The State of Finland has nearly 190 datacenters in many of its government agencies and the plan is to centralize them and radically lower the number of datacenters. This is a part of a trend worth of examining.

Today, Finnish IT Journal Tietoviikko (http://www.tietoviikko.fi) released an article of Government of Finland is going to centralize its datacenters and cut down the current number of datacenters within Finnish government agencies. Most of the audience probably paid attention to the value of the plan. 240 million Euros. But what is more important to me, is that this is another proof of the trend we have in hand: datacenter workloads are on the run. This is already happening at the moment, and I’m betting we are seeing lots of consolidations and datacenter shutdowns in a near future. In my company Onrego, we have had a number of interesting meetings with clients, which are planning on shutting down their own datacenter(s) in couple of years and are going to move their workloads to hosters (such as Nebula in Finland), to co-location providers and/or to IaaS providers, such as Windows Azure. Although this trend is far more environmental friendish than each company running their own datacenters, the driving force is the money. Another driving force is technology. A few years ago we had no technology to extend the borders of datacenters, but the thing have changed. Microsoft’s President of the Server and Tools business, Satya Nadella, have written an email to Microsoft employees and he is willing to share it with all of us. By the way, rumor say that Satya is getting far larger role in Microsoft in a near future.

It’s only two years ago when I presented in the boardroom of my previous employer that the behavior of IT buyers is about to change. It’s going to change because of cloud. It started from consumer cloud services and is keep going on with enterprise ones. Consumerization in a little larger scale. When IT-buyers (and also IT-consumers such as end users) tend to get used to buy services (and devices) with cloudish pricing model (no upfront investments, pay as you go) in their private life, there is no way it would not affect to their professional life. Who would invest millions of dollars to a new datacenter with fixed ROI with no ability to cut down the costs when business is running poorly, when you have an option to buy just the amount of workloads you need, with no upfront investments and with pay as you go model? Another thing worth of mentioning is SaaS. One of our client said it right. All of their business apps have already gone to cloud. Why they still need their own servers and datacenters when all the services are delivered using the SaaS model? Because not everything is in the cloud what comes to IT infrastructure services. Not yet.

Meanwhile, check out Onrego’s Online System Center. We took the best management and monitoring products, turned them into the cloud and we are now serving them with no upfront investments and with pay as you go pricing model. It’s the service of cloud era, because you can manage your workstations and servers wherever they are and whoever owns them, and you can monitor your datacenter workloads, no matter in which datacenters they roam. And if you already have SaaS services, you should monitor the availability of them. Again, with Onrego Online System Center.