Business View Magazine | October 2019

143 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2019 WORLDWIDE SERV I CES pay for it. We know how to cut through the OEM misinformation to understand and use the truth to our clients’ benefit. “Anti-vendor lock-in techniques - here we describe disaggregating features and security from the underlying hardware OEM. If it makes sense to pay that underlying hardware OEM for those features and security, then go ahead and do so. If there’s a way of disaggregating so you don’t get locked in to annual contracts and constantly rising fees, let’s look at what those options are. “Hybrid maintenance applicability – there’s not just one way of supporting IT infrastructure: there’s OEM maintenance; there’s third-party maintenance, which is what we do; there’s using the hardware vendor’s warranty as a backstop; there’s self-sparing; and then there’s one that’s totally valid and that’s doing nothing. You know what your risk tolerance is for certain unknowns, and in some cases, the best thing is to do nothing. It’s looking at all these different maintenance strategies and assessing what’s the right mix and then putting together a system that can manage the right blend. “When we shifted from a hardware-first approach to the services-first approach, we realized what really matters is the upfront architecture and design decisions that are made. Depending on those decisions, you can either benefit from, or lock yourself out from, the real advantages of the independent market. We act as the checks and balances to protect our clients from the runaway power the OEMs covet.” In the end, Kruse says that when a client looks at the totality of its strategies and how to execute them, it can add up to as much as 30,000 different decisions. “And the whole point is to boil it down to one simple truth: reduce risk, reduce cost by a lot, and increase long-term flexibility. If you make poor design decisions at the beginning of the lifecycle, you dramatically limit your procurement and maintenance options later on. This can kick off a vicious cycle of spending to avoid risk. It’s not a coincidence that all the large