The Challenge
This global technology leader was pursuing a broad M&A driven growth strategy. The divisional IT team was called upon to consolidate and rationalize both the business operations and development resources of the acquired companies to gain economies of scale. The client had inherited a panoply of technologies, data centers and operational systems.

At the same time, their major data centers had run out of both power and space. In the main data center they could not take any additional power from the grid. Additionally, there was not a single rack unit left for provisioning new servers for critical development needs unless an existing server was removed first.

The Solution
After an exhaustive evaluation process, the client chose BDNA Insight to support their strategic and tactical IT objectives. Several unique product capabilities of BDNA Insight aligned with these objectives:

Non-intrusive discovery: Without the use of software agents or administrative access to target systems, BDNA Insight captured the breadth and depth of data needed to support the initiatives without disrupting network or systems operations. Of the wide array of tested products, only BDNA Insight delivered on this critical need.

Coverage and accuracy: BDNA Insight was able to accurately identify a much wider range of assets – from servers to desktops to IP phones –than other solutions. In addition to discovering the assets, however, BDNA also provided the detailed hardware and software information necessary to support other initiatives across the organization.

Architecture: In addition to BDNA Insight’s intuitive analytical interface, the underlying architecture lent itself to high scalability and easy integration with other systems, such as business intelligence tools and systems management frameworks.

The Results
Within 3 months of its deployment, the client realized many times the planned return on investment from BDNA Insight. The most dramatic ROI was seen in server consolidation and rationalization.

With asset re-use and recovery as the primary driver, the client expected to find between 200 and 500 unmanaged servers in their existing data centers. By retiring or re-using the servers and their power and space, they would save over $3,000 per server, based upon their internal calculations. Using BDNA Insight, they quickly discovered over 32,000 servers, including 2,900 servers not in their control system. This represented more than 8 times the ROI that was expected from this single initiative – a whopping $7.7 million in capital expense savings through retirement and consolidation of servers!