Ariba Network helps Cox Enterprises manage procurement across six different ERP systems

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

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast, from the 2012 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas, explores the latest in cloud-based collaborative commerce with Cox Enterprises, a $15 billion communications, media, and automotive services company.

We'll learn how Cox, through the Ariba Network, manages multiple ERP systems for an improved eProcurement strategy, and has moved toward more efficient indirect spend efforts to improve ongoing operations and drive future growth across more than 50,000 employees.

To hear more about how they have done this, Interarbor Solutuons Principal Analyst Dana Gardner interviews Brooke Krenn, the Senior Manager of Procurement Systems for Cox Enterprises, based in Atlanta. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: A lot of organizations either have organically developed multiple systems for different groups or, for merger and acquisition reasons, have different ERPs. How has that been a challenge, when it comes to procurement?

Krenn: We have six separate ERP systems spanning major subsidiaries, including Cox Communications, Manheim, Cox Media Group, and AutoTrader.com. Cox is a very interesting company in that our business units are very diverse and very unique. Across four divisions and our holding company we have those six ERP systems.

So with that, obviously, there are a lot of challenges. There's not a lot of common ground, when it comes to purchasing. Across those six ERP systems we needed some way to drive consistency, as we focused on really capitalizing on our indirect spend across all the business units.

Procurement systems team

My team is the Procurement Systems Team. We fall under supply chain in Cox Enterprises. I have a team of three, and we manage our eProcurement platform, with which we do about $50 million year-end POs, and average about 1,500 POs a month. We also manage our P-Card program, which is about $130 million a year in spend, and also our fuel card program, which is about $50 million a year.

Historically, our spend, specifically the indirect spend, has been all over the place. We haven’t had a lot of visibility into that spend and haven’t had a consistent manner in which we purchased.

Ariba was one of the top contenders, simply because of the user experience was most important to us, and also how quickly we could implement it.

We had an eProcurement solution for about 10 years. We were on that software for a decade, and it was just very dated. It wasn't supported very well. We knew it was time to make that change. Where we were in the economy, everyone was looking at the most logical places to save time and money and to become more efficient. Obviously, procurement was one of those areas where we could do very quickly.

We knew the first step was replacing the software that we did have. Immediately, Ariba was one of the top contenders, as we looked for a new solution, simply because of the user experience was most important to us, and also how quickly we could implement it.

Gardner: So you’re going from an on-premises software installed affair to now more of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud affair. Was that something that was difficult or something you were looking forward to?

Krenn: Moving to the cloud in an on-demand solution was great for us. Having the on-premises software in the past, any time there was an upgrade or an update, we had to be sure IT knew about it and we scheduled the time on a night or a weekend. We had to call on resources internally within the company. So it was very exciting for us to move to an on-demand solution and all of the technology that was available with that.

A great change

For the users, it's been a great change, because now they consistently know there's one place to go. When they need to order office supplies, when they need to order something for their break room, when they need to order business cards, they know where to go. In all of our divisions and all of our locations, employees want to do the right thing. They want to purchase the right way. A lot of times they're just not sure of what to do.

So with this implementation of a new tool, we were able to really drive them in the right direction, and it was an easy solution for them. It was easy for us to implement, and it's been very easy for our end users and our employees to adopt.

Gardner: Has that, in fact, translated into other metrics of success that you could describe for us?

With this implementation of a new tool, we were able to really drive them in the right direction, and it was an easy solution for them.

Krenn: Probably one of the biggest wins for us has been just driving compliance against our contracts. We’re able to see very easily now when a location or a business unit within one of the divisions is purchasing off-contract or when they're not utilizing one of our preferred or negotiated suppliers. That's probably been the biggest win for us.

We have the visibility now to see very quickly within our P2P tool and also within our spend management tool to see where this spend is taking place and able to reach out directly to those locations or to those employees that are purchasing off-contract. Obviously, the more purchasing power we have, the more spend we are driving to these contracts, the better our pricing is going to be going forward.

Unconventional

We went about implementing our new P2P solution a bit unconventionally, you could say. About 98 percent of our transactions are actually on a supplier card -- a P-Card model, which has just been tremendously successful for us. With that, we didn't have to integrate directly into our six separate ERPs because our payment method is with that supplier card.

Ease of implementation was one of the biggest wins. Also with that is the ease of use for the end user. There's no reconciliation for them at the end of the month. We’re taking care of all of that GL coding information, all of the approvals, upfront. The supplier card model, again, has been great on the end user side as well as on the AP reconciliation side.

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

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Another vote for the Apache Hadoop stack

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

By Tony Baer

As we’ve noted previously, the measure of success of an open source stack is the degree to which the target remains intact. That either comes as part of a captive open source project, where a vendor unilaterally open sources their code (typically hosting the project) to promote adoption, or a community model where a neutral industry body hosts the project and gains support from a diverse cross section of vendors and advanced developers. In that case, the goal is getting the formal standard to also become the de facto standard.

The most successful open source projects are those that represent commodity software – otherwise, why would vendors choose not to compete with software that anybody can freely license or consume? That’s been the secret behind the success of Linux, where there has been general agreement on where the kernel ends, and as a result, a healthy market of products that run atop (and license) Linux. For community open source projects, vendors obviously have to agree on where the line between commodity and unique value-add begins.

And so we’ve discussed that the fruition of Hadoop will require some informal agreement as to exactly what components make Hadoop, Hadoop. For a while, the question appeared in doubt, as one of the obvious pillars – the file system – was being contested with proprietary alternatives like MapR and IBM’s GPFS.

Retrenching

What’s interesting is that the two primary commercial providers that signed on for the proprietary files systems – IBM and EMC (via partnership with MapR) – have retrenched. They still offer the proprietary file system systems in question, but both now also offer purer Apache versions. IBM made the announcement today, buried below the fold after its announced intention to acquire data federation search player, Vivisimo. The announcement had a bit of a grudging aspect to it – unlike Oracle, which has a full OEM agreement with Cloudera, IBM is simply stating that it will certify Cloudera’s Hadoop as one of the approved distributions for InfoSphere BigInsights – there’s no exchange of money or other skin in the game. If IBM also gets demand for the Hortonworks distro (or if it wants to keep Cloudera in its place), it’ll also likely add Hortonworks to the approved list.

Against this background is a technology that is a moving target. The primary drawback – that there was no redundancy or failover with the HDFS NameNode (which acts as a file directory) – has been addressed with the latest versions of Hadoop. The other – which provides POSIX compliance so Hadoop can be accessed through the NFS standard) – is only necessary for very high, transactional-like (OK, not ACID) performance which so far has not been an issue. If you want that kind of performance, Hadoop’s HBase offers more promise.

What’s interesting is that the two primary commercial providers that signed on for the proprietary files systems have retrenched.

But just as the market has passed judgment on what comprises the Hadoop “kernel” (using some Linuxspeak), that doesn’t rule out differences in implementation. Teradata Aster and Sybase IQ are promoting their analytics data stores as swappable, more refined replacements for HBase (Hadoop’s column store), while upstarts like Hadapt are proposing to hang SQL data nodes onto HDFS.

When it comes to Hadoop, you gotta reverse the old maxim: The more things stay the same, the more things are actually changing.

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

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Fast data hits the big data fast lane

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

By Tony Baer

Of the 3 “V’s” of Big Data – volume, variety, velocity (we’d add “Value” as the 4th V) – velocity

has been the unsung ‘V.’ With the spotlight on Hadoop, the popular image of Big Data is large petabyte data stores of unstructured data (which are the first two V’s). While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion.

“Fast Data” refers to processes that require lower latencies than would otherwise be possible with optimized disk-based storage. Fast Data is not a single technology, but a spectrum of approaches that process data that might or might not be stored. It could encompass event processing, in-memory databases, or hybrid data stores that optimize cache with disk.

Fast Data is nothing new, but because of the cost of memory, was traditionally restricted to a handful of extremely high-value use cases. For instance:

• Wall Street firms routinely analyze live market feeds, and in many cases, run sophisticated complex event processing (CEP) programs on event streams (often in real time) to make operational decisions.
• Telcos have handled such data in optimizing network operations while leading logistics firms have used CEP to optimize their transport networks.

  While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion.

• In-memory databases, used as a faster alternative to disk, have similarly been around for well over a decade, having been employed for program stock trading, telecommunications equipment, airline schedulers, and large destination online retail (e.g., Amazon).

Hybrid in-memory and disk have also become commonplace, especially amongst data warehousing systems (e.g., Teradata, Kognitio), and more recently among the emergent class of advanced SQL analytic platforms (e.g., Greenplum, Teradata Aster, IBM Netezza, HP Vertica, ParAccel) that employ smart caching in conjunction with a number of other bells and whistles to juice SQL performance and scaling (e.g., flatter indexes, extensive use of various data compression schemes, columnar table structures, etc.).

Many of these systems are in turn packaged as appliances that come with specially tuned, high-performance backplanes and direct attached disk.

Finally, caching is hardly unknown to the database world. Hot spots of data that are frequently accessed are often placed in cache, as are snapshots of database configurations that are often stored to support restore processes, and so on.

So what’s changed?

The usual factors: the same data explosion that created the urgency for Big Data is also generating demand for making the data instantly actionable. Bandwidth, commodity hardware and, of course, declining memory prices, are further forcing the issue: Fast Data is no longer limited to specialized, premium use cases for enterprises with infinite budgets.

Not surprisingly, pure in-memory databases are now going mainstream: Oracle and SAP are choosing in-memory as one of the next places where they are establishing competitive stakes: SAP HANA vs. Oracle Exalytics.

Both Oracle and SAP for now are targeting analytic processing, including OLAP (by raising the size limits on OLAP cubes) and more complex, multi-stage analytic problems that traditionally would have required batch runs (such as multivariate pricing) or would not have been run at all (too complex, too much delay).

Not surprisingly, pure in-memory databases are now going mainstream.

More to the point, SAP is counting on HANA as a major pillar of its stretch goal to become the #2 database player by 2015, which means expanding HANA’s target to include next generation enterprise transactional applications with embedded analytics.

Potential use cases for Fast Data could encompass:

• A homeland security agency monitoring the borders requiring the ability to parse, decipher, and act on complex occurrences in real time to prevent suspicious people from entering the country
• Capital markets trading firms requiring real-time analytics and sophisticated event processing to conduct algorithmic or high-frequency trades
• Entities managing smart infrastructure which must digest torrents of sensory data to make real-time decisions that optimize use of transportation or public utility infrastructure
• B2B consumer products firms monitoring social networks may require real-time response to understand sudden swings in customer sentiment

For such organizations, Fast Data is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.

More specialized use cases are similarly emerging now that the core in-memory technology is becoming more affordable. YarcData, a startup from venerable HPC player Cray Computer, is targeting graph data, which represents data with many-to-many relationships. Graph computing is extremely process-intensive, and as such, has traditionally been run in batch when involving Internet-size sets of data. YarcData adopts a classic hybrid approach that pipelines computations in memory, but persisting data to disk. YarcData is the tip of the iceberg – we expect to see more specialized applications that utilize hybrid caching that combine speed with scale.

Memory’s not the new disk

The movement – or tiering – of data to faster or slower media is also nothing new. What is new is that data in memory may no longer be such a transient thing, and if memory is relied upon for in situ processing of data in motion or rapid processing of data at rest, memory cannot simply be treated as the new disk. Excluding specialized forms of memory such as ROM, by nature anything that’s solid state is volatile: there goes your power… and there goes your data.

Not surprisingly, in-memory systems such as HANA still replicate to disk to reduce volatility. For conventional disk data stores that increasingly leverage memory, Storage Switzerland’s George Crump makes the case that caching practices must become smarter to avoid misses (where data gets mistakenly swapped out).

There are also balance of system considerations: memory may be fast, but is its processing speed well matched with processor?

There are also balance of system considerations: memory may be fast, but is its processing speed well matched with processor? Maybe solid state overcomes I/O issues associated with disk, but may still be vulnerable to coupling issues if processors get bottlenecked or MapReduce jobs are not optimized.

Declining memory process are putting Fast Data on the fast lane to mainstream. But as the technology is now becoming affordable, we’re still early in the learning curve for how to design for it.

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

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Case study: Strategic approach to disaster recovery and data lifecycle management pays off for Australia's SAI Global

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

The latest BriefingsDirect case study discussion focuses on how business standards and compliance services provider SAI Global is benefiting from a strategic view of IT enabled disaster recovery (DR).

Learn here how SAI Global has brought advanced backup and DR best practices into play for its users and customers. Examine too how this has not only provided business continuity assurance, but it has also provided beneficial data lifecycle management and virtualization efficiency improvement.

Mark Iveli, IT System Engineer at SAI Global, based in Sydney, Australia, details on how standardizing DR has helped improve many aspects of SAI Global’s business reliability. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Iveli: When we started to get into DR, we handled it from an IT point of view and it was very much like an iceberg. We looked at the technology and said, "This is what we need from a technology point of view." As we started to get further into the journey, we realized that there was so much more that we were overlooking.

We were working with the businesses to go through what they had, what they didn’t have, what we needed from them to make sure that we could deliver what they needed. Then we started to realize it was a bigger project.

The initiative for DR started about 18 months ago with our board, and it was a directive to improve the way we had been doing things. That meant a complete review of our processes and documentation.

We had a number of business units that all had different strategies for their disaster recovery, and different timings and mechanisms to report on it.

Through the use of VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) in the DR project, we've been able to centralize all of the DR processes, provide consistent reporting, and be able to schedule these business units to do all of their testing in parallel with each other.

So we can make a DR session, so to speak, within the business and just run through the process for them and give them their reports at the end of it.

We've installed SRM 4.1 and our installation was handled by an outsource company, VCPro. They were engaged with us to do the installation and help us get the design right from a technical point of view.

Trying to make it a daily operational activity is where the biggest challenge is, because the implementation was done in a project methodology.

Trying to make it a daily operational activity is where the biggest challenge is, because the implementation was done in a project methodology. Handing it across to the operational teams to make it a daily operation, or a daily task, is where we're seeing some challenges.

I'm a systems engineer with SAI Global, and I've been with the company for three years. When the DR project started to gather some momentum, I asked to be a significant part of the project. I got the nod and was seconded to the DR project team because of my knowledge of VMware.

That’s what my role is now -- keeping the SRM environment tuned and in line with what the business needs. That’s where we're at with SRM.

Complete review

The first 12 months of this journey so far has been all around cleaning up, getting our documentation up to spec, making sure that every business unit understood and was able to articulate their environments well. Then, we brought all that together so that we could say what’s the technology that’s going to encapsulate all of these processes and documentation to deliver what the business needs, which is our recovery point objective (RPO) and for our recovery time objective (RTO).

SAI Global is an umbrella company. We have three to four main areas of interest. The first one, which we're probably most well-known for, is our Five Ticks brand, and that’s the ASIS standards. The publication, the collection, the customization to your business is all done through our publishing section of the business.

That then flows into an assurance side of the business, which goes out and does auditing, training, and certification against the standards that we sell.

We continue to buy new companies, and part of the acquisition trail that we have been on has been to buy some compliance businesses. That’s where we provide governance risk and compliance services through the use of Board Manager, GRC Manager, Cintellate, and in the U.S., Integrity 360.

Finally, last year, we acquired a company that deals solely in property settlement, and they're quite a significant section of the business that deals a lot with banks and convincing firms in handling property settlements.

So we're a little bit diverse. All three of those business sections have their own IT requirements.

Gardner: Like many businesses, your brand is super important. The trust associated with your performance is something you will take seriously. So DR, backup and recovery, business continuity, are top-line issues for you.

Because of what we do, especially around the property settlement and interactions with the banks, DR is critical for us.

Is there anything about what you've been doing as a company that you think makes DR specifically important for you?

Iveli: From SAI Global’s point of view, because of what we do, especially around the property settlement and interactions with the banks, DR is critical for us.

Our publishing business feels that their website needs to be available five nines. When we showed them what DR is capable of doing, they really jumped on board and supported it. They put DR as high importance for them.

As far as businesses go, everyone needs to be planning for this. I read an article recently where something like 85 percent of businesses in the Asia-Pacific region don’t have a proper DR strategy in place. With the events that have happened here in Australia recently with the floods, and when you look at the New Zealand earthquakes and that sort of stuff, you wonder where the businesses are putting DR and how much importance they've got on it. It’s probably only going to take a significant event before they change their minds.

Gardner: I was intrigued, Mark, when you said what DR is capable of doing. Do you feel that there is a misperception, perhaps an under-appreciation of what DR is?

Process in place

Iveli: The larger DR whole was just that these business units had a process in place, but it was an older process and a lot of the process was designed around a physical environment.

With SAI Global being almost 100 percent virtual, moving them into a virtual space opened their minds up to what was possible. So when we can sit down with the business units and say, "We're going to do this DR test," they ask if it will impact production. No, it won’t. How is it happening? "Well, we are going to do this, this, and this in the background. And you will actually have access to your application the way it is today, it’s just going to be isolated and fenced off."

They say, "This is what we've been waiting for." We can actually do this sort of stuff. They're starting to see and ask, "Can we use this to test the next version of the applications and can we test this to kind of map out our upgrade path?"

We're starting to move now into a slightly different world, but it has been the catalyst of DR that’s enabled them to start thinking in these new ways, which they weren’t able to do before.

Gardner: So being able to completely switch over and recover with very little interruption in terms of the testing, with very little downtime or loss, the opportunity then is to say, "What else can we do with this capability?"

It has been the catalyst of DR that’s enabled them to start thinking in these new ways, which they weren’t able to do before.

Iveli: Absolutely. With this new process, we've taken the approach of baby steps, and we're just looking to get some operational maturity into the environment first, before we start to push the boundaries and do things like disaster avoidance.

Having the ability to just bring these environments across in a state that’s identical to production is eye-opening for them. Where the business wants to take it is the next challenge, and that’s probably how do we take our DR plan to version 2.0.

We need to start to work with the likes of VMware and ask what our options are now. We have this in place, people are liking it, but they want to take it into a more highly available solution. What do we do next? Use vCloud Director? Do we need to get our sites in an active/active pairing?

However, whatever the next technology step is for us, that’s where the business are now starting to think ahead. That’s nice from an alignment point of view.

Gardner: Those DR maturation approaches put you in a position to further leverage virtualization. Is there sort of a virtuous adoption pattern, when you combine modern DR with widespread virtualization?

Iveli: Because all of a sudden, your machines are just a file on a data store somewhere, now you can move these things around. As the physical technologies continue to advance -- the speed of our networks, the speed of the storage environments, metro clustering, long haul replication -- these technologies are allowing businesses to think outside of the box and look at ways in which they can provide faster recovery, higher availability, more elastic environments.

You're not pinned down to just one data center in Sydney. You could have a data center in Sydney and a data center in New Zealand, for instance, and we can keep both of those sites online and in sync. That’s couple of years down the track for our business, but that’s a possibility somehow through the use of more virtualization technology.

Gardner: Any advice for those listening in who are beginning their journey? For those folks that are recognizing the risks and seeing these larger benefits, these more strategic benefits, how would you encourage them to begin their journey, what advice might you offer?

Iveli: The advice would be to get hired guns in. With DR, you're not going to be able to do everything yourself. So spend a little bit more money and make sure that you get some consultants in like VCPro. Without these guys, we probably would have struggled a little bit just making sure that our design was right. These guys ensured that we had best practice in our designs.

Before you get into DR, do your homework. Make sure that your production environment is pristine. Clean it up. Make sure that you don’t have anything in there that’s wasting your resources.

Come around with a strong business case for DR. Make sure that you've got everybody on board and you have the support of the business.

Make sure that your production environment is pristine. Clean it up. Make sure that you don’t have anything in there that’s wasting your resources.

When you get into DR, make sure that you secure dedicated resources for it. Don't just rely on people coming in and out of the project. Make sure that you can lead people to the resource and you make sure that they are fully engaged in the design aspects and the implementation aspects.

And as you progress with DR, incorporate it as early as you can into your everyday IT operation. We're seeing that, because we held it back from our operations, just handing it over and having them manage the hardware and the ESX and the logical layers, the environment, they were struggling just to get their head around it and what was what, where should this go, where should that go.

And once it’s in place, celebrate. It can be a long haul. It can be quite a trying time. So when you finally get it done, make sure that you celebrate it.

Gardner: And perhaps a higher degree of peace of mind that goes with that.

Iveli: Well, you'll find out when you get through it, how much easier this is making your life, how much better you can sleep at night.

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

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Virtualization simplifies disaster recovery for insurance broker Myron Steves while delivering efficiency and agility gains too

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

When Hurricane Ike struck Texas in 2008, it became the second costliest hurricane ever to make landfall in the U.S. It was also a wake-up call for Houston-based insurance wholesaler Myron Steves & Co., which was not struck directly but nonetheless realized its IT disaster recovery (DR) approach was woefully inadequate.

Supporting some 3,000 independent insurance agencies in the Gulf Coast region, with many insured properties in that active hurricane zone, Myron Steves must have all it resources up and available, if and when severe storms strike.

The next BriefingsDirect discussion then centers on how Myron Steves, a small- to medium-sized business (SMB), developed and implemented a modern disaster recovery and business continuity strategy based on a high-degree of server and clients virtualization.

Learn how Tim Moudry, Associate Director of IT, and William Chambers, IT Operations Manager, both at Myron Steves, made a bold choice to go essentially 100 percent server virtualized in 90 days. That then set the stage for a faster, cheaper, and more robust DR capability. It also helped them improve their desktop-virtualization delivery, another important aspect of maintaining constant availability no mater what.

The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Moudry: When Hurricane Ike came, we were using another DR support company, and they gave us facilities to recover our data. They were also doing our backups.

We went to that site to recover systems, and we had a hard time recovering anything. We were testing it, and it was really cumbersome. We tried to get servers up and running. We stayed there to recover one whole day and never got even a data center recovered.

So William and I were chatting and thinking that there's got to be a better way. That’s when we started testing a lot of the other virtualization software. We came to VMware, and it was just so easy to deploy.

We made a proposal to our executive committee, and it was an easy sell. We did the whole project for the price of one year of our old DR system.

Gardner: William, what were your top concerns about change?

Chambers: Our top concerns were just avoiding what happened during Ike. In the building we're in in Houston, we were without power for about a week. So that was the number one cause for virtualization.

Number two was just the amount of hardware. Somebody actually called us and said, "Can you take these servers somewhere else and plug them in and make them run?" Our response was no.

That was the lead into virtualization. If we wanted everything to be mobile like that, we had to go with a different route.

Then, once you get into virtualization, you think, "Well, okay, this is going to make us mobile, and we'll be able to recover somewhere else quicker," but then you start seeing other features that you can use that would benefit what you are doing at smaller physical size. It's just the mobility of the data itself, if you’ve got storage in place that will do it for you. Recovery times were cut down to nothing.

Simpler to manage

There was ease of backups, everything that you have to do on a daily maintenance schedule. It just made everything simpler to manage, faster to manage, and so on.

Gardner: And so for you as an SMB with 200 employees, what requirements were involved? You obviously don't have unlimited resources and you don't have a huge IT staff.

Chambers: It’s probably what any other IT shop wants. They want stability, up-time, manageability, and flexibility. That’s what any IT shop would want, but we're a small shop. So we had to do that with fewer resources than some of the bigger Exxons and stuff like that.

Moudry: And it can't cost an arm and leg either. We're an insurance broker. We're not a carrier. We are between the carriers and agents. With our people being on the phone, up-time is essential, because they're on the phone quoting all the time. That means if we can’t answer our phones, the insurance agent down the street is going to go pick up the phone, and they're going to get the business somewhere else.

Now, we're trying to get more green in the industry, and we are trying to print less paper

Also, we do have claims. We don't process all claims, but we do some claims, mainly for our stuff that's on the coast. After a hurricane, that’s when people are going to want that.

We have to be up all the time. When a disaster strikes, they are going to say, "I need to get my policy," and then they are going to want to go to our website to download that policy, and we have to be up.

Gardner: Why did you go 100 percent virtualized in such a short time?

SAN storage

Chambers: We did that because we’ve got applications running on our servers, things like rating applications, emails, our core applications. A while back, we separated the data volumes from the physical server itself. So the data volume is stored on a storage area network (SAN) that we get through an iSCSI.

That made it so easy for us to do a physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion on the physical server. Then in the evenings, during our maintenance period, we shut that physical server down and brought up the virtual connected to the SAN one, and we were good. That’s how we got through it so quickly.

Moudry: William moved us to VMware first, and then after we saw how VMware worked so well, we tried out VMware View and it was just a no-brainer, because of the issues that we had before with Citrix and because of the way Citrix works. One session affects all the others. That’s where VMware shines, because everybody is on their independent session.

Gardner: Where are your data centers?

Moving to colos

Moudry: Right now it’s Houston and San Antonio, but we are moving all of our equipment to colos, and we are going to be in Phoenix and Houston.

Gardner: So that’s even another layer of protection, wider geographic spread, and just reducing your risk in general. Let’s take a moment and look at what you’ve done and see in a bit more detail what it’s gotten for you. Return on investment (ROI), do you have any sense, having gone through this, what you are doing now that perhaps covered the cost of doing it in the first place?

Moudry: We spent about $350,000 a year in our past DR solution. We didn’t renew that, and the VMware DR paid for itself in the year.

We're working with automation. We're getting less of a footprint for our employees. You just don’t hire as many.

And we are not buying equipment like we used to. We had 70 servers and four racks. It compressed down to one rack. How many blades are we running, William?

Chambers: We're running 12 blades, and the per year maintenance cost on every server that we had compared to what we have now is 10 percent now of what it was.

Gardner: I notice that you're also a Microsoft shop. Did you look at their virtualization or DR? How come you didn’t go with Microsoft?

Then he downloaded the free version of VMware and tried the same thing on that. We got it up in two or three days.

Chambers: We looked at one of their products first. We've used the Virtual PC and Virtual Server products. Once you start looking at and evaluating theirs, it’s a little more difficult setup. It runs well, but at that time, I believe it was 2008, they didn’t have anything like the vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) that I could find. It was a bit slower. All around, the product just wasn’t as good as the VMware product was.

Moudry: I remember when William was loading it. I think he spent probably about 30 days loading Microsoft and he got a couple of machines running on it. It was probably about two or three machines on each host. I thought, "Man, this is pretty cool." But then he downloaded the free version of VMware and tried the same thing on that. We got it up in two or three days?

Chambers: I think it was three days to get the host loaded and then re-center all the products, and then it was great.

Moudry: Then he said that it was a little bit more expensive, but then we weighed out all the cost of all the hardware that we were going to have to spend with Microsoft. He loaded the VMware and he put about 10 VMs on one host.

Increased performance

It was running great. It was awesome. I couldn’t believe that that we could get that much performance from one machine. You'd think that running 10 servers, you would get the most performance. I couldn’t believe that those 10 servers were running just as fast on one server that they did on 10.

Chambers: That was another key benefit. The footprint of ESXi was somewhat smaller than a Microsoft.

Moudry: It used the memory so much more efficiently.

Gardner: You mentioned vSphere, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, and View. Is that it? Are you up to the latest versions of those? What do you actually have in place and running?

Chambers: We have both in production right now, vCenter 4.1, and vCenter 5.0. We’re migrating from 4.1 to 5.0. Instead of doing the traditional in-place upgrade, we’ve got it set up to take a couple of hosts out of the production environment, build them new from scratch, and then just migrate VMs to it in the server environment.

It went by so fast that it just happened that way. We were ahead of schedule on our time-frames and ahead on all of our budget numbers.

It's the same thing with the View environment. We’ve got enough hosts so we can take a couple out, build the new environment, and then just start migrating users to it.

It all happened much quicker than we thought. Once we did a few of the conversions, of the physical servers that we had, and it went by so fast that it just happened that way. We were ahead of schedule on our time-frames and ahead on all of our budget numbers. Once we got everything in our physical production environment virtualized, then we could start building new virtual servers to replace the ones that we had converted, just for better performance.

Without disruption

We were able to do it without disruption, and that was one of the better things that happened. We could convert a physical server during the day, while people were still using it, or create that VM for it. Then, at night, we took the physical down and brought the virtual up, and they never knew it.

Gardner: How about some other metrics of success?

Copying the template

Moudry: Making new servers is nothing. William has a template. He just copies it and renames it.

Chambers: The deployment of new ones is 20 minutes. Then, we’ve got our development people who come down and say, "I need a server just like the production server to do some testing on before we move that into production." That takes 10 minutes. All I have to do is clone that production server and set it up for them to use for development. It’s so fast and easy that they can get their work done much quicker.

Moudry: Rather than loading the Windows disk and having to load a server and get it all patched up.

Chambers: It gives you a like environment. In the past, where they tested on a test server you built, that’s not exactly the same as the production server. They could have bugs that they didn’t even know about yet, and that just cuts down on the development time just a lot.

Gardner: Any advice for folks who are looking at the same type of direction, higher virtualization, gaining the benefits of DR’s result and then perhaps having more of that agility and flexibility? What might you have learned in hindsight that you could share with some other folks?

We’ve got a lot of people working at home now, just because of the View environment and things like that.

Chambers: If you are going to use virtualization, then get in and start using it on a small basis. Just to do a proof of concept, check performance, do all the due diligence that you need, and get into it. It will really pay off in the end.

Moudry: Have a change control system that monitors what you change. When we first went over there, William was testing out the VMs, and I couldn’t believe, as I was saying earlier, how fast it is. We have people who are on the phones. They're quoting insurance. They have to have the speed. If it hesitates, and that customer on the phone takes longer to give our people the information and our people has hard time quoting it, we’re going to lose the business.

When William put some of these packages over to the VM software, and it was not only running as fast, but it was running faster on the VM than it was on a hard box. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe how fast it was.

Chambers: And there was another thing that we saw. We’ve got a lot of people working at home now, just because of the View environment and things like that. I think we’ve kind of neglected our inside people, because they'd rather work in a View environment, because it's so much faster than sitting on a local desktop.

Backbone speed

Moudry: When somebody works at home, they're at lightning speeds. Upstairs is a ghost town now, because everybody wants to work from home. That’s part of our DR also. The model is, "We have a disaster here. You go work from home." That means we don’t have to put people into offices anywhere, and with the Voice over IP, it's like their call-center. They just call from home.

Chambers: They can work from different devices now, too. I know we’ve got laptops out there, iPads, different type of mobile devices, and it's all secure.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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Microsoft teams up with Ariba on B2B ecommerce front

Ariba is now teaming with Microsoft in business streamlining to empower buyers and sellers to better connect and collaborate across Microsoft applications and Ariba's commerce cloud services.

Announced last week at the AribaLIVE conference in Las Vegas, the joint effort paves the way for many more businesses and resellers globally to plug into what Ariba calls the Networked Economy by giving Microsoft Dynamics AX users automated access to the Ariba Network.

Microsoft Dynamics offers productivity tools and built-in contextual business intelligence that help decision-makers move faster. There are 300,000 businesses that use Microsoft Dynamics applications and 10,000 Microsoft Dynamics reselling partners worldwide.

The Ariba Network leverages cloud-based invoicing, supplier discovery and spend management services and an online trading community to drive collaboration and efficiency in business-to-business ecommerce. Companies use the network to transact more than $300 billion in commerce annually, and it's growing rapidly. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP, for example, now uses Ariba to sell $1.3 billion in orders over the Ariba Network annually, changing game of automation for IT orders and fulfillment, said Ariba President Kevin Costello on the Ariba main stage last week. Ariba, said Costello, provides a "neutral gateway" to extended enterprise business processes around supply chain and spend. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The new strategic alliance wit Microsoft is a response to trends like cloud computing and the convergence of enterprise applications, social media and communities. Microsoft and Ariba are seeing more organizations looking beyond the four walls of the enterprise, extending processes and systems to connect and collaborate more with customers, suppliers, and other trading partners.

“Business has officially entered a new era,” said Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing Officer at Ariba. “It’s social, it’s mobile, it’s collaborative and it’s creating a major shift in how companies interact.”

In other AribaLIVE news, Ariba announced stronger ties to ThomasNet (nee Thomas Register), bringing scads more product and detailed supplier data into Ariba Network. Ariba also now using Dell Boomi to accelerate integration with company systems for collaborative commerce, the company announced. And Ariba is also partnering with Accenture on commerce strategies and business process outsourcing (BPO) alliances.

Joins other partners

For it's part, Redmond is bringing Microsoft Dynamics AX to the Ariba commerce cloud integration table, joining other major customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) online and hybrid providers, such as Salesforce.com, SAP and Oracle. Ariba is confident that the broad-based business applications integration and automation will set the stage for its network to gain critical mass and become a de facto standard for supply chain transaction and business collaboration discovery services.

“By combining the powerful capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics AX with the world’s largest business trading network, we can deliver a solution that enables companies of all sizes to connect with their trading partners electronically, helping businesses improve collaboration, grow their business with existing customers and discover new opportunities,” said Doug Kennedy, vice president of Partners and Existing Customer Service Programs, Microsoft Dynamics.

For Ariba’s part, the company is developing an adapter that will allow Microsoft Dynamics AX customers to connect to the Ariba Network. The Ariba Network offers cloud-based apps that allow organizations that share a business process to also share the technology that drives it. The network also offers a community of partners, as well as best practices in community-derived intelligence in areas like unique analytics, preferred financing and ratings.

With Microsoft joining the Ariba Network partnership gaggle, Ariba now has all major CRM and ERP providers tied into its collaborative commerce cloud. I would also definitely expect more Microsoft applications synergies with Ariba.

Updated P2P

At LIVE, Ariba also updated its Ariba Procure-to-Pay offerings, allowing users to create and deploy easy-to-search and access catalogs through which employees can find the goods and services they need and purchase them in compliance with preferred vendor agreements. The user experience looks and feels very much like Amazon.com. But it’s clearly more than just a slick interface.

The new catalog search and comparison capabilities in Ariba Procure-to-Pay certainly make it easier for buyers to find precisely the products they’re looking for, and also secure the best deals available. But the larger value comes with the budget monitoring and visual workflow features which allow all permissioned stakeholders to see where requests stand, and to be able to adjust processes on the fly to suit dynamic business needs. What's more, the expanded set of tools helps drive compliance with specific corporate purchasing policies.

These are building blocks to the larger networked effect or faster, automated and scaleable business transactions across all types of suppliers, users and types of business. And the net effect of that is to change business substantially.

"The Networked Economy effect is far more transformative than we can imagine," said Vivek Kundra, former US CIO, and currently executive vice president at Salesforce.com, an AribaLIVE keynote speaker. Hard to argue with that, based on Ariba's growth and user adoption.

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The business aspects of cloud: Let's get started

This guest post comes courtesy of Christian Verstraete, Chief Technologist, Cloud Strategy for HP.

By Christian Verstraete

I’ve spent the last several weeks addressing some of the business aspects of cloud and why/how companies move to the cloud. It’s time now to wrap this series up. The cloud discussions have been changing rapidly over the last months, focusing away from infrastructure to applications, services and industry requirements.

Implementations in larger companies typically started with development & test activities within the IT department, while business teams used “shadow-IT” approaches to source services from external parties, potentially putting the enterprise at risk. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The main reason is the perceived lack of responsiveness and agility of IT. As I pointed out, it is increasingly becoming clear that one size does not fit all, in cloud computing and that the CIO should become a “strategic service broker”, sourcing services from a series of cloud environments going from private to public clouds and from IaaS to SaaS services.

To achieve a successful transition to cloud computing, the CIO needs to address three areas:

Review the IT organization

Moving away from an architecture focused on the development, maintenance and management of a series of applications running in a proprietary environment to the sourcing of services from multiple sources, require rethinking how the organization is structured and managing the changes that this imply. Gone are the deep technical siloes, each managed in isolation.

They should be replaced by a more holistic approach where a team is focused on the implementation and operation of a cloud platform, if the enterprise decides to maintain its own private cloud, and teams focused on the sourcing, development, maintenance and management of the services needed by the business. What makes this transformation difficult is the fact the move to cloud takes time, and for the foreseeable future, legacy and cloud environments will have to co-exist.

What makes this transformation difficult is the fact the move to cloud takes time, and for the foreseeable future, legacy and cloud environments will have to co-exist.

This pushes to a gradual evolution of the IT organization, building a cloud focused team in parallel with the reduction of the traditional one. One advantage is that in IT many resources will retire over the next 10 years as the baby boomers are slowly replaced by millennials. One approach is to build the new organization around these, while keeping the baby boomers focused on the traditional environment.

But you may want to transfer some of the experience gained over the years, and even if cloud is a different approach to IT, a lot of the fundamentals are still applicable. This will force you to review your existing IT organization thoroughly, assess the capabilities and rebuild a new organization capable of addressing both the traditional and cloud world.

The good news is that others have done this before you. A couple weeks ago I ran into a podcast by Teri Takai, CIO US Department of Defense and Suren Gupta EVP of IT at Allstate Insurance Company. They discuss how to transform traditional IT to cloud IT and provide some interesting hints. This is just one of the many articles pointing out something has to happen. Recognizing the needs is easy, but transforming in flight is a little more complex.

Set-up service governance with the business

As stated in part 1, cloud is a vehicle for IT to respond faster to the needs of the business. To use cloud to its full extent, it’s key to understand those needs, isn’t it? And that is where governance comes in. Sitting down with the business and prioritize their requirements is critical for the CIO to be successful. I cannot stress enough the prioritization as in many situations, the needs of the business vastly surpasses the financial capabilities of IT to implement.

I’ve often used ROI as a way to help the business to prioritize their requirements. What is the return of investment of a specific service required. I cannot tell you how often I have heard about needs that were absolutely mandatory, but when discussing them without emotions and reviewing the added value to the bottom line or the increase in productivity, it quickly became clear there was none.

It also allows IT to demonstrate added value to the business and builds a true partnership spirit between both parties.

It helps the business teams looking at things objectively and maximize their productivity. It also allows IT to demonstrate added value to the business and builds a true partnership spirit between both parties.

In organizations, IT is often seen as an entity that does not really understand what is needed, that makes things complicated, that always needs a long time to deliver etc. Building such governance provides the business teams with a better understanding of what IT is up to and helps them decide what is really important for them.

Develop an application roadmap

The third element the CIO needs to focus on is the development of an application roadmap. What do I mean by that? It’s the definition of which applications will be retained in the transformation and what platform (legacy, private, virtual private or public cloud) is it intended to migrate too.

To perform this, a number of steps are required. Here are the main ones:


1. Perform an inventory of the available applications. This step alone will provide you with many surprises. Don’t limit you to applications, but look at application instances, and if packaged applications are included, identify the different versions used.
   
2. Establish the applications or application instances you will sunset. In other words, what are the applications you do not plan to use any longer. Here obviously the governance is mandatory as this is a discussion between business and IT. Don’t hesitate to utilize the ROI approach I described earlier to focus attention, as the business by default sees the need to keep everything.
   
3. For each of the sunset applications, define a replacement and sunset plan. In other words, how will this functionality be delivered in the future (by another application that is already available, by a new application, is it no longer needed etc.) As a result of this exercise, new applications may have to be added to the inventory as they will become part of the application environment in the future.

   This is a new technology with which you do not have a lot of experience yet, so you will run into roadblocks that will take time to resolve.

   
   
4. For each of the applications in the inventory, identify the data sources required, identify potential latency and responsiveness issues and look at whether this application is a core or context application as described in part 4.
   
5. Identify the sensitivity of the data sources. Are these core data items? Are they subject to privacy or other laws enforcing geographical boundaries etc.
   
6. With all this information, run a workshop with the business to review where each application will run. What is the target platform? You may want to use the approach taken by ACME corporation in part 7. Look at the characteristics of the application gathered in step 4, but also at the associated data sources and their sensitivity in the identification of the target platform
   
7. And then last, set-up a plan. By when should each of the applications been migrated to their target platform. Don’t be too optimistic in the first steps. This is a new technology with which you do not have a lot of experience yet, so you will run into roadblocks that will take time to resolve.

This close collaboration with the business should transform relations in the long run, improve IT’s responsiveness and provide an environment for growth.

Conclusion

Cloud is a game changer. It is probably the first “revolution” in IT since the appearance of the mainframes and forces IT to rethink and transform itself. SMBs and start-ups have understood this quickly as it allowed them to do a quantum leap forward in the use of IT in general and infrastructure in particular. Larger enterprises, having well-structured IT departments, have a little more difficulty in understanding the value and making the step.

Having talked to many CIO’s and business people, I do not believe it’s about whether to go to cloud, but when. And the first movers get the greatest benefits.

I do not believe it’s about whether to go to cloud, but when.

Let me finish this series with a little story. It may not seem relevant at the start, but read till the end, you’ll understand.

Two people are walking in the savanna and suddenly one of them spots a tiger. Unfortunately, the tiger has seen them too. He warns his colleague who kneels down to put his running shoes on. The first guy burst laughing saying: “Those shoes won’t help you running faster than the tiger, you know.” The second responds: “I don’t need to run faster than the tiger, I just need to run faster than you.”

Improving agility and responsiveness faster than their competitors allow companies to gain market share, even in depressed markets. That’s all I wish you. I hope this series helped you think through this and understand how you can use cloud as a way to beat your competition, not the tiger.

This guest post comes courtesy of Christian Verstraete, Chief Technologist, Cloud Strategy for HP.

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