Integrating data center support: Lower costs and decrease downtime with your support strategy

As organizations and their data centers embrace hybrid cloud deployments, they have a rapidly growing number of vendors and workloads in their IT environments. The proliferation of these vendors leads to numerous issues and challenges that overburden IT staff, impede clients’ core business innovations and development, and complicate the support and operation of these environments.

Couple that with the CIO’s priorities to improve IT environment availability, security and privacy posture, performance, and the TCO, and you now have a challenge that is insurmountable for many clients. In fact, according to the clients IDC surveyed, 62% reported that multivendor environments caused more downtime issues than a single source. However, capital may not be available for the support renewal of OEM estate, service scope improvements, or the refreshing of end-of-life products.

Clients following an integrated support strategy engage a trusted advisor to support most, if not all, of the products across the data center. Over the coming years, IT data center solutions will become increasingly sophisticated—further complicating the challenges articulated above. This will require clients to elevate their infrastructure support model from hardware-centric systems to complete workload-enabling solutions, integrating hardware and software in a solution-support model.

Clients following this strategy choose the level of service and tasks that they want their support vendor to handle across the lifecycle of their infrastructure products. That includes the choice between standard or proactive support. Support vendors can also handle services like cross-platform orchestration, management of vendors and IT assets, and availability management (to name a few).

Leveraging IBM for support across the data center provides crucial benefits. The Forrester Total Economic Impact of IBM Hybrid IT Support report, commissioned by IBM, demonstrates these benefits based on surveys with 277 of our clients and 5 deep-dive interviews. Let’s look at the benefits and what is driving them:

• 25% reduction in maintenance and support spending: Consolidation under a single vendor can have significant cost savings for organizations. Often, clients divert budget and resources to other initiatives, including digital transformation and cloud migration.
• 20% reduction in time spent on hardware support tasks: IT staff spend a significant amount of time on day-to-day support tasks, such as managing inventory, troubleshooting, managing incidents, and installing and updating equipment. With IBM’s hybrid IT support, a single point of contact will provide remote and onsite support, parts logistics and billing. The contact will troubleshoot issues and assist with problem resolution. IBM Support Insights, a cloud-based service that identifies current and potential system issues, delivers risk scores and recommendations for actions to reduce unplanned downtime and avoid service gaps. It provides product-level recommendations for IT systems, devices and software by integrating and analyzing inventory exposure, lifecycle and contract data from multiple IT vendors.

• 21% reduction in mean time to resolve hardware outages: With a single point of contact for managing incidents and IBM Support Insights to provide a view into potential incidents before they occur, clients with IBM’s hybrid IT support are reducing downtime. The increased accuracy of inventory is also a major factor along with the recommended proactive code updates and patches and the elimination of support gaps. It’s important to note that beyond actually reducing the time to resolve incidents, organizations avoid, on average, seven hardware incidents/outages annually by leveraging IBM for their consolidated data center support strategy.

• 22% reduction in time spent on vendor relationship management: Having a single point of contact to manage vendor relationships frees up additional time for IT staff.

If you are struggling with the integration of data center support, it may be time to start thinking about a better support strategy so that you can take advantage of IBM’s unique enterprise capabilities and outcomes. Check out the full Forrester TEI report and use the IBM Hybrid IT Support Estimator Tool to estimate the potential three-year cost savings of consolidating support in your data center.