How to Reduce Your IT Costs?

Both in our country and around the world, market conditions are getting harder, investments are delayed, budgets are being cut. With the reflection of the increases in the exchange rates on the costs in the coming period, IT costs will become more and more conspicuous. In addition, it is of vital importance to make critical decisions in times of difficult conditions, to make the decreasing sales more efficient, to better understand the needs of customers and to protect sales by providing them with better products and services, and to increase profitability. In other words, both IT budgets produce glaring deficits and needs that can only be met by using high technology. On top of that, the response time to these needs is getting shorter and more complex solutions need to be found and implemented more quickly and flexibly.

When the August holiday period ends and the last quarter of the year begins, we will enter a busy working period both for the completion of this year's projects and next year's budgets. I'm sure many IT managers and decision makers are thinking about the fate of investments this year, on the one hand, and how they can budget for the next year and the following years, on the other. I am sure that there are those who consider postponing investments or giving up altogether in this uncertainty environment. However, in times of difficult market conditions, companies need flexible IT solutions much more. While budgets are shrinking, is it possible to introduce new products or renew existing applications without reducing or even increasing the IT service quality?

In this article, you can find our suggestions on how you can reduce your IT costs without sacrificing your service quality with innovative approaches instead of conventional solutions.

First, let's lay out the principles:

– Service quality will not be compromised. In other words, we will not compromise on flexibility, performance, functionality and ease of use.

– Considering budget constraints, initial investment costs will be low.

– Operational costs will be predictable and low.

– The application will be as self-service as possible. We will be able to see our business on our own without the need for outsourcing.

The above principles are fundamentally important in order not to compromise on quality while reducing our costs. But we know that both data is growing and business needs are increasing, but more importantly, it is necessary to respond very quickly to these needs.

So, How will it be? Our costs will decrease, but our implementation speed will increase and our solutions will be more flexible, is this possible?

It is certainly possible with innovative approaches.

Use New Technologies

Let's take database technologies. It is a fact that the most serious expense items of data centers are database license and maintenance costs. Operation (design, management, tuning) costs to be performed on databases can also be added to these. However, there are options that are designed in accordance with today's needs, are much more flexible in terms of architecture and provide ease of application.

For example, by using MongoDB, you can get rid of the cumbersomeness of a high-cost database such as Oracle and develop applications much faster and make changes very quickly. With the document data model, MongoDB enables you to develop applications much faster than relational databases. With its schemaless architecture, it allows changes in applications to be made without any loss of time or interruption of the operation. Licensing logic is not core based like Oracle and is much more cost effective. Your application speed, operational flexibility will increase, and your costs will decrease. MongoDB is a general purpose database that also supports transaction type transactions, it is a one-to-one solution for any application you develop with Oracle or SQL Server.

In addition to general-purpose MongoDB, Exasol as an analytical database will help you to reduce your investment and operation costs and to design high-performance analytical applications, especially in your data warehouse and data mart projects.

With its “tuning-free” approach, Exasol will significantly reduce your technical architecture and operational management costs in Oracle or SQL server, so your resources will be able to focus on getting maximum benefit from the data instead of wasting time to get maximum performance from the database.

Switch to License Lease

Now software companies are turning to the leasing model, which is much more flexible and reduces the initial investment costs to a much more acceptable level. Especially the initial investment costs can lead to the postponement of projects in terms of budget. The rental model offers a much more flexible alternative in terms of lowering initial investment costs and adjusting the usage as desired in the following years.

Tableau, MongoDB, Exasol, which we represent, and KNIME, which we support very fondly, offer very affordable first investment cost opportunities.

Use Open Source Software

More precisely, do not be afraid to use open source software. Of course, also research how to get support when it comes to your corporate needs or the licensing opportunities offered by the company.

MongoDB, Exasol and KNIME Analytics platform allow free use in different ways and require licensing for certain functions or corporate technical support.

Control Application Costs with Self-Service

There is something we say when describing Tableau; data is your data, it's your job, why would you need the help of someone else, some consultants, to report or analyze this data?

Implementation costs of software as well as purchasing are one of the factors that push IT budgets. Business intelligence and analytical databases are very good examples of these areas. Especially when data sizes increase, you need to do serious performance optimization studies on conventional databases such as Oracle, SQL Server. In the field of business intelligence, it is common to need consultants who are experts in the business intelligence tool to be used. Tableau, a self-service business intelligence product, targets exactly this area, you can do your own analysis.

Likewise, Exasol, which is self-managed and does not require performance optimization, offers an alternative that will reduce your maintenance-implementation costs in the field of analytical databases.

Implementation costs can often exceed the license and hardware costs required for the initial investment. In that case, it is necessary to work with technologies that can be learned as easily as possible without the need for outside help, and that do not bring additional technological difficulties such as learning a new programming language, pulling data into its own environment.

Benefit From Your Investments

A new component you add to your infrastructure should be able to work in harmony with your old architecture. For example, while investments such as Exasol, Oracle Exadata, Teradata, SAP HANA have been made in your infrastructure, you should not perform a separate data extraction for business intelligence software. Business Intelligence software should be able to take full advantage of the power of databases in your infrastructure.

Tableau offers a live connection option with your infrastructure.