squeezeIT

Total Cost of Ownership or TCO is a TLA (three letter acronym) that has perhaps been used too many times. It is up there with ROI (Return on Investment) as a perennial favorite when talking about technology products and in particular when trying to sell technology products and services. I myself am as guilty as the next person. Because of this overuse perhaps sometimes we ignore the TCO benefits and in particular what it means to us and our businesses.

For many businesses and particularly the smaller variety, the main consideration in purchasing a new product or system for their IT infrastructure is the initial cost. I was reminded of this when a potential customer asked me whether I could get a discount on some particular hardware and would I be getting it on-line or from a store. These are very fair questions as they will be the ones picking up the tab and as ever, every penny counts. 10% off is 10% off.

The particular problem with this viewpoint is that the hardware in questions may have only cost two or three hundred dollars so a 10% saving (if there was one to be had) doesn’t add up to much. I therefore write this to draw attention back to the total cost of ownership of hardware, software and systems. In hard times the focus is too often on the capital expenditure right now, but if you intend to be in business in 2 years time and still be using today’s investment then you must consider what the ownership costs will be for the product over the life of the purchase.

Lets take a single server running Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 as a simple example. A server like this for a small business might cost $3000. This is where a small business (and sometimes larger ones) seems to focus most of their time on product selection. They may shop around, comparing models, haggle with the supplier and after several days may acquire that server for $2600 as they managed to really beat down the company. Now comes the expensive part. If your core skills are not IT then you will need someone to set the server up, configure it to your requirements and ensure it is working. If this entails email set up, domain names, migration of existing machines and applications, print queues, group policy, patch management, back up and restore, the list goes on, then you may have someone with you for 3 or 4 days at $500 or so per day. Once the server is happily whirring away, you need to figure in electricity costs, management and administration and monitoring. You may pay $400 per month for a basic service support service.

Did you choose hardware support when you bought the server? If you didn’t becuase it was $350 more for 3 years and something fails like a motherboard, you could be out of action for days whilst you get a new one shipped to you and the cost of setting up alternative arrangements during the disaster could easily run into the thousands in consulting time, new emergency hardware and software, etc. If the systems are critical to your business operations, and they normally are, then please factor how much it will cost you whilst they are out of action.

About a year into ownership your business is doing great and you need to upgrade the server and introduce a new application and remote working. Now your initial system still supports all this by getting some add-ons, but once again you will need to dig deep for the software and hardware additions and the services to implement, plus a review of your well documented backup and recovery plans now things have changed. Lets price this at $5000 for the whole shebang.

I am not going to continue with my theoretical business (based on real world) example but your total over two years (assuming the disaster doesn’t strike) would be – $ 19200, of which $2600 was the only part that you got excited about in pricing terms, though it is only 13% of the TCO over a two year time frame. I didn’t account for electricity or AV software or other subscriptions and ongoing costs and assumed that disaster never struck. so the percentage is more likely less than 10%.

So my point. When you decide to implement a new system and especially if it is an infrastructure update, the important factor is ensuring that you plan your system correctly from the ground up and examine the TCO costs rather than just asking how much will so and so be and is it cheaper on Amazon. That $10 saving, though worth having shouldn’t be the “be all and end all” of your system planning and selection process because it is just a drop in the ocean. Time and time again it has been shown that a more expensive implementation, that is planned carefully before product selection takes place (and not just on price), where fault tolerant components are chosen, adequate disaster recovery options are selected and where the systems are standardized, locked down and controlled will reduce your TCO over the long run and mean you pay out less over the lifetime as your business grows more successful.

After using the Foxmarks Favorites synchronization tool for a while I decided I needed to write a post on this great product.

Very recently Foxmarks has been renamed to XMarks, I assume to better reflect the fact the product can work with other browsers than just FireFox.

I was first introduced to the utility when I become a heavier Firefox user and it solved a problem for me that I am sure many users have. I heavily use Internet Favorites and have a fairly well organized and categorized set of folders and bookmarks. I also have 3 PCs that I use regularly and for reasons I wont bore you with as to why they are not on a domain and I don’t use roaming profiles (which would at least mean IE favorites remained centrally managed) for these systems.

The first thing that is really cool about Xmarks is that you can synchronize your browser favorites and user name and password combinations with the Xmarks server – obviously after considering carefully what types of passwords I want out there! So after doing that you now have an off site central repository for all your bookmarks. If you should then add a second PC to your set up you simply install the Xmarks add on and enter your details and immediately all your internet shortcuts are now on your new PC too. You can repeat this with as many PCs as you would like. You can choose whether to copy over any existing shortcuts on the new PC, or merge the server entires with the local ones, etc.

I also happen to use Internet Explorer a lot and in days gone by I would use the SyncToy utility, free from Microsoft, to ensure my IE Favorites were replicated between PCs. That’s fine, but it doesn’t help me with FireFox. Xmarks also happens to have a version that syncs with IE too. I therefore can ensure my different browsers, even on the same PC and across multiple PCs have the same favorites and if I add, delete or edit one in one place it is changed everywhere else.

Should I ever rebuild or lose my PC (and cant get my hands on an up to date backup!) then I can simply install Xmarks and bam, I have all my favorites back again.

The tool is simple, works great, saves time and effort and is free. I recommend you check out www.xmarks.com  – the latest version does a whole lot more than I have described including allowing you to set up profiles for home and work and how they are replicated.

Check it out – you want be disappointed.

I am very excited by the release of Windows 7  from a personal perspective and a business perspective. It can’t come too soon in my opinion.

I have been running Windows 7 Beta on my primary business laptop since the download was available. I was fearful that this was going to be another “pigs ear” of an OS like Vista. Now I am one of those people who has persevered with Vista and the experience improved over time; once I turned off the annoying features and found my way round the interface so I could do things my way.

I have met very few people (I can count them on one hand) who actually like Vista and there was good reason for this opinion. It was slow, the interface though pretty initially, was all over the shop, they had moved everything for no good reason and file access was tiresome. That was without talking about the User Account Control and plenty of other annoyances. I found people to be aggressively negative about the product in fact.

So here are a few reasons to get excited:

• Since running Windows 7 I have found that the OS is super fast, even on old hardware with 512MB of RAM – I was really impressed
• The interface has been tightened up and greatly improved and I find it much easy to achieve tasks and just get around
• The product fits together much better overall, just like XP does and support for devices and software is great (the ones I use)
• It is good looking and you wont be quite as envious of the Mac user sitting next to you in Starbucks

From a business point of view, this is the release that Vista should have been, and I don’t think there is any reason not to adopt it quickly. There will be a learning curve for users as the interface is significantly different to XP and at the back end if you are deploying it and managing it using Active Directory and group policies the features and items you can control centrally just keeps growing, which is good of course but means more effort to tune it to your particular needs. Still out of the box it is far more secure, stable and complete.

Being in the business of helping companies deploy technology and in particular Microsoft infrastructure , I have felt a large hole in my business because I havent come across anyone who wanted to roll the product out. I know some companies have, but I feel they are few and far between. I have a 1000 seat plus financial services customer who is about to roll out Windows XP for the third time. The last two roll outs have been whilst Vista has been available! They have chosen to do a new OS software refresh with everything but the OS being refreshed!

I am sure we are not the only IT services company missing out on these projects, before it felt like a conveyor belt that always turned on time, Windows 95/ 3.11 to NT4, NT4 to Windows 2000, Windows 2000 to XP and then it all stopped.

With the current economic crisis still taking it’s toll, businesses starting to perform hardware and software rerfreshes to their user base would be great for everyone concerned and that is why Windows 7 cant come soon enough.

I will be talking about particular Windows 7  features in future entries.