New Year, New Projects, No New Resources? Just Add Time

Happy New Year! And happy week of realizing resolutions, pitching new ideas, restarting projects, and revisiting old opportunities. Let’s hope everything goes to plan!

For Cloudshare users, particularly those in development and IT, new ideas can mean more tickets with the same resources. Rework a user portal! Prototype a new feature! …And keep the backlog clean.

For small organizations, this can mean more hands warming on the same fire – a developer on two projects, maybe a repurposed test server – and incrementally more time. For larger organizations, it can be much more challenging. As this Gartner survey argues, the larger the project, the more likely it is to “fail”.

And what is “failure” to Gartner? Their survey indicates what you might expect: missed deadlines, disappointing quality or ballooning budgets.

How can (Cloud) Services Help?

Compressing or eliminating labor time and resources without raising costs reduces the probability of “failure”. And if cost lowers too, then just a little bit of planning has saved the project from the start. Infrastructure services like CloudShare offload work from production servers to shared development servers. That save resources. And with more automation, time compresses as well.

This is the basis for many “Total Cost of Ownership” (marketing) calculations. As this oldie-but-ok read from VMWare in 2006 shows, buying a virtualization service saves cost mostly by consolidating servers and speeding up development time:

How does CloudShare help?

For those developers using just their own laptop, and those IT departments who haven’t migrated to fully virtualized environments, CloudShare will bring a huge benefit. Not only are the servers consolidated, often at a 10+:1 ratio, but infrastructure utilization is nearly 100% when you pay only for what you use. When you add the pre-configured templates, infrastructure API, and snapshots, the “failure” protection is thorough.

So What’s New?

This week, we introduced the ability to pre-purchase usage hours directly in the application. This means total control over the “cost of ownership”. If the project needs a little more time, buy more server hours and take a discount for your trouble. There’s no hidden fees, surge prices, or auctions. Just add time!

Happy New Year and Happy CloudSharing!