Streamlining IT operations and going green are top on the minds of IT directors this year, according to a recent eWeek IT management article addressing expected IT cost-cutting trends for 2009.

Also among chief trends, as the economy drives companies to adopt a small business mentality, are cloud computing, virtualization management, tacking and automation, and a renewed focus on software license compliance.

A major finding from a recent HP-commissioned survey showed 2008 demand for data center space grew by 14%, while available space increased by less than half of that number. Because of this, IT directors are leading data center transformation initiatives to implement consolidation efforts. In addition, businesses are responding to President Obama’s push for fewer global emissions and more renewable energy programs.

IT departments are also embracing a shift toward a more service-oriented future, and feeding into one of the hottest trends of all: cloud computing. By providing a single point of access for enterprise business access needs, cloud computing allows organizations a cost-effective way to create a more streamlined IT environment. Companies will be working to maximize the cloud by gaining valuable insight into their IT space and infrastructure components.

The cloud computing craze feeds into the need for virtualization management, tracking and automation to ensure the deployment of a proper disaster recovery plan, necessary to combat the increased risk of added network vulnerabilities.

With the adaption of, at times, excessive, use of data center software over recent years, IT directors will also be concentrating on eliminating unused software and re-focusing on software license compliance. 2009 will be the year of organization and housekeeping.

Most organizations are transforming their data centers through independent projects instead of taking a broad, integrated approach. The new research indicates that 20 percent of technology decision makers are initiating a complete transformation, while the remaining 80 percent are implementing individual transformation projects without an overall DCT strategy.

By focusing on independent projects as a way of achieving a complete transformation initiative, companies will be working to resist the results of a down economy and maximizing the strategy and value of their IT departments.

1. To engage in strategic conversations or stimulating idea-sharing, and offer observations, advices and support to one another.
2. It’s a highly targeted community where you can announce news, share white papers, post articles, link your corporate blog, listen to your prospects and customers.
3. To inform your tribe about concept, strategy, and business deals tailored specifically for them.
4. To give information to your tribe while also keeping it away from your competitors.

One thing to note: LinkedIn has recently changed some policy that previously allowed group managers to download email lists and communicate more often with the members in their group. Group managers can now only communicate with the group in once-weekly “announcements”.

From 30-year systems and storage veteran, and President and chief analyst at FOCUS, Barb Goldworm’s recent presentation,”The Efficient Next Gen Datacenter: Doing More with Less”:

The bottom line of IT efficiency for 2009, Barb explains, is “an opportunity for IT to address
the bottom lines through a variety of technologies and we talk about consolidation, optimization and automation as the QAs to do that driving up efficiency in terms of the infrastructure and in terms of users. So productivity within the IT organization and so I put together here a list of the things that we see as the most effective ways for users to help contribute to the bottom line. The technology initiatives that we are hearing that are moving forward and helping make the most difference, things like consolidation with blades, consolidating storage, virtualization, Green IT.”

Technorati Tags: data center marketing, data centers, Marketing to Data Centers

From 30-year systems and storage veteran and President and chief analyst at FOCUS, Barb Goldworm’s recent presentation, “The Efficient Next Gen Datacenter: Doing More with Less”.

And based on projected energy usage through 2011, she adds, “significant savings that can come through both power management and efficiency as well as virtualization to address those challenges that we talked about on the energy side.”

Addressing reliability, availability, and serviceability, Barb explains, “not only do I need to be able to make my applications available but I also need to make sure that they scale, so that when I have on-demand requirements I have peak loads coming into play. I need to be able to continue to deliver on that application availability commitment and use the infrastructure and what the infrastructure is scaled to do that.”

The way to do that, she says, is “capacity management, making the most efficient use of my physical and virtual infrastructures, so that I can meet my current needs, my future needs, my average workload and my peak workload. And that’s all about dynamic workloads and all of the changes that I need to address and deal with on demand, and my planned, unplanned migrations and outages. So we get into things like automated resource management.”

Within an enterprise, an average storage more than doubles in five years. Adds Barb, “And what we are seeing is a compound annual growth rate of somewhere along the lines of 60% with a 10 fold increase over the next five years. We are talking about 1.8 zetabytes by 2011, that’s 1800 extra bytes.”

More on this presentation to come–

Technorati Tags: data center marketing, Marketing to Data Centers

From 30-year systems and storage veteran and President and chief analyst at FOCUS,Barb Goldworm’s recent presentation, “The Efficient Next Gen Datacenter: Doing More with Less.”

Consolidating and automating helps to bring the costs down. Consolidation–delivering the same workload on fewer systems with fewer components can bring costs down while driving up utilization, quicker delivery times, and decreased time to production. In addition, it reduces capital expenses through reduction of hardware, software and management costs.

As the cost of energy rises (see graph #2), “green” operations are becoming more significant to the data center community as it holds the opportunity for substantial cost savings.

Barb discusses her graph: “It now costs more just for the energy to power the servers than it does for the servers themselves. And so if you look at the kind of dollars we are talking about, I have an example here a 1000 square foot datacenter holding 3010 kilowatts racks, power required for that infrastructure is 300 kilowatts therefore the power required to cool it also 300 kilowatts. What that brings you is an annual cost for cooling of $240,000. If we can reduce that by 50%, that’s a $120,000 per year to the bottom line that gets people’s attention, you know, the challenge of course is that that money tends to come out of the facilities budget. And so one of the challenges is how do you get your facilities folks working with your IT folks who work together where that money comes together leverage that savings to power or fund the investment that it takes to get those savings and way that you do that is through a variety of different opportunities.”

More from this presentation to come–

Technorati Tags: data center, data center marketing, Marketing to Data Centers

30-year systems and storage veteran, and President and chief analyst at FOCUS, recently delivered the timely presentation, “The Efficient Next Gen Datacenter: Doing More with Less”. You can read the full transcript here, or read the abstract over the next few posts:

Barb discussed the top 5 challenges of the 2009 IT departments:

1) IT faced with doing more with less. Financial considerations are greater than ever before, and, as opposed to 6 months ago, are in every single planning meeting today.
2) Facilities must deliver the same workload, the same services, and/or better budget while also consolidating, reducing space, and reducing power and cooling. Again–doing more with less
3) Scalability and performance on demand is a must. IT must deliver services out to users in a 24/7 type of environment and, as needs grow, must be able to scale that service and deliver the kind of performance users require.
4) Increased availability requuirements–requirements of doing more with less space.
5) IT must provide an infrastructure to stay current and keep up with the growth of information demands while not growing the budget at the same level.

Barb poses the question, “So how do we provide an infrastructure to stay current and keep up with the growth of information demands while not being able to grow the budget at that same level? How quickly can I get money back for the investments that I am making,
what is the payback period, what is the internal rate of return?”

On the very positive end, Bard give the good news: “IT has the opportunity to
directly contribute to the bottom line through a variety of technologies that we have
available today. We see IT being more a part of the partnership within businesses today
where IT CIOs are being asked, ‘how can you help us with this financial issue rather than
just having budgets cut?’ And IT has an opportunity today to do that through things like
consolidation, optimization and automation, doing more with what is in the infrastructure,
making the infrastructure work better, making the infrastructure more efficient, making
users more efficient, increasing user productivity.”

ROI and TCO of Consolidation & Automation Graph:

More from this presentation in the next few posts–

Technorati Tags: data center marketing, marketing for telecom, marketing to data center, telecom marketing

A New Expert Ezine Author Article:

Top 5 Biggest Bang for Your Buck Online Marketing Strategies

By: Wendy Brache and Joy Milkowski
These days, most everyone is trying to squeeze more out of their marketing budget.   Print ads, yellow pages and direct mail are astronomically high in price, while yielding significantly low returns.

Here’s the good news:  The online space is ripe for cutting costs without skimping on results.

So, here are our Top 5 Biggest Bang for Your Buck Online Marketing Strategies:

Lower Your PPC Bids: Conduct a simple test by decreasing your positioning in sponsored links, and monitor the impact on your overall conversions.  Chances are you’ll see a drop in your spend – without seeing a corresponding drop in leads/sales.  Take it nice and slow, so as to avoid a massive drop in results, and regularly monitor the results.

Utilize Dayparting: (Another PPC tip–it works.) Have you noticed a time of day that your PPC campaign spends money with little or no results?  If so, now may be the time to turn your ads off at certain times of the day or night to see if you can save a few bucks.  Again—a smart idea without sacrificing performance.

Write an Article– and Take it Viral: Chances are you have knowledge and expertise that you can put into a format your audience would appreciate.  Pen an article that’s rich with information and optimize it for keywords.   Publish it on a free article site (EzineArticles.com is ideal).  Don’t forget to give it a titillating title to attract interest.  Add the link to your email signature (and, if you can—add a “forward to a friend” link).  You can even send excerpts to the media or bloggers in your industry to see if you can get a nibble.

Link Your A** Off on Social Media Sites: Upload SocialMarker.com, and use it to bookmark your content every time you publish something.  If you have a blog, add it to your LinkedIn account via LI’s Wordpress and Blog applications.  Add links to your content to your messages in your LinkedIn groups, on your Facebook page.  Everywhere you sign your electronic signature, add a link to some of your expert content.  Think about it—how many emails do you send out a day?  A week?

Outside the Box Email: If you’re still sending the same old tired email newsletter in a template created by your ESP, then it’s time to spice things up.  Generate promo emails, special offers, “personalized” emails and even sophisticated e-zine designs to get your message out –and in your recipients’ Inboxes. In fact, there are some very cool new low-cost tools that can help you maximize email through behavioral targeting and robust cross-platform tracking.  Sounds expensive, but it really isn’t–not when you factor in what you stand to gain by getting a far greater level of intelligence from your email and website.  Also keep this in mind:  LinkedIn has a 100% delivery rate to it’s user-generated spam-blocker program.  Definitely NOT to be taken advantage of, but perfect for your very best email campaign.

It’s easy to lose site of marketing value during a bad economy—but the worst thing you can do is to cut marketing budgets and activities indiscriminately.  Studies show that companies that continue to invest in marketing during an economic downturn are the ones that survive –and thrive when the market rebounds, which it will. Getting good at these cost-cutting measures now means you’ll have extra marketing budget to spend when the economy invariably bounces back.

Joy Milkowski and Wendy Brache are B2B high-tech online marketing strategists at Access Marketing Company.  Visit Access Marketing Company at www.getmoreaccess.com.

Technorati Tags: data center marketing, marketing for telecom, online marketing telecom, telecom marketing

In finalizing a 2009 marketing plan, I realized there was one piece on which everything was predicated: our clients’ satisfaction.

I’m not talking about how satisfied we think they are, or about the stuff we sweep under the rug and say we’ll get to later–no one will notice for now…I’m sure they’re still happy…  No.  I’m talking about the real deal–the value of satisfied customers.  And when it all comes down to it, it’s the stuff I love:  common sense.

For free,  you can send out a Survey Monkey questionnaire–it’s not a long list of time-wasting questions–in fact, there is only one question to answer–the most crucial question of all:

How likely is it that you would you recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague?

Take a look at Satmetrix, Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Economics, where they discuss the value of a satisfied customer (a Promoter) over an unsatisfied customer ( a detracter):

Net Promoter Economics

Promoters and Detractors exhibit dramatically different behaviors and produce dramatically different economic results. Several factors distinguish Detractors from Promoters — explaining why it is so compelling for companies to increase the number of Promoters and decrease the number of Detractors in their business.

Retention Rate: Detractors generally defect at higher rates than Promoters, which means that they have shorter and less profitable relationships with a company.

Margins: Promoters are usually less price-sensitive than other customers because they believe they are getting good value overall from the company. The opposite is true for Detractors: they’re more price-sensitive.

Annual Spend: Promoters increase their purchases more rapidly than Detractors. They tend to consolidate more of their category purchases with their favorite supplier. Promoters’ interest in new product offerings and brand extensions exceeds that of Detractors or Passives.

Cost Efficiencies: Detractors complain more frequently, thereby consuming customer-service resources. Some companies also find that credit losses are higher for Detractors. (Perhaps that is how the Detractors extract revenge.) By contrast, Promoters help bring down your customer-acquisition costs by staying longer and helping to generate new referrals.

Word-of-Mouth: Quantify the proportion of new customers who selected your firm because of reputation or referral. The lifetime value of these new customers, including any savings in sales or marketing expense, should be allocated to Promoters. Between 80 and 90% of positive referrals come from Promoters. Detractors, meanwhile, are responsible for 80 to 90% of the negative word-of-mouth, and the cost of this drag on growth should be allocated to them.

You can see how asking (and acting upon the answer of) one question–especially in this economy–can mean the difference in a company’s success or failure.

Technorati Tags: net promoter, net promoter economics, net promoter score

Social Media Trend 2009: Optimize By Natalie Myers

Client-side marketers are optimizing social-media efforts this year, says Karen O’Brien, Partner, Interactive Services, Crimson Consulting. I asked Karen to describe the social-media trends among her big-brand clients.

Optimization is a big trend, she says.

Companies are optimizing social media by:

o setting standards and goals about how many members, RSS subscribers, friends, etc. they’d like to have on social-media channels

o setting standards and goals about conversations they want to target on social networks

o consolidating multiple presences on social networks, such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace (often, big companies have several profiles on various social networks, each profile representing a different product line, brand, or service)

“From a customer standpoint, it’s confusing to see a bunch of different [presences] unless they’re clearly labeled,” Karen says.

About 70% of consumers consider social-media sites to be sources of information that will influence purchasing decisions, according to research data in MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Social Media Marketing & PR Benchmark Guide.

Now is more important than ever to optimize. Make sure your brand is not only meeting its goals, but also consolidating its social-media presence and clearly labeling each one.

Technorati Tags: marketing for telecom, marketing strategy, online marketing stratgy, optimizing, telecom marketing strategy

When someone Googles your brand, service, or relevant keywords (”"Ed’s Plumbing”, “plumbing, Atlanta”, “plumbing, backup”), you want your company name to be at the top of the search results page. You want them to click on your link, go to your website, and turn into a lead.  This is called “driving traffic” and increasing “conversion rates”.

There are two ways to do this:

1)  You can spend time building links, getting content published on theme-relevant sites and keyword-rich pages.  You can create hub pages and blogs.  You can build great relationships with other bloggers, prompting them to point people in your direction in the form of quality back-links.  Or,

2) You can pay for it.  You can drive traffic on Google with a Pay Per Click campaign, increase conversions via specific landing pages, and optimize your website for relevant keywords.  These are just a few tactics to make your site easily found by the Google “bot” and push leads to your website before they go to the competition.

Number 1 is time consuming, but effective.  Number 2 can be costly, and–if done right–can be extremely effective.  Here’s some Sherpa advice on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns.

Technorati Tags: drive traffic, increase conversions, increase leads, marketing plan telecom, marketing strategy, merketing for telecom, online marketing strategy, telecom marketing