One of the financial considerations when contemplating mainframe outsourcing is indirect costs of things such as unfulfilled contracts. If you’ve been leasing mainframe equipment or data center facilities and you’re nearing the end of that lease, now is the perfect time to reassess your strategy, rather than automatically renewing.

If you don’t take an up-to-date snapshot of your enterprise-wide IT situation, you can’t be sure leasing is still your best functional and financial option for the coming years.

Certainly nothing has remained static within your company or throughout your broader business environment over the life of your lease. And you have to think about the future. It could be that mainframe outsourcing solutions can better meet upcoming needs and priorities. And a transition to outsourcing as your lease expires will eliminate any threat of early termination penalties.

Mainframe outsourcing comes in many flavors these days.

Compared to just a few years ago, the solutions field is wide open. You can retain your valuable mainframe operations, but outsource specific services or management functions instead of leasing. You can devise a partial shift to distributed systems, cloud computing, etc. The fact is, the mainframe outsourcing industry now allows you to tailor a hybrid configuration of solutions designed to fit your enterprise like the proverbial glove.

You can achieve greater flexibility to compete in an ever-changing working environment, moving quickly to capture new opportunities. You can achieve the scalability essential to ride the ups and downs of an unpredictable marketplace, expanding or contracting quickly to test new products and avoid costly operations delays.

Mainframe outsourcing can do more than simply replace your infrastructure lease.

• Long popular for helping reduce operations expenses, outsourcing actually enables you to optimize your budgeted funds. You may spend less on things like operations, maintenance and associated labor, but you can also eliminate stiff software licensing fees. And you can also redirect precious capital funds to other important corporate projects.

• Outsourcing is an excellent way to vastly improve disaster recovery planning, assuring regular testing and compliance with industry or government-imposed standards while dramatically reducing costs because you won’t be paying to maintain redundant systems you may never need.  

• You can effectively address major industry challenges such as aging legacy infrastructure and retiring IT experts. You’ll have alternatives in place before these issues begin to hinder your operations, and you can effect a gradual transition if that works better for your operation. You can start small, choosing initial solutions that fit your near-term goals, timeframe and budget. If you’re so inclined, you can ensure your outsourcing provider absorbs your top IT people, further easing your company’s transition and protecting their remaining careers, too.

• What’s on the horizon for your enterprise? A merger or acquisition or other expansion? More locations and more people generate more complexity. Greater volumes of data to process, store and access. More diverse devices or applications or processes to assimilate. You also have new initiatives to move forward and new products to develop.

It’s highly likely there’s a mainframe outsourcing solution well-suited to your enterprise. So maybe it’s time to allow your lease to sunset and reposition yourself for the future. Start thinking about that now, and you won’t be caught unprepared when your lease actually expires. You’ll have time to conduct important due diligence and you won’t feel pressured to make decisions you may regret later.

A mainframe outsourcing consultant can help with that, efficiently tightening your time frame and helping ensure your situational review generates the most useful results. You’ll be able to develop a high level business that clearly demonstrates costs and opportunities. With that in hand, you’ll be able to see whether mainframe outsourcing is a better choice for your organization than renewing your lease.