Impactful Business Results

Before making any significant investment in Information Technology, assessing how the current needs impact your overall business strategy and budget, is time well spent.  Regarding investing, Warren Buffet once said, “Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.” While this probably doesn’t apply for most technology organizations, it raises interesting questions, such as; "What should you expect from your IT investment?" and "Are you properly positioned to leverage emerging trends and avoid hype?"

Strategic in Nature
Defining the problem requires subject matter expertise. One Fortune 250 CIO commented; "we don’t want another reseller; we need organizations like Lumenate that add strategic value to us". By specializing in four key practice areas; Security, Virtualization, Storage and the associated Network Lumenate has developed core skills that provide exceptional value to our clients.

On staff, Lumenate employs more senior level engineers located in the combined markets we serve than any other direct competitor. Lumenate also has business expertise on staff to insure that the technical solution comes in the right financial package.

Regardless of your role in the IT organization, Lumenate adds value:

• For the IT leader, Lumenate helps identify strategic initiatives and craft presentations to make IT more relevant to “business leaders”.
• For the security or IT professional, Lumenate provides technical insight that is economically and operationally responsible.

Integrated Approach
Lumenate focuses on architecting solutions that solve multiple problems. While, point solutions are sometimes appropriate. Lumenate takes a more holistic approach, so our clients are able to make more informed decisions and better position their organizations for the future. They also reduce consequential post-implementation risks resulting from fulfillment-style procurement.

Let Lumenate show you the benefits of an integrated solution; "best in breed", not best for a single manufacturer.   

Partner Leverage
When you engage Lumenate you can count on quality, "filtered" recommendations. As a technical consulting organization that goes far beyond fulfillment, it's important to Lumenate to represent key manufacturers but not everyone. Otherwise, we dilute our client value. Lumenate manages this balance through its Chief Technology Officer organization. On a quarterly basis, Lumenate evaluates key technologies and grades them by topic. Manufacturers are classified as “starters”, “niche players” or “bench players”. By taking this practical approach, Lumenate is well positioned to make key training and intellectual investments which benefit our clients. Through this process, we also often recommend multi-vendor solutions that are “best in breed” and provide exceptional value to our clients.

Knowledge Transfer
Our consulting approach is somewhat tactical in nature. We architect a solution. Implement it. Integrate it into the environment. Inspect it as needed by the client. We don’t camp out forever. Instead, we focus on providing knowledge transfer to our clients. We make your team better. We’re not a body shop looking to place our people on site full time. You leverage Lumenate, we help you ramp and become more self-sufficient.

Lumenate Projects Succeed
Lumenate implementations work as planned. Nothing tests the legitimacy of a disaster recovery solution more than pending disaster itself.  

For example, a large energy company with offices in Oklahoma City and Houston is a good indicator of the type of business impact that Lumenate can have.  Lumenate developed the vision, created the architecture and implemented the solution that enabled them to take a direct hit from a Category 5 hurricane with their end customers barely feeling it.  As Hurricane Ike was headed towards Houston, we helped shut down the data center and shift the load to Oklahoma City.  When the Houston infrastructure (e.g., roads, power grid, water, etc.) was back operational 2 days later, we brought the Houston data center back up and then re-balanced the load between the 2 sites . . . with the end user customers seeing little to no impact.  

Regardless of the project, Lumenate builds in quality. Our clients recognize our mutual success and continue to engage us. In fact, over 95% of our clients are satisfied repeat customers.

Economic Sense
How does an organization track business results from a security or IT infrastructure organization? Common metrics include acquisition cost analytics such as Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment. Operationally, Service Level Agreements are also important. While each of these metrics play an important role, are these sufficient? At Lumenate, we believe the answer is “no”.

Often times, the underlying problems are not properly defined. Appropriate linkage to actual results is not examined. Many organizations fail to properly analyze the economic merits of a proposed project. From an economic point of view, it seems like a shell game. Anticipated savings are quickly lost by unexpected costs.

Take server virtualization. An organization improves utilization, reduces energy and saves on server purchases—what could be wrong? On further review, storage requirements increased dramatically and the organization is no longer able to meet its backup requirements. More purchases are required.

By taking an integrated approach, Lumenate can help navigate the repercussions of these kinds of unintended consequences. In the example above, we would recommend technologies that integrate effectively and provide improved overall efficiency as a combined solution.

Lumenate helps organizations build business justifications by applying solid business acumen with accurate fact gathering to ensure that the financial team is equally involved in the success of the project.

What should you expect from Lumenate?
As a new customer, Lumenate will spend time learning about your environment. We will prepare a proposal (not just a quote) outlining our observations and recommended course of actions. We will present the economic implications and work with you to gain the approvals required to proceed with the initiative. From a delivery perspective, we will communicate in a timely manner and execute as outlined in our statement of work.  

As an ongoing customer, Lumenate will continue the theme of outstanding service and provide detailed proposals (not quotes) on significant undertakings. As always, expect technical insight, execution and business results when engaging Lumenate.