How The Open Group Healthcare Forum and Health Enterprise Reference Architecture cures process and IT ills

The next BriefingsDirect healthcare thought leadership panel discussion examines how a global standards body, The Open Group, is working to improve how the healthcare industry functions.

We’ll now learn how The Open Group Healthcare Forum (HCF) is advancing best practices and methods for better leveraging IT in healthcare ecosystems. And we’ll examine the forum’s Health Enterprise Reference Architecture (HERA) initiative and its role in standardizing IT architectures. The goal is to foster better boundaryless interoperability within and between healthcare public and private sector organizations.

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

To learn more about improving the processes and IT that better supports healthcare, please welcome our panel of experts: Oliver Kipf, The Open Group Healthcare Forum Chairman and Business Process and Solution Architect at Philips, based in Germany; Dr. Jason Lee, Director of the Healthcare Forum at The Open Group, in Boston, and Gail Kalbfleisch, Director of the Federal Health Architecture at the US Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: For those who might not be that familiar with the Healthcare Forum and The Open Group in general, tell us about why the Healthcare Forum exists, what its mission is, and what you hope to achieve through your work.

Lee

Lee: The Healthcare Forum exists because there is a huge need to architect the healthcare enterprise, which is approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the economy in the US, and approaching that level in other developing countries in Europe.

There is a general feeling that enterprise architecture is somewhat behind in this industry, relative to other industries. There are important gaps to fill that will help those stakeholders in healthcare -- whether they are in hospitals or healthcare delivery systems or innovation hubs in organizations of different sorts, such as consulting firms. They can better leverage IT to achieve business goals, through the use of best practices, lessons learned, and the accumulated wisdom of the various Forum members over many years of work. We want them to understand the value of our work so they can use it to address their needs.

Our mission, simply, is to help make healthcare information available when and where it’s needed and to accomplish that goal through architecting the healthcare enterprise. That’s what we hope to achieve.

Gardner: As the chairman of the HCF, could you explain what a forum is, Oliver? What does it consist of, how many organizations are involved?

Kipf

Kipf: The HCF is made up of its members and I am really proud of this team. We are very passionate about healthcare. We are in the technology business, so we are more than just the governing bodies; we also have participation from the provider community. That makes the Forum true to the nature of The Open Group, in that we are global in nature, we are vendor-neutral, and we are business-oriented. We go from strategy to execution, and we want to bridge from business to technology. We take the foundation of The Open Group, and then we apply this to the HCF.

As we have many health standards out there, we really want to leverage [experience] from our 30 members to make standards work by providing the right type of tools, frameworks, and approaches. We partner a lot in the industry.

The healthcare industry is really a crowded place and there are many standard development organizations. There are many players. It’s quite vital as a forum that we reach out, collaborate, and engage with others to reach where we want to be.

Gardner: Gail, why is the role of the enterprise architecture function an important ingredient to help bring this together? What’s important about EA when we think about the healthcare industry?

Kalbfleisch

Kalbfleisch: From an EA perspective, I don’t really think that it matters whether you are talking about the healthcare industry or the finance industry or the personnel industry or the gas and electric industry. If you look at any of those, the organizations or the companies that tend to be highly functioning, they have not just architecture -- because everyone has architecture for what they do. But that architecture is documented and it’s available for use by decision-makers, and by developers across the system so that each part can work well together.

We know that within the healthcare industry it is exceedingly complicated, and it’s a mixture of a lot of different things. It’s not just your body and your doctor, it’s also your insurance, your payers, research, academia -- and putting all of those together.

If we don’t have EA, people new to the system -- or people who were deeply embedded into their parts of the system -- can’t see how that system all works together usefully. For example, there are a lot of different standards organizations. If we don’t see how all of that works together -- where everybody else is working, and how to make it fit together – then we’re going to have a hard time getting to interoperability quickly and efficiently.

It's important that we get to individual solution building blocks to attain a more integrated approach. 

Kipf: If you think of the healthcare industry, we’ve been very good at developing individual solutions to specific problems. There’s a lot of innovation and a lot of technology that we use. But there is an inherent risk of producing silos among the many stakeholders who, ultimately, work for the good of the patient. It's important that we get to individual solution building blocks to attain a more integrated approach based on architecture building blocks, and based on common frameworks, tools and approaches.

Gardner: Healthcare is a very complex environment and IT is very fast-paced. Can you give us an update on what the Healthcare Forum has been doing, given the difficulty of managing such complexity?

Bird’s-eye view mapping

Lee: The Healthcare Forum began with a series of white papers, initially focusing on an information model that has a long history in the federal government. We used enterprise architecture to evaluate the Federal Health Information Model (FHIM).  People began listening and we started to talk to people outside of The Open Group, and outside of the normal channels of The Open Group. We talked to different types of architects, such as information architects, solution architects, engineers, and initially settled on the problem that is essential to The Open Group -- and that is the problem of boundaryless information flow.

It can be difficult to achieve boundaryless information flow to enable information to travel digitally, securely and quickly. 

We need to get beyond the silos that Oliver mentioned and that Gail alluded to. As I mentioned in my opening comments, this is a huge industry, and Gail illustrated it by naming some of the stakeholders within the health, healthcare and wellness enterprises. If you think of your hospital, it can be difficult to achieve boundaryless information flow to enable your information to travel digitally, securely, quickly, and in a way that’s valid, reliable and understandable by those who send it and by those who receive it.  But if that is possible, it’s all to the betterment of the patient.

Initially, in our focus on what healthcare folks call interoperability -- what we refer to as boundaryless information flow -- we came to realize through discussions with stakeholders in the public sector, as well as the private sector and globally, that understanding how the different pieces are linked together is critical. Anybody who works in an organization or belongs to a church, school or family understands that sometimes getting the right message communicated from point A to point B can be difficult.

To address that issue, the HCF members have decided to create a Health Enterprise Reference Architecture (HERA) that is essentially a framework and a map at the highest level. It helps people see that what they do relates to what others do, regardless of their position in their company. You want to deliver value to those people, to help them understand how their work is interconnected, and how IT can help them achieve their goals.

Gardner: Oliver, who should be aware of and explore engaging with the HCF?

Kipf: The members of The Open Group themselves, many of them are players in the field of healthcare, and so they are the natural candidates to really engage with. In that healthcare ecosystem we have providers, payers, governing bodies, pharmaceuticals, and IT companies.

Those who deeply need planning, management and architecting -- to make big thinking a reality out there -- those decision-makers are the prime candidates for engagement in the Healthcare Forum. They can benefit from the kinds of products we produce, the reference architecture, and the white papers that we offer. In a nutshell, it’s the members, and it’s the healthcare industry, and the healthcare ecosystem that we are targeting.

Gardner: Gail, perhaps you could address the reference architecture initiative? Why do you see that as important? Who do you think should be aware of it and contribute to it?

Shared reference points

Kalbfleisch: Reference architecture is one of those building block pieces that should be used. You can call it a template. You can have words that other people can relate to, maybe easier than the architecture-speak.

If you take that template, you can make it available to other people so that we can all be designing our processes and systems with a common understanding of our information exchange -- so that it crosses boundaries easily and securely. If we are all running on the same template, that’s going to enable us to identify how to start, what has to be included, and what standards we are going to use.

A reference architecture is one of those very important pieces that not only forms a list of how we want to do things, and what we agreed to, but it also makes it so that every organization doesn’t have to start from scratch. It can be reused and improved upon as we go through the work. If someone improves the architecture, that can come back into the reference architecture.

Who should know about it? Decision makers, developers, medical device innovators, people who are looking to improve the way information flows within any health sector.

Who should know about it? Decision makers, developers, medical device innovators, people who are looking to improve the way information flows within any health sector -- whether it’s Oliver in Europe, whether it’s someone over in California, Australia, it really doesn't matter. Anyone who wants to make interoperability better should know about it.

My focus is on decision-makers, policymakers, process developers, and other people who look at it from a device-design perspective. One of the things that has been discussed within the HCF’s reference architecture work is the need to make sure that it’s all at a high-enough level, where we can agree on what it looks like. Yet it also must go down deeply enough so that people can apply it to what they are doing -- whether it’s designing a piece of software or designing a medical device.

Gardner: Jason, The Open Group has been involved with standards and reference architectures for decades, with such recent initiatives as the IT4IT approach, as well as the longstanding TOGAF reference architecture. How does the HERA relate to some of these other architectural initiatives?

Building on a strong foundation

Lee: The HERA starts by using the essential components and insights that are built into the TOGAF ArchitecturalDevelopment Model (ADM) and builds from there. It also uses the ArchiMate language, but we have never felt restricted to using only those existing Open Group models that have been around for some time and are currently being developed further.

We are a big organization in terms of our approach, our forum, and so we want to draw from the best there is in order to fill in the gaps. Over the last few decades, an incredible amount of talent has joined The Open Group to develop architectural models and standards that apply across multiple industries, including healthcare. We reuse and build from this important work.

In addition, as we have dug deeper into the healthcare industry, we have found other issues – gaps -- that need filling. There are related topics that would benefit. To do that, we have been working hard to establish relationships with other organizations in the healthcare space, to bring them in, and to collaborate. We have done this with the Health Level Seven Organization (HL7), which is one of the best-known standards organizations in the world.

We are also doing this now with an organization called Healthcare Services Platform Consortium (HSPC), which involves academic, government and hospital organizations, as well as people who are focused on developing standards around terminology.

IT’s getting better all the time

Kipf: If you think about reference architecture in a specific domain, such as in the healthcare industry, you look at your customers and the enterprises -- those really concerned with the delivery of health services. You need to ask yourself the question: What are their needs?

And the need in this industry is a focus on the person and on the service. It’s also highly regulatory, so being compliant is a big thing. Quality is a big thing. The idea of lifetime evolution -- that you become better and better all the time -- that is very important, very intrinsic to the healthcare industry.

When we are looking into the customers out there that we believe that the HERA could be of value, it’s the small- to mid-sized and the large enterprises that you have to think of, and it’s really across the globe. That’s why we believe that the HERA is something that is tuned into the needs of our industry.

And as Jason mentioned, we build on open standards and we leverage them where we can. ArchiMate is one of the big ones -- not only the business language, but also a lot of the concepts are based on ArchiMate. But we need to include other standards as well, obviously those from the healthcare industry, and we need to deviate from specific standards where this is of value to our industry.

Gardner: Oliver, in order to get this standard to be something that's used, that’s very practical, people look to results. So if you were to take advantage of such reference architectures as HERA, what should you expect to get back? If you do it right, what are the payoffs?

Capacity for change and collaboration

Kipf: It should enable you to do a better job, to become more efficient, and to make better use of technology. Those are the kinds of benefits that you see realized. It’s not only that you have a place where you can model all the elements of your enterprise, where you can put and manage your processes and your services, but it’s also in the way you are architecting your enterprise.

The HERA gives you the tools to get where you want to be, to define where you want to be -- and also how to get there.

It gives you the ability to change. From a transformation management perspective, we know that many healthcare systems have great challenges and there is this need to change. The HERA gives you the tools to get where you want to be, to define where you want to be -- and also how to get there. This is where we believe it provides a lot of benefits.

Gardner: Gail, similar question, for those organizations, both public and private sector, that do this well, that embrace HERA, what should they hope to get in return?

Kalbfleisch: I completely agree with what Oliver said. To add, one of the benefits that you get from using EA is a chance to have a perspective from outside your own narrow silos. The HERA should be able to help a person see other areas that they have to take into consideration, that maybe they wouldn’t have before.

Another value is to engage with other people who are doing similar work, who may have either learned lessons, or are doing similar things at the same time. So that's one of the ways I see the effectiveness and of doing our jobs better, quicker, and faster.

Also, it can help us identify where we have gaps and where we need to focus our efforts. We can focus our limited resources in much better ways on specific issues -- where we can accomplish what we are looking to -- and to gain that boundaryless information flow.

Reaching your goals

We show them how they can follow a roadmap to accomplish their self-defined goals more effectively.

Lee: Essentially, the HERA will provide a framework that enables companies to leverage IT to achieve their goals. The wonderful thing about it is that we are not telling organizations what their goals should be. We show them how they can follow a roadmap to accomplish their self-defined goals more effectively. Often this involves communicating the big picture, as Gail said, to those who are in siloed positions within their organizations.

There is an old saying: “What you see depends on where you sit.” The HERA helps stakeholders gain this perspective by helping key players understand the relationships, for example, between business processes and engineering. So whether a stakeholder’s interest is increasing patient satisfaction, reducing error, improving quality, and having better patient outcomes and gaining more reimbursement where reimbursement is tied to outcomes -- using the product and the architecture that we are developing helps all of these goals.

Gardner: Jason, for those who are intrigued by what you are doing with HERA, tell us about its trajectory, its evolution, and how that journey unfolds. Who can they learn more or get involved?

Lee: We have only been working on the HERA per se for the last year, although its underpinnings go back 20 years or more. Its trajectory is not to a single point, but to an evolutionary process. We will be producing products, white papers, as well as products that others can use in a modular fashion to leverage what they already use within their legacy systems.

We encourage anyone out there, particularly in the health system delivery space, to join us. That can be done by contacting me at j.lee@opengroup.org and at www.opengroup.org/healthcare.

It’s an incredible time, a very opportune time, for key players to be involved because we are making very important decisions that lay the foundation for the HERA. We collaborate with key players, and we lay down the tracks from which we will build increasing levels of complexity.

But we start at the top, using non-architectural language to be able to talk to decision-makers, whether they are in the public sector or private sector. So we invite any of these organizations to join us.

Learn from others’ mistakes

Kalbfleisch: My first foray into working with The Open Group was long before I was in the health IT sector. I was with the US Air Force and we were doing very non-health architectural work in conjunction with The Open Group.

The interesting part to me is in ensuring boundaryless information flow in a manner that is consistent with the information flowing where it needs to go and who has access to it. How does it get from place to place across distinct mission areas, or distinct business areas where the information is not used the same way or stored in the same way? Such dissonance between those business areas is not a problem that is isolated just to healthcare; it’s across all business areas.

We don't have to make the same mistakes. We can take what people have learned and extend it much further.

That was exciting. I was able to take awareness of The Open Group from a previous life, so to speak, and engage with them to get involved in the Healthcare Forum from my current position.

A lot of the technical problems that we have in exchanging information, regardless of what industry you are in, have been addressed by other people, and have already been worked on. By leveraging the way organizations have already worked on it for 20 years, we can leverage that work within the healthcare industry. We don't have to make the same mistakes that were made before. We can take what people have learned and extend it much further. We can do that best by working together in areas like The Open Group HCF.

Kipf: On that evolutionary approach, I also see this as a long-term journey. Yes, there will be releases when we have a specification, and there will guidelines. But it's important that this is an engagement, and we have ongoing collaboration with customers in the future, even after it is released. The coming together of a team is what really makes a great reference architecture, a team that places the architecture at a high level.

We can also develop distinct flavors of the specification. We should expect much more detail. Those implementation architectures then become spin-offs of reference architectures such as the HERA.

Lee: I can give some concrete examples, to bookend the kinds of problems that can be addressed using the HERA. At the micro end, a hospital can use the HERA structure to implement a patient check-in to the hospital for patients who would like to bypass the usual process and check themselves in. This has a number of positive value outcomes for the hospital in terms of staffing and in terms of patient satisfaction and cost savings.

At the other extreme, a large hospital system in Philadelphia or Stuttgart or Oslo or in India finds itself with patients appearing at the emergency room or in the ambulatory settings unaffiliated with that particular hospital. Rather than have that patient come as a blank sheet of paper, and redo all the tests that had been done prior, the HERA will help these healthcare organizations figure out how to exchange data in a meaningful way. So the information can flow digitally, securely, and it means the same thing to those who get it as much as it does to those who receive it, and everything is patient-focused, patient-centric.

Gardner: Oliver, we have seen with other Open Group standards and reference architectures, a certification process often comes to bear that helps people be recognized for being adept and properly trained. Do you expect to have a certification process with HERA at some point?

Certifiable enterprise expertise

Kipf: Yes, the more we mature with the HERA, along with the defined guidelines and the specifications and the HERA model, the more there will be a need and demand for health enterprise-focused employees in the marketplace. They can show how consulting services can then use HERA.

And that's a perfect place when you think of certification. It helps make sure that the quality of the workforce is strong, whether it's internal or in the form of a professional services role. They can comply with the HERA.

Gardner: Clearly, this has applicability to healthcare payer organizations, provider organizations, government agencies, and the vendors who supply pharmaceuticals or medical instruments. There are a great deal of process benefits when done properly, so that enterprise architects could become certified eventually.

My question then is how do we take the HERA, with such a potential for being beneficial across the board, and make it well-known? Jason, how do we get the word out? How can people who are listening to this or reading this, help with that?

Spread the word, around the world

Lee: It's a question that has to be considered every time we meet. I think the answer is straightforward. First, we build a product [the HERA] that has clear value for stakeholders in the healthcare system. That’s the internal part.

Second—and often, simultaneously—we develop a very important marketing/collaboration/socialization capability. That’s the external part. I've worked in healthcare for more than 30 years, and whether it's public or private sector decision-making, there are many stakeholders, and everybody's focused on the same few things: improving value, enhancing quality, expanding access, and providing security.

All companies must plan, build, operate and improve.

We will continue developing relationships with key players to ensure them that what they’re doing is key to the HERA. At the broadest level, all companies must plan, build, operate and improve.

There are immense opportunities for business development. There are innumerable ways to use the HERA to help health enterprise systems operate efficiently and effectively. There are opportunities to demonstrate to key movers and shakers in healthcare system how what we're doing integrates with what they're doing. This will maximize the uptake of the HERA and minimize the chances it sits on a shelf after it's been developed.

Gardner: Oliver, there are also a variety of regional conferences and events around the world. Some of them are from The Open Group. How important is it for people to be aware of these events, maybe by taking part virtually online or in person? Tell us about the face-time opportunities, if you will, of these events, and how that can foster awareness and improvement of HERA uptake.

Kipf: We began with the last Open Group event. I was in Berlin, presenting the HERA. As we see more development, more maturity, we can then show more. The uptake will be there and we also need to include things like cyber security, things like risk compliance. So we can bring in a lot of what we have been doing in various other initiatives within The Open Group. We can show how it can be a fusion, and make this something that is really of value.

I am confident that through face-to-face events, such as The Open Group events, we can further spread the message.

Lee: And a real shout-out to Gail and Oliver who have been critical in making introductions and helping to share The Open Group Healthcare Forum’s work broadly. The most recent example is the 2016 HIMSS conference, a meeting that brings together more than 40,000 people every year. There is a federal interoperability showcase there, and we have been able to introduce and discuss our HERA work there.

We’ve collaborated with the Office of the National Coordinator where the Federal Heath Architecture sits, with the US Veterans Administration, with the US Department of Defense, and with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS). This is all US-centered, but there are lots of opportunities globally to not just spread the word in public for domains and public venues, but also to go to those key players who are moving the industry forward, and in some cases convince them that enterprise architecture does provide that structure, that template that can help them achieve their goals.

Future forecast

Gardner: I’m afraid we are almost out of time. Gail, perhaps a look into the crystal ball. What do you expect and hope to see in the next few years when it comes to improvements initiatives like HERA at The Open Group Forum can provide? What do you hope to see in the next couple of years in terms of improvement?

Kalbfleisch: What I would like to see happen in the next couple of years as it relates to the HERA, is the ability to have a place where we can go from anywhere and get a glimpse of the landscape. Right now, it’s hard to find anywhere where someone in the US can see the great work that Oliver is doing, or the people in Norway, or the people in Australia are doing.

Reference architecture is great to have, but it has no power until it's used. 

It’s really important that we have opportunities to communicate as large groups, but also the one-on-one. Yet when we are not able to communicate personally, I would like to see a resource or a tool where people can go and get the information they need on the HERA on their own time, or as they have a question. Reference architecture is great to have, but it has no power until it’s used.

My hope for the future is for the HERA to be used by decision-makers, developers, and even patients. So when an organizations such as some hospital wants to develop a new electronic health record (EHR) system, they have a place to go and get started, without having to contact Jason or wait for a vendor to come along and tell them how to solve a problem. That would be my hope for the future.

Lee: You can think of the HERA as a soup with three key ingredients. First is the involvement and commitment of very bright people and top-notch organizations. Second, we leverage the deep experience and products of other forums of The Open Group. Third, we build on external relationships. Together, these three things will help make the HERA successful as a certifiable product that people can use to get their work done and do better.

Gardner: Jason, perhaps you could also tee-up the next Open Group event in Amsterdam. Can you tell us more about that and how to get involved?

Lee: We are very excited about our next event in Amsterdam in October. You can go to www.opengroup.org and look under Events, read about the agendas, and sign up there. We will have involvement from experts from the US, UK, Germany, Australia, Norway, and this is just in the Healthcare Forum!

The Open Group membership will be giving papers, having discussions, moving the ball forward. It will be a very productive and fun time and we are looking forward to it. Again, anyone who has a question or is interested in joining the Healthcare Forum can please send me, Jason Lee, an email at j.lee@opengroup.org.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

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Hybrid cloud ecosystem readies for impact from arrival of Microsoft Azure Stack

The next BriefingsDirect cloud deployment strategies interview explores how hybrid cloud ecosystem players such as PwC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are gearing up to support the Microsoft Azure Stack private-public cloud continuum.

We’ll now learn what enterprises can do to make the most of hybrid cloud models and be ready specifically for Microsoft’s solutions for balancing the boundaries between public and private cloud deployments.

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

Here to explore the latest approaches for successful hybrid IT, we’re joined by Rohit “Ro” Antao, a Partner at PwC, and Ken Won, Director of Cloud Solutions Marketing at HPE. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Ro, what are the trends driving adoption of hybrid cloud models, specifically Microsoft Azure Stack? Why are people interested in doing this?

Antao: What we have observed in the last 18 months is that a lot of our clients are now aggressively pushing toward the public cloud. In that journey there are a couple of things that are becoming really loud and clear to them.

Journey to the cloud

Number one is that there will always be some sort of a private data center footprint. There are certain workloads that are not appropriate for the public cloud; there are certain workloads that perform better in the private data center. And so the first acknowledgment is that there is going to be that private, as well as public, side of how they deliver IT services.

Now, that being said, they have to begin building the capabilities and the mechanisms to be able to manage these different environments seamlessly. As they go down this path, that's where we are seeing a lot of traction and focus.

The other trend in conjunction with that is in the public cloud space where we see a lot of traction around Azure. They have come on strong. They have been aggressively going after the public cloud market. Being able to have that seamless environment between private and public with Azure Stack is what’s driving a lot of the demand.

Won

Won: We at HPE are seeing that very similarly, as well. We call that “hybrid IT,” and we talk about how customers need to find the right mix of private and public -- and managed services -- to fit their businesses. They may put some services in a public cloud, some services in a private cloud, and some in a managed cloud. Depending on their company strategy, they need to figure out which workloads go where.

We have these conversations with many of our customers about how do you determine the right placement for these different workloads -- taking into account things like security, performance, compliance, and cost -- and helping them evaluate this hybrid IT environment that they now need to manage.

Gardner: Ro, a lot of what people have used public cloud for is greenfield apps -- beginning in the cloud, developing in the cloud, deploying in the cloud -- but there's also an interest in many enterprises about legacy applications and datasets. Is Azure Stack and hybrid cloud an opportunity for them to rethink where their older apps and data should reside?

Antao: Absolutely. When you look at the broader market, a lot of these businesses are competing today in very dynamic markets. When companies today think about strategy, it's no longer the 5- and 10-year strategy. They are thinking about how to be relevant in the market this year, today, this quarter. That requires a lot of flexibility in their business model; that requires a lot of variability in their cost structure.

Antao

When you look at it from that viewpoint, a lot of our clients look at the public cloud as more than, “Is the app suitable for the public cloud?” They are also seeking certain cost advantages in terms of variability in that cost structure that they can take advantage of. And that’s where we are seeing them look at the public cloud beyond just applications in terms that are suitable for public cloud.

Public and/or private power

Won: We help a lot of companies think about where the best place is for their traditional apps. Often they don’t want to restructure them, they don’t want to rewrite them, because they are already an investment; they don’t want to spend a lot of time refactoring them.

If you look at these traditional applications, a lot of times when they are dealing with data – especially if they are dealing with sensitive data -- those are better placed in a private cloud.

Antao: One of the great things about Microsoft Azure Stack is it gives the data center that public cloud experience -- where developers have the similar experience as they would in a public cloud. The only difference is that you are now controlling the costs as well. So that's another big advantage we see.

Hybrid Cloud Solutions
for Microsoft Azure Stack

Won: Yeah, absolutely, it's giving the developers the experience of a public cloud, but from the IT standpoint of also providing the compliance, the control, and the security of a private cloud. Allowing applications to be deployed in either a public or private cloud -- depending on its requirements -- is incredibly powerful. There's no other environment out there that provides that API-compatibility between private and public cloud deployments like Azure Stack does. 

Gardner: Clearly Microsoft is interested in recognizing that skill sets, platform affinity, and processes are all really important. If they are able to provide a private cloud and public cloud experience that’s common to the IT operators that are used to using Microsoft platforms and frameworks -- that's a boon. It's also important for enterprises to be able to continue with the skills they have.

Ro, is such a commonality of skills and processes not top of mind for many organizations? 

Antao: Absolutely! I think there is always the risk when you have different environments having that “swivel chair” approach. You have a certain set of skills and processes for your private data center. Then you now have a certain set of skills and processes to manage your public cloud footprint.

One of the big problems and challenges that this solves is being able to drive more of that commonality across consistent sets of processes. You can have a similar talent pool, and you have similar kinds of training and awareness that you are trying to drive within the organization -- because you now can have similar stacks on both ends.

Won: That's a great point. We know that the biggest challenge to adopting new concepts

The biggest challenge to adopting new concepts is not the technology; it's really the people and process issues.   

is not the technology; it's really the people and process issues. So if you can address that, which is what Azure Stack does, it makes it so much easier for enterprises to bring on new capabilities, because they are leveraging the experience that they already have using Azure public cloud.

Gardner: Many IT organizations are familiar with Microsoft Azure Stack. It's been in technical preview for quite some time. As it hits the market in September 2017, in seeking that total-solution, people-and-process approach, what is PwC bringing to the table to help organizations get the best value and advantage out of Azure Stack?

Hybrid: a tectonic IT shift

Antao: Ken made the point earlier in this discussion about hybrid IT. When you look at IT pivoting to more of the hybrid delivery mode, it's a tectonic shift in IT's operating model, in their architecture, their culture, in their roles and responsibilities – in the fundamental value proposition of IT to the enterprise.

When we partner with HPE in helping organizations drive through this transformation, we work with HPE in rethinking the operating model, in understanding the new kinds of roles and skills, of being able to apply these changes in the context of the business drivers that are leading it. That's one of the typical ways that we work with HPE in this space.

Won: It's a great complement. HPE understands the technology, understands the infrastructure, combined with the business processes, and then the higher level of thinking and the strategy knowledge that PwC has. It's a great partnership.

Gardner: Attaining hybrid IT efficiency and doing it with security and control is not something you buy off the shelf. It's not a license. It seems to me that an ecosystem is essential. But how do IT organizations manage that ecosystem? Are there ways that you all are working together, HPE in this case with PwC, and with Microsoft to make that consumption of an ecosystem solution much more attainable?

Won: One of the things that we are doing is working with Microsoft on their partnerships so that we can look at all these companies that have their offerings running on Azure public cloud and ensuring that those are all available and supported in Azure Stack, as well as running in the data center.

We are spending a lot of time with Microsoft on their ecosystem to make sure those services, those companies, or those products are available on Azure Stack -- as well fully supported on Azure Stack that’s running on HPE gear.

Gardner: They might not be concerned about the hardware, but they are concerned about the total value -- and the total solution. If the hardware players aren't collaborating well with the service providers and with the cloud providers -- then that's not going to work.

Quick collaboration is key

Won: Exactly! I think of it like a washing machine. No one wants to own a washing machine, but everyone wants clean clothes. So it's the necessary evil, it’s super important, but you just as soon not have to do it.

Gardner: I just don’t know what to take to the dry cleaner or not, right?

Won: Yeah, there you go!

Hybrid Cloud Solutions
for Microsoft Azure Stack

Antao: From a consulting standpoint, clients no longer have the appetite for these five- to six-year transformations. Their businesses are changing at a much faster pace. One of the ways that we are working the ecosystem-level solution -- again much like the deep and longstanding relationship we have had with HPE – is we have also been working with Microsoft in the same context.

And in a three-way fashion, we have focused on being able to define accelerators to deploying these solutions. So codifying a lot of our experiences, the lessons learned, a deep understanding of both the public and the private stack to be able to accelerate value for our customers -- because that’s what they expect today.

Won: One of the things, Ro, that you brought up, and I think is very relevant here, is these three-way relationships. Customers don't want to have to deal with all of these different vendors, these different pieces of stack or different aspects of the value chain. They instead expect us as vendors to be working together. So HPE, PwC, Microsoft are all working together to make it easier for the customers to ultimately deliver the services they need to drive their business.

Low risk, all reward

Gardner: So speed-to-value, super important; common solution cooperation and collaboration synergy among the partners, super important. But another part of this is doing it at low risk, because no one wants to be in a transition from a public to private or a full hybrid spectrum -- and then suffer performance issues, lost data, with end customers not happy.

PwC has been focused on governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) in trying to bring about better end-to-end hybrid IT control. What is it that you bring to this particular problem that is unique? It seems that each enterprise is doing this anew, but you have done it for a lot of others and experience can be very powerful that way.

Antao: Absolutely! The move to hybrid IT is a fundamental shift in governance models, in how you address certain risks, the emergence of new risks, and new security challenges. A lot of what we have been doing in this space has been in helping that IT organizations accelerate that shift -- that paradigm shift -- that they have to make.

In that context, we have been working very closely with HPE to understand what the requirements of that new world are going to look like. We can build and bring to the table solutions that support those needs.

Won: It’s absolutely critical -- this experience that PwC has is huge. We always come up with new technologies; every few years you have something new. But it’s that experience that PwC has to bring to the table that's incredibly helpful to our customer base.

There’s this whole journey getting to that hybrid IT state and having the governing mechanisms around it. 

Antao: So often when we think of governance, it’s more in terms of the steady state and the runtime. But there's this whole journey between getting from where we today to that hybrid IT state -- and having the governing mechanisms around it -- so that they can do it in a way that doesn't expose their business to too much risk. There is always risk involved in these large-scale transformations, but how do you manage and govern that process through getting to that hybrid IT state? That’s where we also spend a lot of time as we help clients through this transformation.

Gardner: For IT shops that are heavily Microsoft-focused, is there a way for them to master Azure Stack, the people, process and technology that will then be an accelerant for them to go to a broader hybrid IT capability? I’m thinking of multi-cloud, and even being able to develop with DevOps and SecOps across a multiple cloud continuum as a core competency.

Is Azure Stack for many companies a stepping-stone to a wider hybrid capability, Ro?

Managed multi-cloud continuum

Antao: Yes. And I think in many cases that’s inevitable. When you look at most organizations today, generally speaking, they have at least two public cloud providers that they use. They consume several Software as a service (SaaS) applications. They have multiple data center locations.  The role of IT now is to become the broker and integrator of multi-cloud environments, among and between on-premise and in the public cloud. That's where we see a lot of them evolve their management practices, their processes, the talent -- to be able to abstract these different pools and focus on the business. That's where we see a lot of the talent development.

Hybrid Cloud Solutions
for Microsoft Azure Stack

Won: We see that as well at HPE as this whole multi-cloud strategy is being implemented. More and more, the challenge that organizations are having is that they have these multiple clouds, each of which is managed by a different team or via different technologies with different processes.

So as a way to bring these together, there is huge value to the customer, by bringing together, for example, Azure Stack and Azure [public cloud] together. They may have multiple Azure Stack environments, perhaps in different data centers, in different countries, in different locales. We need to help them align their processes to run much more efficiently and more effectively. We need to engage with them not only from an IT standpoint, but also from the developer standpoint. They can use those common services to develop that application and deploy it in multiple places in the same way.

Antao: What's making this whole environment even more complex these days is that a couple of years ago, when we talked about multi-cloud, it was really the capability to either deploy in one public cloud versus another.

Within a given business workflow, how do you leverage different clouds, given their unique strengths and weaknesses?

Few years later, it evolved into being able to port workloads seamlessly from one cloud to another. Today, as we look at the multi-cloud strategy that a lot of our clients are exploring this: Within a given business workflow, depending on the unique characteristics of different parts of that business process, how do you leverage different clouds given their unique strengths and weaknesses?

There might be portions of a business process that, to your point earlier, Ken, are highly confidential. You are dealing with a lot of compliance requirements. You may want to consume from an internal private cloud. There are other parts of it that you are looking for, such as immense scale, to deal with the peaks when that particular business process gets impacted. How do you go back to where the public cloud has a history with that? In a third case, it might be enterprise-grades workloads.

So that’s where we are seeing multi-cloud evolve, into where in one business process could have multiple sources, and so how does an IT organization manage that in a seamless way?

Gardner: It certainly seems inevitable that the choice of such a cloud continuum configuration model will vary and change. It could be one definition in one country or region, another definition in another country and region. It could even be contextual, such as by the type of end user who's banging on the app. As the Internet of Things (IoT) kicks in, we might be thinking about not just individuals, but machine-to-machine (M2M), app-to-app types of interactions.

So quite a bit of complexity, but dealt with in such a way that the payoff could be monumental. If you do hybrid cloud and hybrid IT well, what could that mean for your business in three to five years, Ro?

Nimble, quick and cost-efficient

Antao: Clearly there is the agility aspect, of being able to seamlessly leverage these different clouds to allow IT organizations to be much more nimble in how they respond to the business.

From a cost standpoint, and this is actually a great example we had for a large-scale migration that we are currently doing to the public cloud. What the IT organization found was they consumed close to 70 percent of their migration budget for only 30 percent of the progress that they made.

And a larger part of that was because the minute you have your workloads sitting on a public cloud -- whether it is a development workload or you are still working your way through it, but technically it’s not yet providing value -- the clock is ticking. Being able to allow for a hybrid environment, where you a do a lot of that development, get it ready -- almost production-ready -- and then when the time is right to drive value from that application -- that’s when you move to a public cloud. Those are huge cost savings right there.

Clients that have managed to balance those two paradigms are the ones who are also seeing a lot of economic efficiencies.

Won: The most important thing that people see value in is that agility. The ability to respond much faster to competitive actions or to new changes in the market, the ability to bring applications out faster, to be able to update applications in months -- or sometimes even weeks -- rather than the two years that it used to take.

It's that agility to allow people to move faster and to shift their capabilities so much quicker than they have ever been able to do – that is the top reason why we're seeing people moving to this hybrid model. The cost factor is also really critical as they look at whether they are doing CAPEX or OPEX and private cloud or public cloud.

One of the things that we have been doing at HPE through our Flexible Capacity program is that we enable our customers who were getting hardware to run these private clouds to actually pay for it on a pay-as-you-go basis. This allows them to better align their usage -- the cost to their usage. So taking that whole concept of pay-as-you-go that we see in the public cloud and bringing that into a private cloud environment.

Hybrid Cloud Solutions
for Microsoft Azure Stack

Antao: That’s a great point. From a cost standpoint, there is an efficiency discussion. But we are also seeing in today's world that we are depending on edge computing a lot more. I was talking to the CIO of a large park the other day, and his comment to me was, yes, they would love to use the public cloud but they cannot afford for any kind of latency or disruption of services because that means he’s got thousands of visitors and guests in his park, because of the amount of dependency on technology he can afford that kind of latency.

And so part of it is also the revenue impact discussion, and using public cloud in a way that allows you to manage some of those risks in terms of that analytical power and that computing power you need closer to the edge -- closer to your internal systems.

Gardner: Microsoft Azure Stack is reinforcing the power and capability of hybrid cloud models, but Azure Stack is not going to be the same for each individual enterprise. How they differentiate, how they use and take advantage of a hybrid continuum will give them competitive advantages and give them a one-up in terms of skills.

It seems to me that the continuum of Azure Stack, of a hybrid cloud, is super-important. But how your organization specifically takes advantage of that is going to be the key differentiator. And that's where an ecosystem solutions approach can be a huge benefit.

Let's look at what comes next. What might we be talking about a year from now when we think about Microsoft Azure Stack in the market and the impact of hybrid cloud on businesses, Ken?

Look at clouds from both sides now

You will see that as a break in the boundary of private cloud versus public cloud, so think of it as a continuum. 

Won: You will see organizations shifting from a world of using multiple clouds and having different applications or services on clouds to having an environment where services are based on multiple clouds. With the new cloud-native applications you'll be running different aspects of those services in different locations based on what are the requirements of that particular microservice. 

So a service may be partially running in Azure, part of it may be running in Azure Stack. You will certainly see that as a kind of break in the boundary of private cloud versus public cloud, and so think of it as a continuum, if you will, of different environments able to support whatever applications they need.

Gardner: Ro, as people get more into the weeds with hybrid cloud, maybe using Azure Stack, how will the market adjust?

Antao: I completely agree with Ken in terms of how organizations are going to evolve their architecture. At PwC we have this term called the Configurable Enterprise, which essentially focuses on how the IT organization consumes services from all of these different sources to be able to ultimately solve business problems.

To that point, where we see the market trends is in the hybrid IT space, the adoption of that continuum. One of the big pressures IT organizations face is how they are going to evolve their operating model to be successful in this new world. CIOs, especially the forward-thinking ones, are starting to ask that question. We are going to see in the next 12 months a lot more pressure in that space.

Gardner: These are, after all, still early days of hybrid cloud and hybrid IT. Before we sign off, how should organizations that might not yet be deep into this prepare themselves? Are there some operations, culture, and skills? How might you want to be in a good position to take advantage of this when you do take the plunge?

Plan to succeed with IT on board

Won: One of the things we recommend is a workshop where we sit down with the customer and think through their company strategy. What is their IT strategy? How does that relate or map to the infrastructure that they need in order to be successful?

This makes the connection between the value they want to offer as a company, as a business, to the infrastructure. It puts a plan in place so that they can see that direct linkage. That workshop is one of the things that we help a lot of customers with.

We also have innovation centers that we've built with Microsoft where customers can come in and experience Azure Stack firsthand. They can see the latest versions of Azure Stack, they can see the hardware, and they can meet with experts. We bring in partners such as PwC to have a conversation in these innovation centers with experts.

Gardner: Ro, how to get ready when you want to take the plunge and make the best and most of it?

Hybrid Cloud Solutions
for Microsoft Azure Stack

Antao: We are at a stage right now where these transformations can no longer be done to the IT organization; the IT organization has to come along on this journey. What we have seen is, especially in the early stages, the running of pilot projects, of being able to involve the developers, the infrastructure architects, and the operations folks in pilot workloads, and learn how to manage it going forward in this new model.

You want to create that from a top-down perspective, being able to tie in to where this adds the most value to the business. From a grassroots effort, you need to also create champions within the trenches that are going to be able to manage this new environment. Combining those two efforts has been very successful for organizations as they embark on this journey.

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