Hortonworks Accelerates the Big Data Mashup between Hadoop and HP Haven

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how companies are beginning to capture large volumes of data for past, present and future analysis capabilities.

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, 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 Big Data 2014 Conference in Boston 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 interview highlights how Hortonworks is now working with HP on the management of very large datasets. We'll hear how these two will integrate into more of the HP Haven family, but also perhaps into the cloud, and to make it easier for developers to access business intelligence (BI) as a service.

Fully experience the HP Vertica analytics platform...
Get the free HP Vertica Community Edition
Become a member of myVertica

To learn more about these ongoing big data trends, we are joined by Mitch Ferguson, Vice President of Business Development at Hortonworks. Welcome, Mitch.

Mitch Ferguson: Thank you, Dana. Pleasure to be here.

Gardner: We’ve heard the news earlier this year about HP taking a $50-million stake in Hortonworks, and Hortonworks' IPO plans. Please fill us in little bit about why Hortonworks and HP are coming together.

Ferguson: There are two core parts to that answer. One is that the majority of Hadoop came out of Yahoo. Hortonworks was formed by the major Hadoop engineers at Yahoo moving to Hortonworks. This was all in complete corporation with Yahoo to help evolve the technology faster. We believe the ecosystem around Hadoop is critical to the success of Hadoop and critical to the success of how enterprises will take advantage of big data.

Ferguson

If you look at HP, a major provider of technology to enterprises, both at the compute and storage level but the data management level, the analytics level, the systems management level, and the complimentary nature of Hadoop as part of the modern data architecture with the HP hardware and software assets provides a very strong foundation for enterprises to create the next generation modern data architecture.

Gardner: I'm hearing a lot about the challenges of getting big data into a single set or managing the large datasets.

Users are also trying to figure out how to migrate from SQL or other data stores into Hadoop and into HP Vertica. It’s a challenge for them to understand a roadmap. How do you see these datasets as they grow larger, and we know they will, in terms of movement and integration? How is that path likely to unfold?

Machine data

Ferguson: Look at the enterprises that have been adapting Hadoop. Very early adopters like eBay, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are generating significant amounts of machine data. Then we started seeing large enterprises, aggressive users of technology adopt it.

One of the core things is that the majority of data being created everyday in an enterprise is not coming from traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) financial management systems. It's coming from websites like Clickstream, data, log data, or sensor, data. The reason there is so much interest in Hadoop is that it allows companies to cost effectively capture very large amounts of data.

Then, you begin to understand patterns across semi-structured, structured, and unstructured data to begin to glean value from that data. Then, they leverage that data in other technologies like Vertica, analytics technologies, or even applications or move the data back into the enterprise data warehouse.

As a major player in this Hadoop market, one of the core tenets of the company was that the ecosystem is critical to the success of Hadoop. So, from day one, we’ve worked very closely with vendors like Microsoft, HP, and others to optimize how their technologies work with Hadoop.

SQL has been around for a long time. Many people and enterprises understand SQL. That's a critical access mechanism to get data out of Hadoop. We’ve worked with both HP and Microsoft. Who knows SQL better than anyone? Microsoft. We're trying to optimize how SQL access to Hadoop can be leveraged by existing tools that enterprises know about, analytics tools, data management tools, whatever.

That's just one way that we're looking at leveraging existing integration points or access mechanisms that enterprises are used to, to help them more quickly adopt Hadoop.

The technology like Hadoop is optimized to allow an enterprise to capture very, very large amounts of that data.

Gardner: But isn’t it clear that what happens in many cases is that they run out of gas with a certain type of database and that they seek alternatives? Is that not what's driving the market for Hadoop?

Ferguson: It's not that they're running out of gas with an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) or relational database. As I said earlier, it's the sheer amount of data. By far, the majority of data is not coming from those traditional ERP,  CRM, or transactional systems. As a result, the technology like Hadoop is optimized to allow an enterprise to capture very, very large amounts of that data.

Some of that data may be relevant today. Some of that data may be relevant three months or six months from now, but if I don't start capturing it, I won't know. That's why companies are looking at leveraging Hadoop.

Many of the earlier adopters are looking at leveraging Hadoop to drive a competitive advantage, whether they're providing a high level of customer service, doing things more cost-effectively than their competitors, or selling more to their existing customers.

The reason they're able to do that is because they're now being able to leverage more data that their businesses are creating on a daily basis, understanding that data, and then using it for their business value.

More than size

Gardner: So this is an alternative for an entirely new class of data problem for them in many cases, but there's more than just the size. We also heard that there's interest in moving from a batch approach to a streaming approach, something that HP Vertica is very popular around.

What's the path that you see for Hortonworks and for Hadoop in terms of allowing it to be used in more than a batch sense, perhaps more toward this streaming and real-time analytics approach?

Ferguson: That movement is under way. Hadoop 1.0 was very batch-oriented. We're now in 2.0 and it's not only batch, but interactive and also real-time, and there's a common layer within Hadoop.  Hortonworks is very influential in evolving this technology. It's called YARN. Think of it as a data operating system that is part of Hadoop, and it sits on top of the file system.

Via YARN, applications or integration points, whether they're for batch oriented applications, interactive integration, or real-time like streaming or Spark, are access mechanisms. Then, those payloads or applications, when they leverage Hadoop, will go through these various batch interactive, real-time integration points.

They don't need to worry about where the data resides within Hadoop. They'll get the data via their batch real-time interactive access point, based on what they need. YARN will take advantage of moving that data in and out of those applications. Streaming is just one way of moving data into Hadoop. That's very common for sensor data. It’s also a way to move it out. SQL is a way, among others, to move data.

Fully experience the HP Vertica analytics platform...
Get the free HP Vertica Community Edition
Become a member of myVertica

Gardner: So this is giving us choice about how to manage larger scales of data. We're seeing choice about the way in which we access that data. There's also choice around the type of the underlying infrastructure to reduce costs and increase performance. I am thinking about in-memory or columnar.

What is there about the Hadoop community and Hortonworks, in particular, that allows you to throw the right horsepower at the problem?

Ferguson: It was very important, from Hortonworks perspective from day one, to evolve the Hadoop technology as fast as possible. We decided to do everything in open source to move the technology very quickly and leverage the community effective open-source, meaning lots of different individuals helping to evolve this technology fast.

The ability for the ecosystem to easily and optimally integrate with Hadoop is important. So there are very common integration points. For example, for systems management, there is the Ambari Hadoop services integration point.

Whether it's an HP OpenView or System Center in the Microsoft world, that allows it to leverage, manage, or monitor Hadoop along with other IT assets that those management technologies integrate with.

Access points

Then there's SQL's access via Hive, an access point to allow any technology that integrates or understands SQL to access Hadoop.

Storm and Spark are other access points. So, common open integration points well understood by the ecosystem are really designed to help optimize how various technologies at the virtualization layer, at the operating system layer, data movement, data management, access layer can optimally leverage Hadoop.

Gardner: One of the things that I hear a lot from folks who don't understand yet how things will unfold, is where data and analytics applications align with the creation of other applications or services, perhaps in a cloud setting like a platform as a service (PaaS).

It seems to me that, at some point, more and more application development will be done through PaaS with an associated or integrated cloud. We're also seeing a parallel trajectory here with the data, along the same lines of moving from traditional systems of record into relational, and now into big data and analytics in a cloud setting. It makes a lot of sense.

What a number of people are doing with this concept is called the data lake. They're provisioning large Hadoop clusters on prem, moving large amounts of data into this data lake.

I talked to lot of people about that. So the question, Mitch, is how do we see a commingling and even an intersection between the paths of PaaS in general application development and PaaS in BI services, or BI as a service, somehow relating?

Ferguson: I'll answer that question in two ways. One is about the companies that are using Hadoop today, and using it very aggressively. Their goal is to provide Hadoop as a service, irrespective of whether it's on premises or in the cloud.

Then we'll talk about what we see with HP, for example, with their whole cloud strategy, and how that will evolve into a very interesting hybrid opportunity and maybe pure cloud play.

When you think about PaaS in the cloud, the majority of enterprise data today is on premises. So there's a physics issue of trying to run all of my big data in the cloud. As a result, what a number of people are doing with this concept is called the data lake. They're provisioning large Hadoop clusters on premises, moving large amounts of data into this data lake.

That's providing data as a service to those business units that need data in Hadoop -- structured, semi-structured, unstructured for new applications, for existing analytics processes, for new analytics processes -- but they're providing effectively data as a service, capturing it all in this data lake that continues to evolve.

Think about how companies may want to leverage then a PaaS. It's the same thing on premises. If my data is on premises, because that's where the physics requires that, I can leverage various development tools or application frameworks on top of that data to create new business apps. About 60 percent of our initial sales at Hortonworks are new business applications by an enterprise. It’s business and IT being involved.

Leveraging datasets

Within the first five months, 20 percent of those customers begin to migrate to the data-lake concept, where now they are capturing more data and allowing other business entities within the company to leverage these datasets for additional applications or additional analytics processes. We're seeing Hadoop as a service on premises already. When we move to the cloud, we'll begin to see more of a hybrid model.

We are already starting to see this with one of Hortonworks large partners, where you put archive data from on premises to store in the cloud at low-cost storage. I think HP will have that same opportunity with Hadoop and their cloud strategy.

Already, through an initiative at HP, they're providing Hadoop as a service in the cloud for those entities that would like to run Hadoop in a managed service environment.

We're seeing Hadoop as a service on prem already. When we move to the cloud, we'll begin to see more of a hybrid model.

That’s the first step of HP beginning to provide Hadoop in a managed service environment off premises. I believe you'll begin to see that migrate to on-prem/off-prem integration in a hybrid opportunity in the some companies as their data moves off prem. They just want to run all of their big-data services or have Hadoop as a service running completely in HP cloud, for example.

Gardner: So, we're entering in an era now where we're going to be rationalizing how we take our applications as workloads, and continue to use them either on premises, in the cloud, or hybrid. At the same time, over on the side, we're thinking along the same lines architecturally with our data, but they're interdependent.

You can’t necessarily do a lot with the data without applications, and the applications aren’t as valuable without access to the analytics and the data. So how do these start to come together? Do you have a vision on that yet? Does HP have a vision? How do you see it?

Ferguson: The Hadoop market is very young. The vision today is that companies are implementing Hadoop to capture data that they're just letting fall on the floor. Now, they're capturing it. The majority of that data is on premises. They're capturing that data and they're beginning to use it in new a business applications or existing analytics processes.

Fully experience the HP Vertica analytics platform...
Get the free HP Vertica Community Edition
Become a member of myVertica

As they begin to capture that data, as they begin to develop new applications, and as vendors like HP working in combination with Hortonworks provide the ability to effectively move data from on premises to off premises and provide the ability to govern where that data resides in a secure and organized fashion, you'll begin to see much tighter integration of new business or big-data applications being developed on prem, off prem, or an integration of the two. It won't matter.

Gardner: Great. We've been learning quite a bit about how Hortonworks and Hadoop are changing the game for organizations as they seek to use all of their data and very massive datasets. We’ve heard that that aligns with HP Vertica and HP Haven's strategy around enabling more business applications for more types of data.

With that, I'd like to thank our guest, Mitch Ferguson, Vice President of Business Development at Hortonworks. Thank you, Mitch.

Ferguson: Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner. I'd like our audience for joining us for a new style of IT discussion coming to you from the recent HP Big Data 2014 Conference in Boston. Thanks to HP for sponsoring our discussion, and don't forget to come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how companies are beginning to capture large volumes of data for past, present and future analysis capabilities. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• HP simplifies Foundation Care Services to deliver just-in-time, pan-IT tech support
• HP Analytics Blazes New Trails in Examining Business Trends from Internal Data
• Vichara Technologies grows the market for advanced analytics after cutting its big data teeth on Wall Street
• Big Data Analysis Provides New Degree of Real-Time Financial Position Insights to Large Russian Bank
• A practical guide to rapid IT Service Management as a foundation for overall business agility
• Journey to SAP quality — Home Trust builds center of excellence with HP ALM tools
• ITSM adoption forces a streamlined IT operations culture at Desjardins, paves the way to cloud
• Cloud services brokerages add needed elements of trust and oversight to complex cloud deals
• How Waste Management builds a powerful services continuum across IT operations, infrastructure, development, and processes
• GSN Games hits top prize using big data to uncover deep insights into gamer preferences

ITSM Adoption Forces a Streamlined Operations Culture at Desjardins that Paves the Way to Better Cloud Use

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a Canadian cooperative banking organization is using ITSM to put best practices in place and deliver higher IT value to the company.

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, as well as better business results.

This time, we're coming to you from the HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data, cloud, and converged infrastructure implementations are supporting their goals.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Desjardins Group in Montréal is improving their operations in IT through an advanced IT services management (ITSM) approach.

To learn more, we are joined by Trung Quach, ITSM Manager at Desjardins in Québec. Welcome.

Trung Quach: Thank you very much, Dana, for having us.

Gardner: First tell us a little bit about your organization, for those who aren’t familiar. You're in Canada and you have a large network of credit unions.

Quach: It’s more cooperative banking. We are around 50,000 people across Québec, and we've started moving into both Canada and the US.

Gain better control over help desk quality and impact.  
Learn how to make your help desk more relevant
with a free white paper.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your IT organization, the size, how many people, how many datacenters? What sort of IT organization do you have?

Quach: We're around 2,500 and counting. We're mainly based in Montréal and Lévis, which is near Québec City. Most of them are in Montréal, but some technical people are in Lévis. 

Gardner: Tell us about your role. What are you doing there as ITSM manager?

The ITIL process

Quach: I joined Desjardins last year in the ITSM leader position. This is more about the process, the ITIL process and everything that's invloved with the tool, as well as to support those overall processes.

Gardner: Tell us why ITSM has become important to you. What were some of the challenges, some of the requirements? What was the environment you were in that required you to adopt better ITSM principles?

Quach

Quach: A couple of years ago, when they merged 10-plus silos of IT into one big group, Desjardins needed to centralize the process, put best practice in place, to be more efficient and competitive -- and to give a higher value to the business.

Gardner: What, in particular, were issues that cropped up as a result of that decentralization? Was this poor performance, too much cost, too many manual processes, all of the above?

Quach: We had a lot of manual processes, and a lot of tools. To be able to measure the performance of a team, you need to use the same process and the same tools, and then measure yourself on it. You need to optimize the way you do it, so that you can provide better IT services.

Gardner: What have been some of the results of your movement toward ITSM? What sort of benefits have you realized as a result?

Quach: We had many of them. Some were financial, but the most important thing, I think, is the services quality and the availability of those services. So one indicator is a reduction in major incidents of 30 percent for the last two years.

Gardner: What is it about your use of ITSM that has led to that significant reduction in incidents? How does that translate?

Quach: We put our new problem management approach to work as well with the problem processes. When we open tickets, we can take care of the incidents in a coordinated way at an enterprise level. So the impact is everywhere. We can now advise the line of businesses, follow up with the incident, and close the incident rapidly. We follow up with any problems, and then we fix the real issues so that they don’t come back.

Gardner: Have you used this to translate back to any applications development, or custom development in your organization? Or is this more on the operations side strictly?

Better support

Quach: We started all of this on the operations side. But then we started last year on the development side, too. They're involved in our process slowly, and that’s going to soon get better, so we can support the full IT lifecycle better.

Gardner: Tell us about HP Discover. What's of interest to you? Have you been looking at what HP has been doing with their tools? What's of most importance to you in terms of what they do with their technology?

Quach: I can tell you how important it is for us. Last year we didn't go to HP Discover. This year, around eight in my team and the architecture team are here. That shows you how important it is.

Now we spread out. A lot of my team members went to explore tools and everything else that HP has to offer -- and HP has a lot of offer. We went to learn about the cloud, as well as big data. It all works together. That’s why it was important for us to come here. ITSM is the main reason we're here, but I want to make sure that everything works together, because the IT processes touch everything.

Gain better control over help desk quality and impact.  
Learn how to make your help desk more relevant
with a free white paper.

Gardner: I've talked to a number of organizations, Trung, and they've mentioned that before they feel comfortable moving into more cloud activities, and before they feel comfortable adopting big data, analytics platforms, they want to make sure they have everything else in order. So ITSM is an important step for them to then go to larger, more complex undertakings. Is that your philosophy as well?

Quach: Yes. There are two ways to do this. You use that technology to force yourself to be disciplined, or you discipline yourself. ITSM is one way to do it. You force yourself to work in a certain manner, a streamlined manner, and then you can go to the cloud. It's easier that way.

Gardner: Then, of course, you also have standardization in culture, in organization, not just technology, but the people and the process, and that can be very powerful.

Quach: If asked me about cloud -- and I have done this with another company -- in a 30-minute interview about cloud, I would use 29 minutes to not talk about technology but about people and processes.

Gardner: How about the future of IT? Any thoughts about or the big picture of where technology is going? Even as we face larger data volumes, perhaps more complexity, and mobile applications, what are your thoughts about how we solve some of those issues in the big picture?

Time to market

Quach: IT more and more is going to have a challenge for meeting the speed demanded for improved time to market. But to do that, you need processes, technology, and of course, people. So the client, the business, is going to ask us to be faster. That’s why we'll need to go in that cloud. But to go in the cloud, we need to master our IT services, and then go in the cloud. If not, it would be like not going to the cloud and not having that agility. We would not be competitive.

Gardner: Looking back, now that you have gone through an ITSM advancement, for those who are just beginning, what are some thoughts that you could share with them?

Quach: In an ITSM project, it's very hard to manage change. I'm talking about the people change, not the change-management technology process. Most of the time, you put that in place and say that everybody has to work with it. If I would redo it, I would bring more people to understand the latest ITSM science and processes, and explain why in five or 10 years, it's going to really help us.

You always have to be close to your clients. Even if they are IT, they are your client or partner.

After that, we'll put in the project, but we'll follow them and train them every year. ITSM is a never-ending story. You always have to be close to your clients. Even if they are IT, they are your client or partners. You need to coach them, to make sure they understand why they're doing this. Sometimes it’s a bit longer to get it right at the beginning, but it’s all worth it at the end.

Gardner: Thanks so much. We’ll have to leave it there. We've been talking about how Desjardins Group in Montréal has been embarking on an ITSM journey and we've been learning how that's helped them improve their quality and reduced incidence of IT problems. So thank you to our guest Trung Quach, ITSM Manager at Desjardins Group.

Gain better control over help desk quality and impact.  
Learn how to make your help desk more relevant
with a free white paper.

Quach: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And thank you, too, to our audience for joining this special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2014 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 listening, 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 Canadian cooperative banking organization is using ITSM to put best practices in place and deliver higher IT value to the company. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• Cloud services brokerages add needed elements of trust and oversight to complex cloud deals
• How Waste Management builds a powerful services continuum across IT operations, infrastructure, development, and processes
• GSN Games hits top prize using big data to uncover deep insights into gamer preferences
• Hybrid cloud models demand more infrastructure standardization, says global service provider Steria
• Service providers gain new levels of actionable customer intelligence from big data analytics
• Advanced cloud service automation eases application delivery for global service provider NNIT

• HP network management heightens performance while reducing total costs for Nordic telco TDC
• How Capgemini's UK financial services unit helps clients manage risk using big data analysis
• Perfecto Mobile goes to cloud-based testing so developers can build the best apps faster
• Network virtualization eases developer and operations snafus in the mobile and cloud era
• Big data should eclipse cloud as priority for enterprises
• Big data’s big payoff arrives as customer experience insights drive new business advantages
• How healthcare SaaS provider PointClickCare masters quality and DevOps using cloud ITSM
• Software security pays off: How Heartland Payment Systems gains steep ROI via software assurance tools and methods
• HP ART documentation and readiness tools bring better user experiences to Nordic IT solutions provider EVRY
• NASCAR attains intimacy and affinity with fans worldwide using big data analytics
• HP HAVEn CTO Mundada on new ways for businesses to gain transformation from big data and new wave analysis

How Waste Management Builds a Powerful Services Continuum Across Operations, Infrastructure, Development, and IT Processes

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a large environmental services company uses HP BSM tools to provide always-on, always-available services to customers and internal users.

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

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Waste Management in Houston, Texas is improving the quality of their services and operations in IT for a variety of their users, both internal and external.
To help us learn more about Waste Management’s experience, we're here with Gautam Roy, Vice President of Infrastructure, Operations and Technical Services at Waste Management. Welcome.

Gautam Roy: Hi. Thank you.

Gardner: You're a very large organization across North America with more than 20 million customers. This size and scale requires an awful lot of IT. Tell us about the scope and size of your operation.

Roy: Water Management is an environmental services company. We have primarily three lines of business. First is waste service. This is our traditional waste pickup, transfer, and disposal. Our second line of business is renewable energy or green energy, and our third is recycling.

Roy

What makes Waste Management different from others in the waste industry is that we also invest quite a lot of effort in next-generation waste technology. We invest in companies like Agilyx, which converts very hard-to-recycle waste, such as plastic, into crude oil. We convert organic food waste into natural gas. We pressurize, scrub, and dry municipal solid waste into solid fuel, which burns cleaner than coal.

And we're quite diverse, a global company. We have operations in the US and Canada, Asia, and Europe. We have our renewable energy plants. There is quite a large array of technology and IT to support these business processes to ensure consistent business-services availability.

Gardner: As with many organizations, gaining greater visibility into operations -- having earlier detection of problems, and therefore earlier remediation -- means better performance. What were some of the drivers for your organization specifically to mature your IT operations?

Business transformation

Roy: I'll give a few business reasons, and a couple of technology reasons. From the business side, we began business transformation a couple of years ago. We wanted to ensure that we unlocked the value for our customers and for us, and to institutionalize the benefits for Waste Management.

Customer care, providing outstanding, world-class customer service is aligned completely with our business strategy. Business services availability is crucial, it's in our DNA. Our IT business service availability scorecard a few years ago wasn't too good. So we had to put the focus on people, process, and technology to ensure that we provide a very consistent service set to our customers.

Gardner: Moving across the spectrum of development, test, and operations can be challenging for many organizations. You have put in place standardized processes to measure, organize, and perform better across the DevOps spectrum. Tell us how you accomplished that. How did you get there?

Roy: That's a very good question. For us, IT business-service availability is really not about having a great monitoring solution. It starts even before the services are in production. It starts with partnership with our business and business requirements. It starts with having a great development methodology and a robust testing program. It starts with architecture processes, standardization, and communication. All those things have to be in place. And you have to have security services and a monitoring solution to wrap it up.

We try to approach it from the front end, instead of chasing it from the back end.

What we are trying to do is to not fight the issue at the back-end. If a service is down, our monitoring software picks it up, our operational team and engineering team jumps on it, we are able to fix the problem ASAP before it impacts the customer. Great. But, boy, wouldn’t it be nice if those services aren't going down in the first place? So we try to approach it from the front-end, instead of just chasing it from the back-end.

Gardner: So it’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Business Service Management (BSM), not one or the other, but really both -- and simultaneously?

Roy: Exactly, ALM, BSM, testing, and security products. We also want to make sure that the services are not down from intentional disruption. We want to make sure that we produce code with quality and velocity, and code that is consistent with the experience of our customer.

With our operational processes, ITIL and Lean IT, we want to make sure that the change management and incident management are followed to our prescription. We want to make sure that the disaster-recovery (DR) program, the high-availability (HA) program, the security operation center (SOC), the network operation center (NOC), and the command centers are all working together to ensure that the services are up 24/7, 365.

Gardner: And when you do this well, when you have put in place many of the capabilities that we have been describing, do you have any sense of payback? Do you keep score?

Availability scorecard

Roy: A few years ago, when we were not as good at it, we started rebuilding this all from the ground up, and our availability scorecard was pretty bad. Our services were down. At times, we didn’t know that our services were down. Our first indication of a problem was from customers calling us.

Now, fast-forward a few years, with making the appropriate choices and investments in technology -- such as in people and processes --  and our scorecard is very good. We know of the problems rapidly. We proactively detect problems and fix the problems before they impact our customers.

We have 4 9s availability for our critical applications. We're able to provide services to our customers via wm.com, our digital channel, and it has been quite a success story. We still have work to cover, but it has been following the right trajectory.

Gardner: Here at HP Discover, are there any developments that you're monitoring closely? Are there some things that you're particularly interested in that might help you continue to close the gap on quality?

We want to provide optimal solutions at a right price point for our customers and our business.

Roy: Sure. Things like understanding what's happening in the world of big data and HP’s views and position on that. I want to understand and learn about testing, software testing, how to test faster and produce better code, and to ensure, on a continuous basis that we're reducing the cost of running the business. We want to provide optimal solutions at a right price point for our customers and our business.

Gardner: On that topic of big data, are you referring to the data generated within IT, in your systems, to be able to better analyze and react to that? Or perhaps also the data from your marketplace, things that your customers might be saying in social media, for example? Or is it all of the above?

Roy: It’s all of the above. We have internal data that we're harvesting. We want to understand what it’s telling us. And we'd like to predict certain trends of our system, across the use of our applications.

Externally, we have 18 call centers. We get user calls. We also want to know our customer better and serve them the best. So we want to move into a situation where we can take their issues, frame them into solutions, and proactively service them the best in our industry.

Gardner: I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing how Waste Management improves their IT operations across the BSM spectrum, from development through operations, and then embarking on more use of big data to analyze their business requirements as well as their marketplace.

So a big thank you to Gautam Roy, Vice President of Infrastructure, Operations and Technical Services at Waste Management in Houston. Thanks so much.

Roy: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thank you, too, to our audience for joining this special HP Discover new style of IT discussion.

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 large environmental services company uses HP BSM tools to provide always-on, always-available services to customers and internal users. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• GSN Games hits top prize using big data to uncover deep insights into gamer preferences
• Hybrid cloud models demand more infrastructure standardization, says global service provider Steria
• Service providers gain new levels of actionable customer intelligence from big data analytics
• How UK data solutions developer Systems Mechanics uses HP Vertica for BI, streaming and data analysis
• Advanced cloud service automation eases application delivery for global service provider NNIT
• HP network management heightens performance while reducing total costs for Nordic telco TDC
• How Capgemini's UK financial services unit helps clients manage risk using big data analysis
• Perfecto Mobile goes to cloud-based testing so developers can build the best apps faster
• Software security pays off: How Heartland Payment Systems gains steep ROI via software assurance tools and methods
• HP ART documentation and readiness tools bring better user experiences to Nordic IT solutions provider EVRY
• NASCAR attains intimacy and affinity with fans worldwide using big data analytics
• HP HAVEn CTO Mundada on new ways for businesses to gain transformation from big data and new wave analysis

Cloud Service Automation Eases Application Delivery for Global Service Provider NNIT

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how cloud service automation can improve deployment of IT applications and delivery for higher efficiency.

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 Conference in Barcelona.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how NNIT uses HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) to improve their deployment of IT applications and data, and to provide higher overall efficiency. To learn more, we’re joined by Jesper Bagh, IT Architect and cloud expert at NNIT, based in Copenhagen. Welcome, Jesper.

Jesper Bagh: Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner: So tell us a little about your company and what you do. Then, we’ll get into some of the problems and solutions that you've been tasked with resolving.

Bagh: NNIT is a service provider located in Denmark. We have offices around the world, China, Philippines, Czech Republic, and the United States. We’re 2,200 employees globally and we're a subsidiary of Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company known for making insulin.

Bagh

Gardner: IT Architect, that’s an interesting title. Tell us what you do and what you were doing before you achieved that rank. What are your job responsibilities?

Bagh: My responsibility is to ensure for the company that business goals can be delivered through functional requirements, and in turning the functional requirements into projects that can be delivered by the organization.

Gardner: I know that the IT architect and cloud architect individuals are in high demand in a lot of companies. Tell us how you’ve evolved your thinking toward a cloud deployment, and explain how you are using HP CSA to accomplish that.

Full suite

Bagh: We embarked on CSA together with HP back in 2010. Back then, CSA consisted of many different software applications. It wasn't really complete software back then. Now, it’s a full suite of software.

It has helped us to show to our internal groups -- and our customers -- that we have services in the cloud. For us it has been a tremendous journey to show that you can deliver these services fully automatically, and by running them well, we can gain great efficiency.

Gardner: And has the ability to be more service-oriented in your cloud activities filtered back into more of IT? Are you extending this thinking about service, catalog, and delivery into other aspects of IT, in addition to cloud?

Bagh: We’re a wall-to-wall, full-service provider. So we provide both application development management and infrastructure outsourcing. Cloud is just one aspect that we’re delivering services on. Before we did the cloud project, we started off by doing service-portfolio management and cataloging of our services, trying to standardize the services that we have on the shelf ready for our customers.

That allowed us to put offerings into a cloud, and to show the process of standardizing of services, doing cloud well, and of focusing on the dedicated customers. We still have customers using our facility management who are not able to leverage cloud services because of compliance or regulatory demands.

We have roughly over 10,000 services in our data centers. We’re trying now to broaden the capabilities of cloud delivery to the rest of the infrastructure so that we get a more competitive edge. We’re able to deliver better quality, and the end users -- at the end of the day -- get their services faster.

Back in the good old days, developers were in one silo and operations were in another silo. Now, we see a mix of resources, both in operations and in development.

Gardner: Has this clearly benefited your speed-to-value when it comes to new applications. How do your developer and test and automation individuals react to this?

Bagh: The adaption of automation is an ongoing journey. I imagine other companies have also had the opportunity of adapting to a new breed of software, and a new life in automation and orchestration. What we see is that the traditional operations divisions now suddenly get developers trying to comprehend what they mean, and trying to have them work together to deliver operations automatically.

Back in the good old days, developers were in one silo, and operations were in another silo. Now, we see a mix of resources -- both in operations and in development. So the organizational change management derived from automation projects is key. We started up, when we did service cataloging and service portfolio management, by doing organizational change to see if this could fit into our vision.

Gardner:  Now, a lot of people these days like to measure things. It’s a very data-driven era. Have you been able to develop any metrics of how your service automation and cloud-infrastructure developments have shown results, whether it’s productivity benefits or speeds and feeds? Have you measured this as a time-to-value or a time-to-delivery benefit? What have you come up with?

Value-add

Bagh: As part of the cloud project, we did two things. We did infrastructure as a service (IaaS), but we also did a value add on IaaS. We were able to deliver qualified IaaS to the life science industry fully compliant. That alone, in the traditional infrastructure, would have taken us weeks or months to deliver servers because of all the process work involved. When we did the CSA and the GxP Cloud, we were able to deliver the same server within a matter of hours. So that’s a measurable efficiency that is highly recognized.

Gardner:  For other organizations that are also grappling with these issues and trying to go over organization and silo boundaries for improvement in collaboration, do you have any words of advice? Now that you've been doing this for some time and at that key architect level, which I think is really important, what thoughts do you have that you could share with others, lessons learned perhaps?

Bagh: The lesson learned is that having senior management focus on the entire process is key. Having the organization recognized is a matter of change management. So communication is key. Standardization before automation is key.

You need to start out by doing your standardization of your services, doing the real architectural work, identifying which components you have and which components you don't have, and matching them up. It’s trying to do all the Lego blocks in order to build the house. That’s key. The parallel that I always use is there is nothing different for me as an architect than there is for an architect building a house.

The next step for us is to be more proactive than reactive in our monitoring and reporting capabilities, because we want to be more transparent to our customers.

Gardner:  Looking to the future, are there other aspects of service delivery, perhaps ways in which you could gather insights into what's happening across your infrastructure and the results, that end users are seeing through the applications? Do you have any thoughts about where the next steps might be?

Bagh: The next step for us is to be more transparent to our customers. So the vision is now we can deliver services fully automatically. We can run them semi-automatically. We will still do funny stuff from time to time that you need to keep your eyes on. But in order for us to show the value, we need to report on it.

The next step for us is to be more proactive than reactive in our monitoring and reporting capabilities, because we want to be more transparent to our customers. We have a policy called Open and Honest Value-Adding. From that, we want to show our customers that if we can deliver a service fully automatically and standardized, they know what they get because they see it in a catalog. Then, we should be able to report on it live for the users.

Gardner: Very good. I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We’ve been learning about how NNIT is improving their delivery and performance of applications through the use of an important cloud-service automation technologies.

Gardner: So a big thank you to our guest, Jesper Bagh, IT Architect and Cloud Expert at NNIT, based in Copenhagen. Thank you so much.

Bagh: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thank you too to our audience for joining 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 listening, 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 cloud service automation can improve deployment of IT applications and delivery for higher efficiency. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• HP network management heightens performance while reducing total costs for Nordic telco TDC
• How UK data solutions developer Systems Mechanics uses HP Vertica for BI, streaming and data analysis
• HP network management heightens performance while reducing total costs for Nordic telco TDC
• How Capgemini's UK financial services unit helps clients manage risk using big data analysis
• Perfecto Mobile goes to cloud-based testing so developers can build the best apps faster
• Network virtualization eases developer and operations snafus in the mobile and cloud era
• Big data should eclipse cloud as priority for enterprises
• Big data’s big payoff arrives as customer experience insights drive new business advantages
• How healthcare SaaS provider PointClickCare masters quality and DevOps using cloud ITSM
• Software security pays off: How Heartland Payment Systems gains steep ROI via software assurance tools and methods
• HP ART documentation and readiness tools bring better user experiences to Nordic IT solutions provider EVRY
• NASCAR attains intimacy and affinity with fans worldwide using big data analytics
• HP HAVEn CTO Mundada on new ways for businesses to gain transformation from big data and new wave analysis
• Istanbul-based Finansbank manages risk and security using HP ArcSight, Server Automation

Perfecto Mobile Goes to Cloud-Based Testing Tools so Developers Can Build the Best Mobile Apps Fast

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how the “mobile first” movement is making the cloud more attractive for software developers.

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 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 Perfecto Mobile is using a variety of cloud-based testing tools to help its developers rapidly create the best mobile apps for both enterprises and commercial deployment.

So join me in welcoming our guest, Yoram Mizrachi, CTO and Founder of Perfecto Mobile, based in Woburn, Mass. Welcome Yoram.

Yoram Mizrachi: Hi. Thank you.

Gardner: Tell us about the state of the mobile development market. How fast is it growing, and who are building mobile apps these days?

Mizrachi

Mizrachi: Everyone is building mobile applications today. We have not gone into a single company that doesn’t have anything on mobile. It’s like what happened on the web 15 years ago. Mobile is moving fast. Even today, we have customers with more transactions on mobile than any other channel that they’re offering, including web or making calls. Mobile is here.

Gardner: So that’s a big challenge for companies that perhaps are used to a development cycle that took a lot longer, where they had more time to do testing and quality assurance. Mobile development seems to be speeding up. Is there a time crunch that they’re concerned about?

Mizrachi: Absolutely. In mobile there are two factors that come into play. The first one is that everyone today is expecting things to happen much faster. So everyone is talking about agile and DevOps, and crunching the time for a version from a few months, maybe even a year, into few weeks.

Bigger problem

With mobile, there’s a bigger problem. The market itself is moving faster. Looking at the mobile market, you see hundreds of mobile models being launched every year. Apple is releasing many models. Android is releasing tremendous amount of new models every year. The challenge for enterprises is how to release faster on one side, but still maintain a decent quality on all the wide ranges of devices available.

Gardner: So that’s a big challenge in terms of coming up with a test environment for each of those iterations.

Of course, we’re also seeing mobile first, where they’re going to build mobile, and it's changing the whole nature of development. It's a very dynamic and busy time for developers and enterprises. Tell us about Perfecto Mobile and how you’re helping them to manage these difficult times.

Mizrachi: Yes, it is mobile first. Many of our existing customers, as I mentioned, have more transactions on mobile than anything else. Today, they’re building an interface for their customers starting from mobile. This means there are tremendous issues that they need to handle, starting with automation. If automation was nice to have on traditional web -- with mobile it’s no longer a question. Building a robust and continuous automated testing environment is a must in mobile.

Gardner: Now, we’re talking about not only different targets for mobile, but we’re talking about different types of applications. There’s Android, Apple, native, HTML 5, Web, hybrid. How wide a landscape of types of apps are you supporting with your testing capabilities?

We support native, hybrid applications, Web services, iOS, Android, and any other platform.

Mizrachi: When you look at the market today, mobile is moving very fast, and you’re right, there are lots of solutions available in the market. One of the things that Perfecto Mobile is bringing to the market is the fact that we support them all. We support native, hybrid applications, Web services, iOS, Android, and any other platform. All of this is provided as a cloud service. We enable our customers to worry a little bit less about the environment and a little bit more about the actual testing.

Gardner: Tell us how you’re doing this? I know that you are a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider and that the testing that you provide is through a cloud-based model. A lot of organizations have traditionally done their own testing or used some tools that may have been SaaS-provided. How are companies viewing going purely to a SaaS model for their testing with their mobile apps?

Mizrachi: The nice thing about what we do with cloud is that it solves a huge logistical problem for the enterprises. We’re providing managed solution for those physical devices. So it’s many things.

One of them is just physically managing those devices and enabling access to them from anywhere in the world. For example, if I’m a U.S.-based company, I can have my workforce and my testing, located anywhere in the world without the need to worry about the logistics of managing devices, offshoring, or anything like that. Our customers are utilizing this cloud model to not change their existing processes when moving into mobile.

ALM integration

Gardner: And in order to be able to use cloud amid a larger application lifecycle, you must also offer application lifecycle management (ALM) or at least integrate with ALM, source code management, and other aspects of development. How does that work?

Mizrachi: Our approach was to not reinvent the wheel. When looking at the large enterprises, we figured out that the existing ALM solutions in the market, led by HP, is there, and the right approach is to integrate or to extend them into mobile and not to replace them.

What we have is an extension to the ALM products  in such a way that you, as a customer, don’t have to change your existing processes and practices in order to move to mobile. You’ll have a lot of issues when moving into mobile, and we don’t believe that changing the processes should be one of them.

Gardner: Of course with HP having some 65 percent of the market for ALM and a major market presence for a lot of other testing and business service management capabilities, it was a no-brainer for you to have to integrate to HP. But you’ve gone beyond that. You’re using HP yourself for your own testing. Tell us how you came to do that.

Mizrachi: HP has the largest market in ALM, and looking at our customers in Fortune 500 companies, it was really obvious that we needed to utilize, integrate, or extend HP ALM tools in order to provide a market with the best solution.

One of the things I’m quite proud of is that we, as a company, have proofs of success in the market.

Internally, of course, we’re using the HP suites, including Unified Functional Testing (UFT) Performance Center, and Load Runner in order to manage our own development.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit more about what your users are getting as a result of going to Perfecto Mobile and using a SaaS-based approach to testing for the mobile devices. Do you have any metrics of success or even an example of how this works, so that we can appreciate how this is a better way to do it?

Mizrachi: Absolutely. One of the things I’m quite proud of is that we, as a company, have proof of success in the market, with hundreds of customers already using us and tens of thousands of hours of automation every month being utilized.

We have customers with thousands of automated scripts running continuously in order to validate the applications. It's a competitive environment, obviously, but with Perfecto Mobile, the value that we’re bringing to the table is that we have a proven solution today used by the largest Fortune 500 companies in finance, retail, travel, utilities, and they have been using us not for months, but for years.

Gardner: Where do you see this going next? Is there a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) opportunity where we’re going to do not just testing but development and deployment ultimately? If you are in the cloud for more and more of what you do in development and deployment, it makes sense to try to solidify and unify across a cloud from start to finish.

Mizrachi: I’m obviously a little bit biased, but, yes, my belief is that the software development life cycle (SDLC) is moving to the cloud. If you want to go ahead, you don’t really have a choice. One of the major failures in SDLC is setup of the environment. If you don’t have the right environment, just in time, you will fail to deliver regardless of the tool that you have.

Just in time

Moving to the cloud means that you have everything that you need just in time. It's available for you. Someone has to make sure this solution is available with a given service-level agreement (SLA) and all of that. This is what Perfecto Mobile is doing of course, but I believe the entire market is going into that. Software development is moving to the cloud. This is quite obvious.

Gardner: One other area of course concerning the cloud is security, particularly around intellectual property like source code. Are you and HP working together to try to ameliorate any concerns? How do you answer questions about security?

Mizrachi: For our customers, the top insurance and top financial banks customers, healthcare organizations, all of them, security is extremely important, and of course it is for us. Our hosting solution is a SOC 2-certified solution. We have dedicated personnel for security and we make sure that our customers enjoy the highest level of privacy and, of course, security -- physical security, network security, and all the tools and processes in place.

As the mobile market matures, organization are relying more on mobile to assure and  increase their revenue.

Gardner: And, as we know, HP has been doing testing in the cloud successfully for more than 10 years and moving aggressively in that space early on.

Mizrachi: We’re enjoying the fact that our research and development center and HP's research and development center are close-by. So the development of the two products is very close. We have weekly or biweekly meetings between products and R and D teams in order to make sure that those two tools are moving together.

Gardner: One last area before we end our discussion. You’re going beyond just testing. You’re using Business Service Management (BSM) and the monitoring is ongoing. As we all know with application development, and mobile in particular, you’re never really done. It's an ongoing process, a lifecycle.

Tell us about the monitoring aspect and how you’re helping organizations keep those applications, those mobile apps, up to speed and up to spec, but also ready for the new operating systems and platforms that they will have to perform with.

Mizrachi: SDLC, as you mentioned, is a lifecycle. It's not only about one time testing; it's ongoing. And post-deployment, when moving into production, you need to see that what you’re offering to the market on the real device is actually what you expect. That’s extremely important.

As the mobile market matures, organization are relying more on mobile to assure and  increase their revenue. So making sure the mobile offering is up and running and meets the right key performance indicators (KPIs) on an ongoing basis is extremely important. The integration that we’ve made with BSM is utilizing an existing extremely mature product on the monitoring aspect and extending that with cloud-based real mobile devices for application monitoring.

Gardner: Well, very good. We’ll have to leave it there, I am afraid. We’ve been talking about how the Perfecto Mobile organization has been delivering application testing for mobile development through a cloud-based system and relying heavily on the HP performance and test suite to do so.

I would like to thank our guest, Yoram Mizrachi, CTO and Founder of Perfecto Mobile. Thanks so much.

Mizrachi: Thank you, very much.

Gardner: And 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 listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how the “mobile first” movement is making the cloud more attractive for software developers. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• Big data’s big payoff arrives as customer experience insights drive new business advantages
• How healthcare SaaS provider PointClickCare masters quality and DevOps using cloud ITSM
• Software security pays off: How Heartland Payment Systems gains steep ROI via software assurance tools and methods
• HP HAVEn CTO Mundada on new ways for businesses to gain transformation from big data and new wave analysis
• HP ART documentation and readiness tools bring better user experiences to Nordic IT solutions provider EVRY
• NASCAR attains intimacy and affinity with fans worldwide using big data analytics
• Siemens Brazil Leverages HP Anywhere to Deliver Applications Better to More Mobile Devices
• Nimble Storage Leverages Big Data and Cloud to Produce Data Performance Optimization on the Fly
• MZI Healthcare Identifies Big Data Patient Productivity Gems Using HP Vertica
• Thought Leader Interview: HP's Global CISO Brett Wahlin on the future of Security and Risk