Bob Torz
Bob Torz is a Solutions Specialist in the UK. He has been in the field of IT performance and capacity management for over 25 years. Bob regularly presents at conferences and is passionate about the role of capacity management in the modern IT world.
External Resources
- Improving Forecasting for Capacity Management Using Segmented Regression
- 5 Steps to Capacity Management Maturity
- Proactive Capacity Management is Dead; Long Live Capacity Management
Q & A with Bob Torz
What would you say is the biggest barrier holding customers back from implementing capacity management?
Capacity management used to be much more of a defined discipline where companies would employ capacity managers and generally take the practice more seriously. Nowadays, I think there are many that don’t know what capacity management is and how much they could benefit from it. They might think, “Well, we have the cloud, so we don’t need capacity management. The elasticity of the cloud means we’re expanding our contract when we need to.” Unfortunately, in practice it doesn’t work that way. Organizations often don’t realize this which, in turn, leads to a great deal of wasted money.
What changes do you foresee in the world of capacity management in the next five years?
I think that it will come back into fashion. To make that happen, companies like us must educate on and promote the need for capacity management. Senior management are no longer aware of how badly they need it, and in the next five years, we will have to help them come to that realization.
What is the biggest way you have seen capacity management change since you got your start?
Seeing as I'm going back to about 1985, there's been a few changes to say the least. We've gone from mainframe to distributed to virtual to cloud and everything in between. Yet, many of the problems are still the same. Organizations continue to believe that distributors are cheaper than implementing capacity management. Historically, organizations think they can just buy a new machine, and all of a sudden, they've spent way more than they ever would have spent on a mainframe in order to keep everything going. Virtual and Cloud have had similar stories as well. So, the technology has changed a great deal but the same problems relating to customers’ perceptions continue to persist.