There’s a Windows Server 2003 ad on TV. These people are having a little office party. A suit comes up and asks what appears to be a tech what the party is for. Tech guy says that they just finished the active directory rollout. They created a single ADR that consolidated 70 domains to 4. The group policy something-or-other can be deployed in days instead of weeks. Then, when the suit looks a little baffled, tech says, “It’s going to save us over two million dollars per year.” Suit smiles.
What the hell is this guy talking about? Is there such a thing as what he’s talking about that could save a company $2 million per year, or is this baffling talk just meant to confuse us so that when the company techs come asking for a budget to upgrade the server OS, the suits will think back and rather than embarrass themselves with how much they don’t know, they just say yes.
(What the hell is ADR?)
It’s possible. A great deal of the cost of an IT system is sustainment and maintenance. If you, for example, have to install the next version of MS Office at your company, do you need to visit every workstation? Or can you build a package that executes automatically and installs it for every user the next time they log on?
Talking specifically to the points in the commercial, if a company has 70 domains, that suggests a great deal of administration required; each AD domain has at least one server and, presumably, at least one person to administer it – although obviously the same person could administer multiple domains. And if trust relationships between domains were not set up efficiently, it’s conceivable that a lot of duplication of effort would be going on.
Consider your average support contractor, a Help Desk tech that earns $50,000 per year and works for the tech support company to which the outsourcing contract has been awarded. By the time you factor in all the loading: fringe, overhead, G&A, and fee – that one job costs the client about $110,000 per year. If you can eliminate the need for 19 techs across the whole support contract, you’re saving $2M per year.
I don’t know what “ADR” is. “AD” is Active Directory, Microsoft’s directory service and the model upon which Windows 2000 and 2003 domains are based.
This may be the first time in over three years that I’ve answered a question on the SDMB based on my current career knowledge, as opposed to my former.