The rise of Google and salesforce.com
They came amid great clamor and fanfare. Those great big data centers in the Rocky mountains and the sunshine of the California. The venture capital funded. The dot.com dependent.
Then they whimpered and wilted. The silence has been anything other than golden ever since. The silence of mothballed data centers. Collecting dust.
Once. Not any more. Technology has moved on in the last 4 years. Data growth, requirements, availability and protection needs have exploded. Blade technologies have matured. The total investment required to play at the serious level has increased again. The dusty caverns have been brought out of retirement and repurposed - significantly increased power capabilities, and antarctic cooling capacities for the latest, denser blade enclosures. Redundant power supplies and backups and geographically redundant Internet connections with almost unlimited data capacity (no drooling, boys).
High speed connectivity has penetrated far beyond the domestic USA since 2000. America has long since dropped out of even the top 10 nations for high bandwidth penetration within the global society.
Whilst all of this is good, or even great, news for mega corporations that have both the budget and the annual spending intent to seduce the owners of such LED lit caverns - driven by the need to reduce uptime and productivity, whilst reducing internal costs and complexities and almost as importantly whilst outsourcing their risk of data loss and hence financial catastrophe. What does it mean for the smaller organizations?
Can a smaller organization afford to spend the time and money to jet around North America to select a the ideal remote hosting environment? Especially when they may only be spending a few thousand dollars per month and actually will get very little attention from the giant data center owners - either before or after the sale? Especially where they will be charged for the capital and operational costs of having a $100 Million data center - it is a privilege, really.
Well, whilst we have all heard the phrase that you get what you pay for, sometimes you do not even need what you are being asked to pay for. There is a breed of Application Service Provider (ASP) that has survived the mass extinction. These include the Googles and salesforce.coms of the world that serve the small and mid-market business en-masse as well as the smaller number of large enterprises. There are also the small and mid-market data center providers, usually located in sensible areas of North America, such as the mid-west (far away from coastal disaster regions, high rent, high salaries and high air temperatures - translation = much lower risks and appreciably lower costs of doing business).
So if you run or own a company, here is a scenario that may not be that far from your reality:
You have held off investing all of the capital that it takes to update the aging servers, desktops and other vital network infrastructure. Don't forget to add in the software licenses. Also remember to purchase the warranties and on-site support for 3 years. Oh, and also remember the most expensive part ...the onsite IT person/people that you hired and are now worried that they spend all of their time running around and fixing things, but that it never seems to be enough to keep it all functioning smoothly? Yes, the daily support and maintenance for how the whole complex system is configured and optimized.
Every time you have calculated how much it will cost to purchase, install and maintain that lot you have broken out into a cold sweat, harassed the sales force to work harder, and harangued the controller for not knowing the balance sheet from the cashflow statement. So much for making a profit - unless we can put it off for another year (praying that nothing breaks meanwhile) , after all, we still don't know if we are going to downsize and it would be silly to spend more than we have to. Maybe we could lease it and pay it off over 3 or 4 years? We could conserve our capital, but it will increase our debt and cost more in the long run and then we would still have to pay for the ever needed support and maintenance for the administration of the network, communications and security equipment, productivity and line of business applications and... well, we could outsource it to a provider - at least then the guys we hired 5 years ago cannot cost us big the next time they screw up because they are chronically overworked or out of their depth with all of the new areas of speciality!
STOP! You could probably go on like this for hours. There are other alternatives too. What about moving all of your data and servers to a data center? They then buy and maintain all of the hardware, the software tools and ensure that the staff are both experienced and up to date in their knowledge and skills. They hire and staff the centralized helpdesk. They will even be paying their insurance company for a policy to protect both them and their clients against most mistakes that couls cost money.
Maybe the only refreshing you need to do is in obtaining Thin Client devices to replace the aging PCs - zero moving parts. long life span and very little if any on-site support required. Sweet.
Picture life now: no more backups failing, or software upgrades to make for the latest version to make your IT peoples' lifes easier. No worries about anti-virus and anti-spam. No more threatening calls from the Business Software Alliance (BSA) because a disgruntled current or past employee knows that your IT people have cut corners and pirated software when they didn't have the budget to get what they wanted, or else they have lost the license proof of ownership and it is now the equivalent of pirating the whole lot anyway. just pay for what software you need on a monthly basis - yes, even the Microsoft Office stuff - and run it all remotely (safety in case your office building burns down), and you are always entitled to the latest versions (no more paying out for upgrades very few years).
Maybe it is time to get on with growing and strengthening your core business?!
Then they whimpered and wilted. The silence has been anything other than golden ever since. The silence of mothballed data centers. Collecting dust.
Once. Not any more. Technology has moved on in the last 4 years. Data growth, requirements, availability and protection needs have exploded. Blade technologies have matured. The total investment required to play at the serious level has increased again. The dusty caverns have been brought out of retirement and repurposed - significantly increased power capabilities, and antarctic cooling capacities for the latest, denser blade enclosures. Redundant power supplies and backups and geographically redundant Internet connections with almost unlimited data capacity (no drooling, boys).
High speed connectivity has penetrated far beyond the domestic USA since 2000. America has long since dropped out of even the top 10 nations for high bandwidth penetration within the global society.
Whilst all of this is good, or even great, news for mega corporations that have both the budget and the annual spending intent to seduce the owners of such LED lit caverns - driven by the need to reduce uptime and productivity, whilst reducing internal costs and complexities and almost as importantly whilst outsourcing their risk of data loss and hence financial catastrophe. What does it mean for the smaller organizations?
Can a smaller organization afford to spend the time and money to jet around North America to select a the ideal remote hosting environment? Especially when they may only be spending a few thousand dollars per month and actually will get very little attention from the giant data center owners - either before or after the sale? Especially where they will be charged for the capital and operational costs of having a $100 Million data center - it is a privilege, really.
Well, whilst we have all heard the phrase that you get what you pay for, sometimes you do not even need what you are being asked to pay for. There is a breed of Application Service Provider (ASP) that has survived the mass extinction. These include the Googles and salesforce.coms of the world that serve the small and mid-market business en-masse as well as the smaller number of large enterprises. There are also the small and mid-market data center providers, usually located in sensible areas of North America, such as the mid-west (far away from coastal disaster regions, high rent, high salaries and high air temperatures - translation = much lower risks and appreciably lower costs of doing business).
So if you run or own a company, here is a scenario that may not be that far from your reality:
You have held off investing all of the capital that it takes to update the aging servers, desktops and other vital network infrastructure. Don't forget to add in the software licenses. Also remember to purchase the warranties and on-site support for 3 years. Oh, and also remember the most expensive part ...the onsite IT person/people that you hired and are now worried that they spend all of their time running around and fixing things, but that it never seems to be enough to keep it all functioning smoothly? Yes, the daily support and maintenance for how the whole complex system is configured and optimized.
Every time you have calculated how much it will cost to purchase, install and maintain that lot you have broken out into a cold sweat, harassed the sales force to work harder, and harangued the controller for not knowing the balance sheet from the cashflow statement. So much for making a profit - unless we can put it off for another year (praying that nothing breaks meanwhile) , after all, we still don't know if we are going to downsize and it would be silly to spend more than we have to. Maybe we could lease it and pay it off over 3 or 4 years? We could conserve our capital, but it will increase our debt and cost more in the long run and then we would still have to pay for the ever needed support and maintenance for the administration of the network, communications and security equipment, productivity and line of business applications and... well, we could outsource it to a provider - at least then the guys we hired 5 years ago cannot cost us big the next time they screw up because they are chronically overworked or out of their depth with all of the new areas of speciality!
STOP! You could probably go on like this for hours. There are other alternatives too. What about moving all of your data and servers to a data center? They then buy and maintain all of the hardware, the software tools and ensure that the staff are both experienced and up to date in their knowledge and skills. They hire and staff the centralized helpdesk. They will even be paying their insurance company for a policy to protect both them and their clients against most mistakes that couls cost money.
Maybe the only refreshing you need to do is in obtaining Thin Client devices to replace the aging PCs - zero moving parts. long life span and very little if any on-site support required. Sweet.
Picture life now: no more backups failing, or software upgrades to make for the latest version to make your IT peoples' lifes easier. No worries about anti-virus and anti-spam. No more threatening calls from the Business Software Alliance (BSA) because a disgruntled current or past employee knows that your IT people have cut corners and pirated software when they didn't have the budget to get what they wanted, or else they have lost the license proof of ownership and it is now the equivalent of pirating the whole lot anyway. just pay for what software you need on a monthly basis - yes, even the Microsoft Office stuff - and run it all remotely (safety in case your office building burns down), and you are always entitled to the latest versions (no more paying out for upgrades very few years).
Maybe it is time to get on with growing and strengthening your core business?!
posted by Gray Matter LLC at
12:11 PM
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