IT optimisation directly improves business

How well companies optimise their IT directly impacts their bottom lines. But to date, tools that help manage the main infrastructure factors – of network services, IT services and application performance – aren’t well integrated, nor supported from a single IT vendor. That’s among key conclusions of a huge report on the subject, just published by analyst Butler Group. It suggests that the opportunity is there for firms to reduce costs by streamlining support operations and maximising IT staff productivity through the use of IT department automation. But it adds that companies need to be clear about what they need, and must shop around to get it. Main points and recommendations from its 286 page report (IT Performance Optimisation: Realising Best Value from IT Investments, December 2004) are as follows: Companies that can understand and measure how well their applications are functioning will increase their performance. With the production stage of development accounting for 80% of an application’s total cost, organisations must improve their software lifecycle management to achieve lower running costs and TCO. The increasing complexity of applications, particularly with web-orientation, is making testing difficult. So IT performance management (ITPM) tools need to be used to check performance when they’re live, so helping IT staff to improve productivity and efficiency then. Improved automated monitoring technologies are the answer to achieving full benefit from SLAs (service level agreements) with outsource vendors, and again, companies need to take advantage of available tools. The report points out the power of modern tools to alleviate staffing and skills shortages in IT departments, and specifically covers the automation available across infrastructure monitoring, database optimisation, transaction tuning, traffic management, tools for legacy systems, modelling tools and the big one – application portfolio management. It favours BMC Software, Computer Associates, Compuware, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Mercury and OPNet as best IT suppliers to turn to.