TriState Solar Company Organization Review Problem-Based Learning Scenario TriState Solar Group (TSG) is a small public company that retains and cultivates high technical skills in a niche market, namely solar solutions for energy generation. Because of increased business interest in sustainable energy sources, the market for customized solar solutions has witnessed continuous growth throughout its […]
TriState Solar Group (TSG) is a small public company that retains and cultivates high technical skills in a niche market, namely solar solutions for energy generation. Because of increased business interest in sustainable energy sources, the market for customized solar solutions has witnessed continuous growth throughout its history. The future is expected to further stimulate explosive growth because of increasing costs for energy from fossil fuel sources. Corporations in all businesses are monitoring energy costs, considering the integration of alternative sources. Solar technology does not have geographic limitations, but it is really a business with global interests and unlimited markets.
The chief executive officer (CEO) is a strong evangelist for the support of a solid network infrastructure base for the business operations of the TriState Solar Group. However, the increased demand for its services has resulted in large investments in its data centre to accommodate the added servers and network equipment supporting its applications. Over the last year, the data centre has doubled in size, and it currently hosts 10,000 servers in a 45,000-square-foot data centre at 80% capacity. The power and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) are also increasing and consuming a large share of the operational budget. The data centre consists of different variants of Windows and Linux servers, some of them approaching their end of vendor support. For example, 100 servers still have XP, and their applications cannot be migrated to more modern hardware, forcing the information technology (IT) administrators to maintain older equipment. The cost of upgrading the old servers could be much less than the current budget allocated to old server maintenance, but the applications cannot be ported to more modern equipment. The network administrator has complained that the older equipment is taking too much of his time, and the IT manager agrees. Recently, the TriState Solar Group outsourced support of legacy systems as a stop-gap measure to keep the older systems operational. The IT manager estimates that the support budget would be greatly reduced if the legacy applications could be migrated to newer hardware.
The executive team has requested a study to maintain the legacy systems while reducing the maintenance cost of the older equipment. In addition, the chief financial officer (CFO) informed the executive team that the owner of the building indicated that the cost of leasing the data centre would increase next year, especially if square footage is required to sustain the company’s growth, as predicted. The CEO, CFO, and chief information officer (CIO) recently had an off-site meeting to discuss ways to keep growth under control without sacrificing customer service. At the top of their list was addressing the following conflicting requirements:
You have been contracted to study the current environment and address the current issues. The contract includes a plan to migrate the current environment to a more modern, greener infrastructure that requires minimal investment while ensuring that the current levels of support for production systems are maintained. The ideal outcome would be to finance the upgrades with the savings realized by utilising virtualization.
Describe the organization, its current situation, and the issues noted.
Identify preliminary areas for improvement in the infrastructure.
The TriState Solar Group (TSG) is a small company that deals in solar energy solutions. The demand of the company’s products has been on the rise. It has been triggered by the widespread sensitizations programs on the benefits of environment friendly energy sources. Notably, solar energy has more benefits when compared to the other sources of energy. It is renewable and, therefore, cannot be depleted. Also, it reduces environmental pollution. This type of energy is cheap compared to fossil fuels. These advantages have increased the demand for TriState products to an extent that it is struggling to meet. Although the company is embroiled in a number of challenges, the need to increase the firm’s production capacity to satisfy the market demand is more urgent, and to that end, the TriState Solar Group has to reshape budgetary allocations, reinvent data processes, and expand its spatial operations.
The company is headed by a competent chief executive officer responsible for overseeing its operations. Notably, the organization has banked on an effective infrastructure system which ensures that its database is safe. However, the current situation resulting from the rising demand calls for the expansion of existing operations in the organization. Firstly, the firm needs to invest further in its data center due to the increased burden on its servers. The analysis indicates that over last few years, company’s data center has doubled in size, creating the need for the company to restructure its budget on the center (Greenberg et al., 2005). The administrators have also raised complaints that the old systems are very slow. The IT experts seconded the administrators’ grievances, claiming that the older machines were taking too much time. As a result, there is a need to do make adjustments to the organization’s infrastructure.
Areas that require preliminary improvements include the old servers and low-yield production systems, which need to be updated in order to serve the company efficiently (Tri-State Solar Wind, n.d.). The company outsourced the services of legacy systems which helped it modernize the existing systems. Consequently, despite the over-usage of data center, the company has been able to continue its operations. However, to meet the demand, the TriState Solar Group is in dire need to expand its server-run production operations and install additional hardware as and where required to boost productivity.
Secondly, the TriState Solar Group should increase the square area of the leased building to comfortably accommodate the infrastructural requirements ensuing from its growth. The move calls for the organization to dig deeper into its budget since the owner of the building had previously highlighted a possible increase in rent in the following year. Also, the administrator and the IT experts should sharpen their expertise so that they can competently deal with the current internal as well as external dynamics of the organization. With the improved knowledge and employing refined skill sets, the TriState Solar Group will be in a position to devise most feasible strategies to integrate the servers and the applications to the company’s extended production hardware (Dosi, Nelson, & Winter, 2001). Moreover, the move will help reduce the cost of outsourcing the systems. As a result, the company will have reduced the extra cost incurred when paying for the legacy systems. Markedly, improvement of the above areas will ensure that the TriState Solar Group produces enough in order to fulfill the consumer demand.
In conclusion, TriState Solar Group is facing challenges, especially with regard to production capacity given the prevailing market demand. The management should prioritize introducing changes that will increase company’s production capacity. In addition, the management should consider the cost of making the adjustments so as to enable them to restructure their budget, without affecting the customers by increasing the prices of the products. In order to achieve this, the TriState Solar Group should deliberate on reducing the operating costs as well as cutting the cost of maintaining the legacy system and any other avoidable expenses. The moves warrant a fruitful operation of Tristate Solar Group.
Greenberg, A., Hamilton, J. R., Jain, N., Kandula, S., Kim, C., Lahiri, P., … Sengupta, S. (2009). VL2: A scalable and flexible data center network. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 Conference on Data Communication – SIGCOMM ’09. doi:10.1145/1592568.1592576
Dosi, G., Nelson, R., & Winter, S. (Eds.). (2001). The nature and dynamics of organizational capabilities. OUP Oxford.
Tri-State Solar Wind. (n.d.). WTEC. Retrieved from http://www.wvcommerce.org/App_Media/assets/doc/energy/Energy_Summits/presentations_2014/09_Michael_Smith.pdf
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Published On: 14-03-2018
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