Timo Lindström, CEO, DB Pro Oy & DB Pro Services Oy.

98% of our more than two hundred optimization projects have yielded significant savings, typically 25–50% of TCO. That’s a good figure.

But honest sales work also means talking about that 2%.

When does optimization fail to yield significant savings?

Three typical situations:

First: The environment has already been optimized. Someone has carefully planned the capacity in advance. The licenses are properly sized. The load profile is steady. In this situation, optimization confirms that the current situation is good. This is valuable information, even if it does not result in savings.

Second: Business growth will require an increase in capacity in the near future. Optimization can delay or reduce the investment, but it cannot avoid it. Here, too, information is valuable.

Third: The organization’s contracts or technical constraints prevent optimization. For example, long-term ironwork contracts can limit immediate savings. The analysis indicates when an opportunity will arise.

“98% find savings. 100% gain visibility. Visibility is a value in itself.”

Why is it always a good idea to conduct an analysis?

Performance metrics don’t tell you whether the environment is properly sized. Capacity analysis does.

Without an analysis, you won’t know whether your organization is in the 98% or the 2%. If you’re in the 98% and fail to conduct the analysis, you’ll lose hundreds of thousands of euros a year. If you’re in the 2%, you’ll have confirmation that your environmental performance is in order.

In both cases, knowledge is better than ignorance.

What makes an analysis reliable?

A reliable capacity analysis is based on actual usage data—not on estimates, not on the IT team’s best guess, and not on a vendor’s sales presentation.

It covers a sufficient time period: daily fluctuations, weekly fluctuations, monthly fluctuations, and seasonal spikes. It identifies trends and takes into account both service outages and uptime. It takes into account SQL Server licenses, Windows Server, VMware, other software, and hardware. It calculates the financial impact in euros, not just technical figures.

This is the analysis we conduct for every client before we make recommendations.

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