• Reducing TCO
• Improving return on IT investment (ROI)
• Increasing Return on Assets (ROA)
• Increasing operational efficiency
• Improving service level agreements

The WCG TCO e-Valuator is used by end-user organizations to manage assets and analyze IT investment decisions.

IT Vendors, Systems Integrators and Consulting Firms use WCG TCO e-Valuator as a sales tool for cost justifying IT solutions and as an engagement tool for projects such as Systems Consolidations and Infrastructure Audits.

The following modules form the e-Valuator application:

Asset Management Database
WCG TCO e-Valuator is based on a core asset management and TCO database that enables users to collect and store all relevant information related to the physical location, technical configuration and associated cost of IT assets. The asset management database collects detailed architectural and financial information about servers, storage, networks, software licenses, peripherals, staffing, facilities, contracts and all other aspects of a working infrastructure. The availability of this information alone is a huge step towards improving the management of IT portfolio. Once this information is captured, it serves as a baseline for TCO calculations and scenario analyses used for decision support.

Data Gathering Tools
To facilitate the gathering of asset information, optional data collection agents can be installed on the company’s servers or network to automatically collect the majority of the asset data. These agents automatically interrogate the servers, determine their hardware configurations, and send the information through to the e-Valuator administrator who validates the data and imports it into the database. This significantly increases the speed of creation and maintenance of the asset management database and is extremely valuable in situations where the number and location of assets are unknown. The WCG TCO e-Valuator data collection agents are crucial in keeping the asset management data current, thus reducing the cost of change management.

Financial Analysis and Scenario Comparisons
The justification of any IT investment is dependant upon the financial modeling of the available data. Once the asset management database has been populated, WCG’s TCO e-Valuator provides financial analysis capabilities that enable executives to answer complex questions about their IT environment and perform scenario comparisons. Examples include:

• Calculating the 3 to 10 year TCO for the complete infrastructure
• Calculating the TCO for any portion of the infrastructure
• Performing opportunity cost or disposal cost calculations for any or all assets
• Determining staffing and other overhead costs associated with any asset
• Comparing existing assets with new or proposed assets
• Comparing proposed assets with competitive proposed assets
  
• Determining the effect of replacement architectures on TCO
• Calculating the Net Present Value (NPV) cash flow to determine real savings
  
• Calculating the ROI of any IT investment in the infrastructure
  

Using the financial analysis and scenario comparison features, companies not only gain a more thorough understanding of the business impact of their decision, but also speed up the decision making process, allowing them to be more responsive to business needs.

Report Generator
The WCG TCO e-Valuator includes a Report Generator that enables the development of custom reports, charts and graphs that can be easily exported into Microsoft Word for use in proposals and reports or in Microsoft Excel for further analysis. The Report Generator is a powerful tool that can answer complex questions that would normally take weeks of research to answer. Users can choose from many types of standard reports or define custom reports on the fly. Within seconds, the report generator can return key decision support answers to complex queries such as:

• Identify all servers (or other assets) that were purchased over 3 years ago and run a particular operating system;
  
• Identify all storage devices that are connected to two or more servers;
  
• List all Desktop systems that are supported by a specific Help Desk; or
  
• List all applications that run on servers using a particular operating environment
  

Ordering e-Valuator:
The WCG TCO e-Valuator is available now and can be purchased for either Microsoft Access or Oracle environments. For more information contact us at evaluator@winslow-consulting.com

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