Smart Architectures, Architects (Continued)
Bridging the Business and Technical
Carter: A big part of the role of an enterprise architect is bridging the needs of the business people and the technical people. Has it been difficult reconciling the needs of these two groups?
Rampalli: The biggest lesson I learned was establishing a set of rules by which we can communicate to developers and IT on how business values are going to be delivered and how, in turn, those business values are connected to the notion of TCO. They are not at odds with each other. That debate and discussion still continues as an inherent dichotomy of a co-tension in the environment, and I think tomorrow's IT is going to be looking at embracing business value and TCO as enabling strategies. When I look back at the lesson from this, it's not just TCO; it's the speed with which we can do upgrades, with which we can lend capability to the environment, which is business value.
Carter: Where are 64-bit applications starting to pay off?
Rampalli: We are already seeing a lot of benefit from certain classes of applications. One is decision support. We need fast processing of heuristics; the data and the heuristics that run against that data are stored in cache because if you run into an I/O-based process against a database, you would take forever to get that algorithm crunched and done. So, our focus is to move to 64-bit those areas where we get all these advantages in performance and a reduction in our cost.
Carter: So obviously creating architecture is driven by cost concerns…
Rampalli: …The issue that is front-and-center for most CFOs is, "you're costing me so much; what do I get for it?" Let's say you're a $26 million company and you want to grow to $50 million in three years. The CFO wants to know that if you spend all this money on your business, will you deliver the promised productivity gain and scalability that can help grow the company? If you have a set of reasonable building blocks and a shared-services architecture, you would get economies of scale that you perhaps don't have today, so that you don't build beyond reach. Most IT shops today have a huge fixed-cost burden So, just because the company started reducing its revenue because there's no uptake in the business, it doesn't mean the IT costs go down. You have to pay depreciation on the life of the servers, and you find that IT shops have this back-end issue where, in a theoretical situation of zero growth, or zero revenue, you still have assets to write off, and their fixed costs are pretty high.
One of the things we are doing is looking at the program that completely rearchitects the data center to get to a different performance point and cost point. We are looking at a rearchitecting of the infrastructure that gets us to a different cost basis, perhaps even a 50 percent reduction against what it would have cost. This is critical for the payback model that you want to get to.
Carter: This is a big task. How are you going to get there?
Rampalli: This is going to happen through multiple strategies: shared application services to drive reuse and modularity; globalization to lower our cost basis for development; and this whole server consolidation. So, this is what you will see in the next three years: aggressive growth in shared services, a majority model on globalization, consolidation, dynamic allocation of system resources, leverage of form factors that enable a better cost per unit, automated architectures, and automation that takes people out of the equation on the lower-end activities.
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