Those that cross their fingers and hope for the best will find themselves constantly dealing with service interruptions caused by surprise capacity shortfalls, leading to significant costs in running a reactive incident management function AND the panic buying of extra capacity at short notice followed by the quick (and risky) implementation of capacity upgrades. If you find yourself in situations where you are constantly having "please explain" conversations with your business consumers then you're probably in this category. "Please explain why the service was unavailable; why didn't you know that the system was running out of steam, and why we were held to ransom for the cost of the upgrade?". By closer integration of the operational needs of the business with capacity planning, the Xceed Capacity Management process enables a more efficient and synergistic relationship between IT services and line management.

Those that deliberately over-provision their IT capacity "just in case" will soon find themselves having to explain to their CFO why more capital expenditure is required when the utilisation of existing IT assets is so low. Xceed consultants have encountered many clients for whom peak CPU utilisation for a server is less than 5%, or where expensive SAN storage has been allocated at a factor of 20 or even 50 times higher than that utilised. The one saving grace in this situation is that utilisation data is probably not easy for you to obtain, let alone your CFO! Through the provision of clear capacity data, the Xceed Capacity Management enables IT to demonstrate greater budgetary control and responsibility, enhancing relationships with internal stakeholders…such as the CFO! Clients who choose to be proactive know that managing capacity, or more correctly "managing headroom" is a highly effective and efficient thing to do. Most clients choose to start with mission-critical applications where the risk to the overall business is the highest. The targeted deployment of capacity management tools coupled with a mechanism to accurately predict future business demand allows such organisations the ability to model what will/might/could happen given certain business demand scenarios and develop upgrade plans to be triggered for deployment when certain circumstances arise – well ahead of any interruption in service. Through the integral risk management processes, Xceed Capacity Management brings IT even closer to and more visibly part of strategic business planning Once the service risk has been reduced, clients usually turn their attention to the optimisation of existing assets and evaluate the technical and financial implications of making better use of what they already have, or in switching their technology to take advantage of industry advances, e.g. server and storage virtualisation. Building on our wealth of experience, the Xceed Capacity Management service brings together a number of world-class processes that enable you to take real control of your current and future capacity needs. Please contact Tim Clark (tim.clark@xceedgroup.com),our Capacity Management Practice Director, to discuss your specific requirements and see the list of managed services available.
When? – well, a couple of questions for you:
Can you say you are comfortably in control of your capacity management? If you are not, at what point could capacity issues becomes critical for your business?