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The Cost of Change: Page 2 of 3

"The burden is on us to show how we are economically superior, so we need to help the customer to understand the value of faster discovery, faster migration times, small floor space, and things like that," Merrill says. "We try to discuss hard costs versus soft costs. Of our 33 factors, customers may pick 10 or 12 cost elements they really care about, and we can make recommendations based on their specific issues and concerns."

Merrill's list misses two key costs -- one that often dominates buying decisions and one that isn't given as much consideration as it should.

The first is the cost of change, and that cost is viewed as very high for many enterprises and IT departments that have computing and storage systems that work. The risk that comes with changing vendors can loom large for many conservative IT departments, and saving some dollars often isn't viewed as a worthwhile reason to swap out something that works from a long-time technology partner for something new from somebody new.

The second key cost -- the really important one -- comes from not changing, and it is the hardest to calculate. Too many IT departments are comfortable with their well established processes and procedures using familiar systems, and they aren't looking to shake things up or move in a new direction. Yet in this day and age of economic uncertainty, can any part of the IT department continue to do things in the same old way? Most IT departments will continue to be viewed as merely a cost center if they continue to spend 80 cents of every dollar on maintenance and keeping the servers humming and the disks spinning.

Technology managers can help to support and sometimes lead the transformation of a business, but only if they start to transform their own departments. Storage systems are one place to start. The wave of new storage technologies and applications now on the market can make storage a more important part of overall IT operations and business processes. And they give storage administrators the opportunity to play a greater role in the overall business -- working, say, with the legal department on e-discovery or the sales department on the benefits of faster database response times for online sales. But to take advantage of those opportunities requires careful thought and a commitment to analyze the real cost of not making changes. Do you factor that into your buying decisions?