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]

In this series, we’ll focus on the implications of specific technology solutions for CFOs. Though they are the keepers of a company’s financial health, they don’t always understand the advantages that come with certain technology solutions, and IT professionals sometimes take a suboptimal approach when explaining these concepts to the finance team. This series is intended to help make those conversations easier and more effective.

You’re looking to improve employee collaboration and communication. The reasons are obvious: reduce travel expenses, accelerate project progress and access more company knowledge and experience when dealing with a particular challenge. This type of request typically comes out of the business area, and you conduct the technological due diligence to ensure that a particular solution – such as Cisco Unified Communication – meets your company’s specific needs. But, you still have to get the CFO on board … even if you and the business owner are in complete agreement on every point.

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In this series, we’ll focus on the implications of specific technology solutions for CFOs. Though they are the keepers of a company’s financial health, they don’t always understand the advantages that come with certain technology solutions, and IT professionals sometimes take a suboptimal approach when explaining these concepts to the finance team. This series is intended to help make those conversations easier and more effective.

Your CFO is focused on keeping costs under control, and a request for new technology tends to be met with skepticism. Whether he thinks you’re chasing something new and exciting or believes that the status quo is just fine for now, the CFO isn’t likely to start writing checks just because you asked. Emphasizing the technological advantages of a particular solution won’t help much either, especially for virtualization technologies, which can be difficult for anyone working outside the infrastructure team to grasp fully. So, when you reach out to your CFO to talk about the need for a virtualization solution (e.g., storage, server or desktop), you need to make sure your pitch is tailored to a decidedly non-technical audience.

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You don’t need a Cisco-powered network to run its Unified Communications platform. As long as you have a sufficiently robust infrastructure, you’ll be able to take advantage of the collaboration capabilities afforded by this solution. But, it may make sense to implement Unified Communications on a Cisco network, if you have the flexibility in your infrastructure, budget and staff. There are hidden benefits that you may not recognize immediately, but they will be noticeable down the road.

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It happens all the time: hours, even days, are added to client pursuits and engagements because of an incident in the datacenter. You may be trying to gather data for a proposal, delivering a service or responding to a support issue, but the network isn’t running smoothly. Or an application goes down … at the worst possible time. You can’t access a particular system when you need it, and you have revenue and your reputation on the line. This is when the ROI case for partnering with a managed service provider is most powerful.

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Cutting travel expenses has always been one of the top objectives for collaboration solutions. With the commercialization of the internet came the belief that we could connect effectively and make virtual meetings almost the same as the ol’ fashioned kind. As the underlying technologies have matured, we’re now able to do a lot more online than we were even a decade ago. The progress has been incredible … but could it be threatened by a recovering economy?

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Your datacenter is full of waste. You have unused storage, unused processor power and unused bandwidth. Yet, platform constraints force you to continue to make costly equipment investments. While diligent capacity planning and management can help take the sting out of future purchases, you still may be overspending. Rather than buy systems when much of your infrastructure is idle, it may be time to virtualize.

Server, storage and desktop virtualization can unlock more of your IT infrastructure’s capacity, delivering a rapid cost savings and ROI boost based on investments you have made already. Using virtualization, you can knock down the walls that block platforms: computing power becomes computing power, regardless of the system that provides it. This delivers unparalleled flexibility.

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