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How will you scale up while controlling your costs and your carbon footprint? Sun is exploring your options.
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Even in a downturn, enterprises recognise the need to assess their IT infrastructure to ensure they are getting the most out of it.
For many enterprises IT is not a discretionary expense and there is a need to upgrade, expand or virtualise in order to stay competitive.
Moreover, implementing new technology and optimising existing technology through virtualisation and open source software can improve datacentre efficiencies:
- New hardware can deliver faster speeds with less energy consumption
- Open source software delivers the latest in innovation at a fraction of the cost of proprietary systems
- Implementing a virtualised environment can reduce hardware requirements and costs
Scale and Economy
The question on the mind of every CIO is: "How can I manage scale while keeping control of costs and carbon footprint?"
Especially in this economy, companies and shareholders are demanding that the IT department does more with less — but how?
There are a number of avenues that companies can take to explore this question, including:
- Implementing open source software
- Automating processes to meet regulatory demands
- Forming a strategic partnership
How Open Source Delivers Business Benefits on a Large Scale
Open source software always gains momentum in tough times but many companies are questioning why it isn't adopted widely already.
Three companies that have realised the benefits of open source long before the economic downturn are the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the Australia National University (ANU) and Wotif.com.
The Bureau and ANU have selected Sun hardware and open source software to deliver the southern hemisphere's largest supercomputer, which will enable advanced weather forecasting and climate change modeling on a global scale.
"The new supercomputer, which has 12 times the capability of the present system, will ensure ongoing international competitiveness and provide a facility that will allow Australian researchers to increase the scope, ambition and impact of their research," said Director of National Computational Infrastructure, Professor Lindsay Botten.
By implementing open source software the Bureau and ANU will gain an innovative and highly developed technology suite at a much lower cost than alternative proprietary software.
In the commercial sector, online travel company Wotif.com has made a strategic decision to base its business on open source software. This decision has been critical to Wotif's ability to handle more than 3.4 million Website hits and deliver more than 224,000 bookings each month to its customers.
The implementation of MySQL and GlassFish (among others) to run its business on is paying off and Wotif.com continues to expand into new geographies.
Open source software enables it all while the IT department has an open channel to the developer community and the latest in software innovation.
Automation to Reduce Regulatory Expenses
Another area where companies are looking to IT for help is regulation. When Sarbanes-Oxley came into effect in 2002, businesses spent millions of dollars on manual processes in an effort to comply, without thinking about the advantages that could be gained through the automation of processes.
In the case of identity and access management, Sun estimates that organisations can save 50 per cent of their current expenditure on manual processes through automation.
Not only can identity and access management technologies ensure that companies remain compliant, they also protect against the growing number of internal and external threats faced by global companies.
For more information on the topics covered in this issue of Inner Circle, please, please contact me directly.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Goodlace
Vice President and Managing Director
Sun Microsystems Australasia Pty. Ltd
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