Talking about the relative importance of software and hardware is a little like the chicken and the egg dilemma: everyone seems to have a different idea of what’s most important. But with limited time and money, where should organizations focus to optimize performance and efficiency?
Sometimes, the egg people are clearly right – it’s a hardware problem. In other cases, it’s obviously a software problem. But what should organizations do when the challenge is less clear-cut? Perhaps it’s time to move beyond the chicken/ egg dichotomy, and consider how software and hardware interact.
Recently, a client came to Traust with recurring Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) challenges. The client had determined that running their ERP software on third party hardware was creating latency and drag on their user experience, and delaying several critical behind-the-scenes jobs and back-up services.
To fix this problem, Traust migrated the client’s software solutions with the optimal hardware. Since this process was new to the client’s staff, Traust provided local experts to come in and quickly set-up a development instance to prove out the performance improvement opportunity. After seeing the benefit of the software-hardware pairing in a risk-free environment, the client contracted Traust to migrate their entire production environment to this new hardware system. This solution delivered immediate ROI in terms of performance and maintenance.
Enterprise IT solutions are big investments. Today, the life cycle of these investments is getting longer and performance expectations are increasing. Optimizing software-hardware interaction can lead to a longer-lasting, more productive solution that reduces the total required investment over time.
Stop agonizing over the chicken and the egg. Call Traust today!
Photo credit: “The Chicken & The Egg Dilemma” by Ruben Alexander is licensed under CC BY 2.0