Showing posts with label IT support. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IT support. Show all posts

Thursday, February 18, 2021

How HPE Pointnext ‘Moments’ Provide a Proven Critical Approach to Digital Business Transformation


Transcript of a discussion with
HPE Pointnext Services experts as they detail a multi-step series of “Moments” that guide organizations on their transformations.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. See the video. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of Innovation video podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this timely discussion on effective paths for businesses to attain digital transformation.

Even as a vast majority of companies profess to be seeking digital business transformation, few proven standards or broadly accepted methods stand out as the best paths to take. And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for bold initiatives to make customer engagement and experience optimization an increasingly data-driven and wholly digital affair.

Stay with us now as we welcome a panel of HPE Pointnext Services experts as they detail a multi-step series of “Moments” that guide organizations on their transformations. Here to share the Hewlett Packard Enterprise view on helping businesses effectively innovate for a new era of pervasive digital business are our panelists.

We’re here with Craig Partridge, Senior Director Worldwide, Digital Advisory and Transformation Practice Lead at HPE Pointnext Services. Welcome back, Craig.

Craig Partridge: Hey, Dana, good to see you again.


Gardner:
We’re also here with Yara Schuetz, Global Digital Advisor -- one of many -- at HPE Pointnext Services. Welcome, Yara.

Yara Schuetz: Hello, Dana, nice to be here.

Gardner: We’re also here with Aviviere Telang, Global Digital Advisor at HPE Pointnext Services. Welcome, Aviviere.

Aviviere Telang: Thanks, Dana, glad to be here.


Gardner:
And we’re joined by Christian Reichenbach, Global Digital Advisor at HPE Pointnext Services. Welcome, Christian.

Christian Reichenbach: Thanks, Dana, for having me.

Gardner: And we welcome Amos Ferrari, Global Digital Advisor at HPE Pointnext Services. Welcome, Amos.

Amos Ferrari: Thank you, Dana. Thank you, for inviting me.

Gardner: Craig, while some 80 percent of CEOs say that digital transformation initiatives are under way, and they’re actively involved, how much actual standardization -- or proven methods -- are available to them? Is everyone going at this completely differently? Or is there some way that we can help people attain a more consistent level of success?

Common ground in digital transformation

Partridge: A few things have emerged that are becoming commonly agreed upon, if not commonly executed upon. So, let’s look at those things that have been commonly agreed-upon and that we see consistently in most of our customers’ digital transformation agendas.

Partridge
The first principle would be – and no shock here -- focusing on data and moving toward being a data-driven organization to gain insights and intelligence. That leads to being able to act upon those insights for differentiation and innovation.

It’s true to say that data is the currency of the digital economy. Such a hyper-focus on data implies all sorts of things, not least of all, making sure you’re trusted to handle that data securely, with cybersecurity for all of the good things come that out of that data. 

Another thing we’re seeing now as common in the way people think about digital transformation is that it’s a lot more about being at the edge. It’s about using technology to create an exchange value as they transact value from business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) activities in a variety of different environments. Sometimes those environments can be digitized themselves, the idea of physical digitization and using technology to address people and personalities as well. So edge-centric thinking is another common ingredient.

The third element that’s becoming increasingly common and which underpins digital ambition is the need for greater agility in the way technology is brought into organizations and assembled to build new digital products and experiences. That means shifting organizations rapidly into a cloud-enabled future. Not just establishing the right cloud-use baseline, in terms of platforms and services that IT run, but also increasingly bringing in the development community as well.  And that requires making sure that they’re all coordinated strategically to leverage the cloud in a way that benefits the agility agenda of the organization.

These may not form an exact science, in terms of a standardized method or industry standard benchmark, but we are seeing these common themes now iterate as customers go through digital transformation.

Gardner: It certainly seems that if you want to scale digital transformation across organizations that there needs to be consistency, structure, and common understanding. On the other hand, if everyone does it the same way, you don’t necessarily generate differentiation.

How do you best attain a balance between standardization and innovation?

Partridge: It’s a really good question because there are components of what I just described that can be much more standardized to deliver the desired outcomes from these three pillars. If you look, for example, at cloud-use-enablement, increasingly there are ways to become highly standardized and mobilized around a cloud agenda.

Moving toward containerization and leveraging microservices, or developing with an open API mindset, these are now pervasive principles in almost every industry. IT has to bring its legacy environment to play in all of that at high velocity and high agility.

And that doesn’t vary much from industry to industry. Moving toward containerization, for example, and leveraging microservices or developing with an open API mindset -- these principles are pervasive in almost every industry. IT has to bring its legacy environment to play in that discussion at high velocity and high agility. So there is standardized on that side of it.

The variation kicks in as you pivot toward the edge and in thinking about how to create differentiated digital products and services, as well as how you generate new digital revenue streams and how you use digital channels to reach your customers, citizens, and partners. That’s where we’re seeing a high degree of variability. A lot of that is driven by the industry. For example, if you’re in manufacturing you’re probably looking at how technology can help pinpoint pain or constraints in key performance indicators (KPIs), like overall equipment effectiveness, and in addressing technology use across the manufacturing floor.

If you’re in retail, however, you might be looking at how digital channels can accelerate and outpace the four-walled retail experiences that companies may have relied on pre-pandemic.

Gardner: Craig, before we drill down into the actual Moments, were there any visuals that you wanted to share to help us appreciate the bigger picture of a digital transformation journey?

Partridge: Yes, let me share a couple of observations. As a team, we engage in thousands of customer conversations around the world. And what we’re hearing is exactly what we saw from a recent McKinsey report.


There are number of reasons why seven out of 10 respondents in this particular survey say they are stalled in attaining digital execution and gaining digital business value. Those are centered around four key areas. First of all, communication. It sounds like such a simple problem statement, but it is so hard to sometimes communicate what is a quite complex agenda in a way that is simple enough for as many people as possible -- key stakeholders – to rally behind and to make real inside the organization. Sometimes it’s a simple thing of, “How do I visualize and communicate my digital vision?” If you can’t communicate really clearly, then you can’t build that guiding coalition behind you to help execute. 

A second barrier to progress centers on complexity, so having a lot of suspended, spinning plates at the same time and trying to figure out what’s the relationship and dependencies between all of the initiatives that are running. Can I de-duplicate or de-risk some of what I’m doing to get that done quicker? That tends to be major barrier.

The third one you mentioned, Dana, which is, “Am I doing something different? Am I really trying to unlock the business models and value that are uniquely mine? Am I changing or reshaping my business and my market norms?” The differentiation challenge is really hard.

The fourth barrier is when you do have an idea or initiative agenda, then how to lay out the key building blocks in a way that’s going to get results quickly. That’s a prioritization question. Customers can get stuck in a paralysis-by-analysis mode. They’re not quite sure what to establish first in order to make progress and get to that minimum valuable product as quickly as possible. Those are the top four things we see.

To get over those things, you need a clear transformation strategy and clarity on what it is you’re trying to do. As I always say before the digital transformation -- everything from edge, business model, how to engage with customers and clients, and through to a technology-as-assembly -- to deliver those experiences and differentiation you have to have a distinctive transformation strategy. It leads to an acceleration capability, getting beyond the barriers, and planning the digital capabilities in the right sequence.

You asked, Dana, at the opening if there are emerging models to accomplish all of this. We have established at HPE something called Digital Next Advisory. That’s our joined customer engagement framework, through which we diagnose and pivot beyond the barriers that we commonly see in the customer digital ambitions. So that’s a high-level view of where we see things going, Dana. 

Gardner: Why do you call your advisory service subsets “Moments,” and why have you ordered them the way you did?

Moments create momentum for digital

Partridge: We called them Moments because in our industry if you start calling things services then people believe, “Oh, well, that sounds like just a workshop that I’ll pay for.” It doesn’t sound very differentiated.

We also like the way it expresses co-innovation and co-engagement. A moment is something to be experienced with someone else. So there are two sides to that equation.

In terms of how we sequence them, actually they’re not sequenced. And that’s key. One of the things we do as a team across the world is to work out where the constraint points and barriers are. So think of it as a methodology.

And as with any good methodology, there are a lot of tools in the toolkit. The key for us as practitioners in the Digital Next Advisory service is to know what tool to bring at the right point to the customer.

As with any good methodology, there are a lot of tools in the toolkit. The key for us as practitioners in the Digital Next Advisory service is to know what tool to bring at the right point to the customer.

Sometimes that’s going to mean a communication issue, so let’s go solve for that particular problem first. Or, in some cases, it’s needing a differentiated technology partner, like HPE, to come in and create a vision, or a value proposition, that’s going to be different and unique. And so we would engage more specifically around that differentiation agenda.

There’s no sequencing; the sequencing is unique to each customer. And the right Moment is to make sure that the customer understands it is bidirectional. This is a co-engagement framework between two parties.

Gardner: All right, very good. Let’s welcome back Yara.

Schuetz: To reiterate what Craig mentioned, when we engage with a customer in a complex phenomenon such as digital transformation, it’s important to find common ground where we can and then move forward in the digital transformation journey specific to each of our customers.

Common core beliefs drive outcomes

We have three core beliefs. One is being edge-centric. And on the edge-centric core belief we believe that there are two business goals and business outcomes that our customers are trying to achieve.


In the top left, we have the human edge-centric journey, which is all about redefining customer experiences. In this journey, for example, the corporate initiative could mean the experiences of two personas. It could be the customer or the employees.

These initiatives are designed to increase revenues and productivity via such digital engagements as new services, such as mobile apps. And also to complement this human-to-edge journey we have the physical journey, or the physical edge. To gain insight and control means dealing with the physical edge. It’s about using, for example, Internet of things (IoT) technology for the environment the organization works in, operates in, or provide services in. So the business objective here in this journey consists of improving efficiency by means of digitizing the edge.

Complementary to the edge-centric side, we also have the core belief that the enterprise of the future will be cloud-enabled. By being cloud-enabled, we again separate the cloud-enabled capabilities into two distinct journeys.

The bottom right-hand journey is about modernizing and optimization. In this journey, initiatives address how IT can modernize its legacy environment with, for example, multi-cloud agility. It also includes, for example, optimization and management of services delivery, where different workloads should be best hosted. We’re talking about on-premises as well as different cloud models to focus the IT journey. That also includes software development, especially accelerating development. 

Schuetz

This journey also involves the development improvement around personas. The aim is to speed up time-to-value with cloud-native adoption. For example, calling out microservices or containerization to shift innovation quickly over to the edge, using certain platforms, cloud platforms, and APIs.

The third core belief that the enterprise of the future should strive for is the data-driven, intelligence journey, which is all about analyzing and using data to create intelligence to innovate and differentiate from competitors. As a result, they can better target, for example, business analytics and insights using machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI). Those initiatives generate or consume data from the other journeys.

And complementary to this aspect is bringing trust to all of the digital initiatives. It’s directly linked to the intelligence journey because the data generated or consumed by the four journeys needs to be dealt with in a connected organization with resiliency and cybersecurity playing leading roles resulting in interest to internal as well as external stakeholders. 

At the center is the operating model. And that journey really builds the center of the framework because skills, metrics, practices, and governance models have to be reshaped, since they dictate the outcomes of all digital transformation efforts.

So, the value chain in the heart of an organization needs to evolve in order to optimize existing offerings and to create new digital ones. And as you’ve probably already observed, by now, the four outside business journeys, they overlap in the middle, which I’ve just described as the intelligence operating model and trust piece.


These components build the enabling considerations that one must consider when you’re pursuing different business goals such as driving revenues, building productivity, or modernizing existing environments via multi-cloud agility. To put that all in the context of what many companies are really asking for right now is to put it in the context of everything-as-a-service.

Everything-as-a-service does not just belong to, for example, the cloud-enabled side. It’s not only about how you’re consuming technology. It also applies to the edge side for our customers, and in how they deliver, create, and monetize their services to their customers.

Gardner: Yara, please tell us how organizations are using all of this in practice. What are people actually doing?

Communicate clearly with Activate

Schuetz: One of the core challenges we’ve experienced together with customers is that they have trouble framing and communicating their transformation efforts in an easily understandable way across their entire organizations. That’s not an easy task for them.

Communication tension points tend to be, for example, how to really describe digital transformation. Is there any definition that really suits my business? And how can I visualize, easily communicate, and articulate that to my entire organization? How does what I’m trying to do with technology make sense in a broader context within my company?

So within the Activate Moment, we familiarize them with the digital journey map. This captures their digital ambition and communicates a clear transformation and execution strategy. The digital journey map is used as a model throughout the conversations. This tends to improve how an abstract and complex phenomenon like digital transformation can be delivered as something visual and simple to communicate.

Besides simplification, the digital journey map in the Activate Moment also helps describe an overview and gives a structure of various influencing categories and variables, as well as their relationship with each other, in the context of digital transformation.

Besides simplification, the digital journey map in the Activate Moment also helps describe an overview and gives a structure of various influencing categories and variables, as well as their relationship with each other in the context of digital transformation. It provides our customers guidance on certain considerations, and, of course, all the various possibilities of the application of technology in their business.

For example, at the edge, when we bring the digital journey map into the customer conversation in our Activate Moment, we don’t just talk about the edge generally. We refer to specific customer needs and what their edge might be.

In the financial industry, for example, we talk about branch offices as their edge. In manufacturing, we’re talking about production lines as their edges. If in retail, you have public customers, we talk about the venues as the edge and how – in times like this and the new normal – they can redefine experience and drive value there for their customers there.

Of course, this also serves as inspiration for internal stakeholders. They might say, “Okay, if I link these initiatives, or if I’m talking about this topic in the intelligence space, [how does that impact] the digitization of research and development? What does that mean in that context? And what else do I need to consider?”


Such inspiration means they can tie all of that together into a holistic and effective digital transformation strategy. The Activate Moment engages more innovation on the customer-centric side, too, by bringing insights into the different and various personas at a customer’s edge. They can have different digital ambitions and different digital aspirations that they want to prosper from and bring into the conversation.

Gardner: Thanks again, Yara. On the thinking around personas and the people, how does the issue of defining a new digital corporate culture fit into the Activate Moment?

Schuetz: It fits in pretty well because we are addressing various personas with our Activate Moment. For the chief digital officer (CDO), for example, the impact of the digital initiatives on the digital backbone are really key. She might ask, “Okay, what data will be captured and processed? And which insights will we drive? And how do we make these initiatives trusted?”

Gardner: We’re going to move on now to the next Moment, Align, and orchestrating initiatives with Aviviere. Tell us more about the orchestrating initiatives and the Align Moment, please.

Align with the new normal and beyond

Telang: The Align Moment is designed to help organizations orchestrate their broad catalog of digital transformation initiatives. These are the core initiatives that drive the digital agenda. Over the last few years, as we’ve engaged with customers in various industries, we have found that one of the most common challenges they encounter in this transformation journey is a lack of coordination and alignment between their most critical digital initiatives.


And, frankly, that slows their time-to-market and reduces the value realized from their transformation efforts. Especially now, with the new normal that we find ourselves in, organizations are rapidly scaling up and broadening out that their digital agenda.

As these organizations rapidly pivot to launching new digital experiences and business models, they need to rapidly coordinate their transformation agenda against an ever-increasing set of stakeholders -- who sometimes have competing priorities. These stakeholders can be the various technology teams siting in an IT or digital office, or perhaps the business units responsible for delivering these new experience models to market. Or they can be the internal functions that support internal operations and supply chains of the organizations.

We have found that these groups are not always well-aligned to the digital agenda. They are not operating as a well-oiled machine in their pursuit of that singular digital vision. In this new normal, speed is critical. Organizations have to get aligned to the conversation and execute on all of the digital agenda quickly. That’s where the Align Moment comes in. It is designed to generate deep insights that help organizations evaluate a catalog of digital initiatives across organizational silos and to identify an execution strategy that speeds up their time-to-market. 

Telang
So what does that actually look like? During the Align Moment, we bring together a diverse set of stakeholders that own or contribute to the digital agenda. Some of the stakeholders may sit in the business units, some may sit in internal functions, or maybe even on the digital office. But we bring them together to jointly capture and evaluate the most critical initiatives that drive the core of the digital agenda.

The objective is to jointly blend our own expertise and experience with that of our customers to jointly investigate and uncover the prerequisites and interdependencies that so often exist between these complex sets of enterprise-scale digital initiatives.

During the Align Moment, you might realize that the business units need to quickly recalibrate their business processes in order to meet the data security requirements coming in from the business unit or the digital team. For example, one of our customers found out during their own Align Moment that before they got too far down the path of developing their next generation of digital product, they needed to first build in data transparency and accessibility as a core design principle in their global data hub.

The methodology in the Align Moment significantly reduces execution risk as organizations embark on their multi-year transformation agendas. Quite frankly, these agendas are constantly evolving because the speed of the market today is so fast.

Our goal here is to drive a faster time-to-value for the entire digital agenda by coordinating the digital execution strategy across the organization. That’s what the Align Moment helps our customers with. That value has been brought to different stakeholders that we’ve engaged with.

The Align Moment has brought tremendous value to the CDO, for example. The CDO now has the ability to quickly make sense and -- even in some cases -- coordinate the complex web of digital initiatives running across their organizations, regardless of which silos they may be owned within. They can identify a path to execution that speeds up the realization of the entire digital agenda. I think of it as giving the CDO a dashboard through which they can now see their entire transformation on a singular framework.

We have found that the Align Moment delivers a lot of value for digital initiative owners. Because we work jointly across silos to de-risk, the execution pass implements that initiative whether it's technology risk, process risk, or governance risk.

We’ve also found that the Align Moment delivers a lot of value for digital initiative owners. Because we jointly work across silos to de-risk, the execution pass implements that initiative whether it’s a technology risk, process risk, or governance risk. That helps to highlight the dependencies between these competing initiatives and competing priorities. And then, sequencing the work streams and efforts minimizes the risk of delays or mismatched deliverables, or mismatched outputs, between teams.

And then there is the chief information officer (CIO). This is a great tool for the CIO to take IT to the next level. They can elevate the impact of IT in the business, and in the various functions in the organization, by establishing agile, cross-functional work streams that can speed up the execution of the digital initiatives.

That’s in a nutshell what the Align Moment is about, helping our customers rapidly generate deep insights to help them orchestrate their digital agenda across silos, or break down silos, with the goal to speed up execution of their agendas.

Advance to the next big thing 

Gardner: We’re now moving on to our next Moment, around stimulating differentiation, among other things. We now welcome back Christian to tell us about the Advance Moment.

Reichenbach: The train-of-thought here is that digital transformation is not only to optimize businesses by using technology. We also want to emphasize that technology is used to transform businesses by leveraging digital technology.

Reichenbach

That means that we are using technology to differentiate the value propositions of our customers. And differentiation means, for example, new experiences for the customers of our customers, as well as new interactions with digital technology.

Further, it’s about establishing new digital business models, gaining new revenue streams, and expanding the ecosystem in a much broader sense. We want to leverage technology to differentiate the value propositions of our customers, and differentiation means you can’t do whatever one is doing by just copycatting, looking to your peers, and replicating what others are doing. That will not differentiate the value proposition.

Therefore, we specifically designed the Advance Moment where we co-innovate and co-ideate together with our customers to find their next big thing and driving technology to a much more differentiated value proposition.

Gardner: Christian, tell us more about the discreet steps that people need to do in order to get through that stimulating of differentiation.

Reichenbach: Differentiation comes from having new ideas and doing something different than in the past. That’s why we designed the Advance Moment to help our customers differentiate their unique value proposition.


The Advance Moment is designed as a thinking exercise that we do together with our customers across their diverse teams, meaning product owners, technology designers, engineers, and the CDO. This is a diverse team thinking about a specific problem they want to solve, but they shouldn’t think about it in isolation. They should think about what they do differently in the future to establish new revenue streams with maybe a new digital ecosystem to generate the new digital business models that we see all over the place in the annual reports from our customers.

Everyone is in the race to find the next big thing. We want to help them because we have the technology capabilities and experience to explain and discuss with our customers what is possible today with such leading technology as from HPE.

We can prove that we’ve done that. For example, we sit down with Continental, the second largest automotive part supplier in the world, and ideate about how we can redefine the experience of a driver who is driving along the road. We came up with a data exchange platform that helps our co-manufacturers to exchange data between each other so that the driver who’s sitting in the car gets new entertainment services that were not possible without a data exchange platform.

Our ideation and our Advance Moment are focused on redefining the experience and stimulating new ideas that are groundbreaking -- and are not just copycatting what their peers are doing. And that, of course, will differentiate the value propositions from our customers in a unique way so that they can create new experiences and ultimately new revenue streams.

We're addressing particular personas within our customer's organization. That's because today we see that the product owners in a company are powerful and are always asking themselves, "How can I bring my product to the next level?"

We’re addressing particular personas within our customer’s organization. That’s because today we see that the product owners in a company are powerful and are always asking themselves, “How can I bring my product to the next level? How can I differentiate my product so that it is not easily comparable with my peers?”

And, of course, the CDO in the customer organizations are looking to orchestrate these initiatives and support the product owners and engineers and build up the innovation engine with the right initiatives and right ideas. And, of course, when we’re talking about digital business transformation, we end up in the IT department because it has to operate somewhere.

So we bring in the experts from the IT department as well as the CIO to turn ideas quickly into realization. And for turning ideas quickly into something meaningful for our customers is what we designed the Accelerate Moment for.

Gardner: We will move on next to the Moment with Amos and learn about the Accelerate Moment, of moving toward the larger digital transformation value.

Accelerate from ideas into value

Ferrari: When it comes to realizing digital transformation, let me ask you a question, Dana. What do you think is the key problem our customers have?

Gardner: Probably finding ways to get started and then finding realization of value and benefits so that they can prove their initiative is worthwhile.

Ferrari: Yes. Absolutely. It’s a problem of prioritization of investment. They know that they need to invest, they need to do something, and they ask, “Where should I invest first? Should I invest in the big infrastructure first?”

But these decisions can slow things down. Yet time-to-market and speed are the keys today. We all know that this is what is driving the behavior of the people in their transformations. And so the key thing is the Accelerate Moment. It’s the Moment where we engage with our customers via workshops with them.

We enable them to extrapolate from their digital ambition and identify what will enable them to move into the realization of their digital transformation. “Where should I start? What is my journey’s path? What is my path to value?” These are the main questions that the Accelerate Moment answers.


As you can see, this is a part of the entire HPE Digital Next Advisory services, and it’s enabling the customer to move critically to the realization of benefits. In this engagement, you start with the decision about the use cases and the technology. There are a number of key elements and decisions that the customer is making. And this is where we’re helping them with the Accelerate Moment.

To deliver an Accelerate Moment, we use a number of steps. First, we frame the initiative by having a good discussion about their KPIs. How are you going to measure them? What are the benefits? Because the business is what is thriving. We know that. And we understand how the technology is the link to the business use case. So we frame the initiative and understand the use cases and scope out the use cases that advance the key KPIs that are the essential platform for the customer. That is a key step into the Moment.

Another important thing to understand is that in a digital transformation, a customer is not alone. No customer is really alone in that. It’s not successful if they don’t think holistically about their digital ecosystems. A customer is successful when they think about the complete ecosystem, including not only the key internal stakeholders but the other stakeholders surrounding them. Together they can enable them to build a new digital value and enable customer differentiation.

The next step is understanding the depth of technology across our digital journey map. And the digital journey map helps customers to see beyond just one angle. They may have started only from the IT point of view, or only from the developer point of view, or just the end user point of view. The reality is that IT now is becoming the value creator. But to be the value creator, they need to consider the entire technology of the entire company.

Ferrari
They need to consider edge-to-cloud, and data, as a full picture. This is where we can help them through a discussion about seeing the full technology that supports the value. How can you bring value to your full digital transformation?

The last step that we consider in the Accelerate Moment is to identify the elements surrounding your digital transformation that are the key building blocks and that will enable you to execute immediately. Those building blocks are key because they create what we call the minimal value product.

They should build up a minimum value product and surround it with the execution to realize the value immediately. They should do that without thinking, “Oh, maybe I need two or three years before realize that value.” They need to change to asking, “How can I do that in a very short time by creating something that is simple and straightforward to create by putting the key building blocks in place.”

This shows how everything is linked and how we need to best link them together. How? We link everything together with stories. And the stories are what help our key stakeholders realize what they needed to create. The stories are about the different stakeholders and how the different stakeholders see themselves in the future of digital transformation. This is the way we show them how this is going to be realized.

The end result is that we will deliver a number of stories that are used to assemble the key building blocks. We create a narrative to enable them to see how the applied technology enables them to create value for their company and achieve the key growth. This is the Accelerate Moment.

Gardner: Craig, as we’ve been discussing differentiation for your customers, what differentiates HPE Pointnext Services? Why are these four Moments the best way to obtain digital transformation?

Partridge: Differentiation is key for us, as well as for our customers across a complex and congested landscape of partners that the customers can choose. Some of the differentiation we’ve touched on here. There is no one else in the market, as far as I’m aware, that has the edge-to-cloud digital journey map, which is HPE’s fundamental model and allows us then to holistically paint the story of not only digital transformation and digital ambition -- but also shows you how to do that at the initiative level and to how plug in those building blocks.

I’m not saying that anybody with just the maturity of an edge-to-cloud model can bring digital ambition to life, to visualize it through the Activate Moment, orchestrate it through the Align Moment, create differentiation through the Advance Moment, and then get to quicker value with the Accelerate Moment.

Gardner: Craig, for those organizations interested in learning more, how do they get started? Where can they go for resources to gain the ability to innovate and be differentiated?

Partridge: If anybody viewing this has seen something that they want to grab on to, that they think can accelerate their own digital ambition, then simply pick up the phone and call HPE and your sales rep. We have sales organizations from dedicated enterprise managers at some of that biggest customers around the world, on through to small- to medium-sized businesses with our inside-sales organization. Call your HPE sales rep and say the magic words “I want to engage with a digital adviser and I’m interested in Digital Next Advisory.” And that should be the flag that triggers a conversation with one of our digital advisers around the world.


Finally, there’s an email address,
digitaladviser@hpe.com. If worse comes to worst, throw an email to that address and then we’d be able to get straight back to you. So, it should make it as easy as possible and just reach out to HPE advisors in advance.

Gardner: I’m afraid we have to leave it there. We’ve been examining how to transform organizations to effectively innovate for a new era a pervasive digital business. And we’ve learned how HPE Pointnext Services advises organizations across the multi-step series of Moments that guide organizations on and through their transformations.

Please join me in thanking our guests:

  • Craig Partridge, Senior Director Worldwide, Digital Advisory and Transformation Practice Lead, at HPE Pointnext Services;

  • Yara Schuetz, Global Digital Advisor at HPE Pointnext Services;

  • Aviviere Telang, Global Digital Advisor at HPE Pointnext Services;

  • Christian Reichenbach, Global Digital Advisor at HPE Pointnext Services, and

  • Amos Ferrari, Global Digital Advisor at HPE Pointnext Services.

Thank you all very much. And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining the sponsored BriefingsDirect Voice of Innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host of this ongoing series on HPE-supported discussions.


Thanks again for listening, please pass this along to your IT community, and be sure to come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. See the video. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion with HPE Pointnext Services experts as they detail a multi-step series of “Moments” that guide organizations on their transformations. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2021. All rights reserved.

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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Expert Chat on How HP Ecosystem Provides Holistic Support for VMware Virtualized IT Environments

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with an HP Expert Chat series on the best practices for service and support of highly virtualized environments.

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

Redefine the potential of your virtualization investments.
View the full Expert Chat presentation on VMware support best practices.

Dana Gardner: Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect presentation, a sponsored podcast created from a recent HP Expert Chat discussion on best practices for VMware environment support.

Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better holistic approach to IT support remediation. That’s why HP has made the service and support of global virtualization market leader VMware a top priority.

And while the technology to support and fix these virtualized environments is essential, it’s the people, skills, and knowledge to manage these systems that provide the most decisive determinants of ongoing performance success.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. To learn more, I recently moderated a discussion with Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex Problem Resolution and Quality for VMware Products at HP. Cindy has 27-plus years of experience with HP and 8-plus years supporting VMware specifically. [Disclosure: HP and VMware are both sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

In our discussion, you’ll hear the latest recommendations for how IT support should be done. As part of our chat, we’re also be joined by two other HP experts: Pat Lampert, Critical Service Senior Technical Account Manager and Team Leader, as well as Sumithra Reddy, HP Virtualization Engineer. Our discussion begins with an overview from me of the virtualization market and user adoption trends.

Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, particularly in regard to things like security, performance and how your brands and businesses are perceived across the globe. Many of the companies that I deal with day in and day out are up at 80 percent and even 90 percent virtualized.

When they think about virtualization, they go beyond just server virtualization. It’s really now looking at storage, applications, networks and even the end-user desktop experience, or desktop as a service (VDI).

These are all reasons why it’s no longer just about servers, but has to be something that includes how you're looking at IT in general. It’s also a cultural issue. It’s about managing complexity when you get to that 20 percent or 30 percent level, and not letting the value and benefits for virtualization be eroded by a management issue, or complexity around management.

So how to take advantage of the best things about virtualization? Part of that means allowing your IT team to have access to other experienced support teams, from HP and VMware, around the world, 24×7, to help keep systems up and running. Such support also allows your IT team to progress, to learn as they go, and to be able to take advantage of more virtualization benefits over time.

Another thing to consider is that the way your organizations is perceived, not only your IT organization, but your total company, is so dependent now on how your systems perform. It’s really impossible to separate a business from its IT performance. In many cases, your applications are the business. How you present on performance is, in fact, how you present your sense of competency, capability, and your overall brand.

We encourage people, as they pursue more virtualization, to recognize that their web applications, their mobile applications or e-commerce activities all are running on a combination of virtual and a physical infrastructure. These need to be tuned, and performance needs to be considered on an ongoing basis.

Expert panel

So how do you go about attaining such benefits? How do you keep the positive side of virtualization on track? And how do you put in place an insurance policy around service and support? That’s what the HP experts are going to help us understand.

I’d like to introduce one of our chief experts: Cindy Manderson, a consultant for complex problem resolution at HP with 27 years of experience. She’s been supporting VMware products and the ecosystem of VMware for eight years, when VMware came on the scene in a big way.

Cindy is going to provide more insights into how mission critical support works in virtualization, how HP and VMware are working together, and what the synergy between their products amounts to. Cindy, tell us about yourself.

Manderson: Thanks, Dana. I've been in the multi-vendor space for many, many years -- from applications to operating systems -- all with HP.

In 2002, when VMware came on the scene, HP actually became alliance partners with them. In 2003, we became a reseller, and thus began our support partnership with them. It would only extend recent in 2005, we also became an OEM.

We have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We're also the largest global VMware off-site training center

We have thousands of trained and certified Microsoft engineers and Linux professionals, too.

But we have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We're also have the largest global VMware off-site training center. So HP also does education on these technologies as well. We’ve trained over 20,000 students in the VMware space alone.

And we have had this very strong collaboration with VMware for many years and have support teams around the globe. In addition, we also offer the same level of training that VMware support engineers do. We actually go to their facilities and train right alongside them, too.

We further do this training virtually. The training is then recorded and made available on demand for reference, for folks who are not able to attend a scheduled course. There's definitely a very strong partnership, and as you see from our history with the other vendors as well as VMware, we are no strangers to multi-vendor support.

With all of the VMware products that HP sells, we do provide support across them all. It runs the gamut from the vSphere operating system that will install on the x86 server, through the enterprise management to the vCenter, and virtual desktop infrastructure products like VMware ThinApp. We also support the converter product getting into vCloud Director.

In addition to that, we have the ability to access our peers on the other teams across HP hardware support. This includes servers and storage, and our networking chain. We are quickly able to collaborate with them and pull together a virtual team in to focus on the customer's whole environment, to provide a one-stop shop.

Expertise across technologies

Additionally, you saw that we’ve been in this multi-vendor support business for so many years, with many experts across the other technologies, such as Microsoft and Linux. Of course, the virtual machines (VMs) are running these operating systems. So if the contract is also with them, we can easily pull them in to help us work an end-to-end solution and support it.

Gardner: Let’s think about what happens when there are different levels of support at work. How does that shake-out?

Manderson: We're in a reactive support business. If the customer has a problem, they can either call in at their local region telephone number -- whether they are in America, Europe, or Asia Pacific. There are different phone numbers for them to call.

They can also log in via the web, and they'll get to our next developer Level 1 engineer. They're a great organization and have solved over 85 percent of their cases.

If they have issues where they have to escalate, first they will be collaborating with us. We also have an online chat tool, where we are all in a virtual room, the Level 1 engineers, Level 2 engineers, etc. So we’ll be consulting and collaborating with them before they even get to a point of escalation.

If the case does end up needing escalation, chances are this person that they're already collaborating with will end up taking that case.



If the case does end up needing escalation, chances are they're already collaborating with the first person, and will then end up taking the case. That saves a lot of information transfer, as far as what type of server you have, what’s the firmware, what build level, and what’s the problem there, etc.

Once it reaches Level 2 support, as far as we can continue to collaborate, we can reach our teammates and the hardware teams, too, so we can look at the server and make sure that the environment is what we need it to be. If we can't resolve it, we can also go to Level 3 with VMware at an offline service-partner level.

We have a great relationship with the folks that we work alongside with and would escalate calls to at VMware. We’re obviously not going into Level 1 at VMware because we’ve already done all that work, and we are a service partner. They'll go right up to our peers over at VMware and then we work together, while always owning the solution that we provide back to the customer.

Gardner: And let’s look at this also from the perspective of globalization. So many organizations now just don’t stop in the afternoon and go home. The ongoing problems can’t just be left until the next day. How does it work on a continuity basis, time zone to time zone, region to region?

Manderson: Another part of our infrastructure-as-a-support-organization is that we have a single customer database. I can give an example. A call came into our Level 1 French engineer. When this call came in, for the European folks, it was already the end of their day, and the French engineer could not speak English. It was a critical down, their VMs were offline.

HP Virtual Room


So we worked in a virtual room and they talked to us, and brought the case to us here in America’s time zone. We worked with this case and another tool called HP Virtual Room, where we could actually all look at the customers' desktops in real time. They happened to have EVA storage, and we quickly got an EVA engineer engaged. Of course, we had to find a resource in the Americas because the European folks had already left. So we're all looking in real-time at the customer’s environment and found out that they had locked the storage.

The EVA engineer helped to get back online, while we all watched and the French engineer was translating in French for the customer in order to get it all resolved. We got it back online, and the customers were ready to home.

We gave instructions on getting log files and we placed a call for follow-up for the daytime hours in Europe the next day. So our counterparts in European support teams picked that up and worked with the customers to resolution, to analyze exactly what happened and prevent it in the future.

Gardner: You have a lot of examples at your disposal, I can tell. You've been through a lot with different customers. What sticks out in your mind as a particularly complex engagement that ended up turning out pretty well that might illustrate a bit more about what this takes and what’s involved?

Manderson: A lot of examples I've given have all been involved with the Level 2 support organizations, the HP server storage hardware, and also engaging VMware. There was another case.

Many of the examples that I've given so far are pretty much based on individual incidents. You call in and you get connected to the next available resource.



We have another process in HP that can actually go with top organizations, our escalation manager process. I was lead source for a particular case where we had a field team assisting a customer deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) design. They had a third-party VDI vendor. They had HP hardware, servers, and virtual connects. They had our storage, and we didn’t quite know where the bottleneck was. They were having performance issues by trying to have this VDI at two different locations with the hardware at one site.

The escalation manager was able to get the local office to borrow equipment, and then try to get performance and network traces. They had the Engineering Problem Management Resource (EPMR) lab in Houston trying to duplicate the problems.

Our escalation manager was able to drive the issue to completion across not only the solution standards, but the local office, to owning the actual escalation with all the action items to keep this all on track. We knew where we were going to go. That was about a six-month case, but we did finally find was that the customer was on the technological edge, and the "pipe" to have that performance just did not exist.

Many of the examples that I've given so far are pretty much based on individual incidents. You call in and you get connected to the next available resource.

We have another level, mission-critical support, and we have several offerings in this phase. Essentially, it’s more personalized. We know who you are. We already know your environment. You’re going to find a technical account manager.

Redefine the potential of your virtualization investments.
View the full Expert Chat presentation on VMware support best practices.

Site visits

For example, Pat Lampert is a technical account manager and does site visits. The technical account managers do go out on site. So we’re aware of the environment. We have the information of your environment documented into the database. When you call, we’re not saying, "Now what kind of server is this? What’s the firmware?" We know this because we already have it documented. We could be calling them to say, "Server 3 is running a little off." We already which know VMware version this is on, because we have that information.

And because we have that, we can also offer proactive advice. We can know that there's a new firmware update, or VMware just came out with a new build, and we have a place where you can go find the latest that's specific to your environment. So this helps to reduce further incidents, because we can be more proactive to help you maintain your business.

Gardner: Okay, none of these organizations are the same. They have difference legacy, different installations, and different physical-virtualization mixes. How do you manage that sort of complex combination, as well as customize the service delivery, too?

Manderson: Actually, we have a team, our customer service team. Anything that's been not already in our pre-packaged service offerings, we can add. For example, a customer may need their own 800 number for when they log cases. And they may need just an email sent out.

Pat Lampert is one of our our custom technical account managers. He does have additional requirements and possibilities for some of the customers that he is assigned. This way, we can personalize the businesses even more and focus on choosing that business model.

Our critical and independent support includes onsite resources from HP that also include a lot of proactive support.



Gardner: Tell me about the mission critical offerings, and then the whole portfolio.

Manderson: We have several different packages. Our highest level is the mission-critical. In this particular process, you're assigned a team that are across the technology that you have in your environment. But you also get a set of folks who would actually look at not just the reactive support and even some of the proactive, but how actually your entire business is running according to the ITIL standard.

That is coupled with keeping you up and running, and we also can work with you on a type that would be best suited for your environment.

Our critical and independent support includes onsite resources from HP that also include a lot of proactive support. In addition, they're more focused on specific management, but that would be more of an ITSM technology. We can look at that for you.

One of our most creative services would be Proactive Select, a core product series of credits. You can use these credits for maybe planning on migration and upgrade. You can say you need some consulting time. You can use these credits and work with upgrade and migration. You may need some performance or you may need some type of environmental assessment, and these credits can be used for that.

Gardner: When people do employ these services, how do they measure what the payoff is, the value of these services?

IDC study

Manderson: In 2010, IDC did a study. They went out and looked at the methodology, and this is out on our website. They saw that the customers who have the mission-critical services, reduce their downtime by over 70 percent, and increase their return on investment (ROI) quite high, over 400 percent. The main benefit was in problem management as well as help desk calls, because these were alleviated due to the proactive nature, a lot of looking at the entire environment, and looking at the business processes.

So take a look at the study. It shows IDC's methodology. So looking at things proactively and these support processes can certainly help you reduce that downtime.

Gardner: This support extends across a variety of different areas. We looked at the mission critical, we looked at those complex issues, the need for customization. Can you give a quick overview of some of the additional support services?

Manderson: We have the hardware and software support. One of the cool things we have with our hardware support is support automation, our Insight for remote support. That can notify HP that you're having a disk drive failure. Or we will call you and say that we know that disk drive is failing, or something on a buffer server and storage is about to.

You can even take that a step further to look inside at the Windows operating system. We're hardware agnostic on that operating system. We don't care about the vendor -- and I believe we are looking at expanding that automation to other operating systems. We have installation and startup services that we can actually go out and set up and configure the hardware and software at a site.

We're hardware agnostic on that operating system. We don't care about the vendor.



So we definitely integrate across all the multi-vendor services. We run the gamut between all the x86 operating systems, as well as our proprietary operating systems, our servers and storage. Again, we're no stranger to multi-vendor support and keeping the entire environment up and running.

Gardner: We've talked about the need for ecosystem-level view on virtualization. We looked at how HP and VMware have been working together very closely for a number of years, talked about some of the services available, why the experts’ personal experience and knowledge is essential, and the ability then for them to react toward something that’s unique that they haven’t seen before, bring in the expertise when they need it, act as a adjunct to the teams at the sites of these organizations.

And we have heard a little bit about some of the payback, 400 percent ROI, according to IDC. Now let's take this back to the experts themselves. We've heard from Cindy, but there are others involved. Hi, Sumithra.

Reddy: Dana, I'll address two questions that are frequently showing up. One is, what is the difference between the VMware ESXi image and an HP ESXi image?

Basically, HP takes the same ESXi image that VMware provides to the customers. It then adds HP thin components for hardware management, and it also adds any latest fibre channel and network drivers. Once it's tested and certified, it's available for download both from HP and VMware websites.

Major differences

A
nd one of the major difference between the two images is that VMware image is disk installable only, whereas HP image can be installed on a disk, USB key, or a SD card.

The other question we're getting nowadays is how to upgrade from VCA4 to VCA5. As with any major upgrades, planning helps. The first thing I would do is understand the difference between ESX 4 and ESX 5, because starting with ESX 5, we have no service console. So we need to understand what the architectural differences are.

Also learn about the new licensing policies. Then, use the System Analyzer that VMware provides to evaluate the current environments, and download, check, and complete the checklist. Once this is done, hopefully the upgrade will go smoothly.

Gardner: Pat, tell us about some of the other questions and your answers please.

Lampert: Another question that has come up from customers has to do with the added value of getting support directly from HP. It was partly addressed during the presentation we just gave. First of all, VMware does have a fine support organization. I have a couple of friends who work in VMware Support, and they do a good job of supporting their product.

HP, in addition to a similar level of expertise in the product, also offers our expertise in HP hardware, especially if you have systems based on HP Blades. The infrastructure behind that often is tied very closely to the performance and availability of your ESX host. So when you call us, you will have not only someone who is very familiar with the VMware product, but also is familiar with the HP hardware and able to pull in the proper resourced results, problems you might encounter with running vSphere on HP hardware especially.

In addition to that, we have a partnership agreement with VMware, and when you call in for support through HP, you're getting that same level of service when we have to go to VMware to get answers to questions or fixes.

One other question that has come up is about our lab ability to reproduce problems. We have two global labs, one in India and one in the United States. We have several static vSphere cluster configurations with a number of different types of servers already in those configurations, and the ability, when needed, to add specific models, if there is a problem that’s specific to a particular Blade or rack-mounted server model, or a particular card or something like that. So we're quite able to reproduce most problems that come in. We even have some Dell and IBM equipment in our lab also.

Gardner: Back to you Sumithra. Do you have any thoughts on some of the questions that really caught your attention that you think are representative of what our audience is thinking and feeling today?

Reddy: One little question I can answer is how to troubleshoot server crashes. When something goes wrong in ESX, we call it the "Purple Screen of Death." Often, these are results of hardware failure, but we still need to rule out the software. So we collect all the logs, and look at it to see if it's a software issue. If it's not a software issue, then we engage the hardware team to see how we can get to the root cause and fix the issue.

Lampert: To dovetail with Sumithra’s comment there, one of the questions I get frequently is what to do if you don’t have a dump. Say the host hangs, and that seems to be almost more common than the Purple Screen of Death. Some customers are't aware that through HP’s Integrated Lights-Out Management, there is the ability to generate a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) just by pressing a button, and by saving a certain environment variable ahead of time in your ESX host.

KB article

There is a KB article on this, by the way, if you just search on NMI and core dumping in VMware. But with that setup, you can force a dump while a system is in a hung state, and that will assist us usually in troubleshooting and isolating what caused the hang, whether it be hardware or a problem with the ESX host software.

Gardner: Pat, we have time for one more.

Lampert: One question that came up ahead of time is what HP suggests as far as getting a handle on our inventory of VMs? I happened to be involved in field testing some new tools from HP that will be available in January and February regarding vSphere.

One of them is a Holistic Blade and Firmware Analysis that takes into account the VMware environment on our Blade systems which we are working on having ready soon. We have just completed field tests.

And the second is a really nifty Inventory Report HP has just put together. We're just completing field tests on that now. It will be available soon. Basically, we install a small Perl script in the customer environment on any machine that has access to the vCenter host and has a vSphere CLI installed.

This Perl Script crawls through the VMware environment and builds an XML file, which we then feed into a report generator here at HP. This can be used for us to gather information on customers, so we have ahead of time a clear picture of the environment. But also it will be sold as a service to customers.

This Perl Script crawls through the VMware environment and builds an XML file, which we then feed into a report generator here at HP.



The report is really quite nice, with all sorts of charts and showing availability of machines and availability of memory and also disk space. It's a very nice report. You should be able to get a sample, if you're interested.

Gardner: Well, that about wraps up our hour. I really want to thank our audience for joining us. I hope you found it valuable.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a special BriefingsDirect presentation, a sponsored podcast created from a recent HP expert chat discussion on best practices for VMware environment support.

I would like to also thank our guests, Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex Problem Resolution & Quality for VMware Products at HP; Pat Lampert, Critical Service Senior Technical Account Manager and Team Leader at HP, as well as Sumithra Reddy, HP Virtualization Engineer. And to our audience, again, thanks to you all for listening and come back next time.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with an HP Expert Chat series on the best practices for service and support of highly virtualized environments. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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

Redefine the potential of your virtualization investments.
View the full Expert Chat presentation on VMware support best practices.

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