VMware IT Finance Manager

Organizations around the world rely on Information Technology (IT) like never before to realize their business goals. Yet, IT teams need much better information to make the right decisions to ensure business goals are met. When CIOs, IT managers, and business stakeholders all have easy access to the right facts and figures, they can make much more informed decisions about IT spending and consumption.

While IT organizations can monitor their IT assets and service desks, they cannot easily get definitive answers to key questions critical to running IT as a business, such as:

• How can I reduce IT costs with the optimal impact on the business?
• How can I calculate IT virtualization cost savings?
• Are IT services costing more than industry standards?
• Can we easily see if IT spending is trending over budget?
• Is consumption of IT services aligned with business objectives?
• How well are we meeting service commitments?

Lower Costs and Better IT Services

VMware IT Finance Manager is designed to enable valuable insight for IT spending decisions through better visibility and planning. It includes the following functionality:

• IT Costing — Enables IT managers to map the connections between IT services and their underlying cost drivers so that unit costs and total cost of services can be easily tracked.
• IT Demand Management & Budget Planning — Facilitates accurate and fact-based IT budgeting, planning, and forecasting based on recent usage levels and historical unit costs for IT services.
• IT Showback & Chargeback — Provides visibility to business units about their IT costs and alternatives, sometimes including full billing and chargeback based on an itemized bill of IT usage.
• IT Cost Optimization — Identifies potential areas for ongoing cost reduction, such as candidates for virtualization and consolidation, storage tiering, SLA reduction, end-of-life, deferral of upgrades, support reduction, etc.

Get More Value from Your IT Spend

VMware’s IT Finance Manager is a SaaS business application that helps IT organizations set cost reduction strategies and execute them. It automatically and continually tracks TCO, unit costs and their associated breakdowns by expense type, consuming entity, utilization of IT resources and assets, and quality of services, while comparing all of these to business goals, industry benchmarks, and alternatives.

These strategies include potential areas for continual cost reduction, such as candidates for virtualization and consolidation, storage tiering, SLA reduction, technology end-of-life or refresh, deferral of upgrades, support reduction, and more. With this knowledge, you are empowered to make intelligent decisions about investing in IT services and activities that provide the greatest ongoing value as the business and technology evolves.

Five Steps to Fact based decisions

• Meter and collect all financial data
• Abstract the costs in context
• Create meaningful cost models
• Publish a Bill of IT based on real state of the union
• Optimize your IT to make it competitive

The Value of IT Cost Optimization

• Lower IT costs with proactive control and visibility
• Track and compare IT costs against business goals, industry benchmarks, and alternatives
• Automate error-prone manual efforts

Key Capabilities

• View and analyze TCO and unit costs along with their breakdowns and trends for all IT services
• Identify the top spenders and consumers of all IT services
• Analyze key IT efficiency ratios and compare to industry benchmarks
• Spot such ongoing potential cost saving strategies as potential for virtualization, consolidation, retirement or refresh, SLA reduction, and tiering

Sample of Out-of-the-Box Reports

• TCO and unit cost by services
• Industry benchmark versus unit cost by services
• TCO trend by service
• Unit cost trend by services
• Usage trend by service

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VMware IT Service Level Manager

Your ultimate success depends on building and maintaining trust with your line of business customers and ensuring they receive the highest value from IT. Delivering what customers expect while meeting your business objectives requires definitive answers to such important questions as:

• How well are we meeting our IT service commitments?
• What is the value we are delivering in business terms?
• Are we notified of potential service breaches before they occur?
• Can we see the root cause of potential issues and prioritize actions based on business impact?
• Are customer expectations the same as ours, and do they align with the value being delivered to the business?
• Do we consistently track SLAs and KPIs that measure the business value received from our services?
• Do we collaborate with business unit customers based on the same shared information?

Measure and Ensure Value of IT Services

VMware’s IT Service Level Manager is a SaaS business application that allows IT organizations to set, track, report, and analyze IT performance and value measures — Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Key Performance Indicators (KPI), Key Value Indicators (KVIs), Operations Level Agreements (OLAs) and more — for all services, vendors, and customers, as well as perform root cause and business impact analysis.

Using VMware IT Service Level Manager, both IT and business units understand and agree on a single version of the service commitment facts, including the business definition of each obligation, how business service measures will be calculated, and what data and corresponding data sources will be used. Further, VMware IT Service Level Manager includes standardized templates to help you speed SLA provisioning, reducing the time from weeks to just a few minutes for on-boarding new services, users, and SLAs.

And when SLA, operational, and value commitments are in danger of being missed, or when breaches occur, you receive automated early warning alerts and escalation processes that allow you to quickly take action. This proactive approach helps IT meet SLA and value compliance on an ongoing basis across geographies, service lines, customers, organizations, and other defined business segments.

The Value of VMware IT Service Level Manager

• Reduce the costs associated with error-prone, manual efforts
• Lower IT spending by identifying the most cost/value effective alternatives
• Improve quality of IT services
• Decrease the time required to improve services

Key Capabilities

• Visually define, negotiate, and revise IT quality, operational, and value commitments
• Create workflows to orchestrate, track, and approve agreements and commitments
• Perform service level monitoring and compliance management
• Receive automatic alerts when an SLA, OLA, KPI, or UC commitment is in danger of being missed
• Generate root cause and business impact reports to identify remedial action
• Create "what if" scenarios to identify best course of action
• Conduct monthly reviews
• Use workflows to orchestrate, track, and sign off on compliance results
• Make auditable adjustments to results
• Generate and distribute formatted monthly service reports and booklets

Sample Out-of-the-Box Reports

• IT dashboards that provide a bird's eye view across all applications and systems, including key statistics such as the worst 5 KPIs
• Customer dashboard provides high-level information with drilldown on top 5 breaches by performance, top 5 KPIs, year-to-date credits, etc.
• SLA compliance report summarizes all the compliance information for a specific SLA
• Forecasting reports provide forecast information for KPI performance
• Audit reports to review and change results

VMware IT Service Level Manager Process Flow Diagram

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VMware IT Vendor Manager

Building a win-win relationship with your IT vendors has always been key to the successful delivery of IT services across your enterprise. Now as cloud alternatives become business reality, vendor management and optimization has reached new levels of importance.

Today's enterprise IT organizations know that successful vendor relationships require careful attention to key financial and value processes. With a common view of the facts, both IT organizations and their vendors can have confidence that expected business results are being delivered.

Drive Greater Results from Your IT Vendor Relationships

VMware IT Vendor Manager is a SaaS business application that provides a control mechanism for vendor agreements, enabling you to proactively govern contractual commitments. It offers detailed visibility into continual vendor charges by automatically tracking, managing, and validating invoices as well as credits and earnbacks while mapping to vendor performance and value delivered. You can also easily compare different vendors and options to find the most cost value effective solution for your company. Using IT Vendor Management, you are able to compile the right financial information quickly, while both saving time and avoiding errors and omissions that can occur with manual processes and spreadsheets. With this trusted source of information, you cultivate a collaborative relationship in which both parties win.

The Value of IT Vendor Management

• Reduce cost of manual error prone efforts
• Reduce IT spending by identifying the best cost/value alternatives
• Improve quality of services

Key Capabilities

• Automatically track and manage all invoices received from vendors on an ongoing basis to better understand the spending patterns of the enterprise
• Validate invoices against contract terms and actual spending, as well as map to service performance and value metrics
• Share performance-based credits and earnbacks with your vendors so they can proactively avoid performance penalties and attempt to reach the performance goals needed for earnbacks
• Proactively track actual versus budget trends to identify potential overruns and their causes
• Visually map actual usage of services to specific business units, P&L centers, and geographies, while compiling chargeback audit trails for tax and regulatory compliance purposes
• Compare alternative options and benchmark pricing so that contract pricing can be adjusted when applicable
• Monitor SLA and KPIs defined in the vendor contract to ensure you are receiving the appropriate value for vendor services rendered, as well as for financial management purposes

Sample of Out-of-the-Box Reports

• Vendor management dashboard provides a bird's eye view across all suppliers, including key statistics such as the worst 5 KPIs
• Vendor dashboard provides more detailed information for a specific supplier, such as top 5 breaches by performance, top 5 KPIs, year-to-date credits
• Balanced scorecard showing risk, performance, contract issues, and charges
• SLA compliance report summarizes all the compliance information for a specific SLA
• Credits report summarizes credits information for a specific SLA
• Earnback report summarizes earnback information for a specific SLA
• Forecasting reports provides forecast information for KPI performance, credits, and earnbacks
• Audit reports allow vendor managers to review and change results

IT Vendor Management Process Flow Diagram

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Learn more about VWware's IT Finance Manager integrated cloud-based platform, the foundation of our SaaS business application.