Doing more with less: Reducing OPEX with Technology

IT has traditionally been seen as a cost center. What if I told you that under the right lens, it can be turned into a catalyst of change that can drive increased efficiency and reduce your company’s OPEX? With the uncertainty of a complex global economic climate, CIOs and CTOs alike must find ways to put available technologies in an optimal path for enabling companies to do more with less.

In previous articles, we’ve explored some of the use cases of technology to enhance UX using AI, and business transaction automation using blockchain. In this new delivery, I want to share with you a few ways a sound technology led optimization strategy can yield outstanding savings and ways for people to focus on more relevant tasks for your business.

Assess, Optimize, Reduce

The first step of your journey must be to assess your current IT footprint. Take a look under the hood and raise an inventory of all the applications, solutions, and tools your business is currently using to conduct its daily operations. Map all interactions and existing integrations, you will probably discover many surprises: “island systems” that don’t talk to each other, redundant and overlapping functions, unnecessarily long processes due to bad configurations or inefficient integrations, etc.

Once you’ve understood your status quo, it’s time to take it all to the drawing board and design your new IT landscape of tomorrow. Make sure you use all available inputs from your business, they are the experts in the expected outcome. Your target must be to create new – more efficient – ways for your processes to flow (optimize), while using the knife wherever necessary to eliminate waste in a true “lean” style (reduce).

Throughout this digital transformation, the goal to pursue is reduced complexity. Normally this translates into fewer breaking points and therefore fewer maintenance costs, with the potential to even decommission certain solutions entirely that could result in additional savings. Don’t waste the opportunity to think about how available open-source software could replace paid solutions where possible.

Technology Driven Efficiencies

Now, let's focus our efforts on how existing and emerging technologies can also drive efficiency and keep more dollars in the pocket.

Virtualization and Cloud

From small companies to large enterprises, legacy systems are still at the backbone of today’s business solutions. Often, these systems are collocated on premises and require high maintenance to keep them running, unnecessarily inflating the Total Cost of Ownership (TOC) for infrastructure.

With virtualization of resources alone, companies can go from having multiple servers – usually underutilized – to host each of their business apps separately, to a reduced and optimized array of physical machines, each one running multiple virtual machines that help maximize resource utilization and often reducing the total infrastructure footprint.

But it doesn’t end there, cloud computing can also contribute to reducing costs. By completely moving solutions off-premises, companies can reduce or eliminate their TOC for the underlying infrastructure they require to run their apps. Financially speaking, it is much better to pay only for what you use on the cloud (IaaS), than dealing with multiple costs like electricity, cooling, ISP redundancy, hard drive failures, replacement of outdated (and depreciated) equipment, etc.

There are multiple companies out there promising help with cloud cost optimization, providing insight, tools, and automations to keep your costs in line with your budget. But a new definition of cloud optimization could be in the oven with a company called Exostellar Inc. , that promises up to 90% reduction of your overall cloud costs by allowing you to use AWS spot instances while available (heavily discounted instances that leverage unused AWS EC2 capacity) and use their proprietary technology to dynamically relocate your containerized stateful workloads to regular EC2 instances when the spot capacity is reclaimed, all without any service interruption.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Repetitive and rule-based tasks are common across all business functions. Data entry and validation, invoice and order processing, payroll management, and handling of common IT service desk incidents, are just a few examples of hundreds of use cases under this category.

Robotic Process Automation can help increase productivity, eliminate human error, and reduce labor costs by automating such use cases through AI, ML and/or software bots specifically designed for each scenario. Modern implementations of RPA often rely on a combination of all such technologies to create highly efficient solutions for complex problems.

A few examples of market leaders in RPA are:

• UiPath with a robust enterprise platform offering solutions for a wide array of industries.
• Automation Anywhere , well known for advanced features such as easy drag-and-drop bot building UI, AI powered automation abilities and bot performance monitoring tools.
• 微软 Power Automate, formerly Microsoft Flow, is a fully encompassing solution for low-code/no-code automation within the Microsoft ecosystem.

Honorable mentions for tools such as Zapier or IFTTT , as they share some similarities with RPA tools in terms of automation skills, but since they only address workflow integrations of cloud-based applications through APIs, they lack the scope, dexterity, and UI capabilities of RPA solutions.

Green Computing and IoT

Energy consumption is another area that technology can help optimize to reduce operational costs. On the one hand, we have Green Computing, which is a collection of best practices that focuses on designing and developing lean solutions, by simplifying code and infrastructure to reduce the energy needed to run them. On the other hand, we have the Internet of Things (IoT), that can play a pivotal role in reducing energy costs by connecting devices and sensors to monitor, analyze, and optimize energy usage in real-time.

By combining these two, companies can create a powerful driver for cost savings. Let's break it down further:

• Green Coding: zero-in on coding practices that will allow you to use the least amount of processing power to deliver a functioning solution. The choice of development language (C has been shown to be the most energy efficient language by the way), using the simplest logic with the least number of lines of code, prioritizing the use of smaller resources when possible, avoiding code bloat (open-source software is often "bloated" and needs to be selectively stripped), are only a few of the techniques.
• Green IT: we already talked about how virtualization can contribute to a reduced IT footprint by consolidating hardware, but what remains behind can be further optimized. Enter IoT, which can help data center administrators monitor energy consumption and gain remote control of otherwise "dumb" devices.
• Building Automation: this is where IoT really shines. By leveraging individual device network connectivity through a variety of available protocols (Matter and Thread will become the industry standards soon), buildings can become truly smart when it comes to their energy consuming resources. Lighting, heating, ventilation, HVAC, and other building systems can be fully automated to sense and analyze factors like temperature, humidity, occupancy, and daylight levels, and adjust these their values appropriately to minimize energy waste.

Conclusion

Reducing operational expenses through technology is a journey in search of efficiency and sustainability. Our ability to assess, optimize and reduce our IT footprint while leveraging technologies like virtualization, cloud, RPA, IoT, and best practices around sustainable computing is critical to best position our business to emerge as more resilient and competitive in times of economic instability.