Note: This video is part of our monthly series “T3M” aka “TFiR Topic Of The Month”; the topic for January was Cost Cutting vs Cost Efficiency.

Guest: Rob Hirschfeld (LinkedIn)
Company: RackN (Twitter)

In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-Founder of RackN, to talk about the current cost-cutting trends he is seeing and how RackN helps companies become more cost efficient.

Cost-cutting trends in the market:   

• Companies managing costs by not hiring
• More workload is put on already limited staff
• Lack of slack in operational systems

Operations, DevOps, and infrastructure teams have always been short-staffed, so even though there have been massive layoffs, those are not the positions that are flooding back into the market and suddenly becoming available.

Hirschfeld explains that typically, when a company has a high turn rate on its infrastructure or it has fast cycles, like running setups, running constant streams of automation, the more often it is used, the more efficient it is, the more maintainable it is, and it is not carrying a lot of technical debt. The place where companies are actually throwing money away is where they’ve got something that people never use.

To be cost efficient, companies need to:

• Identify and review systems that are not used frequently and eliminate them when necessary.
• Eliminate toil, i.e., work that is not actually adding to the bottom line. Are you maintaining systems that should be self-maintaining? Do your systems require a lot of specialized skills and knowledge to the extent that if that person is not working or is not available, your systems could fail and you might not be able to recover them?
• Find KPIs that make sense for judging your organization’s effectiveness, e.g., composability and reusability.
• Find out where your teams are spending a lot of time and where they think they could improve.

RackN Digital Rebar helps companies become more cost effective by:

• Providing reliable, unified automation with reusable components
• Providing a simple metric of how much of the software they’re using is out-of-the-box and how much they have managed to add or customize
• Maximizing their ROI
• Getting their time-to-value on infrastructure faster
• Enabling better response, less human intervention, and more cycles where they actually turn things over faster.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.