Recover business value from unprofitable downtime.

Editor's note: This article introduces the white paper "The Power of Information Availability: What Every Senior Executive Should Know" available free at the MC White Paper Center.

Every business—large or small—faces multiple marketplace challenges. They come from increasing competition and customer churn and from productivity and profitability concerns. Overwhelming, you're being asked to find and deliver new value at every turn. And you expect information and technology to deliver cost-effective value.

Your existing IT infrastructure may be able to deliver even more value by unleashing the potential locked inside planned downtime—when systems, applications and databases are brought down for maintenance, backups, or reporting activities. This downtime currently delivers zero value to your business operations—and adds nothing to your bottom line.

This white paper explores how the power of an information availability solution can transform that non-productive, non-profitable downtime into the optimum level of value-producing business uptime for your organization. First, by eliminating or minimizing disruptions from planned system downtime; second, by eliminating or minimizing delays and latency from your information and business processes, speeding up the ability of your employees, customers or partners to act—to buy, to decide, to analyze, to share, to market, to deliver on time, to service, to expand, and to profit. You'll find the worksheets you'll need to discuss these issues with your business unit and IT executives.

Aligning Business and IT

Over the last few years, every business has faced an onslaught of challenges: global economic volatility, fierce competition, customer churn, mergers and acquisitions, rising security concerns, and waves of regulatory compliance issues. Meanwhile, stakeholders continue to demand that top executives increase profits, lower costs, expand market share, and grow revenue.

To solve these issues, much has been demanded from you and your IT executives. The most successful organizations have been able to harness these complex, often competing, initiatives into a larger, strategic vision supported by emerging technologies. When properly aligned with that vision, information technology becomes a potent force for solving business pain throughout the organization, creating competitive advantage and driving shareholder value at every level.

Some businesses have been more adept at this alignment of interests than others. And more will be demanded in the next few years. Users always need more: more data, more data sharing, more applications, more processing time, more reports and more access. Customers want more choices, more convenience, more access points and more flexibility. Shareholders want to see more value, higher profits, greater efficiencies and more return for every dollar spent.

Your organization may be dealing with some of these challenges today; others may pose long-term obstacles to your business strategies or growth. You need the ability to ensure that IT can and will continue to deliver on your goals. That's why it's important to make "information availability" a key issue in discussions with your IT executives.

Want to Learn More?

Download the white paper "The Power of Information Availability: What Every Senior Executive Should Know" available free at the MC White Paper Center.

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Bill Hammond directs Vision Solutions' product marketing efforts for information availability software solutions. Hammond joined Vision Solutions in 2003 with more than 15 years of experience in product marketing, product management, and product development roles in the technology industry. As director of product marketing at Vision Solutions, Hammond is responsible for product positioning and messaging, product launches, and marketplace intelligence for the company's high availability, disaster recovery, systems management, and data management solutions.