Hi all, could do with some info regarding IT spend in your organisation if you know or can find out.

What is your annual IT spend and the size of your user base? Also, how often do you replace the equipment and is it outright purchase or lease? Do you have a preferred supplier?

Reason I’m asking is that I’m trying to justify my IT spend. I work in a University Engineering Department where we need the highest computing power available but I’m sensitive to the cost of it all.

I don’t know but herself’s firm has just installed a Cray and is about to buy another. Does that help? I believe it’s in the region of $20m each.

As little as possible, we’re still running a few g5 proliant servers (which are finally getting replaced)

Small companies tend not to have a proper annual spend, they just cough up luno suns when the IT department finally get some someone to believe their Domesday scenarios.

Sounds like you need a costed business case, not just a list of what other organisations spend.

Buy your compute as a service. Try orgs like OCF. And no, not an employee.

How about thinking about where your graduates go on to work and contacting some alumni? Comparing against a random commercial organisation won’t mean much.

I work for a telco, so almost all spend is “IT”. Annually that’s prob £1bn. Does that help build your business case for a new laptop?

“where we need the highest computing power available “

why – can you list reasons please ?

Sounds like you need a costed business case, not just a list of what other organisations spend.

😀

You’ve not worked at a university, have you?

Dell, £500ish per user, 3 year rolling rotation
Servers as and when we need – generally 5 yr rotation, although looking at consolidating at the mo so prob spend more but generally depends on what we think will be needed that year
Printers – oin contract now – bloody awful idea in my mind

Billed direct to depts :
Blackberries (yes I know) – part of phone contract, purchased outright
Microsoft – bought when the user wants a new pc – volume license

where we need the highest computing power available but I’m sensitive to the cost of it all

VMware or something like this – put the load onto the server ?

Yep, I’ve worked in the Public Sector too, they know:

“the cost of everything, and the value of nothing”

They’d quite happily spend a week trying to save £50, as salary is ‘soft cash’ and spend is ‘hard cash’…

Back now in the private sector – we replace (or buy) IT equipment as and when we need to; so I’ve a new person starting in January and have just ordered their laptop. I’ve a new testing process agreed with the Directors, so will order the hardware after the break. But the guy sitting opposite me works off a 5 y/o desktop; that won’t be replaced until needed.

But I’ve also had +10 y/o servers in both sectors; why replace something that works?

We spend well in the region of at least £50 trillion magilion a year, I bet none of you can beat that ? Can you ?

Desktops 3 years
Servers and Networks 5 years.

Processing power in a High Performance Cluster HPC of cheaper servers.

If we’re talking desktops/laptops, 3 year cycle and typically leased in most places I see. Going longer means expensive extra warranties (or covering repairs / early replacement) on old and slow machines. Current place is small though so it was “anything you like up to £1000” when you start and do that again when we can justify a new one.

Servers, up to 5 years although earlier is common (same issues with balancing costs of running old vs buying new). I’ve seen people replace VM hosts after 18 months because they can buy quicker, more power efficient ones and it made more sense to move to fewer newer boxes than stick with what they had.

Smal charity/business here.

We lease printers, budget to replace 5 laptops or computers a year (out of 20) and another chunk towards things like projector and phone replacements.

we need the highest computing power available

(a) Write more efficient software
(b) Make better use of all the Intel/AMD SIMD instructions
(c) Offload onto a GPU
(d) Offload onto an FPGA
(e) Make a custom ASIC
(f) Throw money at the problem.

Almost every place I’ve worked at has had a rough plan of desktops being replaced every 3 years and servers/network components every 5 with a rolling program so you don’t change too much per year.

Budget wise you need to know an idea of what is available and work it as a percentage really. Percentage IT spend in a multi billion IT company might still only be 5% of the company spend. No point asking for 100% of your departments budget for new toys.

Reason I’m asking is that I’m trying to justify my IT spend. I work in a University Engineering Department where we need the highest computing power available but I’m sensitive to the cost of it all.

Why do you need the highest computing power available?
What will that allow you to do and how will that:
a) Improve the quality of publications;
b) Increase the number of publications;
c) Allow you to apply for research grants.

Can you quantify any of these? What will happen if you don’t get the new kit? What are the risks?

There’s nothing difficult about building the case, but you need some (at least vague) idea of what the benefits are going to be.

I’m a IT Consultant (which is frankly a horribly glorified title for what I actually do).

With most of our clients is more cart before horse than that, typically we’ll identify a need for them (the core of our business is IT Support) that may be a simple as XP machines in the network, SBS 2003 servers or whatever else or they’ll come to us with a request – they need to archive data for multiple years or greater networking or usually “we need to move to the cloud” because, well everyone is aren’t they?

We’ll go back with the info, pricing etc – they’ll tell us it’s too much “I could buy THIS on eBuyer for half the price” we’ll explain how a recon Dual Core with dubious Win7 home licence isn’t really what they need and they’ll accept it – sometimes it’s a case of waiting till the year-end and they’ll tailor their budget to allow for the spend – or sometimes they’ll have to find the cash this year and let the accountant work out the budget retrospectively.

Our clients are the ‘S’ end of ‘SME’ typically 5-10 employees – we do have some larger ones with 50-70 employees, but really they’re no different other than they typically we ask me to find a good deal on desktops and laptops – when I do they’ll buy 5 of each and hold them in stock themselves – we’ll deploy them as/when a current machine either dies or the users complains enough to get the general manager to give them an upgrade.

We have a number of charities and private businesses that work in the public sector via tender – they’re the ones who tend to have an annual budget.

matt_outandabout – Member

Smal charity/business here.

We lease printers, budget to replace 5 laptops or computers a year (out of 20) and another chunk towards things like projector and phone replacements.

Would you mind answering me a question – I’m not trying to pitch you.

Did you know that MS offers basic 365 free to charities?

I’m marketing at the moment for more charity work – most of the ones we’re taking on are paying huge lumps to their current IT support people for email hosting and even occasionally buying full price Office Suites.

Did you know that MS offers basic 365 free to charities?

AFAIK what they offer free doesn’t include the cost of the software – but if you choose to add it it is very cheap. I love it (charity user)

AFAIK what they offer free doesn’t include the cost of the software – but if you choose to add it it is very cheap. I love it (charity user)

This is true – desktop versions start at £1.30 per user per month

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/non-profit/compare-office-365-for-nonprofits-plans-FX104081605.aspx

2 people – about £500 to £700 per year total (including other electronics – we’re a media compnay)

We’ll go back with the info, pricing etc – they’ll tell us it’s too much “I could buy THIS on eBuyer for half the price” we’ll explain how a recon Dual Core with dubious Win7 home licence isn’t really what they need and they’ll accept it – sometimes it’s a case of waiting till the year-end and they’ll tailor their budget to allow for the spend – or sometimes they’ll have to find the cash this year and let the accountant work out the budget retrospectively.

Out of interest, why wouldn’t they lease PCs? Fixed cost per month per unit, no up-front, clear replacement time, no disposal issues, no mucking about with budgets.

Don’t accountants cost money? Surely rejigging a budget is a good chunk of the cost of a PC these days.

Reason I’m asking is that I’m trying to justify my IT spend. I work in a University Engineering Department where we need the highest computing power available but I’m sensitive to the cost of it all.

EC2. Pay for what you use, rather than paying to own it, use it and cool it.

Lease v Buy is a capex / opex question, and usually down to the financial controllers preference from what I can see. We tend to buy (100s of million spend globally, really couldn’t grasp the numbers) and write down over 3-5 years, but things like MFDs we do lease for flexibility.

leffeboy – Member

Did you know that MS offers basic 365 free to charities?
AFAIK what they offer free doesn’t include the cost of the software – but if you choose to add it it is very cheap. I love it (charity user)

Yeah, it’s the hosting side that’s free – I try to call it Microsoft 365 rather than Office 365 for that exact reason – it confuses my clients (and me) 365 is far more than just a lease model for Office suite.

£1.30 per user for the office suite is a bloody bargain though..

I’ve got charity clients we’ve taken on who are paying £10 a month per mailbox for hosting and £190 a pop for H&B ’13 because their support supplier either didn’t know or didn’t care about charity licencing.

€70m on 11k employees, but there is some seriously hefty kit int here like Flame machines.

P-jay Yes, I was aware. We get all desktop software for peanuts from CTXchange (£5 for full ms office pro per licence).
We use a hosted desktop that costs a good whack and is not upto date imo, but it comes with great technical support and help, so for small business with no IT person it works out good value.
We also have back up at each office, and second HD for backing up old data that is less valuable.
If it was up to me, I would likely move us to 365 with a tech support contract.

that may be a simple as XP machines in the network…

What? Still? I thought it was now unsupported.

Your IT spend needs to be broken down
– Keeping the lights on; i.e. just keeping everything working which covers ‘stuff’ from Licensing Costs, Admin staff pay (pay rises) to patching the servers
– Where you want to be in the next few years e.g. having a roadmap of new services etc…

As a basic you need an inventory of what you currently have and what it will cost to maintain.
Then when someone wants a new whizzbang whatever the first question is what do they need it for.

slowoldman – Member

that may be a simple as XP machines in the network…

What? Still? I thought it was now unsupported.

It is as of Spring this year, but there’s no shortage of them in the workplace – in fairness the ones left tend to belong to the people who think I’m only there to rip them off and they “only bought them a year ago, two at most, AND they were expensive” but they’re usually 5-6 year old, built up from parts unknown in generic boxes – that someone sold to them ‘cheap’.

I suspect if MS cared to look the OS isn’t legit, the copy of Office 2007 certainly isn’t.

It makes my job incredibly hard.

I’ve got charity clients we’ve taken on who are paying £10 a month per mailbox for hosting

🙁 our only problem with office 365 is that we have 150 users on free google apps right now and I can’t quite face the pain of the transfer. Would truly love to though

6,000 UK users, equipment leased from IBM, replaced as infrequently as possible – 5-6 year cycle, although certain sites can be more regular.

Couldn’t say on the spend. Exorbitant should cover it.

Arts and councils. 0. Wait until servers and pcs are unusable , lose all your data and rely on freelancers to bring their own macs.

Our organisation has an annual spend of about £30 million + £6 million capital investment budget

EDIT

5500-6000 users

Thanks for the replies.

There are three types of users in my place.

1) Admin staff use basic computers capable of running Windows 7. They use web based tools so their PC’s are currently 6+ years old. I’ll only replace them when I need their PC for a student project or when they fail or the current supported OS will no longer run on them (i.e driver support dries up).

2) Students. We have two 50 room labs. They run a full range of CAD software (Solidworks, AutoDesk, Abaqus, Ansys, Matlab, Hyperworks etc etc. They need reasonably powerful machines, at least ones that are ISV certified (this saves a huge amount of potential issues). At the moment, the more advanced users (the 4th years) are running kit 4+ years old. These will be cascaded down to the other lab where they don’t hammer the machines with simulations. The stuff in the other lab is now 8+ years old. Some of the software (especially the teaching versions) doesn’t support back-end processing.

3) Researchers and PhD students. These run simulations lasting weeks. I have a couple of servers with GPU cards to back-end some of it and a blade infrastructure running VM’s elsewhere. We get them a new entry-level workstation which they have for the 4 year duration they are here.
The kit that they leave gets used for other visiting staff or to drive gas chromatographs, 3D printers etc.

Some of the older servers are 11+ years old. They still do the job as fileservers, license managers etc so no need to replace (other than cutting the electricity consumption).

Now, a student paying £9000 a year expects reasonable kit to be available. I’m trying to cast into stone, a managed life-cycle where the PC’s in one of the labs is replaced after 2-3 years and cascaded down so the oldest equipment in use by the students is no longer than 4-6 years old.
Software wise, we either get it for free or get HUGE discounts on it and maintenance so we run the latest stuff. Hence the need to keep up with the hardware.
I remember talking to some people who worked in the Aerospace industry and a few other similar places. They had a replacement cycle of 3 months! Don’t know if its still like that, computing power has plateaued a bit compared to what it was.
Leasing is usually too expensive and we reuse the old stuff anyway.

computing power has plateaued a bit compared to what it was.

I think this is a fairly critical point.

Ten years ago, a three year old machine may well have been creaking. Twenty years ago, a three year old machine was, well, to be honest a brand new machine often wasn’t up to the job.

These days though, hardware is finally winning the hardware / software arms race. There are power users of course, everybody’s needs are different and the OP’s userbase is somewhat different to an office’s, but most people in the workplace only use a fraction of the computing horsepower at their fingertips. Do we really need to be replacing a call centre PC whose only functions are email and a call logging client, or a warehouse machine running a stock control program, just because it’s in last year’s colours?

I’d certainly stand by a policy that marks machines as eligible for replacement after three years, but a blanket “this is three years old, here’s your new one” suggests that this is an organisation with more money than it knows what to do with (or an absence of any IT knowledge I suppose). Most of the performance issues I see day-to-day with three year old laptops are readily resolved by replacing the 1Gb of RAM with a 4Gb stick.

There are other compelling reasons for shiny kit, of course. Do you want your head sales rep turning up to see clients with a seven year old laptop that’s been kicked across the car park? Probably not. But what I’m getting at is, I don’t think there’s a “one size fits all” answer to this and I think that blindly renewing based purely on age is a legacy approach that perhaps needs reviewing.

Sorry, I appear to have tangented a bit.

For the large labs you have, its worth thinking about usage patterns. My old uni lab had 50ish machines in, but for virtually all the time only 5-10 were being used. You could divide them into 2 of 25, and then replace 25 every year. Mark the new ones, so students knew where to head in an empty lab. Just a thought.

The labs we have are very heavily used – often full. This is because the software, due to licensing issues can only be installed on computers owned by the University.
The lab sizes used to be 25 but the steady increase in students has necessitated teaching larger classes.
Also, disputes will occur if a student wants to run CST Microwave Studio or some such on one of the faster machines in a lab and they are currently being occupied by others using it for word processing or checking up on Facebook (they frequently use FB as an online collaboration tool for group projects and it saves me having to administer Sharepoint)