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For decades, many mid-market American companies fed their burgeoning appetite for data simply by buying and bolting on new equipment. Servers, tape drives and other devices were rushed into service in a frantic effort to stay ahead of emergent data needs.
Consulting expert Nick Cellentani refers to this cycle as a perpetual PO machine. Companies were never done buying, he said. They regularly ran out of memory or storage, or found they couldn't run restores properly so tech departments went out and bought more hardware to plug in.
With some businesses, this short-term strategy worked in the short-term for meeting critical, immediate needs. For growth-oriented organizations with diverse requirements, however, the result was too often an IT infrastructure that lacked cohesive architecture and the flexibility to address new business challenges as they arose.
IT should go beyond the mere management of information and generation of reports, Cellentani indicated. Technology should be important to to engineer growth and create world-changing new market opportunities.
Align Business Needs With Computing and Storage Infrastructure to help businesses be scalable, flexible and strategic, mid-size companies should look for a solution that allows them to align business needs with their computing and storage infrastructure -- one that is designed to bring the assurance that technology is part of the solution, not part of the problem.
When infrastructure and business are properly aligned, challenges can effectively be addressed by layering the right application on top of the computing infrastructure. The formalized, step-by-step process assures an outstanding level of service and a superior solution to any technical challenge.
Before they arrive, solution providers should have done their homework about your business. That fact puts the solution one step closer and uses the customer time more profitably. In addition, they listen. A company's IT staff is a wellspring of knowledge and experience and will be key to executing the solution. Off-the-shelf solutions won't compare to the superior solutions that are discovered by working the process together.
1. Business Needs Identification
The best way to decelerate a perpetual PO machine is to accurately identify a company's business challenges -- the whys behind your projects. The important keys in aligning infrastructure with business needs lie in the applications being run. What is the RTO? RPO? These are business discussions, and the applications are the bridge to linking business and technical requirements.
2. Researching Options
Think about what techniques might successfully be applied to the problem at hand. How many options are conceivably available? Opportunities explored at this stage should have little to do with what companies offer what technologies. The focus at this juncture needs to be what strategies might work then what technologies can be explored as a potential solution?
3. Technical Requirements
Once all feasible options are identified, it's time to examine each one in relation to current system capabilities comparing current solutions with needed solutions. This process reveals existing gaps.
4. Evaluate Potential Solutions
Armed with a thorough understanding of business issues and the options for addressing them, it's time to explore the best path to take to get you where you need to be. This is the critical step where such factors as scalability, flexibility and affordability are subjected to rigorous qualitative and quantitative measurement. Here, each potential solution is ranked and scored to identify the best technique and technology.
5. Evaluate Vendors
Now that needs have been clearly identified, it's appropriate to focus on selecting the best vendor(s) to supply those needs. An independent solution provider is motivated only by a desire to implement the best cost/value solution for the client, Cellentani noted. The independent provider should have relationships with many of the industry's most respected providers so that the company has the latitude to make exactly the right choice.
6. Implement Solution
Working with internal requirements and schedules, the vendor should be able to provide a complete plane for implementing the most effective solution, including installation, testing and any necessary knowledge transfer.
7. Maintain and Support
Ongoing maintenance and support is an important part of continued success, and companies should look to their vendor to provide virtually any service required to keep the system available, efficient and reliable.
Adexis Framework has been proven highly successful at matching Adexis consulting with the way companies buy today. Adexis Framework assures companies get precisely what they need, no more and no less.
The Framework recognizes the importance of the IT infrastructure in budget management. Operating efficiencies traditionally were achieved via automation of various tasks. Today, however, most functions lending themselves to automation already have been addressed with specialized applications. Cost savings must now be found in infrastructure, and the Framework assists businesses in achieving significant efficiencies.
The success of Adexis Framework is reinforced by the close relationships Adexis has established with quality vendors such as Sun Microsystems, a major Tier 1 provider of open source technology and a valued partner of Adexis.
Since its inception in 1982, Sun has been an innovative leader in servers, storage, software and services with a total focus on network computing. Its vision that The "Network is the Computer" has expanded into the Participation Age, a view shared by Adexis.
The Adexis agenda is the customer's agenda. Adexis takes a structured approach to working with its partners and is not concerned which solution is selected as long as the customer gets the right result at the right cost. | 
