Windows 7 has arrived, is popular and is coming to an enterprise near you. Soon. Microsoft has already sold 175 million licenses, according to VentureBeat, making it the company’s fastest selling operating system in history. Many IT departments are already planning their migrations, a process that is likely to be long, time-consuming and packed with risk. Smooth out this operating system migration, and you can lower the total cost of ownership while easing the pressure on your department.

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Data deduplication solutions deliver benefits across your IT organization. Rather than just provide cost savings concentrated on one aspect of storage management, it impacts several, multiplying the TCO and ROI implications of implementing this solution. Here are five ways you can generate financial results for your company using data deduplication:

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The easiest investments to justify are those that deliver a clear, straight and swift route to cost savings or a return. Some projects can take months (or longer) to generate value, making it difficult for company executives to accept the risk that that entails. VeraSMART Call Accounting, which integrates tightly with your Cisco voice infrastructure, delivers a compelling approach to managing costs and accelerating benefit to your organization. In fact, you can get from start to cost savings in four easy steps:

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A lot of letters are getting thrown about, as they always do in the IT business, but there are really only three that matter to you: ROI. Unless you can get a return on your IT investment, there isn’t much point to implementing a solution. Well, to get to ROI, a good place to start is with three other letters: UCS. The Cisco Unified Computing System streamlines your datacenter, making it easier for your organization to gain more value from existing staff and equipment.

Cisco UCS makes your infrastructure easier to manage and your team more efficient. Rather than pull together and integrate a variety of “best of breed” solutions – a process that entails a considerable amount of project and operational risk – UCS brings computing, networking, storage access and virtualization into a cohesive system. As a result, you can scale your infrastructure easily without having to add complexity at the same time.

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It’s easy for a company’s phone bill to creep up. Sure, you don’t want to get in the way of employee business calls, even if they can be costly: business has to move forward. The problem is that you may have a lot of little calls on the monthly tab that are adding up quickly. And, there are some calls that just aren’t necessary. Small costs can become big if left unchecked, creating an opportunity for you to generate significant cost savings.

Behavior modification, of course, is the easy answer. Write up a policy about using directory assistance, and instruct your staff to use the web to find phone numbers – or their company address books. That’ll work, right?

Of course not.

When employees are rushed or taking on multiple tasks at the same time, they’re going to rush to the easiest solution. It’s not just human nature; it’s practical. So, you need to provide a viable alternative that results in a lower cost to your company. VeraSMART eCAS Call Accounting is exactly what you need.

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There’s always some tension between strategy and leading-edge implementation. You want to take advantage of new systems and technologies that can help your company advance in the marketplace, but at the same time, you don’t want “new” and “exciting” to outpace your core objectives and wind up driving your company at the expense of core business objectives.

Yeah, that’s a mouthful, but it’s incredibly important.

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Are you spending too much time managing your infrastructure? It’s not like you have a choice, of course. When you need to tend to your datacenter, you do it, and it’s your other IT initiatives that suffer. A simplified, straightforward approach not only cures the headaches associated with IT management, it frees up your team to focus on the projects that will drive ROI and company growth.

Chances are you’re overspending on your infrastructure. Research from Cisco estimates that infrastructure management ties up 70 percent of your budget. So, that only gives you 30 percent to allocate for the future. Simplifying your infrastructure could tip those scales a bit – making your department far more effective.

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Disaster recovery and business continuity can be a challenge to manage effectively. In addition to investing considerable amounts of capital into robust, reliable solutions, you’re stuck with the nagging thought that you’re putting your budget into something you hope you never actually have to use. Anything you can do to simplify your D/R framework comes with an inherent cost advantage, particularly through a reduction in complexity and resource-hours committed to planning and managing the environment.

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The problem with “best of breed” platform selections is that you wind up with a heterogeneous infrastructure that can be difficult and costly to manage. When it’s time to add to a particular platform’s footprint, you need to write another check, even if there are under-utilized solutions elsewhere in your environment. Unless you have commensurate equipment available, there’s no choice but to invest more. With server and storage virtualization technologies, you can break out of this rut, and extract more value from investments you’ve already made.

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There’s a reason why AppSense was named the Citrix Ready Solution Partner of the Year back at Citrix Synergy. The solution drives end-user adoption and satisfaction in XenDesktop and XenApp environments, ultimately driving more ROI for your investment in desktop and application virtualization.

Specifically, according to a recent article in InfoWorld:

“The AppSense solution provides what is known as user virtualization, a technology that is still in its infancy; because of that, it doesn’t get a lot of airplay in the media. User virtualization isn’t discussed very often, so people may not have heard of the technology yet, let alone fully understand it or how it is used.”

With the AppSense Virtualized User Infrastructure, you can manage “everything specific to a user” – from user-based corporate policies to rights management and user-introduced applications.

Read the original article for a substantial review of how AppSense can help.

[Source: InfoWorld]