Yeah, that’s a mouthful, but it’s incredibly important.

In any company, you have two competing tendencies when it comes to new technology. One is the interest in adopting solutions that will cut costs, beef up ROI and make the company more productive. The other is business-oriented – sticking to your strategy to make sure you accomplish your goals in the marketplace. Though it seems like solutions that preserve budget and generate returns are bound to further your company relative to its strategic objectives, that isn’t always the case.

To get the most out of your new solution implementations, it’s crucial that you balance what the technology offers against what your company as a whole is looking to accomplish. In the case of virtualization, for example, this means identifying the features and benefits of a virtual infrastructure that will help your company adapt to changing market conditions, with the ultimate goal being to increase revenue, widen margins and compete more effectively.

When considering a move to a virtual infrastructure – or any emerging technology – don’t just jump into it. The risks that your implementation won’t go as planned are too high. Instead, weigh the solution against your company’s strategy, and take an approach that will benefit your IT department and the business as a whole.

[Thanks, Harvard Business Review]

Implement a virtual infrastructure, and you’ll gain energy cost containment and better budget predictability along with a more agile datacenter.

The benefits of virtualization for energy cost management are significant. By consolidating your servers through the portability of resources across platforms, you won’t need to over-provision to handle unexpected demand. With less equipment out on the datacenter floor, power and cooling demand won’t climb as high, resulting in contained costs.

Of course, your datacenter energy costs will still fluctuate with market prices, but they’ll fluctuate in a lower range, resulting in a lesser impact on your budget this year. Since next year’s budget is undoubtedly influenced by this year’s levels, the impact of energy cost management stretch into the future. Through virtualization, you’ll have a platform for future cost savings and budgetary simplicity.

Technology agility and flexibility aren’t the only advantages of a virtualized infrastructure – you also gain financial agility and flexibility. By simplifying your infrastructure and reducing the need to provision aggressively while some systems remain dark, you’re able to slash energy consumption – and with it IT operating expenses.

Green IT isn’t just about saving leaves – it’s really intended to save you some cash and free you from the constraints of an uncertain market.

Here are five ways that Cisco UCS makes infrastructure management easier:

1. Cohesive system: With its Unified Computing System, Cisco unites computing, networking, storage access and virtualization into a complete, integrated system. The overhead associated with managing disparate pieces is a thing of the past.

2. Unified network fabric: UCS integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers, advancing your network and operating environment as a whole.

3. Decouple scale from complexity: Gain the ability to scale without the typical attendant cost and management overhead. According to Cisco, “Whether the system has one server or 320 servers with thousands of virtual machines, all resources participate in a unified management domain.”

4. Robust ecosystem support: Take advantage of a standards-based unified network fabric supported by a partner ecosystem of industry leaders. There are plenty of companies investing in the success of the Cisco UCS environment, not just Cisco, creating a pool of innovation from which to draw.

5. Incremental deployment: You don’t have to do it all at once. Instead, deploy incrementally to protect your IT investment.

Chances are you’re overspending on your infrastructure. Research from Cisco estimates that infrastructure management ties up 70 percent of your budget. So, that only gives you 30 percent to allocate for the future. Simplifying your infrastructure could tip those scales a bit – making your department far more effective.

Use the Cisco Unified Computing System to regain control of your datacenter. Through a streamlined, consistent environment, you’ll be able to lower the overhead associated with delivering IT services to your organization, spending less time on maintenance and support calls. In addition to having a happier end-user population, your team will experience an increase in productivity, and how your company perceives IT will change profoundly.

The underlying reason for the increased efficiency afforded by Cisco UCS is a simplified architecture designed for a virtualized datacenter. It integrates servers, storage access and networks into a comprehensive environment that easily scales service delivery and facilitates the integration of other platforms.

The result of a Cisco UCS-powered infrastructure is a lower-cost environment that is powerful, agile and scalable. This translates to a lower TCO and an opportunity to reinvest IT dollars to high-ROI projects, demonstrating how technology can be a competitive force in your company and in your industry. Cisco UCS doesn’t just make managing your infrastructure easier – it also takes these benefits into the competitive space.

In addition to streamlining your IT operation and organization, the use of a managed infrastructure service provider could simplify your D/R environment, bringing with it a reduction in costs and freeing up your IT budget for deployment to higher-impact IT initiatives. Move to a managed services approach to your infrastructure, and the benefits actually extend beyond the traditional TCO/ROI case.

Consider MTM’s Aware360v2 managed infrastructure, for example. Of course, we have a rigorous, reliable and tested D/R program in place – which is something you should look for when going through your due diligence on a potential partner in this space. The advantage, however, is that we apply it to all our clients, which provides an economy of scale that simply isn’t attainable for most individual companies. As a result, we’re able to keep the cost of operation contained. An in-house approach to enterprise-wide D/R is naturally more costly, both in terms of direct expense and consumption of IT department resources.

Disaster recovery doesn’t have to be difficult. Move to a managed services environment, and it’s part of the solution you engage. Focus on your business, and work with MTM to manage your infrastructure: D/R is part of the package.

While service-level agreements (SLAs) provide procedures and remedies for downtime, performance degradation and other potential problems, they are inherently retrospective: SLAs talk about how a problem can be fixed. When choosing a managed services provider, you should take a look at the measures in place that will keep problems from arising.

Evaluate your managed services provider options based on your business objectives. Consider whether you will be using it to host systems or applications that are mission-critical, for example, and use that to determine your requirements … which in turn should guide the equipment and process decisions you make. Review the provider’s plans, equipment and procedures to ensure that they are significantly robust to prevent downtime – and facilitate a swift resolution when it occurs.

Essentially, conduct your due diligence from the perspective of prevention, not post-event remediation.

As you review the managed infrastructure offering, align what you see with your business processes. Consider when you experience spikes in utilization – or simply in business activity. Think about your periods of peak business activity (and when your slower seasons are), and use this information to determine your specific managed infrastructure needs.

With MTM Aware360v2, you’ll be able to architect a solution that addresses your unique operating environment, and you’ll learn about the environment itself, in order to be confident in the infrastructure you’re using to power your business. In the end, the decision you’ll make about using a managed infrastructure will provide better results going forward.

When you use a managed services provider, you’re putting the future of your business into your partner’s hands. Make sure those hands are ready to protect your interests. Thinking through prevention rather than penalties is a smarter way to go.

To help your employees work through a routine that can only be called “the new normal,” you need to implement technology that’s designed to align with this busy, always-connected lifestyle. With Cisco Unified Communications, you’ll make your network truly portable, accommodating those who need to be at least engaged (and likely productive) throughout the day – not to mention the employees who live and work out on the road.

Cisco Unified Communications delivers an integrated environment for mobile communications. Voice, multimedia and even mobile desktops help keep employees connected, informed and active wherever they are. With Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator, for example, your employees can gain access to your telecom infrastructure and even appear to clients that they are calling from the main office with features that make a call look like its coming from the office. And, remote worker expenses can be contained by routing calls through the corporate telephony infrastructure rather than the caller’s mobile service provider.

A distributed workforce can still like it’s based in one place. Whether you have employees who work from home, work from home before and after working at the office or spend their professional and personal lives on the road, you can present a united front to the marketplace with Cisco Unified Communications – while making your employees more productive than ever before.

Here are five ways that virtualization can help you lower your infrastructure TCO:

1. Equipment consolidation: reduce equipment investments by making computing and storage resource portable among platforms. The ability to use existing resources makes it possible to defer spending.

2. Streamline operations: make better use of existing IT staff through a more efficient datacenter management operation. The ability to share resources through virtualization reduces operational complexity and alleviates pressure for additional headcount.

3. Power and cooling: a smaller equipment footprint results in lower energy expenses. By reducing the need for servers and storage in your datacenter, virtualization results in less energy consumption – and cost.

4. Capacity planning: this becomes a more straightforward affair, as the datacenter can be viewed holistically, rather than on a platform-by-platform basis. Planning becomes both faster and more accurate.

5. Available capital: through the reduction of infrastructure TCO, more financial resources can be made available for investment in other initiatives … which can have further TCO benefits.

If you’re thinking about moving to a managed infrastructure, which can come with many advantages, think about the IT resources that your company consumes, as well as how heavily you want to commit to operating and maintaining your own infrastructure. Variable system demand and a desire to focus on your core business while maintaining a lean IT department usually indicate that a managed services approach to your IT infrastructure is prudent.

Businesses characterized by the following conditions tend to be best fits for managed infrastructures:

• System usage sustains periodic, expected spikes (e.g., from seasonal activity), making flexible access to resources preferable to maintaining dark equipment for most of the year
• You expect to grow into your infrastructure over time – and don’t want to start paying for the future now
• Your company is in an early stage or startup period, and it would make more sense to focus on your core business model than in building an IT organization
• The business is small and is unlikely to become large – making an in-house IT presence less cost effective than a managed infrastructure

Of course, there are other situations in which a company would want to outsource some or all of its infrastructure. Strategic drivers around staff size and focus as well as the cost of local talent can make a managed services model more effective.

Instead of making a quick decision regarding whether to use managed services, commit the time required by the gravity of the issue. Contact MTM’s Managed Services team, and we’ll help you identify the most effective approach to delivering technology to your business users and clients.

Cisco Unified Communications is among this rare breed: your end-user community will thank you for it.

The reason Unified Communications has such a short path to adoption is because it delivers value almost immediately upon implementation, solving the problems that are most troublesome for end users. The flexibility available from voice through application sharing comes without disproportionate operational impact – translation: users get the upside with minimal impact to what they do every day.

Some adjustment is necessary, of course. End users will need to adapt to the new features that Unified Communications will bring to them. But, the learning curve is mild, we’ve seen, which makes it easier for the users to get on board quickly. Further, the ability to meet, share and collaborate on a moment’s notice takes the sting out of trying to book everything from flights to conference rooms in a climate where the budget for both is scarce.

Implement Cisco Unified Communications – your business users will thank you for it!