More than just an IT shift, cloud fuels the new engine of business innovation, says Oxford Economics survey

Over the past five years, the impetus for cloud adoption has been primarily about advancing the IT infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) fabric or utility model, and increasingly seeking both applications and discrete IT workload support services from Internet-based providers.

But as adoption of these models has unfolded, it's become clear that the impacts and implications of cloud commerce are much broader and much more of a benefit to the business as a whole as an innovation engine, even across whole industries.

Recent research shows us that business leaders are now eager to move beyond cost and efficiency gains from cloud to reap far greater rewards, to in essence rewrite the rules of commerce.

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Our latest BriefingsDirect discussion therefore explores the expanding impact that cloud computing is having as a strategic business revolution -- and not just as an IT efficiency shift. Join a panel of experts and practitioners of cloud to unpack how modern enterprises have a unique opportunity to gain powerful new means to greater business outcomes.

Our panelists are: Ed Cone, the Managing Editor of Thought Leadership at Oxford Economics; Ralf Steinbach, Director of Global Software Architecture at Groupe Danone, the French food multinational based in Paris; Bryan Acker, Culture Change Ambassador for the TELUS Transformation Office at TELUS, the Canadian telecommunications firm, and Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing officer for SAP Cloud and Line of Business Solutions. The panel is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What has the research at Oxford Economics been telling you about how cloud is reshaping businesses?

Cone: We did a survey for SAP last year, and that became the basis for this program. We went out to 200 executives around the world and asked them, "What are you doing in the cloud? Are you still looking at it for just process speed, efficiency, and cost cutting?"

Cone

The numbers that came back were really strong in terms of actually being a part of the business function. Beyond those basics, cloud is very much part of the daily reality of companies today.

We saw that the leading expectation for cloud to deliver significant improvement was in productivity, innovation, and revenue generation. So obviously process, speed, efficiency, and cost cutting are still very important to business, but people are looking to cloud for new lines of business, entering new markets, and developing new products.

In this program, what we did was take that information and go out to executives for live interviews to dive deep into how cloud has become the new engine of business, how these expectations are being met at companies around the world.

Gardner: Are businesses doing this intentionally, or are they basically being forced by what's happening around them?

Minahan: Increasingly, as was just indicated, businesses are moving beyond the IT efficiencies and the total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits of the cloud, and the cloud certainly offers benefits in those areas.

Minahan

But really what's driving adoption, what's moving us to this tipping point, is that now, by some estimates, 75 percent of all new investments are going into the cloud or hybrid models. Increasingly, businesses are viewing the cloud as a platform for innovation and entirely new engagement models with their customers, their employees, their suppliers and partners, and in some cases, to create entirely new business models.

Just think about what cloud has done for our personal lives. Who would have thought that Apple, a few years ago, would be used to run your home. This is the Apple Home concept that allows you to monitor and manage all of your devices -- your air-conditioning, your alarm, music, and television -- remotely through the cloud.

There's even the quasi business B2B and B2C models around crowd sourcing and crowd funding from folks like Kickstarter or payment offerings like Square. These are entirely new engagement models, new business models that are built on the back of this emergence of cloud, mobile, and social capabilities.

Gardner: Right, and it seems that one of these benefits is that we can cross boundaries of time, space geography, what have you, very easily, almost transparently, and that requires new thinking in order to take advantage of that.

Bryan, at TELUS as Culture of Change Ambassador, are you part of the process for helping people think differently and therefore be able to exploit what cloud enables?

Flexible work schedule

Acker: One hundred percent. It's actually a great segue, because at TELUS we have a flexible work arrangement, where we want 70 percent of our employees to be working either from home or remotely. What that means is we have to have the tools and the culture in place that people understand, that they can access data and relevant information, wherever they are.

Acker

It doesn't matter if they're at home, like I am today, on the road, or at a client site, they need to be able to get the information to provide the best customer experience and provide the right answer at the right time.

So by switching from some of the great tools we already offered, because collaboration is part of TELUS’s cultural DNA, we've actually been able to tear down silos we didn't even know we were creating.

We were trying to provide all the tools, but now people have an end-to-end view of every record for customers, as well as employees and the collaboration involving courses and learning opportunities. They have access to everything when they need it and they can take ownership of the customer experience or even their own career, which is fantastic for us.

Gardner: Ralf, at Danone, as Director of Global Software Architecture, you clearly have your feet on the IT path and you've seen how things have evolved. Do you see the shift to cloud as a modest evolution, or is this something that changes the game?

Steinbach: We've been looking at cloud for quite sometime now. We've started several projects in the cloud, mainly in two areas. One involves the supporting functions of our business which is HR, travel expenses, and mail. There, we see a huge advantage of using standardized services in the cloud.

Steinbach

In these functions we do not need any specifics. The cloud comes standard and you can not change, as you can with SAP systems. You can't adapt the code. But that is one area where we think there's value in using cloud applications.

The other area where we really see the cloud as valued is in our digital marketing initiatives. There, we really need the flexibility of the cloud. Digital marketing is changing every day. There's a lot of innovation there and there the cloud gives us flexibility in terms of resources that we need to support that. And, the innovation cycles of our providers are much faster than they would be on premises. These are the two main areas where we use the cloud today.

Cone: Ralf, it was interesting to me, when I was reading through the transcript of your interview and working on the case studies we did, that it is even changing business models. It's allowing Danone to go straight to the consumer, where previously your customer had been the retailer. Cloud in new geographic markets is letting you reach straight to the end user, the end buyer.

Digital marketing

Steinbach: That's what I meant when I talked about digital marketing. Today, all consumer product goods company like Danone  are looking at connecting to their consumers and not to the retailers as in the past. We're really focusing on the end-consumer, and the cloud offers us new possibilities to do that, whether it is via mobile applications or websites and so on.

One thing that's important is the flexibility of the systems, because we don't know how many consumers we'll address. It can be a few, but it could be over a million. So we need to have a flexible architecture, and on-premise we could not manage that.

Gardner: The concept of speed seems to come up more and more. We're talking about speed of innovation, agility, direct lines of communication to customers and, of course, also supply-chain direct communication speed as well. How prominent did you see speed and the need for speed in business in your recent research?

We're really focusing on the end consumer, and the cloud offers us new possibilities to do that.

Cone: Well, speed was important -- and it's speed across different dimensions. It's speed to enter a new market or it's speed to collaborate within your own company, within your own organization.

This idea of taking IT and pushing it out to the people, to the customer, and really to the line of business allows them to have intimate contact and to move quickly, but also to break down these barriers of geography.

We did a case study with another large company, Hero, which is a large maker of motorcycles and two wheeled vehicles in India. What they're doing with cloud- enabled customer-facing technology is moving their service operation outside of dealerships into the countryside, out across India. They go to parks and they set up what they call service camps.

There, the speed element is the speed and the convenience with which you are able to get your bike serviced, and that's having a large measurable impact on their business. So it is speed, but it is speed across multiple dimensions.

New innovation

Minahan: At the core, the cloud is really all about unlocking new innovations, providing agility in the business, allowing companies to be able to adapt their processes very, very quickly, and even create entirely new engagement models, and that's what we are seeing.

It is not just the cloud, though. This convergence of cloud, big data, analytics, mobile and social, and business networks really ushers in ultimately a new paradigm for business computing, one where applications are no longer just built for enterprise compliance or to be the system of record. Instead, they're really designed to engage and empower the individual user.

It's one that ushers in a new era of innovation for the business, where we can enable new engagement models with customers, employees, suppliers, and other partners.

We've heard some great examples here, but some others were very similar to the experience that Danone has seen. T-Mobile is leveraging the cloud not to replace its traditional systems of records, but to extend them with the cloud, to create a new model for social care, helping monitor conversations on its brand, and engage customer issues across multiple channels.

This convergence of cloud, big data, analytics, mobile and social, and business networks really ushers in ultimately a new paradigm for business computing.

So not just their traditional support channels, but Twitter and Facebook, where these conversations are happening and really it is empowered them to deliver what has become a phenomenal kind of “Cinderella-worst-to-first” story for customer support and satisfaction.

Now, they're seeing first time resolution rates that have gone from the low teens to greater than 94 percent. Obviously, that has a massive impact on customer satisfaction and renewals and is all powered by not throwing out the systems that they've used so long, but by extending them with the cloud to achieve new innovations and then drive new engagement models.

Gardner: Tim, another factor here, in a sense, levels the playing field. When you move to the cloud, small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMBs) can enjoy the same benefit that you just described for example from T-Mobile. Are you at SAP seeing any movement in terms of the size or type of organizations that can exploit these new benefits?

Minahan: What's interesting, Dana, is that you and I have been around this industry for quite some time and the original thought was that the cloud was the big, democratized computing power.

It allowed SMBs to get the same level of applications and infrastructure support that their larger competitors have had for years. That's certainly true, but it is really the large enterprises that have been aggressively adopting this on an equal pace with their SMBs.

All sizes of companies

The cloud is being used to not only accelerate process efficiency and productivity, but to unlock innovations for all sized companies. Large enterprises like UPS, Deutsche Bank, and Danone are using cloud-based business applications. In the case of UPS and Deutsche Bank, they're using business networks to extend their traditional supply chain and financial systems to collaborate better with their suppliers, bankers, and other partners.

It's being used by small upstarts as well. These are companies that we talked about in the past like Mediafly, a mobile marketing start-up. It's using dynamic discounting solutions in the cloud to get paid faster, fund development of new features, and take on new business.

There's Sage Health Solutions, a company started by two stay-at-home moms in South Africa that is really grown from zero to a multi-million dollar operation. That is all powered by the leveraging the cloud to enable new business models.

Cone: To follow on with what Tim said about the broad gamut of usage from company sites and also earlier mentioning mobile, what we saw in our survey is that mobile is of great importance to companies as a way of reaching their customers for internal productivity as well. But reaching customers is actually a higher priority and that comes down to the old adage: You have to fish where the fish are.

The cloud is being used to not only accelerate process efficiency and productivity, but to unlock innovations for all sized companies.

Look at what Danone is doing when they're setting up direct-to-customer technologies and marketing. They're going into markets where people don't necessarily have laptops or landlines. They're leapfrogging that to a world where people have mobile devices.

So if you have mobile customers, and as Tim said, think of the consumer experience, that is how we all live our lives now. No matter what size your company is, you have to reach your customers the way your customer lives now -- and that is mobile.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your research, how you have gone about it, and how that new level of pervasive collaboration was demonstrated in your findings.

Baseline information

Cone: In terms of the research, as I said, we went out to 200 execs around the world and asked them a series of questions about what their investment plans were. It was baseline survey information. What are you doing in the cloud, how much of it are you doing, and what are the key benefits that you're getting?

Then, as we went deeper in this phase of the project, we found that collaboration has different meanings. It can be collaboration within the company. It can be with partners, which cloud platforms allow you to do more easily. It's also this key relationship, a key area of collaboration between IT and the business.

What we see in this research is that IT is increasingly seen as a partner for the business as a way of driving revenue via the cloud. But across the four regions that we surveyed --  North America, Latin America, EMEA and APAC -- we saw a very high percentage of companies say that they see that IT is emerging as a valued partner of the business, not just a support function for the business. I think that's a key collaborative relationship that I'm sure our guests are seeing in their own companies.

Gardner: Just to be clear, Ed, this is ongoing research. You're already back in the field and you'll be updating some of these findings soon?

We're really interested to see how people are doing compared to the targets they set and what their new targets are.

Cone: Yes, we're really excited about that, Dana. We did this survey last year for SAP. Then, we jumped in about a year later using those numbers and did these in-depth research interviews to look at the use of the cloud to drive business. This summer, we're refielding the survey to see how things have changed and to see how the view of the future has changed.

We ask a lot of questions about where they are now, and where they think they'll be in three years. We're really interested to see how people are doing compared to the targets they set and what their new targets are. So we will have some fresh numbers and fresh reports to talk to you about by Q3 or Q4.

Gardner: Let us look into those actual examples now and go back to Bryan at TELUS.

Acker: I have a tangible example that might help express the value of collaboration at TELUS and something that people don't think about, and that is safety.

We have a lot of field technicians who are in remote areas, but have mobile access. A perfect example is that we can go into situation where a technician may be a little unsure of what to do in a situation and it's potentially unsafe.

Because of the mobile access and the cloud, we've enabled them to quickly record a video, upload it directly to our SAP Jam system, which is our collaborative tool suite that we use, and share it with a collection of other technicians, not just the person they can call.

Safer situation

What happens is then people can say this is unsafe, you need to do X, Y and Z. We can even push them required training, so they can be sure that they're making the right decision. All of a sudden, that becomes a safer situation and the technician is not putting themselves at risk. This is really important because people do not think of those real, tangible examples. They often feel that they're just sharing information back and forth.

But in terms of what we are doing and where we are going, I sit in HR, and we're trying to improve the business process. We now have all of our information, the system of record, an integrated learning management system (LMS), our ability to analyze talent, so we make the correct hires.

We now trust the information implicitly and we're able to make the correct decision, whether it means customer information, recruiting choices, hiring choices, or performance choices.

Now, we're in a situation where we're only going to maximize and try to leverage the cloud for even more innovation, because now people are singing from the same choir sheet, so to speak.

We now trust the information implicitly and we're able to make the correct decision, whether it means customer information, recruiting choices, hiring choices, or performance choices.

We have access to the same system or record of truth, and that's the first time we've had that. Now, recruiting can talk to learning, who can talk to  performance, who can talk to technicians and we know they all get a consistent version of the truth. That is really important for us.

Gardner: Those are some excellent examples of how mobile enhances cloud. That extends the value of mobile. That brings in collaboration and, at the same time, creates data and analysis benefits that can then be fed back into that process.

So there really is a cyclical adoption value here. I'd like to go back to the cultural part of this. Bryan, how do you make sure that that adoption cycle doesn't spin out of control? Is there a lack of governance? Do you feel like you can control what goes on, or are we perhaps in the period of creative chaos that we should let spin off on its own in any way?

Acker: That’s a great question, and I'm not sure if TELUS handles this in a unique way, but we definitely had a very detailed plan. The first thing we did was have collaboration as one of our valued attributes or one of our leadership competencies. People are expected to collaborate, and their performance review is dependent on that.

What that means is we can provide tools to say that we're trying to facilitate collaboration. It doesn't mean matter if you're collaborating through a phone call, through a water-cooler chat, or through technology. Our employees are expected to collaborate. They know that it’s part of their performance cycle and it’s targeted towards their achievements for the year. We trust them to do the right thing.

We actually encourage a little bit of freedom. We want to push the boundaries. Our governance is not so tight that they are afraid to comment incorrectly or afraid to ask a tough question.

Flattening the hierarchy

What we're seeing now is individual team members are challenging leadership positions on specific questions, and we're having an honest and frank discussion that’s pushing the organization forward and making us make the accurate correct choice at all time, which is really encouraging. Now, we're really flattening our hierarchy and the cloud is enabling us to do that.

Gardner: That sounds like a very powerful engine of innovation, allowing that freedom, but then having it be controlled, managed, and understood at the same time. That’s amazing. Ed, do you have any reactions to what Bryan just said about how innovation is manifesting itself newly there at TELUS?

Cone: When we spoke to TELUS, I was intertested in that cultural aspect of it. I'm sure the guys on the call would disagree with me on a technical level, but we like to say that technology is easy, and culture is hard. The technology works, and you implement it and you figure that out, but getting people to change is really difficult.

The example that we use in the case study, SAP on TELUS, was about changing culture through gamification, allowing people to learn via an online cloud-based virtual game. It was this massive effort and it engaged a huge number of employees across this large company.

It really shifted the employee culture, and that had an impact on customer service and therefore on business performance

It really shifted the employee culture, and that had an impact on customer service and therefore on business performance. It’s a way that the cloud is moving mountains and it’s addressing the hard thing to change, which is human behavior and attitudes.

Minahan: We talk about the convergence of these different technologies in cloud, social, and mobile and ultimately we had this convergence going on in technology that we talked about all the time. There is massive change going on in the workforce and what constitutes the workforce.

Bryan talked about how there is a leveling of the organization, doing away with the traditional hierarchical command and control, where information is isolated in the hands of a few, and the new eager employees doesn’t get access to solving some of the tough problems. All that’s being flattened and accelerated and powered by cloud and social collaboration tools.

Also, we're seeing a shift in what constitutes the workforce. One of the biggest examples is the major shift in how companies are viewing the workforce. Contingent and statement of work (SOW) workers, basically non-payroll employees, now represent a third of the typical workforce. In the next few years, this will grow to more than half.

It’s already occurring in certain industries, like pharmaceuticals, mining, retail, and oil and gas. It's changing how folks view the workforce. They're moving from a functional management of someone -- this is their job; this is what they do -- to managing pools of talent or skills that can be rapidly deployed to address a given problem or develop a new innovative product or service.

These pools of talent will include both people on your payroll and off your payroll. Tracking, managing, organizing, and engaging these pools of talent is only possible through the cloud and through mobile, where multiple parties from multiple organizations could view, access, collaborate, and share knowledge and experiences running on a shared-technology platform.

Customer is evolving

Acker: That extends quite naturally to the customer. The customer is evolving faster than almost anything and they expect 24x7 access to support. They expect authentic responses and they now have access to just as much information as the customer service agent.

Without mobile, if you can't connect with those customers and be factual, you're in trouble. Your customers are going to reply in social-media channels and in public forums, and you're going to lose business and you're going to lose trust with your existing customers as well.

Minahan: I fully agree. The only addition to that is that they also expect to be able to engage you through any channel, whether it’s their mobile phone, their laptop, or in some cases, directly face to face, on the phone, or in a retail outlet and have the same consistent experience and not need to reintroduce who they are and what their problem as they move from channel to channel.

Gardner: Clearly we're seeing how things that just weren’t possible before the cloud are having pervasive impacts on businesses. Let’s look at a new business example, again with Danone. Ralf, tell us a little bit about how cloud has had strategic implications for you. You have many brands, many lines of business. How is cloud allowing Danone to function better as a whole?

The cloud is definitely the best option for us to start these new businesses and connect to all consumers. 

Steinbach: We have a strategy around digital marketing and, as you know, we're operating in almost every country in the world. Even though we're a big company, locally, we're sometimes quite small. We're trying to build up new markets in emerging countries with very small investments in the beginning. There, the cloud is definitely the best option for us to start these new businesses and connect to all consumers.

Money matters, even for a big company like Danone. That’s very important for us. If you look at Africa, there are completely different business models that we need to address.

People in Africa pay with their mobile phones. Some sell yogurt on a bicycle. Women pick up some yogurt in the morning and then they sell them on the road. We need to do businesses with these people as well. Obviously, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system isn't able to do that, but the cloud is a much better adapted platform to do this sort of business.

Gardner: The C-suite likes to look at numbers. How do we measure innovation?

Metrics lacking

Cone: We're doing some research on another program right now on that very topic for a non-SAP program. That is showing us that metrics for success on basic things like key performance indicators (KPIs) for progress of migration into the cloud are lacking at a lot of companies. Basic return on investment (ROI) numbers are lacking at a lot of companies.

We're really old school. To go back to your definition of what a business is, we think it’s an organization that’s set up to make money for shareholders and deliver value for stakeholders. By those measures, at least by dotted line, the key metrics are your financial performance? Are you entering, as we mentioned before, new markets and creating new products?

So the metrics we're seeing that are cloud specific aren't universal yet. In a broader sense, as cloud becomes an everyday set of tools, the point of those tools is to make the business run better, and we are seeing a correlation between effective use of the cloud and business performance.

There are entirely new engagement models and business models that the companies hadn’t even thought of before.

Minahan: What the cloud, mobile, and social bring to bear in addition to new collaboration models is that they kick off an unbelievable amount of new information, and oftentimes not in a structured way. There's a need to aggregate that information and analyze that in new ways to detect and predict propensity modeling on your customers, your supply chain, and your employees. Progression and development are extremely powerful.

I think we’ve just scratched the surface. As an industry, we provided the channels through which to collaborate, as we heard today. There are entirely new engagement models and business models that the companies hadn’t even thought of before. Once you have that information, once you have that connectivity, once you have that collaboration, you can begin to investigate and trial and error.

To answer your question about measurement on this, yes, we need measurement of the business process and the business outcome. Let’s not forget why companies adopt technology. It’s not just for technology sake. It’s to effect the change. It’s to effect more efficiency, greater productivity, and new engagement capabilities.

Measuring the business benefit is what we're seeing and what we’re advising our customers to do. And rather than just measuring, are we tracking towards an adoption of having more cloud in our infrastructure portfolios.

The focus today is largely driven by the fact that the lines of business are now more engaged in the buying decision and in shaping what they want from a technology standpoint to help them enable their business process. So the metrics have shifted from one of speeds and feeds and users to one of business outcomes.

Gardner: Bryan at TELUS in Toronto, you're closely associated with the human resources productivity and the softer metrics of the employee involvement and dedication that sort of thing. Are there any ways that you can think of that cloud adoption and innovation, as we’ve been describing, has this unintended set of consequences when it comes to employee empowerment or that innovation equation? How do you view measuring success of cloud  adoption?

Simplifying the process

Acker: We measure our customers success by the likelihood to recommend. Will a TELUS customer recommend our services and products to friends, family, and peers?

We measure internal success by our employee engagement metric. If the customers are satisfied and the employees are engaged and fulfilled at work, that means that we're probably moving in the right direction. We can kind of reverse engineer to see what changes are helping us. That allows us to take our information and innovation from the cloud and inspire better behaviors and better process.

We can say, "You know what, in this pocket we’ve analyzed that our customers are likely to recommend it higher than anywhere else in Canada. What are they doing?" We can look back through the information shared on the cloud and see the great customer success stories or the great team building that’s driving engagement through the roof.

We can say, "This is the process we have to replicate and spread throughout all of our centers." Then, we can tweak it for cultural specifics. But because of that, we can use the cloud to inspire better behavior, not just say that we had 40,000 users and 2,000 hits on this blog post. We're really trying to get away from the quantitative and get into the qualitative to drive change throughout the organization.

Gardner: What comes next? Where do you see the impacts of cloud adoption in your business over the next couple of years?

Steinbach: There are still some challenges in front of us. One of the challenges is China. China is one of the biggest markets, but cloud services are not always available or they're very slow. If your cloud solution is hosted outside of China, there's a big problem. These are probably technical challenges, but we have to find solutions with our partners there, so that they can establish their services in China.

That’s one of the challenges. The other is that that the cloud might change the role of IT in our organization. In the past we owned the systems and the applications. Today, the business can basically buy cloud services with a credit card. So you could imagine that they won’t need us anymore in the future, but that's not true.

As an IT organization, we probably have to find our role inside the organization, from just providing solutions or hardware to being an ambassador for the business and to help them to make the right decisions. There are still problems that will remain as the integration between different applications. It doesn’t get easier in the cloud, so that’s where I see the challenge.

And last but not least, it's about security. We take that really seriously. If we store data, whether it's employees or of our consumers, we have to make sure that that our cloud providers have the same standards of security and there are no leaks. That’s very, very important for us. And there are legal aspects as well.

We've just started. There are still a lot of things to do in the next few years, but we're definitely going on with our strategy towards the cloud and toward mobile. And, at the end of the day, it all fits together. I think it was said before that it's not only cloud, but it's the big data, collaboration, and mobile. You have to see the whole thing as one package of opportunities.

Important challenges

Gardner: What do you think might be some of the impacts a few years from now that we're only just starting to realize?

Acker: On a more positive note, which is just the other side of the coin, obviously the challenges are there, but we're actually just starting to be able to experience the fact that innovation at TELUS is moving faster than it used to. We're no longer dependent on the speed at which our pre-assigned resources can make change and develop new products.

IT can now look at it from a more strategic point of view, which is great. Now, we're maximizing quarterly releases from systems that are leveraging the input from multiple companies around the world, not just how fast our learning team can develop something or how fast our IT team can build new functionality into our products.

We're no longer limited by the resources, and innovation is flying forward. That, for us, is the biggest unexpected gain. We're seeing all this technology that used to take months or years to change now on a quarterly release schedule. This is fantastic. Even within a year of being on our cloud-computing system, we're so happy, and that is inspiring to people. They're maximizing that and trying to push the organization forward as well. So, that’s a real big benefit.

Gardner: Tim, do you have any thoughts about where this can lead us in the next few years that we haven’t yet hit upon, things you're just starting to see the first really glimmers of it?

I think the biggest thing is that the cloud is going to unlock new business models and new organization models.

Minahan: A lot of it has been touched on here. We're seeing a massive shift in what the role of IT is, moving from one of deploying technology and integrating things to really becoming business process experts.

We talked a bit about the amount of data and the insights that are now available to help you better understand and predict the appetites of your customers to help you even determine when your machines might fail and when it's time to reorder or set a service repair.

I think the biggest thing is that the cloud is going to unlock new business models and new organization models. We talked a bit about TELUS and their work patterns, in which most of the workers are remote and how they are engaging the field service technicians in the field.

We talked about the growing contingent workforce and how the cloud is enabling folks to collaborate, onboard, and skill up those employees, non-payroll employees much more quickly. We're going to see your new virtual enterprises. We're talking about borderless enterprises that allow you to organize not just pools of talent, but entire value chains, and be able to collaborate in a more much transparent way.

We mentioned before about Apple Home. You're beginning to see it with 3D printers. It's this whole idea where more and more companies become digital businesses. This isn’t just about on-the-channel commerce providing a single customer experience across multiple channels.

It's actually about moving more and more of what you deliver, the solutions you deliver, the former products your deliver, to digital bits that can be tested, experienced, and downloaded all online.

All of this is being empowered by this massive convergence of cloud, mobility, social and business networks, and big data. 

What comes next

Cone: To follow on what Tim said about the borderless enterprise, when we ask people what’s in the cloud now and what’s going to be substantially cloud based in three years, three of the highest growth areas were innovation in R and D, supply chain, and HR. All of those go straight to this idea that boundaryless digital enterprises are emerging and that cloud will be the underpinning of these enterprises.

We're working with Tim right now on a big global study about the workforce. When I talk about culture and the way companies function internally, a year ago, when we started this research, HR was the least likely function of the ones we queried to be in the cloud, and it's going to have massive growth in the next couple of years.

These stories start to converge of boundaryless and culture, all coming together via the cloud.

These stories start to converge of boundaryless and culture, all coming together via the cloud. That’s the segue to say that we're really excited to see how these numbers look when we refield this survey this summer, because that progress is snowballing and accelerating beyond even what people thought it was the last time we asked them.

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How UK data solutions developer Systems Mechanics uses HP Vertica for BI, streaming and data analysis

Three years ago, Systems Mechanics Limited used relational databases to assemble and analyze some 20 different data sources in near real-time. But most relational database appliances used 1980s technical approaches, and the ability to connect more data and manage more events capped off. The runway for their business expansion just ended.

So Systems Mechanics looked for a platform that scales well and provides real-time data analysis, too. At the volumes and price they needed, HP Vertica has since scaled without limit ... an endless runway.

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

To learn more about how Systems Mechanics improved how their products best deliver business intelligence (BI), analytics streaming, and data analysis, BriefingsDirect spoke with Andy Stubley, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Systems Mechanics, based in London. The discussion, at the HP Discover conference in Barcelona, is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner:  You've been doing a lot with data analysis at Systems Mechanics, and monetizing that in some very compelling ways.

Stubley: Yes, indeed. System Mechanics is principally a consultancy and a software developer. We’ve been working in the telco space for the last 10-15 years. We also have a history in retail and financial services.

Stubley

The focus we've had recently and the products we’ve developed into our Zen family are based on big data, particularly in telcos, as they evolve from principally old analog conversations into devices where people have smartphone applications -- and data becomes ever more important.

All that data and all those people connected to the network cause a lot more events that need to be managed, and that data is both a cost to the business and an opportunity to optimize the business. So we have a cost reduction we apply and a revenue upside we apply as well.

Quick example

Gardner: What’s a typical way telcos use Zen, and that analysis?

Stubley: Let’s take a scenario where you’re looking in network and you can’t make a phone call. Two major systems are catching that information. One is a fault-management system that’s telling you there is a fault on the network and it reports that back to the telecom itself.

The second one is the performance management system. That doesn’t specify faults basically, but it tells you if you’re having things like thresholds being affected, which may have an impact on performance every time. Either of those can have an impact on your customer, and from a customer’s perspective, you might also be having a problem with the network that isn’t reported by either of the systems.

We’re finding that social media is getting a bigger play in this space. Why is that? Now, particular the younger populations with consumer-based telcos, mobile telcos particularly, if they can’t get a signal or they can’t make a phone call, they get onto social media and they are trashing the brand.

They’re making noise. A trend is combining fault management and performance management, which are logical partners with social media. All of a sudden, rather than having a couple of systems, you have three.

In our world, we can put 25 or 30 different data sources on to a single Zen platform. In fact, there is no theoretical limit to the number we could, but 20 to 30 is quite typical now. That enables us to manage all the different network elements, different types of mobile technologies, LTE, 3G, and 2G. It could be Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, ZTE, or Alcatel-Lucent. There is an amazing range of equipment, all currently managed through separate entities. We’re offering a platform to pull it all together in one unit.

The other way I tend to look at it is that we’re trying to turn the telcos into how you might view a human. We take the humans as the best decision-making platforms in the world and we probably still could claim that. As humans, we have conscious and unconscious processes running. We don’t think about breathing or pumping our blood around our system, but it’s happening all the time.

We use a solution with visualization, because in the world of big data, you can’t understand data in numbers.

We have senses that are pulling in massive amount of information from the outside world. You’re listening to me now. You’re probably doing a bunch of other things while you are tapping away on a table as well. They’re getting senses of information there and you are seeing, and hearing, and feeling, and touching, and tasting.

Those all contain information that’s coming into the body, but most of the activity is subconscious. In the world of big data, this is the Zen goal, and what we’re delivering in a number of places is to make as many actions as possible in a telco environment, as in a network environment, come to that automatic, subconscious state.

Suppose I have a problem on a network. I relate it back to the people who need to know, but I don’t require human intervention. We’re looking a position where the human intervention is looking at patterns in that information to decide what they can do intellectually to make the business better.

That probably speaks to another point here. We use a solution with visualization, because in the world of big data, you can’t understand data in numbers. Your human brain isn’t capable of processing enough, but it is capable of identifying patterns of pictures, and that’s where we go with our visualization technology.

Gather and use data

We have a customer who is one of the largest telcos in EMEA. They’re basically taking in 90,000 alarms from the network a day, and that’s their subsidiary companies, all into one environment. But 90,000 alarms needing manual intervention is a very big number.
Using the Zen technology, we’ve been able to reduce that to 10,000 alarms. We’ve effectively taken 90 percent of the manual processing out of that environment. Now, 10,000 is still a lot of alarms to deal with, but it’s a lot less frightening than 90,000, and that’s a real impact in human terms.

Gardner: Now that we understand what you do, let’s get into how you do it. What’s beneath the covers in your Zen system that allows you to confidently say you can take any volume of data you want?

If we need more processing power, we can add more services to scale transparently. That enables us to get any amount of data, which we can then process.

Stubley: Fundamentally, that comes down to the architecture we built for Zen. The first element is our data-integration layer. We have a technology that we developed over the last 10 years specifically to capture data in telco networks. It’s real-time and rugged and it can deal with any volume. That enables us to take anything from the network and push it into our real-time database, which is HP’s Vertica solution, part of the HP HAVEn family.

Vertica analysis is to basically record any amount of data in real time and scale automatically on the HP hardware platform we also use. If we need more processing power, we can add more services to scale transparently. That enables us to get any amount of data, which we can then process.

We have two processing layers. Referring to our earlier discussion about conscious and subconscious activity, our conscious activity is visualizing that data, and that’s done with Tableau.

We have a number of Tableau reports and dashboards with each of our product solutions. That enables us to envision what’s happening and allows the organization, the guys running the network, and the guys looking at different elements in the data to make their own decisions and identify what they might do.

We also have a streaming analytics engine that listens to the data as it comes into the system before it goes to Vertica. If we spot the patterns we’ve identified earlier “subconsciously,” we’ll then act on that data, which may be reducing an alarm count. It may be "actioning" something.

It may be sending someone an email. It may be creating a trouble ticket on a different system. Those all happen transparently and automatically. It’s four layers simplifying the solution: data capture, data integration, visualization, and automatic analytics.

Developing high value

Gardner: And when you have the confidence to scale your underlying architecture and infrastructure, when you are able to visualize and develop high value to a vertical industry like a telco, this allows you to then expand into more lines of business in terms of products and services and also expand into move vertical. Where have you taken this in terms of the Zen family and then where do you take this now in terms of your market opportunity?

Stubley: We focus on mobile telcos. That’s our heritage. We can take any data source from a telco, but we can actually take any data source from anywhere, in any platform and any company. That ranges from binary to HTML. You name it, and if you’ve got data, we could load it.

That means we can build our processing accordingly. What we do is position what we call solution packs, and a solution pack is a connector to the outside world, to the network, and it grabs the data. We’ve got an element of data modeling there, so we can load the data into Vertica. Then, we have already built reports in Tableau that allows us to interrogate automatically. That’s at a component level.

Once you go to a number of components, we can then look horizontally across those different items and look at the behaviors that interact with each other. If you are looking at pure telco terms, we would be looking at different network devices, the end-to-end performance of the network, but the same would apply to a fraud scenario or could apply to someone who is running cable TV.

The very highest level is finding what problem you’re going to solve and then using the data to solve it.

So multi-play players are interesting because they want to monitor what’s happening with TV as well and that will fit in exactly in the same category. Realistically, anybody with high-volume, real-time data can take benefit from Vertica.

Another interesting play in this scenario is social gaming and online advertising. They all have similar data characteristics, very high volume and fixed data that needs to be analyzed and processed automatically.

Why Vertica?

Gardner: How long have you been using Vertica, and what is it that drove you to using it vis-à-vis alternatives?

Stubley: As far as the Zen family goes, we have used other technologies in the past, other relational databases, but we’ve used Vertica now for more than two-and-a-half years. We were looking for a platform that can scale and would give us real-time data. At the volumes we were looking at nothing could compete with Vertica at a sensible price. You can build yourself any solid solution with enough money, but we haven’t got too many customers who are prepared to make that investment.

So Vertica fits in with the technology of the 21st century. A lot of the relational database appliances are using 1980 thought processes. What’s happened with processing in the last few years is that nobody shares memory anymore, and our environment requires a non-shared memory solution. Vertica has been built on that basis. It was scaled without limit.

One of the areas we’re looking at that I mentioned earlier was social media. Social media is a very natural play for Hadoop, and Hadoop is clearly a very cost-effective platform for vast volumes of data at real-time data load, but very slow to analyze.
So the combination with a high-volume, low-cost platform for the bulk of data and a very high performing real-time analytics engine is very compelling. The challenge is going to be moving the data between the two environments. That isn’t going to go away. That’s not simple, and there is a number of approaches. HP Vertica is taking some.

There is Flex Zone, and there are any number of other players in that space. The reality is that you probably reach an environment where people are parallel loading the Hadoop and the Vertica. That’s what we probably plan to do. That gives you much more resilience. So for a lot of the data we’re putting into our system, we’re actually planning to put the raw data files into Hadoop, so we can reload them as necessary to improve the resilience of the overall system, too.

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Health data deluge requires secure information flow via standards, says The Open Group’s new healthcare director

An expected deluge of data and information about patients, providers, outcomes, and needed efficiencies is pushing the healthcare industry to rapid change. But more than dealing with just the volume of data is required. Interoperability, security and the ability to adapt rapidly to the lessons in the data are all essential.

The means of enabling Boundaryless Information Flow, Open Platform 3.0 adaptation, and security for the healthcare industry are then, not surprisingly, headline topics for The Open Group’s upcoming event, Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow on July 21 and 22 in Boston.

And Boston is a hotbed of innovation and adaption for how technology, enterprise architecture, and open standards can improve the communication and collaboration among healthcare ecosystem players.

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

In preparation for the conference, BriefingsDirect had the opportunity to interview Jason Lee, the new Healthcare and Security Forums Director at The Open Group. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: I'm looking forward to the Boston conference next week and want to remind our listeners and readers that it's not too late to sign up to attend. You can learn more at www.opengroup.org.

Let’s start by talking about the relationship between Boundaryless Information Flow, which is a major theme of the conference, and healthcare. Healthcare perhaps is the killer application for Boundaryless Information Flow.

Lee: Interesting, I haven’t heard it referred to that way, but healthcare is 17 percent of the US economy. It's upwards of $3 trillion. The costs of healthcare are a problem, not just in the United States, but all over the world, and there are a great number of inefficiencies in the way we practice healthcare.

Lee

We don’t necessarily intend to be inefficient, but there are so many places and people involved in healthcare, it's very difficult to get them to speak the same language. It's almost as if you're in a large house with lots of different rooms, and  every room you walk into they speak a different language. To get information to flow from one room to the other requires some active efforts, and that’s what we're undertaking here at The Open Group.

Gardner: What is it about the current collaboration approaches that don’t work? Obviously, healthcare has been around for a long time and there have been different players involved. What are the hurdles? What prevents a nice, seamless, easy flow and collaboration in information that creates better outcomes? What’s the holdup?

Many barriers

Lee: There are many ways to answer that question, because there are many barriers. Perhaps the simplest is the transformation of healthcare from a paper-based industry to a digital industry. Everyone has walked into a medical office, looked behind the people at the front desk, and seen file upon file and row upon row of folders, information that’s kept in a written format.

When there's been movement toward digitizing that information, not everyone has used the same system. It's almost like trains running on different gauge track. Obviously if the track going east to west is a different gauge than going north to south, then trains aren’t going to be able to travel on those same tracks. In the same way, healthcare information does not flow easily from one office to another or from one provider to another.

Gardner: So not only do we have disparate strategies for collecting and communicating health data, but we're also seeing much larger amounts of data coming from a variety of new and different places. Some of them now even involve sensors inside of patients themselves or devices that people will wear. So is the data deluge, the volume, also an issue here?

Lee: Certainly. I heard recently that an integrated health plan, which has multiple hospitals involved, contains more elements of data than the Library of Congress. As information is collected at multiple points in time, over a relatively short period of time, you really do have a data deluge. Figuring out how to find your way through all the data and look at the most relevant [information] for the patient is a great challenge.

Gardner: I suppose the bad news is that there is this deluge of data, but it’s also good news, because more data means more opportunity for analysis, a better ability to predict and determine best practices, and also provide overall lower costs with better patient care.

We, like others, put a great deal of effort into describing the problems, but figuring out how to bring IT technologies to bear on business problems.

So it seems like the stakes are rather high here to get this right, to not just crumble under a volume or an avalanche of data, but to master it, because it's perhaps the future. The solution is somewhere in there, too.

Lee: No question about it. At The Open Group, our focus is on solutions. We, like others, put a great deal of effort into describing the problems, but figuring out how to bring IT technologies to bear on business problems, how to encourage different parts of organizations to speak to one another and across organizations to speak the same language, and to operate using common standards and language. That’s really what we're all about.

And it is, in a large sense, part of the process of helping to bring healthcare into the 21st Century. A number of industries are a couple of decades ahead of healthcare in the way they use large datasets -- big data, some people refer to it as. I'm talking about companies like big department stores and large online retailers. They really have stepped up to the plate and are using that deluge of data in ways that are very beneficial to them -- and healthcare can do the same. We're just not quite at the same level of evolution.

Gardner: And to your point, the stakes are so much higher. Retail is, of course, a big deal in the economy, but as you pointed out, healthcare is such a much larger segment. So just making modest improvements in communication, collaboration, or data analysis can reap huge rewards.

Quality side

Lee: Absolutely true. There is the cost side of things, but there is also the quality side. So there are many ways in which healthcare can improve through standardization and coordinated development, using modern technology that cannot just reduce cost, but improve quality at the same time.

Gardner: I'd like to get into a few of the hotter trends. But before we do, it seems that The Open Group has recognized the importance here by devoting the entire second day of their conference in Boston, that will be on July 22, to healthcare.

Maybe you could provide us a brief overview of what participants, and even those who come in online and view recorded sessions of the conference at http://new.livestream.com/opengroup should expect? What’s going to go on July 22?

Lee: We have a packed day. We're very excited to have Dr. Joe Kvedar, a physician at Partners HealthCare and Founding Director of the Center for Connected Health, as our first plenary speaker. The title of his presentation is “Making Health Additive.”

It will become an area where standards development and The Open Group can be very helpful.

Dr. Kvedar is a widely respected expert on mobile health, which is currently the Healthcare Forum’s top work priority.  As mobile medical devices become ever more available and diversified, they will enable consumers to know more about their own health and wellness. 

A great deal of data of potentially useful health data will be generated.  How this information can be used -- not just by consumers but also by the healthcare establishment that takes care of them as patients -- will become a question of increasing importance. It will become an area where standards development and The Open Group can be very helpful.

Our second plenary speaker, Proteus Duxbury, Chief Technology Officer at Connect for Health Colorado, will discuss a major feature of the Affordable Care Act — the health insurance exchanges -- which are designed to bring health insurance to tens of millions of people who previous did not have access to it. 

He is going to talk about how enterprise architecture -- which is really about getting to solutions by helping the IT folks talk to the business folks and vice versa -- has helped the State of Colorado develop their health insurance exchange.

After the plenaries, we will break up into three tracks, one of which is healthcare-focused. In this track there will be three presentations, all of which discuss how enterprise architecture and the approach to Boundaryless Information Flow can help healthcare and healthcare decision-makers become more effective and efficient.

Care delivery

One presentation will focus on the transformation of care delivery at the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. Another will address stewarding healthcare transformation using enterprise architecture, focusing on one of our platinum members, Oracle, and a company called Intelligent Medical Objects, and how they're working together in a productive way, bringing IT and healthcare decision-making together.

Then, the final presentation in this track will focus on the development of an enterprise architecture-based solution at an insurance company. The payers, or the insurers -- the big companies that are responsible for paying bills and collecting premiums -- have a very important role in the healthcare system that extends beyond administration of benefits. Yet, payers are not always recognized for their key responsibilities and capabilities in the area of clinical improvements and cost improvements.

With the increase in payer data brought on in large part by the adoption of a new coding system -- the ICD-10 -- which will come online this year, there will be a huge amount of additional data, including clinical data, that become available. At The Open Group, we consider payers -- health insurance companies (some of which are integrated with providers) -- as very important stakeholders in the big picture.

In the afternoon, we're going to switch gears a bit and have a speaker talk about the challenges, the barriers, the “pain points” in introducing new technology into the healthcare systems. The focus will return to remote or mobile medical devices and the predictable but challenging barriers to getting newly generated health information to flow to doctors’ offices and into patients records, electronic health records, and hospitals' data-keeping and data-sharing systems.

Payers are not always  recognized for their key responsibilities and capabilities in the area of clinical improvements and cost improvements.

We'll have a panel of experts that responds to these pain points, these challenges, and then we'll draw heavily from the audience, who we believe will be very, very helpful, because they bring a great deal of expertise in guiding us in our work. So we're very much looking forward to the afternoon as well.

Gardner: I'd also like to remind our readers and listeners that they can take part in this by attending the conference, and there is information about that at the opengroup.org website.

It's really interesting. A couple of these different plenaries and discussions in the afternoon come back to this user-generated data. Jason, we really seem to be on the cusp of a whole new level of information that people will be able to develop from themselves through their lifestyle, new devices that are connected.

We hear from folks like Apple, Samsung, Google, and Microsoft. They're all pulling together information and making it easier for people to not only monitor their exercise, but their diet, and maybe even start to use sensors to keep track of blood sugar levels, for example.

In fact, a new Flurry Analytics survey showed 62 percent increase in the use of health and fitness application over the last six months on the popular mobile devices. This compares to a 33 percent increase in other applications in general. So there's an 87 percent faster uptick in the use of health and fitness applications.

Tell me a little bit how you see this factoring in. Is this a mixed blessing? Will so much data generated from people in addition to the electronic medical records, for example, be a bad thing? Is this going to be a garbage in, garbage out, or is this something that could potentially be a game changer in terms of how people react to their own data -- and then bring more data into the interactions they have with healthcare providers?

Challenge to predict

Lee: It's always a challenge to predict what the market is going to do, but I think that’s a remarkable statistic that you cited. My prediction is that the increased volume of person-generated data from mobile health devices is going to be a game changer. This view also reflects how the Healthcare Forum members (which includes members from Capgemini, Philips, IBM, Oracle and HP) view the future.

The commercial demand for mobile medical devices, things that can be worn, embedded, or swallowed, as in pills, as you mentioned, is growing ever more. The software and the applications that will be developed to be used with the devices is going to grow by leaps and bounds.

As you say, there are big players getting involved. Already some of the pedometer-type devices that measure the number of steps taken in a day have captured the interest of many, many people. Even David Sedaris, serious guy that he is, was writing about it recently in The New Yorker.

What we will find is that many of the health indicators that we used to have to go to the doctor or nurse or lab to get information on will become available to us through these remote devices.

There are already problems around interoperability and connectivity of information in the healthcare establishment as it is now.

There will be a question of course as to reliability and validity of the information, to your point about garbage in, garbage out, but I think standards development will help here This, again, is where The Open Group comes in. We might also see the FDA exercising its role in ensuring safety here, as well as other organizations, in determining which devices are reliable.

The Open Group is working in the area of mobile data and information systems that are developed around them, and their ability to (a) talk to one another, and (b) talk to the data devices/infrastructure used in doctors’ offices and in hospitals. This is called interoperability and it's certainly lacking in the country.

There are already problems around interoperability and connectivity of information in the healthcare establishment as it is now. When patients and consumers start collecting their own data, and the patient is put at the center of the nexus of healthcare, then the question becomes how does that information that patients collect get back to the doctor/clinician in ways in which the data can be trusted and where the data are helpful?

After all, if a patient is wearing a medical device, there is the opportunity to collect data, about blood-sugar level let's say, throughout the day. And this is really taking healthcare outside of the four walls of the clinic and bringing information to bear that can be very, very useful to clinicians and beneficial to patients.

In short, the rapid market dynamic in mobile medical devices and in the software and hardware that facilitates interoperability begs for standards-based solutions that reduce costs and improve quality, and all of which puts the patient at the center. This is The Open Group’s Healthcare Forum’s sweet spot.

Game changer

Gardner: It seems to me a real potential game changer as well, and that something like Boundaryless Information Flow and standards will play an essential role in. Because one of the big question marks with many of the ailments in a modern society has to do with lifestyle and behavior.

So often, the providers of the care only really have the patient’s responses to questions, but imagine having a trove of data at their disposal, a 360-degree view of the patient to then further the cause of understanding what's really going on, on a day-to-day basis.

But then, it's also having a two-way street, being able to deliver perhaps in an automated fashion reinforcements and incentives, information back to the patient in real-time about behavior and lifestyles. So it strikes me as something quite promising, and I look forward to hearing more about it at the Boston conference.

Any other thoughts on this issue about patient flow of data, not just among and between providers and payers, for example, or providers in an ecosystem of care, but with the patient as the center of it all, as you said?

Lee: As more mobile medical devices come to the market, we'll find that consumers own multiple types of devices at least some of which collect multiple types of data. So even for the patient, being at the center of their own healthcare information collection, there can be barriers to having one device talk to the other. If a patient wants to keep their own personal health record, there may be difficulties in bringing all that information into one place.

There are issues, around security in particular, where healthcare will be at the leading edge.

So the interoperability issue, the need for standards, guidelines, and voluntary consensus among stakeholders about how information is represented becomes an issue, not just between patients and their providers, but for individual consumers as well.

Gardner: And also the cloud providers. There will be a variety of large organizations with cloud-modeled services, and they are going to need to be, in some fashion, brought together, so that a complete 360-degree view of the patient is available when needed. It's going to be an interesting time.

Of course, we've also looked at many other industries and tried to have a cloud synergy, a cloud-of-clouds approach to data and also the transaction. So it’s interesting how what's going on in multiple industries is common, but it strikes me that, again, the scale and the impact of the healthcare industry makes it a leader now, and perhaps a driver for some of these long overdue structured and standardized activities.

Lee: It could become a leader. There is no question about it. Moreover, there is a lot healthcare can learn from other companies, from mistakes that other companies have made, from lessons they have learned, from best practices they have developed (both on the content and process side). And there are issues, around security in particular, where healthcare will be at the leading edge in trying to figure out how much is enough, how much is too much, and what kinds of solutions work.

There's a great future ahead here. It's not going to be without bumps in the road, but organizations like The Open Group are designed and experienced to help multiple stakeholders come together and have the conversations that they need to have in order to push forward and solve some of these problems.

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HP network management heightens performance while reducing total costs for Nordic telco TDC

When Swedish communications services provider TDC needed network infrastructure improvements from their disparate networks across several Nordic countries, they needed both simplicity in execution and agility in performance.

Our next innovation case study interview therefore highlights how TDC in Stockholm found ways to better determine root causes to any network disruption, and conduct deep inspection of the traffic to best manage their service-level agreements (SLAs).

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

BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand how over 50,000 devices can be monitored and managed across a state-of-the-art network when we interviewed Lars Niklasson, the Senior Consultant at TDC. The discussion, at the HP Discover conference in Barcelona, is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: You have a number of main businesses in your organization. There’s TDC Solutions and mobile. There’s even television and some other hosting. Explain for us how large your organization is.

Niklasson: TDC is an operator in the Nordic region, where we have a network covering Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. In Sweden, we’re also an integrator and have a quite big consultant role in Sweden. In Sweden we’re around 800 people, and the whole TDC group is almost 10,000 people.

Niklasson

Gardner: So it’s obviously a very significant network to support this business and deliver the telecommunication services. Maybe you could define your network for us.

Niklasson: It's quite big, over 50,000 devices, and everything is monitored of course. It’s a state-of-the-art network.

Gardner: When you have so many devices to track, so many types of layers of activity and levels of network operations, how do you approach keeping track of that and making sure that you’re not only performing well, but performing efficiently?

Niklasson: Many years ago, we implemented HP Network Node Manager (NNM) and we have several network operating centers in all countries using NNM. When HP released different smart plug-ins, we started to implement those too for the different areas that they support, such as quality assurance, traffic, and so on.

Gardner: So you’ve been using HP for your network management and HP Network Management Center for some time, and it has of course evolved over the years. What are some of the chief attributes that you like or requirements that you have for network operations, and why has the HP product been so strong for you?

Quick and easy

Niklasson: One thing is that it has to be quick and easy to manage. We have lots of changes all the time, especially in Sweden, when a customer comes. And in Sweden, we’re monitoring end customers’ networks.

It's also very important to be able to integrate it with the other systems that we have. So we can, for example, tell which service-level agreement (SLA) a particular device has and things like that. NNM makes this quite efficient.

Gardner: One of the things that I’ve heard people struggle with is the amount of data that’s generated from networks that then they need to be able to sift through and discover anomalies. Is there something about visualization or other ways of digesting so much data that appeals to you?

Niklasson: NNM is quite good at finding the root cause. You don’t get very many incidents when something happens. If I look back at other products and older versions, there were lots and lots of incidents and alarms. Now, I find it quite easy to manage and configure NNM so it's monitoring the correct things and listening to the correct traps and so on.

Gardner: TDC uses network management capabilities and also sells it. They also provide it with their telecom services. How have you experienced the use in the field? Do any of your customers also manage their own networks and how has this been for your consumers of network services?

Niklasson: We’re also an HP partner in selling NNM to end customers. Part of my work is helping customers implement this in their own environment. Sometimes a customer doesn’t want to do that. They buy the service from us, and we monitor the network. It’s for different reasons. One could be security, and they don’t allow us to access the network remotely. They prefer to have it in-house, and I help them with these projects.

Now, I find it quite easy to manage and configure NNM so it's monitoring the correct things and listening to the correct traps.

Gardner: Lars, looking to the future, are there any particular types of technology improvements that you would like to see or have you heard about some of the roadmaps that HP has for the whole Network Management Center Suite? What interests you in terms of what's next?

Niklasson: I would say two things. One is the application visibility in the network, where we can have some of that with traffic that’s cleaner, but it's still NetFlow-based. So I’m interested in seeing more deep inspection of the traffic and also more virtualization of the virtual environments that we have.

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