Friday, December 22, 2006
Enterprise Architecture & Rationalization...
The notion of Rationalization is gaining traction with many large enterprises. Today, I share how open source affords opportunities in this regard...
Through rationalization, enterprises are considering rapid deployment of virtualization technologies ranging from Xen to VMWare to Solaris Containers all in the spirit of reducing the amount of equipment in their data center. Likewise, enterprises are also embracing service-oriented archtitectures in an attempt to eliminate functional redundancies across business silos. All of these opportunities allow open source vendors a chance to play if they tune their message accordingly.
Large enterprises have hundreds of IT vendors large and small. The ability to reduce the total count of the vendors that IT folks have to work with on a daily basis saves a ton of money. Some of the savings can come from avoidance of license fees by embracing open source but much more of the savings will actually come from the overhead of maintaining relationships with each and every vendor which is incredibly time consuming.
At work, we have been undergoing a large rationalization excercise and I have been noodling inquiring as to whether their are any industry analyst firms that are interested in doing a case study on our efforts. Rationalization at some level affords us the opportunity to increase transparency which is the mantra of today's modern IT organization. By not only sharing via conversation but exposing all of our metrics for all to see may be a great way to achieve this goal.
One of the elements of transparency may even be to put into the case study published by the industry analyst firm, a listing of all of the vendors we managed to displace. I wonder if I could structure a consulting gig around this with Gartner or Forrester or may be better served by pursuing a firm such as Redmonk?
If there are other industry analysts in the blogosphere that would like to explore the notion of rationalization and transparency, do not hesitate to trackback. I am firm in my belief that enterprises are more transparent than we are given credit for, so lets see if industry analysts are equally interested in helping us become more transparent...
| | View blog reactionsThrough rationalization, enterprises are considering rapid deployment of virtualization technologies ranging from Xen to VMWare to Solaris Containers all in the spirit of reducing the amount of equipment in their data center. Likewise, enterprises are also embracing service-oriented archtitectures in an attempt to eliminate functional redundancies across business silos. All of these opportunities allow open source vendors a chance to play if they tune their message accordingly.
Large enterprises have hundreds of IT vendors large and small. The ability to reduce the total count of the vendors that IT folks have to work with on a daily basis saves a ton of money. Some of the savings can come from avoidance of license fees by embracing open source but much more of the savings will actually come from the overhead of maintaining relationships with each and every vendor which is incredibly time consuming.
At work, we have been undergoing a large rationalization excercise and I have been noodling inquiring as to whether their are any industry analyst firms that are interested in doing a case study on our efforts. Rationalization at some level affords us the opportunity to increase transparency which is the mantra of today's modern IT organization. By not only sharing via conversation but exposing all of our metrics for all to see may be a great way to achieve this goal.
One of the elements of transparency may even be to put into the case study published by the industry analyst firm, a listing of all of the vendors we managed to displace. I wonder if I could structure a consulting gig around this with Gartner or Forrester or may be better served by pursuing a firm such as Redmonk?
If there are other industry analysts in the blogosphere that would like to explore the notion of rationalization and transparency, do not hesitate to trackback. I am firm in my belief that enterprises are more transparent than we are given credit for, so lets see if industry analysts are equally interested in helping us become more transparent...
