Wednesday, June 20, 2012

HP provides tools and services to help SMBs survive and thrive in a mobile environment

HP today announced technology solutions and services, as well as financing and training programs that enable resource-challenged small and medium businesses (SMBs) to simplify IT, while enhancing collaboration in an increasingly mobile world.

As mobile devices, as well as bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives, continue to grow, organizations of all sizes are challenged by the need to access, manage and secure mobile devices and the data generated by them. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

According to Gartner research, by 2016, at least 50 percent of business email users will rely primarily on a tablet or mobile client instead of a traditional desktop. The trend to use devices to access email and other business data requires SMBs to prepare their infrastructures to support increased mobility.

"We've spent a lot of time working with our channel partners," said Lisa Wolfe, Worldwide Small and Medium Business lead for HP. "They're facing a fairly new set of IT challenges. Companies have a growing mobile workforce. These new solutions align to a bring-your-own-device world and are designed to help SMBs provide infrastructure to support a growing workforce."

New offerings

New HP solutions and services include:
Collaboration tools

Also among the new offerings is HP Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) Solutions with Microsoft Lync, an integrated hardware and software solution that enables SMBs to securely video conference, share information on desktops, and collaborate to improve productivity. The comprehensive UC&C solution includes Microsoft Lync software, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones, networking and ProLiant Gen8 servers, storage, and services.

HP has also announced new hardware offerings to facilitate building new wired and wireless networks. These include:
Availability

The HP Client Virtualization SMB Reference Architecture for Microsoft VDI is scheduled to be available in September. All other solutions and services are available now through HP and worldwide channel partners.

To that end, HP is providing SMBs and channel partners with a broad range of programs to drive growth, create new revenue streams, and ensure collaboration. These include:
Additional information about HP’s new SMB offerings is available at http://www.hp.com/go/whatsnewforsmb.

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at 1:43 PM 0 comments

Virtustream delivers cloud software to run private, public and hybrid enterprise-class clouds

Virtustream this week announced xStream 2.0, a private cloud solution designed to provide secure, high-performance, enterprise-class cloud infrastructure services across private, virtual private, public, and hybrid implementations.

Available as software, stand-alone appliance, and as a managed service, xStream helps foster better management of mission-critical applications on clouds, the venture-backed, three-year-old company said. Those deploying may select a tailored mix of on-site private cloud, combined with off-site public and virtual private clouds.

Now in beta and becoming generally available in August, xStream 2.0:
  • Allows enterprises to control their IT infrastructure as a single cloud, combining on-site private clouds, offsite virtual private/public clouds, and managed cloud services -- providing a tailored hybrid cloud to suit each enterprise’s requirements;

    Until now, there have been no cloud solutions that gave customers the confidence to move both legacy and web-scale applications to the cloud.

  • Provides multi-layered logical, physical cloud security, and in-depth threat monitoring and includes silicon-level authentication with Intel TxT, to meet security and compliance standards;
  • Uses patented Virtustream µVM (Micro VM) technology to optimally and dynamically combine compute, memory, network and storage to deliver application performance assured by commercial service-level agreements (SLAs), with cloud efficiency; and,
  • Allows consumption-based pricing/chargeback, so enterprises pay only for resources that they actually use, each five minutes.
Additionally, xStream provides the versatility to allow enterprises to run both mission-critical legacy and web-scale applications in cloud configurations, gaining cloud benefits without rewriting existing applications. µVM technology delivers multi-tenant virtualization benefits, said Simon Aspinall, CMO at Virtustream. And xStream runs as a macro hypervisor/cloud director that supports leading virtualization hypervisors and most major hardware.

Mixing applications

“Enterprises run extremely complex IT environments that mix many legacy and web-scale applications. Until now, there have been no cloud solutions that gave customers the confidence to move both legacy and web-scale applications to the cloud,” said Rodney Rogers, Chairman and CEO, Virtustream. “Virtustream’s xStream software fills that gap by providing them with an enterprise-class cloud solution – for private clouds, virtual private/public clouds and a combination of both in a hybrid model.”

xStream is available in three editions:
  • Private Cloud -- allows enterprises to run private clouds in existing data centers
  • Public Cloud -- for service providers to offer enterprise cloud services to their customers
  • Virtual Private Cloud -- a full set of managed cloud services for enterprises from Virtustream’s cloud
Virtustream, recently closed a series funding round with Columbia Capital, Intel Capital, Noro‐Moseley Partners, QuestMark Partners, TDF and Top Tier Capital Partners (TTCP) bringing total equity raised to $75 million.

While xStream is initially targeting enterprises and governments, I think the solution makes a lot of sense, too, for small- to medium-sized businesses that want to get out of the IT infrastructure business and need a flexible way to do so across a variety cloud models. That means this makes sense for migration activities. Being able to mix and match hypervisors also helps with moving to more than one cloud provider or platform.

I can also see where enterprises that are seeking a cloud support model for their big data architectures would do well to evaluate xStream as a way to move to cloud in increments, with later choices on where to deploy open. What's more, xStream appears well-suited for the auto-scale, massive network and massive storage demands of big data uses. Big data as a service, anyone?

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at 11:54 AM 1 comments

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Microsoft Surface makes us all winners, even as it loses

Where goes Apple, there follows Microsoft. Where goes Microsoft, there follows the enterprise.

And so, the inevitability of mobile work and resulting higher productivity across almost all that IT enables is now assured, thanks to Microsoft's unveiling yesterday of its Surface family of mobility PCs.

It's not that workers have not wanted mobility, as only defined in the past few years by smartphones and tablets, best represented by iOS and Android. It's just that IT departments and planners didn't really know how to give it to them.

Now, with Surface and the Windows PC-tablet hybrid it defines, Microsoft is showing a way to enterprise mobility, albeit via a perilous path for its historic partners and channels. But Microsoft has bolted from its own ecosystem before and still thrived.

Give up control

What's different this time is that Microsoft will need to give up much more control over its users and its ecosystem in order to make its late-to-the game Windows mobility plan work. And that means the Surface plan will be no means replicate the old Windows Everywhere business model.

In effect, to be successful against Apple and the Android ecosystems, Microsoft must walk away from how its own very definition of success was once measured. At best, Microsoft will go head to head in a three-way tied race over a long slog. And that does not allow for the margins or lock-in it has enjoyed in the past -- at any level.

Microsoft must walk away from how its own very definition of success was once measured.



The more that Windows locks in across Windows-only devices, the more value the other platforms demonstrate for doing dynamic and services-based, extra-enterprise business -- even if all other things are equal. To win, Microsoft must give up its long-cherished assets of control -- which means it loses.

To clamp down and force a Windows-only enterprise, means that those shops suffer compared to ones that enjoy more open mobility, broader ecosystems and agile cloud-services vibrancy.

Low chance of lock in

This is great news for enterprises. Surface gives them a path from their legacy Windows PCs, applications, and data to progress to mobility, but with low chance of being locked in again, or of losing their past Windows investments. They can have their old Windows cake, and their new cloud-driven mobility marketplace productivity -- and the choice of new services galore, a blooming universe of available native apps, and interoperability across nearly all their HTML 5-empowered web and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services.

Because Microsoft has not won a cloud advantage either, it lacks a critical mass of applications to force a mobile platform lock in Surface. There's just no way to cut off the oxygen of the cloud. That means Surface is just another mobile choice, not THE mobile choice for enterprises, and that makes all the difference.

There's just no way to cut off the oxygen of the cloud.



More likely -- and a reverse from its role in the lead up to GUI PCs -- Microsoft will soften up the enterprise for mobility in general, and make it easier for its competitors to do far better there than without Surface in the game. Surface also forces total client strategy choices that may well lead to more mobile and less PC, which at this point does not favor Redmond.

This is all a huge boon, and it shouldn't be underestimated. There is so much opportunity to improve how business is done and how people work when mobility is part of the full mix.

Absolutely huge

Enterprise architects, business analysts, and IT innovators around the world should now feel confident that they can design their processes and innovate and transform businesses based on the knowledge that nearly all apps and all data can reach all people at all time. This is absolutely huge.

With Surface, Microsoft has pushed the enterprise from the era of limited client vehicles to the era of processes borne on any transport, of untying work from a client form factor. Finally.

Microsoft will try to keep this a Windows Everywhere world, but that won't hold up.



Microsoft will try to keep this a Windows Everywhere world, but that won't hold up. What makes mobility powerful is the escape from the platform, device, app shackle. Once information and process flow and agility are the paramount goals, those shackles can no longer bind.

Mobility requires the information flow to move across all boundaries. Windows lock-in can't meet the requirements of mobility, and the mobility competitors will always stay one step more interoperable -- and therefore advantageous -- than a Windows only solution.

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at 11:22 AM 0 comments

Monday, June 18, 2012

Le Moyne College accelerates IT innovation with help from VMware View VDI solution provider SMP

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

The latest BriefingsDirect end-user case study hones in on how higher education technology innovator Le Moyne College in upstate New York successfully embraced several levels of virtualization as a springboard to broad client-tier virtualization benefits.

Le Moyne worked with technology solutions provider Systems Management Planning Inc. to make the journey in a structured, predictive fashion to deep server virtualization -- and then on to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The combined path to smooth VDI implementations at the server and desktop levels for Le Moyne came from teaming with a seasoned technology partner so the college community could quickly gain IT productivity payoffs via VDI, even amid the demanding environment and high expectations of an active higher education campus.

To learn more, BriefingsDirect assembled Shaun Black, IT Director at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, and Dean Miller, Account Manager at Systems Management Planning, or SMP, also based in Rochester. 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: Doing IT at a college comes with its own unique challenges. Why did you choose to go to VDI quickly?

Black: It all started for us back in the early 2000s, and was motivated by our management information systems program, our computer science-related programs, and their need for very specialized software.

A lot of that was started by using movable hard drives in very specific computing labs. As we progressed with them, and their needs continue to evolve, we just continued to find that the solutions that we had weren't flexible enough. They needed more and different servers in very specific needs.

There is tremendous diversity in the college and university environment. Our ability to be responsive as an IT organization is incredibly crucial, given the range of different clients, constituents, and stakeholders that we have. These include our students, faculty, administrators, fundraisers, and the like. There's a wide variety of needs that they have, not to mention the higher education expectations in a very much open environment.

Le Moyne is a private, Catholic, Jesuit institution located in Syracuse, New York. We have about 500 employees and we educate roughly 4,000 students on an annual basis. We're the second youngest of 28 Jesuit college universities nationally. Some of our better-known peers are Boston College, Gonzaga, and Georgetown, but we like to think that we're on an equal footing with our older and more esteemed colleagues.

We've been leveraging virtualization technology now for a number of years, going back to VMware Desktop, VMware Player, and the like. Then, in 2007 we embraced ESX Virtual Server Technology and, more recently, the VMware VDI to help us meet those flexibility needs and to make sure that the staff that we have are well aligned with the expectations of the college.

From an IT workforce perspective, we were having the same problem most organizations have. We were spending a tremendous amount of time keeping existing systems working. We were finding that we weren't able to be as responsive to the academic environments, and to some degree, were potentially becoming an impediment in moving forward the success of the organization.

We started experimenting with it initially within a few classrooms and then realized that this is a great technology.



Virtualization was a technology that was out there. How could we apply this to our server infrastructure, where we were spending close to six months a year having one of our people swapping out servers?

We saw tremendous benefits from that, increased flexibility and an increased ability for our staff to support the academic mission. Then, as we start looking in the last couple years, we saw similar demands on the desktop side with requirements for new software and discussions of new academic programs. We recognized that VDI technology was out there and was another opportunity for us to try to embrace the technology to help us propel forward.

Gardner: Tell me about how Systems Management Planning, or SMP, came into play and the relationship between you.

Black: Our relationship with SMP and the staff there has been critical from back in 2006-2007, when we began adopting server virtualization. With a new technology, you try to bring in a new environment. There are learning and assimilation curves. To get the value out of that, to get the bang for the buck as quickly as possible, we wanted to identify a partner to help us accelerate into leveraging that technology.

They helped us in 2007 in getting our environment up, which was originally intended to be an 18-month transition of server virtualization. After they helped us get the first few servers converted within a couple weeks, we converted the rest of our environment within about a two-month period, and we saw tremendous benefits in server virtualization.

Front of the list

When we started looking at VDI, we had a discussion with a number of different partners. SMP was always at the front of our list. When we got to them, they just reinforced why they were the right organization to move forward with.

They had a complete understanding of the impact of desktop virtualization and how it has an impact on the entire infrastructure of an environment, not just the desktop itself, but the server infrastructure, storage infrastructure, network infrastructure.

They were the only organization we talked to, from the start, that began with that kind of discussion of what the implications are from a technology perspective, but also understanding what the implications are, and why you want to do this from a business perspective, and particularly an education perspective.

They brought very experienced people to help us through the process of assimilating.



They are already working with a number of different higher education institutions in the New York region. So they understood education. It's just a perfect partnership, and again, they brought very experienced people to help us through the process of assimilating and getting this technology implemented as quickly as possible and putting it to good use.

Gardner: How typical is Le Moyne's experience? Is this the usual path that you see in the market?

Miller: It is, and we like to see that path, because you don't want to disappoint your users with the virtual desktops. They just want to do their job and they don't want to be hung up with something that's slow. You want to make sure that you roll out your virtual desktops well, and you need the infrastructure behind that to support that.

So, yes, they started with a proof of concept which was a limited installation, really just within the IT department, to get their own IT people up to speed, experimenting with ThinApp and ThinApping applications. That went well. The next step was to go to the pilot, which was a limited roll out with some of the more savvy users. That seemed to go pretty well, and then, we went for a complete implementation.

It's fairly typical, and it was a pleasure working with this team. They recognized the value of VDI and they made it happen.

Focus on data center

At Systems Management Planning, we're a women-owned company, headquartered in Rochester, New York, and we were founded in 1997. Our focus is in the data center, implementing virtualization, both server and desktop virtualization, storage virtualization, and networking.

It's a technical organization. In fact, we have more engineers than salespeople on staff, which in my experience is pretty unusual. And we have more technical certification than any partner in upstate or western New York that I know of.

Our expertise in VMware and its complementing technologies allowed us to grow at a rate of about 30 percent year over year. We have offices in Rochester, Albany, and Orlando, Florida, and we use virtual desktops throughout our organization. This gives us the ability to spin up desktops or remote offices quickly. You could say we practice what we preach.

VMware has recognized SMP as a premier partner. We're also on the VMware technical advisory board and we're really proud of that fact. We work closely with VMware, and they bounce a lot of ideas and things off our engineering team. So, in a nutshell, that’s SMP.

We are still in the process of rolling this out and we will be for another 12 months.



Gardner: If you're going to do VDI, you’ve got to do it right. What did you do to make sure that that initial rollout was successful?

Black: We've been very methodical about going through an initial proof of concept, evaluating the technology, and working with SMP. They been great at informing us what some of the challenges might be, architecting an underlying infrastructure, the servers and the network.

Again, this is an area where SMP has informed us of the kinds of challenges that people have in virtual desktop environments, and how to build an environment that’s going to minimize the risk of the challenges, not the least of which are bandwidth and storage.

Methodical fashion

Then, we're being very deliberate about how we roll this out, and to whom, specifically so that we can try to catch some of these issues in a very methodical fashion and adjust what we're doing.

We specifically built the environment to try to build in an excess capacity of roughly a third to support business growth, as well as to support some variations in utilization and unexpected needs. You do everything you can in IT to anticipate what your customers are going to be doing, but we all know that on a day-to-day basis, things change, and those can have pretty dramatic consequences.

With regard to the members of the pilot team, I’ll give a lot of kudos and hats-off to them, because they suffered through a lot of the learning curve with us in figuring out what some of these challenges are. But that really helped us, as we got to what we consider the second phase of the pilot this past fall. We were actually using a production environment with a couple of our academic programs in a couple of classrooms. Then we began to go into full production in the spring with our first 150 production users.

Gardner: What VMware products are you using? Are you up to vSphere 5, is this View 5, or you're using the latest products on that?

There are a couple different ways that we like to measure. I’d like to think of it as both dollars and delight.



Black: View 5.1 has recently been released. But at the time we rolled it out, vSphere, ThinApp, and View 5, were the latest-and-greatest with the latest service patches and all, when we initially implemented our infrastructure in December.

Gardner: What other metrics do you use to decide that this is a successful ongoing effort?

Black: There are a couple different ways that we like to measure. I’d like to think of it as both dollars and delight. From a server virtualization perspective, there's a dollar amount. We extended the lifecycle of our servers from a three-year cycle to five years. So we get some operational as well, as some capital cost savings, out of that extension.

Most significantly, going to the virtual technology on the servers, one motivator for us on the desktop was what our people are doing. So it's an opportunity-cost question and that probably, first and foremost, is the fundamental measure I'm using.

Internally, we're constantly looking at how much of our time are we spending on what we call "keep the lights on" activity, just the operations of keeping things running, versus how much time we're investing on strategic projects.

Free up resources

Second to that, are we not investing enough time such that strategic projects are being slowed down, because IT hasn’t been able to resource that properly. From the perspective of virtualization, it certainly allowed us to free resources and reallocate those to things that the colleges deem more appropriate, rather than the standard kind of operational activities.

Then, just in regard to the overall stability and functionality in an environment is what I think of as a delight factor, the number of issues and the types of outages that we've had as a result of virtualization technology, particularly on the server front. It's dramatically reduced the pain points, even from hardware failures, which are bound to happen. So generally, it increased overall satisfaction of our community with the technology.

So we're expecting that’s going to contribute to overall satisfaction on the part of both our students, as well as our faculty and our administrators, having the tools that they need to do their job in the databases and be able to take advantage of them.

We're also expecting, as a result of that, that we're going to be able to be much more responsive to the new requests that we have.



Miller: Le Moyne College, specifically Shaun Black and his team, saw the value in virtualizing their desktops. They understood the savings in hardware cost, the energy cost, the administrative time, and benefits from their remote users. I think they got some very positive feedback from some of the remote users about View. They had a vision for the future of desktop computers, and they made it happen.

Gardner: In looking to the future, Shaun, is this setting you up for perhaps more ease in moving toward a variety of client endpoints? I'm thinking mobile devices.

Laying the foundation

Black: It lays the foundation for our ability to do that. That was certainly in our thinking in moving to virtual desktop. It wasn’t what we regard as a primary motivator. The primary motivator was how to do better what we’ve previously done, and that’s what we built the financial model on. We see that just as kind of an incremental benefit, and there may be some additional costs that come with that that have to be factored in.

But from the perspective of recognizing that our students, faculty, and everyone want to be able to use their own technology, and rather than having us issue them, be able to access the various software and tools more effectively and more efficiently.

It even opens up opportunities for new ways of offering our academic courses and the like. Whether it would be distance or the students working from home, those are things that are on our shortlist and our radar for opportunities that we can take advantage of because of the technology.

Another one of the areas that was in our thinking was the disaster recovery (DR) strategy. The idea, particularly for our mobile workers who have laptops, instead of them taking the data with them, to keep that data here on campus. We'll still provide them with the ability to readily access that and be just as effective and efficient as they currently are, but keeping the data within the confines of the campus community, and being able to make sure that’s backed up on a routine basis.

It's not just a control perspective, but it's also being able to offer more flexibility to people.



The security controls, better integration of View with our Windows server environment, and our authentication systems are all benefits that we certainly perceive as part of this initiative. It's not just a control perspective, but it's also being able to offer more flexibility to people, striking that balance better.

Miller: We’re seeing that in higher education as well as in Fortune 500s, even small and medium businesses (SMBs), the security factor of keeping all the data behind the firewall and in the data center, rather than on the notebooks out in the field, is a huge selling point for VDI and View specifically.

Gardner: Shaun, if you were to do this over again, or you wanted to provide some insights to somebody just beginning their virtualization journey, are there any thoughts, any 20/20 hindsight conclusions, that you would share with them?

Black: For an organization that’s our size, a medium business, I'd say to anybody to be looking very hard at this, and be looking at doing it sooner, rather than later. Obviously, every institution has its own specific situation, and there are upfront capital costs that have to be considered in moving forward this. But if you want to do it right and if you’re going to do that, you have to make some of the capital investment to make that happen.

Sooner rather than later

But, for anybody, sooner rather than later. Based on the data we've seen from VMware, we were in the front five percent of adopters. With VDI, I think we’re somewhere in maybe the front 15 or something like that.

So, we're a little behind where I’d like to be, but I think we’re really at the point where mainstream adoption is really picking up. Anyone who isn’t looking at this technology at this point is likely to find themselves at a competitive disadvantage by not realizing the efficiency that this technology can bring.

For us, it really gets down to, as I said earlier, opportunity cost in strategic alignment. If your staff are not focused, from an IT perspective, on helping your organization move forward, but just on keeping the existing equipment running, you’re not really contributing maximally, or as I would say, contributing maximally to move your organization forward.

So to the extent that you can re-allocate those resources toward strategic type initiatives by getting them off of things that can be done differently and therefore done more effectively, any organization welcomes that.

In five years or whatever, the market will be matured enough that we could go to a desktop-as-a-service type environment and have the same level of flexibility and control.



I've told many individuals on the campus, including my vice president, that I expect this to very likely be the last time that Le Moyne is required to make this kind of investment in capital infrastructure. The next time, in five years or whatever, the market will be matured enough that we could go to a desktop-as-a-service type environment and have the same level of flexibility and control.

So we can really focus on the end services that we’re trying to provide, the applications. We can focus on the implications for those, the academics, as opposed to the underlying technology and letting the organization have the time and the focus on the technology, maintaining that underlying infrastructure, take advantage of their competencies and allow us to focus on our core business.

We’re hoping that there's an evolution. Right now, we are talking with various organizations with regard to burst capacity, DR-type capabilities and also talking about our longer term desires to outsource even if some of the equipment is posted here, but ultimately, get most of the technology and underlying infrastructure in somebody else’s hands.

Insight question

Gardner: Dean, what are some good concepts to keep in mind as you're beginning?

Miller: We began talking about virtual desktops, maybe two-and-a-half, three years ago. We started training on it, but it really hadn't taken off for the last year-and-a-half. Now, we’re seeing tremendous interest in it.

Initially, people were looking at savings for a hardware cost and administrative cost. A big driver today is bring your own device (BYOD). People are expecting to use their iPad, their tablet, or even their phone, and it's up to the IT department to deliver these applications to all these various devices. That’s been a huge driver for View and it's going to drive the View and virtual desktop market for quite a while.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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at 4:10 PM 1 comments

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Making Hadoop safe for 'clusterophobics'

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

By Tony Baer

Hadoop remains a difficult platform for most enterprises to master. For now skills are still hard to come by – both for data architect or engineer, and especially for data scientists. It still takes too much skill, tape, and baling wire to get a Hadoop cluster together. Not every enterprise is Google or Facebook, with armies of software engineers that they can throw at a problem. With some exceptions, most enterprises don’t deal with data on the scale of Google or Facebook either – but the bar is rising.

If 2011 was the year that the big IT data warehouse and analytic platform brand names discovered Hadoop, 2012 becomes the year where a tooling ecosystem starts emerging to make Hadoop more consumable for the enterprise. Let’s amend that – along with tools, Hadoop must also become a first-class citizen with enterprise IT infrastructure. Hadoop won’t cross over to the enterprise if it has to be treated as some special island. That means meshing with the practices and technology approaches that enterprises are using to manage their data centers or cloud deployments. Like SQL, data integration, virtualization, storage strategy, and so on.

Admittedly, much of this cuts against the grain of early Hadoop deployment that stressed open source and commodity infrastructure. Early adopters did so out of necessity as commercial software ran out of gas for Facebook when its data warehouse daily refreshes were breaking terabyte range, not to mention that the cost of commercial licenses for such scaled out analytic platforms wouldn’t have been trivial. Anyway, Hadoop’s linearity leverages scale out of commodity blades and direct attached disk as far as the eye can see, enabling such an almost pure noncommercial approach. At the time, Google’s, Yahoo’s, and Facebook’s issues were considered rather unique – most enterprise don’t run global search engines – not to mention that their business was built on armies of software engineers.

Something's got to give

As we’ve previously noted, something’s got to give on the skills front. Hadoop in the enterprise faces limits – the data problems are getting bigger and more complex for sure, but resources and skills are far more finite. So we envision tools and solutions addressing two areas:
  1. Products that address “clusterophobia” – organizations that seeks the scalable analytics of Hadoop but lack the appetite to erect infinite data centers out in the fields or hire the necessary skillsets. Obviously, using the cloud is one option – but the questions there revolve around whether corporate policies allow maintenance of data off premises, and also, as data store size grows, whether the cloud is still economical.
    

  2. The other side of the coin is consummability – tools that simplify access to and manipulation of the data.
In the run-up to this year’s Hadoop Summit, a number of tooling announcements addressing clusterophobia and consumption are pouring out.

The workloads are going to get more equitably distributed, and in the long run, we wouldn’t be surprised to see more Hadoop-only appliances.



On the fear of clusters side, players like Oracle, EMC Greenplum, and Teradata Aster are already offering appliances that simplify deployment of Hadoop, typically in conjunction with an Advanced SQL analytic platform. While most vendors position this as a way for Hadoop to “extend’ your data warehouse so you perform exploration in Hadoop, but the serious analytics in SQL, we view appliances as more than transitional strategy. The workloads are going to get more equitably distributed, and in the long run, we wouldn’t be surprised to see more Hadoop-only appliances, sort of like Oracle’s (for the record, they also bundle another NoSQL database).

Also addressing the same constituency are storage and virtualization – facts of life in the data center. For Hadoop to cross over to the enterprise, it, too, must get virtualization-friendly. Storage is an open question. The need for virtualization becomes even more apparent because (1) the exploratory nature of Hadoop analytics demands the ability to try out queries offline without having to disrupt or physically build a new cluster; and (2) the variable nature of Hadoop processing suggests that workloads are likely to be elastic. So we’ve been waiting for VMware to make their move. VMware – also part of EMC – has announced a pair of initiatives. First, they are working with the Apache Hadoop project to make the core pieces (HDFS and MapReduce) virtualization-aware, and separately, they are hosting their own open source project (Serengeti) for virtualizing Hadoop clusters. While Project Serengeti is not VM-specific, there’s little doubt that this will be a VMware project (we’d be shocked if the Xen folks were to buy in).

Storage follows

Where there’s virtualized servers, storage often closely follows. A few months back, EMC dropped the other shoe, finally unveiling a strategy for leveraging Isilon with the Greenplum HD platform, the closest thing in NAS that replicates the scale-out model storage model popularized with Hadoop. This opens an argument of whether the scales of data in Hadoop make premium products such as Isilon unaffordable. The flip side however is the “open source tax,” where you hire the skills in your IT organization to manage and deploy scale-out storage, or pay consultants to do it for you.

In the spirit of making Hadoop more consummable, we expect a lot of vibes from new players that are simplifying navigation of Hadoop and building SQL bridges. Datameer is bringing down the pricing of its uber Hadoop spreadsheet to personal and workgroup levels courtesy of entry level pricing from $299 to $2999. Teradata Aster, which already offers a patented framework that translates SQL to MapReduce (there are also others out there) is now taking an early bet on the incubating Apache HCatalog metadata spec so that you could write SQL statements that go up against Hadoop. It joins approaches such as those from Hadapt, which hangs SQL tables from HDFS file nodes, and mainstream BI players such as Jaspersoft, that already provide translators that can grab reports directly from Hadoop.

In the spirit of making Hadoop more consummable, we expect a lot of vibes from new players that are simplifying navigation of Hadoop and building SQL bridges.



This doesn’t take away from the evolution of the Hadoop platform itself. Cloudera and Hortonworks are among those releasing new distributions that bundle their own mix of recent and current Apache Hadoop modules. While the Apache project has addressed the NameNode HA issue, it is still early in the game with bringing enterprise-grade manageability to MapReduce. That’s largely an academic issue as the bulk of enterprises have yet to implement Hadoop. By the time enterprises are ready, many of the core issues should resolve — although there will always be questions about the uptake of peripheral Hadoop projects.

What’s more important – and where the action will be – is in tools that allow enterprises to run and, more importantly, consume Hadoop. A chicken and egg situation, enterprises won’t implement before tools are available and vice versa.

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

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at 7:06 PM 1 comments

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Cloud-powered services deliver new revenue and core business agility for SMB travel insurance provider Seven Corners

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

The latest BriefingsDirect cloud computing discussion centers on how small-to-medium sized business (SMB) Seven Corners, a travel insurance provider in Indiana, created and implemented an agile and revenue-generating approach to cloud services.

Seven Corners went beyond the typical efficiency and cost conservation benefits of cloud to build innovative business services that generate whole new revenue streams. A VMware-enabled cloud infrastructure allowed Seven Corners to rapidly reengineer its IT capabilities and spawn a new vision for its agility and future growth.

Here to share their story on an SMB's journey to cloud-based business development is George Reed, CIO of Seven Corners Inc., based in Carmel, Indiana. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: I often hear that culture will trump strategy. It sounds as if in your organization -- maybe because you're an SMB and you can get the full buy-in of your leadership -- you actually were able to make culture into the strategy?

Reed: Absolutely! By changing the culture and getting the departments out there to ask, "Is this stuff you're doing going to help me with this problem?" "Well, yes, it will," and then you deliver on that promise.

When you make a promise and you deliver on it, on or ahead of schedule and under budget people begin to believe, they're willing to participate and actively suggest other possible uses with technology that maybe you didn't think of. So you end up with a great technology-business relationship, which had the immediate result for the owners who were out looking to buy an insurance services application or rent one.

They said, "We're a very entrepreneurial company with so many different lines of business that there is nothing out there that would really work for us. We believe in your IT. Build us one." This year we rolled out an application called Access that is so configurable you could run any kind of insurance services through it, whether you're insuring parrots, cars, people, trucks, or whatever.

When you make a promise and you deliver on it, on or ahead of schedule and under budget people begin to believe.



Gardner: Let's learn some more about that. One of the nice things about early successes is that you get that buy-in and the cultural adoption, but you've also set expectations for ongoing success. I suppose it's important to keep the ball rolling and to show more demonstrable benefits.

So when it came to not only repaving those cow paths, making them more efficient, cutting cost, delivering that six-month return on investment, what did you enable? What did you then move forward to to actually create new business development and therefore new revenue?

Reed: By continuing to lower IT cost, when we virtualized the desktops using VMware's View, and then VMware's Horizon which makes it device-independent, it’s easier for everybody to work. That had appreciable productivity improvements out in the departments.

At the same time, my apps development group began designing and building an application called AXIS. What this came out of was that when we went to insurance conventions, talked to carriers and asked, "What are the top 10 reasons you want to fire your third-party administrator today?"

Technology was always part of those top 10 answers. So we devised and developed an application that would eliminate those as problems. The result is that this year, since February, we have four insurance carriers that were working with either their own stuff or third-party administrator, big COBOL mainframe monsters that are just so spaghetti-coded and heavy you can never really get out of it.

Already implemented

They see what our tool is doing and they ask these questions. "What are the specs for me to be able to connect to it?" "Well, you have to have an Internet connection and something smarter than a coffee cup." "That’s it?" "Yeah, that’s it." "Well, what’s the price for us to implement your solution?" "None. "It’s already implemented. You just import your business."

The jaws drop around the table. "How will I be able to see my data?" "You’ll all get in and look at it." "You mean I don’t ask for a report?" "You can, but it’s easier if you just log and look at your report."

They're flocking in. The biggest challenge is keeping up with the pace of the growing business and that goes back to planning for the future. I planned a storage solution and a compute solution. I can just keep adding blades and adding trays of storage without any outage at all.

Gardner: Pay as you go?

Reed: Yes, and the neat thing is that that the process of closing transactions will run about $7 million in revenue a year. It will cost about $1.5 million to service that revenue. Not a bad profit base for an SMB. And it’s because we're going to come in at 45 percent less than their existing service provider, and we're going to provide services that are 100 times better.

Gardner: Before we learn more about that approach and process, perhaps you could explain for our listener’s benefit what Seven Corners is, how large you are, what you do, and just describe what you are doing as a business.

Reed: Seven Corners started in 1993 as Specialty Risk International, and as we began to grow around the globe with customers in every time zone there is, the company changed its name to Seven Corners.

It started out providing specialty travel insurance, trip cancellation insurance, then began providing third-party administrator, general insurance services, and emergency assistance services around the globe. We have about 800 programs in five major product lines to span hundreds of thousands of members.

The company itself is about 170-175 people. We've been enjoying double-digit growth every year. As a matter of fact, I believe that at the end of February they hit the double-digit growth goal for 2012. So we're going to exceed that as the year goes on. You are going to see the technology has driven some of that growth.

Gardner: Who do you consider your primary customers? Is it travel agencies, or do you go direct to the travelers themselves, or a mixture?

If you communicate that in a passionate, effective way with the ownership and the executive group, you come out of the room with authority to move forward.



Reed: About 50 percent of the business is online. You go to the website to fill out a form to figure out what you need. You buy it right then and there, collect your virtual ID card, and you're on your way.

We have customers that are high-tech companies who are sending their people all over the world. They'll buy, at the corporate level, trip cancellation, trip assistance, and trip major medical insurance.

Then, there are universities and other affinity groups. They have students traveling abroad. We have companies sending people to work in the United States. Then, we are doing benefit management and travel assistance for numerous government agencies, US Department of State, Bureau of Prisons, AmeriCorps, and the Peace Corps as well.

Gardner: So if I understand correctly, George, you're saying that you went from being a broker of services, finding insurance carrier services, and then packaging and delivering them to end users, to now actually packaging insurance as a service. You're packaging the ability to conduct business online and packaging that, in addition, to the value-added services for insurance. Does that capture what’s happened?

With a solid, virtual, private-cloud solution, the cost of delivering technology services is just very low per-member serviced.



Reed: It does, and providing immediate access to what any stakeholder in that insurance lifecycle needs improves the quality of the end product. It lowers the cost of the healthcare.

We're starting to get into the state Medicaid benefits management as well. We're saying, "You're spending too much." The first slide in the proposal is always, "You're spending too much on Medicaid healthcare. We're going to help you cut it down and we are going to do it right now." You get attention, when you just walk in bold as brass and say that.

With a solid, virtual, private-cloud solution, the cost of delivering technology services is just very low per member service. In insurance, there are only so many ways to improve profit. One is to grow business. We all know that. But, two is to reduce the time and price of processing a claim, reduce the time and price to implement new business and collect the premium.

We’ve built an infrastructure and now an application platform that does those things. In the old system, the time to process a claim around here was about 30 minutes going through a complex travel medical claim with tons of lines. Now it’s about 15 seconds.

Gardner: This is really fascinating. It strikes me that you’ve sort of defined the future of business. Being an early adopter of technologies that make you agile and efficient means that you're not only passing along the ability to be productive in your traditional business, but you’ve moved into an adjacency that allows you to then take away from your partners and customers the processes that they can’t do as well and embed those into the services that you provide.

When, of course, you can charge back to them at a rate that was lower for them in the first place. You can really grow your definition of being a business within your market.

Think big

Reed: That’s correct, and you can do this in any industry. There is a talk that I’ve given a couple of times at Butler University about how you can never stop being small, until you think big. You have to say, "What would it take for me to do that? Everything is on the table. What would it take?"

My boss does that to me and my direct reports as well. "What would it take for us to accomplish this thing by this time? Don’t worry about what it is. Just tell me what it would take. Let’s see, if we can’t do it." That’s the philosophy that this company was built on.

By the end of the year, we're not only going to be doing all that kind of service for carriers, but we are going to stand up an instance of AXIS to be software as a service and every small third-party administrator (TPA) in the country is going to have an opportunity to buy seats at this servicing application that is easily configurable to whatever their business rules are.

Gardner: When you began this journey to transform how Seven Corners does IT, did you have a guiding principle or vision? Was there a stake in the ground that you could steer toward?

Reed: I did. I was brought in specifically to be an innovative change agent to take them from where they were to where they wanted to get as a business. They just weren’t there at the time. My vision was to come in, stop the bleeding, pick off the low hanging fruit to step up to the next level, and then build a strategic road map that would not only meet -- but exceed -- the needs of the business, and reach out 5-10 years beyond.

Gardner: Is there anything specifically about an SMB that you think enabled such agility? I know it’s very difficult in large companies to make such a change in short order. Do you have a certain advantage being smaller?


Authority to move

Reed: You do. If you're in a privately held SMB, your goal is to identify a problem or an opportunity, categorize what it would cost to resolve it or achieve it, and show the return on investment (ROI). If you communicate that in a passionate, effective way with the ownership and the executive group, you come out of the room with authority to move forward. That’s exactly what I did.

Gardner: And on one side of your business equation, of course, you have these consumers and customers, but you also must have quite a variety of partners, other insurance carriers, for example, medical insurance providers, and so forth. So you need to match and broker services among and between all these?

Multiple carriers

Reed: Correct. We have multiple carriers and do some of the advances around Seven Corners. We’ve got about four more carriers starting to move business our way. So you have to meet all of their needs, reporting needs, timeliness of service, and support their customers. At the same time, we've got all the individuals and groups that we're doing business with and we are doing it across five different revenue-producing lines of business.

Gardner: Let's move back to what it is that you've done at an architecture level. As you had that vision about what you needed, and as you gathered requirements in order to satisfy these business needs, what did you look for and what did you start to put in place?

Reed: The first thing I did is assess what was going on in the server room. On my first day, walking in there and looking around, I saw a bunch of oversized Dell desktops that were buffed up to be servers. There were about 140 of those in there.

I was thinking, "This is 2000-2003 technology. I'm here in 2010. This isn't going to work." It was an archaic system that was headed to failure, and that was one of the reasons they knew they had to change. They could no longer sustain either the applications or the hardware itself.

What I wanted to do was put in an infrastructure that would completely replace what was there. The company had grown to the point where there was so much transactional volume, so many thousands of people hitting the member portals. The cloud started to speak to me. I needed to be serving member portals out on a private cloud. I needed to be reaching out to the 15,000 medical providers around the world that we're talking with to get their claims without them sending paper or emails.

It was an archaic system that was headed to failure, and that was one of the reasons they knew they had to change.



I looked at an integrating partner locally in the Midwest. It's called Netech. I said, "Here is my problem. I know that within four months my major servers that are backing up or providing our insurance applications are going to fail. You can't even get parts on eBay for them anymore. I need you to come back to me in a week with a recommendation on how you understand my problem, what you recommend I do about it, and what it's going to cost, wheels-on, out the door."

Gardner: Just to be clear, did you have a certain level of virtualization already in place at this point?

Reed: No, there was nothing virtual in the building. It was all physical. Netech went away and came back a week later, after looking at the needs and asking a ton of questions, as any good partner would do. They said, "Here's what we think you need to do. You need something that's expandable easily for your compute side. We recommend Cisco UCS. Here is a plan for that.

"You need storage that can provide secure multitenancy, because you've got a lot of different carriers that don't want their information shared. They want to know that it's very secured. We recommend NetApp’s FlexPod solution for that.

"And for your virtualization, hub and going to the cloud, we're seeing the best results with VMware's product."

Then, we started with VMware Enterprise, and when it became available, upgraded to vSphere 5.0.

Up and running

They came in with a price, so I knew exactly what it would cost to implement, and they said, they could do it in three months. I went to the owners and said, "You're losing $100,000 revenue a month because of this situation in your server room. You'll pay for this entire project in six months." They said, "Well, get it done." And so we launched. In about two and a half months we were up and running. Our partnership with Netech has had a dramatic impact on speed-to-production for each phase of our virtualization.

Gardner: When you looked at creating a private-cloud fabric to support your application, were these including your internal back-office types of apps? Did you have ERP and communications infrastructure and apps that you needed to support? Clearly, you talked about portals and being able to create Web services and integrate across the business processes, all the above. Did you want to put everything in this cloud or did you segment?

Reed: I wanted to get off the old analog phone system that was there and go to a Cisco Unified Communications Manager, which is a perfect thing to drop into a virtual environment. I wanted to get everybody on the voice-over-IP (VOIP) phones. I wanted to get my call center truly managing 24×7×365, no matter where they were sitting.

I wanted to get users, both customer users, partner users and then the people from Seven Corners to get to where it didn't matter what they were connecting to the Internet with. They could connect to my system and see their data and it would never leave my server, which is one of the beauties of a private cloud, because the data never leaves a secure environment.

Gardner: Did you get a vision to bring all of your apps into this or did you want to segment, sort of was this a crawl-walk-run approach to bringing your apps into this cloud or was this more of a transformation, even shock therapy, to kind of do it all at once to get it done?

That got everybody thinking, "Hey, IT can deliver."



Reed: The server virtualization was a shock therapy, because the infrastructure was very outdated, and any piece of it failing is a failure. It doesn’t matter which one it was.

So we took a 144 servers virtual and took all the storage into the NetApp controller, achieving an immediate 50 percent de-duplication rate. And the efficiency in spinning up servers for a development group to support them, was such that we were cutting a ton of manpower that was required to spin those up. Instead of 4-5 days to set up a server for them to work on a new application, it's now 4-5 minutes.

In the first three days here, inside IT and out in the business, I said, "I need a list by Friday, please, of the top five things we need to keep doing, stop doing, or start doing."

I got great input and then I picked the pain points. That's what I call the low-hanging fruit. We knocked those out the first month, just general technology support. That got everybody thinking, "Hey, IT can deliver." Originally they had a nickname for the department --"The Island of Dr. No." ... No, we can't do this, no, we can't do that.

Getting champions

We said, "Let's find a way to say, "Yes," or at least offer a different solution." When we killed some of those early problems, we ended up getting champions out of opposition. It became very easy to get the company to do business differently, and to put up with the testing, user acceptance process, and training to use different technology services.

We're running on vSphere 5.0 and have put in a vCenter Configuration Manager and Operations Manager. We're doing our virtual desktops using the power of ThinApp and VMware Horizon.

Then to make the cloud come to being we got the vCloud Director and vShield in. We're doing a lot of business with the government, and with government agencies we have to be Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliant which makes HIPAA compliance look kind of easy.

The other technology that the VMware is living on is the Cisco UCS, and it’s all being stored on NetApp FlexPod with data replication. In a few months, it will be live mirror for both compute and the data.

Mobile devices

Gardner: And how does that now set you up for perhaps moving toward the use of mobile devices? Clearly, you've got some of those interface issues resolved by going fully virtual. Is there a path to allowing choice, even bring your own device (BYOD) types of choice by your users going to new classes of devices?

Reed: We’re working on the BYOD program now. A lot of the department heads have been issued devices through our secure wireless in the building. A couple of them have iPads and a couple of them have Android OSes. Several of us with the new Cisco phone systems have the Cisco tablet that's your actual VoIP phone station and your thin client.

To get ready to go to a meeting, I get off the phone, pull the tablet out of the docking station, and into the meeting. I have my desktop right there. I've never logged off. When I need to go home for the night, I take it home, and log in through my wireless. I have my Voice over IP handset, and I'm calling from my desk phone from anywhere in the world.

So we're already doing what I would call a pilot program to prove it out to everybody and get them used to it. Right now, our sales guys love the fact that they just pull that thing out of the docking station and go off to show a client what our software and services really are.

Gardner: That's a really impressive story, George, and you've been able to do this in just a couple of years. It’s really astonishing. Before we close out, could you provide some advice to other SMBs that have heard your story and can see the light bulbs for their own benefits going off in their heads? Do you have any advice in hindsight from your experience that you would share with them in terms of getting started?

Reed: The key is that you can’t get to where you’re going if you don’t set the vision of what you want to be able to do. To do that, you have to assess where you’re at and what the problems are.

Phase your solutions that you’re going to recommend to solve big problems early and get buy-in. And when you’ve got executive buy-in, you have department heads and users buying in, it’s easy to get a lot of stuff done very quickly, because people aren’t resisting the change.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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