Inside the complexity crisis

How IT managers are banking on intelligent infrastructure to ease their layered burden.

Bob Kelly is the first to admit it; he's knee-deep in an enterprise complexity crisis.

As CIO at New York state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal in Albany, Kelly has seen his operating expenses for the agency's vast network balloon to almost double what he spends on hardware and software capital expenses.

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Bob Kelly is the first to admit it; he's knee-deep in an enterprise complexity crisis.

As CIO at New York state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal in Albany, Kelly has seen his operating expenses for the agency's vast network balloon to almost double what he spends on hardware and software capital expenses.

Kelly attributes this rise - to $4 million - to the layers upon layers of technology that exist throughout the three main offices and nine remote sites his team supports, from security tools to server farms to application patches and updates. And he sees trouble on the horizon.

"We see the state is going to have difficulty getting resources so we're turning to centralized management," he says. "It's easier to get money for products than staff - the state doesn't like to look like it is hiring people - so we need to consolidate."

Kelly isn't alone. To reduce costs driven by complexity, companies are turning to automation tools from major systems and network players as well as smaller suppliers of advanced management tools, says Andreas Antonopoulos, principal analyst at Nemertes Research.

"The largest cost is the operations overhead - cost in salaries, training, attracting specialized people," Antonopoulos says. To fight back, he says IT managers are looking to blade servers, virtualization tools for server and storage resources, bandwidth allocation programs, and application management software to boost intelligence in the network and reduce the need for human intervention. Eventually, IT shops will feature self-configuring, self-healing, self-protecting networks.

"The fewer people that stick their fingers into the network, the better it runs overall," he says. "Automation tools help the network be as flexible as possible, allowing users to deploy applications with minimal overall operational costs."

Automation has significantly reduced the number of people it takes to run networks, especially in data centers, Antonopoulos says. "Networks are becoming less specialized and as commoditized as possible."

The evidence: VoIP, Web and file servers all can be deployed on the same server or moved from one server to another, which lets IT managers more easily expand or shrink the resources they need.

Getting here from there

The IT complexity crisis has been building for some time, exasperated in part by the buying frenzy unleashed to deal with Y2K. More technology has been layered on without much consideration for network and operation dynamics.

Consider the emergence of the major corporate software suites. "Companies spent a lot of money putting in new applications that created islands of integration - such as ERP and CRM systems," says Tony Bacardi, senior vice president of software at IDC. Then they lumped on complex management tools that didn't work together and featured disparate data dictionaries and schemas, he says. "It's just been one unproven layer of software after another."

Bacardi says there is so much complexity that company executives often wonder if they are getting their money's worth. A recent IDC study found that less than 20% of chief officers felt they were using the full capabilities of their myriad enterprise systems.