* IT leader at IT Roadmap Boston share how they get more from existing infrastructure
Regardless of the economy, enterprise IT managers understand what it feels like to be considered a cost center, and most have learned since the dot-com bust how to optimize resources without spending money.
“We don’t spend money but we do invest in technology. Our return is a reduced run rate,” said Madge Meyer executive vice president of Global Infrastructure Services at State Street Corp. in Boston, who delivered the keynote at Network World’s IT Roadmap: Boston Conference & Expo. She explained to some 400 attendees how State Street faces cuts in capital expenses and budgets and her group represents between 37% and 41% of the total costs to IT. “That is not as cheap as we would like,” she said.
But with zero tolerance for any network or system outage and storage growing between 70% and 100%, Meyer continues to be challenged to bring unit costs under “tremendous cost pressures.” Meyer puts virtualization to use, having nearly 50% of the company’s servers now virtualized. With 400 virtual servers on 10 new physical servers, State Street is also able to provide capacity on demand for particular applications.
“We use automation to help our business grow and as our volume grows, we don’t have to add as many people to manage more resources,” Meyer said. “The infrastructure is viewed as a utility and to build the credibility of IT, we have to establish an extremely robust, redundant infrastructure.”
Another way Meyer found to cut costs was in asset lifecycle management and upgrading equipment that was outdated. She said asset management and depreciating assets helps companies recover cash that can potentially be used to invest in new technologies that can help a company grow. For instance, State Street replaced CRT monitors on desktops with flat panel, which enabled the company to reduce its utility bill by $2 million per year.
“A lot of the things IT built in the past, we have to destroy in a way and replace with something new as technology advances,” Meyer said.
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