Five Ways to Save Money Now with BEZVision

It's easy to yell "charge", it's the rest of the details you're lacking!

Companies are more reliant on computers and applications than ever before. The need and use of technology is crucial to survival and will continue to grow even in an economic downturn. The real question is "how can companies manage cash and preserve or increase the service provided?"

In many of today's industries, the technology is the business, and the business is the technology.

How can you deftly manage the relentless pressures of today's cash-management priority while you are externally focused on the marketplace from which future revenue will come?

Even more important, right now is an excellent time to pull together a plan for innovation during cost cutting -- you and your team already have made all the big cuts and diminishing returns are setting in.

Here are five ways that you and your staff can start saving money now with BEZVision.

1. Eliminate unnecessary databases and maintenance costs for database implementations that are not being utilized effectively and can be consolidated into shared database structures.

Organizations often have many licenses for database software. In the past, a database license may have been allocated for a single application running on a standalone machine. This is now changing as companies are consolidating databases and applications onto larger multi-node, multi-core database clusters. What tends to stop this activity from happening is the uncertainty of application performance in the consolidated environment. How will these databases perform if they are consolidated together? How will end user service delivery be affected?

Within seconds, BEZVision will allow you to model mixed, or consolidated, database "workloads" and predict what the workload performance will be. Saving on license fees and maintenance can be as much as 25% of your total database license costs.

2. Reduced hardware costs for upgrades, hardware migrations and consolidations that are not required.

Just in time (JIT) investments in capital expenditures will keep IT budgets lean and mean. This is a common goal for all companies these days. BEZVision can assist in predicting what future performance expectations will be for your applications. Hardware upgrade predictions can be based on any hardware or storage configuration change being considered. Multiple comparison options can be evaluated against one another and the cost factor can be associated with each option to understand the true cost/performance benefit that each alternative offers.

BEZVision predictive analytics will allow you to accurately pinpoint your upgrade timing needs; when upgrades are required and how much capacity is needed to maintain consistent service levels. In many cases, predictions will show that hardware upgrades can be delayed or possibly even eliminated. Waiting 3-6 months for a hardware purchase with confidence can save considerable money. Right-sizing consolidations will allow better use of existing resources without additional purchases or increased risk. One of our customers postponed a multimillion dollar upgrade deal for over a year as a result of running a BEZVision prediction forecast!

3. Reduce system downtime costs by eliminating surprise outages with proactive performance and utilization forecasts.

This sounds like a lifestyle type of suggestion, but it's real and has real short term consequences.

It's common wisdom that the earlier you fix a bug in a software development process the cheaper its cost impact (people and money) will be. It can be an order of magnitude or more. It can cost $X to fix an application in development, $10X in QA testing and $100X after production rollout.

Predicting a service breach well before it happens is 1000 times cheaper in terms of downtime, personnel time, and careers involved in emergency measures taken to find and fix critical corporate applications. And a quick fix may not be possible. BEZVision gives you a detailed predictive analysis along with the necessary time and data to avoid the crisis altogether.

4. Understand what service is delivered for $$$ spent

In accounting, they call it sharpening your pencil. One of your biggest areas for saving may be right under your mouse.

Response time and throughput can often be throttled up or down by available resources. Increasing resource availability costs money. You will pay considerably more to maintain 1 second response time for your applications than for 3 second or 10 second response time allowances. Not all applications or workloads are equal. Which workloads really need fast response time and which ones can operate at a slower rate? Should you be paying for 1 second response time if you don't need it? BEZVision will let you understand what service level your existing workloads are operating at today and how to change and right-size performance as you plan for the future.

5. Assure BI performance and compliance data availability even at peak times

A slowing economy will not loosen compliance requirements. Data warehousing activity has been cited by many as one of the few areas of significant growth and spending. One major reason is that Business Intelligence (BI) is a key strategic asset for the company to understand their own business performance and the needs of their customers. BI provides a vehicle to allow the company to steer through the crisis. Additionally, BI and DW (Data Warehouse) applications are key components in delivering mandatory compliance data. Performance failures could have major consequences especially at month-, quarter- and year-end reporting cycles.

BEZVision can predict workload performance and throughput months into the future. Potential service delivery impacts can be isolated and corrected well in advance of any pending problem. BEZVision will also offer advice on remedial actions needed to minimize or avoid the problem altogether.