Showing posts with label SaaS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SaaS. Show all posts

Monday, February 23, 2015

How Tunisian IT Service Provider Tunisie Builds Improved IT Service Management Capabilities

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how one systems integrator uses ITSM tools to improve the total customer experience.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT innovation and how it's making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance, gain new insights and deliver better user experiences, as well as better overall business results.

This time we're coming to you directly from the recent HP Discover 2014 Conference in Barcelona to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data changes everything -- for IT, for businesses, and governments, as well as for you and me.

Our next innovation use case interview focuses on how a Tunisian IT services provider has improved their IT service management offerings and capabilities. We'll learn more about better IT control and efficiency using the latest ITSM tools and services.
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With that, please join me in welcoming our guest, Fadoua Ouerdiane, IT Projects Director at SMS and Tunisie Electronique in Tunis, Tunisia. Welcome, Fadoua.

Fadoua Ouerdiane: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: Glad to have you with us. First, tell us a little bit about Tunisie Electronique. What is the company about, and what does it do? 

Ouerdiane: Tunisie Electronique is a systems integrator for multiple vendors, including HP, for more than 40 years. We serve customers of different sizes covering almost all possible sectors. 

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about the challenges that you're facing. What problems are you trying to solve for your customers?

Continuous development

Ouerdiane: Support activity is the pillar of our company. We're in a continuous development process to fulfill our customer expectations. As a solution integrator for HP and others, we are the first interface toward our end customers.

Ouerdiane
We're asked to be as reactive as possible to all kind of customer requests: incidents, claims, and services support. The number of such requests is getting higher on a daily basis.

Gardner: There are an awful lot of IT challenges nowadays, no? People are doing more on mobile devices. They're doing more services from the cloud. Things are changing very rapidly. Therefore, they also have higher expectations about speed for solutions. Tell us about what you're putting in place in order to better serve these very complex needs.

Ouerdiane: Knowing how to manage those requests, consolidating, delegating to relevant resources, escalating, following up, and making sure that service-level agreements (SLAs) are respected are all crucial for our support department.
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In the past, we have tried to manage those needs using in-house development tools and then open-source solutions. However, in each case, we were first confronted by different limitations. Finally, we decided to use the Service Anywhere solution from HP in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) mode and install it in a cloud environment.

Gardner: Why has the cloud environment delivery model been so important? What are the benefits for you in going to cloud rather than on-premises?

Ouerdiane: Our motivation to make the choice was that Service Anywhere is not only offering functionality that perfectly matches our needs, but it has more advantages. The first is easy deployment. My team made the solution available in less than one month. No extra infrastructure is needed. That means no administration efforts, especially with high availability. This will help us to reduce costs effectively.
It's bringing a lot of added value for the support team as well as our end customers.

Gardner: Do you have any sense of what this brings? What do you get in return for this in terms of metrics of success and business benefits? How have you been able to measure how well this is performing for you?

Ouerdiane: Today, using HP Service Anywhere, the support department is much better managed. It's bringing a lot of added value for the support team as well as our end customers.

Information is systematically shared with the relevant persons, thanks to the Service Anywhere notification functionality. There's better access using any device, at anytime, from anywhere; better tracking of each incident or support request. The main benefit is the improved customer satisfaction that we felt and experienced.

Customer reaction

Gardner: Have you gotten any feedback? Do you have examples of what people tell you they like about it? How are your customers actually reacting to this new approach?


Ouerdiane: The customer no longer needs to send emails, to make calls, to get updated about the status and progress of its requests. Reports and dashboards are provided on a regular basis. Customer satisfaction is our main target and daily concern. Service Anywhere is bringing us closer.

Gardner: Given that we're here at HP Discover, have you been hearing anything about what might be coming next? What do you think you will be doing in the future to provide even better IT services and support?
Customer satisfaction is our main target and daily concern. Service Anywhere is bringing us closer.

Ouerdiane: The next release will be available soon with very important features, such as a multi-tenant feature, which we need. We'll work on the platform to add more content, to add all our customers’ content and support contacts.

Gardner: Great, I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning about how a Tunisian IT services provider has been using the latest in IT service management tools in the cloud deployment.

I'd like to thank our guest, Fadouda Ouerdiane, IT Projects Director at SMS and Tunisie Electronique. I'd also like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Barcelona.
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We've explored solid evidence from early enterprise adopters how new cloud models and big data change everything, for IT, for business and governments, as well as for you and me. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how one systems integrator uses ITSM tools to improve the total customer experience. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Friday, August 22, 2014

Hybrid Cloud Models Demand More Infrastructure Standardization, Says Global Service Provider Steria

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on planning and preparing for a journey to cloud.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, and business results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the recent HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.

We’re here to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data, mobile, and cloud, along with converged infrastructure are all supporting their goals.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how European IT services provider Steria is exploring cloud standards and the use of cloud across hybrid models. We welcome on this subject Eric Fradet, Industrialization Director at Steria in Paris. Welcome, Eric.

Eric Fradet: Thank you, I’m glad to be here.

Gardner: For those of our audience who may not be overly aware of Steria, tell us a little bit about what you do, where you do it, and how your business is going?

Fradet: Steria is a 40-year-old service provider company, mainly based in Europe, with a huge location in India and also Singapore. We provide all types of services related to IT, starting from infrastructure management to application management. We help to develop and deploy new IT services for all our customers.

Gardner: There’s a lot of interest these days in trying to decide to what degree you should have a cloud infrastructure implementation on-premises, with some sort of a hosting provider, or perhaps going fully to a service-delivery model vis-à-vis a software-as-a-service (SaaS) or cloud providers. How are your activities at Steria helping you better deliver this choice to your customers?

Fradet: That change may be quicker than expected. So, we must be in a position to manage the services wherever they’re from. The old model of saying that we’re an outsourcer or on-premises service provider is dead. Today, we’re in a hybrid world and we must manage that type of world. That must be done in collaboration with partners, and we share the same target, the same ambition, and the same vision.

Gardner: We’re also seeing quite a bit of discussion about which platforms, which standards, and which type of cloud infrastructure model to follow. For your customers or prospects, how do you go to them now, when we’re still in a period of indecision? What are your recommendations? What do you think should happen in terms of the standardization of a cloud model?

Benefit, not a pain

Fradet: Roughly, I assume at first that the cloud must not be seen as disruptive by our customers. Cloud is here to accompany your transformation. It must be a benefit for them, and not a pain.

Fradet
A private solution should be the best as a starting point for some customers. The full public solution should be a target. We’re here to manage their journey and to define with the customer what is the best solution for the best need.

Gardner: And in order for that transition from private to public or multiple public or sourced-infrastructure support, a degree of standardization is required. Otherwise, it's not possible. Do you have a preferred approach to standardization? Are you working closely with HP? How do you think you will allow for a smooth transition across a hybrid spectrum?

Fradet: The choice of HP as a partner was based on two main criteria. First of all, the quality of the solution, obviously, but there are multiple good solutions on the market. The second one is the capacity with HP to have a smooth transition, and that means getting to the industrialization benefits and the economic benefits while also being open and interconnected with existing IT systems.

That's why the future model is quite simple. Our work is to know we have on-premises and physical remaining infrastructure. We will have some private-cloud solutions and multiple public clouds, as you mentioned. The challenge is to have the right level of governance, and to be in a position to move the workload and adjust the workloads with the needs.
We continue to invest deeply in ITSM because ITSM is service management.

Gardner: Of course, once you've been able to implement across a spectrum of hosting possibilities, then there is the task of managing that over time, not just putting it there, but being able to govern and have control. Is there anything about the HP portfolio, or what you’re doing in particular, that you think is important, as we try to move beyond strictly implementation, but into going operations?

Fradet: With HP, we have a layer approach which is quite simple. First of all, if you want to manage, you must control, as you mentioned. We continue to invest deeply in IT Service Management (ITSM) because ITSM is service governance. In addition, we have some more innovative solutions based on the last version of  Cloud Services Automation (CSA). Control, automate, and report remain as key whatever the cloud or non-cloud infrastructure.

Gardner: Of course, another big topic these days is big data. I would think that a part of the management capability would be the ability to track all the data from all the systems, regardless of where they’re physically hosted. Do you have a preference or have you embarked on a big-data platform that would allow you to manage and monitor IT systems regardless of the volume, and the location?

Fradet: Yes, we have some very interesting initiatives with HP around HAVEn, which is obviously one of the most mature big-data platforms. The challenge for us is to transform a technologically wonderful solution into a business solution. We’re working with our business units to define use-cases that are totally tailored and adjusted for the business, but big data is one of our big challenges.

Traditional approach

Gardner: Have you been using a more traditional data-warehouse approach, or are you not yet architecting the capability? Are you still in a proof-of-concept stage?

Fradet: Unfortunately, we have hundreds of data-warehouse solutions, which are customer-dedicated, starting from very old-fashioned level to operational key performance indicators (KPI) to advanced business intelligence (BI).

The challenge now is really to design for what will be top requirements for the data warehouse, and you know that there is a mix of needs in terms of data warehouses. Some are pure operational KPIs, some are analytics, and some are really big data needs. To design the right solution for the customer remains a challenge. But, we’re very confident that with HAVEn, sometime in 2014, we will have the right solution for those issues.

Gardner: Lastly, Eric, the movement toward cloud models for a lot of organizations is still in the planning stages. They are mindful of the vision, but they have also IT  housecleaning to do internally. Do you have any suggestions as to how to properly modernize, or move toward a certain architecture that would then give them a better approach to cloud and set them up for less risk and less disruption? What are some observations that you have had for how to prepare for moving toward a cloud model?
Cloud can offer many combinations or many benefits, but you have to define as a first step your preferred benefits.

Fradet: As with any transformation program, the cloud’s eligibility program remains key. That means we have to define the policy with the customer. What is their expectation -- time to market, cost saving, to be more efficient in terms of management?

Cloud can offer many combinations or many benefits, but you have to define as a first step your preferred benefits. Then, when the methodology is clearly defined, the journey to the cloud is not very different than from any other program. It must not be seen as disruptive, keeping in mind that you do it for benefits and not only for technical reasons or whatever.

So don't jump to the cloud without having strong resources below the cloud.

Gardner: Please join me in thanking our guest. We've been discussing transition to cloud with Eric Fradet, Industrialization Director at Steria in Paris. Steria is a large and leading European IT services provider. Thank you.

Fradet: Thank you.

Gardner: And also thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect on planning and preparing for a journey to the cloud. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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Monday, November 04, 2013

Press Ganey and Planview Tell Different Stories to Cloud and SaaS-Enablement -- Yet Gain Same Huge Benefits

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how two companies are enhancing their services and transforming their businesses using VMware cloud-computing infrastructure and a unified approach to cloud-infrastructure management.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the 2013 VMworld Conference in San Francisco. We're here to explore the latest in cloud-computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Gardner
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout the series of VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Our next innovator panel interview focuses on how two companies are using aggressive cloud-computing strategies to deliver applications to their end users. We'll hear how healthcare patient-experience improvement provider Press Ganey and project and portfolio management provider Planview are both exploiting cloud efficiencies and agility.

To understand how, please join me now in welcoming our guests, Greg Ericson, Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Press Ganey Associates in South Bend, Indiana, and Patrick Tickle, Executive Vice President of Products at Planview Inc. in Austin, Texas. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We're hearing a lot about cloud computing here at VMworld, and you're going at it a little differently, thinking about making the best use of infrastructure and services on-premises, off-premises and hybrid. Let's start with you, Greg. Tell us a bit about the type of cloud approach you’re taking, and then we’ll want to learn a little bit more about your businesses as well.

Greg Ericson: We started this journey in July of 2012 and we set out to achieve multiple goals. Number one, we wanted to position Press Ganey's software as solution products of the next generation and have a platform that was able to support them.

Ericson
We went through a journey of consolidating multiple data centers. We consolidated 14 different storage arrays in our process and, most importantly, we were able to position our analytic solutions to be able to take on exponentially more data and provide that to our clients.

Gardner: Tell us a little about your company, what you do, and how people benefit from these applications.

Patient experience

Ericson: Press Ganey is the leader in a patient-experience analytics. We focus on providing deep insight into the patient experience in healthcare settings. We have more than 10,000 customers within the healthcare environment that look to us and partner with us around patient-experience improvement within the healthcare setting.

Gardner: Patrick, how has cloud helped you at Planview? You were, at one time, a fully a non-cloud organization. Tell us about your journey.

Patrick Tickle: I'll answer a little bit about the company, because it sets the context for what we're doing. Planview has been an enterprise software vendor, a classic best-of-breed focused enterprise software vendor, in this project and portfolio and resource management space for over 20 years.

Tickle
We have a big global customer base of on-premise customers that built up over the last 23 years. Obviously, in the world of software these days, there's a fairly seismic big shift about being in software as a service (SaaS) and how you get to the cloud, the business models, and all those kinds of things.

Conventional wisdom is for a lot it was that you can't get there unless you start from scratch. Obviously, because this is the only thing we do, it was pretty imperative that we figure out a way to get there.

So two or three years ago, we started trying to make the transition. There were a lot of things we had to go through, not just from an infrastructure standpoint, but from a business model and delivery standpoint, etc.

The essence was here. We didn’t have time to rewrite a code base in which we've invested 10-plus years and hundreds of thousands of hours of customer experience to be a market-leading product in our space. It could take five years to rewrite it. Compared to where we were 10 years ago, when you and I first met, there are a lot more tools in the bag for people to get to the cloud that there were then.

So we really went after VMware and did the research sweep much more aggressively. We started out with our own kind of infrastructure that we bolted together and moved to a FlexPod in our second generation.

We have vCloud Hybrid Services now, and leveraging our existing code base, and then the whole suite of VMware products and services, we have transformed the company into a cloud provider. Today, 90 percent of all our new Planview customers are SaaS customers.

It's been a big transition for us, but the technology from VMware has been right in the center of making it happen.

Business challenges

Gardner: Greg, tell us a little bit about some of the business challenges that are driving your IT requirements that, in turn, make the cloud model attractive. Is this a growth issue? Is this a complexity issue? What are your business imperatives that make your IT requirements?

Ericson: That’s a great question. Press Ganey is a 25-year-old organization. We pioneered the concept of patient experience and the analytics, and insight into the patient experience, within the healthcare setting. We have an organization that's steeped in history, and so there are multiple things that we're looking at.

Number one, we have one of the largest protected health information (PHI) databases in the United States. So we felt that we had to have a very secure and robust solution to provide to our clients, because they trust us with their data.

Number two, with the healthcare reform, the focus on patient experience is somewhat mandatory, whereas before, it was somewhat voluntary. Now, it's regulated or it's part of the healthcare reform. When you look at organizations, some were actually coming to us and saying, "We want to get however many patient surveys out that we need to satisfy our threshold."
Our scientists are also finding a correlation between the patient experience results and clinical and quality outcomes.

Our philosophy is why would you want to do that? We believe that if you can understand and leverage the different media to be able to fill that out, you can survey your entire population of patients that are coming into not only your institution but, in the accountable care organization, the entire ecosystem that you’re serving. That gives you tremendous insight into what's going on with those patients.

Our scientists are also finding a correlation between the patient experience results and clinical and quality outcomes. So, as we can tie those data sets together in those episodic events, we're finding very interesting kinds of new thought, leading thought, out there for our clients to look at.

So for us, going from minimally surveying your population to doing census survey, which is your entire population, represents an exponential growth. The last thing is that, for our future, in terms of going after some of those new analytics, some of the new insight that we want to provide our clients, we want to position the technology to be able to take us there.

We believe that the VMware vCloud Suite represents a completeness of vision. It represents a complete a single pane of glass into managing the enterprise and, longer-term, as we become more sophisticated in identifying our data and as the industry matures, we think that a public cloud, a hybrid cloud, is in the future for us, and we're preparing for that.

Gardner: And this must be a challenge for you, not only in terms of supporting the applications, but also those data sets. You're getting some larger data sets and they could be distributed. So the cloud model suits your data needs over time as well?

Deeper insights

Ericson: Absolutely. It gives us the opportunity to be able to apply technology in the most cost-value proposition for the solutions that we’re serving up for our customers.

Our current environment is around 600 server instances. We have about 300 terabytes (TB) running in 20 SaaS applications, and we're growing exponentially each month, as we continue to provide that deeper insight for our customers.

Gardner: Patrick, for your organization what are some of the business drivers that then translate into IT requirements?

Tickle: As I talked about, obviously the macro trend of SaaS was just a tectonic shift in software. So it was not just an issue of how Planview would evolve as a company in that space, but certainly as someone who has always viewed themselves as market leader, we want to make sure we're as relevant as we possibly can be. More and more customers and prospects were starting to either demand, or at least want to look at, SaaS as an option in our space.

So it was really important, at the end of the day, for us to be able to address the largest addressable market for our solution. If we weren’t going to have a SaaS option, we were going to take big piece of the market off the table.
We had to move from an IT culture to an OPs culture and all the things that go along with that, performance and up time.

That was probably the biggest driver. From an IT perspective, it changed the culture of the company, moving from being a on-premise perpetual kind of "ship the software and have a customer care organization that focuses on bug and break-fix" to a service-delivery model. There were a lot of things that rippled through that whole thing.

At the end of the day, we had to move from an IT culture to an operations culture and all the things that go along with that, performance and up-time. Our customer base is global. So it was being able to provide that around the globe is. All those things were pretty significant shifts from an IT perspective.

We went from a company that had a corporate IT group to a company that has a hosting and DevOps and Ops team that has a little bit of spend in corporate IT.

Gardner: Because your resource management and planning activities span many vertical industries, a large geographic area of many users, how have you made the transition to SaaS in terms of deployment? You have a single data center. You do colo. Do you have any plans for hybrid? How does it translate into the best, most efficient way to support all those users?

Tickle: Out of the gate, the first step at Planview was moving to colo. SunGard has been a great partner for us over the last couple of years as our ping, power, and pipe. Then, in our first generation, as I may have said before, we bolted together some of our storage and computer infrastructure because it wasn’t quite all the way there. Then, in our most recent incarnation of the infrastructure we’re using FlexPods at SunGard in Austin, Texas and London.

OPEX spend

We're always having to evaluate future footprints. But ultimately, like many companies, we would like to convert that infrastructure investment from a capital spend into an OPEX spend. And that’s what’s compelling with vCloud Hybrid Service.

What we've been excited about hearing from VMware is not just providing the performance and the scalability, but the compatibility and the economic model that says we’re building this for people who want to just move virtual machines (VMs). We understand how big the opportunity is, and that’s going to open up more of a public cloud opportunity for us to evaluate for a wide variety of use cases going forward.

Gardner: Greg, back to your situation at Press Ganey with cloud. What are some of the pay offs? Are these soft payoffs of productivity and automation or are there hard numbers about return on investment (ROI) or moving more to a operation cost versus capital cost? What do you get when you do cloud right?

Ericson: We justify the investment based on consolidation of our data centers, consolidation and retirement of our storage arrays, and so on. That’s from a hard-savings perspective. From a soft-savings perspective, clearly in an environment that was not virtualized, virtualizing the environment represented a significant cost avoidance.
Our focus is on a complete solution that allows us to really focus in on what's important for us, what's important for our clients.

Longer-term, we're looking at how to position the organization with a robust, virtual secured infrastructure that runs with a minimum amount of technical resources, so that we can focus most of our efforts on delivering innovative applications to our clients.

The biggest opportunity for us is to focus there. As you look at the size of the data set and the growth of those data sets, positioning infrastructure to be able to stay with you is exciting for us and it’s a value proposition for our clients.

Gardner: It’s interesting that you're both saying that you don't want to be too much in the weeds, that you want to focus on your businesses, on your logic and data and find the means to transition IT to a more modern infrastructure.

You've said, Greg, that you like the fact that VMware is giving you options across the board. It's not your bolt-on to someone else's, or you go find someone else to integrate what's more of a complete package. Tell me a little bit about this whole greater than the sum of the parts benefit, Greg.

Ericson: That’s an excellent point, at least from my experience. In fact, most recently, I spent tens of thousands of dollars troubleshooting open-source products, and we've had some kernel issues that caused us a significant amount of pain.

So for us, the level of resources and the technical cost of the resources to be able to assemble the components does not represent a value-add to our clients. Our focus is on a complete solution that allows us to really focus in on what's important for us, what's important for our clients.

Entire environment

With a minimum amount of staff, we were able to move in nine months and virtualize our entire environment. When you talk about 600 servers and 300 TB of data, that's a pretty sizable enterprise and we're fully leveraging the vCloud Suite.

Our network is virtualized, our storage is virtualized, and our servers are virtualized. The release of vCloud Suite 5.5 and some of the additional network functionality and storage functionality that’s coming out with that is rather exciting. I think it's going to continue to add more value to our proposition.

Gardner: Some people say that a single point of management, when you have that comprehensive suite approach, comes in pretty handy, too.

Ericson: It does, because it gives you the capability of managing through a single pane of glass across your environments. I was going to accentuate that we’re about 50 percent complete in building on our catalog.

For our next steps, number one is that we’re looking at building upon the excellence of Press Ganey and building our next-generation enterprise data warehouse. We’re looking at leveraging from a DevOps perspective the VMware vCloud Suite, and we already have some pilots that are up and running. We'll continue to build that out.
Not only are we maximizing our assets in delivering a secure environment for our clients, but we're also really working toward what I call engineering to zero.

As we deploy, not only are we maximizing our assets in delivering a secure environment for our clients, but we're also really working toward what I call engineering to zero. We’re completely automating and virtualizing those deployments and we're able to move those deployments, as we go from dev to test, and test to user acceptance testing, and then into a production environment.

Tickle: As we all know, there are lot of hypervisors out there. We can all get that technology from a wide variety of sources. But to your question about the value with the stack, that’s what's we look at and again. What's important now is not just the product stack, but the services stack.

We look at a company like VMware and say, "Site Recovery Manager in conjunction with vCloud Hybrid Services brings a disaster recovery (DR) solution to me as SaaS vendor and that fits with my architecture and brings that service stack plus."

There's no comparing another hypervisor vendor to build out that stack of service. Again, we could probably talk about probably numerous, but that’s when I listen to the things that go on at the event and get to spend time with the people at VMware. That whole value stack that VMware is investing in is what looks so much more compelling than just picking pieces of technology.

Gardner: So we've heard how a data strategy aligns well with the stack. We've heard how software development is moving to more iterations and rapid Agile deployment aligns with the stack. We've heard about how moving toward hybrid cloud models also would align with the stack.

It sounds as if there's a common theme here. Looking to the future, Greg, based on what you've heard here at VMworld about the general availability of vCloud Hybrid Services and the upgrade to the suite of private cloud support, what has you most excited? Was there something that surprised you? What is in the future road map for you?

A step further

Ericson: A couple of different things. The next release of NSX is exciting for us. It allows us to be able to take the virtualization of our network a step further. Also to be able to connect hypervisors into a hybrid-cloud situation is something that, as we evolve our maturity in terms of managing our data, is going to be exciting for us.

One of the areas that we're still teasing out and want to explore is how to tie in that accelerator for a big-data application into that. Probably, in 2014, what we're looking at is how to take this environment and really move from a DR kind of environment to a high-availability environment. I believe that we’re architected for that and because of the virtualization we can do that with a minimum amount of investment.

Gardner: Patrick, you talked about how you like the notion of what I call fungibility of being able to move workloads.
We can't afford to have half of the company’s OPEX go into IT, while we’re trying to make customers as successful as they possibly can.

Tickle: We talked about fungibility a long time ago. That word has been in our vocabulary for many, many years.

Gardner: So you transformed your business, moving from client-server to SaaS. What's interesting to you and your future when you can take these work loads, choose where they're going to be, and get that built in DR and business continuity benefit?

How big a deal is it when we can, with just a click of a mouse, move workloads to any support environment we want?

Tickle: It's a huge deal. Whether it’s a production environment or DR environment, at the end of the day it's a big deal for both of us. For a SaaS company the only matter is renewals. It’s happy customers that renew. That transition from perpetual-plus maintenance to a renewal model, where you're on the customer service watch at another level, and it's every minute of every day.

Everything that we can do to make the customer experience, not just from our UI and our software, but obviously the delivery of the service, as compelling as possible, allows us to run our business. That can be a disaster scenario or just great performance across our geography where we have customers and then to do that in a cost effective way that operates inside our business model, our profit and loss.

So our shareholders are equally pleased with their turn off. We can't afford to have half of the company’s OPEX go into IT, while we’re trying to make customers as successful as they possibly can. We continue to be encouraged that we’re on a great path with the stack that we're seeing to get there.

Gardner: I think it's fair to say that cloud is not just repaving old cow paths, that cloud is really transforming your entire business. Do you agree, Greg?

Rejuvenate legacy

Ericson: I agree. It allows us, especially an organization that’s 25 years steeped in history, to be able to rejuvenate our legacy applications and be able to deliver those with maximum speed, maximizing our resources, and delivering them in a secure environment. But it also allows us to be able to grow, to flex, and to be able to rejuvenate and organically transform the organization. It's pretty exciting for us and it adds a lot of value to our clients indirectly.

Gardner: Well, great, I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been talking about how healthcare patient-experience improvement firm Press Ganey and portfolio and project management provider Planview are enhancing their services and even transforming their businesses vis-à-vis cloud-computing infrastructure and a unified approach to cloud-infrastructure management.

So a big thanks to our guests, Greg Ericsson, Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Press Ganey Associates. Thanks, Greg.

Ericson: Thank you.

Gardner: And also Patrick Tickle, Executive Vice President of Products at Planview. Thanks, Patrick.

Tickle: Absolutely. It's great to be here.

Gardner: And thanks also to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you directly from the recent 2013 VMworld Conference in San Francisco. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of VMware sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how two companies are enhancing their services and transforming their businesses using VMware cloud-computing infrastructure and a unified approach to cloud-infrastructure management. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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Thursday, September 26, 2013

Application Development Efficiencies Drive Agile Payoffs for Healthcare Tech Provider TriZetto

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major healthcare software provider is using HP tools to move from waterfall to agile.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving their services' performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end users alike, and this time we're coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

We’re here the week of June 10 to explore some award-winning case studies from leading enterprises. And we’ll see how a series of innovative solutions and IT transformation approach to better development and test and deployment of applications is benefiting these companies.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how TriZetto has been improving its development processes and modernizing its ability to speed the applications development process, and bring better tools for its internal developers as well as support a lifecycle approach to software.

To learn more about how TriZetto is modernizing its development and deployment capabilities, please join me in welcoming Rubina Ansari, Associate Vice President of Automation and Software Development Lifecycle Tools at TriZetto. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Rubina Ansari: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We hear a lot about improving software capabilities, and Agile of course is an important part of that. Tell me where you are in terms of moving to Agile processes, and we’ll get more into how you're enabling that through tools and products?

Ansari: TriZetto currently is going through an evolution. We’re going through a structured waterfall-to-scaled-Agile methodology. As you mentioned, that's one of the innovative ways that we're looking at getting our releases out faster with better quality, and be able to respond to our customers. We realize that Agile, as a methodology, is the way to go when it comes to all those three things I just mentioned.

We're currently in the midst of evolving how we work. We’re going through a major transformation within our development centers throughout the country.

Gardner: And software is very important to your company, tell us why and then a little bit about what TriZetto does?

Ansari: TriZetto is a healthcare software provider. We have the software for all areas of healthcare. Our mission is to integrate different healthcare systems to make sure our customers have seamless information. Over 50 percent of the American insured population goes through our software for their claims processing. So, we have a big market and we want to stay there.

Leaner and faster

Our software is very important to us, just as it is to our customers. We're always looking for ways of making sure we’re leaner, faster, and keeping up with our quality in order to keep up with all the healthcare changes that are happening.

Gardner: You've been working with HP Software and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) products for some time. Tell us a little bit about what you have in place, and then let's learn a bit more about the Asset Manager capabilities that you're pioneering?

Ansari
Ansari: We've been using HP tools for our testing area, such as the QTP Products Performance Center and Quality Center. We’ve recently went ahead with ALM 11.5, it has a lot of cross-project abilities. As for agile, we're now using HP Agile Manager.

This has helped us move forward fairly quickly into scaled agile using HP Agile Manager, while integrating with our current HP tools. We wanted to make sure that our tools were integrated and that we didn’t lose that traceability and the effectiveness of having a single vendor to get all our data.

HP Agile Manager is very important to us. It's a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, and it was very easy for us to implement within our company. There was no concept of installing, and the response that we get from HP has been very fast, as this is the first experience we’ve had with a SaaS deliverable from HP.
It's very lightweight, it's web-based SaaS and it integrates with their current tool suite.

They're following agile, so we get releases every three months. Actually, every few weeks, we get enhancements for defects we may find within their product. It's worked out very well. It's very lightweight, it's web-based SaaS and it integrates with their current tool suite, which was vital to us.

Gardner: And how large of an organization are you in terms of developers, and how many of them are actively using these products?

Ansari: We have between 500 and 1,000 individuals that make up development teams throughout United States. For Agile Manager, the last time we checked, it was approximately 400. We're hoping to get up to 1,000 by end of this year, so that way everyone is using Agile Manager for all their agile/scrum teams and their backlogs and development.

Gardner: Tell us a bit also about how paybacks are manifesting themselves. Do you have any sense of how much faster you're able to develop? What are the paybacks in terms of quality, traceability, and tracking defects? What's the payback from doing this in the way you have?

Working together

Ansari: We’ve seen some, but I think the most is yet to come in rolling this out. One of the things that Agile Manager promotes is collaboration and working together in a scrum team. Agile Manager, having the software work all around the agile processes, makes it very easy for us to roll an agile methodology.

This has helped us collaborate better between testers and developers, and we're finding those defects earlier, before they even happen. We’ll have more hard metrics around this as we roll this out further. One of the major reasons we went with HP Agile Manager is that it has very good integration with the development tools we use.

They integrate with several development tools, allowing our testers to be able to see what changes occurred, what piece of code has changed for each defect enhancement that the tester would be testing. So that tight integration with other development tools was a very pivotal factor in our decision of going forward with that HP Agile Manager.

Gardner: So Rubina, not only are you progressing from waterfall to agile and adopting more up-to-date tools, but you’ve made this leap to a SaaS-based delivery for this. If that's working out well as you’ve said, do you think this is going to lead to doing more with other SaaS tools and tests and capabilities and maybe even look at cloud platform as a service opportunity?
We're also looking at offering some of our products in a SaaS model. So we realize what's involved in it.

Ansari: Absolutely. This was our first experience and it is going very well. Of course, there were some learning curves and some learning pains. Being able to get these changes so quickly and not having it do it ourselves was kind of a mind shift change for us. We're reaping the benefits from it obviously, but we did have to have a little more scheduled conversations, release notes, and documentation about changes from HP.

We're not new to SaaS. We're also looking at offering some of our products in a SaaS model. So we realize what's involved in it. It was great to be on the receiving end of a SaaS product, knowing that TriZetto themselves are playing that space as well.

Gardner: Tell us what the future holds. Are you going to be adding any additional lifecycle elements moving on this journey, as you've described it? What's next?

Ansari: There's always so much more to improve. What we’re looking for is how to quickly respond to our customers. That means also integrating HP Service Manager and any other tools that may be part of this software testing lifecycle or part of our ability to release or offer something to our clients.

We'll continue doing this until there is no more space for efficiency. But, there are always places where we can be even more effective.

Mobile development

Gardner: How about mobile development? Is that something that’s on your radar and that you’ll be doing more of, given that devices are becoming more popular? I imagine that’s true of your customers too?

Ansari: We've talked about it, but it's really not on our roadmap right now. It hasn't been one of our main priorities.

Gardner: I suppose that you're in a good position to be able to move in that direction should you decide to.

Ansari: Absolutely. There's no doubt. The technologies that we’re advancing towards as well will allow us to easily go into the mobile space once we plan and do that.
The technologies that we’re advancing towards as well will allow us to easily go into the mobile space.

Gardner: Well great. I'm afraid we’ll leave it there. We’ve been learning about how TriZetto has been moving to a more agile methodology for its development and using a variety of HP software products for Application Lifecycle Management.

So please join me in thanking our guest. We’ve been here with Rubina Ansari, Associate Vice President of Automation and Software Development Lifecycle Tools at TriZetto. Thank you.

Ansari: Thank you. The pleasure was all mine.

Gardner: And I'd also like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance Podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner. Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major healthcare software provider is using HP tools to move from waterfall to agile. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Unum Group Architect Charts a DevOps Course to a Hybrid Cloud Future

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Unum Group has benefited from a better process around application development and deployment using HP tools.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving their services' performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end users alike, and this time we're coming to you directly from the recent HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how employee benefits provider Unum Group has been building a DevOps continuum and is exploring the benefits of a better process around applications development and deployment. And we are going to learn more about how they've been using certain tools and approaches to improve their applications delivery.

So join me in thanking our guests for being here. We're joined by Tim Durgan, an Enterprise Application Architect at Unum Group. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Durgan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Petri Maanonen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Application Performance Management at HP Software. Welcome, Petri. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Petri Maanonen: Hello, Dana.

Gardner: Let's talk a little bit about what's important for your company. You're a large insurer. You're in the Fortune 500. You're one of the largest employee benefits providers in the U.S. and you have a big presence in the UK as well. What are some of the imperatives that have driven you to try to improve upon your applications delivery?

Durgan: Even though, as you said, we're one of the largest employee benefits providers in the United States, we began to realize that there were smaller companies starting to chip away in segments of the market.

Durgan
It became imperative to deliver products more rapidly to the market, because delivery was a multi-year effort, which was unacceptable. If it took that long from concept to delivery, there would be a completely new market dynamic at play.

We started to look at application architectures like service-oriented architecture (SOA) to deliver agility, process automation, and rules automation -- all very mainstream approaches. We discovered pretty quickly that to use those approaches effectively you needed to have a level of governance.

Governance initiative

We had an SOA governance initiative that I led and we brought in technology from HP to aid us with that. It was the Business Service Management (BSM) suite of tools, the Systinet Repository, and some partner products from HP.

What we discovered very quickly is that in enterprise architecture, where I am from in the company, bringing in an operational tool like monitoring was not hailed as, "Thanks for helping us." There was this organizational push back. It became very clear to me early on that we were operating in silos. Delivery was doing their efforts, and we would throw it over the wall to QA. QA would do their job, and then we would ultimately move it out to a production environment and operational aspects would take over.

It really dawned on me early on that we had to try to challenge the status quo around the organization. That's what started to get me focused on this DevOps idea, and HP has a number of products that are really allowing that philosophy to become a reality.

Gardner: Tell me what you think that philosophy is. Does it differ from perspective and position within organizations as an enterprise architect, sort of a über role over some of these groups? How do you define DevOps?

Durgan: I have a couple of principles that I use when I talk about DevOps, and I try to use titles for these principles that are a little disruptive, so people pay attention.

For instance, I'll say "eliminate the monkeys," which essentially means you need to try to automate as much as possible. In many companies, their development process is filled with committees of people making decisions on criteria that are objective. Machines are very good at objective criteria. Let's save the humans for subjective things.
We want to put a product out quickly, but if it's going to fail, we would love to know it's going to fail very quickly, not make millions of dollars in investments.

That's what I talk about when we say eliminate the monkeys, get people out of the middle. It's really interesting, because as an architect, I recognize the automation of business process. But somehow I missed the fact that we need to automate the IT process, which in a lot of ways, is what DevOps is about.

Another principle is "fail fast." If you're going to deliver software fast, you need to be able to fail fast. As an example that I presented here at the conference last year -- which I knew most of the HP people loved -- was Palm. I'm sure they wished they had failed faster, because that was a pretty painful lesson, and a lot of companies struggle with that.

Unum does. We want to put a product out quickly, but if it's going to fail, we would love to know it's going to fail very quickly, not make millions of dollars in investments.

Another one is visibility throughout. I will say monitoring is a team sport. In a lot of companies, there are 50 or 60 monitoring tools. Each team has a monitoring tool. You have to have a secret decoder ring to use each monitoring tool.

While diversity is normally a great thing, it isn't when it comes to monitoring. You can't have the ops guy looking at data that's different from what the developer is looking at. That means you're completely hopeless when it comes to resolving issues.

Working collaboratively

My last one is "Kumbaya." A lot of IT organizations act competitively. Somehow infrastructure believes they can be successful without development and without QA and vice versa. Business sees only IT. We are a complete team and we have to work collaboratively to achieve things.

So those are really the ways I think about DevOps at the company.

Gardner: Petri, when you hear words like "process automation for IT" and a common view of the data across IT groups, it must be music to your ears?

Maanonen: Oh, sure. And the team has been very accurately capturing the essence of how DevOps needs to be supported as a function and of course shared among different kinds of teams in silos.

Maanonen
If you look at HP, we've been supporting these various teams for 15 years, whether it has been testing a performance of an application or monitoring from the end-user perspective and so forth. So we've been observing from our customers -- and Unum is a brilliant example of that -- them growing and developing their kind of internal collaboration to support these DevOps processes. Obviously the technology is a good supporting factor in that.

Tim was mentioning the continuous delivery type of demands from the business. We have been trying to step up, not only by developing the technology, but actually bringing very quickly supportive software-as-a-service (SaaS) types of offerings, Agile Manager and Performance Anywhere for example. Then, customers can quickly adopt the supporting technology and get this collaboration and a DevOps cycle, the continuous improvement cycle, going.

Gardner: Now, of course, this isn't just a technology discussion. When you said Kumbaya, obviously this is about getting people to see the vision, buy into the vision, and then act on the vision. So tell me a little bit more, Tim, about the politics of DevOps.
We are a complete team and we have to work collaboratively to achieve things.

Durgan: So you are going to ask me politics for this public interview. At Unum there is none, first of all, but I hear there is at other companies. I think the problem that a lot of companies have, and Unum as well, is that unfortunately we all have individual expectations and performance. We all have a performance review at the end of the year and we have things that we need to do. So it is, as you mentioned, getting everybody to buy into that holistic vision, and having these groups all sign up for the DevOps vision.

We've had good success in the conversation so far at Unum. I know we've talked to our Chief Technology Officer, and he's very supportive of this. But because we're still on the journey, we want data, metrics, and some evidence to support the philosophy. I think we're making some progress in the political space, but it's still a challenge.

I'm part of the HP BSM CAB (Customer Advisory Board), and in that group is, they talk about these other different small monitoring products trying to chip away at HP's market. The product managers, will ask, "Why is that? And I say that part of the problem is BSM is pitching enterprise monitoring.

The assumption is that a lot of organizations sign on to the enterprise monitoring vision. A lot of them don't, because the infrastructure team cares about the server, the application team cares about the app, and the networking team cares about the network. In a lot of ways, that's the same challenge you have in DevOps.

Requests for visibility

But I hear a lot of requests from the infrastructure and application teams for that visibility into each other's jobs, into their spaces, and that's what DevOps is pitching. DevOps is saying, "We want to give you visibility, engineer, so that you can understand what this application needs, and we want to give you visibility, developer, into what's happening in the server environment so you can partner better there."

There is a good grassroots movement on this in a lot of ways, more than a top-down. If you talk about politics, I think in a lot of cases it has to be this “Occupy IT” movement.

Gardner: What are some of the paybacks that are tangible and identifiable when DevOps is done properly, when that data is shared and there is a common view, and the automation processes gets underway?

Maanonen: What we hear from our customers, and obviously Unum is no exception to that, is that they're able to measure the return on investment (ROI) from the number of downtime hours or increased productivity or revenue, just avoiding the old application hiccups that might have been happening without this collaborative approach.

Also, there's the reduction of the mean time to resolve the issues, which they see in production and, with more supportive data than before, provide the fix through their development and testing cycles. That's happening much faster than in the past.
There is a good grassroots movement on this in a lot of ways, more than a top-down.

Where it might have been taking days or weeks to get some bugs in the application fixed, this might be happening in hours now because of this collaborative process.

Gardner: Tim, what about some of the initiatives that you're bound to be facing in the future, perhaps more mobile apps, smaller apps, the whole mobile-first mentality, and then more cloud options for you to deploy your apps differently, depending on what the economics and the performance and other requirements dictate. Does DevOps put you in a better position vis-à-vis what we all seem to see coming down the pike?

Durgan: It is, if you think about movement to the cloud, which Unum is very much looking at now. We're evaluating a cloud-first strategy. My accountability is writing this strategy.

And you start to think about, "I'm going to take this application and run it on a data center I don’t own anymore. So the need for visibility, transparency, and collaboration is even greater."

It’s a philosophy that enables all of the new emerging needs, whether it’s mobile, cloud, APIs, edge of the enterprise, all those types of phenomena. One of the other major things  we didn’t touch on it earlier that I would contend is a hurdle for organizations is, if you think about DevOps and that visibility, data is great, but if you don’t have any idea of expectations, it’s just data.

What about service-level management (SLM) and ITIL process, processes that predated ITIL, just this idea of what are the expectations, performance, availability, what have you for any aspect of the IT infrastructure or applications? If you don’t have a mature process there, it’s really hard for you to make any tangible progress in a DevOps space, an ALM space, or any of those things. That’s an organizational obstacle as well.

Make it real

One of the things we're doing at Unum is we're trying to establish SLAs beginning in dev, and that’s where we take fail fast to make it real. When I come to the conference and presented it, I had a lot of people look surprised. So I think it's radical.

If I can’t meet that SLA in dev, there's no way I am going to magically meet it in production without some kind of change. And so that’s a great enhancement. At first people say, that’s an awful lot of burden, but I try to say, "Look, I'm giving you, developer, an opportunity to fail and resolve your problem Monday through Friday, versus it goes to production, you fail, and you're here on the weekends, working around the clock."

That, to me is just one of those very simple things that is at the heart of a DevOps philosophy, a fail fast philosophy, and a big part of that development cycle. A lot of the DevOps tooling space right now is focused on some ALM on the front end, HP Agile Manager, and deployment.

Well, those are great, but as an application architect, I care about design and development. I think HP is well-positioned to do some great things with BSM, which has all that SLA data, and integrate that with things like the Repository, which has great lifecycle management. You start having these enforcement points and you say, "This code isn't moving unless it meets an SLA." That decision is made by the tool, objective criteria, decided by the system. There's no need to have a human involved. It's a great opportunity for HP to really do some cutting-edge and market-leading stuff.
Cloud and mobile are coming into play and are increasing the velocity of the applications and services being provisioned out to the end users.

Maanonen: We see that the cloud and mobile, as you mentioned, Dana, are coming into play and are increasing the velocity of the applications and services being provisioned out to the end users. We see that this bigger and larger focus, looking from the end user perspective of receiving the service, whether it’s a mobile or a cloud service, is something that we've been doing through our technology as a unifying factor.

It's very important when you want to break the silos. If the teams are adopting this end-user perspective, focusing on the end user experience improvement in each step of the development, testing, and monitoring, this is actually giving a common language for the teams and enhancing the chances of improved collaboration in the organization.

Durgan: That's a really good point. You start to hear this phrase now, the borderless enterprise, and it’s so true. Whether it’s mobile, cloud, or providing APIs to your customers, brokers, or third parties, that's the world we now live in. So we need to increase that quality and that speed to market. It’s no longer nice to have; You've got to deliver on that stuff.

If you don’t adopt DevOps principles and do some of these things around failing fast and providing holistic visibility and shared data, I just don't see how you change the game, how you move from your quarterly release cycle to a monthly, weekly, or daily release cycle. I don’t see how you do it.

Gardner: Here at HP Discover, we're hearing a lot about HAVEn, a platform that’s inclusive of many data and information types, with scale and speed and provisioning.

We're also hearing about Converged Cloud, an opportunity to play that hybrid continuum in the best way for your organization. And we heard some interesting things about HP Anywhere, going mobile, and enabling those endpoints at an agnostic level.

But after all, it’s still about the applications. If you don't have good apps -- and have a good process and methodology for delivering those apps -- all those other benefits perhaps don't pay back in the way they should.

Strong presence

So what’s interesting to me is that HP may be unique in that it has a very strong presence in the applications test, dev, deployment, fostering Agile, and fostering DevOps that the other competitors that are presenting options for mobile or for cloud don't have. So that’s a roundabout way of saying how essential it is to make people like Tim happy to the future of HP?

Maanonen: Tim has been pointing out that they're coming from a traditional IT environment and they're moving to the cloud now very fast. So you can see the breadth of the HP portfolio. Whatever technology area you're looking at, we should be pretty well-equipped to support companies and customers like Unum and others in different phases of their journey and the maturity curve when they move into cloud, mobile, and so forth. We're very keen to leverage and share those experiences we have here over the years with different customers.

Yesterday, there were customer roundtable events and customer advisory boards, where we're trying to make the customers share their experiences and best practices on what they've learned here. Hopefully, this podcast is giving an avenue to the other customers to hear what they should explore next.

But the portfolio breadth is one of the strengths for HP, and we're trying to stay competitive in each area. So I am happy that you have been observing that in the conference.
The portfolio breadth is one of the strengths for HP, and we're trying to stay competitive in each area.

Gardner: Last word to you, Tim. What would you like to see differently -- not necessarily just from a product perspective, but in terms of helping you cross the chasm from a siloed development organization and a siloed data center and production organization? What do you need to be able to improve on this DevOps challenge?

Durgan: The biggest thing HP can do for us is to continue to invest in those integrations of that portfolio, because you're right, they absolutely have great breadth of the offerings.

But I think the challenge for HP, with a company the size they are, is that they can have their own silos. You can talk to the Systinet team and talk to the BSM team and say, "Am I talking to the same company still?" So I think making that integration turnkey, like the integrations we're trying to achieve, is using their SOA Repository, their Systinet product as the heart of an SOA governance project.

We're integrating with Quality Center to have defects visible in the repository, so we can make an automated decision that this code moves because it has a reasonable number of defects. Zero is what we'd like to say, but let's be honest here, sometimes you have to let one go, if it’s minor. Very minor for any Unum people reading this.

Then, we are integrating with BSM, because we want that SLA data and that SLM data, and we are integrating with some of their partner products.

There’s great opportunity there. If that integration can be a smoother thing, an easier thing, a turnkey type operation, that makes the portfolio, that breadth something that you can actually use to get significant traction in the DevOps space.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been learning about how Unum Group has been working toward a DevOps benefit and how they've been using HP products to do so.

So join me in thanking our guests, Tim Durgan, Enterprise Application Architect at Unum Group. Thank you, Tim.

Durgan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And also Petri Maanonen, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Application Performance Management at HP Software. Thank you, Petri.

Maanonen: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And I'd like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance Podcast coming to you from the recent HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Unum Group has benefitted from a better process around application development and deployment using HP tools. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in: