Appliances eliminated the design process and proof of concept stages for data-warehousing projects and also freed up engineers for higher value consulting work, said an integrator who specialised in business intelligence.
Peter Wardy, chief technical architect of Wardy IT Solutions, had freed up 15 percent of engineers’ time by using appliances co-produced by Microsoft and HP.
“These appliances are proven architecture so you just have to look at the workload for the customer and then find an appliance. It effectively solves that complexity of all those moving parts,” Wardy said.
Appliances could also solve the biggest challenge in deployment for data warehousing - sizing the infrastructure to suit the customer’s needs, Wardy said.
Wardy IT Solutions had reduced the design process and proof of concept stages to a calculation based on the number of users and the number of concurrent processes.
Customers were satisfied that appliances were already certified and so there were no questions from IT executives as to whether the solution would work as promised, Wardy said.
Wardy had found that customers were still willing to pay the same amount for projects despite the savings from a month of scoping and designing infrastructure.
“Effectively they are reallocating the cost on the discovery to ongoing maintenance. The business is getting better outcomes for their investment so they can deliver more to the end user.
“It’s great for us to have the engineers delivering the solution rather than spinning cycles working out the infrastructure.”
Wardy said he wasn’t concerned about the prospect of being locked in to vendor hardware.
“When you’ve got a device that’s not an appliance you have the complexity of maintaining it. You have a number of moving parts you need to support. The appliance is easier to maintain and support once they have been implemented,” he said.
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