Today I met with two more CIOs, both with a pretty mature virtualization environment. One is aggressively virtualizing in-house built customer facing applications, the second one is stepping up the virtualization of their SAP implementation.

Virtualization Business Metric Best Practice

They both brough up a business best practice that I heard before:

Define and track virtualization-related MBOs for their teams

These metrics can be expressed in one or more of the following areas:

• Target virtualization percentage (e.g.  45% virtualization by year-end)
• Cost savings attributable to virtualization (e.g. Capital, data center space and cooling, carbon footprint)
• Quality of Service improvement (E.g. provisioning time, application uptime,  application time to market)

We fond that customers who put these type of MBOs in place tend to accelerate their adoption and achieve higher level of return on their investment.

“Help me with the business justification”

The CIO who is doing the big SAP implementation in the virtual environment asked me if we can help her with a business justification that goes beyond server consolidation to help her complete their virtualization journey. Our existing ROI tool is primarily focussed on server consolidation and cost saving but we are rolling out a new one that aggregates the value delivered by our solutions around metrics such as time to market for new applications or new versions of exiting applications, business continuity, application quality of service, and so on. We are going to follow-up with her to validate our update model as we get ready to roll it out more aggressively.

I expect more and more customers will ask us about this type of ROI tool.

Also, I expect CIOs to seek help in calculating the computing cost of their internal IT infrastructure as more and more businesses start comparing it to the cost of renting computing resources from the public cloud.

Vittorio