How much will you pay for ‘mission-critical’ IT?

What criteria do enterprise customers use to deem a workload or application ‘mission-critical’?

I think it goes something like this: “If I don’t have access, I’m losing money; and if I lose access for a long time, I go out of business.”

Apparently, non availability of data costs the U.S. economy $60 billion annually: Software Errors

Alright, I can dig that. 

So, what I do at HP is try to deliver solutions for customers who aim to never lose access to their data and applications.  We call them ‘High Availability’ solutions.  They’re not particularly easy to develop—thus competing with other IT providers who aim to offer the similar solutions is always fun. 

I had a lively back-n-forth with a colleague in presales in Germany this morning on exactly this topic.  Some of my other colleagues at HP write on this topic regularly here.  I was pointing out the shortcoming in the message IBM delivers to some of our joint customers: i.e. that fast processors can cure cancer in addition to give them the best IT solution.  He pointed out that some customers seek to cut costs by purchasing a server with a faster processor, in order to save money on Per Core Licensing costs from ISV’s.  Fair enough—some large enterprises could indeed save some cash today by purchasing hardware with a faster processor.  I did retort, however, that it may feel all gravy to save on the initial purchase, but—and you betcha, I used the scare tactic—I asked him what good it would do to save $100k today on a purchase of a fully loaded server and all the fun software to go along with it…if that thing crashed on you next month and in the 6 hours your online retail site was down you lost $3 million. 

This report by the Gabriel Consulting Group asked 266 professionals some great questions about availability, manageability, and observed performance.   The findings?  Enterprise customers report that HP delivers better availability. 

So maybe my little regretful cost-savings attempt ‘scenario’ above isn’t so unrealistic, after all.  Maybe I’m overly conservative, but I’ll pay a little extra today if I know it will allow me to sleep at night for years to come.