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Common Sense: IT Procurement News

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Welcome to Common Sense: IT Procurement News

Common Sense is a program focused on helping you, the IT procurement/purchasing professional, have the information you need to: 1) understand the value you are receiving from Compuware products; and 2) identify opportunities to cut costs.

January 2005 Issue: 
How to save IT budget money by avoiding hardware upgrades

This issue focuses on how you may be able to achieve cost-cutting goals by fine-tuning your applications, in turn avoiding or delaying costly hardware upgrades.

Cutting costs, increasing productivity and reaping greater ROI are common goals for most corporations.  Many companies are concentrating on streamlining as much as possible.  Every budget dollar is contested. Every penny spent is challenged. All purchases must be closely scrutinized and maximized. 

IT organizations are asked not only to deliver on all promised results, but to accomplish these goals while retaining existing system functionality and credibility.  Service Level Agreements (SLAs) become stricter, yet workloads continue to climb upward. Extreme expectations have now become the norm.  Add tough economic times to this equation and there is no way that the current demands on IT will ease. 

… after three years spent trimming costs, many CIOs feel that there is nothing left to cut.  For this reason, Gartner predicts that many IT organizations will shift their focus during the next year from traditional cost-cutting techniques to process improvement—a measure that will not only affect IT costs, but also IT performance. —CIO Update: Predicts 2005, IT Management Reinvents Itself, Gartner 2004

Compuware's Application Performance Assessment (APA) services offering coupled with Strobe saved us $34 million in fewer than 3 months. —Performance Management Group, Financial Services

As a result, IT professionals have learned that in order to increase IT productivity to meet or exceed these demands, it can be beneficial that their applications and mainframes are well-tuned.  Below are just some of the benefits companies can reap by running well-tuned applications:

• Meet SLA commitments
• Increase productivity of development and operational staff
• Consolidate mainframes resulting in reduced costs for operations and license fees
• Reduce batch job runtime
• Create capacity to withstand spikes in system resource demands
• Add new applications without creating performance crises
• Delay/eliminate mainframe upgrades.

IT Operating Budget Distribution

What percentage of your IT budget is spent on hardware? What is your estimated hardware increase each year? How much of that increase could be avoided or saved?

MIPS and salaries are my highest unit cost per month.  Strobe and iStrobe have helped us effectively manage costly MIPs, allowing us to continue to achieve our business objectives. —Nancy White, CIO, Certegy

If companies have corporate-wide initiatives to reduce spending and save money, fine-tuning applications and systems to run more efficiently may be one of the ways to achieve success.  Tuning an application’s performance reduces costs by delaying hardware upgrades and assists in regaining system processing power—power that is already owned.

Strobe enables us to manage our MIP usage more effectively and to grow our business without increasing costs associated with increasing MIPs. —Tomas Suero, Senior Analyst, Certegy

Compuware’s Strobe family has been the industry leader since 1971. The capabilities of Strobe, iStrobe and AutoStrobe more than address the requirements needed to fine-tune an application or system.  Because of this leadership, Compuware has been instrumental in saving millions of dollars for customers worldwide. 

Compuware’s Application Performance Assessment (APA) service assists clients in achieving a higher level of performance for their z/OS business-critical applications. 

Compuware’s Application Performance Management (APM) consulting services assist clients in identifying and resolving specific performance problems in their z/OS business-critical applications.  Using Strobe and iStrobe, APM Consulting Engineers work closely with a client's IS personnel to measure an application's performance, identify performance-improvement opportunities and make recommendations for implementing solutions.  Organizations can not only resolve problems quickly and effectively, but also gain the skills necessary to prevent future application performance degradation.

Using Strobe has saved us 14, 15 and 16 million dollars over three consecutive years. —Runtime Improvement Group, Bank of America

If you would like to learn more about Compuware’s Strobe solution or if you would like to tell us your unique story on how Compuware products have saved your company money, please send an email message to vocommunications@compuware.com.

We are hoping that “Common Sense” is both helpful and interesting.  It is our goal to provide useful information that can be used when assembling a compelling business case; one that will convey the confidence that hard-earned IT budget money is not squandered away. 

:: IT Procurement Over 100 of our customers have used the ROI Collection facilities for Abend-AID, File-AID and XPEDITER.  To request the new STROBE usage collectors for your company, please send an email to: vocommunications@compuware.com

:: Tell Us What You Think Many of our best ideas come from you, our customers; Please respond to our "Common Sense" survey and let us know what other topics you would like us to address. Are you a current STROBE user? Please let us know about your organization and how you use STROBE by responding to our STROBE survey.

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