How’s your budget doing CY2023? Are you feeling good about your budgeting process for your business and IT environment? Do you have some money socked away you want to try to spend at the end of the year? BE CAREFUL. Depending on what you’re buying, there are some changes in store from vendors.
Veeam just brought back socket licensing for some customers (read more about this here), and promptly raised the pricing for it on 7/1. Dell is expected to raise prices on 8/1, and usually do every other quarter. If you want perpetual VMware, your time is getting short (here is more about this). That’s not great… but it gets worse.
Were you planning some hardware purchases at the end of the year? Do you have to receive the hardware for it to count against this budget? DANGER, DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
Depending on what you’re ordering, it may already be difficult to get it by the end of the year. Some specific network devices are showing long lead times… which is cutting it right down to the wire. If you have to receive the hardware for it to count on this year’s budget, amazingly, you need to order it in SEPTEMBER to have a good chance of it landing this year.
Every year dozens of clients pop up in November/December wanting to blow some of that end-of-year money. If all you have to do is be invoiced, no sweat. If you need to actually RECEIVE the hardware though, you need to be thinking about that now, or you may accidentally hit your CY2024 budget by a delayed shipment.
So, let’s get started…
Budgeting For Your Business And IT Environment Is Hard…
Budgeting is one of the hardest things to do in an IT environment. Not only does technology change on a daily basis, business needs change almost as quickly. One day you think you’re getting everything together that you need, and everything is great. The next week the CEO comes to you with this great new thing that the sales department found that will fix all their issues, and you as an IT person need to pay for it. So much for that server upgrade you were planning on doing….
Further complicating things: the current supply chain issues and the increasing costs from that.
No big deal, we’ll just move to ‘The Cloud’ – that’ll fix everything, right?
Well, not necessarily.
The Cloud Won’t Fix Everything
Cloud prices can change faster than literally anything you do on premise. Don’t believe me?
Starting with Microsoft 365 pricing, since that impacts seemingly everyone (except our GSuite friends!), there has not been a price increase announced yet – but I wouldn’t count one out. Last year, there was only an increase on a handful of subscriptions, the rest will likely catch up at some point. Even if the price increases don’t directly come, I would be careful since price changes can come in many forms.
Microsoft has started a new strategy – packaging changes. This year alone, Intune has changed licensing models and packages at least twice, which drastically change pricing depending on what you need.
How about another? Kaseya’s ever-growing nature has led to package and price changes across a wide range of their monitoring/analysis tools. But what else?
Try watching Azure or AWS pricing on a monthly basis. The tweaks they do are often pennies or fractions of a penny per GB/TB/hour/etc., but it adds up over the course of time.
How about the industry migration to SaaS via the cloud and away from perpetual? I already mentioned VMware, but Veeam has done this (and now backtracked a bit) in recent years. DataCore is now a subscription company, and there is Microsoft 365 (that is the name this week!).
Why are they doing this? Isn’t one of the great things about technology is that it gets cheaper as time goes on? Well, normally that’s true. But right now everyone is facing the same supply chain issues as everyone else. The Cloud is no exception.
Microsoft, AWS and the other big players get preferential treatment due to the volume they purchase, but they are also feeling the rising prices due to the limited supply. Throw in some inflation for good measure, and everything is getting more expensive per GB/TB right now, instead of cheaper like it normally would.
So, that’s not great. What’s the solution? Stay on premise? Well… maybe not…
Stay tuned for our next blog on the woes thereof.
Learn more about making cent$ of IT budgeting!
If you’re interested in learning more about how to plan and budget for your business and IT environment, please contact us and call 502-240-0404 or email us at info@mirazon.com.