With the dramatic cuts to IT spend that the market has seen over the past six-to-twelve months, the pressure is firmly on enterprise technology vendors to drive performance levels even higher, while bringing the cost of those additional capabilities down by a similar margin.
However, says Jacques Klopper, IBM business unit manager at Tarsus Technologies, too many of today’s leading technology vendors are taking a short-term view of providing value to customers and this will backfire on them in time.
“It’s almost as if they’re trying to do the bare minimum,” he says, “and are failing to see that intrinsic changes to today’s platforms, no matter how small, really pay off in the long-term.”
Klopper cites some vendors reticence to adopt UEFI – a next-generation software interface that resides between a computer’s operating system and the firmware embedded on their hardware – as an example of this in practice.
“When one looks at the benefits brought to the table by the new standard, the decision to utilise it shouldn’t be too hard to make.” Klopper says.
“However, many vendors see this as a cost-contributor, since it will require some re-engineering of their computing platforms and create a need for additional technical support resource.
“IBM has seen this as an opportunity to give its customers access to a technology that’s simpler to use and more functionally-rich than the technologies that preceded it and which will reduce costs in the long-term,” Klopper explains.
“Notably, UEFI has done away with the ‘beep codes’ that frustrated so many IT managers and administrators in the past, and it supports the revolutionary ‘Lightpath diagnostics’ technology which IBM has employed to speed up hardware troubleshooting,” he says.
“It also does away with cryptic event logs by giving administrators a more detailed, legible report of any configuration errors or hardware issues that have occurred, and because it supports both in- and out-of-band firmware updating, it can be configured remotely via the execution of a script.
“It’s a revolutionary jump in the right direction and one that IBM feels will benefit its customers in the long-run,” he adds.
“I truly believe that this is the right way to approach the possibility of extra cost in the learner IT environment that we find out in the market today.
“Success in today’s IT climate is more about long-term efficiency gains than short-term cost-savings, however, it is still a perpetual balancing act.
“And for the moment it looks like IBM is getting it right,” he concludes.
