IT Budget/ Project Funding (Virtualization)

[mark_smith111]

Hey folks, I was wondering, how are your IT budgets till the end of the year and if you are able to get projects approved for funding, and what trick (if any) do you use to get projects funded. We are having tough time to get our projects off the ground. Any advice will be appreciated

[fatality_uk]

Of course it depends when your companies year end is and if you have carry over of budgets into next fiscal period.

If the projects is a techy wet dream, i.e. Linux roll out for the sake of it or cloud computing WAN, then an FD block it.

If you have provided a compeling business case with supporting case studies and cost/benefit analysis, then most boards will, given a little nudge, approve projects.

Always have as much documentation as possible to present when you propose a project. Try and anticipate the questions raised from your proposal and have answers ready. Show where possible how others have done this and how it made life/budgets better, smaller.

[JoulesG]

Hi Mark,

even with Vitulisation-projects, this is a common problem.

I am a game keeper turned poacher - Comptroller turned "Techie" - my advice is to work out what the panic buttons are and steer clear - by this I mean that some organisations ahte the "i"-word (investment) but have less of a problem with Budget or running costs.

There are ways to disclose necessary investment i.e. in machinery (blade servers), software (ESX) and training as running costs (e.g. refinance via lease / rent) - there are some service providers who do this.

Or if the Budget is the problem, then the discussion should be along the lines of "desirable" changes - i.e. lower running costs (power, air conditioning maintenance, admin), lower infrastructure investment (less and smaller machines and higher flexibility & availability / lower risk of outage. Also the "rebranding" of some running costs as investment may help the "powers that be" to bight the bullet and approve a "fact-finding" project - which is always favourable to a full blown "migration".

I hope that this helps "focus the mind" - if I can help further - just let me know.

Cheers

JoulesG

[koenn]

Here's some pro-virtualization arguments. See how they apply to your situation

1- reduced TCO - you can probably get some case studies from vendors, or have them do a TCO simulation for you

2- availability, disaster recovery, business continuity
virtualization will allow you to create high availability configurations and disaster recovery procedures so that failing servers don't result in productivity loss the way they would now.

3- testing
with virtualization, you can set up test environments that are exact copies of your production environment, allowing for better, safer, ... software rollouts or updates, without additional hardware costs

4- flexibility, manageability, ...
a consolidated, virtualized environment will free up time for the IT department, allowing them to take on new projects, or spend more time IT business alignement, or develop "green IT", or whatever project appeals to management at the moment



5- support for legacy applications. You can continue to run legacy apps in virual machines without having to worry about the hardware deggrading or the risks involved in moving legacy systems to new hardware