By Marvin Blough

Until this year, your enterprise customers could find a dozen reasons to ignore your advice to update their infrastructure. So what if their servers aren’t optimized for virtualization and their OS is so old it came on a CD? Capital outlay, time and employee training all are such real and pressing concerns for overburdened IT teams that many have stubbornly—if understandably—procrastinated on IT modernization for years.

But with extended support for the Windows Server 2003 OS ending today, “throwback” data centers are officially out of commission. Companies that don’t upgrade this year could face compliance fines, an increased risk of data breaches and an overall less stable environment moving forward.

The Good News: Modernization Means Better Performance and Money Savings

However, there’s plenty of good news for enterprises that are upgrading this year. A Forrester study of six midsized and large organizations showed that an upgrade from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012 R2 paid for itself within six months, and after a year, it produced a risk-adjusted ROI of 270 percent. Forrester also estimated $2.1 to $2.3 billion in additional benefits when upgrading from an earlier version of Windows Server. The cost savings that come from consolidation via virtualization are well worth the initial capital outlay.

The Windows Server 2003 OS was designed for speed and performance, but at the time, speed and performance meant a server had a processor in excess of 900MHz with 512MB of RAM and a SCSI drive array with at least three 20GB drives. By contrast, Windows Server 2012 R2 is optimized for today’s best-of-breed hardware. Customers who are modernizing their hardware along with their OS can expect faster application performance, the ability to run workloads for any scale and a major simplification of systems management.

It’s clear that modernization is worth the challenges, but many IT managers still face mental hurdles when beginning the migration process. That’s why it’s so important that partners provide proactive advice and counseling to set expectations and help customers make tough decisions throughout the migration process.

Show Clients How to “AIM”

Customers who approach the update with a clearly defined plan will experience much less anxiety and better results. You can help by breaking down their upgrade plan into three stages: assessment, integration options and migration.
 
1. Assessment: First, the customer and migration services provider (if applicable) must achieve an in-depth understanding of the existing server environment by identifying and cataloguing software and workloads that are running on earlier versions of Windows Server. Microsoft offers a free Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit IT teams can use to create this list and sort it by type, criticality, complexity and risk. This is a good opportunity to retire underutilized or redundant applications, consolidate licenses across the organization and update older applications to reap the benefits in more current versions. Then, they can determine the sequence of updates that need to be performed by prioritizing the applications and workloads for migration.

2. Integration options: Next, your customer must consider the integration options for each workload, determining which applications should be moved to new hardware and which could be deployed and managed effectively within a hybrid cloud or public cloud environment.

3. Migration: Migration without downtime can be a big challenge, especially when migrating foundation services such as Active Directory, DNS and others. Your customers should use automated software that promotes security and compliance and ensures users will have the same access to resources after migration to the new Windows Server environment.

Modernization Is an Opportunity, Not an Obligation

Today’s enterprise is so radically different than 2003’s, there can be no question that companies still operating on turn-of-the-century technology have run out of runway. Mobility, BYOD, big data, distributed enterprises, virtualization and the cloud—all terms that define IT strategies in 2015—were non-existent in the world that Windows Server 2003 was built to address.

Maybe some of your customers are being dragged into 2015 kicking and screaming, but the highly flexible, efficient and reliable systems they’ll gain in the process truly will make life easier for everyone on the team. Moreover, they’ll see cost savings and gain the ability to create new business opportunities.

What may seem like a dreaded obligation for enterprises in 2015 is going to feel like a business-changing opportunity in 2016 and beyond. Lucky for your customers, you’re here to make that journey as painless as possible.

Marvin Blough is executive director, Worldwide Channels and Alliances, for Dell Software Group.