IBM has unveiled a service that allows companies to
outsource management of their data centre and get billed based on
service usage volume - as opposed to upfront fees - without
transferring data centre IT assets and employees to the outsourcing
provider.
Previously, clients had to ferry over to IBM related IT assets
and employees if they wanted flexible billing on outsourcing
projects.
The new service, called Strategic Outsourcing Flexible Support
Option, will offload datacentre management tasks from the client's
IT department, thus saving clients money and freeing the staff to
do higher-level work and improve the data centres operation.
"Existing customer environments are often siloed, especially if
the company has gone through acquisitions or implemented a variety
of application suites. The company ends up with islands of
technology," said Dev Mukherjee, vice president of e-business
marketing and strategy at IBM Global Services.
"We bring business discipline to turn those islands into a pool
of technology. This pooling approach increases data centre
flexibility and utilisation."
With this new service, IBM's Global Services unit remotely
manages a company's data centre from an IBM facility, using its
Universal Management Infrastructure (UMI).
UMI is a combination of systems management, software deployment
and configuration management software, architecture workflows and
outsourcing methodologies.
Mukherjee said four major steps are involved in rolling out the
service for a client.
First, IBM carries out a thorough assessment of the client's
data centre, to map the infrastructure and identify ways to improve
it.
Second, IBM moves on to consolidating and standardising the data
centre environment, to simplify its management.
Third, UMI, created two years ago and rolled out last year, is
deployed to link the client's data centre with the IBM remote
management site.
Fourth, IBM provides ongoing remote management, most of which is
automated, of the client's entire data centre, or of parts of it,
including applications, storage devices, servers and networks.
Pricing varies depending on the scope of the engagement and is
based on the number of components being managed and on service
usage volumes.
This service is likely to appeal to chief information officers
who want to test the on-demand outsourcing waters without
committing to a full-blown engagement, said IDC analyst Doug
Chandler.
"It could be a first step to a broader outsourcing agreement for
some customers who are still feeling their way around the utility
model and on demand approach," he added.
Although remote management by no means new nor unique, IBM's new
twist here is its offer to manage entire data centres that have a
variety of heterogeneous software and hardware products.
"In most cases, remote management tends to be much narrower,
involving some servers or a network, and it's typically the vendor
of those products the one doing the remote management," Chandler
said. "Here IBM is offering to provide remote management of a data
centre environment, as opposed to individual devices, which is what
you usually get."
Juan Carlos Perez writes for IDG News Service