Monday, August 29, 2011

From VMworld, cosmetics giant Revlon harnesses the power of private cloud to produce impressive savings and cost avoidance

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

Today’s consensus is no longer around an "if" for cloud computing, but the "when" and what types of cloud models are best suited for any particular company. The present challenge then is about the proper transitions to leveraging cloud for improved IT and for far better business results.

This week at VMworld, as part of the main keynote address Monday, one company and its design and implementation of a private cloud rose above the rest. Revlon and its CIO were in the spotlight for such impressive returns on their cloud. In just two years, Revlon has benefited by nearly $70 million from savings due to cost avoidance and reductions.

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 tell us about how private cloud such savings emerged and to describe one of the most efficient enterprise private cloud implementations in the world is David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO at Revlon. 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: Is there a reason for doing private cloud holistically, completely, rather than piecemeal? What’s the benefit for doing it that way?

Giambruno: From a technology standpoint, we look at ourselves as doing oneness. We pick one way and we get very good at. We own that technology, so we can command it. It’s really about the density of our skill sets and our capability around that order to execute for the business.

When you look at that, it drives a degree of simplicity of execution, because at the end of the day, what we're really focused on is delivering IT capability back to the business faster, cheaper, better. That’s essentially what our cloud was planned to do and has delivered.

Gardner: And this is no small undertaking. It's over 530 applications, 15,000 automated moves a month. Give us a sense of what you’ve done with this singular approach to full competency at this particular data center and your approach to private cloud?

Giambruno: It’s not a data center. It’s the globe. That’s important for everyone to understand. Revlon’s cloud covers all of Revlon’s presences globally. It’s not just a single data center. We have a core data center and then we have little data centers around the world that everything replicates between and things move between.

Entire ecosystem

We’ve built this entire ecosystem to deliver our applications. We started this about five years ago with this whole idea of oneness. We re-ITed the planet. We have one DNS and DHCP structure. We have one global directory. We have one SAN globally. We have one desktop image. We have one server image. That simplicity allowed us to use the cloud as a competitive advantage.

We've saved or avoided $70 million in last two years. If you go by a simple timeline, the first 18 months was laying that oneness foundation. We did that in 18 months. The second 18 months was the virtualization of the servers, the network, and the storage systems globally.

At the end of the 18 months, we were done. That was the first three years. We’ve been running this way for the last two years. We're not in the "I think" mode. We're looking now at how we continually extend the capability of our cloud.

Gardner: Our listeners might be familiar with Revlon, your brand, but tell us more about the scope of your operations and the extent to which IT is supporting your business.

Giambruno: Revlon is a global cosmetics, hair color, beauty tools, fragrance, skincare, anti-perspirant/deodorants, and beauty care company. The vision of Revlon is to deliver glamor, excitement, and innovation through high-quality products at affordable prices.

We didn’t spend any additional money, other than our normal capital refresh. The thing that we did was change the way we're spending our money



We are arguably one of the strongest consumer franchises in the world. Our brand is incredibly powerful. We've got offices around the world. Our global headquarters are in New York. Our flagship manufacturing facility is in Oxford, North Carolina, and our consumers are women around the world. Our products are sold in more than 100 countries.

So we are big, as far as our reach and our capability. Essentially, our cloud delivers roughly 95 percent of all Revlon IT services around the world. We've got a couple of systems that aren’t in there yet. They will be shortly, but for all intents and purposes, we operate everything off of our cloud.

Gardner: Let’s go back to how you got to this point and how you're able to enjoy such significant savings. You have a comprehensive virtualized approach of servers, network, applications, and services. Why is that important?

Giambruno: Again, it’s that density of skill sets. Through this whole implementation, we only used about 10 percent professional services. We didn’t spend any additional money, other than our normal capital refresh. The thing that we did was change the way we're spending our money.

We took that leap to do things differently, because at the end of the day -- I always say this just to keep my and my team’s frame of reference -- we make cosmetics and personal care products. We have lots of brands, but it’s the idea of simplicity.

Faster, better, cheaper

We're not a revenue-generating piece of Revlon. How we can add value back to the business is by doing things faster, better, cheaper? If we're not spending that money, we're avoiding spending money, or giving money back, that means it can go into new product development. It can go into R&D. It can go into marketing. All activities focused on driving profitable growth.

Getting technology to facilitate the business and do things faster and more effectively is really important. To me, it’s the most material thing we’ve done - if you look at your projects. We’ve increased the number of projects we complete every year by 300 percent. When you talk about the business alignment, getting what they want done faster, cheaper, better, to me, that’s it.

Gardner: And you're talking about spanning the cycle from full development to implementation. What’s the role that the cloud has played in terms of increasing the ease in which you move from development to operations?

Giambruno: I have a couple of buckets. We have reliability. Currently, our cloud has been operating at north of six nines uptime, which has allowed me to take resources out of operations, put them into projects and working with the business.

That’s resulted in speed. If you want a server, if there is a demand for new application or testing something, our cycle time for getting a server up is anywhere from 15-20 minutes and there isn’t the associated cost. For us, a server is just a file. If you want one, great, here you go.

One of the greatest things that we monitor is our ratio of physical to logical servers. When we started this, our server ratio was 1:7. We are now 1:34.



And we manage capacity on the top line. So we essentially move that infrastructure barrier and cost. We’ve disconnected it. One of the greatest things that we monitor is our ratio of physical to logical servers. When we started this, when we first went live three-and-a-half or four years ago, our server ratio was 1:7. We are now 1:34. That’s essentially a 500 percent increase in capacity without the cost.

That makes a material difference in the business not having to pay for things. The speed at which we can nail up applications and the accuracy at which we can do it has made a material difference in our ability to deliver projects to the business.

Gardner: In addition to improving this cycle for development flexibility and resources, you've also devoted significant improvements to disaster recovery (DR). Tell me a little bit about why the private cloud has helped you in DR.

Giambruno: One of the things that we’ve learned very quickly was rate of change. When you're on a cloud, every time someone hits a keystroke on a keyboard, that’s a change in your cloud. Our rate of change is anywhere between 20-30 terabytes a week.

We made a conscious decision as we don’t tier anything in DR; we literally copy everything. There are two pieces of things. I'm most impressed with what my team has done.

Cheaper storage

One is if you take that rate of change and attach it to storage growth, you're roughly at $27 million a year. Through a series of technologies that we employ, we turn that $27 million into $400,000 of storage that we actually have to pay for. So, our shareholders get that benefit, because I don’t think anybody else’s shareholders would have that interest in place.

The second thing is that it does allow us to copy everything. Roughly a month ago, we lost our factory in Venezuela to a fire. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but from the time someone made a phone call, two hours and 40 minutes later -- and roughly two hours of the time of finding people, because it was a Sunday afternoon -- we moved the country of Venezuela up into our DR side, had everything running, and we're giving the users virtual desktops so they could keep working. That’s the power.

Gardner: Peace of mind and trust.

Giambruno: And it’s not fake. We’ve done it. Globally, we are minus-15 minutes replication in their stuff. That’s a little longer or little shorter depending where it is and time of the day, but it goes back to the simplicity. We just copy everything so we don’t have to worry about it.

Gardner: All right. Let’s see metrics-wise what this gets for you in data reduction. What sort of volumes have you been able to improve?

We keep finding ways to squeak more out, because, again, the less money we can use, the better for the business.



Giambruno: We’ve run about 96 percent data reduction for everything from compression and de-duplication. As we’ve gone through this, we've also learned that with different storage protocols, block versus CIFS, you get better compression. Running at NFS you pick up 15 percent utilization over block.

Everybody has different business cases for why they need either, but we keep finding ways to squeak more out, because, again, the less money we can use, the better for the business. The more efficient and effective we are, the better for the business, and the less they have to spend on this.

Conversely, we keep leveraging those capabilities in extending our cloud. So we can sling a Windows 7 desktop to an iPad, or we're enabling our cloud so people can use resources wherever they are, regardless of the device. That just makes their lives easier and their ability to do business better, so we can support people growing the company.

Gardner: It’s really impressive to me, David that the more value that you derive from you architecture and approach, the more it contributes to other things. For example, what you’ve described is great for DR, but you’re also reducing your racks, restructuring your server licensing, and also getting to improve asset utilization. So it’s sort of a snowball, but in a virtuous way.

The asset is never cold

Giambruno: It’s interesting because in our DR site we run our test and dev. So the asset is never cold. We're actually using the virtual servers while they are not being used for DR to run all our tests and dev. It just contributes to the uptime. The data is already there.

We reuse assets all the time, and as we go forward, we have plans to go active-active. So now end-of-life servers that are coming out for maintenance, we just throw them in DR, because they can just stay there forever. It doesn’t matter to us if one dies a year. So what? It’s really that ability to keep using those assets to extend capabilities.

Gardner: How about the stack? Can you describe some of your products and what they’ve done for you? Are you venturing to some new areas around either management or governance to try to continue to tweak this to get more bang for the buck?

Giambruno: The bang for the buck for us is that we're working really hard on essentially creating an internal marketplace, like the Apple marketplace or the Android marketplace.

We’ve got desktop virtualization, but we see huge value to the business in creating this internal marketplace. We know a user. We know their devices. We know the applications they're supposed to be using. Depending on the device that they connect, we can format the application they are using and its view to that device to deliver them in context.

To some degree, it’s like going from a LAN to a trusted WAN, where we know the device that’s registered to you. We know you as a user so we can deliver very securely your information, and that information never leaves my data center. So you are only ever viewing the information they are working with.

When that device comes out, our cloud will understand context. We'll be able to deliver that application in the context of the person.



Gardner: You're also now creating an application marketplace. How does that benefit from your cloud infrastructure?

Giambruno: Our cloud can send them anything. The applications are already running on the cloud. Essentially, when that device comes out, our cloud will understand context. We'll be able to deliver that application in the context of the person. You've got a highly secure environment. We're not moving data anywhere. We’ve got control of the device. We understand who the person is, and so we can deliver in context what they are supposed to have access to, regardless of where they are.

If you have an iPad or anything like that, you have an icon on the front. You’ll have a Revlon marketplace. You open that up, and there will be a list of applications that you have access to that are already authorized for you to have access to, and we will start sending you those applications.

Gardner: What’s your advice for folks getting started?

Giambruno: I tend to live by "isms" to make very clear pictures, because I had to move own organization through them. Two things: trust or verify, which maps into the second, which is just try. They are very symbiotic.

Trust and verify that you’re delivering the capabilities that the business needs and that you know they need.



As you look at this, just try, and as you go through that, trust and verify that you’re delivering the capabilities that the business needs and that you know they need. As you go along that path, you can build trust and confidence in yourself and your capabilities, your team can build trust and confidence, and you can show that to your business units.

That's like that snowball that you get rolling. Once everybody realizes that it can be done, it’s more of a human experience thing than it is the technology. The technology works, and we’ve been doing this for a couple of years. I couldn’t imagine operating any other way any longer until the next big geometry train comes, but that’s probably another 10 or 15 years.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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at 8:16 PM 0 comments

From VMworld, NYSE Euronext on hybrid cloud vision and strategy behind the Capital Markets Community Platform vertical cloud

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

When we hear about cloud, especially public clouds, we often encounter one-size-fits-all services. Advanced adapters of cloud delivery models are now quickly creating more specialized hybrid clouds for certain industries. And they're looking to them as both major sources of new business, and the means to bring much higher IT efficiency to their clients.

We'll learn here about how the NYSE Euronext recently unveiled one such vertical offering, their Capital Markets Community Platform. We’ll see how they built the cloud, which amounts to a Wall Street IT services destination, what it does, and how it’s different from other cloud offerings.

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 tell us about how specialized clouds are changing the IT game in such vertical industries as finance is Steve Rubinow, Executive Vice-President and Chief Information Officer at NYSE Euronext. 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’d like to hear more about how you put your cloud together. You're supporting these services both inside your cloud as well as your clients'. Why have you done it this way?

Rubinow: It’s the convergence of a couple of trends and also things that our customer started to tell us. Like a lot of companies, we started to use cloud technology within our own company to service our own internal needs for the reasons that many people do -- lower cost, more flexibility, more rapid spin up, those kinds of things, and we found, of course, that was very useful to us.

At the same time, we've talked to a lot of our customers via our commercial division, which we call NYSE Technologies. By virtue of all the turbulence that's happened in the world, especially in the financial markets in the last couple of years, a lot of our customers -- big ones, small ones, banks, brokerages, and everyone in between -- said the infrastructure that we traditionally have supported within our own companies, is a new model that we could adapt, given these technologies that are available, and given that we NYSE Technologies wants to provide these services. We asked if we should take a different look at what we are doing and see if we should pursue some of these things.

What it comes down right down to is that many of these companies said that maintaining their own infrastructure is not a competitive advantage for them. It’s really a cost of doing business like telephones and office furniture. It would be better if someone else helped them with it, maybe not 100 percent, but like we propose to do, and everyone wins. They get lower cost and they get to offload a burden that wasn’t particularly strategic to them.

We say we can do it with good service and at a good price, and everybody comes away a winner. So we launched this program this summer, with one offering called Compute on Demand, which has a number of attributes that make it different than your run-of-the-mill public cloud.

Higher Requirements

In the capital markets community, we have some attributes of infrastructure, a higher requirement, that most companies wouldn’t care so much about, but in our industry they are very, very critical. We have a higher level of security than an average company would probably pay attention to.

And reliability, as you can imagine. The markets need to be up all the time when they are supposed to be open. A few seconds makes a big difference. So we want to make sure that we pay extra attention to reliability.

Another thing is performance. Our industry is very performance-sensitive. Many of the executions are measured in micro-seconds. Any customer of ours, including ourselves, are sensitive to make sure that any infrastructure that we would depend on has the ability to make sure that transactions happen. You don’t find that in the run-of-the-mill public cloud because there just isn’t a need for the average company to do that.

For that reason, we thought our private offering, our community cloud, was a good idea. By the way, our customers seem to be nodding their heads a lot to the idea as well.

Gardner: Why have it as a hybrid model?

We're a very rich source of market data, as one might imagine. We generate a lot of market data ourselves because of the large marketplace we are.



Rubinow: In the spirit of trying to accommodate all the needs that people will have, for many of the cloud services, you get the most leverage out of them, if you as a customer are situated in the data center with us.

Many customers choose to do that for the simple reason of speed-of-light issues. The longer the network is between Point A and Point B, the longer it takes a message to get across it. In an industry where latency is so important, people want to minimize that distance, and so they co-locate there. Then, they have high-speed access to everything that's available in the data center.

Of course, customers outside the data center certainly can have access to those services as well. We have a dedicated network that we call SFTI, Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure. That was designed to support high speed, high reliability, and high resiliency, things that you would expect from a prominent financial services network. Our customers come to our data centers over that network, and they can avail themselves of the services that we have there too.

Historical data

We have historical data that lot of our customers would like to take a look at and analyze, rather than having to store the data themselves. We have it all here for them. We have applications like risk management and other services that we intend to offer in the future that customers would be hard-pressed to find somewhere else, or if they could find it somewhere else, they probably won't find it in as efficient a manner. So it makes sense for them to come to us to take a look at it and see how they can take advantage of it here.

Gardner: Tell us about your organization, your global nature, and where you expect to deliver these cloud services over time.

Rubinow: The full name of the company is NYSE Euronext, and that reflects the fact that we are a collection of markets not only in the United States but also in Europe. We operate a number of cash and derivative exchanges in Europe as well. So we talk about the whole family being part of NYSE Euronext.

We segment our business into three segments. There is the cash business, which is global. There is the derivatives business, which is global, and those are the things that people would have normally associated our company with, because the thing we've been doing for many years.

The newest piece of our business is the piece that I've referred to earlier and that's our commercial technology business, which we call NYSE Technologies. Through that segment of the business, we offer all these services, whether it be software products we might develop that our customers take advantage of or services as we've already referenced.

Over the years, we've been offering these services to our customers, and then a couple of years ago we decided to do it in a much bigger way, because we realized the need was there.



In a small way, over the years, we've been offering these services to our customers, and then a couple of years ago we decided to do it in a much bigger way, because we realized the need was there. Our customers told us that they would take advantage of these services. So we made a bigger effort in that regard. Right now, the commercial part of our business is several hundred million dollars a year in terms of revenue.

Question of latency

I have to add one note in terms of latency. For people who aren't familiar with our obsession with latency, the true textbook cloud profile means that one could execute cloud-like services. If we had 20 data centers across the world, they could be executed across any of those data centers and transparent to the customer as long as they get done.

In ours latency-sensitive world, we are a little bit constrained with some of the services that we offer. We can't afford to be moving things around from data center to data center, because those network differences, when you're measuring things in micro-seconds, are very noticeable to our customers. So some of our services could be distributed across the world, but some of our services are very tied to a physical location to make sure we get the maximum performance.

To add further to that, one of the cornerstone technologies, as we all know, of cloud computing is virtualization. That gives you a lot of flexibility to make sure that you get maximum utilization of your compute resources.

Some of the services we offer can't use virtualization. They have to be tied to a physical device. It doesn't mean that we can't use a lot of other offerings that VMware provides to help manage that process, but some are tied to physical devices, because virtualization in some cases introduces an overhead. Again, when you're measuring in micro-seconds, it's noticeable. Many other of our services where virtualization is key to what we do to offer the flexibility in cost to our customers.

So we have kind of a mixed bag of unique provisioning that's designed for the low-latency portion of our business, and then more general cloud technologies that we use for everything else in our business. You put the two of them together and we have a unique offering that no one else that we know of in the world offers, because we think we're the first, it’s not among the first, to do this.

You put the two of them together and we have a unique offering that no one else that we know of in the world offers.



Gardner: So this is a rather big business undertaking for you. This cloud is really an instrument for your business in a major way.

Rubinow: That's right. Sometimes we think the core of our business is trading. That is the core. That's our legacy That's the core of what we do. It's a very important source of our business, and it generates a lot of the things that we've been talking about. Without our core business we wouldn’t have the market data to offer to our customers in a variety of formats.

The technologies that we used to make sure that we were the leader in the marketplace in terms of trading technology and all the infrastructure to support that, that's also what we're offering our customers. What we're trying to do is cover all the bases in the capital markets community, and not only trading services, which of course is the center of what we do and it's core to everything that we do.

All the things that surround that our customers can use to support their traditional trading activities and then other things that they didn't used to look to us to do. These are things like extensive calculations that they would not have asked the NYSE to do, but today they do it, because we provide the infrastructure there for them.

Gardner: What are some of the underlying numbers perhaps of how this works economically?

Rubinow: From a metrics standpoint, it's probably too early to provide metrics, but I can tell you, qualitatively speaking, the few customers that we have that were early adopters are happy to get on stage with us and give great testimonials about their experience so far. So that’s a really good leading indicator.

Again, without offering numbers, our pipeline of people wanting these services globally has been filling very nicely. So we know we've hit a responsive chord. We expect that we will fulfill the promises that we’re offering and that our customers will be happy. It’s too early, though, to say, "Here's three case studies that show, our customers are saying how it’s gone, because they haven’t been in it long enough to deliver those metrics.

Many of the things needed to be done from scratch, because we didn’t have models to look for that we could copy in a marketplace.



When we were putting together our cloud architecture and thinking about the special needs that we had -- and I keep on saying it’s not run-of-the-mill cloud architecture -- we we’re trying to make sure that we did it in a way that would give us the flexibility, facilities, and cost that we needed. Many of the things needed to be done from scratch, because we didn’t have models to look for that we could copy in a marketplace.

And we also realized that we couldn’t do it ourselves; we have a lot of smart people here, but we don’t have all the smart people we need. So we had to turn to vendors. We were talking to everyone that had a cloud solution. Lots of vendors have lots of solutions. Some are robust, and some are not so robust.

When it came down to it, there were only a couple of vendors that we felt were smart enough, able enough, and real enough to deliver the things to us that we felt we needed to get started. I'm sure we will progress over time, and there will be other people who will include the picture.

Top of the list

But VMware was at the top of that list of technologies that we have been using internally for several years, been very happy with. Based on our historical relationship with VMware and the offerings that VMware have in the traditional VMware space, plus the cloud offerings, things like Cloud Director and other things, that we felt that those were good cornerstone technologies to make sure we have the greatest chance of success with few surprises.

And we needed partners to push the envelope, because we view ourselves as being innovative and groundbreaking, and we want to do things that are first in the industry. In order to do those with better certainty of outcome, you have to have good partners, and I think that’s what we found at VMware.

Gardner: What did you learn? Is there any 20-20 hindsight or Monday morning quarterback types of insights that you could offer to others who are considering such cloud and/or vertical specialty cloud implementations?

Rubinow: It goes back to the comments I just made in terms of choosing your partners carefully. You can’t afford to have a whole host of partners, dozens of them, because it would get very confusing. There's a lot of hype in the marketplace in terms of what can be done. You need people that have abilities, can deliver them, can service them, and can back them up.

You can’t afford to have a whole host of partners, dozens of them, because it would get very confusing.



Every one of us who’s trying to do something a little bit different than the mainstream, because we have a specific need that we’re trying to service, has to go into it with a careful eye towards who we’re working with.

So I would say to make sure that you ask the right questions. Make sure you kick the tires quite a bit. Make sure that you can count on what you’re going to implement and acquire. It’s like implementing any new technology It’s not unique to cloud.

If you're leading the charge, you still want to be aggressive but it’s a risk management issue You have to be careful what you’re doing internally. You have to be careful who you’re working with. Make sure that you dot your I’s and cross your T’s. Do it as quickly as you can to get to market, but just make sure that you keep your wits about you.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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at 8:02 PM 0 comments

Priming the private cloud pump, HP releases VirtualSystem for VMware at VMworld

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.



“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.

At VMworld the synergy between private cloud infrastructure and desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI) deployments is a major theme.



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.)

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at 4:07 PM 0 comments

Thursday, August 25, 2011

HP's Liz Roche on why enterprise technology strategy must move beyond the 'professional' and 'consumer' split

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

The past several years have ushered in a changing set of expectations from users as they engage with technology and services as both consumers and workers. The sense is that they want to get as much ease of use and productivity from enterprise technology as from their smartphones, social networks, tablets, and cloud-based offerings.

These deep rumblings of change mean that IT needs to rethink things a bit, to develop a "prosumer" strategy, whereby both the applications and services they provide to internal employees and their end-user customers increasingly bear the hallmarks of modern consumer services.

Their applications may need to behave more like apps. Their provisioning may need to be more like app stores. And self-service and intuitive adoption of new features need to be built in as primary requirements. Ease in social collaboration has become a must.

So how can IT adjust to this shift? What must they do differently, or more importantly, how must they think differently? This is the type of problem that a product or technology itself cannot address. It requires a comprehensive and methodological perspective, one that impacts consumers, business goals, and behaviors around technology use and adoption.

We're here now with an innovator and leader in HP’s Technology Consulting group to learn how enterprises can tackle and exploit such complex challenges as developing a prosumer strategy. The discussion with Liz Roche, a Director in the HP Technology Consulting organization, is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: It seems that the adoption of technology now seems to be moving at the volition of the savvy consumer, not the IT director.

Roche: If we look at some of the economic trends, you'll start to see that folks who went to college 20 or 30 years ago got out of school with the expectation of working their way up a corporate ladder and adopting technology and tools that were provided by the corporation. The folks who are coming up these days have been weaned on technology.

A really big mega-trend is that our workers of today and tomorrow, not us who are already in the workplace, those folks coming up, are going to not just demand technology that will enable their work and their life, but they will expect it and indeed may not be able to function as well without it.

Mega-trends include the consumerization of IT. At HP, we're calling it the Instant-On Enterprise, where everything and everyone is connected. Immediate gratification and instantaneous results are mandatory. There is this notion of 24×7, always-on commerce. We could go on and on, but I think the big trends are in that general category, at least as pertains to the prosumer. [To connect further with Liz Roche, visit her at her micro site.]

Gardner: How do you see the economics of this shifting and pushing the adoption patterns that enterprises need to try to catch up to?

Roche: It's funny, because in many ways it has become a numbers game. Some of these applications or businesses price their products at low or no cost -- with the objective being conversion to paid, either subscriptions or paid services and advertising, but also the value of the connection, the value of the social network as part of the business model.

Shared knowledge

Organizations or enterprises today are going to be taking philosophies like that and applying it to more traditional goods and services in the marketplace, where the value isn't necessarily on the initial transactions. It’s not about a 99-cent Angry Birds [app]. It's about what happens once you're using the technology, the product, the service, the relationships that you form, the advertising, and the knowledge that can be shared.

Gardner: So we have this cauldron of bubbling and churning change. What is it that you think organizations need to try to do in order to be on that advantageous side of shifts, rather than find themselves at a disadvantage?

Roche: A bunch of things. Let's start with the big picture. Organizations that are truly instant-on enterprises are those that serve their constituents, customers, employees, partners with whatever they want and need instantly, at any point in time, through any channel. So organizations that are instant-on, and those are the kinds of organizations that we need to evolve to, are going to explore better ways to run business and government by designing new process and methods, by building flexible systems that interact with greater personalization.

I think back to 10 or 15 years ago, when we were talking about mass customization and the science fiction world that was all about personalization of every transaction and every purchase. Companies are going there. I think companies will also need to look at frameworks for transacting efficiently and securely.

Creating a framework for this instant-on enterprise will enable this whole idea of everybody on, and the prosumer, the professional, and the consumer coming together as one person, one view, with two different sides to them, two worlds.



Governance is going to become ever more important. There are certainly legal and ethical goals and constraints. Creating a framework for this instant-on enterprise will enable this whole idea of everybody on, and the prosumer, the professional, and the consumer coming together as one person, one view, with two different sides to them, two worlds. That's going to have to be where organizations move to support.

Gardner: Help me understand about how you at HP are looking at this. It seems to be a terrific opportunity.

Roche: HP has a long, very cool history of being really innovative, but at HP today, our vision is to provide seamless and context-aware experiences for this connected world.

We're in a particularly interesting time and place to provide this to our customers, because we are going through it ourselves, both internally -- as an employee I can see it -- but also in how we interact with our customers, our partners, and all our constituents. [To connect further with Liz Roche, visit her at her micro site.]

Not just about prosumers

Just by way of example, at HP it's not just about prosumers, folks like me doing personal activities during work hours and work during personal hours. It's about these personal activities evolving into becoming work activities.

I'm not just messing around on YouTube because I like looking at the latest videos. I'm working You Tube, because that's where our HP Channel is. It’s one of the places where our HP Channel lives and it's one of the ways that I communicate with my clients. The same thing with Twitter and Facebook, and indeed even this podcast, speaking with you. These are prime examples of things that we at HP place a very high value on and our technology infrastructure has been overhauled to support that.

The other interesting thing about HP being well-positioned to do this is that we have a depth and breadth of both services and products that meet almost every requirement of this new instant-on enterprise.

Certainly, we would never expect to see an HP-only environment. We are very, very focused on what's right for our clients and our customers. But, the fact that I can reach back into my toolkit of HP brain power and HP Labs and our various products and service units and gain access to the information and the mind share that my clients need, is a hugely valuable tool to have at my disposal.

Gardner: What about the technology consulting organization?

The way our services are structured, we're designed to meet the various needs of transforming to an instant-on enterprise.



Roche: Let's talk a little bit about what all clients should look for in a consulting organization.

The way our services are structured, we're designed to meet the various needs of transforming to an instant-on enterprise, I mean that is the entire backbone of how we have structured ourselves.

If you look at our Converged Infrastructure team, for example, we have folks who are not only designing services to support a converged infrastructure, but we have folks who are looking at helping organizations create a transformation vision for what it means, how to get there, what your roadmaps need to look like, or how mature are you as an organization.

One of the things that we like to do a lot and, in fact, anyone considering working with a consulting partner should look for this as well, is to help folks understand their own maturity. I'm not talking about the traditional capability maturity model. We certainly we can do that, but we like to look at things in a slightly different way. We like to look at organizational culture and the risk profile of that organization. That’s unique to how we work at HP.

If I look at an organizational maturity model, we're looking at where culturally folks are going to be placed in terms of how they want to take a risk. Are they a science-fiction type organization where they're comfortable being on the bleeding edge, extremely early adopter organizations.

I've got this taxonomy in my brain from way back when I was an industry analyst and we used to talk about future organizations, which are these early adopter IT organizations, not bleeding edge, but willing to be early adopters.

Broker of services

There are the folks that are in the mainstream, and then there are the stalled IT organizations that look to deliver IT support, rather than moving to enable the business with IT and to have a seat at the table and to be not just a provider but an actual broker of services.

When you're a broker of IT services, which is what we teach our clients to be, you are providing not just IT support, but you're also providing new cost models for business process enablement. You're looking at things like service delivery in one of three ways: traditional, which is in-house or outsourced, private cloud, public cloud.

At HP Consulting, we believe that you're driving to create a service portfolio that drives a value chain. And the value chain delivers these services to the consumer, customer, citizen, via whatever channel is most appropriate -- web, chat, IM, etc.

Gardner: When you focus this problem set through a consultative solution or methodology, it’s really experiential, a tribal knowledge. It seems to me that the consultative function is perhaps more important when we come into this period of change.

We've been working really hard to make sure that we share our experiences, and to capture that tribal knowledge, to systematically input it into places where others can access it.



Roche: It’s one of the things that is pervasive throughout HP Consulting, that it really takes a village to deliver services and top-notch innovation to our clients.

Every time I walk into a client site with a team of consultants, it’s not just one of us working independently in our area of specialty. It’s about all of us working together. It’s about that tribal knowledge.

We've been working really hard to leverage the innovation in the field. So we need a really strong knowledge management capability. We've been working really hard to make sure that we share our experiences, and as you say, through tribal knowledge, to capture that tribal knowledge, to systematically input it into places where others can access it. And, of course, all while respecting the privacy and the non-disclosures we have with our clients.

When I walk into a healthcare organization to start working on a digital hospital activity, let's say, I've got the knowledge of all the folks who have come before me, including our long history of innovations.

The bottom line is that if someone says to me, what's very different and special about your team walking in versus someone else's team walking in, I'm going to say it is the depth and breadth of HP that's behind me, including the way that we work with our customers and partner with our clients to bring the depth and breadth of HP to bear in every engagement.

Gardner: So we're crossing chasm of consumer to business. You really need to have almost a behavioral, empathetic, sympathetic approach to bringing people into change. It's not easy to change.

Resistance to change

Roche: No, it's not. And while it may seem a little trite to say it, if anything is going to derail a project, it's going to be resistance to change, lack of a good change management strategy, and lack of executive support and governance.

The cool thing about this whole instant-on enterprise approach that we are taking is that we do actually have a taxonomy for change, and the taxonomy is both social and technology, and it basically is a way to connect all these different constituents to meet their needs.

The taxonomy itself says, if you're going to transform to an instant-on enterprise, the first level of the taxonomy is looking at the business and government requirements. Within IT, the best practice today seems to be all about alignment, business IT alignment.

We think that it's really not about alignment, but it's about taking that next step towards empowerment and empowering the business with IT. That means becoming a strategic service broker. That's the third level of this taxonomy.

To be a strategic service broker, you need to look at disciplines like converged infrastructure, security, information optimization, application and infrastructure transformation, and look to deliver those through those three service delivery mechanisms we spoke of earlier -- public cloud, private cloud, or traditional delivery, which includes outsourcing. Build those up into a service portfolio and roll it out in terms of services that are delivered.

We do actually have a taxonomy for change, and the taxonomy is both social and technology.



If you group this whole thing together, you're looking at a hybrid delivery capability, where there is no one-size-fits-all for every organization, but the taxonomy acts as a map and a rallying point to get to this idea of everybody on and supporting the prosumer. [To connect further with Liz Roche, visit her at her micro site.]

Gardner: How about some examples of how this can work when it's pulled together properly, when you have the alignment of services, consulting, technology, business buy-in, and so forth?

Roche: We actually have several great success stories with clients and I'm going to start with one client, Black & Veatch. We worked with them recently to deploy a unified communications solution from Microsoft that, for them, is going to pay for itself in 18 months, which is pretty amazing when you consider that we did this, basically creating a virtual environment to help Black & Veatch solve their client’s problems.

We worked with the client to design a unified communications solution and configure the architecture. We set up an infrastructure, including servers and load balancers and the like. We tested our Unified Communications software and voice, and we obviously are using voice over IP (VoIP).

We did all sorts of enhanced service desk and helpdesk implementations. And we also provided our own helpdesk -- or we set one up for them that was staff by HP to resolve issues during the cut-over. We did lots of training to help the users adapt to the new systems.

Reduced risk

After we put in place new converged technologies like IM and Mobile Access and desktop sharing, we replaced their phone system, and we gave them integrated fax and voicemail and email. We ended up reducing the risk of their outages through lots of built-in redundancies. We did this all in about 20 weeks.

As I said, they expect this project will pay for itself in 18 months, and essentially we gave Black & Veatch the ability to communicate and collaborate internally and with their customers around the world.

We worked with another client recently as well to provide them digital healthcare and digital hospital capabilities, that included things like video, telemedicine, that included the converged infrastructure to support voice and IM and other things like that.

We also worked with them to provide automated client case-management technology. I'm speculating a little bit, because some of the decisions haven’t totally been made, but imagine nurses walking into patient rooms carrying HP TouchPads, for example, rather than lugging the big heavy carts that nurses today do when they are doing automated medical records. It's really cool stuff like that, but again speaks to the whole nature of the prosumer.

We're working with education, a couple of education organizations, and in one instance working with some speech therapists to use tablet devices and handheld devices to help students with speech problems throughout their therapy. Rather than use flash cards, they're using specially built software that students can touch and listen to and things like that. Again, it's this integration of consumer and professional capabilities.

The idea that you have is provisioning that might look like app stores. Applications might look like apps on your device.



Gardner: One of the big things of course with the economy still being tough in many regions is how to do more with less. Is there a continuing economic incentive or I suppose even an engine of adoption that we should expect in the future, Liz?

Roche: Absolutely. In fact, I might even go so far as to call it an economic imperative. You talk about a harbinger of things to come, and I would say look at this whole reemergence of this prosumer trend. When I say reemergence, I'm talking about back in the '80s when Alvin Toffler first made up the idea that there is a convergence. He wasn’t calling it a professional, but he was calling it a producer and a consumer.

If we take that and look at how it has evolved into this notion that one person with a separate consumer and professional life is over and that we are looking for convergence, that’s the harbinger. The idea that you have, as you said in your introduction, provisioning that might look like app stores. Applications might look like apps on your device.

But as we see technology continue to increase in its velocity, as we see more and more technology adopted into our homes earlier and more deeply embedded into everything we do. That’s where we are going to see the future go.

Tight integration

Just think for a minute about our pets. We're embedding our pets with microchips that have not just their name and their address, but maybe if they have got some medical risks, they are on there.

I think we are going to start seeing things like that, that tight integration, maybe not embedded in our bodies, but certainly medical records, certainly integrated payment devices, the idea that paper money goes away and we have one card that does every thing. Organizations that aren’t at least thinking in that direction are really going to miss the boat.

To connect further with Liz Roche, visit her at her micro site.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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Friday, August 19, 2011

HP does a 180 -- Now it's Apotheker's company

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

By Tony Baer

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. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

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 Vertical to handle unstructured data, just as Advanced SQL rivals like Teradata’s Aster Data already do.

Autonomy is clearly a gem, but HP paid dearly for it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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