BMC Software's internal IT organization launched a virtualization and automation initiative that achieved financial payback in less than six months. The effort not only improved productivity and increased responsiveness, it also saved the company $5 million per year.
b m c i N D U S T R Y I N S I G H T s
Uncover the Benefits
of Virtualization
Improved Productivity, Increased Responsiveness, and More Than $5 Million in Annual SavingsBy Mark Settle, Chief Information Officer, BMC Software
BMC Software's IT organization, like many, began its virtualization and automation journey with some key objectives. We wanted to help IT become more responsive to business needs, and we wanted to better understand how the assets that the IT organization manages support the business. We were pleasantly surprised to discover significant side benefits that far exceed the objectives of our original plan. These benefits include dramatic labor savings and productivity improvements through automation - achievements that help make our software developers much more responsive to business needs at a time when all IT organizations must be especially focused on staying ahead of the curve.
Our IT organization achieved the typical "virtues of management metrics, such as fill rates, inventory virtualization," such as reducing costs by improving turns, and inventory working capital, to manage R&D asset utilization. In 2008, reusing servers saved more assets in a pooled fashion with temporary rights of than $5 million. These efforts also reduced power ownership for individual project teams. consumption and requirements for floor space by 20 percent. The financial payback of this investment Developers now enjoy a shorter wait from the time in virtualization, which was approximately $2 million, they identify a need for equipment to the time they was achieved in fewer than six months. have the equipment, so they can proceed with their work. They also have realized the advantage of In addition, our ability to meet the service level agree- standardized requirements. When people can access ments (SLAs) for making assets available for routine resources in a timely manner, they don't feel the development requests improved significantly, and need to hoard them. Although it's difficult to precisely response times for R&D development environments estimate the time savings associated with the new became much faster and very predictable. Software process, lead times for individual requests have been development teams became less possessive of "their" reduced by at least 10 - 15 workdays. This is equivalent assets, and they accepted the benefits of using to a collective reduction in lead times of 360 work pooled resources. We now use standard inventory months per quarter.b m c i N D U S T R Y I N S I G H T s
Getting Started of multiple servers and storage volumes. Without this Our original objectives were to reduce server sprawl provisioning capability, more than 100 development in an environment where IT resources span multiple projects encompassing a community of more than geographies, and to improve productivity by reducing 1,500 developers worldwide could be impacted by response time to developer requests. The initiative delays in server availability.focused on employing state-of-the art service request management, hardware virtualization, and system Reaping the Benefits Through BSMmonitoring technologies to manage server and storage Business Service Management (BSM) is an approach assets on a pooled basis. This approach created an in- and unified platform for managing IT according to busi-house, on-demand, cloud computing environment for ness priorities. We followed this approach - which the BMC R&D team and provided them with just-in-time was developed by BMC - with our technology and access to data center resources - which include an processes, and we subsequently reduced the number asset pool of approximately 7,000 physical servers and of physical servers by almost 50 percent over two 30TB of storage - required to conduct product develop- years. In addition, we exceeded our productivity goal by ment projects. managing everything in our infrastructure - spread throughout multiple geographies - as a single data center. When IT organizations make decisions to leverage virtualization, it's impor-tant to consider the capacity they The financial payback of this provide to various regions. For example, if a company has 1,000 investment in virtualization, employees in Asia Pacifi... [download for more]
