By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 8th February 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

In two separate recent announcements, HP has affirmed its goal of being the neutral supplier of choice for all things cloud.

Last week, HP delivered HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) Content Pack 10, bringing with the ability to better manage cloud instances across the enterprise-public cloud continuum, including deep discovery of virtualized workloads' performance inside of Amazon and VMware vCloud clouds.

Then this week, HP on Tuesday further thrust its global market-leading LoadRunner performance testing suite—via partners—into development clouds, known as platform as a service (PaaS) providers. This is clearly aimed at the fast-growing mobile development and greenfield SMB development spaces.

Interestingly, neither the cloud operations efficiency benefits of the updated DDMA nor the HP LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud offering will be initially offered inside of any HP public clouds. These formerly enterprise-targeted development and operations tools are being extended to more private and public cloud uses—but via cloud ecosystems, partners and channels. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Picks and shovels
While HP is not taking the arrival of its own public cloud offerings off the table—indeed they have committed to them in the past—they seem to be happy for now to develop the picks and shovels and provide them to the miners and the current mine owners.

The strategy lessens the potential for conflict that other cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and VMware can face (no mention yet of Microsoft Azure). And it makes HP more amenable as a supplier to those public clouds, which may be of interest to them, given both HP's technologies and their vast and global installed base of enterprise customers.

Digging more deeply into the news items, the DDMA Content Pack 10 brings a critical part of the HP IT Performance Suite to more types of cloud uses, as well as back into more kinds of mainframes, particularly for the IBM iSeries servers. Reaching more deeply into legacy workloads and across various cloud and hybrid models allows for more automation of those apps and runtimes, and fosters far better change management when those loads need to be adjusted to accommodate varying demands.

HP is also enabling any IP-pingable device to be discovered, mapped, and managed via the various online deployments. The overall benefit is more a lifecycle approach to management of apps and devices across legacy and hybrid environments, and to gain a single view as a business service of all the parts that support the apps and processes regardless of their locations.

Discovery capabilities have also been added for HP ServiceGuard, Glassfish open-source server and VMware Datastore. In addition, integration has also been enhanced to include CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution (LMS), Aperture VISTA, NNMi, Application Signature and Service-Now. Functionality has also been added to the integration of Troux. Finally, Content Pack 10 provides new features such as support for SAP JCo3, Oracle VM Server for SPARC, UCMDB to XML export and a BMC Atrium pull adapter.

Three partners
On the LoadRunner news today, HP has worked so far with three partners that will take the LoadRunner on demand services out to their specific customers and on their public clouds of their choices. The initial partners are: Orasi Software Inc., Genilogix and J9 Technologies. These partners will set the pricing, but the performance testing services are delivered on a pay as you go basis.

"This is unique. It's the easiest, lowest-cost way to bring LoadRunner capabilities to the cloud," said Matt Morgan, senior director, Product and Solution Marketing, Software, HP.

Incidentally, the testing phase of the cloud PaaS proposition is essential for quick devops and RAD benefits. It further allows any investments that enterprises have made in Loadrunner to be extended via the cloud providers to developers working on new mobile projects, or for them to control and view testing results when using third-party developers.

By straddling the cloud-enterprise ecosystem HP may be able to bring more value to the channel partners and end users—especially SMBs—then trying to build the whole cloud first and putting in services later. It's the ecosystem of services, after all, not the location of them, that matters most.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 6th February 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

This guest post comes courtesy of Chris Harding, Forum Director for SOA and Semantic Interoperability at The Open Group.

This week, I've been at The Open Group Conference in San Francisco. The theme was Enterprise Transformation which, in simple terms, means changing how your business works to take advantage of the latest developments in IT.

Evidence of these developments is all around. For example, when I took a break and went for coffee and a sandwich to a little cafe on Pine and Leavenworth, it seemed to be run by and for the Millennial Generation. True to type, my server pulled out a cellphone with a device attached through which I swiped my credit card. An app read my screen-scrawled signature and the transaction was complete.

Then to make dinner reservations, the hotel concierge tapped a few keys on her terminal and, presto, we had a window table at a restaurant on Fisherman's Wharf. No lengthy phone negotiations with the maitre d'. We were just connected with the resource that we needed quickly and efficiently.

The power of ubiquitous technology to transform the enterprise was the theme of the inspirational plenary presentation given by Andy Mulholland, Global CTO and Corporate Vice President at Capgemini. Mobility, the cloud and big data are the three powerful technical forces that must be harnessed by the architect to move the business to smarter operation and new markets.

Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at MIT's Center for Information System Research, shared her recipe for architecting business success with examples drawn from several major companies. Indomitable and inimitable, she always challenges her audience to think through the issues. This time we responded with: "Don't small companies need architecture too?" Of course they do, was the answer, but the architecture of a big corporation is very different from that of a corner cafe.

Corporations don't come much bigger than Nissan. Celso Guiotoko, Corporate VP and CIO at the Nissan Motor Company, told us how Nissan is using enterprise architecture for business transformation. Highlights included the concept of information capitalization, the rationalization of the application portfolio through service-oriented architecture (SOA) and reusable services, and the delivery of technology resource through a private cloud platform.

The set of stimulating plenary presentations on the first day of the conference was completed by Lauren States, VP and CTO Cloud Computing and Growth Initiatives at IBM. Everyone now expects business results from technical change, and there is huge pressure on the people involved to deliver results that meet these expectations. IT enablement is one part of the answer, but it must be matched by business process excellence and values-based culture for real productivity and growth.

My role in The Open Group is to support our work on cloud computing and SOA, and these activities took all my attention after the initial plenary. If you had thought five years ago that no technical trend could possibly generate more interest and excitement than SOA, cloud computing would now be proving you wrong.

Interest in SOA continues
But interest in SOA continues, and we had a SOA stream including presentations of forward thinking on how to use SOA to deliver agility, and on SOA governance, as well as presentations describing and explaining the use of key Open Group SOA standards and guides: the Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM), the SOA Reference Architecture, and the Guide to using TOGAF for SOA.

We then moved into the cloud stream with a presentation by Mike Walker of Microsoft on why enterprise architecture must lead cloud strategy and planning. The “why” was followed by the “how.” Zapthink's Jason Bloomberg described Representational State Transfer (REST), which many now see as a key foundational principle for cloud architecture. But perhaps it is not the only principle. A later presentation suggested a three-tier approach with the client tier, including mobile devices, accessing RESTful information resources through a middle tier of agents that compose resources and carry out transactions.

In the evening we had a CloudCamp, hosted by The Open Group and conducted as a separate event by the CloudCamp organization. The original CloudCamp concept was of an "un-conference" where early adopters of cloud computing technologies exchange ideas. Its founder, Dave Nielsen, is now planning to set up a demo center where those adopters can experiment with setting up private clouds. This transition from idea to experiment reflects the changing status of mainstream cloud adoption.

The public conference streams were followed by a meeting of the Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group. This is currently pursuing nine separate projects to develop standards and guidance for architects using cloud computing.

The meeting in San Francisco focused on one of these—the Cloud Computing Reference Architecture. It compared submissions from five companies, also taking into account ongoing work at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with the aim of creating a base from which to create an Open Group reference architecture for cloud computing. This gave a productive finish to a busy week of information gathering and discussion.

Ralph Hitz of Visana, a health insurance company based in Switzerland, made an interesting comment on our reference architecture discussion. He remarked that we were not seeking to change or evolve the NIST service and deployment models. This may seem boring, but it is true and it is right. Cloud computing is now where the automobile was in 1920. We're pretty much agreed that it will have four wheels and be powered by gasoline. The business and economic impact is yet to come.

So now I'm on my way to the airport for the flight home. I checked in online, and my boarding pass is on my cellphone. Big companies, as well as small ones, now routinely use mobile technology, and my airline has a frequent-flyer app. It's just a shame that they can't manage a decent cup of coffee.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 2nd February 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

Good data management, analytics, and helping to shape the goals of the business are keys to transforming the enterprise through impactful enterprise architecture (EA). That was the theme, from different perspectives, presented by a series of plenary speakers this week at The Open Group Conference in San Francisco.

Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at MIT's Center for Information System Research, opened Monday's plenary session, telling the attendees that the stakes are high for EA, which needs to show swift success in the new digital economy. Enterprise architects also now need to help their organizations better use new services and instill a "value cycle." [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Coming from the siloed past in IT, companies are now moving to business service-driven processes across various resources, Ross said. But they need to recognize the forces around consumption of such services, not just the implementation.

Making good data management a priority, a "single source of truth" is also at the heart of making EA valuable, said Ross. Ensuring the quality of data and the speed of data refresh will help enterprise architects rise in performance appreciation more than just about anything else, she said. Ross studies how firms develop competitive advantage through the implementation and reuse of digitized platforms.

She is also the co-author of three books: IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results, Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, and IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain.

I also interviewed Ross on enterprise transformation issues before the conference.

IT-enablement isn't enough, Ross said, because companies typically under-utilize new systems and applications. It's not that we can't build them, she said of systems, but that companies aren't using them to their potential. Architects need to consider this and then market and evangelize solutions.

And EAs need to be more involved with making quality data center stage in their companies. "You don't get good analytics with bad data," Ross said, "The secret to good EA is to put information in every person's hands so they can use data better." And that in turn will help transform the business and spur added innovation using IT systems and good architecture principles.

Most senior executives aren't very good at combining business and technology strategies, Ross said, and she outlined the architect's elevated role in helping their bosses deliver increased business value:

• Help senior execs clarify business goals
• Identify architectural capabilities that can be readily exploited
• Present options and their implications for business goals
• Build capabilities incrementally

She closed out, getting applause from the audience, by predicting, "Some day CIOs are going to report to the enterprise architect, because that's the way it ought to be."

Impressive cost reduction
The second plenary speaker, Celso Guiotoko, Corporate Vice President and CIO of Nissan Motor Co, Ltd., told how business value is at the top of IT principles for Nissan, information as an asset comes next, and then reducing complexity.

Using these principles, Nissan in 2005 developed "BEST" as an IT mid-term plan and significantly improved the efficiency of its information systems. BEST is an acronym for business alignment, EA, selective sourcing, and technology simplifications.

This was followed in 2009 with the development of the "Change" program, which provided the basis for further advances by changing people, technology, and "process." And, in 2011, the next IT mid-term plan "VITESSE" was launched, designed to bring direct profit to the company. VITESSE encompasses value, innovation, technology, simplification, and service excellence. Through the various initiatives, Nissan has reduced IT cost by over 40 percent, going from a cost per user of $1.09 to $0.63.

The transformed enterprise
Andy Mulholland, Global Chief Technology Officer and Corporate Vice President at Capgemini, focused on the transformed enterprise and cloud trends, as well as the effect of new devices and social networking. Forty million tablets and 70 million smartphones are having a huge impact on how workers and consumers expect to work and shop.

The "bring your own device" phenomenon is forcing a change in thinking for enterprises, Mulholland said, as two environments are developing—inside IT and outside IT. Typically back-end activities operate inside the firewall, while front-end people and activities operate outside the firewall, yet people nowadays want to be able to use smartphones and tablets for both personal and work tasks.

This has led to a situation in which workers are increasingly going outside IT to buy services. Mulholland quoted a Gartner prediction that up to 35 percent of IT expenditures will be outside the IT department by 2015. Other industry analysts like IDC have placed the figure higher.

Because of this, IT faces a huge “re-integration project” to bring together the inside and outside services in a rational way, Mulholland said, adding that the transformed enterprise needs to focus on the productivity of people and innovative business models.

I interviewed Mulholland a few weeks ago and we delved even deeper into the cloud duality issues now coming to the fore of enterprise technology issues and planning. I was also intrigued by a Wall Street Journal piece today on how the US faces a new tech boom. It was aligned with much of what Mulholland was saying.

The key to doing this “re-integration project,” according to Mulholland, is governance, and the industry really lacks a good cloud governance model, meaning that many businesses are already in trouble. However, enterprises shouldn't let that get in the way of progress. Mulholland advised, "If business wants something radically different from you, don't try to stop it. Try to understand it and take control of it."

Driving IT transformation
Lauren States, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Computing and Growth Initiatives, IBM, emphasized that transforming the enterprise requires a huge emphasis on analytics, and a successful integration of analytics and IT.

States drew on IBM's decades-long journey of constant transformation, relying on business process excellence, values-based culture, and IT-enablement. This has led to $1.5 billion in IT savings since 2005 as well as avoiding over $20 million in expenses over five years with a private analytics cloud, she said.

According to States, CMOs are overwhelmingly underprepared for the data explosion and recognize the need to invest in and integrate technology and analysis and consider analytics as business differentiators.

CEOs and CIOs are both highly focused on insights, clients, and people skills, States said, feeding into what she called the "new reality," the need to harvest and pass insights and build trusted relationships.

States' takeaway: We're at the beginning of a major change, much like the PC revolution three decades ago. The cloud's sweet spot now, she says, is in bringing new innovation and insights to marketing, sales and customer service.

No need to wait
Speaker Bill Rouse, executive director, Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Tech, said that many enterprises wait too long to change, with the decision to transform dragging on until the damage is beyond repair. As evidence, he said that in the past 25 years, 1000 companies have dropped from the Fortune 500 list—showing enterprise transformation has high failure rate, and that waiting for the right time change is a risky business plan.

Moreover, for those enterprises seeking transformation, they need to look at the full ecosystem that a business operates in to effectively transform, says Rouse. Business ecosystems are co-creating high-value services, expanding transformation across supply chains, says Rouse. This is an important nee dimension, he added.

Using analytics better to support evidence-based decision making is transformative and should be a priority, says Rouse. And architecture-oriented thinking can be transformative in itself, he said.

Cyber security threats
On the topic of cyber security, plenary speaker Joseph Menn, cyber security correspondent for the Financial Times and author of Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet, made it clear that business as usual won't do.

Joe has covered security since 1999 for both the Financial Times and then before that, for the Los Angeles Times. Fatal System Error is his third book, he also wrote All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster. I also recently interviewed him.

"It's in no one's interest to tell us how bad it really is" when it comes to cyber crime and security, said Menn. And the Stuxnet affair is huge as a harbinger of things to come, he said.

As a result, more taxpayer money will be needed for effective government-level defenses against cyber attacks, he suggested. But government intervention won't do the job alone. Increasingly, corporations will need to play more than just defense on attacks, many of which come from Russia and China and from groups that blend state and criminal interests.

Counter attacks may be a strong defense when it comes to cyber risks, and US government may "turn a blind eye", says Menn. We may even see cyber crime bounty hunters that corporations hire on the QT to go after those that attack them, he said.

Meanwhile, IT groups and enterprise architects can play a bigger role. Knowing what you have helps you know when something has been taken, so improve tracking of assets, Menn told them. He also suggusted that companies keep their most critical data offline, and protect their intellectual property by burying it in and among fake data.

Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group, said that more than 400 corporations are now members of The Open Group, showing strong growth over past 12 years since its founding. TOGAF 9 certification rates growing rapidly worldwide, he said.

FACE standard
In other news from The Open Group on Monday, The Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Consortium, announced the official release of the FACE Technical Standard, which provides guidelines for creating a common operating environment to support applications across multiple Department of Defense avionics systems. See my interview on FACE as it was just getting under way.

The standard is designed to enhance the U.S. military aviation community’s ability to address issues of limited software reuse and accelerate and enhance warfighter capabilities, as well as enabling the community to take advantage of new technologies more rapidly and affordably.The FACE technical standard will enable developers to create and deploy a wide catalog of applications for use across the spectrum of military aviation systems through a common operating environment. Product development efforts by industry and procurements by government customer organizations are already underway based on the FACE standard.

“The introduction of the FACE Technical Standard is an important milestone in extending interoperability among the armed forces and creating a common platform for avionics that enables systems to work together across each of the branches of the U.S. military,” said Brown.

And on Tuesday, The Open Group announced the arrival of ArchiMate 2.0, the latest version of the organization's open and independent modeling language for enterprise architecture. This version is more tightly aligned to TOGAF, so enterprise architects using the language can improve the way key business and IT stakeholders collaborate and adapt to change.

ArchiMate 2.0 improves collaboration through clearer understanding across multiple functions, including business executives, enterprise architects, systems analysts, software engineers, business process consultants and infrastructure engineers, according to the release. The new standard enables the creation of fully integrated models of an organization's Enterprise Architecture, the motivation behind it, and the programs, projects and migration paths to implement it.

"By combining TOGAF and ArchiMate, TOGAF becomes more easy to apply in any organization," said Harmen van den Berg, partner and co-founder at BiZZdesign. "Having a reference model makes them both easier to apply in any industry or vertical."

He added: "Architects like to make models, and this now helps them to use those models to create change in the organization, for something that means more to the business."

Making the EA function a chief weapon of enterprise transformation in a time of roiling change and complexity, that's the main message from the conference. No time to wait.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 24th January 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

Scribe Software, a customer relationship management (CRM) data integration provider, will launch next week Scribe Online Synchronization Services (SYS), the second major service delivered on the Scribe Online cloud integration platform.

According to the Manchester, NH-based company, Scribe Online provides a cloud-based alternative to integration middleware, and simplifies the integration experience without sacrificing performance or functionality. The goal is to allow companies to reap the benefits of integrated CRM data from a variety of sources and technologies in days, rather than months.

The timing is more than pretty good because CRM as a category is expanding, driven by businesses' recognition that rich data on customers (and partners) is essential for better productivity, and for leveraging cloud-enabled business innovation outside the company.

Many companies I speak with are looking to pull appropriate and relevant data in near real-time from many internal systems of record to augment the full picture of customers. They are looking to their CRM systems as the meta data repository of such integrated views. And now they want to bring in more data from more sources, including those outside their four walls.

And, of course, the power of knowing the most about customers—and making the analysis from such data widely available to business units and functions across the enterprise—can make or break a company. Across the full business cycle, relevant and insightful data on customers drives success, from product development to effective marketing, to help desk and support, to entering new markets.

Scribe then, has developed its cloud offerings, built on Microsoft Azure and released last year, to make the instantiation of CRM data from as many sources as makes sense a function of the cloud, as well as on-premises. Such a hybrid approach to data integration makes even more sense than a hybrid approach to IT infrastructure services, if you ask me. You really need to be in the cloud to leverage the hybrid data integration benefits.

Now, Scribe has made it easier to leverage that cloud by offering synchronization services for CRM data integration a drag-and-drop affair that many business users can accomplish. Furthermore, Scribe is releasing SPARK, a developer program to help foster a community effort around making more connections to more types of data available to more synchronization efforts.

“Synchronization Services builds on our commitment to deliver superior CRM integration to customers and partners in the cloud. SYS fills a void in the market for an integration tool that is affordable and easy to use,” said Lou Guercia, president and CEO of Scribe. “Until now, integration products have been either too basic or too complex.”

Developer program
Scribe, with the SPARK Solution Developer Program, is targeting software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, channel partners, systems integrators, VARS, and other business technology consultants. This means that while enterprise IT departments are gearing up for hybrid cloud-based CRM integrations, the community of ISVs and VARs needs to move more quickly, to innovate and expand into new models.

The SPARK Solution Developer Program is designed to help solution providers quickly build data integration capabilities between their solutions and CRM, as well as any other application or endpoint on Scribe Online. This will fit very well, too, into the Salesforce.com ecosystem, and the Microsoft Dynamics one, as well.

Scribe expects that partner networks will share and extend customer data—and value-added services on top of that joined and integrated data—for a variety of additional business services, said Guercia. Integrated and automated marketing services providers like HubSpot, Marketo, and Eloqua, certainly come to mind, too.

“CRM is no longer just a contact management system. It’s a critical revenue enabler for the business. Companies that integrate customer data from all areas of the business benefit with increased sales and satisfied customers,” said Roger Hodskins, vice president of strategic alliances at Scribe.

Using Scribe's latest offering, SaaS independent software vendors (ISVs) who offer integration to more than one CRM vendor can extend their presence in multiple CRM markets. As customers expand the scope of CRM in their businesses, integration can readily incorporate the SaaS ISVs’ offerings with connections both to CRM and to other complementary applications, said Scribe.

For more information on Scribe SYS, sign up for live weekly webinars, or to watch a four-minute demo video at scribesoft.com/online. Scribe Online SYS is available, too, free for 15 days at scribesoft.com/Free-Trials.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd January 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better, holistic approach to IT support and remediation.

And while the technology to support and fix virtualized environments is essential, it’s the people, skills, and knowledge to manage these systems that provide the most decisive determinants of ongoing performance success.

In a special BriefingsDirect sponsored podcast, created from a recent HP Expert Chat discussion on best practices for VMware environment support, HP experts explain how they have made the service and support of global virtualization market leader VMware a top priority.

For example, Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex Problem Resolution and Quality for VMware Products at HP, provides case studies for how managed escalation and multi-vendor support around the globe can reduce downtime by 70 percent, with large ROI benefits as well.

Other HP experts in the discussion include Pat Lampert, Critical Service Senior Technical Account Manager and Team Leader, as well as Sumithra Reddy, HP Virtualization Engineer. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP and VMware are both sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, particularly in regard to things like security, performance and how your brands and businesses are perceived across the globe. Many of the companies that I deal with day in and day out are up at 80 percent and even 90 percent virtualized.

When they think about virtualization, they go beyond just server virtualization. It’s really now looking at storage, applications, networks and even the end-user desktop experience, or desktop as a service (VDI).

Successful virtualization is no longer just about servers, it’s about managing complexity when you get beyond the 20 percent or 30 percent level and expand into converged infrastructure virtualization without failures.

So how to take advantage of the best things about virtualization? Part of that means allowing your IT team to have access to other experienced support teams, from HP and VMware, around the world, 24x7, to help keep systems up and running. Such support also allows your IT team to progress, to learn as they go, and to be able to take advantage of more virtualization benefits over time.

So how do you go about attaining such benefits? How do you keep the positive side of virtualization on track? And how do you put in place an insurance policy around service and support?

Manderson: We have several different packages. Our highest level is the mission-critical. In this particular process, you're assigned a team that are across the technology that you have in your environment. But you also get a set of folks who would actually look at not just the reactive support and even some of the proactive, but how actually your entire business is running according to the ITIL standard.

That is coupled with keeping you up and running, and we also can work with you on a type that would be best suited for your environment.

Our critical and independent support includes onsite resources from HP that also include a lot of proactive support. In addition, they're more focused on specific management, but that would be more of an ITSM technology. We can look at that for you.

... We also have the hardware and software support. One of the cool things we have with our hardware support is support automation, our Insight for remote support. That can notify HP that you're having a disk drive failure. Or we will call you and say that we know that disk drive is failing, or something on a buffer server and storage is about to.

You can even take that a step further to look inside at the Windows operating system. We're hardware agnostic on that operating system. We don't care about the vendor—and I believe we are looking at expanding that automation to other operating systems. We have installation and startup services that we can actually go out and set up and configure the hardware and software at a site.

So we definitely integrate across all the multi-vendor services. We run the gamut between all the x86 operating systems, as well as our proprietary operating systems, our servers and storage. Again, we're no stranger to multi-vendor support and keeping the entire environment up and running.

... One of our most creative services would be Proactive Select, a core product series of credits. You can use these credits for maybe planning on migration and upgrade. You can say you need some consulting time. You can use these credits and work with upgrade and migration. You may need some performance or you may need some type of environmental assessment, and these credits can be used for that.

Gardner: When people do employ these services, how do they measure what the payoff is, the value of these services?

Manderson: In 2010, IDC did a study. They went out and looked at the methodology, and this is out on our website. They saw that the customers who have the mission-critical services, reduce their downtime by over 70 percent, and increase their return on investment (ROI) quite high, over 400 percent. The main benefit was in problem management as well as help desk calls, because these were alleviated due to the proactive nature, a lot of looking at the entire environment, and looking at the business processes.

So take a look at the study. It shows IDC's methodology. So looking at things proactively and these support processes can certainly help you reduce that downtime.

... I've been in the multi-vendor space for many, many years—from applications to operating systems—all with HP.

In 2002, when VMware came on the scene, HP actually became alliance partners with them. In 2003, we became a reseller, and thus began our support partnership with them. It would only extend recent in 2005, we also became an OEM. We have thousands of trained and certified Microsoft engineers and Linux professionals, too.

But we have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We also have the largest global VMware off-site training center. So HP also does education on these technologies as well. We’ve trained over 20,000 students in the VMware space alone.

And we have had this very strong collaboration with VMware for many years and have support teams around the globe. In addition, we also offer the same level of training that VMware support engineers do. We actually go to their facilities and train right alongside them, too.

We further do this training virtually. The training is then recorded and made available on demand for reference, for folks who are not able to attend a scheduled course. There's definitely a very strong partnership, and as you see from our history with the other vendors as well as VMware, we are no strangers to multi-vendor support.

With all of the VMware products that HP sells, we do provide support across them all. It runs the gamut from the vSphere operating system that will install on the x86 server, through the enterprise management to the vCenter, and virtual desktop infrastructure products like VMware ThinApp. We also support the converter product getting into vCloud Director.

In addition to that, we have the ability to access our peers on the other teams across HP hardware support. This includes servers and storage, and our networking chain. We are quickly able to collaborate with them and pull together a virtual team in to focus on the customer's whole environment, to provide a one-stop shop.

Additionally, you saw that we’ve been in this multi-vendor support business for so many years, with many experts across the other technologies, such as Microsoft and Linux. Of course, the virtual machines (VMs) are running these operating systems. So if the contract is also with them, we can easily pull them in to help us work an end-to-end solution and support it.

Gardner: Let’s think about what happens when there are different levels of support at work. How does that shake-out?

Manderson: We're in a reactive support business. If the customer has a problem, they can either call in at their local region telephone number—whether they are in America, Europe, or Asia Pacific. There are different phone numbers for them to call.

They can also log in via the web, and they'll get to our next developer Level 1 engineer. They're a great organization and have solved over 85 percent of their cases.

If they have issues where they have to escalate, first they will be collaborating with us. We also have an online chat tool, where we are all in a virtual room, the Level 1 engineers, Level 2 engineers, etc. So we’ll be consulting and collaborating with them before they even get to a point of escalation.

If the case does end up needing escalation, chances are they're already collaborating with the first person, and will then end up taking the case. That saves a lot of information transfer, as far as what type of server you have, what’s the firmware, what build level, and what’s the problem there, etc.

Once it reaches Level 2 support, as far as we can continue to collaborate, we can reach our teammates and the hardware teams, too, so we can look at the server and make sure that the environment is what we need it to be. If we can't resolve it, we can also go to Level 3 with VMware at an offline service-partner level.

We have a great relationship with the folks that we work alongside with and would escalate calls to at VMware. We’re obviously not going into Level 1 at VMware because we’ve already done all that work, and we are a service partner. They'll go right up to our peers over at VMware and then we work together, while always owning the solution that we provide back to the customer.

Another part of our infrastructure-as-a-support-organization is that we have a single customer database. I can give an example. A call came into our Level 1 French engineer. When this call came in, for the European folks, it was already the end of their day, and the French engineer could not speak English. It was a critical down, their VMs were offline.

So we worked in a virtual room and they talked to us, and brought the case to us here in America’s time zone. We worked with this case and another tool called HP Virtual Room, where we could actually all look at the customers' desktops in real time. They happened to have EVA storage, and we quickly got an EVA engineer engaged. Of course, we had to find a resource in the Americas because the European folks had already left. So we're all looking in real-time at the customer’s environment and found out that they had locked the storage.

The EVA engineer helped to get back online, while we all watched and the French engineer was translating in French for the customer in order to get it all resolved. We got it back online, and the customers were ready to go home.

We gave instructions on getting log files and we placed a call for follow-up for the daytime hours in Europe the next day. So our counterparts in European support teams picked that up and worked with the customers to resolution, to analyze exactly what happened and prevent it in the future.

We have another process in HP that can actually go with top organizations, our escalation manager process. I was lead source for a particular case where we had a field team assisting a customer deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) design. They had a third-party VDI vendor. They had HP hardware, servers, and virtual connects. They had our storage, and we didn’t quite know where the bottleneck was. They were having performance issues by trying to have this VDI at two different locations with the hardware at one site.

The escalation manager was able to get the local office to borrow equipment, and then try to get performance and network traces. They had the Engineering Problem Management Resource (EPMR) lab in Houston trying to duplicate the problems.

Our escalation manager was able to drive the issue to completion across not only the solution standards, but the local office, to owning the actual escalation with all the action items to keep this all on track. We knew where we were going to go. That was about a six-month case, but we did finally find was that the customer was on the technological edge, and the "pipe" to have that performance just did not exist.

Pat Lampert is a technical account manager and does site visits. The technical account managers do go out on site. So we’re aware of the environment. We have the information of your environment documented into the database. When you call, we’re not saying, "Now what kind of server is this? What’s the firmware?" We know this because we already have it documented. We could be calling them to say, "Server 3 is running a little off." We already know which VMware version this is on, because we have that information.

And because we have that, we can also offer proactive advice. We can know that there's a new firmware update, or VMware just came out with a new build, and we have a place where you can go find the latest that's specific to your environment. So this helps to reduce further incidents, because we can be more proactive to help you maintain your business.

Gardner: What are some of the the most frequent questions you receive from the field?

Reddy: I'll address two questions that are frequently showing up. One is, what is the difference between the VMware ESXi image and an HP ESXi image?

Basically, HP takes the same ESXi image that VMware provides to the customers. It then adds HP thin components for hardware management, and it also adds any latest fibre channel and network drivers. Once it's tested and certified, it's available for download both from HP and VMware websites.

And one of the major difference between the two images is that VMware image is disk installable only, whereas HP image can be installed on a disk, USB key, or a SD card.

The other question we're getting nowadays is how to upgrade from VCA4 to VCA5. As with any major upgrades, planning helps. The first thing I would do is understand the difference between ESX 4 and ESX 5, because starting with ESX 5, we have no service console. So we need to understand what the architectural differences are.

Also learn about the new licensing policies. Then, use the System Analyzer that VMware provides to evaluate the current environments, and download, check, and complete the checklist. Once this is done, hopefully the upgrade will go smoothly.

Lampert: Another question that has come up from customers has to do with the added value of getting support directly from HP. It was partly addressed during the presentation we just gave. First of all, VMware does have a fine support organization. I have a couple of friends who work in VMware Support, and they do a good job of supporting their product.

HP, in addition to a similar level of expertise in the product, also offers our expertise in HP hardware, especially if you have systems based on HP Blades. The infrastructure behind that often is tied very closely to the performance and availability of your ESX host. So when you call us, you will have not only someone who is very familiar with the VMware product, but also is familiar with the HP hardware and able to pull in the proper resourced results, problems you might encounter with running vSphere on HP hardware especially.

In addition to that, we have a partnership agreement with VMware, and when you call in for support through HP, you're getting that same level of service when we have to go to VMware to get answers to questions or fixes.

One other question that has come up is about our lab ability to reproduce problems. We have two global labs, one in India and one in the United States. We have several static vSphere cluster configurations with a number of different types of servers already in those configurations, and the ability, when needed, to add specific models, if there is a problem that’s specific to a particular Blade or rack-mounted server model, or a particular card or something like that. So we're quite able to reproduce most problems that come in. We even have some Dell and IBM equipment in our lab also.

Gardner: What other issues are users grappling with?

Reddy: One question I can answer is how to troubleshoot server crashes. When something goes wrong in ESX, we call it the "Purple Screen of Death." Often, these are results of hardware failure, but we still need to rule out the software. So we collect all the logs, and look at it to see if it's a software issue. If it's not a software issue, then we engage the hardware team to see how we can get to the root cause and fix the issue.

Lampert: To dovetail with Sumithra’s comment there, one of the questions I get frequently is what to do if you don’t have a dump. Say the host hangs, and that seems to be almost more common than the Purple Screen of Death. Some customers are't aware that through HP’s Integrated Lights-Out Management, there is the ability to generate a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) just by pressing a button, and by saving a certain environment variable ahead of time in your ESX host.

There is a KB article on this, by the way, if you just search on NMI and core dumping in VMware. But with that setup, you can force a dump while a system is in a hung state, and that will assist us usually in troubleshooting and isolating what caused the hang, whether it be hardware or a problem with the ESX host software.

One question that came up ahead of time is what HP suggests as far as getting a handle on our inventory of VMs? I happened to be involved in field testing some new tools from HP that will be available in January and February regarding vSphere.

One of them is a Holistic Blade and Firmware Analysis that takes into account the VMware environment on our Blade systems which we are working on having ready soon. We have just completed field tests.

And the second is a really nifty Inventory Report HP has just put together. We're just completing field tests on that now. It will be available soon. Basically, we install a small Perl script in the customer environment on any machine that has access to the vCenter host and has a vSphere CLI installed.

This Perl Script crawls through the VMware environment and builds an XML file, which we then feed into a report generator here at HP. This can be used for us to gather information on customers, so we have ahead of time a clear picture of the environment. But also it will be sold as a service to customers.

The report is really quite nice, with all sorts of charts and showing availability of machines and availability of memory and also disk space. It's a very nice report.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 16th January 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

The latest BriefingsDirect case study podcast discussion centers on how Nottingham Trent University gained strategic operational efficiency and improved IT management.

A combination of professional services and portfolio management technologies allowed the 25,000-student university—one of the U.K.’s largest—to improve end-user satisfaction while freeing up IT resources to pursue additional technology innovation.

To learn more, BriefingsDirect brought together Ian Griffiths, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Nottingham Trent University, and Michael Garrett, Vice President of Professional Services for HP EMEA. The discussion was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What was the one glaring thing that needed to be changed when you began to think about improving how you did IT?

Griffiths: We were very, very good at moving forward and doing lots and lots of things, but delivering products at the end of that period was more difficult. We seemed to be running around in circles, and didn’t quite meet customers’ expectations. So we were doing a lot, working really hard, but not really delivering the last mile.

Gardner: Why did something like professional services become a priority for you?

Griffiths: We found that our processes were not really defined well enough. We really weren’t getting sign-off from the business, and the expectations were never really met. So it was clear that we were not doing something well, and we didn’t quite know what that was. And our teams within the department weren’t gelling that well together either.

Gardner: So perhaps having some outside additional authority and experience seemed to work for you?

Griffiths: Yes. That worked really well. We had had another attempt about 18 months before, and had some consultants in, but it didn’t really gel. We were aware that we had a partnership with HP, and HP Professional Services seemed a sensible way to go. But we were still doubtful as a management team within the university's Information Services (IS) Department whether it was really going to work. And we are very pleased with the outcome.

Gardner: Let’s learn about Nottingham Trent University. You’re in Nottinghamshire and you have 25,000 students. Tell us a bit more.

Griffiths: We’ve been a higher education establishment for about 160 years. We’re one of the biggest providers of "sandwich education," which means that students have two years at the university, a year in industry, and then a year at the university.

We're seen as a popular university that has good reputation for placing students at the end of their courses, and we got top of The Green Agenda twice in the last three years within the U.K. We have about 150 people working in the IS Department on three campuses and nine academic schools.

I have responsibility for the strategic partnership we have with companies and with firms. I have responsibility for the regional network within the East Midlands of the U.K., which is connecting all the universities in that region and all the further education colleges. And I also manage relationships with key suppliers, such as HP.

Gardner: Ian had a relationship with HP, but looked for something bigger.

Garrett: It’s often imagined that these organizations look to pure-play consulting organizations for that advisory activity. In Nottingham Trent’s situation they were willing to listen to a different type of vendor or organization in that space as to what they could offer in their approach. What’s different for HP Professional Services is that it forms part of HP’s Software organization. Our consulting capability is very focused on IT transformation, operations, organizations, and applications.

But it’s about bringing that into real practical use quickly with the support of technology. That's the real differentiator we wanted to bring to customers like Nottingham Trent, and hopefully that’s true with what we've seen in the practical implementation and the work we've done with them.

Gardner: Ian, how has this worked out for you?

Griffiths: We had some initial workshops where all the senior management team of the IS Department worked with HP and looked at what we wanted to achieve, and looked at what the journey might look like to get there. I have to congratulate HP. They were able to get that team to gel together within IS in a way that we hadn’t before.

We spent a lot of time working together and working through the structure, the plan of the department, and what we called the "tube map" of the department. Everything, in a sense, was allowed. HP was very good at giving us a straw man to look at. In other words, giving those examples of what other companies have done, but forcing us to discuss them in detail and change them into what was right for Nottingham Trent.

They weren’t trying to sell the straw man, but were using the straw man as an example to move us forward, and it worked extremely well. Although there were some heated discussions amongst IS staff, HP was very good at facilitating those discussions.

We had to go back to the rest of the department to try not to force something new on people that, as far as they could see, had no relevance to the situations they were in. We had to find a way, as well, of getting the business to buy into our new methodology, getting the business to feel some ownership, and getting the business to make some decisions during the planning of projects and the ending of projects.

Garrett: It’s that level of being able to bring the input, the straw man, and then guide organizations around that model. To customize from scratch takes a great deal of time and can take too much energy and cost. What we’re trying to do is bring our method and models at the start point and then work in a very collaborative, but directed, way to get clients to a point, although, a configured approach rather than a completely dispersed approach.

Therefore, we get to things more quickly, but absolutely meet the requirement of the individual organization. We’ve got to appreciate they are different across different industries and different areas, and strong cultural alignment is critically important. We certainly saw that in this program.

Griffiths: The important thing again was that we were producing our outline, and that outline allowed us to go away and do a lot more detail later. In other words, we got the big picture agreed upon and then all the details were passed back to teams within the department to build up details in the areas where they had real knowledge of what happened.

Gardner: Was there a point at some time where you needed to get an understanding of where and what’s going on in order to know how to measure any improvement?

Griffiths: An important step early on in this was beginning to define how many projects we were running as a department and to categorize work into projects that were developmental and projects that were more of the business-as-usual type.

We found in the end that we had over 100 projects running simultaneously. Some of those projects had been running for more than a year, some had no real defined endpoint, and the customer requirements weren’t documented in a thorough way.

It’s important to measure how many projects you’ve actually got, and actually have a start date and a planned finish date for them. One thing we learned was that 100 was too many for us to run, and we were able to cut down by finishing some off, to less than 50 that we have now.

Gardner: And what has that done now? What are some of the metrics of success by getting more of a handle over your portfolio and managing it?

Griffiths: Probably the biggest one is that projects are getting completed and the project didn’t become the be-all and end-all, and continue running forever. We were actually delivering something that the customer was expecting. And the customer, the student or the staff department, had a glow that they have had something delivered to them.

The student satisfaction with IS has gone up over the last two to three years. They're very happy with our technology and technology moving forward. But again, we found that people were happier with the delivery of an item, rather than as IS was before, striving for technical perfection.

Before, we had the figures of 80 percent [of IT projects] being used in the areas of business-as-usual, and only 20 percent in project and development work. We quickly moved to a 70/30 split and our target is to move towards 50 percent. We're not quite there yet, but we’re a lot more like 60 percent business as usual, 40 percent new development work.

It’s a virtuous cycle, and the other thing that is gained from that is appreciation amongst other departments within the university and with senior management with what IS was delivering, and getting them to prioritize what we did.

There was a problem, if we look back two or three years. IS very much decided what the priorities were. Now, the business is deciding and even deciding in the case that a project that was a favorite of a senior member of staff, he or she may decide that it no longer is a top priority, compared with other projects that needed to be delivered.

Gardner: Is there something about the products themselves, the portfolio management approach, that now allows the business side of the organization, the leadership in this case, to have more visibility or input? How were you able to get it?

Griffiths: More visibility and more input. The example we always give is of a jam jar. You can keep putting rocks into a jam jar, but in the end, it becomes full. Unless you allow something to come out of that, nothing happens. So you’ve got to be able to allow things to finish and give you some capacity.

The other thing that I talked about was looking at the business benefits of everything we were doing and deciding the nice-to-haves probably weren't going to get prioritized at this stage.

We're using [the tube map] outside the department to make people realize that we are working to an operational framework. As such, we have them stuck up round the department. And in the rooms where we have project meetings, they exist as well. As to vocabulary, we have senior staff using the phrase "the gate," where approval has to be given. The business has to be involved in the approval and deciding what priorities it has at that stage.

Gardner: Ian is describing being able to double their innovation budget, cut their project numbers in half, get buy-in from leadership, a sense of cooperation across the organizational boundaries. Is this typical? How would you describe this in terms of the industry at large?

Garrett: It's a typical situation that we see in a lot of organizations, even in very mature, even global and enterprise organizations that struggle with these challenges of organizational alignment and processes to support that. Project selection identification and transitioning to survey is the common problem we see.

With Nottingham Trent, we regulated it very quickly through that organizational design, then into the process to support that, and then working out what are the catalog and services that they offer. How do we then build that into projects and programs and then manage that into service transition?

It's very common. We see it in a lot of places. More mature organizations believe they do this very effectively. Nottingham Trent acknowledged that they needed help. It probably put them ahead of a lot of other organizations, especially in university space, which is a fast moving sector in the U.K., to be able to do something that many other large organizations just can't do.

If you build the right organizational relationship and engagement model, you take the workshop approach that we have up front and take your organization through that, right through to something tangible that’s delivering the real outcome in the business that’s very visible and usable. I think that’s very different than having different organizations do different types of consulting.

Gardner: We've come back to this workshop concept several times in discussion, I think that it's called the Transformation Experience Workshop. Why is that so powerful?

Garrett: It's something we've used for a few years now, something we developed in-house and we see as a really effective mechanism. It starts off in a fairly classic way of where are we, the current state, looking at future state, and workshop of the organization through that. But it's done in a very live, interactive way.

So it's not a classic style workshop. We walk people around the room. We take them on a journey, and we bring them together through that process. As Ian said, if you didn’t attend the early workshop process, then you struggle sometimes to buy into it. It takes more time, and we end up reiterating things later on. The Transformation Experience Workshop is a way of bringing people together and bringing them around their own problems in a very active physical way.

We can do it in a small period of time, but usually people dedicate a day or so to that process. What they get out of it is that they bring themselves together around the challenges, the problems, and as Ian said, the quick wins, the things we can then go and address quickly. So it has a very different feel and a very different outcome than a classic workshop approach that many consulting firms have.

Gardner: And Ian, is this something now that you’re building on?

Griffiths: That's correct. We produced a lot of what we call Level 3 processes from this and we looked at what our customers felt. We found that we’re having regular discussions about how we can tweak the diagrams and the systems that we’ve got in place. We see it very much as a live document, a live methodology and we’re looking at ways we can improve as time goes on.

It's important that you have all your senior staff together designing the system from the start. We found that if people miss the early workshop, we tended to go back around the loop again. So I would say get your staff together and devote enough energy to it.

But don’t go into all the detail. Leave your staff on the ground, who’ve got more knowledge of the details inner workings of some elements of it, to do some work so they feel some ownership. And very quickly get an appreciation with your senior staff within your organization, not within IS, but from outside the IS department, of what you're doing and what you're trying to achieve.

But in the end, you need a few quick wins. In other words, if you can get a couple of projects working through the scheme quickly, people begin to think it's going to work.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 12th January 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

This BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview comes in conjunction with The Open Group Conference this month in San Francisco.

The conference will focus on how IT and enterprise architecture support enterprise transformation. Speakers in conference events will also explore the latest in service oriented architecture (SOA), cloud computing, and security.

We’re now joined by of the main speakers, Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Jeanne studies how firms develop competitive advantage through the implementation and reuse of digitized platforms.

She is also the co-author of three books: IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results, Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, and IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain.

As a lead-in to her Open Group presentation on how adoption of enterprise architecture (EA) leads to greater efficiencies and better business agility, Ross explains how enterprise architects have helped lead the way to successful business transformations. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: How you measure or determine that enterprise architects and their practices are intrinsic to successful business transformations?

Ross: That’s a great question. Today, there remains kind of a leap of faith in recognizing that companies that are well-architected will, in fact, perform better, partly because you can be well-architected and perform badly. Or if we look at companies that are very young and have no competitors, they can be very poorly architected and achieve quite remarkably in the marketplace.

But what we can ascribe to architecture is that when companies have competition, then they can establish any kind of performance target they want, whether it’s faster revenue growth or better profitability, and then architect themselves so they can achieve their goals. Then, we can monitor that.

We do have evidence in repeated case studies of companies that set goals, defined an architecture, started to build the capabilities associated with that architecture, and did indeed improve their performance. We have wonderful case study results that should be very reaffirming. I accept that they are not conclusive.

We also have statistical support in some of the work we've done that shows that high performers in our sample of 102 companies, in fact, had greater architecture maturity. They had deployed a number of practices associated with good architecture.

Gardner: Is there something that’s new about this, rather than just trying to reengineer something?

Ross: Yes, the thing we're learning about enterprise architecture is that there's a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.

Nobody wants to get rid of the heroes in their company. Heroes are people who see a problem and solve it. But we do want to get past heroes sub-optimizing. What companies traditionally did before they started thinking about what architecture would mean, is they relied on individuals to do what seemed best and that clearly can sub-optimize in an environment that increasingly is global and requires things like a single face to the customer.

What we're trying to do is adopt a culture of discipline, where there are certain things that people throughout an enterprise understand are the way things need to be done, so that we actually can operate as an enterprise, not as individuals all trying to do the best thing based on our own experience.

The fundamental difference of being an architected firm is that there is some underlying discipline. I'll caution you that what tends to happen is great architects really embrace the discipline. They love the discipline. They understand the discipline, and there is a reluctance to accept that that’s not the only thing we need in our organization. There are times when ad hoc behaviors enable us to be much more innovative and much more responsive and they are exactly what we need to be doing.

So there is a cultural shift that is critical to understanding what it is to be architected. That’s the difference between a successful firm that’s successful because it hasn’t gotten into a world of really tough competition or restrictions on spending and things like that and an organization that is trying to compete in a global economy.

Gardner: What then is the proper role of the architect?

Ross: The architect plays a really critical role in representing the need for this discipline, for some standards in the organization, and for understanding the importance of shared definitions for data. The architect should be able to create a very constructive tension in the organization, and that’s the tension between individuality, innovation, local responsiveness, and the need for enterprise thinking, standardization, and discipline.

Normally, in most companies, the architect’s role will be the enforcer of discipline, standardization and enterprise thinking. ...We want to be architected enough to be efficient, to be able to reuse those things we need to reuse, to be agile, but we don’t want to start embracing architecture for architecture’s sake or discipline for discipline’s sake.

We really just need architecture to pull out unnecessary cost and to enable desirable reusability. And the architect is typically going to be the person representing that enterprise view and helping everyone understand the benefits of understanding that enterprise view, so that everybody who can easily or more easily see the local view is constantly working with architects to balance those two requirements.

Gardner: Is this a particularly good time, from your vantage point, to undertake enterprise architecture?

Ross: It’s a great time for most companies. There will be exceptions that I'll talk about in a minute. One thing we learned early on in the research is that companies who were best at adopting architecture and implementing it effectively had cost pressures. What happens when you have cost pressures is that you're forced to make tough decisions.

If you have all the money in the world, you're not forced to make tough decisions. Architecture is all about making tough decisions, understanding your tradeoffs, and recognizing that you're going to get some things that you want and you are going to sacrifice others.

If you don't see that, if you just say, "We're going to solve that by spending more money," it becomes nearly impossible to become architected. This is why investment banks are invariably very badly architected, and most people in investment banks are very aware of that. It’s just very hard to do anything other than say, "If that’s important to us, let’s spend more money and let’s get it." One thing you can't get by spending more money is discipline, and architecture is very tightly related to discipline.

In a tough economy, when competition is increasingly global and marketplaces are shifting, this ability to make tough decisions is going to be essential. Opportunities to save costs are going to be really valued, and architecture invariably helps companies save money. The ability to reuse, and thus rapidly seize the next related business opportunity, is also going to be highly valued.

The thing you have to be careful of is that if you see your markets disappearing, if your product is outdated, or your whole industry is being redefined, as we have seen in things like media, you have to be ready to innovate. Architecture can restrict your innovative gene, by saying, "Wait, wait, wait. We want to slow down. We want to do things on our platform." That can be very dangerous, if you are really facing disruptive technology or market changes.

So you always have to have that eye out there that says, "When is what we built that’s stable actually constraining us too much? When is it preventing important innovation?" For a lot of architects, that’s going to be tough, because you start to love the architecture, the standards, and the discipline. You love what you've created, but if it isn’t right for the market you're facing, you have to be ready to let it go and go seize the next opportunity.

Gardner: Perhaps this environment is the best of all worlds, because we have that discipline on the costs which forces hard decisions, as you say. We also have a lot of these innovative IT trends that would almost force you to look at doing things differently. I'm thinking again of cloud, mobile, the big data issues, and even social-media types of effects.

Ross: Absolutely. We should all look at it that way and say, "What a wonderful world we live in." One of the companies that I find quite remarkable in their ability to, on the one hand, embrace discipline and architecture, and on the other hand, constantly innovate, is USAA. I'm sure I'll talk about them a little bit at the conference.

This is a company that just totally understands the importance of discipline around customer service. They're off the charts in their customer satisfaction.

They're a financial services institution. Most financial services institutions just drool over USAA’s customer satisfaction ratings, but they've done this by combining this idea of discipline around the customer. We have a single customer file. We have an enterprise view of that customer. We constantly standardize those practices and processes that will ensure that we understand the customer and we deliver the products and services they need. They have enormous discipline around these things.

Simultaneously, they have people working constantly around innovation. They were the first company to see the need for this deposit with your iPhone. Take a picture of your check and it’s automatically deposited into your account. They were nearly a year ahead of the next company that came up with that service.

The way they see it is that for any new technology that comes out, our customer will want to use it. We've got to be there the day after the technology comes out. They obviously haven't been able to achieve that, but that’s their goal. If they can make deals with R&D companies that are coming up with new technologies, they're going to make them, so that they can be ready with their product when the thing actually becomes commercial.

So it's certainly possible for a company to be both innovative and responsive to what’s going on in the technology world and disciplined and cost effective around customer service, order-to-cash, and those other underlying critical requirements in your organization. But it's not easy, and that's why USAA is quite remarkable. They've pulled it off and they are a lesson for many other companies.

Gardner: Is The Open Group a good forum for your message and your research, and if so, why?

Ross: The Open Group is great for me, because there is so much serious thinking in The Open Group about what architecture is, how it adds value, and how we do it well. For me to touch base with people in The Open Group is really valuable, and for me to touch base to share my research and hear the push back, the debate, or the value add is perfect, because these are people who are living it every day.

Gardner: Are there any other major themes that you'll be discussing at the conference coming up that you might want to share with us?

Ross: One thing we have observed in our cases that is more and more important to architects is that the companies are struggling more than we realized with using their platforms well.

I'm not sure that architects or people in IT always see this. You build something that’s phenomenally good and appropriate for the business and then you just assume, that if you give them a little training, they'll use it well.

That’s actually been a remarkable struggle for organizations. One of our research projects right now is called "Working Smarter on Your Digitized Platform." When we go out, we find there aren't very many companies that have come anywhere close to leveraging their platforms the way they might have imagined and certainly the way an architect would have imagined.

It's harder than we thought. It requires persistent coaching. It's not about training, but persistent coaching. It requires enormous clarity of what the organization is trying to do, and organizations change fast. Clarity is a lot harder to achieve than we think it ought to be.

The message for architects would be: here you are trying to get really good at being a great architect. To add value to your organization, you actually have to understand one more thing: how effectively are people in your company adopting the capabilities and leveraging them effectively? At some point, the value add of the architecture is diminished by the fact that people don't get it. They don’t understand what they should be able to do.

We're going to see architects spending a little more time understanding what their leadership is capable of and what capabilities they'll be able to leverage in the organization, as opposed to which on a rational basis seem like a really good idea.

Gardner: When you're an organization and you've decided that you do want to transform and take advantage of unique opportunities for either technical disruption or market discipline, how do you go about getting more structure, more of an architecture?

Ross: That's idiosyncratic to some extent, because in your dream world, what happens is that the CEO announces, "This is what we are going to be five years from now. This is how we are going to operate and I expect everyone to get on board." The vision is clear and the commitment is clear. Then the architects can just say, and most architects are totally capable of this, "Oh, well then, here are the capabilities we need to build. Let’s just go build them and then we'll live happily ever after."

The problem is that’s rarely the way you get to start. Invariably, the CEO is looking at the need for some acquisitions, some new markets, and all kinds of pressures. The last thing you're getting is some clarity around the vision of an operating model that would define your critical architectural capabilities.

What ends up happening instead is architects recognize key business leaders who understand the need for reused standardization, process discipline, whatever it is, and they're very pragmatic about it. They say, "What do you need here to develop an enterprise view of the customer, or what’s limiting your ability to move into the next market?"

And they have to pragmatically develop what the organization can use, as opposed to defining the organizational vision and then the big picture view of the enterprise architecture.

So in practice, it's a much more pragmatic process than what we would imagine when we, for example, write books on how to do enterprise architecture. The best architects are listening very hard to who is asking for what kind of capability. When they see real demand and real leadership around certain enterprise capabilities, they focus their attention on addressing those, in the context of what they realize will be a bigger picture over time.

They can already see the unfolding bigger picture, but there’s no management commitment yet. So they stick to the capabilities that they are confident the organization will use. That’s the way they get the momentum to build. That is more art than science and it really distinguishes the most successful architects.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 6th January 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

Better managing virtualized IT workloads and private clouds is a top concern for IT leaders going into 2012. They may want to follow the lead of global travel and tourism giant TUI Group. The IT organization there, TUI InfoTec, has found ways to manage highly virtualized IT operations better, especially in mixed environments like hybrid clouds.

The critical need to better identify performance issues and outages prompted TUI InfoTec to find ways to cut time to troubleshooting, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in the time needed to identify the causes of such problems.

To learn more about better systems management in heterogeneous cloud environments and in virtualized environments, BriefingsDirect interviewed Christian Rudolph, Infrastructure Architect at TUI InfoTec in Hanover, Germany. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Rudolph: We're a very silo-based environment. We have dedicated network storage and a server team responsible for resolving issues in our infrastructure.

What we've seen in the past were a lot of problems in getting these people together. Everybody had different management tools from the different vendors and nobody had an overall view about the infrastructure.

We’re 60 percent in the Windows environment, and 20 percent in the UNIX environment, which is virtualized, and we're currently planning to go further—to 80 percent virtualization in the total landscape. That's our current state, and we’ve driven more and more to a virtualized infrastructure for all the mission-critical systems.

Normally when we have performance issues, our responsibilities are not very clear—this is a server problem, a network problem, an OS system problem, or this is only the end-user who has a problem. He feels that the application isn't fast enough. In the past, we had a large problem getting information all together.

This is where we evaluated VMware vCenter Operations to get an overall overview about our infrastructure and to get a deep dive into our infrastructure to take a look at how can we solve problems faster and how this could help us in the normal process.

Now we have vCenter Operations on a single pane of glass that can roll down to the storage network and also the infrastructure CPU memory resources to have a clear overview of what could be the first root cause of an issue or performance for the end user. We've tried to figure out how can we bring it better together, and for us vCenter Operations, it’s a single pane of glass.

We currently use the vCenter Operations 1.0 Standard version, but we're in the beta program currently for 5.0. It's a new version, which comes out [in 2012] with vCenter Operations 5.0. This version gives us the ability to do capacity planning and also performance analysis in one view so that we can adapt the things we have discovered in normal business hours for the system and also to do capacity planning for the future.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about TUI, and TUI InfoTec.

Rudolph: TUI InfoTec is an external IT provider for the TUI AG Group. The TUI AG Group is a European leading company in travel and tourism. They're very large in Germany, in the UK, and also in other European countries. They’re not presently doing a lot of business in the US.

We started as an internal IT organization from TUI Germany, and moved in 2006 to an external service provider for the TUI AG and other companies. We're a joint venture company with Sonata Software Ltd., which holds about 50 percent of the company. We're responsible for all the business-critical IT for TUI AG group like the booking systems, the access planning system, and all the other systems related to the business of the TUI AG group.

If it comes to an outage of the IT systems we lose a lot of money. So we have to take care that everything is working and running in the infrastructure.

Gardner: How is your landscape for cloud?

Rudolph: We’re currently thinking about planning our private cloud for our development team. We're also starting to take a look at how, from a cost perspective, we can do the best for our customers. Maybe we can include peak trading for some of the systems. We have a great opening for producing catalogs for the customer, so that they're able to connect our internal cloud over to external clouds and have the hybrid clouds then in place.

Gardner: Okay. How has that beta with vCenter Operations 5.0 worked out? Are some of these features something that you think will be of value to you?

Rudolph: We have two or three good cases there. This has really helped us in the normal business. We've been running with the beta for two months and what we've detected is that we have a good overview, because we have some multi-vCenter environments. We have, in total, three productive vCenters and we need to discover all of them. We had a problem, because we can't use Linked Mode for the vCenters. We had no central view for all the systems to get a performance overview of the system.

And there is a second step. We didn't have the capacity in the same view. So we weren't able to do capacity planning, until we manually got all the information from the different vCenters to have a consolidated planning view. For us, this is one of the most important things that we can do for planning in one place for all our vCenters and also know how many capacity hours are left for new machines. So we increased our time to deliver a virtual machine (VM).

Gardner: What has this better IT visibility in operations and remediation brought to you in technical and in business terms?

Rudolph: The process is very easy, because we've seen that we reduced the time until we can deliver our root cause for our known problem by nearly 50 percent. We reduced the time for doing that, and this is also the best case for our customers—that we can deliver faster solution for a system problem.

The second thing we've seen is that we can see earlier information about how the system is feeling. Through vCenter Operations and through the health status in the vC Ops we can see how our end-users feel. We can detect some problems before they occur, and that’s the best use case we can ever have.

Gardner: How about looking toward the future? We talked a little bit about your use of improved operations, but will this become important when you move to more cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and/or mobile types of activities. How important is this proactive ability in management as you innovate?

Rudolph: It's very important for us. We currently have the vCenter orchestration platform implemented, and we're starting to deliver to the end-user a service portal, where they can request more-and-more VMs. When we didn’t have the products to monitor this system and we come to great trouble. How can we else go further, maybe to a hybrid cloud environment, if we can’t manage our private cloud like now with the vCenter Orchestrator and also with the vC Ops.

Gardner: Taking a step back and reviewing how things have gone, do you have any recommendations or advice for other companies that might be pursuing higher levels of virtualization and perhaps looking for similar reduction in meantime to solution for problems?

Rudolph: I see two recommendations. Not many people know how powerful vCenter Orchestration is. This is one powerful tool as an automatic way for deployment, for maintaining, and also to do some other basic tasks in your virtual infrastructure. This is one important step for us to go to a higher virtualization ratio, because it can be delivered faster to our end-users.

The second thing is really to take a look at vCenter Operations and definitely to the new version that’s coming up. This really helps us to understand how my infrastructure is working. When I don’t know that, I may have problem with one of my disks and I/O and this reflects back to one VM especially. You have to know that, otherwise you don’t have recognition from the end-user that virtualization is really working and that you can bring mission-critical systems to the virtual infrastructure.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 21st December 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

This BriefingsDirect podcast discussion centers on how worldwide enterprise applications leader SAP has designed and implemented a private cloud infrastructure model that supports an internal consulting and training program.

By standardizing on a VMware cloud platform, SAP has been able to slash provisioning times for multiple instances of its flagship application suite in the training setting, as well as set the stage for wider adoption of cloud models.

Here to tell us about the technical and productivity benefits of private clouds is Dr. Wolfgang Krips, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure at SAP in Walldorf, Germany. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of Briefings Direct podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What is it about private cloud that made the most sense for SAP?

Krips: Expanding a bit on the use case, there is a specific challenge here. In the training business, people book their courses, and we know only on Friday evening who is attending the course on Monday. So we have only a very short amount of time over the weekend to set up the systems. That was one of the big challenges that we had to solve.

The second challenge is that, at the same time, these systems become more and more mission critical. Customers are saying, "If the system isn't available during the course, I'm not willing to pay." Maybe the customer will rebook the course. Sometimes he doesn’t. That means that if the systems aren't available, we have an immediate revenue impact.

You can imagine that if we have to set up a couple of hundred, or potentially a couple of thousand, systems over the weekend, we need a high degree of automation to do that. In the past, we had homegrown scripts, and there was a lot of copying and stuff like that going on. We were looking into other technologies and opportunities to make life easier for us.

A couple of challenges were that the scripts and the automation that we had before were dependent on the specific hardware that we used, and we can't use the same hardware for each of the courses. We have different hardware platforms and we had to adopt all the scripts to various hardware platforms.

When we virtualized and used virtualization technology, we could make use of linked cloning technology, which allowed us to set up the systems much faster than the original copying that we did.

The second thing was that by introducing the virtualization layer, we became almost hardware independent, and that cut the effort in constructing or doing the specific automation significantly.

Gardner: What did you need to put in place, and how difficult was it?

Krips: Luckily, we already had some experience. The big thing in setting up the cloud is not getting, say, vSphere in place and the basic virtualization technology. It's the administration and making it available in self-service or the automation of the provisioning. That is the important piece, as most would have guessed.

We had some experience with the Lifecycle Manager and the Lab Manager before. So we said at that time because we did this last year, we set up a Lab Manager installation and worked with that to realize this kind of private cloud.

In this specific cloud, typically we have between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand VMs running. Overall, at SAP we're running more than 20,000 virtual machines (VMs). And, in fact, I have about 25 private cloud installations.

... As I mentioned, this cloud has to work. If this goes down, it’s not like some kind of irrelevant test system is down—or test system pool—and we can take up another one. Potentially a lot of training courses are not happening. With respect to mission criticality, this cloud was essential.

Gardner: We often hear similar requirements being applied to a test and development environment. Are some of your clouds involved with the test and development as well?

Krips: As I mentioned before, we have 25 private-cloud installations, and in fact, most of them are with development. We also have cloud installations in the demo area. So if sales people are providing demos, there are certain landscapes or resource pools where we are instantiating demo systems.

SAP wants to shorten the innovation cycles. Internally, we've moved to a development model, where every six weeks development provides potentially a shippable release. It doesn’t mean that the release gets shipped, but we’re running through the whole process of developing something, testing it, and validating it. There is a demonstrable release available every six weeks.

In the past, with a traditional model, if we were provisioning physical hardware, it took us about 30 days or so to provision a development system. Now, if you think about a development cycle of six weeks and you’re taking about nearly the same amount of time for provisioning the development system, you’ll see that there is a bit of a mismatch.

Moving to the private cloud and doing this in self-service, today we can provision development systems within hours.

Gardner: That’s what I hear from a number of organizations, and it's very impressive. When you had a choice of different suppliers, vendors, and professional services organizations, was there everything that led you specifically to VMware, and how has that worked out?

Krips: I can give you a fairly straightforward answer. At the time we started working with private cloud and private-cloud installations, VMware was the most advanced provider of that technology, and I'd argue that it is still today.

Gardner: How about security and management benefits?

Krips: From our perspective, we wanted to have the advantages of cloud with respect to flexibility, provisioning speed, but we didn’t want to have more security headaches than we already had. That’s why we said, "Let's get our arms first around a private cloud."

Gardner: Is there something about a standardized approach to your cloud stack that makes that hybrid potential, when you’re ready to do it, when it's the right payload, something that you'll be pursuing?

Krips: That’s one of our biggest problems that we're having. Clearly, if one had a standard cloud interface like a vCloud interface, and it was the industry norm, that would be extremely helpful. The issue is that, as you can imagine, there are a couple of workloads that we also want to test in some other well known clouds. I'm having a bit of a headache over how to connect to multiple clouds.

... Now, if a couple of interesting providers had a standardized cloud interface, it would be very nice for me.

Gardner: Any thoughts about what your experience and benefits with cloud might mean for your future vision around client devices and mobility?

Krips: Dana, the thing is pretty clear. If you look at the strategy that SAP pursues, mobility is an integral part. We also think that not only that business process mobility is more important, but what we’re also seeing, and I mentioned that before, with the agility and development. So for instance, there are people who are working every couple of months in new teams. For us, it's very important that we separate the user data and the desktop from the device. We’re definitely pushing very strongly into the topic of desktop virtualization (VDI).

The big challenge that we’re currently having is that when you’re moving to VDI, you take everything that’s on the user's desktop today, then you make out of that more or less a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. As you can imagine, if you’re doing that to development, and they are doing some complex development for the user interfaces or stuff like that, this puts certain challenges on the latency that you can have to the data center or the processing power that you need to have in the back-end.

From our side, we’re interested in technologies similar to that view, and where you can check out machines and still run on a VDI client, but leverage the administrative and provisioning advantages that you have through the cloud provisioning for virtual desktops. So it's a pretty interesting challenge.

We understand what kind of benefits we’re getting from the cloud operations, as I said, the center provisioning, application patching, improved license management, there are a lot of things that are very, very important to us and that we want to leverage.

Particularly for us, the VDI, the benefits, are very much in the kind of centralized provisioning. Just to give you an example, imagine how easy it would be if you’re doing desktop virtualization, to move from Windows 7 to Windows 8. You could basically flip a switch.

On the other hand, we have to solve the issue that we’re not blowing the business case, because the processing power and the storage that you have at the end point is relatively cheap. That’s why we were so interested in VDI technologies. That would allow us also to take care of all of our mobile users.

But we’re confident that we can get the business case to work.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 19th December 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

The latest BriefingsDirect discussion targets the need to make sense of the deluge and complexity of the data and information that is swirling in and around modern enterprises. Most large organizations today are able to identify, classify, and exploit only a small portion of the total data and information within their systems and processes.

Perhaps half of those enterprises actually have a strategy for improving on this dismal fact. But business leaders are now recognizing that managing and exploiting information is a core business competency that will increasingly determine their overall success. That means broader solutions to data distress are being called for.

This discussion then examines how metadata-driven data virtualization and improved orchestration can help provide the inclusion and scale to accomplish far better data management. Such access then leads to improved integration of all information into an approachable resource for actionable business activities.

With us now to help better understand these issues—and the market for solutions to these problems—are Noel Yuhanna, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, and Todd Brinegar, Senior Vice President for Sales and Marketing at Stone Bond Technologies. The panel is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Stone Bond is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: It’s hard to overstate that the size and rate of growth of data and information is just overwhelming the business world. Why is it a critical stage now to change how we're addressing these issues?

Yuhanna: We have customers who have 55,000 databases, and they plan to double this in the next three to four years. Imagine trying to manage 55,000 databases. It’s a nightmare. In fact, they don’t even know what the count is actually.

The data has been growing significantly over the last few years because of different application deployments, different devices, such as mobile devices, and different environments, such as globalization. These are obviously creating a bigger need for integration.

Then, they're dealing with unstructured data, which is more than 75 percent of the data. It’s a huge challenge trying to manage this unstructured data. Forget about the intrusions and the hackers trying to break in. You can’t even manage that data.

Then, obviously, we have challenges of heterogeneous data sources, structured, unstructured, semi-structured. Then, we have different database types, and then, data is obviously duplicated quite a lot as well. These are definitely bigger challenges than we've ever seen.

Gardner: We're not just dealing with an increase in data, but we have all these different data sources. We're still dealing with mainframes.

It seems to me that you can’t just deal with big data. You have to deal with the right data. What’s the difference between big data and right data?

Yuhanna: It’s like GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out. A lot of times, organizations that deal with data don’t know what data they're dealing with. They don’t know that it’s valuable data in the organization. The big challenge is how to deal with this data.

The other thing is making business sense of this data. That's a very important point. And right data is important. I know a lot of organizations think, "Well, we have big data, but then we want to just aggregate the data and generate reports." But are these reports valuable? Fifty percent of times they're not, and they've just burned away 1,000 CPU cycles for this big data.

That's where there's a huge opportunity for organizations that are dealing with such big data. First of all, you need to understand what this big data means, and ask are you going to be utilizing it. Throwing something into the big data framework is useless and pointless, unless you know the data.

Brinegar: Noel is 100 percent correct, and it is all about the right data, not just a lot of data. It’s interesting. We have clients that have a multiplicity of databases. Some they don’t even know about or no longer use, but there is relevant data in there.

When you were talking about the ability to attach to mainframes, all legacy systems, as well as incorporated into today’s environments, that's really a big challenge for a lot of integration solutions and a lot of companies.

So the ability to come in, attach, and get the right data and make that data actionable and make it matter to a company is really key and critical today. And being able to do that with the lowest cost of ownership in the market and the highest time to value equation—so that the companies aren’t creating a huge amount of tech on top of the tech that they already have to get at this right data—that’s really the key critical part.

Gardner: What’s with this notion about orchestrating, metadata, and data virtualization? Why are some of these architectural approaches being sought out, especially for real-time uses?

Yuhanna: You have to look at the holistic data set. Today, most organizations or business users want to look at the complete data sets in terms of how to make business decisions. Typically, what they're seeing is that data has always been in silos, in different repositories, and different data segregations. They did try to bring this all together like in a warehouse trying to deliver this value.

But then the volumes of data, the real-time data needs are definitely a big challenge. Warehouses weren't meant to be real-time. They were able to handle data, but not in real time.

So this whole data segregation delivers a yet even better superior framework to deliver real-time data and the right data to consumers, to processes, to applications, whether it’s structured data, semi-structured, unstructured data, all coming together from different sources—not only on-premise, also off-premise, such as partner's data and marketplace data coming together and providing that framework toward different elements.

We talked about this many years ago and called it the information fabric, which is basically data virtualization that delivers this whole segregation of data in that layer, so that it could be consumed by different applications as a service, and this is all delivered in a real-time manner.

Now, an important point here is that it's not just read-only, but you can also write back through this virtualized layer, so that it can get back at the data.

Definitely, things have changed with this new framework and there are solutions out there that offer this whole framework, not only just accessing data and integrating data, but they also have frameworks, which includes metadata, security, integration, transformation.

Gardner: For the companies that you work with at Forrester, when they do this correctly, what sort of benefits are they able to gain?

Yuhanna: The good thing about data virtualization is that it's not just a single benefit. There are many, many benefits of data virtualization, and there are customers who are doing real-time business intelligence (BI), business with data virtualization. As I mentioned, there are drawbacks and limitations in some of the older approaches, technologies, and architectures we've used for decades.

We want real-time BI, in the sense that you can’t just wait a day for this report to show up. You need this every hour or every minute. So these are important decisions you've got to make for that.

Real-time BI is definitely one of the big drivers for data virtualization, but also having a single version of the truth. As you know, more than 30 percent of data is duplicated in an organization. That’s a very conservative number. Many people don’t know how much data is duplicated.

And you have different duplication of data—customer data, product data, or internal data. There are many different types of data that is duplicated. Then the data has a quality issue, because you may change customer data in one of the applications that may touch one database, but the other database is not synchronized as such. What you get is inconsistent data, and customers and other business users don’t really value the data actually anymore.

A single version of the truth is a very important deliverable from solutions, which has never been done before, unless you have one single database actually, but most organizations have multiple databases.

Also it's creating this whole dashboard. You want to get data from different sources, be able to present business value to the consumers, to the business users, what have you, and the other cases like enterprise search, you're able to search data very quickly.

Imagine if an auditor walks into an organization, they want to look at data for a particular event, or an activity, or a customer, searching across a thousand resources. It could be a nightmare. The compliance initiative through data virtualization becomes a lot simpler.

Then, you're doing things like content-management applications, which need to be delivered in federation and integrate data from many sources to present more valuable information. Also, smart phones and mobile devices want data from different systems so that they all tie together to their consumers, to the business users, effectively.

So data virtualization has quite a strong value proposition and, typically, organizations get the return on investment (ROI) within six months or less with data virtualization.

Brinegar: This is exactly the fabric and the framework that Enterprise Enabler, Stone Bond’s integration technology, is built on.

What we've done is look at it from a different approach than traditional integration. Instead of taking old technologies and modifying those technologies linearly to effect an integration and bring that data into a staging database and then do a transformation and then massage it, we've looked at it three-dimensionally.

We attach with our AppComms, which are our connectors, to the metadata layer of an application. We don’t agent within the application. We get at the data of the data. We separate that data from multiple sources, unlimited sources, and orchestrate that to a view that a client has. It could be Salesforce.com, SharePoint, a portal, Excel spreadsheets, or anything that they're used to consuming that data in.

Gardner: Just to be clear, Todd, your architecture and solution approach is not only for access for analysis, for BI, for dashboards and insights—but this is also for real-time running application sets. This is actionable data?

Brinegar: Absolutely. With Enterprise Enabler, we're not only a data-integration tool, we're an applications-integration tool. So we are EAI/ETL. We cover that full spectrum of integration. And as you said, it is the real-time solution, the ability to access and act on that information in real time.

Enterprise Enabler provides the ability to virtualize, federate, orchestrate, all in real-time and is a huge value. The biggest thing is time to value though. How quickly can they get the software configured and operational within their enterprise? That is really the key that is driving a lot of our clients’ actions.

When we do an installation, a client can be up and operational doing their first integration transformations within the first day. That’s a huge time-to-value benefit for that client. Then, they can be fully operational with complex integration in under three weeks. That's really astounding in the marketplace.

I have one client that on one single project calculated $1.5 million cost savings in personnel in the first year. That’s not even taking into account a technology that they may be displacing by putting in Enterprise Enabler. Those are huge components.

HP is a great example. HP runs Enterprise Enabler in their supply chain for their Enterprise Server Group. That group provides data to all the suppliers within the Enterprise Server Group on an on-time basis.

They are able to build on demand and take care of their financials in the manufacturing of the servers much more efficiently than they ever have. They were experiencing, I believe, a 10-times return on investment within the first year. That’s a huge cost benefit for that organization. It's really kept them a great client of ours.

We do quite a bit of work in the oil business and the oil-field services business, and each one of our clients has experienced a faster ROI and a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

We just announced recently that most of our clients experienced a 300 percent ROI in the first year that they implemented Enterprise Enabler. CenterPoint Energy is a large client of Stone Bond and they use us for their strategic transformation of how they're handling their data.

Gardner: Let’s go back to Noel. Do you have a sense of where companies that are successful at doing this have begun?

Yuhanna: One is taking an issue, like an application-specific strategy, and building blocks on that, or maybe just going out and looking at an enterprise-wide strategy. For the enterprise-wide strategy, I know that some of the large organizations in the financial services, retail, and sales force are starting to embark on looking at all of these data in a more holistic manner:

"I've got customer data that is all over the place. I need to make it more consistent. I need to make it more real-time." Those are the things that I'm dealing with, and I think those are going to be seen more in the coming years.

Obviously, you can’t boil the ocean, but I think you want to start with some data which becomes more valuable, and this comes back to the point that you talked about as the right data. Start with the right data and look at those data points that are being shared and consumed by many users, business users, and that’s going to be valuable for the business itself.

The important thing is also that you're building this block on the solution. You can definitely leverage some existing technologies, if you wanted to. I would definitely recommend now looking at newer technologies, because they definitely are faster. They do a lot of caching. They do a lot of faster integration.

As Todd was mentioning, quicker ROI is important. You don’t have to wait for a year trying to integrate data. So I think those are critical for organizations going forward. But you also have to look at security, availability, and performance. All of these are critical, when you're making decisions about what your architecture is going look like.

We've actually done extensive research over the last four or five years on this topic. If you look at Information Fabric, this is a reference architecture we've told customers to use when you're building a data virtualization yourself. You can build the data virtualization yourself, but obviously it will take a couple of years to build. It’s a bit complex to build, and I think that's why solutions are better at that.

But Information Fabric reports are there. Also, information as a service is something that we've written about—best practices, use cases, and also vendor solutions around this topic of discussion. So information as a service is something that customers could look at and gain understanding.

We have use cases or case studies that talk about the different types of deployments, whether it’s a real-time BI implementations or doing single version of fraud detection, or any other different types of environments they're doing. So we definitely have case studies as well.

There are case studies, reference architectures, and even product surveys, which talk about all of these technologies and solutions.

Gardner: Todd, how about at Stone Bond? Do you have some white papers or research, reports that you can point to in order to help people sort through this and perhaps get a better sense of where your technologies are relevant and what your value is?

Brinegar: We do. On our website, stonebond.com, we have our CTO, Pamela Szabó's, blog, which has a great perspective of data, big data, and the changing face of data usage and virtualization.

I wish everybody would explore the different opportunities and the different technologies that there are for integration and really determine not what you need today—that’s important—but what will you need tomorrow. What’s the tech that you're going to carry forward, and how much is the TCO going to be as you move forward, and really make that value decision past that one specific project, because you're going to live with the solution for a long time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 16th December 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Our next VMworld case study interview focuses on how a major game developer in Europe has successfully leveraged the hybrid cloud model.

We’ll learn how SEGA Europe is standardizing its cloud infrastructure across its on-premises operations, as well as with a public cloud provider. The result is a managed and orchestrated hybrid environment to test and develop multimedia games, one that dynamically scales productively to the many performance requirements at hand.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the recent VMworld 2011 Conference in Copenhagen. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here to tell us more about how the hybrid approach to multiple, complementary cloud instances is meeting SEGA’s critical development requirements in a new way is Francis Hart, Systems Architect at SEGA Europe, in London. The case study interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Clearly one of the requirements in game development is the need to ramp up a lot of servers to do the builds, but then they sit there essentially unproductive between the builds. How did you flatten that out or manage the requirements around the workload support?

Hart: Typically, in the early stages of development, there is a fair amount of testing going on, and it tends to be quite small—the number of staff involved in it and the number of build iterations.

Going on, when the game reaches to the end of its product life-cycle, we’re talking multiple game iterations a day and the game size has gotten very large at that point. The number of people involved in the testing to meet the deadlines and get the game shipped on date is into the hundreds and hundreds of staff.

Gardner: How has virtualization and moving your workloads into different locations evolved over the years?

Hart: We work on the idea of having a central platform for a lot of these systems. Using virtualization to do that allowed us to scale off at certain times. Historically, we always had an on-premise VMware platform to do this. Very recently, we’ve been looking at ways to use that resource within a cloud to cut down from some of Capex loading but also remain a little bit more agile with some of the larger titles, especially online games that are coming around.

Gardner: We’re all very familiar with the amazing video games that are being created nowadays. And SEGA of course is particularly well-known for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise going back a number of years. What are some of the other critical requirements that you have from a systems architecture perspective when developing these games?

Hart: We have a lot of development studios across the world. We're working on multiple projects. We need to ensure that we supply them with a highly scalable and reliable solution in order to test, develop, and produce the game and the code in time. ... We’re probably looking at thousands of individual developers across the world.

... The first part was dealing with the end of the process, and that was the testing and the game release process. Now, we’re going to be working back from that. The next big area that we’re actively involved in is getting our developers to develop online games within the hybrid environment.

So they’re designing the game and the game’s back-end servers to be optimal within the VMware environment. And then, also pushing from staging to live is a very simple process using the Cloud Connector.

We're restructuring and redesigning the IT systems within SEGA to be more of a development operations team to provide a service to the developers and to the company.

Gardner: How did you start approaching that from your IT environment, to build the right infrastructure?

Hart: One of the first areas we targeted very early on was the last process in those steps, the testing, arguably one of the most time-consuming processes within the development cycle. It happens pretty much all the way through as well to ensure that the game itself behaves as it should. It’s tested, and the customer gets the end-user experience they require.

The biggest technical goal that we had for this is being able to move large amounts of data, un-compiled code, from different testing offices around the world to the staff. Historically we had some major issues in securely moving that data around, and this is what we started looking into cloud solutions for this.

For very, very large game builds, and we're talking game builds above 10 gigabytes, it ended up being couriered within the country and then overnight file transfer outside of the country. So, very old school methods.

We needed both to secure that up to make sure we understood where the game builds were, and also to understand exactly which version each of the testing offices was using. So it’s gaining control, but also providing more security.

Gardner: So we’re seeing a lot more of the role-play games (RPG) types of games, games themselves in the cloud. That must influence what you're doing in terms of thinking about your future direction.

Hart: Absolutely. We’ve been looking at things like the hybrid cloud model with VMware as a development platform for our developers. That's really what we're working on now. We've got a number of games in the pipeline that have been developed on the hybrid cloud platform. It gives the developers a platform that is exactly the same and mirrored to what it would eventually be in the online space through ISPs like Colt, which should be hosting the virtual cloud platform.

And one of the benefits we're seeing in the VMware offering is that regardless of what data center in the world is the standard platform, it also allows us to leverage multiple ISPs, and hopefully gain some cost benefits from that.

Very early on we were in discussions with Colt and also VMware to understand what technology stack they were bringing into the cloud. We started doing a proof of concept with VMware and a professional services company, and together we were able to come over a proof of concept to distribute our game testing code, which previously was a very old-school distribution system. So anything better would improve the process.

There wasn't too much risk to the company. So we saw the opportunity to have a hybrid cloud set up to allow us to have an internal cloud system to distribute the codes to the majority of UK game testers and to leverage high bandwidth between all of our sites.

For the game testing studios around Europe and the world, we could use a hosted version of the same service which was up on the Colt Virtual Cloud Director (VCD) platform to supply this to trusted testing studios.

Gardner: When you approach this hybrid cloud model, what about managing that? What about having a view into what’s going on so that you know what aspects of the activity and requirements are being met and where?

Hart: The virtual cloud environment of vCloud Director has a web portal that allows you to manage a lot of this configuration in a central way. We’re also using VMware Cloud Connector, which is a product that allows you to move the apps between different cloud data centers. And doing this allows us to manage it at one location and simply clone the same system to another cloud data center.

In that regard, the configuration very much was in a single place for us in the way that we designed the proof of concept. It actually helped things, and the previous process wasn’t ideal anyway. So it was a dramatic improvement.

One of the immediate benefits was around the design process. It's very obvious that we were tightening up security within our build delivery to the testing studios. Nothing was with a courier on a bike anymore, but within a secured transaction between the two offices.

Also from a security perspective, we understood exactly what game assets and builds were in each location. So it really helped the product development teams to understand what was where and who was using what, and so from a risk point of view it’s greatly reduced.

In terms of stats and the amount of data throughput, it’s pretty large, and we’ve been moving terabytes pretty much weekly nowadays. Now we’re going completely live with the distribution network.

So it’s been a massive success. All of the UK testing studios are using the build delivery system day to day, and for the European ones we’ve got about half the testing studios on board that build delivery system now, and it’s transparent to them.

VMware was very good at allowing us to understand the technology and that's one of the benefits of working with a professional services reseller. In terms of gotchas, there weren't too many. There were a lot of good surprises that came up and allowed us to open the door to a lot of other VMware technologies.

Now, we're also looking at alternating a lot of processes within vCenter Orchestrator and other VMware products. They really gave us a good stepping stone into the VMware catalogue, rather than just vSphere, which we were using previously. That was very handy for us.

Gardner: I’d like to just pause here for a second. Your use of vSphere 4.1 must have been an important stepping stone to be able to have the dynamic ability to ramp up and down your environments, your support infrastructure, but also skills.

Hart: Absolutely. We already have a fair footprint in Amazon Web Services (AWS), and it was a massive skill jump that we needed to train members of the staff in order to use that environment. With the VMware environment, as you said, we already have a large amount of skill set using vSphere. We have a large team that supports our corporate infrastructure and we've actually got VMware in our co-located public environment as well. So it was very, very assuring that the skills were immediately transferable.

Gardner: Now that you've done this, any words of wisdom, 20/20 hindsight, that you might share with others who are considering moving more aggressively into private cloud, hybrid cloud, and ultimately perhaps the full PaaS value?

Hart: Just get some hands-on experience and play with the cloud stack from VMware. It’s inexpensive to have a go and just get to know the technology stack.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 15th December 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

You don’t need to go very far in IT nowadays to find people who are diligently working to do more with less, even as they're working to transform and modernize their environments.

One way to keep the interest high—and those operating and investment budgets in place—is to show fast results, and then use that to prime the pump for even more improvement—and even more funding—with perhaps even growing budgets.

The latest BriefingsDirect discussion then explores how to build quick data center project wins, by leveraging project tracking and scorecards, as well as by developing a common roadmap for both facilities and IT infrastructure.

We'll hear from a panel of HP experts on some of their most effective methods for fostering consolidation and standardization across critical IT tasks and management. This is the second in a series of podcasts on data center transformation (DCT) best practices and is presented in conjunction with a complementary video series.

With us now to explain how these solutions can drive successful data center transformation is our panel, Duncan Campbell, Vice President of Marketing for HP Converged Infrastructure and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs); Randy Lawton, Practice Principal for Americas West Data Center Transformation & Cloud Infrastructure Consulting at HP, and Larry Hinman, Critical Facilities Consulting Director and Worldwide Practice Leader for HP Critical Facility Services and HP Technology Services. The panel is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Campbell: We've seen that when a customer is successful in breaking down a large project into a set of quick wins, there are some very positive outcomes from that.

Number one, it breeds confidence, and this is a confidence that is actually felt within the organization, within the IT team, and into the business as well. So it builds confidence both inside and outside the organization.

The other key benefit is that when you can manifest these quick wins in terms of some specific return on investment (ROI) business outcome, that also translates very nicely as well and gets a lot of key attention, which I think has some downstream benefits that actually help out the team in multiple ways.

It's not just about attracting the best talent and executing well, but it's about marketing the team’s results as well.

One of the benefits in that is that you can actually break down these projects just in terms of some specific type of wins. That might be around standardization, and you can see a lot of wins there. You can quickly consolidate to blades. You can look at virtualization types of quick wins, as well as some automation quick wins.

We would advocate that customers think about this in terms of almost a step-by-step approach, knocking that down, getting those quick wins, and then marketing this in some very tangible ways that resonate very strongly.

Gardner: When you start to develop a cycle of recognition, incentives, and buy-in, we could also start to see some sort of a virtuous adoption cycle, whereby that sets you up for more interest, an easier time evangelizing, and so on.

Campbell: A virtuous cycle is well put. That really allows the team to get the additional green light to go to the next step in terms of their blueprint that they are trying to execute on. It gets a green light also in terms of additional dollars and, in some cases, additional headcount to add to their team as well.

What this does is, and I like this term the virtuous cycle, not only allows you to attract key talent, but it really allows you to retain folks. That means you're getting the best team possible to duplicate that, to get those additional wins, and it really does indeed become a virtuous cycle.

A good example is where we have been able to see a significant total cost of ownership (TCO) type of savings with one of our customers, McKesson, that in fact was taking one of these consolidated approaches with all their development tools. They saw considerable savings, both in terms of dollars—over $12.9 million—as well as a percentage of TCO savings that was upwards of 50 percent.

When you see tangible exciting numbers like that, that does grab people’s attention and, you bet, it becomes part of the whole social-media fabric and people want to go to a winner. Success breeds success here.

Lawton: Many of the transformation programs we engage in with our customers are substantially complex and span many facets of the IT organization. They often involve other vendors and service providers in the customer organization.

So there’s a tremendous amount of detail to pull together and organize in these complex engagements and initiatives. We find that there’s really no way to do that, unless you have a good way of capturing the data that’s necessary for a baseline.

It’s important to note that we manage these programs through a series of phases in our methodology. The first phase is strategy and analysis. During that phase, we typically run a discovery on all IT assets that would include the data center, servers, storage, the network environment, and the applications that run on those environments.

From that, we bridge into the second phase, which is architect and validate, where we begin to solution out and develop the strategies for a future-state design that includes the standardization and consolidation approaches, and on that begin to assemble the business case. In a detailed design, we build out those specifications and begin to create the data that determines what the future-state transformation is.

Then, through the implementation phase, we have detailed scorecards that are required to be tracked to show progress of the application teams and infrastructure teams that contribute to the program in order to guarantee success and provide visibility to all the stakeholders as part of the program, before we turn everything over to operations.

During the course of the last few years, our services unit has made investments in a number of tools that help with the capture and management of the data, the scorecarding, and the analytics through each of the phases of these programs. We believe that helps offer a competitive advantage for us and helps enable more rapid achievement of the programs from our customer perspective.

In these complex engagements it’s normally some time before there are quick-win type of achievements that are really notable.

For example, in the HP IT transformation program we undertook over several years back through 2008, we were building six new data centers so that we could consolidate 185 worldwide. So it was some period of time from the beginning of the program until the point where we moved the first application into production.

All along the way we were scorecarding the progress on the build-out of the data centers. Then, it was the build-out of the compute infrastructure within the data centers. And then it was a matter of being able to show the scorecarding against the applications, as we could get them into the next generation data centers.

If we didn't have the ability to show and demonstrate the progress along the way, I think our stakeholders would have lost patience or would not have felt that the momentum of the program was going on the kind of track that was required. With some of these tools and approaches and the scorecarding, we were able to demonstrate the progress and keep very visible to management the movements and momentum of the program.

A very notable example is one of our telecom customers we worked with during the last year and finished a program earlier this year. The company was purchasing the assets of another organization and needed to be able to clone the applications and infrastructure that supported business processes from the acquired company.

Within the mix of delivery for stakeholders in the program, there were nine different companies represented. There were some outsourced vendors from the application support side in the acquiree’s company, outsourcers in the application side for the acquiring company, and outsourcers in the data centers that operated data center infrastructure and operations for the target data centers we were moving into.

What was really critical in pulling all this together was to be able to map out, at a very detailed level, the tasks that needed to be executed, and in what time frame, across all of these teams.

The final cutover migration required over 2,500 tasks across these 9 different companies that all needed to be executed in less than 96 hours in order to meet the downtime window of requirements that were required of the acquiring company’s executive management.

It was the detailed scorecarding and operating war rooms to keep those scorecards up to date in real-time that allowed us to be able to accomplish that. There’s just no possible way we would have been able to do that ahead of time.

Gardner: Has there usually been a completely separate direction for facilities planning in IT infrastructure? Why was that the case, and why is it so important to end that practice?

Hinman: If you look over time and over the last several years, everybody has data centers and everybody has IT. The things that we've seen over the last 10 or 15 years are things like the Internet and criticality of IT and high density and all this stuff that people are talking about these days. If you look at the ways companies organized themselves several years ago, IT was a separate organization, facilities was a separate organization, and that actually still exists today.

One of the things that we're still seeing today is that, even though there is this push to try to get IT groups and facilities organizations to talk and work each other, this gap that exists between truly how to glue all of this together.

If you look at the way people do this traditionally—and when I say people, I'm talking about IT organizations and facilities organization—they typically will model IT and data centers, even if they are attempting to try and glue them together, they try to look at power requirements.

So we took this whole complex framework and data center program and broke it into four key areas. It looks simplistic in the way we've done this, and we have done this over many, many years of analysis and trying to figure out exactly what direction we should take. We've actually spun this off in many directions a few times, trying to continually make it better, but we always keep coming back to these four key profiles.

Business and risk is the first profile. IT architecture, which is really the application suite, is the second profile. IT infrastructure is the third. Data center facilities is the fourth.

One of the things that you will start to hear from us, if you haven’t heard it already via the data center transformation story that you guys were just recently talking about, is this nomenclature of IT plus facilities equals the data center.

Look at that, look at these four profiles, and look at what we call a top-down approach, where I start to get everybody synchronized on what risk profiles are and tolerances for risk are from an IT perspective and how to run the business, gluing that together with an IT infrastructure strategy, and then gluing all that into a data center facility strategy.

What we found over time is that we were able to take this complex program of trying to have something predictable, scalable, all of the groovy stuff that people talk about these days, and have something that I could really manage. If you're called into the boss’s office, as I and others have been over the many years in my career, to ask what’s the data center going to look like over the next five years, at least I would have some hope of trying to answer that question.

One of the the big lessons learned for us over the years has been this ability to not only provide this kind of modeling and predictability over time for clients and for customers. We had to get out of this mode of doing this once and putting it on a shelf, deploying a future state data center framework, keep the client pointing in the right direction.

The data gets archived, and they pick it up every few years and do it again and again and again, finding out that a lot of times there's an "aha" moment during those periods, the gaps between doing it again and again.

We've taken all of our modeling tools and integrated them to common databases, where now we can start to glue together even the operational piece, of data center infrastructure management (DCIM), or architecture and infrastructure management, facilities management, etc., so now the client can have this real-time, long-term, what we call a 10-year view of the overall operation.

So now, you can do this. You get it pointing the right direction, collect the data, complete the modeling, put it in the toolset, and now you have something very dynamic that you can manage over time. That's what we've done, and that's where we have been heading with all of our tools and processes over the last two to three years.

Gardner: I also remember with great interest the news from HP Discover in Las Vegas last summer about your EcoPOD and the whole POD concept toward facilities and infrastructure. Does that also play a part in this and perhaps make it easier when your modularity is ratcheted up to almost a mini data center level, rather than at the server or rack level?

Hinman: With the various what we call facility sourcing options, which PODs are certainly one of those these days, we've also been very careful to make sure that our framework is completely unbiased when it comes to a specific sourcing option.

What that means is, over the last 10 plus years, most people were really targeted at building new green-field data centers. It was all about space, then it became all about power, then about cooling, but we were still in this brick and mortar age, but modularity and scalability has been driving everything.

With PODs coming on the scene with some of the other design technologies, like multi-tiered or flexible data center, what we've been able to do is make sure that our framework is targeted at almost a generic framework where we can complete all the growth modeling and analysis, regardless of what the client is going to do from a facilities perspective.

It lays the groundwork for the customer to get their arms around all of this and tie together IT and facilities with risk and business, and then start to map out an appropriate facility sourcing option.

We find these days that POD is actually a very nice fit with all of our clients, because it provides high density server farms, it provides things that they can implement very quickly, and gets the power usage effectiveness (PUE) and power and operational cost down. We're starting to see that take a stronghold in a lot of customers.

Gardner: As we begin to wrap up, I should think that these trends are going to be even more important, these methods even more productive, when we start to factor in movement toward private cloud. Any thoughts about how scorecards and tracking will be even more important in the future, as we move, as we expect we will, to a more cloud-, mobile-, and eco-friendly world?

Lawton: In a lot of ways, there is added complexity these days with more customers operating in a hybrid delivery model, where there may be multiple suppliers in addition to their internal IT organizations.

Just like the example case I gave earlier, where you spread some of these activities not only across multiple teams and stakeholders, but also into separate companies and suppliers who are working under various contract mechanisms, the complexity is even greater. If that complexity is not pulled into a simplified model that is beta driven, that is supported by plans and contracts, then there are big gaps in the programs.

The scorecarding and data gathering methods and approaches that we take on our programs are going to be even more critical as we go forward in these more complex environments.

Operating the cloud environments simplifies things from a customer perspective, but it does add some additional complexities in the infrastructure and operations of the organization as well. All of those complexities add up too, meaning that even more attention needs to be brought to the details of the program and where those responsibilities lie within stakeholders.

Gardner: Larry Hinman, we're seeing this drive toward cloud. We're also seeing consolidation and standardization around data center infrastructure. So perhaps more large data centers to support more types of applications to even more endpoints, users, and geographic locations or business units. Getting that facilities and IT equation just right becomes even more important as we have fewer, yet more massive and critical, data centers involved.

Hinman: Dana, that's exactly correct. If you look at this, you have to look at the data center facilities piece, not only from a framework or model or topology perspective, but all the way down to the specific environment.

It could be that based on a specific client’s business requirements and IT strategy that it will require possibly a couple of large-scale core data centers and multiple remote sites and/or it could just be a bunch of smaller types of facilities.

It really depends on how the business is being run and supported by IT and the application suite, what the tolerances for risk are, whether it’s high availability, synchronous, all the groovy stuff, and then coming up with a framework that matches all those requirements that it’s integrating.

We tell clients constantly that you have to have your act together with respect to your profile, and start to align all of this, before you can even think about cloud and all the wonderful technologies that are coming down the pike. You have to be able to have something that you can at least manage to control cost and control this whole framework and manage to a future-state business requirement, before you can even start to really deploy some of these other things.

So it all glues together. It's extremely important that customers understand that this really is a process they have to do.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 6th December 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

HP, at the Discover 2011 Conference in Vienna last week, announced a wide range of new Cloud Solutions designed to advance deployment of private, public and hybrid clouds for enterprises, service providers, and governments. Based on HP Converged Infrastructure, the new and updated HP Cloud Solutions provide the hardware, software, services and programs rapidly and securely deliver IT as a service.

I found these announcements a clearer indicator of HP's latest cloud strategy, with an emphasis on enabling a global, verticalized and marketplace-driven tier of cloud providers. I've been asked plenty about HP's public cloud roadmap, which has been murky. This now tells me that HP is going first to its key service provider customers for data center and infrastructure enablement for their clouds.

This makes a lot of sense. The next generation of clouds—and I'd venture the larger opportunity once the market settles—will be specialized clouds. Not that Amazon Web Services, Google, and Rackspace are going away. But one-size-fits-all approaches will inevitably give way to specialization and localization. Telecos are in a great position to step up and offer these value-add clouds and services to their business customers. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

And HP is better off providing the picks and shovels to them in spades, than to come to market in catch-up mode with plain vanilla public cloud services under its own brand. It the classic clone strategy that worked for PCs, right? Partnerships and ecosystem alliances are the better way. A good example is the partnership announced last week with Savvis.

HP’s new offerings address the key areas of client needs—building differentiated cloud offerings, consuming cloud services from the public domain, and managing, governing and securing the entire environment. This again makes sense. No need for channel conflict on cloud services between this class of nascent cloud providers and the infrastructure providers themselves.

Expanding the ecosystem
Among the announcements was an expansion of the cloud ecosystem with new partners, offerings and programs:

• New HP CloudSystem integrations with Alcatel-Lucent will enable communications services providers to deliver high-value cloud services using carrier-class network and IT by automating the provisioning and management of cloud resources.
• HP CloudAgile Service Provider Program offers service providers expanded sales reach, an enhanced services portfolio and an accelerated sales cycle through direct access to HP’s global sales force. HP has expanded the program with its first European partners and with new certified hosting options that enable service providers to deliver reliable, secure private hosted clouds based on HP CloudSystem.
• HP CloudSystem Matrix 7.0, the core operating environment that powers HP CloudSystem, enables clients to build hybrid clouds with push-button access to externally sourced cloud-based IT resources with out-of-the-box “bursting capability.” This solution also includes automatic, on-demand provisioning of HP 3PAR storage to reduce errors and speed deployment of new services to just minutes.
• The HP Cloud Protection Program spans people, process, policies and technologies to deliver a comparable level of security for a hybrid cloud as a private internet-enabled IT environment would receive. The program is supported by a Cloud Protection Center of Excellence that enables clients to test HP solutions as well as partner and third-party products that support cloud and virtualization protection.

Enterprise-class services
New and enhanced HP services that provide a cloud infrastructure as a service to address rapid and secure sourcing of compute services include:

• HP Enterprise Cloud Services – Compute which automates distribution of application workloads across multiple servers to improve application performance. Clients also can improve data protection through new backup and restore options while also provisioning and managing additional virtual local area networks within their cloud environment. A new HP proof-of-concept program allows clients to evaluate the service for existing workloads prior to purchase.
• HP Enterprise Cloud Services for SAP Development and Sandbox Solution enable clients to evaluate and prototype functionality of SAP enterprise resource planning software via a virtual private cloud, using a flexible, consumption-based model.

Guidance and training
HP has also announced guidance and training to transform legacy data centers for cloud computing:

• Three HP ExpertONE certifications – HP ASE Cloud Architect, HP ASE Cloud Integrator and HP ASE Master Cloud Integrator, which encompass business and technical content.
• Expanded HP ExpertONE program that includes five of the industry’s largest independent commercial training organizations that deliver HP learning solutions anywhere in the world. The HP Institute delivers an academic program for developing HP certified experts through traditional two- and four-year institutions, while HP Press has expanded self-directed learning options for clients.
• HP Cloud Curriculum from HP Education Services offers course materials in multiple languages covering cloud strategies. Learning is flexible, with online virtual labs, self study, classroom, virtual classroom and onsite training options offered through more than 90 HP education centers worldwide.
• Driven by HP Financial Services, HP Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Cloud Roundtables help CFOs understand the benefits and risks associated with the cloud, while aligning their organizations’ technology and financial roadmaps.
• HP Storage Consulting Services for Cloud, encompassing modernization and design, enable clients to understand their storage requirements for private cloud computing as well as develop an architecture that meets their needs.
• HP Cloud Applications Services for Windows Azure accelerate the development or migration of applications to the Microsoft Windows Azure platform-as-a-service offering.

A recording of the HP Discover Vienna press conference and additional information about HP’s announcements at its premier client event is available at www.hp.com/go/optimization2011.

By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 6th December 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Spiceworks, a supplier of network management software primarily for SMBs, is coming to Europe, forming Spiceworks Europe Ltd, based in London - a hint at its sky-rocketing growth path.

In a time of great international austerity, five year-old Spiceworks' interesting business model looks tailor-made for the times. After developing its SMB network management software, it promptly made it available free of charge - but I did not say open source. The founders came from a major network software vendor - having asked the question: "What about the little guy?"

Their user companies, typically of less than 1,000 employees with only one or two IT professionals keeping their systems up and running, suddenly had some free software to tap into. It was a good application to help them do their job better. Growth among users was so fast from the off that, in 10 days in July 2006, Spiceworks gained 3,500 users, expanding to 33,000 by year-end. Now, according to Spiceworks, there are some two million IT professionals on Spiceworks' network, connected into the world's biggest IT community (increasing faster than I can count).

As of now, the software includes network discovery and inventory management, warranty monitoring, network mapping and monitoring, configuration change management, troubleshooting, IT help desk (etc.). (It excludes network security, leaving that to vendor partner specialists.) Now that the software has a proven track record, it certainly narrows the options for direct competitors in network management and asset management.

Many of Spiceworks' software improvements and expansions have resulted from user feedback; wisely, it connected these users into what is now the world's biggest IT community (even ahead of Twitter in network traffic), and the software is still developing fast. However, unlike open source, Spiceworks' staff alone does the code.

In 2011 the company added iPhone and Android mobile support and new reports are out on network bandwidth traffic, trended usage of printer ink and vendor-neutral UPS power management - in themselves small but all assisting users as they seek to save costs. Now it is working on integrating cloud services such as hosted e-mail.

Of course, giving away software would not on its own be a bright business model. So, right from when the beta appeared in 2006, the company allowed closely-controlled but free vendor advertisements within the user interface, providing an immediate revenue stream. Some vendors then found they got lots of extra leads, so now there are over 500 technical brands, with the advertising facility extended to allow product quoting, bidding and purchasing on-line.

The user community likes these vendor listings, not least because they can save time trawling through vendor offerings, including those from smaller vendors, to inform their own purchasing decisions. This advertising was initially only available through the US, but Spiceworks Europe Ltd will soon add some UK-based partners for the local market.

Newer benefits include a user knowledgebase of templates of "how to" items. So far there are 2,500 of these. So the network story continues.

Privately-held Spiceworks' mantra is "Simplify everything IT" and the company has worked hard to maintain high integrity and best practice. Spiceworks moved into the black in 2011 and now seems destined to soar away. Love or loathe the Spiceworks' business model, it works.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 3rd November 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

The latest BriefingsDirect case study interview explores how large businesses are using cloud commerce and automated sourcing and procurement to dramatically improve how they modernize and manage their buying processes.

In doing so, we'll see how they improve cash management and gain an analytical edge to constantly improving these vital processes. The Ohio State University Medical Center (OSUMC), for example, has moved its procurement activities to the cloud and adopted strategic sourcing, dramatically increasing efficiency across the purchases managed.

Through our discussion with Karen Sherrill, Senior Commodity Manager at The Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus, we learn more about how a large medical enterprise is conducting its business better through collaborative cloud commerce. The moderator is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What did you need to change in how you sourced and procured that led you to adopt more automation and more of these cloud-based services?

Sherrill: The Medical Center is a government agency. So, as you can imagine, it’s tied down with a lot of bureaucracy and paper. But as we moved into the year 2010, we were receiving a lot of pressure to do things faster and more efficiently. The only way to do that was some type of technology to allow our current staffing levels to support the needed growth to be able to support our customers faster.

We were processing about 422 bids a year, and that equated to about the same number of contracts. We had only 26 buyers who were able to support the business, which was projected to grow significantly with our medical center expansion and the growth of our ambulatory site.

Some of the limitations that we were running up against was that our resources were spending a lot of time providing technical support to the old legacy system. In addition, the legacy system was supporting static documents. So we were posting PDFs, and suppliers were mailing in bids, which was not an efficient way to analyze them on the back-end.

We were manually tracking supplier contract terms, conditions, and modifications, and that was taking a significant amount of time in order to execute the final agreement.

We had no repository for contracts. So when people were seeking agreements, we were looking on shared drives and peoples’ desks and were having to go to external storage. Contracts were expiring. We were not aware of them and not renewing them in a timely fashion.

In addition, we had counterparts with the university and we weren't able to collaborate with them and have visibility into what bids they were doing and what bids we were doing. So there was no framework to support that type of collaboration that was essential for us to be successful going forward.

Those were some of the limitations and concerns that we were trying to address and we therefore implemented technology in order to help us meet or relieve some of these concerns.

Gardner: What were the requirements that you had in mind when you were seeking to improve on this situation?

Sherrill: One of the requirements was that it had to be an automated technology and it had to be easy to use. The provider of the technology would need to provide the technical support, primarily not for the buyers, but for the suppliers, who would be interacting with the system and would need training and guidance to navigate the system in order to submit an effective bid result.

Gardner: Tell me a bit about The Ohio State University Medical Center.

Sherrill: The Ohio State University Medical Center is located in Columbus, Ohio. We consist of five hospitals. The main hospitals are the James Cancer Hospital, the Ohio State University Hospital, the main campus, and then we have Ohio State University Medical Center Hospital East.

We have about 58,000 inpatient admissions and about one million outpatient admissions, and we do about 15,000 inpatient surgeries, about 19,000 outpatient surgeries, and about 120,137 visits to our emergency department.

We consist of about 450 beds, and that does not include our one million square foot expansion construction project that we currently have underway, and is expected to be completed in fiscal year 2014.

We're divided into two sections. I head up the indirect products and services, which means that anything that's non-clinical or not related to a patient's care. So that would be marketing, advertising, linen, landscaping, anything that's not directly related with patient care.

I have a counterpart who handles all the clinical types of purchases, which would be mammography equipment, needles, drug-eluting stents, all the medical type related supplies and services.

Gardner: How did the journey begin, and where have you come in just a fairly short amount of time?

Sherrill: Initially they did an RFP for the e-sourcing technology. Ariba was selected. That was done prior to my coming on board, but when I came on board they said, "This is the technology we have selected and you need to implement this."

As a result, being a new person in the organization, I didn't really know how the organization operated, because I came from the private sector. This was a public sector entity. I was a new person, and no one knew who I was.

The first thing for me was to build relationships internally, and I did that by just taking the time to stop, listen to the way they currently did business, and why they did it that way. Sometimes they may be doing things for a good reason or maybe there was a legal reason. There were other things they were doing because they did it for 50 years, and maybe we didn't need do it that way any longer. So that was the first step.

The second step was that the leadership heads agreed to lay out a significant amount of investment in this particular technology, and my only assignment was to implement it. So we created this analogy that the locomotive is out of the gate. The financial investment had been made. Then you have Karen Sherrill, who is trying to prove something, and my only assignment is to get this implemented.

The rule was that you have three choices: you can get on the locomotive and enjoy the ride, you can step aside and let the train pass you by, or you can try to get in front of the train and stop the progress.

That was the analogy or the vision that we put in place, and they could decide where they wanted to fall. We had individuals who chose three different areas.

Most of them decided to get on the train and enjoy the ride, because they were really itching for change and becoming more efficient. Others were nonbelievers, saying that this is never going to stick, so I am going to let the train pass me by. And there were a few who were afraid of technology changing, afraid of the processes changing, afraid of the shift in power as a result of the processes changing, and they feared visibility. So they tried to stop the train.

Because we had leadership support, whenever we ran across those individuals, we could run it up the chain. We had an endearing term that they would then get the smack down or be smacked back in line so the train can continue on.

We had to do that several times, but in the end we knew what the destination was and the locomotive was going to get there. We were not going to be one of those organizations that bought the technology, and when the subscription expired, we had not had one bid go through the tool.

One of my personal objectives was that a year was not going to go by without one bid going through the tool. One year sounds like a long time, but they didn’t have any processes documented. So we had to step back a few months to document the processes in order to effectively communicate how we wanted this technology to be configured.

But it was not going to take more than a year to get one bid through the tool. Then, when we had the one success, the goal was to build upon that success and continue to get more and more momentum. That’s how we were able to drive this locomotive to conclusion very quickly.

One of the key reasons we selected the cloud, on-demand version versus something hosted behind our firewall—or even deciding to integrate it with our systems behind our firewall—is that you have to get IT support internally, get their approval, and that would have delayed the implementation of this significantly.

We consciously made the decision not to integrate. There was really no need to do it at this point. And they wanted to see if we would use the technology. Why invest in integrating something that’s never going to be adopted?

So one of the benefits of using the on-demand solution in the cloud is that you don’t have to build that interface behind a firewall and you do not have to use internal resources to implement or execute the system. So that was one benefit to using the cloud solution.

One of the problems we were having was that on the old system buyers were providing suppliers’ technical support, such as suppliers can't remember their email, they got the wrong category, they didn’t get the bid, and the buyers were constantly having to interface with suppliers.

When you go to a technology approach that’s more advanced, they're going to need even more assistance on how to navigate the sites or get their passwords reset. With the on-demand technology we are able to utilize the Ariba help desk. Most of our tickets are supplier based, and within 12 months of implementing there were over 700 tickets issued to the help desk, which were transparent to me and all the buyers.

That's a benefit that is definitely required when you go to a more advanced technology for processing bids. The suppliers are going to be needing more support, but you can't have your resources that are supposed to be focusing on strategic sourcing spending all their time trying to help suppliers to submit a response to a bid.

Gardner: What are the higher-level benefits around strategic sourcing?

Sherrill: There was an additional benefit from using Ariba Discovery in our legacy system. There were only about 5,000 suppliers. As a public entity we're required to do public notifications of our bid opportunities. With only 5,000 suppliers within our legacy base, the competition could be somewhat limited, because it's only those suppliers who knew about our site and had come there to register to receive our bid notification.

When we transitioned to Discovery, there were about 350,000 suppliers on Discovery. It's grown to over a half-million at this point. So we've substantially increased the number of suppliers that are aware of our bid opportunities.

When you increase the number of suppliers aware of your bid opportunities, the number of suppliers that participate grows or increases. When you have more suppliers participating, you have increased competition, which then lowers pricing. And we found that to be the case on two high profile projects.

One project was related to linen. There was a supplier that we were aware of but we couldn’t find their contact information. We put the public bid notification on Discovery, and the supplier popped up. They participated in our bid.

They didn’t win, but they were strong competition, and the incumbent felt the need to reduce their pricing by about 16 percent, which resulted in a half-million dollar savings in year one and year two of the agreement. So if we didn’t have that strong competition, that saving probably would not have been generated.

The dynamics that were working there was that you had the incumbent, who if they lost the business, would have a lot of explaining to do, working against the dynamic of a new company who was being told, "Do whatever you have to do to get the business." That dynamic drove the pricing down. So that was one benefit.

On several of our categories, we're just getting a lot more suppliers participating, finding suppliers that can source things that the buyers may not be a subject matter expert in. Because we're joined with the university, they're utilizing the system too, and sometimes they're being asked to source things like hay or dental strips. They're not a subject matter expert in that. Where are they going to find suppliers?

By just putting out a bid notification on Discovery, it makes the buyers who are more of a generalist have the tools necessary to find suppliers that can compete on categories that they're not subject matter experts in, in order to generate the competition to reduce price and get additional value from the supplier base.

Gardner: You mentioned earlier that one of the requirements you had was to automate and create more of a solid data repository. How has being able to satisfy that requirement benefited you as a business?

Sherrill: It's allowed us to standardize on the Seven-Step Strategic Sourcing Process, and within that process there are certain documents that have to be completed. We get audited on that documentation being completed. It's basically around: did we follow the public bidding guidelines? Did we do a public bid? Was the lowest and most responsive bidder selected? And what was the documentation, the score sheet, that support that contract award?

Now, when an auditor comes in and they select bids, we can run a report of all the bids that were run during a particular period of time. They can just select the bids that they want, and the buyers can just do a search and pull the documents that were requested.

Before, they had to go to some file cabinet and find the bid number. What if it was misfiled? It allows us to obtain audited documents much more quickly and it also standardized on the process to make sure the documents are completed in order to close the project out. So from a visibility standpoint, that has benefited us.

From the reporting aspect, we also can see how many bids are being run by what people and how many contracts are being executed, so we can get visibility into workload. Someone is doing x number of bids, but their work is not very contract related, versus someone is not doing very many bids, but they are doing a lot of contracts, versus someone who is not doing any bids or any contracts—and that’s kind of an issue. So we can run a report and keep track of productivity, where we may have to shift projects or resources in order to better support our customers. And we can do that by just running a quick report.

Savings is another big initiative. Everybody wants to know, how much savings you generated over what period of time. We used to have an Excel spreadsheet where people were loading in their projects. A high-level executive would say, "I want to know what the savings were," and there would be this big initiative about going to the spreadsheet to update your savings. Of course only one person could go into the particular spreadsheet at a time, and the accuracy of it was always questionable.

Now we have the technology where people load up their projects and load up their savings. We can run a monthly report that is scheduled. People are required to review their savings numbers on a monthly basis and make any tweaks or adjustments. When we get those requests for savings number, the accuracy of it is a lot higher and people feel more comfortable with it and people can update their savings at the same time.

So if we have to do it on a quick term basis, like in two or three hours, you can say, "Go and update your projects." The source analysts can just pull down that report, and we've got our numbers. That is a beautiful thing as far as visibility into savings, tracking the savings, and building more confidence in the accuracy of the numbers we report.

... Before we implemented Ariba, the construction category had a lot of bids, and that particular buyer was getting a lot of complaints that he wasn't turning the bids around faster, or as fast as the end user would like, and the analysis was taking too long. They wanted to see the bid results. They wanted to see it analyzed quickly, and they were escalating these complaints.

We implemented Ariba. So now he's able to execute his bids faster. Once he loaded one bid up, if another one was similar, he could copy and just tweak, which increased the efficiency on his end.

And because the suppliers were inputting their responses online, it was easier for him to export and do the analysis much quicker, but that particular user base also embraced the technology. We've got them to the point that when the bids come in, they can go in and pull them down themselves and do the analysis and decide who they want to shortlist.

That particular group is much happier. We're not getting any complaints, and the projects are moving off of his plate much faster. In fact, we used to have a lot of projects that were past due, past due, past due. The last report that we did there was something that was just due out in the future. So we're starting to get ahead of our strategic sourcing pipeline.

Gardner: What would you have in terms of suggestions or recommendations for folks who are examining moving to a cloud-based procurement and strategic sourcing service or activity? Do you have any 20/20 hindsight, something that you could offer in terms of what you learned along the way?

Sherrill: The first thing I would recommend, and most companies may have it, is that you need to have your processes documented. When you buy one of these subscriptions, the clock starts ticking. If you have to stop and document your processes, then you're not using the tool, but you are paying for it.

Have your processes documented, so as soon as your subscription starts, you can have the tool configured and you don't have to use eight months, like we had to do, to figure out how we wanted the tool to be configured.

They also need to keep in mind that the technology is just a tool and it requires people, processes, and the technology to be successful. I like to say that you have to have brains behind the tool or it's not going to work for you.

Some of the people here had the skill set to embrace the tool and the utilization of the tool, but we have other people who don't have the correct skill set in order to effectively utilize the tool. That’s kind of a constraint if you don't have the authority to transform your organization and right size it with the people that have the correct skill sets.

Another important implementation is that you've got to have support from the top; who will back you up when someone is trying to put up a wall or be an obstacle to the implementation?

The way you get the leadership support is having an individual who has built credibility as far as the transformation actually working. The person leading the process needs to have the right skill set and, from what we found, that was a person who had excellent project management skills.

Also key is that they need to be able to do strategic sourcing. You have more credibility, if you're actually using the tool and actually using the processes that you are implementing.

Number three, the person has to have excellent communication and interpersonal skills to deal with those people who don't want to go along with the process, as well as team building skills. If that particular leader has all those skills, it allows the opportunity for them to do sourcing events and lead by example.

One of the things that made Ohio State University’s implementation successful is that my projects were the ones that went through the tool first. I was able to identify any problems and reconcile them immediately, so that the buyers that were putting in their bids behind mine would never run across those problems.

If there were problems that I encountered that I wasn't able to fix, and a buyer identified it, I could say, "I'm aware of that problem, and here is your workaround," so that I didn't get any "aha" or "got you" moment that they were trying to come up with to stop the implementation.

The second component to that is that you need to have early adopters. These were people who wanted to change, who wanted to have their sourcing projects to be the first ones to go to the tool. That was valuable in that, while I as a project leader will say that this is great, I'm going to say it's great, because I am responsible for rolling it out. But I had early adopters who also agree, who are fans, who are vocal about it, and also had successes. That was very instrumental to rolling the project out successfully.

Then once you've got several of the people who have the credibility of utilizing the tool, who are actually sourcing professionals that are using the tool, it adds credibility, and then everyone else has no choice but to follow along.

The other important thing is that you have to shut down the old way of processing bids. We had a go-live date and we had those individuals that decided to use the old way all the way up until the last date, but when we came to the go-live date, there were no more bids going out the old way. That led to us having 100 percent compliance since we went live May of 2010.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 3rd November 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

In the old days, those tasked with ensuring their organisation’s networks were secure, reliable and sufficient for their needs were dealing with known resources and predictable usage. Network equipment was confined to the organisation’s various premises, the larger of which were linked via dedicated leased lines; smaller locations were often deemed unworthy of network access. The applications that ran over the network were nearly all planned and provisioned by the IT department. That has all changed in the last twenty years as the internet has become a fundamental business resource and employees have become far more mobile.

Today, ensuring the performance, reliability and security of network usage requires that a holistic view is taken of internal network resources, the internet and mobile network services. Only when this is the case can the impact the network has on the end-to-end user experience be understood and a minimum acceptable service level aspired to.

The problem is exacerbated by unpredictable workloads. IT departments themselves have been loading networks with ever more resource hungry applications, for example voice and video conferencing. They have also been cramming more and more processing power in to data centres through the use of virtualisation, which means more network resource is required per physical server. They are also using online resources to supplement internal infrastructure which requires a reliable and suitably “broad” interface to the internet.

On-demand services also make it easy for lines of business to provision their own applications and IT resources. Employees can do this too; accessing social media sites and firing up mobile apps at will, sometimes for good business reasons, but more likely for personal use. Such unplanned use makes ensuring network performance and security problematic, to say the least.

Data from Plan B Disaster recovery reported in Quocirca’s recent report, “Don’t forget the network”, shows that the most common reason for application failure is a network communications breakdown of some sort. In other words the network is the soft under belly of most organisations’ IT infrastructure. To get on top of this requires that the user experience is constantly monitored and that when that experience is not good enough, the impact that the network is having is understood.

Mitigation may require upgrades to network services or equipment, but it may be sufficient in some cases to simply adjust and optimise usage of the existing network. A port assessment by Networks First, a network management company (who sponsored Quocirca’s recent report), shows that in many cases network equipment is actually underutilised. With intelligent application it should be possible to drive more performance out of existing resources.

For many it makes sense to hand the complexities of ensuring minimum network service levels to a third party management company. The initial stage of any such assignment is discovery. What equipment and services are in place and how do they map together to form the total network. It may seem surprising that a given organisation does not already know this; however, most networks have been cobbled together over a number of years by a succession of network managers and contractors, often dealing with tactical issues without regard for an overall long term network strategy.

Once the network components are understood, the network’s current base performance and loading can be assessed. Whether this is good or bad, it is a necessary measure to provide a benchmark for measuring how the management company improves service levels going forward. The user experience needs to be measured on an on-going basis and ensuring it does not regularly drop below a target baseline and that when it does this the reasons why are understood, and if necessary, remedied.

The tools required for monitoring and managing network performance tend to be sophisticated and expensive. Open source ones are available but need good technical skills to make effective use of. Smaller organisation may not have access to any such tools and larger organisations may lack the time or wherewithal to get the most out of them. Network management companies will have developed the expertise to use such tools and can share their cost over a number of customers, making them available to their customers, whatever their size.

Whatever steps are taken to ensure the on-going performance, availability and security of a network, the cost of doing so must be justified by three factors. First, it must be possible to reduce running costs, or at least ensure better on-going performance, without excessive short to medium term investments in new equipment and/or services. Second, the business risks posed by the network and problems with its performance and security must be mitigated and minimum service levels guaranteed. Third, a stable network that performs well and has excess capacity should be able to be relied upon to provide new business value as and when required.

The majority of businesses will not have the in depth understanding of their networks to be sure of achieving many of these goals. Most will not even have had a recent network assessment. If they did, they may well be surprised at how poorly it is serving them and how much may be gained from addressing this. A functional network is imperative for a 21st century business. A well-managed high-availability, high-performance and secure network can be a distinct competitive advantage; a poorly managed one a fundamental business risk.

Quocirca’s report, sponsored by Networks First, “Don’t forget the network”, is freely available here: http://www.networksfirst.com/dontforgetthenetwork.aspx

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 28th October 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

A recent new story in New Scientist: “Light is not fast enough for high-speed stock trading”, reminds us how important the speed of network communications has become for some organisations.

….“cable company Hibernia Atlantic is spending $300 million to build a new transatlantic cable to shave 6 milliseconds from the present 65-millisecond transit time between London and New York. It will be the first new cable to cross the Atlantic in a decade and trading firms are likely to pay premium rates to use it.”

“This is because even though a computer can execute millions of instructions in a microsecond, the furthest light can travel in that time - even in a vacuum - is just 300 metres. That is an age if algorithms are competing to execute the best trades.”….

For intercontinental finance trading firms, the network is the problem; perhaps they should try replacing photons with faster than light neutrinos!

For most businesses, their use of networks is somewhat more pedestrian, however, the network each relies on is fundamental to their business. That network is a complex mix of internal infrastructure, network services from mobile and fixed line providers and the internet; take any element away and their business processes start to fail.

Making the network faster is only part of the challenge for most businesses, although many tolerate worse performance than they need to, because the network has been neglected for too long. The other two big challenges are availability and security.

Only when these three aspects of network management are under control can a business consider that it is getting the best of its existing network assets and know when and where added investments will make a real difference. A high performance, highly available and secure network infrastructure is the only way a business can consider itself ready for today’s IT challenges – to be cloud-ready.

In the age of device and application consumerisation, users, as well as lines-of-business and IT departments themselves, are constantly deploying ever rmore resource hungry applications; businesses expect the network to cope. IT managers that take their network for granted or fail to pro-actively maintain it will be going backwards just by standing still.

Quocirca’s report, sponsored by Networks First, “Don’t forget the network”, is freely available here.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 26th October 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

The issue of success or failure in moving your company data, IT storage, servers or software to the cloud is often driven by technical issues, including performance, bandwidth, security and total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) considerations. While many of these factors are key criteria for selecting cloud solutions, they usually don’t align with the bigger picture that C-level executives must consider when adding new IT solutions.

How IT can help sustain or create a competitive advantage has never been more apparent than today through the use of cloud computing. This technology boasts benefits such as reduced costs and scalability, just to name a few, but many companies fail to find the right fit for cloud within their business. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

This is because cloud computing is not 'one size fits all'. Performance, network bandwidth, security, and total cost concerns can be allayed through a better portfolio and investment approach that considers the multitude of options available.

How cloud computing fits
In industries where working capital bears a high price and is in short supply, businesses often have to make ends meet and have limited investment available. Therefore, being able to source the lowest cost and drive efficiencies even further is critical to growing business and market share.

For companies with limited working capital resource or cash flow funds, the use of on-demand services becomes an attractive option for consumers to avoid upfront costs or maintenance of services. Likewise, companies seeking to provide better profitability from their operation and vendors managing their cost center can leverage on-demand models to target areas of their portfolio to reduce cost and maximize return.

When adopting cloud computing, companies are often driven by cost effectiveness, rather than looking at the bigger picture and asking what cloud solution is the best fit for the business. Cost savings, longevity of product, and performance aren’t mutually exclusive, and all should be factored into the decision-making process when researching and purchasing a cloud solution.

Here are four questions, which include key metrics and drivers, to ask when researching cloud solutions that will maximize the value of cloud computing for your organization:

1. Why is investment being spent on areas of IT that are not differentiating your business and can be commoditized?
   Key Metric: The balance of percent of investment on non-core commodity IT
   Key drivers: TCO needs to consider where to focus IT investment
   
2. How can IT grow and adapt with the ever-increasing expansion of data storage and the growth of computing demands eclipsing on-premise facilities?
   Key Metric: The cost of storage and archiving , recovery and continuity
   Key drivers: Latency of network and storage costs can be targeted through considering the whole IT portfolio, not just niche use cases of cost-performance. Look at the bigger picture.
   
3. How can access to new markets and new channels be better served through extending networks and partnerships?
   Key Metric: Size of markets and effectiveness of sales channels, both internal sales and external direct sales and reselling
   Key drivers: Total cost of acquisition can include the creation or use of third-party distributed marketplaces and self-service portals and platforms
   
4. Is your own IT fast enough to beat your competition or drive the cost savings or revenue and margin growth plans you need?
   Key metric: Speed of IT delivery and its cost and quality of service.
   Key drivers: Performance can be offered through selected service provisioning. Question whether all knowledge needs to be in-house. Skills can be as-a-service too.

Open Group Cloud Computing Book
The Open Group recently published Cloud Computing for Business –The Open Group Guide to address many of these key questions. The book is intended for senior business executives and practicing architects responsible for defining corporate strategy, and it identifies how to select and buy cloud computing services to achieve the best business and technical outcomes.

You can purchase a copy of the book from The Open Group here or download preview sections here:

• Cloud Computing for Business – Preview – first 30 pages
• Cloud Computing for Business – Section 1.8
• Cloud Computing for Business – Section 4.1

This guest post comes from Mark Skilton, Global Director of Strategy and Global Infrastructure Services, Capgemini, and Co-Chair of the Cloud Computing Work Group, The Open Group.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 20th October 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

While integration isn’t necessarily a new problem, the unique challenges of integrating in the cloud require a new approach. Many enterprises, however, are still using point-to-point (P2P) solutions to address their cloud integration needs.

In order to tackle cloud integration successfully, we need to move beyond P2P integration and avoid repeating the same mistakes. To aid in that effort, here is a list (in no particular order) of the top 10 pitfalls of P2P integration to avoid repeating in the cloud:

1. Building vs. buying: If you have developers with integration experience in your IT department, you can have them build a custom P2P integration in house, rather than buy a packaged solution. Building your own integration, however, typically means that you will also have to manage and maintain a codebase that isn’t central to your business and is difficult to change.

2. Quickfire integrations: Let’s say you need to integrate two systems quickly and hire a developer to work on the project over a couple of days. You notice an improvement in business efficiency and see an opportunity to integrate additional systems. You hire the same developer and expect the same quickfire integrations, but the complexity of the project has increased exponentially. The takeaway? It’s always a good idea to approach integration systematically and establish a plan up front, rather than integrate your systems in an ad hoc P2P fashion.

3. Embedding integrations in your application: Although it might be tempting to embed P2P integrations in your web application, you should be cautious about this approach. It may be fine for really simple integrations, but over time, your integration logic becomes scattered in different web apps. Instead, you should think of integration as a separate tier of your application architecture and centralize this logic.

4. Creating dependencies between applications: When you integrate applications in a P2P fashion, you create a dependency between them. For example, let’s say you’ve integrated App A and App B. When App A is modified or updated, you will need to change the integration that connects it to App B. You also need to re-test the integration to make sure it works properly. If you add App C to the mix, your workload can increase exponentially.

5. Assuming everything always works: One of the consistently recurring mistakes of doing quick P2P integrations is assuming that things will not break. The reality is that integrations don’t always work as planned. As you integrate systems, you need to design for errors and establish a course of action for troubleshooting different kinds of errors. Error handling is particularly troublesome when integrating software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, because you have limited visibility and control over the changes that SaaS vendors make to them.

6. It worked yesterday: Just because P2P integration worked for one project does not mean it will work for another. The key is to test each integration you build. Unfortunately, P2P integrations are often built and deployed quickly without sufficient planning or proper testing, increasing the chances for errors. Although it can be difficult and does require a decent amount of effort, testing integrations is absolutely critical.

7. Using independent consultants: Many companies are not staffed with developers who have enough integration expertise and hire consultants to resolve their integration issues. The problem with this approach is that you often have limited visibility into whatever the consultant delivers. If you need to make changes, you typically need to work with the same consultant, which is not always possible.

8. Creating single points of failure: As your P2P integration architecture grows in size and complexity, its chances of becoming a single point of failure in your entire network increase as well. Minimizing the potential for single points of failure should be a priority when it comes to integration, but the lack of decoupling in a P2P approach makes it hard to eliminate bottlenecks in your system.

9. Black-box solutions: Custom-built P2P solutions are usually black box in nature. In other words, they lack reporting capabilities that tell you what is happening between systems. This makes it very hard to debug problems, measure performance, or find out if things are working properly.

10. Creating a monster: Quick P2P integrations are relatively manageable when you have 2 or 3 systems to connect, but when you start adding other systems, your architecture quickly becomes a complicated mess. And because no two P2P integrations are exactly the same, managing your integrations becomes a major pain. If you invest in doing some design work up front, however, this will save you from having to throw away a tangled P2P architecture and starting from scratch to find a new solution under pressure. If you have a well thought out design and a simple architecture, you can reduce the management burdens and costs associated with integration.

This guest post comes courtesy of Ross Mason, CTO and founder of MuleSoft. Disclosure: MuleSoft is a sponsor of BriefingDirect podcasts.

Ross Mason is the CTO and Founder of MuleSoft. He founded the open source Mule project in 2003. Frustrated by integration "donkey work," he started the Mule project to bring a modern approach, one of assembly, rather than repetitive coding, to developers worldwide. Now, with the MuleSoft team, Ross is taking these founding principles of dead-simple integration to the cloud with Mule iON, an integration platform as a service (iPaaS).

By: David Norris, Practice Leader - Analytics, Bloor Research Posted: 19th October 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

As part of my research into Big Data it is sometimes difficult to describe things that convey the scale and capability that is a step change from anything that most of us are used to. So much that goes under the big data banner seems to be just more of what we have done for a long time, with POS data analysis in retail, and CDR analysis in Telco as obvious examples. But every so often you come across something that is really jaw dropping and Quantcast is one such. The scale is staggering and shows a need to operate in real time, so that execution has to be conducted in the time that it takes for you to hit the send button and for the web page to come back with the content you requested, supported by the advertising that Quantcast has identified to the ad server as the most relevant. When it comes to big data, nothing that I have come across so far is as big and demanding as online advertising, and Quantcast are leaders in this field.

There is a seismic shift going on within the online advertising market; not only is it growing in importance at the expense of more traditional channels, but the nature of the advertising displayed is changing rapidly. The advertising world used to be one based upon periodic agreements to buy slots over months - if not quarters - but now that is fast being replaced by real time bidding for each and every slot. Online advertising used to be based on the search request submitted by the consumer, but that is fast being replaced by displaying ads based upon a profile, not of what was requested but by who is doing the requesting. Display advertising is initiated when a consumer submits a request, and has to be concluded quickly enough to allow the correct ads to be brought to their screen with the requested content. That involves making a profile of the user, assessing the options of what to target them with to maximise the chances of them actually buying, and also making a bid for the slot. And to do all of that billions of times a minute and all in the blink of an eye - impressive stuff!

To cope with the requirements of display advertising requires something more than just a bit more of what has gone before: what is required is a revolutionary approach. We are talking about a major step change, it's mass production on an awesome scale. We are talking about petabytes of data being processed, which is not just about the application of static business rules but is about real time machine learning and optimisation; and all of that has to be brought together as a coherent whole and repeated billions of times a minute 24 by 365.

Quantcast are market leaders in this field based upon business knowledge, technical excellence and an amazing ability to deliver on a vision. Quantcast have built the largest data set of human interests on the planet, so whilst Google and Facebook know a lot about certain aspects of what you do, Quantcast have most of the other data that is of value. What that gives them is the facts on which to build their insight. They can profile a user based upon an understanding of who they are in terms of income, education, lifestyle, family etc. and then use that data to make a judgement on whether or not they are likely to buy.

Online advertising is not Marketing - it is about sales. The advertisers are not interested in brand awareness, they want to see things translated into hard sales, and this is where Quantcast excel. Quantcast have the ability to identify what they term a "Lookalike". A lookalike is someone who they can say is more like a buyer than a non-purchaser. They do that quickly enough to then allow a bid for the display to be made, which will allow the ads to be requested from the ad server and displayed with the content without any discernable delay to the consumer, and with a very high likelihood that the display will be made to a purchaser.

The scale of all of this is quite staggering. Quantcast are processing over 20+ billion records a day to build their insight. They are handling over 7 billion auction bids a day. This is all continuously growing and undertaken on proprietary software stack assembled from massively redundant arrays of commodity hardware, because at the volumes these guys operate at failure is certain so keep it cheap and use software to ensure you keep running! This I think provides a real insight into what Big data is all about, and shows just what is going on the background when you submit a request on-line. All of this is truly remarkable and Quantcast are deservedly leaders on their chosen field because all aspects of what they do exhibit a fantastic ability to deliver.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 18th October 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Our next VMware case study interview focuses on the City of Fairfield, California, and how the IT organization there has leveraged virtualization and cloud-delivered applications to provide new levels of service in an increasingly efficient manner.

We’ll see how Fairfield, a mid-sized city of 110,000 in Northern California, has taken the do-more-with-less adage to its fullest, beginning, interestingly, with core and mission-critical city services applications.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the VMworld 2011 Conference. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to share more detail on how virtualization is making the public sector more responsive at lower costs is Eudora Sindicic, Senior IT Analyst Over Operations in Fairfield. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Why virtualize mission-critical applications, things like police and fire support, first?

Sindicic: First of all, it’s always been challenging in disaster recovery and business continuity. Keeping those things in mind, our CAD/RMS systems for the police center and also our fire staffing system were high on the list for protecting. Those are Tier 1 applications that we want to be able to recover very quickly.

We thought the best way to do that was to virtualize them and set us up for future business continuity and true failover and disaster recovery.

So I put it to my CIO, and he okayed it. We went forward with VMware, because we saw they had the best, most robust, and mature applications to support us. Seeing that our back-end was SQL for those two systems, and seeing that we were just going to embark on a brand-new upgrading of our CAD/RMS system, this was a prime time to jump on the bandwagon and do it.

Also, with our back-end storage being NetApp, and NetApp having such an intimate relationship with VMware, we decided to go with VMware.

Gardner: So you were able to accomplish your virtualization and also gain that disaster recovery and business continuity benefit, but you pointed out the time was of the essence. How long did it take you?.

Sindicic: Back in early fiscal year 2010, I started doing all the research. I probably did a good nine months of research before even bringing this option to my CIO. Once I brought the option up, I worked with my vendors, VMware and NetApp, to obtain best pricing for the solution that I wanted.

I started implementation in October and completed the process in March. So it took some time. Then we went live with our CAD/RMS system on May 10, and it has been very robust and running beautifully ever since.

Gardner: Tell me about your IT operations.

Sindicic: I have our finance system, an Oracle-based system, which consists of an Oracle database server and Apache applications server, and another reporting server that runs on a different platform. Those will all be virtual OSs sitting in one of my two clusters.

For the police systems, I have a separate cluster just for police and fire. Then, in the regular day-to-day business, like finance and other applications that the city uses, I have a campus cluster to keep those things separated and to also relieve any downtime of maintenance. So everything doesn’t have to be affected if I'm moving virtual servers among systems and patching and doing updates.

We’re also going to be virtualizing several other applications, such as a citizen complaint application called Coplogic. We're going to be putting that in as well into the PD cluster.

The version of VMware that we’re using is 4.1, we’re using ESXi server. On the PD cluster, I have two ESXi servers and on my campus, I have three. I'm using vSphere 4, and it’s been really wonderful having a good handle on that control.

Also, within my vSphere, vCenter server, I've installed a bunch of NetApp storage control solutions that allow me to have centralized control over one level snapshotting and replication. So I can control it all from there. Then vSphere gives me that beautiful centralized view of all my VMs and resources being consumed.

It’s been really wonderful to be able to have that level of view into my infrastructure, whereas when the things were distributed, I hadn’t had that view that I needed. I’d have to connect one by one to each one of my systems to get that level.

Also, there are some things that we’ve learned during this whole thing. I went from two VLANs to four VLANs. When looking at your traffic and the type of traffic that’s going to traverse the VLANs, you want segregate that out big time and you’ll see a huge increase in your performance.

The other thing is making sure that you have the correct type of drives in your storage. I knew that right off the bat that IOPS was going to be an issue and then, of course, connectivity. We’re using Brocade switches to connect to the backend fiber channel drives for the server VMs, and for lower-end storage, we’re using iSCSI.

Gardner: And how has the virtualization efforts within all of that worked out?

Sindicic: It’s been wonderful. We’ve had wonderful disaster recovery capabilities. We have snapshotting abilities. I'm snapshotting the primary database server and application server, which allows for snapshots up to three weeks in primary storage and six months on secondary storage, which is really nice, and it has served us well.

We already had a fire drill, where one report was accidentally deleted out of a database due to someone doing something—and I'll leave it at that. Within 10 minutes, I was able to bring up the snapshot of the records management system of that database.

The user was able to go into the test database, retrieve his document, and then he was able to print it. I was able to export that document and then re-import it into the production system. So there was no downtime. It literally took 10 minutes, and everybody was happy.

... We are seeing cost benefits now. I don’t have all the metrics, but we’ve spun up six additional VMs. If you figure out the cost of the Dells, because we are a Dell shop, it would cost anywhere between $5,000 and $11,000 per server. On top of that, you're talking about the cost of the Microsoft Software Assurance for that operating system. That has saved a lot of money right there in some of the projects that we’re currently embarking on, and for the future.

We have several more systems that I know are going to be coming online and we're going to save in cost. We’re going to save in power. Power consumption, I'm projecting, will slowly go down over time as we add to our VM environment.

As it grows and it becomes more robust, and it will, I'm looking forward to a large cost savings over a 5- to 10-year period.

Gardner: Was there anything that surprised you that you didn’t expect, when you moved from the physical to the virtualized environment?

Sindicic: I was pleasantly surprised with the depth of reporting that I could physically see, the graph, the actual metrics, as we were ongoing. As our CAD system came online into production, I could actually see utilization go up and to what level.

I was also pleasantly surprised to be able to see to see when the backups would occur, how it would affect the system and the users that were on it. Because of that, we were able to time them so that would be the least-used hours and what those hours were. I could actually tell in the system when it was the least used.

It was real time and it was just really wonderful to be able to easily do that, without having to manually create all the different tracking ends that you have to do within Microsoft Monitor or anything like that. I could do that completely independently of the OS.

Gardner: We're hearing a lot here at VMworld about desktop virtualization as well. I don’t know whether you’ve looked at that, but it seems like you've set yourself up for moving in that direction. Any thoughts about mobile or virtualized desktops as a future direction for you?

Sindicic: I see that most definitely on the horizon. Right now, the only thing that's hindering us is cost and storage. But as storage goes down, and as more robust technologies come out around storage, such as solid state, and as the price comes down on that, I foresee that something definitely coming into our environment.

Even here at the conference I'm taking a bunch of VDI and VMware View sessions, and I'm looking forward to hopefully starting a new project with virtualizing at the desktop level.

This will give us much more granular control over not only what’s on the user’s desktop, but patch management and malware and virus protection, instead of at the PC level doing it the host level, which would be wonderful. It would give us really great control and hopefully decreased cost. We’d be using a different product than probably what we’re using right now.

If you're actually using virus protection at the host level, you’re going to get a lot of bang for your buck and you won't have any impact on the PC-over-IP. That’s probably the way we we'll go, with PC-over-IP.

Right now, storage, VLANing all that has to happen, before we can even embark on something like that. So there's still a lot of research on my part going on, as well as finding a way to mitigate costs, maybe trade-in, something to gain something else. There are things that you can do to help make something like this happen.

... In city government, our IT infrastructure continues to grow as people are laid off and departments want to automate more and more processes, which is the right way to go. The IT staff remains the same, but the infrastructure, the data, and the support continues to grow. So I'm trying to implement infrastructure that grows smarter, so we don’t have to work harder, but work smarter, so that we can do a lot more with less.

VMware sure does allow that with centralized control in management, with being able to dynamically update virtual desktops, virtual servers, and the patch management and automation of that. You can take it to whatever level of automation you want or a little in between, so that you can do a little bit of check and balances with your own eyes, before the system goes off and does something itself.

Also, with the high availability and fault tolerance that VMware allows, it's been invaluable. If one of my systems goes down, my VMs automatically will be migrated over, which is a wonderful thing. We’re looking to implement as much virtualization as we can as budget will allow.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 13th October 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

We hear about the post-PC era, but rarely does anyone talk about the post-LAN or even the post-WAN era. Yet the major IT trends of the day—from mobile to cloud to app stores—are changing the expectations we all have from our blended networks.

How are the campus networks of yesterday going to support the Internet-borne applications and media delivery requirements of tomorrow?

It’s increasingly clear that more users will be using more devices to access more types of web content and services. They want coordination among those devices for that content. They want it done securely with privacy, and they want their IT departments to support all of their devices for all of their work applications and data too.

From the IT mangers' perspective, they want to be able to deliver all kinds of applications using all sorts of models, from smartphones to tablets to zero clients to HD web streaming to fat-client downloads and website delivery across multiple public and private networks with control and with ease.

This is all a very tall order, and networks will need to adjust rapidly or the latency and hassle of access and performance issues will get in the way of users, their new expectations, and their behaviors—for both work and play.

The latest BriefingsDirect IT discussion is with an executive from at Akamai Technologies to delve into the rapidly evolving trends and subsequently heightened expectations that we're all developing around our networks. We are going to look at how those networks might actually rise to the task with Neil Cohen, Vice President of Product Marketing at Akamai Technologies. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Given the heightened expectations—this always-on, hyper connectivity mode—how are networks going to rise to these needs?

Cohen: Nobody wants the network to be the weak link, but changes definitely need to happen. Look at what’s going on in the enterprise and the way applications are being deployed. It’s changing to where they're moving out to the cloud. Applications that used to reside in your own infrastructure are moving out to other infrastructure, and in some cases, you don’t have the ability to place any sort of technology to optimize the WAN out in the cloud.

Mobile device usage is exploding. Things like smartphones and tablets are all becoming intertwined with the way people want to access their applications. Obviously, when you start opening up more applications through access to the internet, you have a new level of security that you have to worry about when things move outside of your firewall that used to be within it.

Gardner: How do you know where the weak link is when there is a problem?

Cohen: The first step is to understand just what many networks actually mean, because even that has a lot of different dimensions to it. The fact that things are moving out to public clouds means that users are getting access, usually over the internet. We all know that the internet is very different than your private network. Nobody is going to give you a service-level agreement (SLA) on the internet.

Something like mobile is different, where you have mobile networks that have different attributes, different levels of over subscription and different bottlenecks that need to be solved. This really starts driving the need to not only 1) bring control over the internet itself, as well as the mobile networks, but also 2) the importance for performance analytics from a real end-user perspective. It becomes important to look at all the different choke points at which latency can occur and to be able to bring it all into a holistic view, so that you can troubleshoot and understand where your problems are.

There are a lot of different things that people are looking at to try to solve application delivery outside of the corporate network. Something we’ve been doing at Akamai for a long time is deploying our own optimization protocols into the internet that give you the control, the SLA, the types of quality of service that you normally associate with your private network.

And there are lots of optimization tricks that are being done for mobile devices, where you can optimize the network. You can optimize the web content and you can actually develop different formats and different content for mobile devices than for regular desktop devices. All of those are different ways to try to deal with the performance challenges off the traditional WAN.

Gardner: Are the carriers stepping up to the plate and saying, "We’re going to take over more of this network performance issue?"

Cohen: I think they're looking at it and saying, "Look, I have a problem. My network is evolving. It's spanning in lots of different ways, whether it's on my private network or out on the internet or mobile devices," and they need to solve that problem. One way of solving it is to build hardware and do lots of different do-it-yourself approaches to try to solve that.

That’s a very unwieldy approach. It requires a lot of dollars and arguably doesn’t solve the problem very well, which is why companies look for managed services and ways to outsource those types of problems, when things move off of their WAN.

But at the same time, even though they're outsourcing it, they still want control. It's important for an IT department to actually see what traffic and what applications are being accessed by the users, so that they understand the traffic and they can react to it.

Gardner: I'm seeing a rather impressive adoption pattern around virtualized desktop activities and there’s a variety of ways of doing this. We’ve seen solutions from folks like Citrix and VMware and Microsoft and we’re seeing streaming, zero-client, thin-client, and virtual-desktop activities, like infrastructure in the data center, a pure delivery of the full desktop and the applications as a service.

Cohen: There are different unique challenges with the virtual desktop models, but it also ties into that same hyper-connected theme. In order to really unleash the potential of virtual desktops, you don’t only want to be able to access it on your corporate network, but you want to be able to get a local experience by taking that virtual desktop anywhere with you just like you do with a regular machine. You’re also seeing products being offered out in the market that allow you to extend virtual desktops onto your mobile tablets.

You have the same kind of issues again. Not only do you have different protocols to optimize for virtual desktops, but you have to deal with the same challenges of delivering it across that entire ecosystem of devices and networks. That’s an area that we’re investing heavily in as it relates to unlocking the potential of VD. People will have universal access, to be able to take their desktops wherever they want to go.

Gardner: And is there some common thread to what we would think of in the past as acceleration services for things like websites, streaming, or downloads? Are we talking about an entirely new kind of infrastructure or is this some sort of a natural progression of what folks like Akamai have been doing for quite some time?

Cohen: It's a very logical extension of the technology we’ve built for more than a decade. If you look a decade ago, we had to solve the problem of delivering streaming video, real-time over the web, which is very sensitive to things like latency, packet loss, and jitter and that’s no different for virtual desktops. In order to give that local experience for virtual users, you have to solve the challenges of real-time communication back and forth between the client and the server.

Gardner: If I were an architect in the enterprise, it seems to me that many of my long-term cost-performance improvement activities of major strategic initiatives are all hinging on solving this network problem.

Cohen: What I'm hearing is more of a business transformation example, where the business comes down and puts pressure on the network to be able to access applications anywhere, to be able to outsource, to be able to offshore, and to be able to modernize their applications. That’s really mandating a lot of the changes in the network itself.

The pressure is really coming from the business, which is, "How do I react more quickly to the changing needs of the business without having IT in a position where they say, 'I can't.' " The internet is the pervasive platform that allows you to get anywhere. What you need is the quality of service guarantees that should come with it.

If you can help transform a business and you can do it in a way that is operationally more efficient at a lower cost, you’ve got the winning combination.

... Akamai continues to offer the consumer-based services as it relates to improving websites and rich media on the web. But now we have a full suite of services that provide application acceleration over the internet. We allow you to reach users globally while consolidating your infrastructure and getting the same kind of benefits you realize with WAN optimization on your private network, but out over the internet.

And as those applications move outside of the firewall, we’ve got a suite of security services that address the new types of security threats you deal with when you’re out on the web.

Gardner: Is there an analysis, a business intelligence benefit from doing this as well?

Cohen: What’s important is not only that you improve the delivery of an application, but that you have the appropriate insight in terms of how the application is performing and how people are using the application so that you can take action and react accordingly.

Just because something has moved out into the cloud or out on the Internet, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have the same kind of real-time personalized analytics that you expect on your private network. That’s an area we’ve invested in, both in our own technology investment, but also with some partnerships that provide real-time reporting and business intelligence in terms of our critical websites and applications.

Gardner: Not only are the types of applications changing, but is there a need to design and build these applications differently, in such a way that they are cloud-ready or hybrid-ready or mobile-ready?

Cohen: If I were to go back to the developers, I’d ask, "Do you really need to build different websites or separate apps for all these different form factors, or is there a better way to build one common source, a code, and then adapt it using different techniques in the network, in the cloud that allow you to reuse that investment over and over again?"

What I expect to see is more adoption of standard web languages. It means that you need to use good semantic design principles, as it relates to the way you design your applications. But in terms of optimizing content and building for mobile devices and mobile specific sites, a lot of that is going to be using standard web languages that people are familiar with and that are just evolving and getting better.

Websites are based on HTML and with HTML5, the web is getting richer, more immersive, and starting to approach that as the same kind of experience you get on your desktop.

We go back to the developers and get them to build on a standard set of tools that allow them to deal with the different types of connected devices out in the market. If you build one code base based on HTML, for example, could you take that website that you've built and be able to render it differently in the cloud and allow it to adapt on the fly for something like an iPhone, an Android, a BlackBerry, a 7-inch tablet, or a 9-inch tablet?

Gardner: So part of the solution to the many screens problem isn’t more application interface designs, but perhaps a more common basis for the application and services, and let the network take care of those issues on a screen to screen basis. Is that closer?

Cohen: That’s exactly right. More and more of the intelligence is actually moving out to the cloud. We’ve already seen this on the video side. In the past people had to use lots of different formats and bit rates. Now what they’re doing is taking that stuff and saying, "Give me one high quality source." Then all of the adaptation capabilities that are going to be done in the network, in the cloud, just simplify that work from the customer.

I expect exactly the same thing to happen in the enterprise, where the enterprise is one common source of code and a lot of the adaptation capabilities are done, again, that intelligent function inside of the network.

These are all hot topics. The WAN is becoming everything, but you really need to change your views as it relates to not just thinking about what happens inside of your corporate network, but with the movement of cloud, all of the connected devices, all of this quickly becoming the network.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 30th September 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Social media and the increased role that linked communities of users have on issues, discourse, and public opinion are changing the world in many ways -- from how societies react such as in the Middle East turmoil to how users flock to or avoid certain products and services.

The fact is that many people are now connected in new ways and they’re voicing opinions and influencing their peers perhaps more than ever before. Businesses cannot afford to simply ignore these global -- and what now appeared to be long-term -- social media trends.

The latest BriefingsDirect discussion then focuses on the impact that social media is having on enterprises. We specifically examine with an executive at Capgemini on what steps businesses can take to manage social media as a market opportunity, rather than react to it as a hard-to-fathom threat. Hear too how services are being developed to help businesses to better understand and exploit the potential of social media.

The discussion with Paul Cole, Vice President of Customer Operations Management and Business Process Outsourcing at Capgemini, is the first in the series of podcasts with Capgemini on social media issues and business process outsourcing. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Capgemini is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: It seems a bit of a twisted logic when we say that social media can be both a threat and an opportunity. How could social media be both?

Cole: It's all in how you decide to respond. Social media, in and of itself, is a neutral topic. It could be viewed as a utensil or a platform, upon which you can do things. And depending on your intent, whether you’re an enterprise or a customer, those activities could be viewed favorably or negatively. And that's true as much in the sociopolitical world as in business.

The important thing is that social media is the platform, not the action itself, and it’s really what you decide to do over that platform that makes the difference in business and in the world at large.

Gardner: Do you have any evidence, research, or findings of any sort that bolster this notion that social media is a sea change and not just a blip?

Game changer

Cole: Well, based on a survey we commissioned last winter, somewhat surprisingly, a bit more than one in 10 executives did characterize it as a fad relative to the business world.

However, you can look at it in the everyday world around us and the media as it relates to impact on society and in the sociopolitical spectrum, and there's very little doubt that it’s changing the game there. I believe it will have an equally profound impact on business over time.

Social media has become the bullhorn of the 21st century. It allows people to spread their message, to amplify that message, to mobilize the community, and also to monitor in real time the events as they unfold.

We are having to deal with it across the political, social, and cultural spectrums. Witness, unfortunately, the emergence of something that we’re now calling flash mobs, a case where the platform is being misapplied toward organizing a community of people who have damaging intentions.

So back to your question on threat or opportunity, significant or insignificant impact, it’s all based on the intent and actions of the individuals utilizing the utensil.

Gardner: On one hand, we seem to see a lack of control or at least different aspects to how people behave. We don’t have the necessary tools. But on the other hand, we're seeing a lot more information generated, and information often is the lifeblood of how organizations react and adjust to markets.

Cole: Information overload is one potential consequence of this. It’s all a matter of how you take that information and translate it into actionable insights, against which you can make some smarter business decisions, and from our perspective, ultimately deliver a better customer experience which will help you grow.

What’s neat about what’s happening in the world of technology, on top of the social environment, is that there is a whole new generation of tools emerging that allow you to develop that insight.

There are four steps that a company can go through to generate social intelligence. First, is listening to what is going on out there. There has not been an earpiece for us to really take the pulse of the market, and what's happening in the virtual world or the internet world until the recent development of some of these social listening tools. So the ability just to know what's going on, who is saying what, who are the influencers, what are their sentiments is an important first step.

Monitoring change

The second step is the ability to monitor that over time and see how attitudes, perceptions, and most importantly, behaviors are changing and what are the impact and implication of that for your business, either from a marketing or a selling or customer service standpoint. In addition to monitoring that, you’re also now able, with text analytics tools to not simply track and describe what happening, but also isolate cause and effect.

So if I'm launching a Twitter campaign, putting a new product out there, running a contest, or engaging in some kind of social care activity, what is the impact it's having in terms of the customer’s behavior and what adjustments can I make to be more successful?

It's being able to get attribution and get to a root cause by applying these analytic tools. So you've listened, monitored, and analyzed. The killer app, if you will, is the last step of closing loop in terms of your ability to respond. So many companies today are putting their toe in the water in the social world by listening with these tools and trying to understand what's being said. It's new enough where not that many have actually industrialized their process for responding.

Ultimately, your ability to now go back into that community and influence the customer or attempt to influence the customer and their behavior is where there is a tremendous upside for companies in terms of generating higher growth and profit.

Gardner: How is Capgemini working toward some solutions on this?

Cole: As a global provider of consulting technology and outsourcing services, Capgemini attempts to keep its finger on the pulse of market. You have to be blind and deaf to not recognize that social media has quickly emerged on the scene. The question then becomes, as a provider of services, how to translate that into sets of offerings that add value for our clients.

At one level, you could look at social media as a wave or a phenomenon. I’ve been in the professional services, technology services business for 30 years, and we’ve seen the waves come and go, whether that would be CRM or ERP through SAP or eCommerce, which I think this mirrors quite a bit, and Y2K. So there's always an emerging area that people will try to understand, chase, and then capitalize on.

My particular area of expertise is around customer management. So I look through the lens of how a company acquires, develops, and retains its customers and how can we manage some of that process for them in a faster, better, or cheaper manner. We do that today in traditional forms with managing their call centers or their customer service operations, helping them present stronger web content, providing them with insights through analytical services, and so forth.

What social media started to suggest to us was that there was a new opportunity to bring another service to the market that allowed clients to focus on the business problem that they’re trying to solve and provided us the opportunity to provide them with everything they needed to mobilize around that objective in the social world.

Marketing enhancement

In and of itself, social media is not going to drive your business forward. As we've discussed, it's really a platform or a utility upon which you can engage customers for one or more activities based on a business objective. It does, at the end of the day, relate back to what you're trying to accomplish.

When I went to school, we were trained on the four Ps in marketing. You develop a product that the marketplace is interested in. You price that product at a level that the consumer or customer perceives value so they want to transact with you. You need to promote that in terms of distinguishing you against your competitors and bring that product to market with some form of distribution. We call that the four Ps.

Obviously you still need to do all those things, but in the social world now, there is a new twist. If you think about the product, we used to take a very linear approach to doing market research, testing concepts, via surveys and focus groups. In today’s social world, you can do that much more dynamically. There's a whole phenomenon around crowd sourcing with which you can solicit people's input and feedback and iterate on that massively, and closer to real time.

Your ability to get really close to the marketplace is enhanced tremendously by social media. In terms of promoting, it used to be broadcast media, but now you're able to do micro campaigns. You can do tweet campaigns. You can do campaigns through Facebook. Your ability to target the individual that you are trying to influence has gone up exponentially.

We've always talked about the segment of one, but it was very difficult to do. Now, you can get in there and really understand who is driving popular opinion, who are the big influencers, who do you need to convert to be an enthusiast or an advocate of your product, and launch very specific campaigns against them. It's a different form of promotion.

It's the same thing with pricing and distribution. While you still need to do many of the same activities, the way in which you will execute on those activities has evolved and become much more dynamic.

Every function within the organization has a potential application in the social world. I don't think it's the kind of thing that any one executive or any one function is going to own per se.

It's a matter of looking at it through the lens of the process that you're responsible for, and trying to understand how to apply new thinking and activities to improve your efficiency or your effectiveness of that area. That could be public relations and the brand, marketing and developing effective positioning, product development and management, selling through more targeted campaigns or, at the end of the value chain, a better servicing of the customer to generate greater loyalty.

Different ways

Gardner: Are we going to repeat history and have a fragmented approach to this or is there a better way?

Cole: You’ve really put your finger on a core issue. It all depends. What is social media? That depends on who you are and what you're trying to accomplish. That’s going to be variable based on your area of responsibility within the enterprise.

There is something to be said for standardization and taking a platform-based approach to avoid the recurring tendency of investing in your own individual solutions and then lacking interoperability or having to face integration issues and so forth.

While the application of what you do on top of the social platforms may vary, there is potential for the organization to operate as an enterprise on top of a single instance of a platform. That’s part of why we got into offering a managed service.

We allow the client to focus on what they are trying to do in the marketing, selling or customer service world. We provide them with the infrastructure, the technology, the process discipline, the data, and importantly, the social media advocates, the human intelligence layer that is ultimately conducting the monitoring and the analytics and the interpretation of what’s happening there.

By buying into a managed service the company can avoid having to make capital investments in the technology, avoid the potential risk of different groups going off and doing their own thing. They can remain current, because they don’t have to pay attention to this fast paced dynamic technology market and what is the state of the art. That would be our responsibility.

Hopefully, it's the best of both worlds. They can each, as user communities, decide what they want to get out of social media, but be able to leverage the fact that they're all investing in a common platform. ... It is a different way of storing, distributing, and accessing the data.

What it translates into for us is the ability to provide process as a service. That’s a fundamental shift in the marketplace that’s occurring as a result of the development of cloud capabilities.

Organizations can just tap into a service, and that makes it easier for them to get into a new area. It’s faster, it’s less expensive. We're trying to apply that same concept to social media. We can provide a faster, better, and/or cheaper approach. The client buys the process as a service on a subscription model.

We assure the integrity and security of the data. We provide the data management, the repository, the infrastructure, and the toolset. You're buying a service around a process, whether that be listening to your customers, wanting to launch marketing campaigns, providing social care or whatever.

The whole SaaS cloud phenomenon is just changing the distribution model and also facilitating an easier approach for companies to get up and running in this area.

Gardner: How are organizations getting started?

Cole: As evidence of the fact that it is a new phenomenon, you can just notice the volume of conferences that are out there with social media in the title. It just reinforces that companies are trying to understand still what "good" looks like. They’re out there looking for best practices. They are still paying for "PowerPoint," for consultants to come in and help them understand the strategy, the power of social, what that translates into in terms of metrics and governance, and so forth.

The market is very much in its exploratory stage. I'm not sure you can over-architect what social media means to you at the moment. This is something that you have to get in and dip your toe in the water. Instead of "ready, aim, fire," it's probably "fire, fire, aim, ready, fire." This means that you need to iterate.

You don’t know what you don’t know….. until you get in to the market and you start to listen to what is happening out there, identify who the key influencers are, where they're talking about, who are the advocates for the brand, and who are the potential saboteurs who can represent a threat? What are some of the kinds of programs and activities that one can run?

Rather than the grand strategies, the big-bang approach, this particular area is deserving of more experimentation, and iteration. Then, over time, we need the development of a broader strategy. But, you need to get in there, and listen, and learn, and act, and from that you'll figure out what works and what doesn’t work.

Part of what we’re trying to offer our clients is the ability to do that faster than doing it themselves, where they have to go out, acquire the tools, hire the people, and put in place the processes.

In this case, they can say we want to launch a campaign and we’d like to understand how we can use the social world to solve customer service problems or whatever. We provide all the tools and capabilities to do that. They focus on learning and evolving their strategy of what to do in the social world.

... As part of that, in our Social Media Management Solution, we’ve built a joint solution with a company called Attensity, which really comes at the market initially from the text analytics world, but offers a nice suite of applications that enable your ability to listen, monitor, analyze what's being done, and then respond to the customer in terms of workflow and direct customer engagement. So it's what you decide to do, but it's also having the right toolset with which to do it.

Gardner: Are there any places to which we could direct our listeners and readers for additional information, perhaps whitepapers, other research, and/or more information on your services?

Cole: Certainly capgemini.com. We do have a featured social media section on the website. We've recently published a whitepaper called "Harvesting the Fruit from the Social Media Grapevine". We hope that clients will find that insightful. It's a bit of a point-of-view on where the market is today and where it's headed.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Capgemini.

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Proliferated, Outmoded Applications and Data Explosion Hamper Enterprises in Innovation, Any Quick Move to Cloud Computing Capgeminim CSC Line Up for AppLabs Enterprise IT Plus Social Media Plus Cloud Computing Equals The Future What Can Businesses Learn About Predictive Behavior from American Idol? I Collaborate, Therefore I Think, Therefore I Am ... An Enterprise

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 29th September 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Our next VMworld case study interview takes the pulse of CharterCARE Health Partners, and examines how virtualized desktops and thin clients are helping with digital records management and healthcare industry compliance and privacy requirements.

We learn how Rhode Island-based CharterCARE has embraced private cloud and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to support its distributed, 579-bed community-based health system. The organization operates the Roger Williams Medical Center, Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, and several other caregiver facilities.

We'll hear how the tag team of private cloud and VDI has provided better data management, security, reliability, and regulatory auditing capabilities. The successful infrastructure modernization effort has also helped CharterCARE move to electronic health records and has helped improve their processes for clinicians.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the recent VMworld 2011 Conference. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to dig into more detail on the CharterCARE IT infrastructure improvement story is Andy Fuss, Director of Technology and Engineering at CharterCARE Health Partners. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: I'm interested why data management has been a primary driver for you as you've looked to adopt both the private cloud and VDI. What is it about the data equation that’s made this look like a good solution for you?

Fuss: We need our data to be accessible everywhere, at every time, no matter what provider is at what facility. Even from an engineering and technology standpoint, no matter what system analyst, what network engineer may sit down wherever they are to troubleshoot an issue, we need that common set of tools.

Common repository

We need the common repository of information for a caregiver. That would be the electronic medical information. It could be the x-rays, the slides, the CT scans, or the results that were dictated by a radiologist. Whatever it might be, that information needs to be available in a flexible manner and delivered directly to the deskside experience.

Now, if that’s a desktop, it needs to be on a regular PC, but if we're talking about a tablet, we need to accommodate the tablets that people bring in and have come into the facility and are now actively being used, or zero client technology.

We have all the different technologies and pieces. We're trying to promote these pieces to be used and trying to be flexible with accommodating them and getting people to the information that they need so they can take care of the first priority, which really is patient care.

Gardner: Tell me about the extent of your distributed campus and environment. Not only are you dealing with many different types of data and many different endpoints, but you're also distributing this across a multitude of different environments.

Fuss: We have two main acute hospitals. We have a nursing home, a cancer center, outpatient care offices, and several different offices all around the community. So the data truly needs to not be resident in one spot.

We also needed to have a secured disaster recovery (DR) facility, so that if anything were to happen to our primary data center that’s on one of the campuses, we could flex seamlessly over.

So building a cloud for us made total sense. That cloud hovers between one of two data centers. One is at one of the acute facilities, and then 100 miles away in another state, we have another data center. Our cloud roams between the two, and we have data flowing from each area.

So the connection really is no longer about where it’s physically located by any restriction. It’s more of just gaining access to the internet and being able to make connections. Where you're accessing that data from or where you're using it is seamless to the end user and provides a solid customer experience.

... There are a lot of people who can embrace different types of clouds. You've got hybrid clouds, private clouds, public clouds, all with different offerings. For us it made sense to do a private cloud. For others, it may make sense to do hybrid type cloud.

As we move toward the future, I can see that we might be able to offload some of our services toward the public cloud. As we increase the size of some of our data and we have patient care cut over to the side, there might be some other data that does not follow the same guidelines. We can put that into a secure public cloud and attach everything.

VMware is coming out with those tools and using those tools to make that kind of continuation project possible to look at. We're very excited about some of the initiatives that we've seen at VMworld -- the vCloud Director, with security, the different layers built into that that could make some of the public cloud usable for us for specific applications.

Gardner: Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds as if private cloud to you means better security.

Fuss: Oh, it does, most definitely. I'm no longer worried about the endpoint device walking away from us. I'm not worried about theft of an individual device, because the device has nothing more on it than some connectors to get somewhere.

When we were first embracing zero client technology in a lot of places, we did some studies. We talked to some different people who had already embraced it. One particular hospital I spoke to said they had on video someone stealing a zero client device, perhaps thinking that they had stolen some great new utility tool for home, a new PC. They were all excited.

They also have them on video, bringing it back the next morning, because they couldn’t do anything with it when they got to their house. Using cloud, using the technologies that ride in the cloud, like VMware View and access to the data through VMware View, really helps to lock things down and it helps to prevent things.

No data leakage

In the past, somebody could have taken a PC, and let’s say that PC could have had metadata on it or could have had some files on it that were saved in someway. It was comical to hear that story from another person who was in a similar situation as us, where there was no data loss or data leakage, even if that device had never come back. So the cloud really has tightened things down for us.

One of the primary concerns for our electronic medical records is that it’s patient data, financial data, and so needs to be PCI-, and HIPAA-compliant. All the different compliance standards that we need to abide by are all satisfied with the ways that these machines are locked down, by the way the cloud is moving, and where we allow it to move to.

Gardner: How do you view private cloud and VDI -- separate, distinct, together? What’s the relationship?

Fuss: They're definitely together. They have to be together. In my opinion, it’s what makes sense. We want to see the data tight. We want to see the integration tight. We can have a cloud where the data roams back and forth, but the connection into the cloud actually uses that data.

As I sit here on a device, a personal device at the office that is connected to my virtual desktop instance, this device doesn't even have to be on my network. I'm utilizing a public network that we have here at the hospital system and I've connected into my virtual desktop. I have full accessibility. I'll flip over here in a few minutes when I go into another meeting. I'll bring my iPad with me, another personal device, and I'll be connected right to that same virtual desktop.

So the cloud has allowed me, with View, to seamlessly move between all these different devices. I no longer am tied to something. I'm no longer tied to a specific physical location, a physical anything. I really am completely mobile. I can work anywhere at any time and have that same common set of tools.

It doesn't matter if I'm working out of the DR site. I should no longer call it disaster recovery. I should call it our second data center because even though it really is 100 miles away, I can still sit there and work all day long just like I'm anywhere else. That ability is really the value that using a cloud and using View gives you.

I want a physician in his office, out on the road or wherever they might be, at home, in a practice have access to that same data and have a similar look and feel every time they connect from whatever device. That's what these solutions that we've opted for have provided for us.

... We can already see the expansion, the use of that technology in different areas. We have some physicians with iPads working throughout the facility, visiting the patient’s bedsides, looking at their charts, all that kind of flex room is great.

I've seen it in our administrative areas, our human resource officer using iPad remotely. We’ve had our Chief Information Officer using an iPad, using a PC at home, and connecting through the View client to her machine.

We’ve gotten support not just from forcing the technology out there, but by people asking for the technology. That’s how you can tell you have a good product. People asking, "Can I be moved to this new product, because the flexibility of my supervisor, director, whoever is using is what I need."

Hit a home run

If the director calls saying, "I need this employee to have this flexibility," you know you've hit a home run with the technology. I haven’t had anybody call asking for another PC at another location for the same person to work. I have people calling saying, "I really need to get them onto this technology as soon as it’s possible, because it's made this employee so efficient. I need to do that for everybody else."

... Also, everything that we're doing allows us not to focus on location, and that's the big thing. We break away from location. So where is the data center? Is it going to be affected by the next hurricane coming up the East Coast? Well, if we have a fear of where the hurricane is, we can move our data center 100 miles inland. Or if we think that inland is going to be more affected, we can keep it in Rhode Island, which is right on the ocean.

So we have that ability, and nobody knows where that data is other than the IT department. We know it's within the system, within the security, but nobody would ever notice the difference or question where the data is running or residing. They might ask, and we could tell them, but nobody says, "Wow, that's slow" or "I can see a difference." None of those kind of calls comes in as the cloud flexes.

Gardner: At VMworld, you've had a chance to look over View 5, and the PC-over-IP benefits there; is that something that’s in your pipeline?

Fuss: Absolutely. We’re blessed to be in the VMware 5 beta test user group, and we’re loving what we see. We like the performance. The PC-over-IP expansion is amazing. They’ve written a great protocol there with their partners, and that is the technology that’s going to continue to drive the reinvention of the desktop.

We’ve gone through the reinvention of the desktop a few times in my career, from somewhat dumb terminals to smart terminals to client server. We seem to be making our way back to where we’re keeping our data safe in data centers and in silos. We’re giving people a great end-user experience to give them a full PC feature-set. We’re doing it all securely and we’re doing it all with products that integrate seamlessly with one another, and that’s really the goal.

We want the user to sit down and feel comfortable with whatever technology they use, and to have a way to take care of our patients that need our help and take care of what other important administrative business they may do, so we can keep moving forward.

... So the benefits are there, and they’re just growing now, as it's integrated and being used more in the clinical areas. We’ve seen some growth recently. Even our pharmacy staff is starting to carry iPads around, when they’re doing inventories of some of the medication machines and being able to get that information right there, but on a device that’s secure. If they were to leave it behind, nobody could connect to anything, and that data all sitting safe inside the data center.

So the adoption is there, the benefits are already there, and it's just growing and growing. Every time I turn around, we’re bumping another 50, another 75, virtual machines, into another pool of machines for a new purpose, and that’s the expansion that I keep wanting to encourage.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 2nd September 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Our next VMworld case study interview focuses on the City of Pittsburgh’s Information Systems organization and how they’ve deeply embraced virtualization at the server level and now increasingly at the desktop level. We’ll see how critical city services in Pittsburgh are being supported using VMware View 4.6 and the new View 5.0 version and how the beneficial synergy between virtualized servers and desktops is shaping up.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the VMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas the week of August 29. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to share his story on bringing VDI to his employees is Alex Musicante, the System Security Architect in the City Information Systems department in Pittsburgh. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Your environment is almost 100 percent virtualized on the server side. First, why is there such a holistic embrace, and how has that provided the confidence for you to move now aggressively into the desktop virtualization space as well?

Musicante: The City of Pittsburgh decided to embrace virtualization five years or so ago, and we did this in a development environment with VMware. The confidence was not there for the server virtualization, and we decided it's a good place to offer development to our internal engineers.

From there, we kept building and building, and we decided to put our first production system on there. Without a problem, everything started going. What virtualization had to offer for us was higher availability, higher reliability.

When we were remote, we had full console access. We were able to offer higher reliability on our development than our production. That was what led us to go to production. It's very difficult in this day and age with budgets and all that. We're now doing more with less. In order to be able to accommodate that and be able to handle the increased workload with fewer people, it has been embracing server virtualization, and virtualization in general.

In server virtualization we currently have 16 hosts, 98 percent virtual. There are about 250 or so virtual machines (VMs) between two data centers; and we are using VMware Site Recovery Manager to replicate or to bring up the replicated site in the event of a disaster or any planned maintenance that we need to perform at one data center versus the other.

Gardner: I’d like to hear more about your desktop virtualization strategy, but let's learn a little bit more about the scope and scale of your mission-critical set of services.

Musicante: The City of Pittsburgh’s City Information Systems Department, which I work for, has about 3,000 users that they support. That ranges from all public safety—Police, Fire, EMS, and Building Inspection—to the branches of government—the Mayor’s Office, the City Council, and Controller’s Office as well as other important departments like the Finance Department, Personnel, Human Resources, and Parks and Recreation. That's who we're supporting, and each and every one of them has their own little caveats of technology that they need.

Gardner: You’re also of course concerned about security, performance, disaster recovery, which you’ve already mentioned. How has virtualization helped you not just in cutting cost, but in making these more hardened, more resilient services?

Musicante: In terms of hardening and security, when we took our virtualization approach, we started out by saying that we were going to physical-to-virtual (P2V) and migrate a lot of these machines. As we proceeded and matured in that environment, we decided that we were going to build fresh and build new.

So when we did our server virtualization, we looked at virtualization in general. It became an opportunity for us to evaluate how we were going to harden things, how we were going to secure things, and since now we don’t have to support that many physical servers, we can expand on our current capacity, and hardware.

We’re able to separate things, where servers that were multi-functional servers, database server, file server, web server, all in one, now get to be three different servers, and only allow communications to the specific application and supports what they need.

Gardner: Any issues around storage? Has that been something that you’ve been able to wreak some efficiencies out as well?

Musicante: Storage was very interesting for the City of Pittsburgh. They were coming from an environment where everything was on direct-attached storage (DAS), and going to a storage area network (SAN) environment, which they had. They had an array with an HP 6000, but they were only using 500 gigabytes at the time. So storage transition was huge in terms of reliability, but as well as cost at the same time.

It was an unexpected thing from the city’s perspective, as they were not in the market for an array where everything is central. It was all individual and unique to each host and physical server. So storage came about and offered a lot more flexibility and a lot of benefit to the City of Pittsburgh, but it was not without hassle.

Gardner: So you’ve gone through that process—98 percent is very impressive on your server, and your infrastructure. What prompted you to now take the additional step to use VMware View and move into desktop virtualization?

Musicante: The City of Pittsburgh moved into desktop virtualization with very similar characteristics as we looked at the server virtualization as how can we offer higher reliability and higher support, give us more management from a central standpoint back at our remote offices, and offer them to the clients and given them the same if not a better level service for additional benefits from administrative.

There were a bunch of reasons, and those are like pushing out software updates without downtime for the users. They just log off and get a new one. It was security provisioning software, keeping all the storage and everything back in our data center, so nothing leaves the facility.

Those were motivating factors as well as keeping administrative cost down. That was the push, and it actually took off. It took some time, but it's being embraced more than I ever would have thought it would have been.

Gardner: Let's learn a little bit more about the nature of your distribution requirements. Obviously, you have City Hall. You’ve got some centralization. You’ve got police headquarters and fire headquarters, but you’ve also got a lot of distributed sites around the city. So let us better understand your distribution requirements when you’re going to desktop virtualization?

Musicante: There are 175 remote facilities, and they range from connectivity of facilities that are on dark fiber, with 100, 200, 300, 500 users, to these individual remote offices that are located in the park facility, and they have one or two employees that are coming across the DSL line.

One of the major complaints was the problem with connectivity where people are on DSL. They would load the roaming profile or pull documents or upload files and they would see this huge lag where it took them upwards of 30 minutes to start their day off. They're now able to go into View, sign-in, and they're in. So we pretty much recovered 30 extra minutes for some of these employees on a daily basis.

Gardner: How are you leveraging the PCoIP bandwidth improvements for the WAN?

Musicante: Very well. With each version it's definitely gotten better. Still from a management side we do maintain an IPSec tunnel to all of our facilities.

So PC-over-IP has been what we’ve been using for our remote facilities, even back in the 3.0 days. When 4.1 PC-over-IP came out, 4.5, 4.6, it's been progressively getting better and has higher availability with more response. When 4.6 matured, they gave us the View Security Server, and even now with 5, it has increased and lowered the actual requirements necessary for traffic. So some of our facilities are not feeling the same same pain that they were prior to.

Gardner: As you’ve been making this transition, it would be good to understand better how you’ve adopted version 5. To what degree are you using version 5 for View on your desktop virtualization installations?

Musicante: Currently, we're in a mixed mode. We have two environments which we're trying to expedite to move off of, but we currently have a 4.6 environment and a 5.0 environment. Right now with our 5.0 environment we are embracing Persona Management for some of our EMS employees.

Gardner: That’s another one of those ancillary benefits that people don’t always appreciate but it’s pretty important.

Musicante: Absolutely. It wasn’t something that we were expecting, but at the same time, when we go back with 20/20 hindsight, we reevaluated and said that that makes sense. Everything is now identical. We use non-persistent machine. So every time they log in, it's a brand-new machine and it’s configured identically the way we want it. The only factor that’s different for each user is their profile.

Gardner: You know how to resolve them, it’s not starting from scratch.

Musicante: Absolutely not starting from scratch. That’s also one of the beautiful benefits. As we move and as we mature with the product and as the product matures itself, we seem to be taking a very parallel progression between the two—the City of Pittsburgh and VMware View. Persona Management right now has been doing wonders for that.

Those departments that have migrated over and wanted to take this “experiment” of Persona Management have been pleasantly surprised. Definitely, that’s also a point to bring up. When you hear problems from people, when end-users complain, there’s always something that they target. It was networking at one point. Then it moved on to virtualization and everyone said it was the promised virtualization, whether it was or wasn’t.

With View, it actually stands alone. It an outlier. Our users call and they say, "I would like to be on View. I would like to be on that system." For an end-user come back to us and request that blows our mind. We appreciate it. It means we’ve done something right. And it also has to be attributed back to VMware. They’ve done something right.

Gardner: Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet, and then some, with 5.0, what are some of the other salient benefits?

Musicante: That’s going to give us extra 5 percent. There is always that server virtualization where you’d only get that 95 percent, although we got past that. There’s that 5 percent that you couldn’t or you wouldn’t for whatever reason. That’s the same market for the desktop virtualization and 5 percent was for high graphic-intensive people. We're able to now start to achieve that and we're looking to try to achieve that.

We've not gone through some of the advanced 3D accelerated graphic things that are now out with 5. We are in the process of testing, but it’s currently in our test labs within our department. It’s also in terms of deriving the benefit. We have all of our infrastructure. We're going to with a more green approach. So we're going with zero client. They're currently Dell FX 100s. So they may take one tenth of the power, but there is very little there.

I know that VMware View 5.0 3D acceleration is going to be there and is going to help out, but those people are going to be using the repurposed machines, taking their machine, putting a stripped down version of 7 and use it from there. So we're trying to achieve that, but it’s multiple facets.

Gardner: When we think about your adoption pattern around virtualization, you took your time, learned through your development environment, walked in, made some progress and then really ramped up on adoption for your server side. You’ve followed a similar pattern now with desktops.

What’s next? Is there an additional synergy between a private cloud implementation, where you can get even better synergy efficiency? Tell me what you think about this fear and moving towards even higher plane of efficiency and productivity on that overall delivery from a central data center environment?

Musicante: It’s really unclear where we're going to go. As far as cloud and where the cloud is taking the City of Pittsburgh and where the City of Pittsburgh is going with cloud, City of Pittsburgh currently is in the process of taking that last two percent of our system that isn’t virtualized, which is Exchange, and we are currently in the process of going towards the cloud. So it’s actually going to be going to Google Apps for government for mail.

As far as cloud within ourselves, the City of Pittsburgh is using its resources that we’ve regained or recouped from all of our consolidation purposes, especially with the government processes and mentality of doing more with less. There is a lot of fellow government agencies that we're now going to be partnering with to provide them infrastructure as a service.

That’s where some of the other product lines come in like vCloud Director, to be able to allow them to still manage their infrastructure to use our resources, and we can now ourselves be a cloud provider, which I have been marketing as Cloud9 because there are nine entities including the City of Pittsburgh—nine entities that we are going to consolidate.

Gardner: I'm impressed with the fact that you’ve been able to move through this progression, recoup those savings, and then apply it to the innovation that get you yet more productivity and savings that you can further apply. That’s commendable. Any words of advice for folks that are perhaps not as far along as you’ve been on this progression? What 20/20 hindsight and words of wisdom might you supply them?

Musicante: With server virtualization, everyone is involved in it, and that is the easy part. Desktop virtualization is where we got hit hard and the lessons that will be learned is that end-users matter. Every step of the way, you need their input. It’s not just an administrative decision saying this is the right thing. You need to be good at psychology to convince your users that this is what they want, and getting them to the point of seeing that this is the best approach or getting their input.

That really makes all the difference in the world. You’ll have the same end result and you’ll get to the same target, to the same place, but you need their input. It was not the same with server virtualization. That was for the administrators. They owned it. It was their territory. These desktops that you're taking from the users, yes, they’ll have a better reliability, better up-time, better everything, and better end-user experience, but they feel that that’s theirs, and rightly so.

The only thing that I could say is to involve your users. Get them in the proof of concept from the beginning. Get their input, what they need, what they want, how they want to access it, and with that it’ll no doubt be a sure success.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 1st September 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Looking to drive another nail in the coffin of the desktop PC, VMware Inc. has announced several new products at VMworld to advance cloud computing and virtualization.

A global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, VWware unveiled several new products and cloud-based services today at the Las Vegas convention, all aimed to “help organizations break free from device-centric legacy desktop models and accelerate their journey to a new way to work in the post-PC era.”

The key announcement was the upcoming release of VMware View 5, and enhancements to VMware Horizon. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Available in a few weeks, VMware View 5 promises to simplify IT manageability and control, while providing a high fidelity desktop virtualization experience. Users can expect to realize protocol enhancements that will provide as much as 75 percent bandwidth improvement over LAN and WAN connections; advanced support of 3D graphics; scalable unified communications integration for voice and video media services; and virtual desktop personalization with integrated persona management.

“As our customers begin to embrace this shift to the post-PC era, we offer a simple way to deliver a better Windows-based desktop-as-a-service that empowers organizations to do more with what they already have,” says Christopher Young, vice president and general manager of end-user computing at VMware. “At the same time, we are investing in expertise and delivering the open products needed to accelerate the journey to a new way to work beyond the Windows desktop. This combination of empowered users and flexible IT as a service, enables a new working style that leads to a more connected enterprise.”

VMware’s vision is to deliver a more user-centric, IT-as-a-service experience for the connected enterprise. In this new model, enterprises leverage hybrid cloud resources, while maintaining a managed, secure environment, and providing new ways for employees to collaborate across applications and data from any device, where and when a user needs it.

Enhancements to VMware Horizon extend the benefits of cloud-based application management to virtualized Windows applications and connected mobile workspaces.

During the opening keynote address yesterday at VMworld, VMware CEO Paul Martiz said that IDC research now shows that more servers running on virtual than physical server environments. What's more, a new server virtual machine is created every 6 seconds, more than the pace of live births in US, said Maritz.

Maritz also alluding to the post-relational database era, which follows fast on the post-PC era. He said that the new requirements and architectures of the cloud and mobile trend lines mean that data stuck in RDBs won't bee able to keep up. A new layer is needed, and he pointed to VMware's Cloud Foundry, with open source licensing, as the new best option. Furthermore, Foundry's open framework will be portable across most clouds, he said.

Martitz also announced vSphere Essentials, data center appliance in a box, aimed at SMBs.

Maritz painted a vision of post-PC and post-RDB worlds, with cloud and mobile as key drivers. VMware clearly has it's sights set on being the de facto standard infrastructure—the picks and shovels—that enable this new architecture.

Other product announcements
But there are plenty of other product announcements coming from VMware today as well. Here is a run-down on other releases or enhancements:

• Leveraging the application virtualization capabilities of VMware ThinApp, VMware Horizon Application Manager will now offer a centralized console to help organizations manage access, deployment and updates to virtual Windows applications regardless of the type of device or the underlying operating system. These new capabilities will be available in beta by the end of the year.
• Based on the VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) technology previewed earlier this year, VMware Horizon Mobile will offer new features that establish and securely manage an employee’s connected mobile workspace in isolation from their personal mobile environment. This will enable an employee to choose a single Android device for both personal and work use.
• Future releases of VMware Horizon will marry the management of existing Windows applications via application virtualization and publishing technologies from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, with the management of mobile and cloud-based applications. In addition, VMware Horizon will enable the secure delivery of cloud-based, personal and enterprise data resources.

VMware also previewed two new end-user computing technologies—code named Projects AppBlast and Octopus—that advance the company’s vision for enabling universal application and data delivery:

• Project AppBlast will provide the universal delivery of any application -- including Windows-based applications -- to any device supporting HTML5. This will enable instant remote access to applications.
• Project Octopus will leverage data sync technology from VMware Zimbra and Mozy to enable enterprise-grade collaboration and information/data sharing. Project Octopus will also offer easy integration with VMware Horizon, VMware View and Project AppBlast to create a secure enterprise cloud service.

And as discussed above, available in the coming weeks, VMware View 5 is a family of products, including:

• VMware View 5, Enterprise Edition: includes VMware vSphere 5 for desktops, VMware vCenter Server 5 and VMware View Manager 5, a flexible desktop management server enabling IT administrators to quickly provision and tightly control user access. VMware View 5 Enterprise Edition is priced at $150 per concurrent connection.
• VMware View 5, Premier Edition: includes VMware vSphere 5 for desktops, VMware vCenter Server 5, VMware View Manager 5, View Client with Local Mode, VMware ThinApp 4.6, VMware View Composer and VMware vShield Endpoint to enable integration of offline capabilities, image management optimization, application virtualization and centralized anti-virus protection with virtual desktop delivery and management. VMwareView 5 Premier Edition is priced at $250 per concurrent connection.

Fastest thin client
In other VMworld news, Wyse Technology is introducing its fastest thin clients ever, the Wyse Z90D7 and Z90DW, are now shipping.

Wyse also introduced two new Linux-based members of its Z class family – the Wyse Z50S and Wyse Z50D. The Wyse Z50 is the high performance thin client family based on Wyse Enhanced SUSE Linux Enterprise. It is the industry’s only enterprise-quality Linux operating system, which Wyse execs say combines the security, flexibility, and market-leading usability of SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell, with Wyse’s thin computing optimizations in management and user experience.

The heart of the Wyse Z class thin clients is a new engine, where all the major system elements—CPU cores, vector engines, and a unified video decoder for HD decoding tasks—live on the same piece of silicon. This design concept eliminates one of the fundamental constraints that limit performance.

These units also include the first SuperSpeed USB 3.0 connectivity in a thin client, which enables the newest peripherals and speeds up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0. Customers benefit from having more display options than ever before including DisplayPort and DVI.

HP has delivered a big presence at VMworld, including early show announcements in virtualization support infrastructure. But HP has also announced enhancements to its HP FlexNetwork architecture.

HP FlexNetwork is part of the HP VirtualSystem suite, and enables organizations to flatten their networks from 3-tier to 2- or 1-tier. This should aid with performance, increase throughput, and lower network latency.

HP officials say the new FlexNetwork products deliver a reduction of up to 50 percent of the cost, and 85 percent of the complexity of 3-tier architectures. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

This should come as good news for organizations that have multi-tier systems architectures, and are struggling to implement a cloud computing environment with ease and simplicity.

“Organizations with a proprietary multi-tier network infrastructure create lock in that drives up cost and management complexity. As a result, implementing new applications and services is difficult and slow, reducing overall productivity,” an HP spokesman says.

HP has taken a number of steps to increase the delivery of applications and services through virtualization with the new enhancements to HP FlexNetwork. These include server connectivity, switching, management, and security.

In making the announcement, HP officials were quick to discuss the changes that virtualization makes to data center traffic patterns, and how the enhancements to FlexNetwork are addressing that.

Server traffic
“According to Gartner research, by 2014, network planners should expect more than 80 percent of traffic in the data center’s local-area network (LAN) to be between servers,” the HP spokesperson says. “However, to improve business agility, enterprises rely on virtual machine mobility, which can burst data rates up to 9 gigabits per second and significantly slow data transfer between servers.”

HP’s product response is HP FlexFabric solution for the data center, which includes HP Virtual Connect, and the HP 5800 and HP 12500 series switches. The company is aiming to eliminate unnecessary network layers and costly bottlenecks with a 1-tier network fabric approach. It provides wire-once direct connections to thousands of virtual, physical and storage components.

HP also announced the release—or pending release—of:

• The new HP 5830 top-of-rack switch series, which delivers high-density server access connectivity, as well as flexible application and storage deployment. Powered by the HP Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF), the HP 5830 top-of-rack 48 port switch is available now starting at $11,990.
• HP Virtual Connect as first wire-once technology that simplifies the job of implementing a cloud computing environment by eliminating 95 percent of network cables and reducing cost by up to 65 percent. Introduced in 2007, Virtual Connect recently passed the 5-million-port milestone and accounts for 16.2 percent of all 10Gb ports shipped worldwide, according to company officials. New Virtual Connect v3.3 firmware upgrade provides customers with greater flexibility and capacity—and can support more than a thousand VLANs per server (eight times more than the previous version). It also holds promise for six times greater network capacity per server network interface card (NIC). Virtual Connect v3.30 firmware will be available for download in September 2011.
• HP Intelligent Management Center (IMC 5.1) is the industry’s first single pane-of-glass network management platform. It manages both virtual and physical environments across heterogenous networks; and it automatically discovers VMs and switches, and identifies their relationship to the physical network, enabling clients to simplify administration and gain control of their assets. HP Intelligent Management Center 5.1 is expected to be available fall 2011 with a list price of $6,995.
• HP TippingPoint and VMware are co-developing next-generation security solutions. The aim is to deliver pervasive security in the cloud with unified management and automated scanning for identifying and blocking potential threats. HP TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), with Controller+Firewall solution, is available starting at $40,000.

(BriefingsDirect contributor David Weldon added research and reporting to this post.)

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 31st August 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Our next VMworld case study interview takes aim at ADP Dealer Services and details how they're benefiting from expanding use of desktop virtualization. We'll learn about how ADP Dealer Services is enjoying increased security, better management, and higher productivity benefits as they leverage desktop virtualization across their applications development activities.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the VMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas the week of August 29. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

To hear more about their VMware View expansion experience, we're joined by Bill Naughton, the Chief Information Officer at ADP Dealer Services, and Shane Martinez, Director of Global Infrastructure at ADP Dealer Services. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Why have you pursued desktop virtualization for application development first?

Naughton: We had an interesting problem to solve. The first issue was developer productivity, which is very important to us, because we do have a big software development engineering house that needs to be productive.

And we had issues where our traditional approach of putting them on the user based plan was not giving them the creativity, flexibility, and productivity they needed to spin up new environments, to have a free workspace so they could do what they needed to create products.

So we thought that a VDI solution, combined with a quick provisioning and deprovisioning for development environments, would make them more productive and protect their normal day-to-day use of email, ERPF, Salesforce automation apps that they might need on the traditional production environment.

It's been now going on for probably about a year-and-a-half. We were looking at what was the right design and what was the process, because there is a lot of process involved with change management, with the provisioning and deprovisioning. So we did some pilots and now we're in full roll out and pretty excited about the results.

We're talking over 1,000 technical people who will use the solution—software engineers, QA type people, test people. And because ADP Dealer Services has a pretty big application portfolio, we're talking about hundreds of environments, thousands of servers that have kind of grown up over the years that support our R&D environment.

Gardner: What does ADP Dealer Services do that relies to heavily on software development prowess?

Naughton: ADP is the world’s largest outsourced human resources, payroll, and tax benefits company started in 1949. It's about a $10 billion company, with 50,000 employees and close to 600,000 clients. It's one of Fortune’s most admired companies and one of only four companies with a AAA credit rating from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.

ADP Dealer Services is a division of ADP, about a $1.7 billion company that’s serving the auto retail client base throughout the globe. It has about 8,000 employees and 25,000 clients to serve through software and services the auto retail and the OEM auto manufacturing industry.

Gardner: So I imagine that the applications that you are creating for these dealers are very intensive in terms of data, and many different types of applications, custom apps, as well as more off-the-shelf or third-party, need to be integrated, so a fairly complex set.

Naughton: It's a very complicated set. You are right on the money. It's all the way from ERP systems that we develop for the industry, CRM applications, digital marketing applications, all the way to the telephony side of the business.

So there is hardware integration, third party integration, but it’s mostly ground-up software development that is the core base of the business of cloud computing apps, multi-tenant applications, and then applications that will tie into telephony systems and other applications through APIs. But the core products are ground-up software development.

Gardner: So it's a highly technical undertaking and your developers are really on the front lines of making this business work for you. This isn’t a nice to have. This is mission critical across the board?

Naughton: Absolutely. And you want to make sure the developers have as much creativity and freedom as they can possibly have.

At the same time, ADP, being a public company and being a company that people entrust the data with, we need to have good security across our different platforms. So the challenge was to give the developers a platform where they could be creative, where they could be given a wide range of latitude of tools and technology and, at the same time, protect their day-to-day compute that they needed for things like messaging or applications the managers need to administer the workforce.

Gardner: Bill, as CIO, you had this vision about how to empower and enable your developers, perhaps even cut some costs along the way, I can imagine that you went to Shane and said, "Make it happen." Is that how it happened or did Shane come to you and say, "Listen, I've got this great idea?"

Naughton: It was a joint effort between knowing that we wanted to do something different, knowing that the developers had unique needs, knowing that security had definite requirements on how we protect from malware, how we protect from viruses, how do we patch and protect the environments. And then we had a cost consideration too in that the spiral of development that we provide to the CTO in his office was getting quite big.

So the combination of Shane being forward-looking at a solution, the requirements we had from the development community, and the security requirements from our GSO office brought it all together into something where we're going to try something a little bit different than traditional approaches.

Gardner: Shane, how has this impacted you from the infrastructure point of view?

Martinez: There's been a tremendous consumption. The adoption by the associate community has been wonderful. We were faced with a challenge where we had to present the development community with an environment, which, as Bill mentioned, had the latitude for them to perform their job function and they could be creative again. They were re-empowered to do their job and had all of the operational benefits that a typical compute would give them.

In addition to just that environment flexibility, also with the VDI View infrastructure, we were able to provide them with compute environment that was more specifically designed to meet their needs.

As Bill mentioned, we have a litany of different applications and development communities, and each one of their specific compute requirements are different. Using a technology like View that allows us to abstract from the hardware, we create infrastructure specific to each one of their needs.

There was a complex challenge that obviously we had to overcome, which was how do we present this pretty powerful environment and construct to people who are distributed, not just across the continental United States, but globally. By creating a separate VRF instance in our wide area network, we were able to bifurcate our WAN and create two discrete networks. That second network, which effectively became a shadow of our production infrastructure, is where the VDIs and all of our lab environments live.

As Bill said, that separate environment is one that is specifically designed to meet the needs of our development community. By virtue of having VDI and View out there for them to access over the separate network, they then can reach it from anywhere within our global network. So we have associates that are distributed across all of our sites that have the ability to consume these resources that we made available.

Gardner: And they have been mostly happy with the latency issues and performance?

Martinez: Oh, very pleased. As a matter of fact, there are several different ways in which we allow them to consume it. The first one is they can access the assets direct. With the View client, they can access their remote workstation and work on it however they are comfortable with.

In addition, though, we have the ability for them to check out that workstation and they can use that workstation either locally or when they are remote on the road. They can use that on their assets and then come back in and check it back in the library. It works very well for them.

There are two great benefits. The first thing is, from an administrative standpoint, just purely the FTE consumption. I have a very small staff that is designed to manage this specific environment. Currently, we're managing 300–400 workstations per administrator. So we get a very high level of density to associate from a support standpoint.

In addition, we can create and deploy workstations exceedingly fast, at a rate some days of up to 50 and 60 a day.

In addition to that, there's the server administration, as Bill mentioned, with Lab Manager and the accompanying technologies from VMware that we use. This small team is also able to manage in excess of 2,000 servers for the same group of developers and the development community.

Naughton: It's really important that we try to provide a service to the development community that they send a case in and Shane’s team does the provisioning, deprovisioning for them. We spin the environments up real quick and deprovision and reclaim the space. So we get efficiency there.

The service by the admin is taken care of—the whole process that they need for new environments. You want to make sure the environments get taken care of. So they do both of that. There is a service component to it that we think is important.

Gardner: You're referring here to your application development activities, but your R&D and lab, are they separate? Do they overlap? How does that work, and what have you been using to support them both with VDI?

Martinez: There are two different environments, as Bill mentioned, throughout the lifecycle of creating a new product. Our development community has to obviously create code and write code, but as we become more of a cloud-based service provider to the auto, truck, marine industries that are out there in the world, we become more of that and interact with the Internet.

So that lab, that test environment, needs to be very dynamic as we create new product, release it, and have it interact with the Internet and some of the OEMs and external parties that have access to that.

As a result of that, this environment also is able to provide us with a very secure, remote location that is separate from our ERP applications, our standalone Salesforce automation applications, etc., where we can have people connect and test product, beta product, alpha product even, in a place that poses no risk to the rest of our infrastructure.

As we, as an organization, continue to abstract our operating systems and the applications from the hardware that underlies it, it allows us to become more flexible in how we deliver compute and application services, both to our internal associates as well as to our external clients.

So ADP has undertaken a great deal of effort in order for it to create its own private cloud infrastructure and the View client and the vSphere environment really is an adjunct to that strategy.

Gardner: All right. One other area that I've heard folks mention, when it comes to the benefit of more centralized control and management, is in the disaster recovery and business continuity aspects. Are you able to also feel lower risk in terms of how you can back up and maintain continuity regardless of external factors for both your application development activities as well as production?

Martinez: Absolutely. By virtue of compressing a great deal of this very critical data and intellectual property into an environment that is virtualized and abstracted by virtue of all the benefits you get with just a virtual environment, vMotion, etc., our data and our environment are much more highly available.

In addition, by virtue of the design, the way in which it’s architected, by bringing all this critical data together, we then can better manage it through a variety of ways that we manage our DR. However, this has really been the stepping stone for us to begin to compress and consolidate all of our distributed lab environments across the world.

Gardner: It almost sounds like a snowball effect, the more you do this, the more you can avail it. The more you can avail it, the more you can apply it, and so on and so forth. Does that overstate in the case when it comes to virtualization?

Naughton: No. Shane worked with some of the more forward-looking and toughest R&D owners we have—Hamid Mirza, our CTO, and Mark Rankin, the VP of Engineering for our core products, a person who has very demanding requirements—and they started at the places where we felt we had the most benefit.

So he has evangelized what we have done. That’s really helped with adoption across the business and it's really starting to gain momentum.

Martinez: From a business standpoint we've stopped the technical infrastructure sprawl that we had in our lab environment. So we don’t see that. It was lots of small purchases for servers, for backup infrastructure, for commodity items. That has stopped. So there's a business benefit on just the rates of buying an infrastructure sprawl.

The provisioning and deprovisioning has compressed the cycles that they have of the rote activity that we had in the past. Developing software is a complicated process. So we've automated the steps that we could through the provisioning and deprovisioning.

In terms of all the connectivity challenges for developers, where they had to get to environments and the management of those environments, we have relieved the burden on that. They have the client, it spins up, and they are ready to go instantaneously, versus a lot of traversing and a lot of custom configurations just to get the environments to make a mark.

Gardner: What’s the business payback for this so far?

Naughton: This had an ROI, and sometimes the infrastructure on the ROIs are difficult because this is enabling technology. But it made our criteria that we have investment. So the ROI is pretty quick. We have certain criteria before we make any investment. This one fell right in line with it and it’s delivering what it’s supposed to.

Gardner: Is there anything about what you've done with virtualization and desktop virtualization that you think might allow you to go out and bring your apps and business processes to a wider range of devices?

Martinez: Absolutely. The environment has very powerfully allowed us to open up our compute activities at the end-user, associate level, so that they can consume applications that typically wouldn’t be available to them on a pad, tablet device, or even a smartphone. Now, by virtue of being able to access those particular workstations in that environment with the View client, they now can consume those applications that don’t have something specifically written for a tablet or a smartphone.

So effectively, they use that remote View workstation as a jump post that allows them to interact with any application. So we are no longer bound by the restriction that a tablet or a smartphone may normally present our associates.

In addition to that access, we're allowed to do it securely. Historically if you wanted to allow a tablet or a smartphone to interact with applications, you had to do so straight from the Internet. It was very difficult to do so unless the person was connected to your network.

Now with this View application, we can disconnect, check out a workstation, allow it to securely VPN in, and then interact with all of our applications in the infrastructure, via a mechanism that the associate is comfortable with, and an interface that they have historically worked with. So our adoption rates have been very high.

Naughton: What Shane is describing is for our internal users who need applications that we provide internally to our workforce. From product development side of the house, what’s been exciting about what we have put together is, as they have come up with mobile platforms, as they want to do native development, or they want to go to HTML5, this environment, we'll be able to scan up those environments for new technology for them to test and to write code against very quickly. In the past we would have to set up a mobile platform, set up a gateway, or put up an environment that would do native apps.

What we have done here is allowed test, QA, and development very quickly for new technology like mobile, which is there in the midst, where we have actually put product in the marketplace, put mobile product out there against our core applications and we are able to spin up those environments very quickly.

Gardner: Here at VMworld, we're hearing a lot about the new View 5.0. Do you have any impressions about anything in it in particular that’s enticing?

Martinez: Some of the greatest benefits that we see coming down the pike from the new product releases is going to be specifically around the protocols it will support. I think that with some of the features and functionality that can be difficult over high latency links over a wide area network, with improved and tighter protocols—PC-over-IP as an example—the benefits to our associates will be huge.

Some of the challenge is that when you abstract the associate locally from their interface, it can be the WAN, high latency links, etc. We have no challenges with this today, but I can see as we go into more and more remote markets, that we need to support third-world countries, where links can be exceedingly pricy or can be very poor in their quality, this will be a huge benefit to our associates.

Naughton: Depending on where the profiling ends up, that’s also important, because as we get into different user bases in our associate community, profiles is going to be an important piece that will help with faster adoption and the ability to include more of our workforce up to a VDI solution.

Gardner: Last question before we wrap up. I imagine too that your success in using VDI for application development is a harbinger of expanding this into other parts of ADP Dealer Services or maybe even ADP at large. Any thoughts about whether you're a proof point that others will look to in terms of taking VDI into even more of your organization?

Naughton: At our payroll division in our corporate office they're looking at different solutions and have solutions in production for VDI. Obviously, the benefits of administrative productivity improvements with patching, deployment, roll outs, streaming applications, are all stuff that are exciting developments.

We have probably gone deeper in our home shore, in our application development areas. But I think that there’s some pretty strong use cases where more of our transaction-based functions like customer support, internal sales, where they are high transaction volumes where a VDI solution would be very helpful.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 30th August 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

HP is taking full advantage of the VMworld conference in Las Vegas this week to make a series of major announcements around its virtualization and cloud computing products. One of the most important is the announcement of HP VirtualSystem for VMware.

While there is growing adoption of cloud computing, many organizations find the cloud to be a hard thing to grab hold of. HP is promising to help simplify and speed the process of implementation with the new releases. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP is tackling the problem with three different products within the HP VirtualSystem suite – HP Converged Storage, HP BladeSystem Servers, and HP Insight software. Taken together, HP hopes to be offering “best in class, at every level of the rack,” according to Tom Joyce, vice president of marketing, strategy and operations at HP StorageWorks.

Joyce took the opportunity to discuss the features and importance of the VirtualSystem release in a pre-VWworld briefing, along with Mike Banic, vice president of global marketing, and Michael Nielson, director of product solutions, both at HP Networking.

VirtualSystem has been three years in the works, according to Joyce. And it comes in response to struggles that many organizations have had with migration toward cloud computing. VirtualSystem for VMware is being promoted as “a highly optimized, turnkey solution that gives organizations a virtualized infrastructure that speeds implementation and provides a foundation for cloud computing.”

“As virtualization has gained adoption, multi-tier network architectures, virtual sprawl, inflexible storage, unpredictable workloads and security concerns have increased complexity and limited broad deployment,” an HP spokesperson says.

Specifically, VirtualSystem for VMware suite aims to help:

• Accelerate virtual machine mobility by up to 40 percent, while doubling throughput and reducing network recovery time by more than 500 times. It does this using the new HP FlexFabric virtualized networking solution.

• Cut capacity requirements by 50 percent, double virtual machine density, and speed deployment, all using HP LeftHand and HP 3PAR Storage Systems.

Remote trouble shooting
Using HP Insight Control for VMware vCenter Server, the new system also allows for remote trouble shooting and management, which should help improve virtual server operations. IT administrators should like this feature, since complexity is currently one of the loudest complaints of virtualization.

Despite virtualization becoming main stream for some organizations, there are still obstacles to many for a smooth deployment, notes Paul Miller, vice president, systems and solutions, at the Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking division of HP. With HP VirtualSystem for VMware, organizations will be able to scale up in their cloud computing efforts as they add more desktops to the system, or as they combine private and public clouds.

This should come as welcome news for IT managers struggling with ever-changing deployment needs. Also welcome news is that VirtualSystem can be customized with HP Virtualization Smart Bundles.

HP clearly sees the new release as part of an umbrella strategy toward seemless and scalable deployment, but also one that provides strategic advantage for the client.

Indeed, here at VMworld the synergy between private cloud infrastructure and desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI) deployments is a major theme. We're seeing a lot of VDI news and thin client news from the likes of Wyse. And VMware is expected to make some big View VDI product news as well.

On the business side, the new HP system is being heralded as helping organizations “align virtualization strategy and investments to business goals with consulting, planning, pre-integration, deployment and support services from HP Technology Services and HP ServiceONE partners,” the HP spokesperson notes.

VirtualSystem for VMware is available now from HP, with pricing starting at $167,300. This includes HP Converged Infrastructure, factory integration and three years of HP Support Plus 24 service.

(BriefingsDirect contributor David Weldon added research and reporting to this post. He can be reached via LinkedIn.)

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 22nd August 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

HP chose the occasion of its Q3 earnings call to drop the bomb. The company that under Mike Hurd’s watch focused on Converged Infrastructure, spending almost $7 billion to buy Palm, 3COM, and 3PAR, is now pulling a 180 in ditching both the PC and Palm hardware business, and making an offer to buy Autonomy, one of the last major independent enterprise content management players, for roughly $11 billion.

At first glance, the deal makes perfect sense, given Leo Apotheker’s enterprise software orientation. From that standpoint, Apotheker has made some shrewd moves, putting aging enterprise data warehouse brand Neoview out of its misery, following up weeks later with the acquisition of Advanced SQL analytics platform provider Vertica. During the Q3 earnings call, Apotheker stated the obvious as to his comfort factor with Autonomy: “I have spent my entire professional life in software and it is a world that I know well. Autonomy is very complementary.”

There is potential synergy between Autonomy and Vertica, with Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch (who will stay on as head of the unit, reporting to Apotheker) that Autonomy’s user screens provide the long missing front end to Vertica, and that both would be bound by a common “information layer.” Of course, the acquisition not being final, he did not give details on what that layer is, but for now we’d assume that integration will be at presentation and reporting layer. There is clearly a lot more potential here - Vertica for now only holds structured data while Autonomy’s IDOL system holds everything else. In the long run we’d love to see federated metadata and also an extension of Vertica to handle unstructured data, just as Advanced SQL rivals like Teradata’s Aster Data already do.

Autonomy, according to my Ovum colleague Mike Davis who has tracked the company for years, is one of only three ECM providers that have mastered the universal document viewer – Oracle’s Stellent and an Australian open source player being the others. In contrast to HP (more about that in a moment), Autonomy is quite healthy with the latest quarterly revenues up 16 percent year over year, operating margins in the mid 40 percent range, and a run rate that will take the company to its first billion dollar year.

Autonomy is clearly a gem, but HP paid dearly for it. During Q&A on the earnings call, a Wall street analyst took matter back down to earth, asking whether HP got such a good deal, given that it was paying roughly 15 percent of its market cap for a company that will only add about 15 to its revenues.

Not doing well
Great, expensive acquisition aside, HP’s not doing so well these days. Excluding a few bright spots, such as its Fortify security software business, most of HP’s units are running behind last year. Q3 net revenue of $31.2 billion was up only 1 percent over last year, but down 2 percent when adjusted for constant currency. By contrast, IBM’s most recent results were up 12 percent and 5 percent when currency adjusted. Dennis Howlett tweeted that it was now HP’s turn to undergo IBM’s near-death experience.

More specifically, HP Software was the bright spot with 20 percent growth year over year and 19.4 percent operating margin. By contrast, the printer and ink business – long HP’s cash cow – dropped 1 percent year over year with the economy dampening demand from the commercial side, not to mention supply chain disruptions from the Japanese tsunami.

By contrast, services grew only 4 percent, and is about to kick in yet another round of transformation. John Visenten, who ran HP’s Enterprise services in the Americas region, comes in to succeed Ann Livermore. The problem is, as Ovum colleague John Madden states it, HP’s services “has been in a constant state of transformation” that is making some customers’ patience wear thin. Ever since acquiring EDS, HP has been trying – and trying – to raise the legacy outsourcing business higher up the value chain, with its sights literally set in the cloud.

The trick is that as HP tries aiming higher up the software and services food chain, it deals with a market that has longer sales cycles and long-term customer relationships that prize stability. Admittedly, when Apotheker was named CEO last fall, along with enterprise software veteran Ray Lane to the board, the conventional wisdom was that HP would train its focus on enterprise software. So to that extent, HP’s strategy over the past 9 months has been almost consistent – save for earlier pronouncements on the strategic role of the tablet and WebOS business inherited with Palm.

Longer perspective
But HP has been around for much longer than 9 months, and its latest shifts in strategy must be viewed with a longer perspective. Traditionally an engineering company, HP grew into a motley assortment of businesses. Before spinning off its geeky Agilent unit in 1999, HP consisted of test instruments, midrange servers and PCs, a token software business, and lest we forget, that printer business. Since then:

• The 2001 acquisition of Compaq that cost a cool $25 billion, under Carly Fiorina’s watch. That pitted it against Dell and caused HP to assume an even more schizoid personality as consumer and enterprise brand.
• Under Mark Hurd’s reign, software might have grown a bit (they did purchase Mercury after unwittingly not killed off their OpenView business), but the focus was directed at infrastructure – storage, switches, and mobile devices as part of the Converged Infrastructure initiative.
• In the interim, HP swallowed EDS, succeeding at what it failed to do with its earlier ill-fated pitch for PwC.

Then (1) Hurd gets tossed out and (2) almost immediately lands at Oracle; (3) Oracle pulls support for HP Itanium servers, (4) HP sues Oracle, and (5) its Itanium business sinks through the floor.

That sets the scene for today’s announcements that HP is “evaluating a range of options” (code speak for likely divestment) for its PC and tablet business – although it will keep WebOS on life support as its last gasp in the mobile arena. A real long shot: HP’s only hope for WebOS might be Android OEMs not exactly tickled pink about Google’s going into the handset business by buying Motorola’s mobile unit.

There are logical rationale for dropping those businesses – PCs have always been a low margin business in both sales and service, in spite of what it claimed to be an extremely efficient supply chain. Although a third of its business, PCs were only 13 percent of HP’s profits, and have been declining in revenue for several years. PCs were big enough to provide a distraction and low enough margin to become a drain. And with Palm, HP gained an eloquent OS, but with a damaged brand that was too late to become the iOS alternative – Google had a 5-year headstart. Another one bites the dust.

Logical moves, but it’s fair to ask, what is an HP? Given HP’s twists, turns, and about-faces, a difficult one to answer. OK, HP is shedding its consumer businesses – except printers and ink because in normal times they are too lucrative – but HP still has all this infrastructure business. It hopes to rationalize all this in becoming a provider of cloud infrastructure and related services, with a focus on information management solutions.

As mentioned above, enterprises crave stability, yet HP’s track record over the past decade has been anything but. To be an enterprise provider, technology providers must demonstrate that they have a consistent strategy and staying power because enterprise clients don’t want to be left with orphaned technologies. To its credit, today’s announcements show the fruition of Apotheker’s enterprise software-focused strategy. But HP’s enterprise software customers and prospects need the assurance that HP won’t pull another about face when it comes time for Apotheker’s successor.

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 19th August 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

We knew that HP was in acquisition mode for enterprise software, and it seems the $10 billion apple in HP's eye is UK-based software giant Autonomy.

We'll know more after the US markets close today and HP has its earnings statement for the most recent quarter. But if the Autonomy acquisition is true, it tells us some very important things about HP, its direction and strategy.

Let's look at what HP did not buy (yet). No open source platform and infrastructure (Red Hat), no open source relational data bases (Ingres), no middleware (TIBCO). No business apps (NetSuite). [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Instead HP is apparently targeting the element of IT that cuts across all growth areas: information management. Information is exploding and the places it needs to go are expanding rapidly, including all manner of mobile devices.

HP has the data center server hardware, storage and networking infrastructure to support a converged infrastructure—from soup to nuts—that supports information in all its forms. That is information inside of applications, databases, flat files, PCs, Tvs, smartphones, cars, refrigerators, and anything else connected and always on. These days that's just about everything.

This information is the key ingredient and life blood to business intelligence, business process management, cloud computing, integration, overall management/governance, social media and networking, and the web of sensors and embedded devices that will create even more … information.

Apple has its various business revenues lined up around consumer content, media and entertainment, and is doing quite well. HP has he opportunity to do the same to the content, media and data that under girds all business, all over the world, all the time.

We also hear that HP will spin off—a la Agilent—its PC business. Smart move. This is a global and vibrant business that will continue to generate nice profits on thin margins, but not the growth business HP needs to be in to prosper against IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. They too, incidentally, know the value of having a business that earns based on the flow and ebb of data and information. But they are too relational database (RDB)-centric.

If we're in the post PC-era—and we are—we may also well be in the post-RDB era, too. And so then what's the era still going strong? Information, and how to make it strategic and managed for all aspects of business and commerce. The middle of the middle of all that grows is a good place to be. Information is the common denominator to all computing and business alignment.

We now know that HP is basing its future of the business of supporting businesses, and in working to dominate the next growth areas. Information use and management will drive the growth in hardware, networking, storage, consulting, and applications development and testing.

And, back to the future, IBM is the only other firm with a similarly full arsenal to take on this task, with Oracle as the third-place wildcard.