Cut IT Spending by virtualizing the desktop and reduce Power consumption

Implications: 1. Power consumes more than the cost of the PC. 2.  Virtualization of PC's can reduce the IT budget.

Analysis: If only we could make IT organizations pay for their power usage.  Then decisions around PC's purchases would change.  I did a little research and found that a Wyse head unit uses about one tenth of the power of a desktop machine(according to their statistics).  I am not necessarily endorsing Wyse over other similar units, but rather using Wyse as the example.

Using simple back of the envelop calculations, we can assume that if you were to put Wyse devices where every desktop currently exists, you could save $200K/thousand employees.  How did I come up with this number?

Well let's assume that the average PC power costs $400/year (as compared to $700/year for a server.  Let's also assume that one server can virtualize to 5 PC's.  Therefore, the power used by 5 virtualized desktops is equal to $900 ($700 for the server + $200 for the 5 Wyse devices).  This compares to $2000/year for five desktops.  This equates to over $200/year in savings per desktop.  This equates to $200K/thousand employees.  The scarier part is that the cost will only go up every year as power costs go up.

This does not even include the savings of the Wyse device over a PC.  I feel that standardizing on laptops and Wyse thin clients can save on Microsoft licenses, capital purchasing, as well as power.

The larger point is that the CIO has the opportunity to position himself / herself as an operational leader and possibly be seen as the COO.  The kind of work that looks for business efficiencies is the kind of work that COO's look for in industry.  And it is time we look at productivity in the white collar staff the same way we have for "factory" workers.

The more we (CIO's) think like business people, the more time we will have with senior business people.  This is as much a statement for me as it is for you reading this post.