Welcome to WCG's TCO Newsletter! This free monthly newsletter provides the latest information on trends in IT Portfolio Management, IT investment strategies and new ideas for optimizing your IT portfolio.

NEW WHITE PAPER

Looking to reduce IT costs while increasing efficiencies? In today's tough financial climate, most companies are struggling to reduce costs quickly, without hampering productivity or making costly mistakes. By implementing an IT Portfolio Management strategy, you can identify areas for cost reduction, prioritize investments, and optimize your resources. To learn more, download our new white paper "IT Portfolio Management: the Need for a Financial Approach".

PARTNER NEWS

If you are a systems integrator or reseller with expertise in consolidation, asset management or infrastructure audits, we may be looking for you! WCG just announced a new partner program designed for consulting firms and resellers that want to leverage the WCG TCO e-Valuator software and methodologies in customer engagements. For more information about this new program, click here.

FEATURED ARTICLE: Measuring TCO

As TCO becomes a standard measurement tool for IT organizations, it is important to ensure that it is calculated properly and truly represents total cost of ownership, as opposed to just measuring hardware and software purchase and maintenance costs. This excerpt from IT Web's "Cutting Back on IT Cost of Ownership" by Rodney Weidemann features WCG's Patrick Kuwana outlining the various levels of TCO:

"There are three levels to look at when focusing on TCO," says Patrick Kuwana, WCG's regional director. He says the first of these levels consists of determining the physical and financial makeup of the organization's IT infrastructure. "These are the physical IT assets a company has, such as hardware, software and all costs of running a data center, such as power usage and the physical data center footprint costs.

"The second level is the 'soft' IT issues, which includes the cost of people, training and maintenance. In other words, the recurring costs to keep the IT department operational and delivering on its objectives to the organization's internal and external business customers.

"Finally, there are the intangible issues. These are difficult to quantify, as they include things like the stability of the architecture and the cost of downtime," says Kuwana.

He says that for a company to effectively work out its TCO, it needs to work with a partner that understands all the factors involved, and has the sophisticated tools and methodologies to analyze these three levels. "An infrastructure audit that analyses and works out the relevant costs for all three of the levels can then be used - in conjunction with the right software tools - to break this information down into an organization's various cost centers. Effectively, it becomes a business analysis tool."

The point is to show a business its TCO by its internal divisions or functional areas, rather than only focusing on its overall IT TCO. This promotes business accountability.

Kuwana says what a lot of organizations don't realize is that getting an understanding of TCO is only half the issue - the big question is then what do you do with this information?

"The next step is for the organization to use this analysis tool to make sound business and financial decisions. It becomes the base from which to measure any critical IT investment or restructuring decision, such as systems consolidation or outsourcing.

"A company's TCO will show where it is at the present moment. By using this information correctly, a business can then work out what its ROI will be on any given future project," he says.

To read the complete article, click here.

OTHER USEFUL ARTICLES

• Computerworld: 5 Cost Cutting Strategies for Data Storage:
  
  
• CFO Magazine Survey: The Truth About Tech:
  
  
• CIO Magazine: Good Business Sense- CXOs must immerse themselves in the IT planning process to ensure that technology investment pays off: