I just returned from presenting at the Wall Street Technology Association (WSTA) seminar in New York. The umbrella theme for the conference was Modernizing the Data Center: Green and Other Considerations and the audience for my presentation, Cost Containment, Consolidation & Virtualization of the Modern Messaging Infrastructure, consisted of about 50 people. Following the seemingly obligatory, but redundant, introductory slides that every vendor feels they must add (including myself!) regarding the economy, cost reductions, virtualization, etc., I jumped straight into the essence of the presentation which was the greening of messaging infrastructures though consolidation, ultimately resulting in cost savings.
While I stayed true to the Sendmail message – consolidating the messaging infrastructure in three easy steps and saving money through virtualization – I felt that this specific venue was not the right fit for the ‘messaging consolidation and costs savings’ story since most audience members had little, to no, familiarity with messaging architectures.
However, the event’s keynote speaker, Johna Till Johnson made a great point when she noted that if you were to ask IT executives what power consumption costs were for their data centers, less than 25% would be able to answer with most deferring to their facilities management team. With that said, if we are really going to ‘green’ our messaging infrastructures we need to think outside of the traditional IT messaging team and include data center managers in our discussions and activities around ROI with regards to consolidation and virtualization. These are the folks after all, that have the information around power consumption – with a keen interest in reducing it – combined with the need to maximize available space in the data center. So maybe it was the right audience after all.