CWP: What main challenges do you currently encounter with your data center and how do you, as head of the IT department, address these issues?

Principe: A challenge right now would be the flexibility of the total data center, primarily because there is a lot of growth in terms of the services and clients. Another challenge is maximizing the investments on the infrastructure that we have, without compromising quality of service and ensuring that we still meet the expectation of our internal and external customers. In IT, the mandate is always to do more with less.

Espino: The main challenge is speed—delivering what the business needs at the soonest possible time. In our business where information is our lifeline, availability is also paramount. One way to address these issues is to be pro-active, anticipate what the business needs so we can plan early. Another common challenge is trying to do more with less. In the current business environment, the pressure to optimize all costs, not just IT, is much greater than before.

Liao: Since ASI’s setup as a call center business is new, we still do not have any major challenges on our data center setup aside from the cooling system where we need to add another five-tonner airconditioning unit to cope with the heat coming out of the equipment we added for our expansion project.

CWP: How different are your data center challenges compared to those in other industries? Does a call center environment demand more from data centers?

Espino: Compared with, say, a traditional manufacturing environment, BPOs demand a lot more from their technology departments. In traditional manufacturing companies, for example, the business can survive a significant downtime of their ERP systems (enterprise resource planning). They may take some hit on the timeliness of their financial reporting, but the plants can go on making the products, sales can go on in manual mode, etc. In our company, the moment our main system goes down, virtually all work stops; we might as well just send our people home.

Principe: In the call center and BPO industry, we face a lot of different challenges. One of these is the flexibility of the design of our current data center and the need to ensure that it could cater to the different requirements from different customers. We also need to comply with standards to ensure the security of our information and the robustness of our disaster recovery system to maintain 24×7 availability.

Liao: Being in the industry for just a few months limits my view of the industry’s data center challenges in comparison with those of other industries that I have worked with before, but I think a BPO or call center environment demands just as much as with those in the financial or retail industries, since they also require a robust IT infrastructure.

CWP: Given the current trends in server consolidation, virtualization, and the recent buzz about “green IT” and “green data centers,” what initiatives, if any, have you undertaken in line with these?

Espino: Like I mentioned earlier, First Advantage grew through more than 50 acquisitions in the past five years throughout the US and the Asia Pacific region, and, as you can probably imagine, we have disparate systems located in 17 different data centers globally. We have started a move to consolidate four or five data centers, primarily to lower costs and enable more synergies across the company. Besides consolidating our data centers, we are also moving into server consolidation using virtualization technology such as VMWare to derive more savings in hardware, software, administration, and power consumption.

Principe: We are looking at really maximizing the infrastructure that we currently have and avoiding additional electrical loading with the addition of new hardware. We are also looking at consolidating applications into one server without, of course, compromising security and availability.

Liao: Admerex Limited has been into server consolidation and virtualization for quite awhile already. Its contact center business, ASI, has only started its collection business for a year, so its server technology structure is not big enough to reap the full benefits of these virtualization and consolidation technologies. However, with our expansion plans lined up over the next two years, we will surely go into this as well.

CWP: What future data center trends do you foresee affecting local organizations and how are you preparing for such changes?

Espino: I see more local companies moving into outsourced data center services, eschewing the traditional view of building and maintaining their own data centers, primarily to lower costs. I would think that if local companies actually do rigorous financial analyses on their data center costs, it would turn out to be cheaper to outsource, especially for medium-sized companies that don’t have sufficient scale to justify maintaining their own.

Principe: We are taking a serious look at the scarcity of space and the spike in the price of space and electricity especially in the commercial areas. We are then looking at several strategies to prepare for these, like having a smaller hardware footprint, moving from 1U-type (one rack unit) servers to blade servers, and going into server consolidation and virtualization.

Liao: There are three data center issues which I see affecting future trends: virtualization, cooling, and power generation. The first will somehow address the second and third but there are still some equipment that are not yet designed for virtualization and whose manufacturers have yet to design a less power-hungry system. For now, system consolidation and vendor-hosted services are key factors in addressing these hurdles.

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