Ariba’s digital handshake helps Caesars up the ante on supply chain diversity

The next BriefingsDirect business trends interview focuses on Caesars Entertainment Corp. and how they're transforming supplier discovery and improving their supplier diversity through collaboration across cloud-based services and open business networks.

Learn from Caesars' best practices on how they expand diversity across their supply chain and how that’s been accomplished using Ariba Discovery. We’ll hear first-hand how one supplier, M & R Distribution Services, has benefited from such supplier visibility on the business network.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcript or download a copy. 

For the inside story on improved supply chain visibility and access, please join our guests, Jessica Rosman, Director of Supplier Diversity and Sustainability at Caesars Entertainment based in Las Vegas, and Quentin McCorvey, Sr., President and COO of M&R Distribution Services, based in Cleveland. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What are some of the more difficult aspects of finding the right supplier for the right job under the right circumstances?

Rosman

Rosman: Oftentimes, our portfolio managers look into their natural networks of suppliers we’ve already used or suppliers who have contacted us, but that can be limiting. Having a wider network or using the Discovery tool on Ariba has allowed us to open up to millions of different suppliers that we haven’t met before and who we might want to do business with us.

Additionally, we do numerous outreach events into the communities in which we operate, so we can find top suppliers and include them in our supply chain.

Gardner: What sort of supplier requirements are there, and has that been changing over the years? Is there a moving target for this?

Rosman: For Caesars, it really depends on the category or commodity that we're searching for. Certain commodities may require larger supply chains or more integrated processes than others. But for all of our suppliers, we're looking for quality, service, and price. That may also include requirements around insurance, delivery time, or other needs to meet those three areas.

Gardner: People are familiar with the Caesars’ name, but your organization includes a lot more. Tell us about the breadth and scope of your company.

Rosman: Caesars Entertainment is the largest globally diversified casino network. We're also the home of Horseshoe, Harrah’s, Total Rewards, Paris, Rio, and obviously, the most famous, Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Gardner: Quentin, tell us a little bit about M&R and why getting the visibility from folks like Caesars has been a good thing for you?

McCorvey: M&R Distribution Services, my company, was established in 2008 by my partner Joe Reccord and myself. I came out of banking and had experience and a background of 12 years in banking. My partner has been in the distribution business for over 20 years as a market leader in a regional distribution company. We're primarily focused on distributing products such as disposable gloves. Most maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) product lines are in our portfolio, as well as personal protective equipment and trash liners.

McCorvey

You asked how this has been important for us or how Caesars’ relationship has been important for us. It has been very important, because, as Jessica said, we found each other through some of their outreach events that they have in the community.

It was through a National Minority Supplier Development Council. My company is a nationally certified minority business. With this networking event and through a matchmaking event, I found someone on Jessica’s team, Bridget Carter, and learned a little bit more about Caesars and the opportunities that happened within Caesars. Then, through further connections, we had some opportunities that led to a strong relationship.

Gardner: What is it about making these connections between buyer and seller that’s easier today? What’s changed in the past several years?

It's about relationships

Rosman: Technology has changed, but some things haven’t changed. At the end of the day, business is about relationships. To start that relationship, there are new ways that we can meet different businesses by doing outreach and having the Ariba Discovery tool, where we can team up buyers and sellers through using Naics codes, UnPsc codes, or other types of codes. Using those, we can find those who want to sell and those who want to buy.

But part of it is the same as it has always been, which is about having that face-to-face connection, knowing that there is a potential relationship and feeling comfortable that that business will deliver on the quality, the service, and the need for the internal customer that there always has been.

Gardner: As to your title, Supplier Diversity and Sustainability, how important is that? How did that come about and what are your goals?

Rosman: Caesars Entertainment has a code of commitment. Our code of commitment is our code that says that we have a responsibility to the community, to the environment, to our customers, and to our employees to be the best that we can be. Under that code of commitment and in line with it is our Supplier Diversity Program. Our Supplier Diversity Program sits within our sourcing office, but also has a dotted line into the Diversity Department overall.

We are in unique areas across the country. When we do outreach within the community, in part it’s because in order for our businesses to grow, it’s important that we find community and local business partners that can meet the 24-hour, seven-days-a-week business that we have.

It’s different than other business types that have a delivery on Monday and don’t need it again until next week. That outreach has allowed us to find small, medium-size, and large businesses that are minority-owned, women-owned, veteran-owned, and other diverse businesses that can meet those needs.

Gardner: Quentin, tell me a bit about how long you’ve been working with Caesars? Is this strictly in Ohio with some of their properties there? Is it expanded across the company? Have you got a beachhead that’s then expanded? What’s the nature of the business you have?

While I didn’t win that opportunity, what I did win was the entrée into a relationship with Caesars.

McCorvey: We initially got engaged with Caesars, as I mentioned, through an outreach program, and through that, an opportunity came up for me to bid on a project with Caesars. Because I had bid on that project, I had to get connected to the Ariba Network. While I didn’t win that opportunity, what I did win was the entrée into a relationship with Caesars. Jessica talked about how a relationship is important, and for minority business, clearly, it’s really about relationship development.

As a minority-owned company, I'm not looking for handout. I'm looking for handshake, an opportunity to earn the business of a customer. I have to prove myself in being able to produce tier 1 pricing capacity and helping in solving pains within the supply chain network. Even with not getting this opportunity, I continued having conversations with Caesars and continued to develop the relationship.

Caesars has a mentoring program, which I was involved in and had the pleasure to become a part of. Through that mentoring program, I was able to sit down with Caesars and discuss certain goals that I wanted to accomplish, not only with my business personally, but also with the business opportunity with Caesars.

Some of those things included meeting the category managers in the categories where I was supplying into the organization and really understanding how to grow my key performance indicators (KPIs), not only directly, but also with Caesars and some of the other opportunities that are there.

Mentoring program

Through this mentoring program, we began to work on the relationship. I began to meet other people within the supply chain more regionally, as well as the national folks -- from Jessica and her team to up and down and across the Caesars organization. That’s been a very important process for me.

That's how we started out. I've gotten, and I'm going to get, opportunities through the mentoring program to start serving the company regionally. There are casinos in Ohio. My primary markets are servicing the Ohio casinos. Then, moving out of the region is a goal, ultimately growing into being a national supplier with all 52 properties within Caesars casinos.

Gardner: How important have Ariba Discovery and the Ariba Network been for you? How did you get on it? Was it easy? And where else have you been able to extend this visibility?

I actually won a couple of opportunities through the system and through the Ariba Network.

McCorvey: I got into the Ariba Network accidentally on purpose. On purpose because I had an opportunity to bid on a national contract with Caesars. When I had that opportunity, I got an invite from the buyer to sign up into Ariba. So I had to put my profile in there in order to bid on the opportunity that was available to me.

I did that, and it was a quick turnaround on the bid. I spent all of my time trying to figure out how to get through this, how to get my profile updated, and how to get the bid engaged.

I didn’t really know that much about the network and how connected the matches were to opportunities. I started seeing alerts and I started seeing, direct opportunities that really connected with my business. Through that, I said let me investigate a little bit further. And when I did, I began to look at some other opportunities. I actually won a couple of opportunities through the system and through the Ariba Network.

When I say "accidentally and on purpose," I guess it was fortuitous that we had this opportunity to bid. Even though it wasn't a win directly with that opportunity, it was a win for me and my company.

Gardner: Jessica, how about from the buyer side at Caesars, using the network, having the data, the insights, and the visibility. Has that added more value to your process? Obviously, you’ve got a certain specialization, but is there a more general value that you're seeing over time?

Rosman: We've used Ariba Network for a quite a while now. We started off with request for proposal (RFP) or the sourcing phase or module. We extended to the contracting phase or module and then we eventually went to the procure-to-pay.

We've seen a plethora of Ariba services, each one adding and building upon prior Ariba services that we had used. In all of those areas, it’s beneficial, because the lessons learned from a past RFP are archived and you can go back in and find RFPs that were used in the past.

When we're mentoring suppliers, especially within our Supplier Diversity Program, talking to minority or women suppliers, it helps us to know what some of the contract managers might be asking, or a little bit more about the categories. We don't pull the entire RFP. We don’t share all of those pieces, but unique items that might be applicable to future questionnaires. That goes all the way through to the procure to pay (P2P). It keeps it easy in one place and it archives the data for us.

Real standardization

Gardner: It sounds like you have a real standardization about how you are going about these things. Is that fair to say?

Rosman: Yes, I believe it is. Our sourcing team has evolved throughout this process to a category-driven leadership approach, and Ariba has been an integral part of that.

Gardner: Any thoughts or recommendations with 20/20 hindsight now for other organizations that are looking for specific requirements in the suppliers that they're targeting?

Rosman: As we continue to grow, Ariba also continues to grow in this area of supplier diversity. Using Ariba Discovery has also helped us when we're trying to find minority women or vendors in unique industries.

An example of that is also in Ohio. We were looking to find a women-owned or minority-owned company in that region that sells carbon dioxide. We put it into Ariba Discovery assuming that we wouldn’t find anybody that we hadn’t already met through our outreach events.

When you're looking for hard-to-reach vendors and looking for that opportunity and connection, it just takes it one step further.

We had done very extensive outreach events in the community and talked to more than 300 local vendors and yet we still were able to do find some. When you're looking for hard-to-reach vendors and looking for that opportunity and connection, it just takes it one step further.

Gardner: Quentin, I imagine that, as a business owner, you're curious about what new business opportunities are available. Has the visibility within the Ariba environment, seeing what alerts come across, seeing what the bids are about, led you to pursue other business opportunities and lines of business within your company? Has it helped you grow?

McCorvey: It has definitely helped us to grow. When I initially looked at the Ariba Network, I saw it as a procurement platform. But for me it's actually more of a supply chain accelerator, and I say that because as with any good business what's important is deal flow, how you get projects and opportunities in the pipeline.

Ariba has been a minimal level of inputs with a maximum level of outputs. So as a company and as a smaller growing company, you’re constantly looking at ways to grow opportunities, to grow market share. Do you invest $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 in a B2B website? Do you engage in Google Analytics? Do you put sales executives in other parts of the country to begin to grow?

Those are all the decisions you have to make every day with a limited amount of resources, because you really want to put that into growing your company. Ariba has has been able to do that. I don't necessarily have to have a larger sales team or some of the other things out there. I can begin to look at opportunities where I can grow my company in other markets. I can service those markets. It also gives me access to other Fortune 100 and 200 companies that I don't necessarily have the access to, to begin to look at.

A lot of ideas

What's important for me is to get a lot of ideas. Jessica talked a little bit about the archived RFPs. But really mining through those archived RFPs, I can see what companies are looking for, what their RFPs have been about, when are their sales cycles coming up again, when can I begin to look at those opportunities and target those opportunities, who are the purchasing and procurement managers that’s managing those lines.

That’s tough data to find. It’s tough to be able to find out who, for example, is procuring resins for a company. You can Google over their website, you can search for it, and you can’t find it, but you will never find that opportunity. It really, really closes down the sales cycle loop for me and gives me maximum value.

Gardner: Well, we're here at Ariba LIVE, and there's lots of news being made. We're hearing about integrated services for travel and expenses. We’re seeing more emphasis on the user experience, end-to-end processes that would end up in a mobile environment or any number of environments.

What's of interest to you? Where do you see yourselves taking advantage of some of these new technological and process innovations?

Rosman: One of the areas that's most interesting is learning about how to implement Ariba within your internal team and externally. We've done a great job of it within Supplier Diversity Program, but how do we roll that out further amongst our entire supply chain? The takeaway is how can we train internally and train externally to find results using Ariba?

It's worth spending some time really understanding how Ariba works and what are the components there within the system.

Gardner: Quentin, any thoughts about what’s of interest to you and then perhaps words of advice you could give other companies that are trying to improve their business using a business network?

McCorvey: Jessica hit on it again. Technology is really driving the market. My partner, who has been in the business for 25 years, often tells a story about how when he first started out. He left home every day with a pocket full of quarters and a pager. That day is gone. This is not your father's Oldsmobile. We really had to begin to leverage technology in a different way.

As a distributor, I'm looking at, and have been typically looking at, the sales side. How can I look at opportunities here? But what’s also been important for me to see and really learn is that I can look at it on the buy side. How can I not only find other manufacturing partners to begin to drive more cost out of my supply chain and even be more competitive in my business and my business environment.

Relative to advice for other customers, other people or other suppliers who are using the network, it's worth spending some time really understanding how Ariba works and what are the components there within the system. Ariba has some very knowledgeable account executives who work directly with you. You need to spend some time with your account executive to make sure that you update your profile to the point where you can get maximum amount of exposures to the maximum amount of hits.

To reiterate what I said before, it’s important to not only look at to the opportunities that are available to you, but closed opportunities, and see where you can begin to look at opportunities, and see if there are other business ideas or business partnerships that you can develop through the Ariba Network.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

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Redcentric orchestrates networks-intensive merger using advanced configuration management database

The next BriefingsDirect performance management discussion uncovers how Redcentric PLC in the UK tackled a major network management project due to a business merger. We'll hear how Redcentric used an advanced configuration database approach to scale management of some 10,000 devices across two disparate companies and made them accessible as a single system.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To learn more about how two major networks became merged successfully using automation based on systems data, we're joined by Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric in Harrogate, UK. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your company and this merger. What two companies came together, and how did that prove to be a complicated matter when it comes to network management?

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Jackson: The two companies coming together were InTechnology and Redcentric. Redcentric bought InTechnology in 2013. Effectively, they were reasonably separate in terms of their setup. Redcentric had three separate organizations, they had already acquired Maxima and Hot Chilli. And the requirement was to move their network devices and ITSM platform base onto the HP monitoring and ITSM platforms in InTechnology.

It’s an ongoing process, but it’s well on the way and we've been pretty successful so far in doing that.

Gardner: And what kind of companies are these? Tell us about your organization, the business, rather than just the IT?

Jackson

Jackson: We're a managed service providers (MSPs), voice, data, storage, networks, and cloud. You name it, and we pretty much deliver it and sell it as part of our managed portfolio..

Gardner: So being good at IT is not just good for you internally; it's really part and parcel of your business.

Jackson: It's critical. We have to deliver it and we have to manage it as well. So it's 100 percent critical to the business.

Gardner: Tell us how you go about something like this, Edward, when you have a big merger, when you have all these different, disparate devices that support networks. How do you tackle that? How do you start the process?

Data cleansing

Jackson: The first phase is to look at the data and see what we've got and then start to do some data cleansing. We had to migrate data from three service desks to the InTechnology network, and to the InTechnology ITSM system. You need to look at all the service contracts. You need to also look at all the individual components that make up those contracts, and effectively all the configuration items (CIs), and then your looking at a rather large migration project.

Initially, we started to migrate the customer and the contact information. Then, slowly, we started to re-provision devices from the Redcentric side to the InTechnology Managed Services (IMS) network and load it into our HP management platforms.

We currently manage over 11,000 devices. They are from multiple types of vendors and technologies. InTechnology was pretty much a Cisco shop, whereas at Redcentric, we're looking at things like Palo Alto, Brocade, Citrix load balancers and other different types of solutions. So it's everything from session border controllers down to access points.

It was a relatively challenging time in terms of being able to look at the different types of technology and then be able to manage those. Also, we've automated incidents from Operations Manager to Service Manager and then notifying customers directly that there is a potential issue ontheir service. So it's been a rather large piece of work.

Gardner: Was there anything in hindsight that you did at InTechnology vis-à-vis the data about your network and devices that made this easier? Did Redcentric have that same benefit of that solid database, the configuration information? In doing this, what did you wish you had done, or someone else had done, better before that would have made it easier to accomplish?

It was a relatively challenging time in terms of being able to look at the different types of technology and then be able to manage those.

Jackson: Unfortunately, the data on the Redcentric side of the business wasn’t quite as clean as it was on the InTechnology side. It was held in lots of differnet sources, from network shared drives to Wiki pages. It all had to be collated. Redcentric had another three service desks. We had to extract all the data out of them as well. The service desks didn’t really contain any CI information either. So we had to collate together the CI information along with the contacts and customers.

It was a rather mammoth task. Then, we had to load it into our CRM tool, which then has a direct connection automatically using Web Services and into Service Manager. So it initially creates organizations and contacts.

We had a template for our CIs. If they were a server CI or a network CI, it would be added to a spreadsheet, and would use HP Connect-IT to load into Service Manager. It basically automatically created CIs against the customer and the contacts that were already loaded by our CRM tool.

Gardner: Is there anything now moving forward as a combined company, or in the process of becoming increasingly combined, that these due diligence efforts around network management and configuration management will allow you to do?

Perhaps you're able to drive more services into your marketplace for your customers or make modernization moves towards perhaps software-defined networking or other trends that are afoot. So now that you are into this, you are doing your due diligence, how does that set you up to move forward?

New opportunity

Jackson: It opens up a new sphere of opportunity. We were pretty much a Cisco shop, but now we have obviously opened up to a lot more elements and technologies that we actively manage.

We have a lot of software-based type of firewalls and load balancers that we didn’t previously have -- session border controllers, etc and voice products that we didn’t deliver previously -- that we can deliver now due to the fact that we've opened up the network to be able to monitor and manage pretty much anything.

Gardner: Any words of advice for other organizations that may have been resisting making these moves. You were forced to do it across the board with the merger. Do you have any advice that you would offer in terms of doing network management and modernization sooner rather than later, other than the fact that people might just think good enough is good enough, or if it's not broken, don’t fix it?

Jackson: When you're looking at a challenge like this, you have to make sure you do your due diligence first. It’s down to planning, an "if you fail to plan, you plan to fail" kind of thing, and it’s very true.

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You need to get all the information. You need to make sure that you normalize it and sanitize it before you load it. The cliché is garbage in, garbage out, so there’s no point in putting bad information into a system once again.

We have a good set of clean data now across the board. We literally have 150,000 CIs in our CMDB. So it’s not an insignificant CMDB by any stretch of the imagination. And we know that the data from the Redcentric side of the business is now clean and accurate.

Gardner: How about proving this to the business? For MSPs it might not be as critical, but for other enterprises, this might be a bit more of a challenge to translate these technical benefits into financial or economic benefits to their leadership. Any thoughts about metrics of success that you've been able to define that would fit into a return on investment (ROI) or more of an economic model? How do you translate network management proficiency into dollars and cents or pounds or euros?

Jackson: It’s pretty difficult to quantify in a monetary sense. Probably the best way of quantifying the success of the project has been the actual level of support that customers have been given and the level of satisfaction that the customers now have. They're very, very happy with the level of support that we have now achieving due to Redcentrics ITSM and business service management (BSM) systems. I think, going forward, it will only increase the level of support that we can provide our customers.

As I said, It's quite difficult to quantify in a monetary sense. However, when churn rates are now as low as 4 percent, you can basically say that you're doing something good.

Fundamental to the business

In terms of things like the CIs themselves, the CI is fundamental to the business, because it describes the whole of the service, all the services that we offer our customers. If that’s not right, then the support that we give the customer can’t be right either.

You need to give the guys on support the kind of information they need to be able to support the service. Customer satisfaction is ever increasing in terms of what we are able to offer the migrated customers.

Gardner: How about feedback from your help desk, your support, and remediation of people. Do they find that with this data in place, with it cleansed, and with it complete that they're able to identify where problems exist perhaps better, faster, and easier. Do they recognize whether there is a network problem or a workload support problem, the whole help desk benefit. Anything to offer there?

The CI is fundamental to the business, because it describes the whole of the service, all the services that we offer our customers. If that’s not right, then the support that we give the customer can’t be right either.

Jackson: About 80 percent of the tickets raised in the organization are raised through our management platform, monitoring and performance capacity monitoring. We can pretty much identify within a couple of minutes where the network error is. This all translates into tickets being auto raised in our service management platform.

Additionally, within a few minutes of an outage or incident we can have an affected customer list prepared. We have fields that are defined in Service Manager CI’s that will actually give us information regarding what devices are affected and what they are connected to in terms of an end to end service.

We run a customer report against this, and it will give you a list of customers, a list of key contacts and primary contacts. You can convert this into an email. So for a network outage, within a few minutes we can email the customer, create an incident, create related interactions to that incident, and the customer is notified that there is an issue.

Gardner: That’s the sort of brand reinforcement and service quality that many organizations are seeking. So that's enviable, I'm sure.

Is there any products or updates that could make your job even easier going forward?

Jackson: We're looking at a couple of things. One of them is HP Propel, which is a piece of software that you can hook into pretty much anything you really want. For example, if you have a few disparate service desks, you can have a veneer over the top. They'll look all the same to the customers. They'll have like an identical GUI, but the technology behind it could be very different.

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It gives you the ability then to hook into anything, such as HP Operations Orchestration, Service Manager, Knowledge Management, or even Smart Analytics, which is another area that we are quite keen on looking at. I think that’s going to revolutionize the service desk. It would be very, very beneficial forRedcentric..

There are also things like data mining. This would be beneficial and also help the auto creation of knowledge articles going forward and giving remedial action to incidents and interactions.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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HP at Discover delivers the industry's first open, hybrid, ecosystem-wide cloud architecture

Kicking off Discover 2015, HP today made a wide range of announcements, including industry-wide inclusive enhancements to their heterogeneous Helion cloud portfolio, new DevOps-friendly agile test automation solutions, expanded converged infrastructure offerings with partner Arista, as well as an all-flash expansion of their 3PAR StoreServ products.

HP's open, ecosystem-wide cloud vision marks, in my opinion, the IT industry's first and most inclusive architecture that cuts across all major cloud services, "pubic" and "private," PaaS and IaaS. The HP approach, leveraging open source and standards, provides much more choice to how enterprises exploit cloud-centric hybrid IT -- but without running the risk of being exploited themselves.

"We're the only company that brings it all to you. ... A cloud that works with your infrastructure. ... The way that you want to transform. ... With the right financial architecture for you. ... And we don't dictate to you how to do it," said HP CEO Meg Whitman in her opening keynote address that the HP Discover conference in Las Vegas.

Specifically, HP announced updates to the HP Helion portfolio, designed to help enterprises transition to a broadly hybrid IT. HP introduced HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0, the next release of its flagship integrated enterprise cloud solution, and enhancements to HP Helion Managed Cloud Services for managing enterprise workloads in hosted cloud environments.

The expanded support for multiple hypervisors and cloud environments in HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 gives enterprises and service providers added flexibility to gain cloud benefits for their existing and new applications.

"Enterprise customers have a range of needs in moving to the cloud. Some need to cloud-enable traditional workloads, while others seek to build next generation 'cloud native' apps using modern technologies like OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and Docker," said Bill Hilf, senior vice president, HP Helion Product and Service Management. "The expanded support for multiple hypervisors and cloud environments in HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 gives enterprises and service providers added flexibility to gain cloud benefits for their existing and new applications." [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP Helion CloudSystem forms a cross-cloud, private-cloud solution, designed to help enterprises and service providers attain hybrid infrastructure capabilities -- enabling automation, orchestration and control across multiple heterogeneous clouds, workloads, and technologies, says HP. HP is calling itself a transition partner, not just a vendor or cloud provider.

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 expands support for multiple hypervisors and multiple clouds to provide enterprises and service providers with maximum flexibility. Additionally, HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 integrates HP Helion OpenStack and the HP Helion Development Platform to provide customers an enterprise grade open source Cloud Foundry PaaS for cloud native application development and infrastructure.

Features and benefits

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 features and benefits include:

• Simultaneous support for multiple cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, HP Helion Public Cloud, OpenStack technology and VMware, with the ability to fully control where workloads reside.
  
• The latest release of HP Helion OpenStack, exposing OpenStack software APIs to simplify and speed development and integration with other clouds and offering developer-friendly add-ons with the HP Helion Development Platform based on Cloud Foundry.
  
• Support for multiple hypervisors, now including Microsoft Hyper-V, Red Hat KVM, VMware vSphere, as well as bare-metal deployments, offering customers additional choice and avoiding vendor lock-in.
  
• Support for AWS-compatible private clouds through integration with HP Helion Eucalyptus, giving customers the flexibility to deploy existing AWS workloads onto clouds they control.
  
• Support for unstructured data through the Swift OpenStack Object Storage project
  
• The latest version of HP Cloud Service Automation, providing the management capabilities to control hybrid cloud environments and a built-in path to support distributed compute, efficient object storage and rapid cloud native application development
  
• An intuitive setup model delivered as a virtual appliance, allowing for installation in hours
  HP Helion Managed Cloud Services provides enterprise security and high availability capabilities needed to run mission-critical business applications.

Given that enterprises spend up to 90 percent of their IT budget on maintaining existing systems, HP estimates that enterprises can reduce IT maintenance costs by approximately 40 percent by migrating existing systems to a clouds-based architecture.

HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0 is available as standalone software supporting a multiple-vendor hardware environment or as a fully-integrated blade-based or hyper-converged infrastructure with HP ConvergedSystem. Availability is planned for later this year.

HP Helion Managed Cloud Services will launch into beta later this year HP Helion OpenStack Managed Private Cloud and HP Helion Eucalyptus Managed Private Cloud, both of which will be consumable as a service via an easy access portal.

In addition to these new beta offerings, HP Helion Managed Cloud Services will support the development of cloud native applications within a managed cloud service via the HP Helion Development Platform and automation of select virtual private cloud services.

HP Helion Managed Cloud Services features and benefits include:

• New automated provisioning capabilities through a self-service portal based on HP Cloud Service Automation, enabling clouds to be deployed more quickly.
  
• Support for multiple platforms to enable hybrid cloud proof-of-concepts using HP Helion OpenStack and HP Helion Eucalyptus.
  
• Cloud native application development capabilities through integration with the HP Helion Development Platform, allowing enterprises to rapidly develop, deploy and deliver cloud native apps.

Helping developers "shift left"

HP also announced a new functional test automation solution, HP LeanFT, which allows software developers and testers to leverage continuous testing and continuous delivery methodologies to rapidly build, test, and deliver secure, high-quality applications. In many ways, it accelerates the adoption of agile and DevOps, but in a managed way.

HP LeanFT embraces the Agile methodology "shift left" concept by leveraging the key tools of the modern Agile developer ecosystem, says HP. It's built specifically for continuous testing and continuous delivery, and fits naturally into existing ecosystems (such as Microsoft TFS, GIT, and Subversion) and frameworks that support test driven and behavior driven development. It has powerful test automation authoring with either C# or Java, and IDE integration. It forms an enabling test foundation for improved DevOps.

LeanFT will be the bridge from UFT to the future with increased focus on Agile developers, flexible licensing, better cross-browser testing, mobile testing, and IoT testing.

In the most recent Forrester Wave on Modern Application Functional Test Automation, Forrester states: "HP UFT vision will appeal to developers. HP's vision and three-year road map is anchored on LeanFT, which, if executed in a timely fashion, will appeal to testers and developers. In fact, LeanFT will be the bridge from UFT to the future with increased focus on Agile developers, flexible licensing, better cross-browser testing, mobile testing, and Internet of Things (IoT) testing as further key elements of the road map."

The new solution integrates with HP Application Lifecycle Management, Quality Center, and Mobile Center, which allows developers and testers to reduce maintenance costs, share testing resources, and deliver new mobile applications at Agile speed. HP also introduced major upgrades to its flagship HP Unified Functional Testing and HP Business Process Testing products, including support for GIT integration as a repository option and scriptless keyword-driven testing, says HP.

"HP LeanFT beautifully balances the twin imperatives of velocity and quality by allowing developers to operate in the modern Agile and DevOps ecosystem, while also leveraging our proven capabilities in application testing and application lifecycle management," says Raffi Margaliot, SVP and GM, HP Application Delivery Management.

HP LeanFT will be available in July 2015 on http://saas.hp.com. HP Unified Functional Testing 12.5 and HP Business Process Testing 12.5 will also be available in July. Customers who upgrade to HP UFT 12.5 will receive HP LeanFT free of charge.

HP Application Defender is available now for free on five pre-production application instances. For more information, please visit http://go.saas.hp.com/application-defender-trial.

In other news

In other news, HP announced that it was expanding its converged infrastructure portfolio, including enhancements to its HP OneView 2.0 management platform, a new partnership with Arista Networks, and a series of new workload optimized reference architectures. These new offerings will give customers the flexibility they need to transform to hybrid architecture and at the same time, protect their existing IT investments.

OneView unifies processes, UI’s and APIs across HP server, storage, and Virtual Connect networking devices. HP states that OneView can be configured in 96 percent less time, taking only five steps to deploy a VMware vSphere Cluster, and has nine times faster error resolution.

New features include automated server change management, server profile templates (making it easier to define firmware and driver baselines as well as server, LAN and SAN settings), and new profile mobility that enable migration and recovery of workloads across server platform types, configurations, and generations.

The partnership with Arista Networks is beneficial for customers who are looking for flexibility in infrastructure that handles performance-intensive, virtualized and highly dynamic workloads.

The partnership with Arista Networks, which delivers software-defined networking solutions for data centers, cloud computing, and HPC environments, is beneficial for customers who are looking for flexibility in infrastructure that handles performance-intensive, virtualized and highly dynamic workloads.

These new solutions are designed to support private, public and hybrid cloud applications while providing a flexible and open choice across compute and storage, including all-flash solutions with HP 3PAR StoreServ.

HP announced new 3PAR flash storage models. The HP 3PAR StoreServ 20000 enterprise family is due to ship in August and features a 20850 all-flash model and a 20800 converged flash array that supports hard-disk drives and solid state drives.

Both start at two controllers and can scale out to eight. The 20850 can hold up to 1024 solid state  drives, ranging from 480 GB to a new 3.84 TB drive.

HP also took advantage of Discover to announce that DreamWorks Animation has selected HP to automate its IT infrastructure. By deploying  HP Datacenter Care - Infrastructure Automation, HP is enabling DreamWorks Animation to manage its infrastructure as code for continuous delivery of applications and services.

You may also be interested in:

• How Tableau Software and big data come together: Strong visualization embedded on an agile analytics engine
• Big Data Helps Conservation International Proactively Respond to Species Threat in Tropical Forests
• How Globe Testing helps startups make the leap to cloud- and mobile-first development
• GoodData analytics developers on what they look for in a big data platform
• ITIL-ITSM tagteam boosts Mexican ISP INFOTEC's operations quality
• Novel consumer retail behavior analysis from InfoScout relies on HP Vertica big data chops
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How Tableau Software and big data come together: Strong visualization embedded on an agile analytics engine

The next BriefingsDirect big data innovation discussion highlights how Tableau Software and big data analytics platforms come together to provide visualization benefits for those seeking more than just crunched numbers. They're looking for ways to improve their businesses effectively and productively, and to share the analysis quickly and broadly.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To learn more, BriefingsDirect sat down with Paul Lilford, Global Director of Technology Partners for Tableau Software, based in Seattle, and Steve Murfitt, Director of Technical Alliances at HP Vertica. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Why is the tag-team between Tableau and big data so popular. Every time I speak with some one using Vertica, they inevitably mention that they're delivering their visualizations through Tableau. This seems to be a strong match.

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Lilford: We’re a great match primarily because Tableau’s mission is to help people see and understand data. We're made more powerful by getting to large data, and Vertica is one of the best at storing that. Their columnar format is a natural format for end users, because they don’t think about writing SQL and things like that. So, Tableau, as a face to Vertica, empowers business users to self serve and deliver on a depth of analytics that is unmatched in the market.

Lilford

Gardner: Now, we can add visualization to a batch report just as well as a real-time. streamed report. What is it about visualization that seems to be more popular in the higher-density data and a real-time analysis environment?

Lilford: The big thing there, Dana, is that batch visualization will always common. What’s a bigger deal is data discovery, the new reality for companies. It leads to becoming data driven in your organization, and making better-informed decisions, rather than taking a packaged report and trying to make a decision that maybe tells you how bad you were in the past or how good you might think you could be in the future. Now, you can actually have a conversation with your data and cycle back and forth between insights and decisions.

The combination of our two technologies allows users to do that in a seamless drag-and-drop environment. From a technical perspective, the more data you have, the deeper you can go. We’re not limiting a user to any kind of threshold. We're not saying, this is the way I wrote the report, therefore you can go consume it.

We’re saying, "Here is a whole bunch of data that may be a subject area or grouping of subject areas, and you're the finance professional or the HR professional. Go consume it and ask the questions you need answered." You're not going to an IT professional to say, "Write me this report and come back three months from now and give it to me." You’re having that conversation in real time in person, and that interactive nature of it is really the game changer. 

Win-win situation

Gardner:  And the ability for the big data analysis to be extended across as many consumer types in the organization as possible makes the underlying platform more valuable. So this, from HP's perspective must be a win-win. Steve?

Murfitt: It definitely is a win-win. When you have a fantastic database that performs really well, it's kind of uninteresting to show people just tables and columns. If you can have a product like Tableau and you can show how people can interact with that data, deliver on the promise of the tools, and try to do discovery, then you’re going to see the value of the platform.

Murfitt

Gardner: Let’s look to the future. We've recently heard about some new and interesting trends for increased volume of data with the Internet of Things, mobile, apps being more iterative and smaller, therefore, more data points.

As the complexity kicks in and the scale ramps up, what do you expect, Paul, for visualization technology and the interactivity that you mentioned? What do you think we're approaching? What are some of the newer aspects of visualization that makes this powerful, even as we seek to find more complexity?

Lilford: There are a couple of things. Hadoop, if you go back a year-and-a-half or so, has been moving from a cold-storage technology to more to a discovery layer. Some of the trends in visualization are predictive content being part of the everyday life.

Tableau democratizes business intelligence (BI) for the business user. We made it an everyday thing for the business user to do that. Predictive is in a place that's similar to where BI was a couple years ago, going to the data scientist to do it. Not that the data scientist's value wasn’t there, but it was becoming a bottleneck to doing things because you have to run it through a predictive model to give it to someone. I think that's changing.

So I think that predictive element is more and more part of the continuum here. You're going to see more forward-looking, more forecast-based, more regression-based, more statistical things brought into it. We’ll continue to innovate with some new visuals, but the standard visual is unstructured data.

This is the other big key, because 80 percent of the world's data is unstructured. How do you consume that content? Do you still structure it or can you consume it where it sits, as it sits, where it came in and how it is? Are there discoverers that can go do that?

You’re going to continue see those go. The biggest green fields in big data are predictive and unstructured. Having the right stores like Vertica to scale that is important, but also allowing anyone to do it is the other important part, because if you give it to a few technical professionals, you really restrict your ability to make decisions quickly.

Gardner: Another interesting aspect, when I speak to companies, is the way that they're looking at their company more as an analytics and data provider internally and externally. The United States Postal Service  view themselves in that fashion as an analytics entity, but also looking for business models, how to take data and analysis of data that they might be privy to and make that available as a new source of revenue.

I would think that visualization is something that you want to provide to a consumer of that data, whether they are internal or external. So we're all seeing the advent of data as a business for companies that may not have even consider that, but could.

Most important asset

Lilford: From our perspective, it's a given that it is a service. Data is the most important asset that most companies have. It’s where the value is. Becoming data driven isn’t just a tagline that we talk about or people talk about. If you want to make decisions and decisions that move your business, so being a data provider.

The best example I can maybe give you, Dana, is healthcare. I came from healthcare and when I started, there was a rule -- no social. You can't touch it. Now, you look at healthcare and nurses are tweeting with patients, "Don’t eat that sandwich. Don't do this."

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Data has become a way to lower medical costs in healthcare, which is the biggest expense. How do you do that? They use social and digital data to do that now, whereas five, seven years ago, we couldn't do it. It was a privacy thing. Now, it's a given part of government, of healthcare, of banking, of almost every vertical. How do I take this valuable asset I’ve got and turn it into some sort of product, market, or market advantage, whatever that is?

Gardner: Steve, anything more to offer on the advent or acceleration of the data-as-a-business phenomena?

Murfitt: If you look at what companies have been doing for such a long time, they have been using the tools to look at historical data to measure how they're doing against budget. As people start to make more data available, what they really want to do is compare themselves to their peers.

As people start to make more data available, what they really want to do is compare themselves to their peers.

If you're doing well against your budget, it doesn't mean to say you gaining or losing market share or how well you’re doing. So as more data is shared and more data is available, being able to compare to peers, to averages, to measure yourself not only internally, but externally, is going to help with people making their decisions.

Gardner: Now for those organizations out there that have been doing reports in a more of a traditional way that recognize the value of their data and the subsequent analysis, but are yet to dabble deeply into visualization, what are some good rules of the road for beginning a journey towards visualization?

What might you consider in terms of how you set up your warehouse or you set up your analysis engine, and then make tools available to your constituencies? What are some good beginning concepts to consider?

Murfitt: One of the most important things is start small, prove it, and scale it from there. The days of boiling the ocean to try come up with analytics only to find out it didn’t work are over.

Organizations want to prove it, and one of the cool things about doing that visually is now the person who knows the data the best can show you what they're trying to do, rather than trying to push a requirement out to someone and ask "What is it you want?" Inevitably, something’s lost in translation when that happens or the requirement changes by the time it's delivered.

Real-time conversation

You now have a real-time, interactive, iterative conversation with both the data and business users. If you’re a technical professional, you can now focus on the infrastructure that supports the user, the governance, and security around it. You're not focused on the report object anymore. And that report object is expensive.

It doesn’t mean that for compliance things the financial reports go away, it means you've right sized that work effort. Now, the people who know the data the best deliver the data, and the people who support the infrastructure the best support that infrastructure and that delivery.

It’s a shift. Technologies today do scale Vertica as a great scalable database. Tableau is a great self-service tool. The combination of the two allows you to do this now. If you go back even seven years, it was a difficult thing. I built my career being a data warehouse BI guy. I was the guy writing reports and building databases for people, and it doesn’t scale. At some point, you’re a bottleneck for the people who need to do their job. I think that's the biggest single thing in it.

Gardner: Another big trend these days is people becoming more used to doing things from a mobile device. Maybe it’s a “phablet,” a tablet, or a smartphone. It’s hard to look at a spreadsheet on those things more than one or two cells at a time. So visualizations and exercising your analytics through a mobile tier seem to go hand in hand. What should we expect there? Isn't there a very natural affinity between mobile and analysis visualization?

Most visuals work better on a tablet. Right-sizing that for the phone is going to continue to happen.

Lilford: We have mobile apps today, but I think you're going to see a fast evolution in this. Most visuals work better on a tablet. Right-sizing that for the phone is going to continue to happen, scaling that with the right architecture behind it, because devices are limited in what they can hold themselves.

I think you'll see a portability element come to it, but at the same time, this is early days. Machines are generating data, and we're consuming it at a rate at which it's almost impossible to consume. Those devices themselves are going to be the game changer.

My kids use iPads, they know how to do it. There’s a whole new workforce in the making that knows this and things like this. Devices are just going to get better at supporting it. We're in the very early phases of it. I think we have a strong offering today, and it's only going to get stronger in the future.

Gardner: Steve, any thoughts about the interception between Vertica, big data, and the mobile visualization aspect of that?

Murfitt: The important thing is having the platform that can provide the performance. When you're on a mobile device, you still want the instant access, and you want it to be real-time access. This is the way the market is going. If you go with the old, more traditional platforms that can’t perform when you're in the office, they're not going to perform when you are remote.

It’s really about building the infrastructure, having the right technology to be able to deliver that performance and that response and interactivity to the device wherever they are.

Working together

Gardner: Before we close, I just wanted to delve a little bit more into the details of how HP Vertica and Tableau software work. Is this an OEM, a partnership, co-selling, co-marketing? How do you define it for those folks out there who either use one or the other or neither of you? How should they progress to making the best of a Vertica and Tableau together?

Lilford:  We're a technology partnership. It’s a co-selling relationship, and we do that by design. We're a best-in-breed technology. We do what we do better than anyone else. Vertica is one of the best databases and they do what they do better than anyone else. So the combination of the two, providing customers options to solve problems, the whole reason we partner is to solve customer issues.

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We want to do it as best-in-breed. That’s a lot what the new stack technologies are about, it’s no longer a single vendor building a huge solution stack. It's the best database, with the best Hadoop storage, with the best visualization, with the best BI tools on top of it. That's where you're getting a better total cost of ownership (TCO) over all, because now you're not invested in one player that can deliver this. You're invested in the best of what they do and you're delivering in real-time for people.

It's the best database, with the best Hadoop storage, with the best visualization, with the best BI tools on top of it.

Gardner: Last question, Steve, about the degree of integration here. Is this something that end user organizations can do themselves, are there professional services organizations, what degree of integration between Vertica and Tableau visualization is customary.

Murfitt: Tableau connects very easily to Vertica. There is a dropdown on the database connector saying, "Connect to Vertica.” As long as they have the driver installed, it works. And the way their interface works, they can start query and getting value from the data straight away.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

You may also be interested in:

• Big Data Helps Conservation International Proactively Respond to Species Threat in Tropical Forests
• How Globe Testing helps startups make the leap to cloud- and mobile-first development
• GoodData analytics developers on what they look for in a big data platform
• ITIL-ITSM tagteam boosts Mexican ISP INFOTEC's operations quality
• Novel consumer retail behavior analysis from InfoScout relies on HP Vertica big data chops
• IT Operations Modernization Helps Energy Powerhouse Exelon Acquire Businesses
• ECommerce portal Avito uses big data to master rapid fraud detection
• How a Hackathon Approach Juices Innovation on Big Data Applications for Thomson Reuters
• How Waste Management Builds a Powerful Services Contiunuum Across Operations, Infrastructure, Development, and IT Processes
• GSN Games hits top prize using big data to uncover deep insights into gamer preferences
• Hybrid cloud models demand more infrastructure standardization, says global service provider Steria
• Service providers gain new levels of actionable customer intelligence from big data analytics