I don’t think there can be much more of an exciting job as an IT Manager with budget to spend, I remember when I was an IT Manager long before I turned to the dark side of having my own business, back when the economy was booming, the growth in technology in business meant there was always something new and shiny to play with. Whether this was hardware or software there was always a project to be done to somehow improve efficiency of the business and it was simply brilliant to always be pushing forward with something new, there was pressure to deliver but there was also the thrill of the challenge to do something cool…
The last number of years since the bubble burst, IT Managers have had different pressures on them, they’ve had to work miracles in terms of keeping systems online, have little budget for repairs and replacements. In many cases they’ve expected full refreshes to come along imminently and have done sticking-plaster repairs on their systems just to keep them running and these temporary patch-up jobs have become almost permanent. I have absolute envy for one of my buddies who is the IT Manager for a national retailer who’s had a substantial budget who’s completely re-engineered his datacentres and had several large office moves to carry out too. Office moves being an ideal time to get new toys!
These days I obviously work in the supply of hardware and its associated services and my buddy is unfortunately one of a privileged few who’s getting his refresh under way. The vast majority of IT Managers are having daily battles with their users, complaining about speeds, things not working as they should and the general decay of the system. Not that most discerning IT Managers aren’t taking this personally and really don’t want to let their users down, but what’s really on their mind is that they ran out of storage 18 months ago and what they’ve actually done is stuck a USB hard drive on the back of their server for their less critical files but are constantly worried how long that’ll last for! There is always a bigger worry on the IT Managers mind in the post-recession world.
I was also talking to a customer this week another IT Manager of a high profile company, and back when times were good, I remember shutting down my networks and rebuilding them over periods like Christmas, Easter even bank holidays. Not now, when we were comparing notes, I came to the conclusion that these days the pressures of maintaining productivity and cash flowing into the business mean that a lot of large scale infrastructure changes that require major works such as domain renames, IP address changes and such like, just don’t happen.
We make a point of listening to IT Managers, it’s pretty easy for me as I have the sympathy card – but being a businessman also we often sit between IT and the business managers and directors in the advice we give.
To help both parties we’ve actually gone out and selected products such as the Scale Computing HC3 hyper-converged storage plus virtualisation appliance in an all-in-one box, which allow a company to virtualise at a fraction of the traditional cost. We’ve partnered with companies such as SpectorSoft who produce monitoring software that not assist in the ease of gaining ISO 27001 compliance but increase employee productivity. We’re also working with a few other companies such as PHD Virtual, Cradlepoint, Webroot and Uniprint who all have some pretty innovative solutions that will help reduce costs within businesses.
Whether you’re a company manager, director or IT Manager we welcome the opportunity to discuss your business problems, whether you want to carry out a project but simply don’t have the budget, you need to do something that produces a saving to the business so you can get the go-ahead, or you simply find yourself at stalemate and you don’t know what to do then give us a call. Our advice is free and we may have something to help unleash your IT Manager back to the good old days when they could concentrate on improving business performance and helping users.
