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A recent report by Forrester Research identified the top three challenges of IT management as:

• Providing consistent end-to-end application and service performance guarantees;
• Avoiding incidents and downtime resulting from unplanned infrastructure changes;
  
• Resolving unanticipated effects of consolidation and new application projects.

Fully 80% of non-staff related IT budgets are tied up in maintaining current infrastructure, applications and service levels. CIO’s have very little latitude to reorient that spend given the current decision tools at their disposal. Whilst expectations of the CIO from the executive committee are increasing, budgets are flat to slightly up- hardly enough to support both status quo and new projects. CIO’s are increasingly called upon to not only support new growth initiatives, but to provide innovation and differentiation based on technology.

And so CIO’s face a conundrum: how to simultaneously meet the performance and capacity needs of current customers, whether internal or external, and invest in new opportunities, whilst working within their budget constraints. Intuitively, the answer is to pare back maintenance spend and consolidate current operations to make budget room for growth. But when IT executives must make spending decisions on application deployments, infrastructure reconfiguration and support of business transformations - without ugly surprises or costly over-provisioning - business insight and decision support are required.

The data that IT executives need to make sound decisions lurks throughout the enterprise. From the ground up, each part of the organisation manages their own silo of data, including business requirements, system requirements, budgets and performance statistics. These data elements must be combined and distilled to provide insight and decision support. Predictive IT management combines these disparate bits of data into accurate, actionable decision support.

The key to success is a comprehensive performance management strategy comprising both IT capacity management and performance engineering. Capacity management provides rapid decision support for a multitude of performance and change initiatives, whilst performance engineering provides expert, detailed analysis where performance optimisation is critical. These two functions exist in most organisations, but they often operate within organisational silos, which limit their application and their effectiveness. The only way to provide CIO’s with the business insight they need from current operations is to tap into these disciplines as a continuum for performance management. .

Predicting the impact of change

Maintaining predictable service levels in the face of business and infrastructure changes requires:

• Performance and configuration data for infrastructure, applications, users, and services;
• Understanding of anticipated and known business and user demands;
• Available budget, resource, and time requirements for changes.
  

Solutions for Predictive IT Management™ from HyPerformix help IT leaders understand how business and user demands affect infrastructure capacity and performance, and to identify opportunities for optimisation. Predictive IT management helps keep development and deployment on schedule, reduces fire fighting of new applications recently deployed in production, improves infrastructure sizing and helps assure the deployed application meets the performance needs within the budget of the business.

Case Studies – Accurate application and infrastructure sizing

When an initial “rule-of-thumb” analysis for a global corporation called for the costly doubling of server capacity to support a holiday business boom, IT engaged HyPerformix solutions to evaluate the true capacity and risks. The team quickly analysed the production infrastructure using HyPerformix and determined it could handle a 160% increase in order volume with no additional spending, but with some requisite reconfiguration. In another case, a capacity modelling initiative at a UK financial firm showed they could achieve 80% business growth before infrastructure expansion was needed, allowing them to defer new hardware purchases safely, whilst applying millions of pounds in savings to other important projects.

Common information needs

In the traditional silo approach, information developed in each organisation may not be effectively shared. Organisational boundaries can impede information flow. Further, information is often captive in the diverse tools used by each team.

In most IT operations organisations, for example, day-to-day infrastructure monitoring collects performance and resource usage data. This data collection is the most difficult aspect of a predictive IT management strategy; once the data is captured, a world of possibilities exists for transforming it into actionable information for decision support.

A comprehensive strategy for predictive IT management will facilitate and automate the collection of performance data from both production and test systems, combine that data with budget constraints and business capacity requirements, and synthesise these inputs into actionable insight for IT management.

IT can no longer afford to be a cost centre - it must be strategic and core to growth and innovation. Predictive IT management provides the business insight into IT operations that IT managers need to make informed decisions, decisions that reduce IT risk, meet service commitments, improve efficiency of IT resources and contribute to the bottom line.

Case Study – Mobile handset manufacturer

A global manufacturer of mobile handsets applied performance engineering to size a CRM application and its servers for a new business initiative. In two weeks, performance modelling showed they could achieve desired service levels with eight servers, rather than the 28 recommended by their hardware vendor. The savings in hardware and software license costs exceeded $7 million - demonstrating exceptional ROI and freeing up already budgeted IT spend for innovative services designed to increase customer retention and reduce churn.

About HyPerformix

The integrated suite of solutions for Predictive IT Management™ by HyPerformix enables IT organisations to make informed business decisions to predictably, efficiently, and dependably deliver good business outcomes, productivity and growth.
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, HyPerformix has offices throughout the United States, Europe & Asia. For more information, contact HyPerformix Ltd. at +44 870 351 0206 or visit us online at www.hyperformix.com/cxo.