Audit all network and communications costs and contracts (voice, data, cell, etc.), such as: - re-negotiate, where possible (I'd say try them all). Pick up the phone and ask for better rates or drop the service. Every day these people have discounts and promotes ready to keep customers - move to lower cost communications (a-la Skype, VoIP of any flavor, etc.) - fine-toothcomb-audit all large comm invoices - you won't believe how many mistakes (guess in whose favor ;)) are found in those and even where accurate, question charges vis-a-vis contract provisions - look for alternative services in data provisioning (either different vendors, or underlying technology used for WAN/MAN/I'net/site2siteVPN ...) ... and so on ...
Stefan On 1/22/09, Neil Neely <[email protected]> wrote: > This economy is quite rotten these days (shocking news, I know) and > layoff's and pay cuts are the norm all over the place. We've been > trying to do everything we can to trim down costs to lean up to > weather the storm - and I'm sure many of the rest of you have at least > felt the impact of this if not been directly involved in it. > > I'm starting this thread to encourage some sharing of idea's and > brainstorming on things folks here have tried / want to try to cut > expenses. At the end of the day I'd much rather cut an expense out of > the budget that we can live with than let another friend go - and I'd > much rather let a friend go then let the company fail. We've done > well at $work on this, but there is always room for improvement, so > I'm hoping to get some discussion going and see what comes of it. > > Most of these idea's are low to no capital invested, but if you've got > idea's that use some capital but save a lot of money those would be > useful to share as well. > > Cost saving ideas: > #1) Vendor management: Reduce costs for service X by either changing > provider or renegotiating the price for X from the current provider. > #2) Using open source instead of commercial: Things like using ClamAV > for your AV needs > #3) Finding things that have really high annual costs and seeing if > there is a different way to do them (get rid of it, go FOSS, etc) > #4) Shrinking something to control it's cost (i.e. you colo 1 full > rack and 2u of a second and are paying for 2 racks - find a way to > squeeze down those 2u and drop a rack) > #5) Dropping services completely that are expensive to provide (often > leads leads to layoffs) > #6) Cutting Power usage - using higher efficiency lighting > > Unpleasant ideas: > #1) Merge teams to achieve efficiencies (Read: double the workload on > one team and lay off most of the other team) > #2) Fortnight's - work 9 days every 2 weeks with a 10% pay cut > #3) Pay cut's > #4) Layoff's > > > That is just a start - we've done some of those and not others, and if > the economy doesn't get better I'm sure more and more of the > unpleasant solutions are going to become necessary at more and more > places. > > Thank you for your time, > > Neil Neely > http://neil-neely.blogspot.com > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > -- Sent from my mobile device _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
