Hello all you cool cats and kittens out there, hopefully you’re all keeping safe and healthy, and hopefully you’ve watched tiger king – otherwise you’re not going to understand this intro!
It has been a solid month since things have started getting really locked down here in the US, and people and businesses have been making some dramatic changes. My partner had a call two weeks ago, on which 15% of the entire staff was let go. It was very tough and emotional. I don’t think any of us lack the understanding of how these things happen (people stay inside, and buy less stuff -> less demand -> less work to do -> less jobs) but understanding doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to watch friends and loved ones lose their jobs.
Before this post turns into another bad news story about the damaging effects of the “CoronEconomy”, lets bring the subject back to the business. Why do people get laid off? Because the company is making less money so it needs to reduce costs, pretty simple. But there are ways we can save costs, that don’t involve laying people off!
Of course, because I’m in the software license world, I’m talking about saving money on the business’ software purchasing! Software can quickly become a huge expense for a business, and therefore, can quickly become a place where the business can save money!
When the economy is doing good, businesses have a reletively easy time getting expenses approved. For this reason, people are going out and buying anything they feel they need to get their work done. Next thing you know, you have 15 different project management app subscriptions, all being expensed from personal credit cards! When the economy slows down, looking for things like this can reap great rewards. Here are a couple things you can try to get started:
- Run an inventory – Every cost savings evaluation needs to start with data gathering. From an IT perspective, you need to first find out what you’re dealing with. You can run multiple inventories to get a look at the various segments of your IT. You can download a free scan utility here to get a view of your LAN and whats installed. I would also recommend working with someone like Zylo to get a picture of your cloud apps.
- Pull purchase reports – Software Inventory data is really only half the battle: you’re going to want to see License inventory as well. I recommend reaching out to your reseller or partner community to get help gathering any and all purchases you can for the business, because in my experience, purchases can end up all over the place, and easily missed.
- Review server workloads – Are you virtualizing? If you have a significant chunk of on premise infrastructure, it will probably be worth looking into consolidation, and reorganisation of that infrastructure to optimize for costs. When we are growing, we tend to spin up new virtual machines and workloads based on the business needs, without first determining the right way to configure it for cost optimization.
- Look for similar apps – Take your inventory data, and look for applications that do the same thing. People tend to get stuck in their habits, and so sometimes they start using the tools they want, even if the company has provided a similar tool. Find cases like these, and stop paying for them.
- Optmize your clouds – Cloud is a new world for a lot of us and many of us dove in just to stay up to date with everything. When we were sold these wonderfully scalable cloud infrastructure services, it seemed like a no-brainer because the way they typically bill is a sort of “pay-as-you-go” model that charges you for usage, and so you only pay for what you use! great! Trouble is that you end up paying for this flexibility. Think of it like old school phone bills – yes they only charge you for what you use, but the rates were pretty terrible. These days you can pay X amount of money for X amount of data/minutes/etc. This is nice if you know exactly what your data needs are, and it allows you to say upfront, “hey this is what I’m going to need, lets just bill on that”. This same sort of set up is possible in the cloud through something called “Reserved Instances“.
These are just a few ideas I wanted to throw out there to anyone who might be feeling the crunch a bit. Of course, as always my philosophy is that those of you out there reading this are experts in your field and more than capable or running these sorts of evaluations yourselves – BUT sometimes you have about a zillion other things you need to work on! If you find that you’re interested in reducing your software and cloud spend, but don’t have the time or bandwidth to do it, contact us and we’ll have a look!
Stay safe and healthy out there everyone!
