Simon Ellis, Director Estate Management Solutions and Services EMEA
Following Avnet Technology Solutions’ acquisition of Mattelli during the summer, we caught up with Simon Ellis to understand the Estate Management solutions that form a cornerstone of Avnet’s comprehensive services portfolio.
Today’s CIO is under attack. Business demands new offerings and improved service levels but all within a reduced budget. Now, more than ever, organisations have to maximise the value of existing IT investments. When new investment is called for, a clear understanding of the entire IT landscape and return on investment (ROI) is an absolute requirement. Add to that, the question of compliance and regulation and it’s no wonder the CIO and IT managers are under so much pressure.
Understanding how to ‘sweat the assets’ is increasingly difficult to do in a mixed hardware and software estate. Various commercial agreements and deployment measures, different replacement lifecycles and a variety of deployment and commercial opportunities add to the complexity.
At Avnet we believe in complete lifecycle estate management, supporting our channels partners and end customers from ‘cradle to grave’ with their IT estates. Avnet’s solution allows IT managers to begin with today’s pain points whether that’s coming from a commercial or a deployment focal point.
Estate Management services offer Avnet’s channel new incremental opportunities and revenue streams by building closer and deeper relationships with their existing customer base while also offering new services to the market to gain new clients.
So, what is Estate Management?
Estate Management allows IT and business managers to manage all aspects of their IT estate: from contracts, renewals, compliance, deployment and staff through to future purchasing. Making critical data readily available in this way means IT managers can easily spot potential opportunities for savings, consolidation and optimisation. More importantly, end of life products and those ‘out of support’ are identified and therefore more easily actioned. Not having good visibility of IT hardware and software that’s no longer supported by the vendor can be a substantial risk to the business.
Overall, effective estate management solutions puts information directly into the hands of the IT managers to allow them to make smarter, more informed decisions to meet tight budgets.
What are the key benefits?
From specific project needs through to complete management of an IT estate, Estate Management solutions available today can cover a range of areas which can be used in isolation or together to form a comprehensive overview of a company’s IT infrastructure.
These benefits include:
Contracts and renewals
- Contracts and renewals are assets to an organisation. They define the ‘rights to use and consume’ products and services from vendors and resellers. By enabling proactive management of contracts and renewals applicable to your estate you can improve commercial management and identify new opportunities.
Discovery and estate baseline
- Identifying what hardware and software is deployed in an estate is critical to defining your ‘as-is’ position and provides detailed knowledge to optimise the estate for the future. Managing your estate correctly requires a solid baseline from which the user can understand, govern and assess changes, new deployments and opportunities as they arise.
Common language and visualisation
- Bring a common language to all your assets enabling you to ask questions such as: ‘show me all databases,’ ‘show me all servers,’ ‘show me all virtualization’ in your estate. Visualise where assets are located and how they relate to each other which allows deeper insight into your estate.
Modelling
- Managing an estate also means planning for the future, looking how existing estates can be transformed, scaled up, removed from and augmented. Implementing an effective estate management solution can help the user to model changes in the estate and to look at the commercial impact.
Opportunity identification
- Analysis of contract and discovered estate uncovers areas of opportunity and pin-points issues. This can help to highlight product and service cross sell and upsell where applicable.
What does this have to do with the channel?
Customer spend is getting tighter, the mantra ‘to do more with less’ applies to CIOs, IT managers and also to channel partners who manage their customer estates today.
Estate Management solutions provide the channel with new opportunities for incremental revenue from their existing customers by providing tools to gain deeper insight into existing customer estates, helping to identify new service opportunities thus enabling the channel to offer improved services and value to their customer base.
