The Data Center Dilemma: How to Achieve Immediate ROI Through Data Center Transformation

Unless you have been hiding under a raised-tile floor since the shared storage array was invented, you know how cloud can benefit your enterprise. Decreased cost, increased agility, lowered CAPEX: the list is long and the benefits are undeniable. If you had a magic button that you could press that would instantly move some or all of your IT to an “as-a-service” model, you would do it – but you can’t. Instead, you have to write a big check based on the promise of future benefits.

The imaginary conversation probably goes something like this:

Cloud: “In years four and five, you are going to love your ROI.” 

You: Four or five years? That’s a lifetime in the world of IT. The average CIO tenure is four years.

Cloud: “Okay, in four or five years, your replacement will love what you did for them.”  

In the current environment, in the midst of a global pandemic, resources are constrained and the imperative to “clean up the financials” associated with IT is more important than ever before. 

“To get to the cloud, you must go there. That ain’t free.” – Unknown

That’s right. There are upfront costs associated with moving to the cloud. You’ll need smart people who don’t work for free to examine your environment, create plans, and execute those plans. Migrations are complicated. Have you ever heard of the “6R approach”? Retire, Retain, Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, and Replace. If there was only one R, life would be so much easier, and cheaper too. But there are 6 of them. Those people you need to hire will help you to either migrate or modernize each part of your IT landscape need to figure out which of the R’s is appropriate for each element of your complex environment.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could do all of this while preserving cash, lowering the cost of IT as a share of revenue, and experiencing a positive return on investment immediately?

Fortunately, this is possible. You can capture immediate gains along with long term benefits with a Data Center Transformation effort led by Atos and Maven Wave. 

Instant ROI from Data Center Transformation: “Funding the Hump”

We refer to the upfront costs associated with modernization as “the hump.” These costs are usually considerable. The object of this exercise is to offset those costs with a comprehensive plan that leverages Atos’ long history of driving costs down and efficiencies up. You can think of those as the traditional levers that we can pull, but there are others: 

• In a case where you own your data center, we can arrange for a purchase and lease-back that can free up capital and provide a cash infusion
• Additionally, hardware that you own can be “traded in” and used to fund modernization efforts
• Also, hyper-scale public cloud providers can provide incentives based on the size and term of consumption commitments. These incentives can go a long way towards eliminating “the hump” and delivering instant savings and predictable costs. 

There are many other opportunities to take advantage of the benefits. In the end, it’s all about leverage.

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” -Archimedes 

Since we just quoted Archimedes, who was a pretty detail-oriented guy, we should point out that the details are important. Your situation isn’t exactly the same as anyone else’s. That’s why the creativity we bring to this endeavor is so important. Here is an example of that creativity in action. A client that is a $9 billion a year financial services company achieved an $8 million P&L savings in CY2020 while reducing IT costs to below 5.5% of revenue. Their plan involved transitioning more than 400 employees to Atos and it was critical that they maintain in-house knowledge while keeping downtime to zero. They will save over $200M over the term of the agreement. 

Can we do something like that for your business? There is only one way to know. We should talk. A great first step would be to attend our upcoming webinar, How to Get ROI from Your Cloud Transformation on Day One, on October 14 at 12:00 pm CT. We will go into detail about how data center transformation removes common obstacles when migrating to the cloud, the immediate and long term ROI you can expect, and more. Register now to join us live, or to receive the recording post-webinar if you can’t make it.