Computacenter enables the out-tasking of time-consuming licence management processing to remove cost complexity and risk from operations.

What we do:
Software represents between 30 -35% of a total IT budget so it makes sense to keep a detailed view on, how, where and which licences you buy. Computacenter’s service provides complete visibility of software inventory and licence position.

Find out how Computacenter’s Software Asset Management service can help you

Find out how rationalising and standardising IT procurement will increase agility, mitigate risk and reduce costs at a free workshop.

Less is more when it comes to IT suppliers. When you rationalise the IT supply chain, you also rationalise the associated procurement and financial overhead.

These efficiency savings combined with aggregated spend and volume discounts will help you save up to 10 per cent on IT procurement in just 12 months.

As well as saving money, supplier rationalisation helps to:

• Increase business agility by accelerating access to new technologies
• Remove risk from the IT supply chain by eliminating maverick spend and unreliable providers
• Simplify support by facilitating hardware standardisation and centralised asset management
• Improve budgeting for future IT spend through accurate management data

To help organisations maximise the value of supplier rationalisation, Computacenter is offering a free half-day workshop that will help organisations:

• Evaluate current IT procurement processes
• Establish rationalisation and efficiency goals
• Identify potential areas for savings

Computacenter has direct relationships with more than 1,100 vendors and offers a range of supply chain services, including leasing, e-procurement, buy and hold facilities, and pre-delivery services, such as configuration and imaging.

Find out how to kick-start your supplier rationalisation strategy with our free white paper

Fast-track your supplier rationalisation strategy by signing up to a free half-day workshop now

Office 365 promises to transform how organisations provision workplace collaboration and productivity applications. Find out if Microsoft’s cloud-based service is right for your organisation and if you are ready to make the leap

Analysts are predicting that several million users will have migrated to Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 suite by this time next year as they abandon legacy mail platforms in favour of a state-of-art platform that requires little or no capital investment and a lengthy implementation.

Access to a cloud-based Exchange email service will be the main driver for adoption, followed by SharePoint and Lync. The capacious 25 gigabyte mailbox on offer to enterprise users of Office 365 will help fuel this phased adoption.

Launched at the end of June 2011, Office 365 provides organisations with cloud-hosted versions of Exchange 2010, SharePoint, Office Web Apps and Lync – which combines instant messaging with presence, audioconferencing and videoconferencing features. Customers can also procure Office 2010 Professional via an Office 365 subscription.

Unlike other cloud-based offerings, Office 365 components can be bought separately or as part of six preconfigured offers, providing organisations with both predictable costs and flexibility.

As a result, organisations can limit their expenditure according to the current scale and needs of their business. Prices for the pre-configured offers range from £2.60 per month for a kiosk user with Exchange and SharePoint to £15.75 per month for an enterprise user including a desktop Office licence and Lync Plus for voice communications.

Andy Goddard, Practice Leader for Workplace and Software at Computacenter, comments: “Office 365 provides organisations with the most cost-effective alternative to hosting email and other workplace applications internally. IT departments will not only be released from the cyclical pain and expenditure of upgrades but also the day-to-day burden of backup, security patching and capacity planning and so on.”

Ensuring confidence in the cloud

As with any cloud-based offering, the risk of service outages and security breaches have been widely debated by the press, analysts and user community alike since the launch of Office 365.

In a recent outage, however, although Microsoft’s older platform Business Productivity Online Standard (BPOS) went down Office 365 stayed online, which will help to improve customer confidence that the service has indeed evolved and become of age for enterprises.

Microsoft has invested heavily in disaster recovery capabilities, globally-redundant backups, and extensive privacy features to prevent Office 365 from falling victim to such outages. As Andy comments: “Office 365 is designed to provide a highly available and highly secure service to corporates. With the added benefit of federation services to facilitate single sign-on, Office 365 will prevent customer identity information from being exposed via the internet.”

Office 365 also supports additional security measures to protect sensitive information, such as Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) for public key encryption and digital signatures as well as critical information rights management for restricting access to and external distribution of documents, email, and even voicemail messages.”

Under the service level agreement (SLA), customers will receive 25 per cent off their monthly payment if uptime falls below 99.9 per cent to 99 per cent, half of the sum back if it falls below 99 per cent and a complete refund for anything under 95 per cent.

Cutting costs and increasing productivity

For many organisations, it won’t be a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’ will they migrate to Office 365. An exceptionally large number of enterprise customers are still running their email services on Exchange 2003 platforms, which is rapidly becoming untenable as a robust and effective service.

These legacy platforms not only lead to outage and scalability problems but users also have to cope with severely constrained mailbox sizes. To address these challenges, organisations must make significant capital investment – a process they will have to go through again in another five years when the email platform once again becomes outdated. Office 365 provides not only enables customers to migrate to a new platform at a fraction of the cost but also eliminates the need for any future upgrades.

“One of our customers using Exchange 2003 is restricted to mailboxes of 200 megabytes, which rapidly disappears in today’s world of multi-media attachments,” comments Andy. “It’s hardly surprising then that have already chosen to adopt Office 365, which will provide 25 gigabytes per mailbox. To deliver this kind of capacity via an internal email platform would have required investment in additional storage resources, which the customer has now avoided.”

As well as saving on implementation costs, organisations can also save valuable time by signing up to Office 365. As Andy explains: “The average Exchange 2010 implementation costs a mid-sized enterprise around £500,000 and can take up to nine months to complete. With Office 365, an organisation can plan, prepare and migrate 2,500 mailboxes end-to-end in around three months.”

Although the modular nature of Office 365 will enable organisations to sign up for specific applications, such as email, rather than the full suite, it can make the licensing model rather complicated. Even more so if Enterprise Agreements need to be considered or if a customer has to upgrade their Outlook client – Office 365 enterprise users must use Outlook 2007 or 2010.

Minimising migration risks

To help identify the right licensing model and determine if Office 365 is viable and suitable, Computacenter is offering customers a five-day assessment: ‘Are you Office 365 ready?’

Through a series of workshops, Computacenter will help to:

• Establish whether your organisation is right for Office 365
• Identify if there are users who are not suited to Office 365 and therefore might require a co-existence or hybrid scenario
• Evaluate the most cost-effective and flexible licensing options for your organisation and the impact on existing Microsoft agreements
• Identify support requirements above and beyond the basic Microsoft offering
• Ascertain the actual number of mailboxes that are required to minimise email subscription costs
• Identify any business or application constraints that would prevent adoption 
• Qualify what it will cost to migrate and transform to Office 365

“Despite 100,000 organisations taking part in the open beta programme, Office 365 will not be right for every company or user community,” comments Andy. “For example tightly regulated sectors, such as financial services, are less likely to be suited to this type of cloud model than for example retail companies or service providers.”

Office 365 is based on a multi-tenant model, which means data from multiple customers might be housed on the same hardware resources. This model is fundamental to providing economies of scale and delivering cost advantages over the older model BPOS, which allowed for dedicated environments for larger customers – an option that is no longer available. 

UK customers can expect their data to be hosted primarily in Microsoft’s Dublin datacenter, with failover for resilience to Amsterdam. With Microsoft fully compliant with EU data legislation, data sovereignty barriers of old are removed except for the most critical of organisations, such as central government organisations.

Cost-effective alternatives

Public cloud offerings, such as Office 365, however, are not the only route to more cost-effective and scalable email services. For example, Computacenter’s C³Mail and Collaboration also provides access to Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, via a predictable ‘utility’ billing model.

Part of Computacenter’s pragmatic approach to cloud-based IT services, C³Mail and Collaboration offers the flexibility of a dedicated or shared infrastructure implemented and managed on your behalf either on-premises or in one of Computacenter’s high availability environments.

As with its public cloud counterparts, this approach limits the need for investment in internal infrastructure assets, support staff, and management methodologies and provides organisations with a predictable operational cost per month per mailbox.

Whether an organisation is ready for full cloud adoption or wants to retain an on-premises platform, Computacenter has the services and skills to help.

“We will help you find the right way to escape the constant cycle of expenditure on email and other workplace applications without compromising security or service levels. We have extensive experience of helping customers licence, design, migrate, upgrade and manage their enterprise email infrastructures, and typically transform around 150,000 mailboxes a year,” comments Andy.

Office 365: fact facts

• Microsoft intends to provide service updates to Office 365 every 90 days. Any new releases of applications, such as Exchange, will be made available to Office 365 subscribers in advance of traditional on-premise versions, which could result in competitive advantage
• Office 365 is a service offering, which means licences grant temporary use rights and do not have a buy back-to-perpetual provision
• Most elements of Office 365 were designed with the cloud in mind, while Business Productivity Online Standard was effectively retrofitted for cloud deployment
• Pre-configured plans E1 and K1 are expected to be the most applicable to enterprise customers
• Office 365 enables organisations to establish a hybrid environment with some users working via the cloud and others from on-premises deployments, thereby minimising the risk of business disruption if connectivity is lost

Find about how Office 365 could help your organisation

Microsoft Office 365 buyer’s Guide for the Enterprise

Read more about Computacenter’s C3Mail and Collaboration offering

The conference will provide technical education and training on the hottest IT topics, including private, public and hybrid clouds, desktop virtualisation, Bring Your Own Device and much more. The agenda features breakouts in two tracks — Desktop Virtualisation and Datacenter and Cloud — as well as Hands-on Learning Labs, complimentary Citrix certification exams and live demos at the Solutions Expo of products and services from leading IT vendors.

Networking opportunities will be plentiful throughout Synergy, particularly at regional get-togethers, the Welcome Reception and the Synergy party.

Finally, Synergy Barcelona aims to inspire attendees by presenting virtual computing trends, new solutions and forward-thinking ideas, and showing how they can benefit users, IT and the whole organisation. For registration and information, visit www.citrixsynergy.com/barcelona.


From instant messaging and wikis to video conferencing and microblogging, the opportunities for collaboration in the workplace have never been greater.

Collaboration software will be one of the top application software growth segments this year. According to Gartner¹, “unified communications and collaboration will see increased adoption in 2012, and context-aware and presence-based computing will gain more traction in 2013″.

Adoption will be further accelerated by ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) strategies, which will inevitably drive greater levels of real-time collaboration regardless of the access device.

Although employing a wide array of collaboration channels can help businesses stimulate productivity and competitive advantage, it also represents a major operational and data security headache, which must be addressed by IT departments.

Pierre Hall, Workplace Solutions Director for Computacenter, comments: “As well as getting to grips with emerging collaboration technologies, IT departments need to ensure the continued availability and performance of more mature solutions, such as email.”

Safeguarding the user experience means ensuring that there is sufficient storage capacity, security controls and network bandwidth to support both current and future collaboration platforms.

The desire to shift towards using ‘social’ networking solutions as part of the corporate collaboration landscape means organisations must also adopt new policies and tools to ensure identity governance and data protection.

As a result, organisations will need to invest in a lot more than just new software if they are to meet the collaboration expectations of today’s connected workforce.

“The impetus for greater collaboration and a ‘borderless’ workplace often stems from employees rather than boardroom, with individuals increasingly regarding work as ‘something they do’ rather than ‘something they travel to’,” comments Pierre. “As well as demanding more collaboration choices, users also want a more integrated approach that spans multiple platforms, for example email, instant messaging and voice/video.”

Collaborating via the cloud

These growing demands both at a board and user level come at a time when CIOs are under relentless pressure to achieve more for less. Budget issues remain the most pressing challenge for 60 per cent of organisations, according to a survey by Loudhouse².

Against this backdrop of cost reduction, it’s not surprising that cloud computing is being heralded as a key enabler for collaboration. With its promise of scalability and utility pricing, cloud computing can offer a compelling and cost-effective alternative to internal datacenters.

Although organisations are increasingly evaluating alternative delivery models, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and the cloud, this is not yet leading to widespread adoption. According to Gartner³ “the big rush to cloud email and collaboration services will not be visible in earnest until 2012 to 2014.”

Matt Lovell, Computacenter’s Chief Technology Officer, comments: “Organisations’ reluctance to migrate can be attributed to ongoing concerns about security, user support and service levels in today’s nebulous and evolving public cloud market.”

Fifty per cent of organisations cite service level degradation and concerns over cost benefits not being realised as significant factors that could slow or prevent migration to the cloud2. Sunk investment in existing email and collaboration platforms can also impede adoption.

While CIOs wait for these issues to be addressed, the cost and complexity of delivering collaboration services to users will only intensify. “Organisations need a viable alternative to internal service delivery – and they need it now,” says Matt.

A pragmatic alternative

Many CIOs already recognise that the future of email and other collaboration applications lies outside the doors of the corporate datacenter. According to the Loudhouse survey, only nine per cent of organisations will host their email infrastructure internally by 2014 compared with today’s 58 per cent.

Instead organisations will leverage a blend of public and private clouds along with third party datacenters and shared infrastructures for a variety of desktop and end user collaboration applications.

“Organisations want to maximise their flexibility while also minimising operational and capital expenditure, which means reducing the number of applications hosted on internal infrastructures,” comments Matt. “Although public clouds are currently viewed as a step too far for many businesses, there are other alternatives that come with the same benefits and no added risk.”

For example, Computacenter’s C³Mail and Collaboration service delivers the same benefits of a public cloud – lower costs, utility consumption, greater agility – coupled with the security, performance, service integration and user support needed in today’s connected workplace.

Part of Computacenter’s pragmatic approach to cloud-based IT services, C³Mail and Collaboration offers the flexibility of a dedicated or shared infrastructure implemented and managed on your behalf either on-premise or in one of Computacenter’s high availability environments. This limits the need for investment in internal infrastructure assets, support staff, and management methodologies.

“By taking advantage of shared resources and industrialised processes, CIOs can not only cut costs but also provide users with rapid and reliable access to collaboration tools that will help boost productivity and flexibility,” comments Pierre.

Encompassing key collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, which includes instant messaging, video calling and web conferencing, C³Mail and Collaboration can be adapted to meet the needs of different user communities; implemented as part of a wider workplace transformation programme and integrated with public cloud offerings.

Simplifying the transition

As an independent advisor, Computacenter can also help the organisations that are considering adopting a public cloud approach to email and collaboration applications during the next 12 to 18 months.

For example, Computacenter can not only assist with advice on licensing Microsoft’s new cloud-based offering, Office 365, but also provide migration and service desk support.

Microsoft Office 365 combines the familiar Microsoft Office desktop suite with online versions of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Lync.

“Microsoft Office 365 follows the trend towards more integrated collaboration and communication services,” explains Pierre. “As this and other new workplace technologies become available, organisations will need to evaluate how they deliver functionality and services to the business to ensure they are achieving maximum efficiency and continuing to control costs.”

With more vendors choosing to provision new workplace technologies via the cloud, organisations will soon find themselves operating a hybrid IT infrastructure that includes internal and external resources.

According to Gartner¹, “using cloud computing services to create environments in which multiple vendors participate in assembling, deploying, selling and consuming IT services will broaden in appeal.”

This blended approach will enable organisations to adopt cloud computing on a phased and pragmatic basis. As Matt explains, “Although collaboration services are being increasingly linked to cloud delivery models, many organisations will continue to host some applications on dedicated infrastructures either on or off site. Despite all the hype, cloud computing will not sound the death knell for the datacenter.”

Ensuring a return on investment

Organisations need to take an equally methodical approach to adopting the new collaboration technologies that are clamouring for attention – and precious IT budget.

Gartner⁴ cites that “even when there are reasonable expectations of business value, these are hard to quantify in a way that would justify such deployments in opposition to those who fear time wasting, loss of quality control and system abuse.”

“Although collaboration technologies have the potential to empower users to work faster and smarter, organisations need to ensure they are not seduced by this promise into implementing superfluous tools, especially when it comes to ‘social networking’,” comments Pierre. “Many organisations are already struggling to take full advantage of their existing collaboration tools, so new investments must come with a solid business case and measurable benefits.”

Gartner⁴ issues a similar warning: “Time and time again, we hear of organisations that have rolled out ‘social’ capabilities as an infrastructure play, rather than working with the business to supercharge the performance of selected special ad hoc teams. Projects focused on specific activities and defined business outcomes are the ones that will deliver the highest return on investment.”

As well as recognising the needs of diverse user groups, organisations need to understand how new applications will impact infrastructure operations and the pros and cons of different IT delivery options for their workplace collaboration strategy to be a success.

Simplicity is a major factor – with the workplace collaboration toolset constantly growing, users need straightforward and fast access, which can be achieved through a single interface and single sign-on.

“To meet the demand for greater workplace collaboration, IT departments will need to address a range of much wider issues, which will require an equally wide skills set,” comments Pierre. “Get the foundations right, and collaboration will be an enabler; get them wrong, and it could prove to be an expensive encumbrance.”

Find out how Computacenter can help you with your cloud strategy

The practical reality of Cloud
Read the full independent survey by Loudhouse Research

¹ Market Trends: Enterprise Software Markets Are Shifting From Bricks and Mortar to ‘BRIC and Mortals’, Gartner, January 2011
² Computacenter 2011 Cloud Computing survey, Loudhouse, January 2011,
³ E-Mail and Collaboration in the Cloud, Gartner, July 2010
⁴ Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, Gartner, October 2010

As of July 2011 customers with active Software Assurance will have access to new License Mobility rights for server and Client Access License (CAL ) application licenses. This will provide organisations the flexibility to deploy certain application server software on-premises or in the cloud to take advantage of the lowest cost infrastructure, which is particularly appropriate for Exchange Mail for example.

• These new Software Assurance Benefits enable the increasing adoption of cloud services. Giving you the flexibility of moving certain application workloads to the Cloud, with distributed workloads across on-premises and off-premises, and to move licenses around as required.
• This benefits the licensee,  as you can preserve and leverage your current investment in Microsoft on-premises licenses and take a unified view of your organisations IT investments.

What does this mean for organisations that have invested in server licensing and wish to have a choice in deployment?

• There is no extra cost for this new flexibility: It is a Software Assurance (SA) Benefit, so there are no new CALs or Mobility fees. No purchasing process change is necessary, as Server and Client Access  licenses are purchased with Software Assurance through your volume license (VL) agreement as normal.
• However clients wishing to take advantage of Office 365, will need a new updated Enterprise Agreement addendum. This Addendum will form part of the next iteration of the Enterprise Agreement from July 2011 for new customers.
• What products are eligible for license mobility? In general terms, all product categories that have rights today for “mobility within the datacenter” will have extended mobility rights to the cloud.

To find out how to maximise the potential flexibility of these license changes, click here to contact Computacenter’s software sales experts software@computacenter.com

Core to adoption considerations are a range of complications and a series of drivers which conflict with those complications to create the degree of interest and hype that has prevailed in IT Services thinking for the past two years.

Why the attraction?
Those who have adopted to date site their primary reason for the approach as flexibility – enabling growth, agility, efficiency and new services in their organisation.

Cost is undoubtedly a factor however the degree to which cost of purchase, cost of adoption and cost of ownership are considered and weighted may ultimately vary and may be difficult to establish.

The fabric of strategies for adoption could be segregated within the three core structural offerings availed to an organisation as broken out below where the degree of effect on the organisation’s operations increases moving right across the scale.

Apps on pay per use basis are in the minority, to date only some 10% of applications provided in the cloud utilise a pay per use commercial model. The extent of applications yet to migrate commercial models which deliver on cost to output matching demands may be limiting adoption and progress.

Hype vs reality
In late 2009 Gartner produced the hype cycle diagram below which shows SAAS expectations being fulfilled at the tail of disillusionment and into a phase of enlightenment. Considering the reality of adoption, DR infrastructure and backup are at the vanguard with Storage operations also significant, whilst end user solutions adopted are lead by email and collaboration. Broadly speaking enterprise and productivity applications are yet to demonstrate a significant cloud presence.

Considerations for the CIO
A Cloud Industry Forum survey recently cited security as a principal cause of concern. Security coupled with privacy (primarily reliable data management and access controls) is logically a point of focus where report driven applications are utilised.

Internet dependence and reliability of networks to enable timely access on demand, efficiency and productivity in mission critical high turnover services was also cited as a barrier to expanding use of cloud services. Availability of solutions and dependence thereon being a critical point but also speed, not just of download but upload across global networks and reliance on bandwidth in areas less well served are potentially key limiters to widespread adoption of end user SAAS solutions.

Location effects such as globalised vs localised data storage, regulation, stability and reliability are considered critical by some, arguably more so in public sector. Challenges associated with foreign laws, capacity to reclaim damages, timezones, wars and terrorism may all create risks which are both difficult to overcome and mitigate against.

Cloud control
Market solutions condensed on fewer instances will reduce a number of principally hardware related overheads against which the cost of transition, acquisition and migration should be modelled to identify relative return.

SLA management and re-orientation of skills will be associated costs of transition and may be considered operating costs and budgeted on a reducing basis as efficiencies increase and cultural effects reduce over time.

Increased flexibility and adoption timescales will both be difficult to identify and measure as intangible items which will affect efficiency of operations rather than procurement or 3rd party costs. Acquisition costs will however be clearer and may be considered as a contributor to increased flexibility through ease of procurement and adoption.

Commercial considerations should include licence mobility and transition costs including the potentially significant cost of data migration. Many existing contracts may be restrictive in nature and require either competitive replacement or repurchase. Identifying or negotiating capacity to migrate existing software licences to the cloud should be an early strategic consideration for all options analysis.

Visibility of billing as part of the governance processes in Software Asset Management will play a role in confirming savings and managing supplier relationships. Measuring access to applications will require URL monitoring and vendor driven reporting however tools which enable effective monitoring of application usage through the cloud as a 3rd party management function are yet to emerge.

Wherever the relative return equation provides justification for transition, the approach should be subject to a risk analysis before identifying acceptable contract terms to mitigate perceived risks.

Resources:

• C3: Computacenter can reduce the risk of cloud service adoption
• Computacenter launches cloud offering: read press release

Most UK companies will plan to use, or consider using, mobile technology over the next two to three years, according to the survey of 320 businesses of different sizes and sectors by SAP.  SAP says the survey shows accurate, real-time information is now expected anywhere, at any time. Companies want this data to improve customer service, business flexibility and productivity.

Read the full article here

Providing Scalable Deduplication Solution For the Enterprise. Symantec NetBackup 5000 Appliance, powered by NetBackup PureDisk technology, is a complete backup solution. It delivers the benefits of NetBackup’s deduplication technology along with the hardware, software and support that enterprise customers require – all integrated within a single appliance to ensure:

• Simplicity: Easy to install, configure and use
• Scalablity: Modular capacity, depending on data centre needs (16TB to 96TB)
• Flexibility: De-duplicate data across the business, including remote offices and virtual environments
• Reliability: Telecommunications grade hardware delivers high performance

For more information contact your Computacenter account manager or email software@computacenter.com.

www.computacenter.com/Symantec

Improve your IT operational efficiency and control costs

The release of Altiris 7.1 includes Altiris IT Management Suite and its integrated suites and solutions: Client Management Suite, Server Management Suite, Asset Management Suite and Service Desk.

Altiris 7.1 not only introduces tremendous quality advances, significant improvements in performance and scalability, and has been vetted by over 500 beta customers. New features include:

• A new management interface delivering the fastest console performance with consolidated management of common tasks, drag and drop functionality, and tighter product integration
• Deeper automation and intelligence driving innovation and optimising software expenditures – freeing up valuable human and financial capital
• Broad patch management coverage helping organisations protect against a growing list of non-Microsoft, 3rd party applications – over 2/3 of vulnerabilities exist in third party desktop applications

Please contact your Computacenter account manager for more information or email software@computacenter.com.

www.computacenter.com/Symantec