Take 4 minutes to read this article
Having too many vendors leads to inefficiency. Like too much IT spend. Too many profit margins to cover. Too many points of contact. And too many projects that are out of your control. It’s time to regain control of IT spend and the rest of your IT operations with vendor consolidation.
If you’re operating internationally, then your vendor sprawl can become much worse. With exponential vendors comes exponential logistical and financial burdens, including:
- Overly complicated vendor communication
- Extensive project management errors and inconsistencies
- Unnecessary service redundancy and overhead
- Unstandardized protocols and support methodologies
Outsourcing your IT tasks is a necessity in this age of leaner IT teams and more generalized engineering talent. But outsourcing, fundamentally, is supposed to relieve pressure on your in-house teams, not add more strain.
If your IT spend is all over the place, you need to regain control of spend in your data centers.
What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You.
The risk you currently face of overspending to support decommissioned devices (or worse, letting support on your most vital equipment lapse) is real.
“We don’t know” is an unacceptable answer when it comes to inventory and costs in your data centers.
To streamline your costs, you can begin by streamlining your processes across all your sites—from production equipment, to sparing and renewal, to equipment shutdown and decommissioning. Using a single, standardized support solution enables you to tackle your IT needs, optimize your costs, and stay in control.
How to Streamline Your Processes to Fulfill Cost Optimization Goals
If you want to begin the process of vendor consolidation and IT cost optimization, you’ll need a global solutions provider with the presence and network to enable you to work with one vendor.
To streamline your processes, your vendor should consult with your IT leaders and conduct in-depth, manufacturer-independent assessments of your infrastructure and processes. From there, the provider should work with you to determine the most cost-effective solutions for your company’s support needs in the following areas:
Hardware Acquisitions
- The faster you can get a workload running, the quicker you can start generating positive ROI. Not everything you acquire needs to be new. There are some misconceptions about the secondary markets, but a global provider can efficiently source new and refurbished hardware to sustain operations within your environments by coordinating the best deals available, unlike the OEMs. From there, your provider can streamline your acquisition and setup timelines by pre-configuring all of your new equipment at local hardware depots and providing shipping logistics as well as rack and stack services.
Maintenance
- By consolidating all of your hardware lifecycle, status reports, and contract renewals in an ITSM tool, you can more easily monitor your infrastructure and keep all of your equipment consistently under the proper coverage. Moreover, by using Third-Party Maintenance offerings you can save between 40-70% compared to OEM hardware support costs.
IMAC
- Rather than have you sort through piles of contracts to try to figure out which vendor covers which site, consolidated support services give you a single point of contact for all of your IMAC, network, and Help Desk needs. By consolidating to one global provider, there’s no question of quality or varying 24x7x4 SLAs. Often, a third-party provider will deliver a better 24x7x4 standard than the OEM.
Decommissioning
- Too many companies see ITAD as “taking out the trash.” But, by taking a more strategic approach, you can use the end of life as a value engine for to reinvest in other initiatives. Evaluate your entire physical infrastructure holistically to get the most out of its performance lifecycle and to help you recover the most value in secondary markets after decommissioning.
A true global lifecycle management provider delivers in all of these areas.
Cut Out the Slack and Fine Tune Your Processes
If you’ve been paying entirely too much for disorganized and ineffective support, that’s not a luxury that you (or anyone) can afford.
At CentricsIT, we provide full IT lifecycle management. Anytime, anywhere.
We also don’t charge premiums once your hardware reaches EOL; our influence in the secondary markets allow us to pass those savings directly along to our clients. Additionally, our international network of partners enables us to deploy our qualified SmartHands engineers directly to your datacenters’ doors within hours of your ticket submittal (whether it be for downtime mitigation, hardware audits, rack and stack, installation, etc.). And we provide R2-certified data sanitization services—both on and off-premise—to keep your critical data secure well after decommissioning is completed.
By unifying your processes, fine-tuning your in-house methodologies, and strategically sharing resources between your datacenters, CentricsIT will help you establish additional value efficiencies across your sites. It’s time to get more out of your infrastructure.
