Zivaro Blog

4 Reasons to Use a Lifecycle Management Calculator

Spiceworks’ 2016 State of the CIO report predicts stagnant IT spending in 2017. With hardware accounting for 32% of the average IT budget, many organizations will be asked to “sweat the assets” to get the most of out of their infrastructure investment. This strategy can be risky; with 52% of outages caused by hardware failure, […]

Spiceworks’ 2016 State of the CIO report predicts stagnant IT spending in 2017. With hardware accounting for 32% of the average IT budget, many organizations will be asked to “sweat the assets” to get the most of out of their infrastructure investment. This strategy can be risky; with 52% of outages caused by hardware failure, some budgets will be hard pressed to cover needed fixes, updates and replacements. Thus, it’s very important to have a reliable and accessible system in place to track end-of-life equipment and overall utilization.

As part of our Lifecycle Management roadmap, GTRI offers an easy, cost-effective way to ensure organizations are always in tune with their hardware – the Lifecycle Calculator. Below is a closer look at how this tool helps businesses avoid downtime, track utilization and improve forecasting.

Preventative Analytics

Possibly the most important benefit of GTRI’s Lifecycle Calculator is the built-in preventative analytics function. Hardware failure is one of the top five reasons for unexpected outages and it can be time-consuming to pinpoint where the failure occurs on the network. Understanding utilization and end-of-life is critical to mitigating this risk.

With the GTRI Lifecycle Calculator, organizations always know what equipment is “in the red” when it comes to lifespan. Each asset’s remaining useful life is reported, resulting in increased awareness of threats and timing. This tool also enables users to make informed decisions to attempt to extend the life of hardware by seeing how hard the infrastructure is taxed with full utilization reports.

Hardware data helps prevent outages, keeping businesses operating smoothly, and internal and external customers happy with IT services.

Long-term Forecasting

Forecasting hardware spend is a key feature of GTRI’s Lifecycle Calculator, which can predict necessary upgrades or new purchases up to five years out, with rolling updates as new hardware comes in and old assets are retired. The forecasting tool accounts for utilization trends and projects asset disposal to deliver a recommended spend for the year in question.

While IT budgets are predicted to stay flat, the reality is that unexpected failures force emergency purchases, making that flat budget line spike dramatically. Being able to predict when each piece of equipment will come to end of support/end of life allows organizations to accurately budget IT spend years out, preventing future headaches that come from scrambling for additional money. This long-term forecasting also benefits companies and IT departments engaging in transformative initiatives that span multiple years.

User-friendly Reporting

During configuration of the tool, GTRI will demonstrate sample dashboards and gather feedback. At deployment, we schedule automated dashboard distribution at the desired cadence. The report scheduling functionality ensures customers receive whichever dashboards are requested, delivered to the inboxes specified, at the specific time desired. Dashboard data can be used in presentations to the IT team, other departments and even the CFO when discussing future budgets. Over time, the compounding trend data with snapshots at current utilization levels to check models becomes a powerful tool in your arsenal.

Easy Updating

When assets need to be added to or removed from the Lifecycle Calculator, customers simply contact GTRI with the specifics and we take care of the rest. Or they can bring this ability in-house if they prefer.

Many of our customers take advantage of our team’s expertise to help them with the entire hardware selection and replacement process, including identifying strategic objectives, vetting vendors, presenting solutions, procuring the necessary components and updating the Lifecycle Calculator.

Don’t get blindsided by sporadic spend and hopeful “Do we really need to replace that now?” guessing. Let GTRI help with the Lifecycle Calculator.

Want to know more or see a demonstration? Feel free to contact me at sbierwirth@gtri.com or 303-327-7604.

Scott Bierwirth is an Enterprise Sales Account Executive for GTRI.