When AT&T inked its exclusive iPhone deal with Apple, they surely must have had the smile of the fabled Cheshire cat.    AT&T had sole possession of a hot product with a locked-in revenue stream – what could be better?   Have a look at the following analysis by Alcatel-Lucent on North American iPhone wireless usage:

The iPhone is turning out to be a bit more expensive for AT&T than perhaps they were expecting.   While the air time minutes aren’t all that interesting, the bandwidth numbers do tell a  story – unexpected hidden costs.  The bandwidth-hungry nature of iPhone web applications is seriously taxing the AT&T wireless network, and the company will have to add cell towers and back-haul lines to support the increasing load.   Who’s going to foot that bill?  Since iPhone plans don’t have bandwidth limits, it won’t be existing customers, and so it turns out that the locked-in revenue stream is really a double-edged sword.   AT&T can’t go back to existing customers for more money, but they need to fund the expansion to keep the service viable.   Sounds a little like blackmail – infrastructure blackmail to be exact.

The underlying message of the iPhone story has a familiar ring to it (no pun intended).  Do you have technology in your business that periodically puts you over a financial barrel?   Are you finding yourself forced to fund infrastructure improvements without additional revenue to offset the cost?

We all have critical business applications – those applications without which we cannot transact business.   Sooner or later the day comes when the system breaks and can’t be fixed without being upgraded.  Then we learn that the upgrade comes with a list of pre-requisite hardware and other ancillary software that has to be upgraded as well.   The total price tag is huge, but there is no choice.   We swallow hard and pay the cost, or else the vendor banishes us to the land of No Technical Support with a broken application.

Insofar as unexpected server hardware costs are concerned, virtualization can be a saving grace.   If you have a virtualized system with excess capacity, you can react quickly at no additional cost.    Our analysis of customer systems over the past decade reveals that on average, most servers are running at under 15% processor utilization.   If you still haven’t virtualized a portion of your environment, this is an easy strategy to deploy to avoid infrastructure blackmail.

Another strategy is to find a good hosting partner that can provide you with capacity on demand, either with physical or virtualized servers.    By moving to a hosted environment, you effectively transfer the burden of hidden infrastructure expense from yourself to the hosting company.   Large unexpected capital expenses can be transformed into low to moderate increases in operating expense.   AT&T is probably wishing they could do that very thing right about now…

//spk

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Describing our IT jobs to friends and family can be a bit of a challenge, and sometimes a simple answer is best.

So what do we do all day in the world of IT?  In the smaller server closets of the world, very little needs to be done on a daily basis unless something breaks.   However, in shops of any significant size, here is just a starter list for daily computer TCB:

1. Did last night’s backups run OK?
2. Did last night’s batch processing run OK? 
3. Are the online applications healthy and responsive?
4. Did all of scheduled change activity go well?  
5. Are all of the servers operating at nominally (e.g. acceptable response time, no 100% hung CPUs, etc.)
6. Is free disk space at acceptable levels?
7. Are there any trouble tickets from the overnight hours?
8. Is the network performing normally?
9. Are there any suspicious entries in the security logs?
10. Are any equipment alarm lights lit?

Any wrong answers to the above questions become the day’s TCB workload. Intertwined with that comes the standing to-do list items:

1. Returning phone calls
2. Answering Email
3. Attending Meetings
4. Performing project work
5. Managing staff
6. Meeting with customers
7. Closing business
8. Handling the unexpected, which usually trumps everything else.

Are you tired yet? 

Regardless of the level of automation one can employ to keep the infrastructure running, there are certain activities that require human attention.   There simply is no substitute.   If infrastructure is not your core business, you may want to take a hard look at whether caring and feeding for your IT systems is the best use of your time and resources.

We don’t each generate our own power, but we certainly need it to run our businesses.   There simply is no reason for each of us to invest in the people and equipment to generate electricity – it’s impractical and unaffordable.   Likewise, you certainly need computing resources to run your business, but unless IT infrastructure is your business, the ever-increasing complexity and cost of IT is making in harder to find a compelling business reason to continue building and running it yourself.  

Not to mention that good IT staff is hard to find…

 It would be much better to find a good partner to handle your computing TCB.

//spk

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