We are trying something new. I haven’t been able to put out as much written content as I’d like. The ideas don’t seem to stop but I don’t have a long-form medium that I can’t personally churn out the content. Well, not in a produced enough fashion for the website. I need something bigger than Twitter but smaller than the official blog. So, let’s see where substack fits into the equation.
One of the things I’ve been noodling has been making the transition from a capital expense model to an operational expense model. Specifically, how that transition impacts the architectural decisions an organization makes.
I commonly run into the challenge where infrastructure leaders much squeeze blood from turnips. They are told to move from a private data center model with fixed assets to a pay-as-you-go model with little to no budget for overlapping costs.
Think migrating SAP to the public cloud. You must lay the new OS images, perform a test transfer, test applications, and then perform the move. With very few exceptions, there’s always an unexpected time period where both environments remain in place. There’s no new functional business capability moving SAP. IT may be more agile but the additional cost may not be easily explained.
What’s the solution? Well, this is where services such as a Managed Service Provider (MSP) or OEM finance arms come into play. These services will outright purchase your existing IT infrastructure and lease it back to you via OPEX. Services such as HPE GreenLake may even provide additional opportunities to redirect that same spend/budget to net new cloud offerings.
A critical part of IT architecture is financial engineering and getting past the budget issues. Maybe something for the paid subscription offer? I’d love to expand upon this concept in future research. But for now, you get the bits.
Let me know what you think of this new format.