Courtesy of our friends at Oracle cost containment company Miro Consulting, I am giving a webinar tomorrow at 1pm EST (click this link for the time in other timezones please.

The subject I’ve chosen is how to apply the best practices around advanced supply management that are extremely successful and mature in the product supply chain world to the equally extremely immature practices we typically find in enterprise IT supply provisioning.

It should be a great presentation; I give an overview of the famous “Toyota Way” and cover some recent findings from the California Management Review as well.

The first point of the webinar is gaining an understanding of what the “supply management promise” really is - in broad terms it means achieving double-digit annual compound cost savings on the resource being supplied. The second point of the webinar is to discuss the methods for achieving this recurring savings and how to apply them to IT services.

This isn’t easy and requires substantial discipline, leadership and often even attitudinal change and leadership from the purchaser, and of course a vendor that is committed to passing on those savings to their customer, something that is culturally de rigueur in the product/manufacturing space, but highly unusually in the IT infrastructure management space (since claiming those savings are typically the vendor’s profit model). Of course, the Pythian approach is highly compatible with the application of advanced supply management strategies, whereas most outsourcing companies in the IT infrastructure and architecture space are very much not. Interestingly enough, the fully-insourced approach to enterprise data and systems management is also incapable of delivering the savings (because of the substantial cost in morale and team cohesion of claiming any should they materialize).

The target audience for this presentation is executives responsible for the IT infrastructure spend, often CFOs, COOs and CTOs who have an oversight role not only for the database licensing cost, but also for the operational cost of IT infrastructure ownership. A technical audience will learn about how Pythian works and how we position our offering to the executive suite purchaser.

I’ll do my best to get the audio and slides up on our website in the coming days.

As I mentioned, the presentation is being hosted and sponsored by Miro, a great partner of Pythian’s, and I blogged about Miro once before, here. You can register for the presentation by following this link: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/204538076. Although the presentation is sponsored by Miro and they focus on Oracle, the presentation is not at all Oracle-specific and the techniques I discuss within it are highly appropriate for customers of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server or MySQL.