This goes oposite to what a lot of people are saying right now, but thats because they are selling managed services, contracts, leased support, etc.

We've saved a lot by cutting maintenance and support contracts. They are very expensive and just serve to deskill your teams. We have had some training expense but otherwise its a massive win.

Also people massively overcook the TCO thing. I saw some figures as to the "true cost of a desktop PC" claiming the TCO figures per year of an office desktop and multiplied that up by the number of desktops we have and came out with a figure three times the whole company IT Budget... [and that includes salaries, travel etc.] Don't fall for this BS.

We went with the managed print service thing, which was the soup du jour for vendors about a year, 18 months ago. We are 2 years into it and we did a real financial review and its saved us nothing. In fact, we would probably have been able to save by keeping the damn thing in house.

We have some pretty old desktops out there, plenty of people will tell you they are costing you money but this is not true. We have reduced our support cost by getting the build right, getting our patching and remote management strategy right, and guess what, we have some 5 year old desktops and they are as easy and cheap to manage as the brand new ones. If one pops, we have a few hot spares. We image it and swap it out. But guess what, they don't pop. HP and others now ship their kit with a 4 year warranty. Why would I replace after 2 or 3 years? The kit doesn't cost, its how you manage it that does. Spec it right when you buy it. Don't cheap out and you'll thank yourself 3 or 4 years later.

Manage your people, give them a rewarding, varied job. Listen to them and act on what they tell you where appropriate. Reward as you can. Your guys will stay with you. You will save a fortune in recruitment costs, contractors to back fill roles or worse, the productivity canyon which opens up when someone leaves and the top table won't authorise a replacement and leave the post open.

Get your processes right, get on top of images, patching, inventory management, remote deployment and thats where we saw our biggest returns.