spreadsheets to create management reports on the status of your data center, you should be able to cut that time by 80-90% using a library of standard reports built into your DCIM solution.

·         Reduce cost and time of migration and consolidation projects. Migrating to a new data center or consolidating multiple data centers are large, complex and risky projects. Reduce the planning process for a migration or consolidation by up to 50% by modeling your existing environment, deployment and capacity utilization in the new environment and automatically generating precise work orders to manage the move.

Energy-cost savings:

·         Reduce power expenses by removing orphaned servers and decreasing your PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness). Automated what-if analysis and intelligent capacity are crucial in identifying opportunities for power savings. Real-time monitoring identifies power hogs and active MAC management finds orphaned servers that waste power.

·         Defer cost of new data center build-outs. With the identification and removal of orphaned servers you can optimize vertical space in your data center. One company I know used DCIM to identify opportunities to free up power and space in their data centers, extending their lifetimes from five years to 15. Also, by modeling existing data center configuration, you can identify and eliminate hotspots to effectively use power capacity and avoid over-provisioning.

In conclusion, we have found that companies that have already purchased DCIM were generally able to justify their purchase first by getting their management emotionally invested in acquiring DCIM and then using one of the logical arguments noted above to drive the purchase over the line.

About the author: Craig Ledo is senior director of product and corporate marketing at nlyte Software

Disclaimer: Views expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of DatacenterDynamics.