Companies are also buying off-brand commodity products that offer the same functionality as well-known products at a fraction of the price. Jim Huntley, network administrator at City National Bank in Kilgore, Texas, says his company bought an off-brand Ethernet switch for $150; similar new products from Cisco list for $3,000.
Other organizations are saving money by postponing, if not eliminating, the "automatic upgrade" that became standard procedure in the 1990s. "Our mentality is 'if it ain't broke, we ain't gonna fix it,' " says Andrew Rossetti, CTO at Felton Bank in Felton, Del. "Unless we add an employee, we are not purchasing new PCs. Unless a printer, router, monitor or other device breaks, we are not upgrading."
Enterprises are also taking a hard look at what existing hardware and software is being underutilized. More than 57 percent of IT executives surveyed last year by Enterprise Management Associates cited "reclaiming and/or repurposing hardware and software that is underutilized" as a top priority for 2004. More than 64 percent said they're increasing time and money spent on asset management.
Many enterprises are lowering software costs by using freeware, shareware and open-source alternatives. Nearly all the IT execs interviewed for this article cited open-source software as an element of their cost-cutting strategies. For some, open source is the only option.
"When you have very little money to spend, everything has to be built on open source," says an IT manager at an Issaquah, Wash., professional services firm. "We are building an environment that uses nothing but open-source technology: TomCat server, MySQL, Java, Tiles, Struts. For most companies, the big-dollar systems are like swatting a flea with a bazooka."
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