IT Operations Blog

It’s Time to Shift from Capacity Optimization to Resource and Cost Optimization

2 minute read
Al Brodie

In today’s complex business environment, organizations are striving to accelerate innovation with increased business agility, improved customer service, reduced capital and operating expenditures (CapEx/OpEx), and faster return on investment (ROI), all while contributing to growth and profitability. Capacity optimization isn’t getting it done anymore. It’s time to shift our thinking to resource and cost optimization.

Until recently, enterprises relied on capacity planning and optimization to align IT resources with changing business demand and ensure service level agreements (SLAs) for critical business services. However, as organizations adopt new technologies to deliver scalable services faster and more reliably, simply focusing on capacity optimization alone will not deliver the positive business outcomes IT decision makers seek. Why?

The emergence of new technologies such as multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and legacy on-premises infrastructure, along with the increased deployment of applications based on Kubernetes, micro-services, containers, and Pods, have dramatically increased IT complexity. The result? IT is attempting to manage complex environments with multiple, disconnected tools that make it difficult to:

  • View and understand the resources, usage, and costs of supporting applications and business services
  • Identify dependencies between resources and the impact of changes to the infrastructure
  • Accurately predict capacity and scale IT services to meet business demand
  • Manage growing infrastructure complexity—the combination of on-premises and cloud-based capacity and cost management solutions and the transition to modern technologies (Kubernetes, containers, Pods, etc.) from legacy technologies

Having a toolset that’s loaded with disconnected tools is clearly not the answer, and it can also increase costs and degrade business service performance. A better alternative is to shift to comprehensive solutions that deliver deeper, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)-enabled insights to help balance risk, efficiency, and cost. Organizations need a way to see resource usage and demand across the entire infrastructure to continuously optimize resources to deliver service and operational excellence that exceeds customer expectations, minimizes risk, and reduces capital and operational spend.

By doing so, they can:

  • Achieve greater productivity and efficiency while reducing risk around migrations and strategic company initiatives
  • Improve clarity into capital and operational costs and vendor billing
  • Make the business more agile
  • Plan and position for the future with more accurate IT forecasts

To learn more about the shift from capacity optimization to resource and cost optimization and how it could benefit your organization, download the e-book, Service Assurance and Optimization with AIOps.

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New strategies for modern service assurance

86% of global IT leaders in a recent IDG survey find it very, or extremely, challenging to optimize their IT resources to meet changing business demands.


These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

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About the author

Al Brodie

Al Brodie is a Principal Solution Manager for BMC Helix Continuous Optimization and BMC Helix Platform. Al joined BMC Software 2 years ago after a lengthy career in Sales, Sales Management and Marketing in both the IT and Telecom industry.