Enterprises Look for Partners to Make the Most of Microsoft Azure Stack Apps

Transcript of a discussion on how the application development and PaaS benefits from Microsoft Azure Stack will provide vertical industries with hybrid cloud deployment flexibility.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on digital transformation strategies and best practices.

Our next hybrid cloud advancements discussion explores the application development and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) benefits from Microsoft Azure Stack. We’ll now learn how ecosystems of solutions partners are teaming to provide specific vertical industries with applications and services that target private cloud deployments.

Here to help us explore the latest in successful cloud-based applications development and deployment is our panel, Martin van den Berg, Vice President and Cloud Evangelist at Sogeti USA, based in Cleveland. Welcome, Martin.

van den Berg

Martin van den Berg: Thank you, Dana. I am glad to be here.

Gardner: We’re also here with Ken Won, Director of Cloud Solutions Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Welcome back, Ken.

Ken Won: Thank you, Dana. Always a pleasure.

Gardner: Martin, what are some of the trends that are driving the adoption of hybrid cloud applications specifically around the Azure Stack platform?

van den Berg: What our clients are dealing with on a daily basis is an ever-expanding data center, they see ever-expanding private clouds in their data centers. They are trying to get into the hybrid cloud space to reap all the benefits from both an agility and compute perspective.

Bridging the gap

They are trying to get out of the data center space, to see how the ever-growing demand can leverage the cloud. What we see is that Azure Stack will bridge the gap between the cloud that they have on-premises, and the public cloud that they want to leverage -- and basically integrate the two in a true hybrid cloud scenario.

Gardner: What sorts of applications are your clients calling for in these clouds? Are these cloud-native apps, greenfield apps? What are they hoping to do first and foremost when they have that hybrid cloud capability?

van den Berg: We see a couple of different streams there. One is the native-cloud development. More and more of our clients are going into cloud-native development. We recently brought out a white paper wherein we see that 30 percent of applications being built today are cloud-native already. We expect that trend to grow to more than 60 percent over the next three years for new applications.

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The issue that some of our clients have has to do with some of the data being consumed in these applications. Either due to compliance issues, or that their information security divisions are not too happy, they don’t want to put this data in the public cloud. Azure Stack bridges that gap as well.
 

They can leverage the whole Azure public cloud PaaS while still having their data on-premises in their own data center. That's a unique capability.

Microsoft Azure Stack can bridge the gap between the on-premises data center and what they do in the cloud. They can leverage the whole Azure public cloud PaaS while still having their data on-premises in their own data center. That's a unique capability.

On the other hand, what we also see is that some of our clients are looking at Azure Stack as a bridge to gap the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space. Even in that space, where clients are not willing to expand their own data center footprint, they can use Azure Stack as a means to seamlessly go to the Azure public IaaS cloud.

Gardner: Ken, does this jibe with what you are seeing at HPE, that people are starting to creatively leverage hybrid models? For example, are they putting apps in one type of cloud and data in another, and then also using their data center and expanding capacity via public cloud means?

Won

Won: We see a lot of it. The customers are interested in using both private clouds and public clouds. In fact, many of the customers we talk to use multiple private clouds and multiple public clouds. They want to figure out how they can use these together -- rather than as separate, siloed environments. The great thing about Azure Stack is the compatibility between what’s available through Microsoft Azure public cloud and what can be run in their own data centers.

The customer concerns are data privacy, data sovereignty, and security. In some cases, there are concerns about application performance. In all these cases, it's a great situation to be able to run part or all of the application on-premises, or on an Azure Stack environment, and have some sort of direct connectivity to a public cloud like Microsoft Azure.

Because you can get full API compatibility, the applications that are developed in the Azure public cloud can be deployed in a private cloud -- with no change to the application at all.

Gardner: Martin, are there specific vertical industries gearing up for this more than others? What are the low-lying fruit in terms of types of apps?

Hybrid healthcare files

Van den Berg: I would say that hybrid cloud is of interest across the board, but I can name a couple of examples of industries where we truly see a business case for Azure Stack.

One of them is a client of ours in the healthcare industry. They wanted to standardize on the Microsoft Azure platform. One of the things that they were trying to do is deal with very large files, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) files. What they found is that in their environment such large files just do not work from a latency and bandwidth perspective in a cloud.

With Microsoft Azure Stack, they can keep these larger files on-premises, very close to where they do their job, and they can still leverage the entire platform and still do analytics from a cloud perspective, because that doesn’t require the bandwidth to interact with things right away. So this is a perfect example where Azure Stack bridges the gap between on-premises and cloud requirements while leveraging the entire platform.

Gardner: What are some of the challenges that these organizations are having as they move to this model? I assume that it's a little easier said than done. What's holding people back when it comes to taking full advantage of hybrid models such as Azure Stack?

van den Berg: The level of cloud adoption is not really yet where it should be. A lot of our clients have cloud strategies that they are implementing, but they don't have a lot of expertise yet on using the power that the platform brings.

Some of the basic challenges that we need to solve with clients are that they are still dealing with just going to Microsoft Azure cloud and the public cloud services. Azure Stack simplifies that because they now have the cloud on-premises. With that, it’s going to be easier for them to spin-up workload environments and try this all in a secure environment within their own walls, their own data centers.

Should a specific workload go in a private cloud, or should another workload go in a public cloud?

Won: We see a similar thing with our client base as customers look to adopt hybrid IT environments, a mix of private and public clouds. Some of the challenges they have include how to determine which workload should go where. Should a specific workload go in a private cloud, or should another workload go in a public cloud?

We also see some challenges around processes, organizational process and business process. How do you facilitate and manage an environment that has both private and public clouds? How do you put the business processes in place to ensure that they are being used in the proper way? With Azure Stack -- because of that full compatibility with Azure -- it simplifies the ability to move applications across different environments.

Gardner: Now that we know there are challenges, and that we are not seeing the expected adoption rate, how are organizations like Sogeti working in collaboration with HPE to give a boost to hybrid cloud adoption?

Strategic, secure, scalable cloud migration 

Van den Berg: As the Cloud Evangelist with Sogeti, for the past couple of years I have been telling my clients that they don’t need a data center. The truth is, they probably need some form of on-premises still. But the future is in the clouds, from a scalability and agility perspective -- and the hyperscale with which Microsoft is building out their Azure cloud capabilities, there are no enterprise clients that can keep up with that. 

We try to help our clients define strategy, help them with governance -- how do they approach cloud and what workloads can they put where based on their internal regulations and compliance requirements, and then do migration projects.

The future is in the clouds, from a scalability and agility perspective.

We have a service offering called the Sogeti Cloud Assessment, where we go in and evaluate their application portfolio on their cloud readiness. At the end of this engagement, we start moving things right away. We have been really successful with many of our clients in starting to move workloads to the cloud.

Having Azure Stack will make that even easier. Now when a cloud assessment turns up some issues on moving the Microsoft Azure public cloud -- because of compliance or privacy issues or just comfort (sometimes the information security departments just don't feel comfortable moving certain types of data to a public cloud setting) -- we can move those applications to the cloud, leverage the full power and scalability of the cloud while keeping it within the walls of our clients’ data centers. That’s how we are trying to accelerate the cloud adoption, and we truly feel that Azure Stack bridges that gap.

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Gardner: Ken, same question, how are you and Sogeti working together to help foster more hybrid cloud adoption?

Won: The cloud market has been maturing and growing. In the past, it’s been somewhat complicated to implement private clouds. Sometimes these private clouds have been incompatible with each other, and with the public clouds.

In the Azure Stack area, now we have almost an appliance-like experience where we have systems that we build in our factories that we pre-configure, pretest, and get them into the customers’ environment so that they can quickly get their private cloud up and running. We can help them with the implementation, set it up so that Sogeti can help with the cloud-native applications work.
 

With Sogeti and HPE working together, we make it much simpler for companies to adopt the hybrid cloud models and to quickly see the benefit of moving into a hybrid environment.

Sogeti and HPE work together to make it much simpler for companies to adopt the hybrid cloud models.

van den Berg: In talking to many of our clients, when we see the adoption of private cloud in their organizations -- if they are really honest -- it doesn't go very far past just virtualization. They truly haven't leveraged what cloud could bring, not even in a private cloud setting.

So talking about hybrid cloud, it is very hard for them to leverage the power of hybrid clouds when their own private cloud is just virtualization. Azure Stack can help them to have a true private cloud within the walls of their own data centers and so then also leverage everything that Microsoft Azure public cloud has to offer.

Won: I agree. When they talk about a private cloud, they are really talking about virtual  machines, or virtualization. But because the Microsoft Azure Stack solution provides built-in services that are fully compatible with what's available through Microsoft Azure public cloud, it truly provides the full cloud experience. These are the types of services that are beyond just virtualization running within the customers’ data center.

Keep IT simple

I think Azure Stack adoption will be a huge boost to organizations looking to implement private clouds in their data centers.

Gardner: Of course your typical end-user worker is interested primarily their apps, they don’t really care where they are running. But when it comes to getting new application development, rapid application development (RAD), these are some of the pressing issues that most businesses tell us concern them.

So how does RAD, along with some DevOps benefits, play into this, Martin? How are the development people going to help usher in cloud and hybrid cloud models because it helps them satisfy the needs of the end-users in terms of rapid application updates and development?

van den Berg: This is also where we are talking about the difference between virtualization, private cloud, hybrid clouds, and definitely cloud services. So for the application development staff, they still run in the traditional model, they still run into issues in provisioning of their development environments and sometimes test environments.

A lot of cloud-native application development projects are much easier because you can spin-up environments on the go. What Azure Stack is going to help with is having that environment within the client’s data center; it’s going to help the developers to spin up their own resources.

There is going to be on-demand orchestration and provisioning, which is truly beneficial to application development -- and it's really beneficial to the whole DevOps suite.

There is going to be on-demand orchestration and provisioning, which is truly beneficial to application development -- and it's really beneficial to the whole DevOps suite. 

We need to integrate business development and IT operations to deliver value to our clients. If we are waiting multiple weeks for development and the best environment to spin up -- that’s an issue our clients are still dealing with today. That’s where Azure Stack is going to bridge the gap, too.

Won: There are a couple of things that we see happening that will make developers much more productive and able to bring new applications or updates quicker than ever before. One is the ability to get access to these services very, very quickly. Instead of going to the IT department and asking them to spin up services, they will be able to access these services on their own.

The other big thing that Azure Stack offers is compatibility between private and public cloud environments. For the first time, the developer doesn't have to worry about what the underlying environment is going to be. They don’t have to worry about deciding, is this application going to run in a private cloud or a public cloud, and based on where it’s going, do they have to use a certain set of tools for that particular environment.

Now that we have compatibility between the private cloud and the public cloud, the developer can just focus on writing code, focus on the functionality of the application they are developing, knowing that that application now can easily be deployed into a private cloud or a public cloud depending on the business situation, the security requirements, and compliance requirements.

So it’s really about helping the developers become more effective and helping them focus more on code development and applications rather than having them worry about the infrastructure, or waiting for infrastructure to come from the IT department.

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Gardner: Martin, for those organizations interested in this and want to get on a fast track, how does an organization like Sogeti working in collaboration with HPE help them accelerate adoption?

van den Berg: This is where we heavily partner with HPE, to bring the best solutions to our clients. We have all kinds of proof of concepts, we have accelerators, and one of the things that we talked about already is making developers get up to speed faster. We can truly leverage those accelerators and help our clients adopt cloud, and adopt all the services that are available on the hybrid platform.

We have all heard the stories about standardizing on micro-services, on a server fabric, or serverless computing, but developers have not had access to this up until now and IT departments have been slow to push this to the developers.

The accelerators that we have, the approaches that we have, and the proofs of concept that we can do with our client -- together with HPE --  are going to accelerate cloud adoption with our clientele. 

Gardner: Any specific examples, some specific vertical industry use-cases where this really demonstrates the power of the true hybrid model?

When the ship comes in

Won: I can share a couple of examples of the types of companies that we are working with in the hybrid area, and what places that we see typical customers using Azure Stack.

People want to implement disconnected applications or edge applications. These are situations where you may have a data center or an environment running an application that you may either want to run in a disconnected fashion or run to do some local processing, and then move that data to the central data center.

One example of this is the cruise ship industry. All large cruise ships have essentially data centers running the ship, supporting the thousands of customers that are on the ship. What the cruise line vendors want to do is put an application on their many ships and to run the same application in all of their ships. They want to be able to disconnect from connectivity of the central data center while the ship is out at sea and to do a lot of processing and analytics in the data center, in the ship. Then when the ship comes in and connects to port and to the central data center, it only sends the results of the analysis back to the central data center.

This is a great example of having an application that can be developed once and deployed in many different environments, you can do that with Azure Stack. It’s ideal, running that same application in multiple different environments, in either disconnected or connected situations.

van den Berg: In the financial services industry, we know they are heavily regulated. We need to make sure that they are always in compliance.

So one of the things that we did in the financial services industry with one of our accelerators, we actually have a tool called Sogeti OneShare. It’s a portal solution on top of Microsoft Azure that can help you with orchestration, which can help you with the whole DevOps concept. We were able to have the edge node be Azure Stack -- building applications, have some of the data reside within the data center on the Azure Stack appliance, but still leverage the power of the clouds and all the analytics performance that was available there.

That's what DevOps is supposed to deliver -- faster value to the business, leveraging the power of clouds.

van den Berg: In talking to many of our clients, when we see the adoption of private cloud in their organizations -- if they are really honest -- it doesn't go very far past just virtualization. They truly haven't leveraged what cloud could bring, not even in a private cloud setting.

So talking about hybrid cloud, it is very hard for them to leverage the power of hybrid clouds when their own private cloud is just virtualization. Azure Stack can help them to have a true private cloud within the walls of their own data centers and so then also leverage everything that Microsoft Azure public cloud has to offer. We just did a project in this space and we were able to deliver functionality to the business from start of the project in just eight weeks. They have never seen that before -- the project that just lasts eight weeks and truly delivers business value. That's the direction that we should be taking. That’s what DevOps is supposed to deliver -- faster value to the business, leveraging the power of clouds.

Gardner: Perhaps we could now help organizations understand how to prepare from a people, process, and technology perspective to be able to best leverage hybrid cloud models like Microsoft Azure Stack.

Martin, what do you suggest organizations do now in order to be in the best position to make this successful when they adopt?

Be prepared

Van den Berg: Make sure that the cloud strategy and governance are in place. That's one of the first things this should always start with.

Then, start training developers, and make sure that the IT department is the broker of cloud services. In the traditional sense, it is always normal that the IT department is the broker for everything that is happening on-premises within the data center. In the cloud space, this doesn’t always happen. In the cloud space, because it is so easy to spin-up things, sometimes the line of business is deploying.

We try to enable IT departments and operators within our clients to be the broker of cloud services and to help with the adoption of Microsoft Azure cloud and Azure Stack. That will help bridge the gap between the clouds and the on-premises data centers.

Gardner: Ken, how should organizations get ready to be in the best position to take advantage of this successfully?

Mapping the way

Won: As IT organizations look at this transformation to hybrid IT, one of the most important things is to have a strong connection to the line of business and to the business goals, and to be able to map those goals to strategic IT priorities.

Once you have done this mapping, the IT department can look at these goals and determine which projects should be implemented and how they should be implemented. In some cases, they should be implemented in private clouds, in some cases public clouds, and in some cases across both private and public cloud.

The task then changes to understanding the workloads, the characterization of the workloads, and looking at things such as performance, security, compliance, risk, and determining the best place for that workload.

Then, it’s finding the right platform to enable developers to be as successful and as impactful as possible, because we know ultimately the big game changer here is enabling the developers to be much more productive, to bring applications out much faster than we have ever seen in the past.

Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We have been exploring application development and PaaS benefits and best practices around Microsoft Azure Stack. And we have learned how ecosystems of solution partners are teaming to provide application development organizations with the services they need to target hybrid cloud models.

So please join me in thanking our guests, Martin van den Berg, Vice President and Cloud Evangelist at Sogeti USA, and Ken Won, Director of Cloud Solutions Marketing at HPE.

And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining us for this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation strategies discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored interviews.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how the application development and PaaS benefits from Microsoft Azure Stack will provide vertical industries with hybrid cloud deployment flexibility. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2017. All rights reserved.

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Need for Fast Analytics in Healthcare Spurs Sogeti Converged Solutions Partnership Model

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how a triumvirate of big players have teamed to deliver a rapid and efficient analysis capability for healthcare data.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HPE 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.

Google

Our next big-data discussion explores how a triumvirate of big-data players have teamed to deliver a rapid and efficient analysis capability across disparate data types for the healthcare industry. We'll learn how the drive for better patient outcomes amid economic efficiency imperatives has created a demand for a new type of big-data implementation model.

This model with the support from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft, and Sogeti leverages a nimble big-data platform, converged solutions, hybrid cloud, and deep vertical industry expertise. The result is innovative and game-changing insights across healthcare ecosystems of providers, patients, and payers.

The ramp-up to these novel insights is rapid, and the cost-per-analysis value is very aggressive. Here to share the story on how the Data-Driven Decisions for Healthcare initiative arose and why it portends more similar vertical industry focused solutions, we're joined by Bob LeRoy, Vice President in the Global Microsoft Practice and Manager of the HPE Alliance at Sogeti USA. He's based in Cincinnati. Welcome Bob.

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Analytics = Transformation
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Bob LeRoy: Hi, Dana. Thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here.

Gardner: Why the drive for a new model for big data analytics in healthcare? What are some of the drivers, some of the trends, that have made this necessary now?

LeRoy: Everybody is probably very familiar with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as ObamaCare. They've put a lot of changes in place for the healthcare industry, and primarily it's around cost containment. Beyond that, the industry itself understands that they need to improve the quality of care that they're delivering to patients. That's around outcomes, how can we affect the care and the wellness of individuals.

LeRoy

So it’s around cost and the quality of the care, but it’s also about how the industry itself is changing, both from how providers are now doing more with payments and how classic payers are doing more to actually provide care themselves. There is this blur between the lines of payer and provider.

Some of these people are actually becoming what we call accountable care organizations (ACOs). We see a new one of these ACOs come up each week, where they are both payer and provider.

Gardner: Not only do we have a dynamic economic landscape, but the ability to identify what works and what doesn't work can really be important, especially when dealing with multiple players and multiple data types. This is really not just knowing your own data; this is knowing data across organizational boundaries.

LeRoy:  Exactly. And there are a lot of different data models that exists. When you look at things like big data and the volume of data that exist out in the field, you can put that data to use to understand who are your critical patients, and how that can affect your operations?

Gardner:  Why do we look to a triangulated solution between players like Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft, and Sogeti? What is it about the problem that you're trying to solve that has led it to a partnership type of solution?

Long-term partner

LeRoy: Sogeti, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Capgemini Group, has been a long-term partner with Microsoft. The tools that Microsoft provides are one of the strengths of Sogeti. We've been working with HPE now for almost two years, and it's a great triangulation between the three companies. Microsoft provides the software, HPE provides the hardware, and Sogeti provides the services to deliver innovative solutions to customers and do it in a rapid way. What you're getting is best in class in all three of those categories -- the software, the hardware, and the services.

Gardner: There's another angle to this, too, and it’s about the cloud delivery model. How does that factor into this? When we talked about hardware, it sounds like there's an on-premises aspect to it, but how does the cloud play a role?

LeRoy: Everybody wants to hear about the cloud, and certainly it’s important in this space, too, because of the type of data that we're collecting. You could consider social data or data from third party software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and that data can exist everywhere.

You have your on-premise data and you have your off-premise data. The tool that we're using, in this case from HPE and Microsoft, really lend themselves well to developing a converged environment to deliver best in class across those different environments. They're secured, delivered quickly, and they provide the information and the insights that their hospitals and insurance companies really need.

Gardner: So we have a converged solution set from HPE. We have various clouds that we can leverage. We have great software from Microsoft. Tell us a little about Sogeti and what you're bringing to the table. What is it that you've been doing in healthcare that helps solidify this solution and the rapid analysis requirements?

Sogeti’s strength is that we're really focused on the technology and the implementations of technology.

LeRoy: This is one of the things that Sogeti brings into the table. Sogeti is part of the Capgemini Group, a global organization with 150,000 employees, and Sogeti is one of the five strategic business units of the group. Sogeti’s strength is that we're really focused on the technology and the implementations of technology and we are focused on several different verticals, healthcare being one of them.

We have experts on the technology stacks, but we also have experts in healthcare itself. We have people who we've pulled from the healthcare industry. We taught them what we do in the IT world, so they can help us focus best practices and technologies to solve real healthcare organizational problems, so that we can get toward the quality of care and the cost reduction that the ACA is really looking for. That’s a real strength that's going to add significant values to healthcare organizations.

Gardner: It’s very important to see that one size does not fit all when it comes to the systems. Having industry verticalization is required, and you're embarking on a retail equivalent to this model, and manufacturing in other sectors might come along as well.

Let's look at why this approach to this problem is so innovative. What have been some of the problems that have held back the ability of large and even mid-sized organizations in the healthcare vertical industry from getting these insights? What are some of the hurdles that they've had to overcome and that perhaps beg for a new and different model and a new approach?

Complexity of data

LeRoy: There are a couple of factors. For sure, it’s the complexity of the data itself. The data is distributed over a wide variety of systems. So it’s hard to get a full picture of a patient or a certain care program, because the systems are spread out all over the place. When the systems in so many different ways end up with you, you get part of the data. You don’t get the full picture. We call that poor data quality, and that y makes it hard for somebody who's doing analysis to really understand and gain insight from their data.

Of course, there's also the existing structure that’s in place within organizations. They've been around for a long time. People are sometimes resistant to change. Take all of those things together and you end up with a slow response time to delivering the data that they're looking for.

Access to the data becomes very complex or difficult for an end-user or a business analyst. The cost of changing those structures can be pretty expensive. If you look at all those things together, it really slows down an organization’s ability to understand the data that they've got to gain insights about their business.

Gardner: Just a few years ago, when we used to refer to data warehouses, it was a fairly large undertaking. It would take months to put these into place, required a data center or some sort of a leasing arrangement, and of course a significant amount of upfront costs. How has this new model approached those costs and length of time or ramp-up time issues?

HPE is providing a box that’s going to allow me to put both into a single environment. So that’s going to reduce my cost a lot.

LeRoy: Microsoft’s model that they have put in place to support their Analytics Platform System (APS) allows them to license their tools at a lower price. The other thing that's really made a difference is the way HPE has put together their ConvergedSystem that allows us to tie these hybrid environments together to aggregate the data in a very simple solution that provides a lot of performance.

If I have to look at unstructured data and structured data, I often need two different systems. HPE is providing a box that’s going to allow me to put both into a single environment. So that’s going to reduce my cost a lot.

They have also delivered it as an appliance, so I don't need to spend a lot of time buying, provisioning, or configuring servers, setting up software, and all those things, I can just order this ConvergedSystem from HPE, put it in my data center, and I am almost ready to go. That’s the second thing that really helps save a lot of time.

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The third one is that at Sogeti Services, we have some intellectual property (IP) to help the data integration from these different systems and the aggregation of the data. We've put together some software and some accelerators to help make that integration go faster.

The last piece of that is a data model that structures all this data into a single view that makes it easier for the business people to analyze and understand what they have. Usually, it would take you literally years to come up with these data models. Sogeti has put all the time into it, created these models, and made it something that we can deliver to a customer much faster, because we've already done it. All we have to do is install it in your environment.

It's those three things together -- the software pricing from Microsoft, the appliance model from HP, and the IP and the accelerators that Sogeti has.

Consumer's view

Gardner: Bob, let’s look at this now through the lens of that consumer, the user. It wasn’t that long ago where most of the people doing analytics were perhaps wearing white lab coats, very accomplished in their particular query languages and technologies. But part of the thinking now for big data is to get it into the hands of more people.

What is it that your model, this triumvirate of organizations coming together for a solution approach, does in terms of making this data more available? What are the outputs, who can query it, and how has that had an impact in the marketplace?

LeRoy: We've been trying to get this to the end users for 30 years. I've been trying to get reports in the hands of users and let them do their own analysis, and every time I get to a point where I think this is the answer, the users are going to be able to do their own reports, that frees up guys in the IT world like me to go off and do other things, it doesn’t always work.

This time, though, it's really interesting. I think we have got it. We allow the users access directly to the data, using the tools that they already know. So I'm not going to create and introduce a new tool to them. We're using tools that are very similar to Excel, that point to a data source that’s well organized for them already and it’s the data that they are already familiar with.

This is something that we couldn't do before, and it’s very exciting to see that we're able to gain such insights and be able to take action against those insights.

So if they're using Microsoft Excel-like tools, they can do Power Pivots and pivot tables that they've already being doing, but just in an offline manner. Now, I can give them direct access to real-time data.

Instead of waiting until noon to get reports out, they can go and look online and get the data much sooner, so we can accelerate their access time to it, but deliver it in a format that they're comfortable with. That makes it easier for them to do the analysis and gain their insights without the IT people having to hold their hands.

Gardner: Perhaps we have some examples that we can look to that would illustrate some of this. You mentioned social media, the cloud-based content or data. How has that come to bear on some of these ways that your users are delivering value in terms of better healthcare analytics?

LeRoy: The best example I have is the ability to bring in data that’s not in a structured format. We often think of external data, but sometimes it’s internal data, too -- maybe x-rays or people doing queries on the Internet. I can take all of that structured data and correlate it to my internal electronic medical records or my health information systems that I have on-premise.

If I'm looking at Google searches, and people are looking for keywords such as "stress," "heart attacks," "cardiac care," or something like that, those keywords, I can map the times that people are looking at those kinds of queries by certain regions. I can tie that back to my systems and ask what the behavior or the traffic patterns look like within my facility at those same times. You can target certain areas to maybe change my staffing model, if there is a big jump in searches, do a campaign to ask people to come in and do a screening, or encourage people to get to their primary-care physicians.

There are a lot of things we can do with the data by looking just at the patterns. It will help us narrow down the areas of our coverage that we need to work with, what geographic areas I need to work on, and how I manage the operations of the organization, just by looking at the different types of data that we have and tying them together. This is something that we couldn't do before, and it’s very exciting to see that we're able to gain such insights and be able to take action against those insights.

Applying data science

Gardner: I can see now why you're calling it the Data Driven Decisions for Healthcare, because you're really applying data science to areas that would probably never have been considered for it before. People might use intuition or anecdote or deliver evidence that was perhaps not all that accurate. Maybe you could just illustrate a little bit more ways in which you're using data science and very powerful systems to gather insights into areas that we just never thought to apply such high-powered tools to before.

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LeRoy: Let’s go back to the beginning when we talked about how we change the quality of care that we are providing. Today, doctors collect diagnosis codes for just about every procedure that we have done. We don’t really look and see how many times those same procedures are repeated or which doctors are performing which procedures. Let’s look at the patients, too, and which patients are getting those procedures. So we can tie those diagnosis codes in a lot of different ways.

The one that I think I probably would like the best is that I want to know which doctors perform those procedures only once per patient and have the best results come from the treatments that that doctor performs. Now, if I'm from a hospital, I know which doctors perform which procedures the best and I can direct the patients that need those procedures to those doctors that provide the best care.

My quality of care goes up, the patient has a better experience, and we're going to do it a lower cost because we're only doing it once. 

And the reverse of that might be that if the doctor doesn’t perform that procedure well, let’s avoid sending him those kinds of patients. Now, my quality of care goes up, the patient has a better experience, and we're going to do it a lower cost because we're only doing it once. 

Gardner: Let’s dive into this solution a bit, because I'm intrigued by the fact that this model of bringing converged-infrastructure provider, a software provider and expertise in the field that crosses the chasm between a technology capability and a vertical industry knowledge-base works. So let’s dig in a little bit. The Microsoft APS, tell us a little bit about that -- what it includes and why it’s powerful and applicable in this situation?

LeRoy: The APS is a solution that combines unstructured data and structured data into a single environment and it allows the IT guys to run classic SQL queries against both.

On one side, we have what used to be called parallel data warehouse. It’s a really fast version of SQL Server. It's massively parallel processing and it can run queries super fast. That’s the important part. I have structured data that I can get to very quickly.

The other half of it is HDInsight, which is Microsoft's open source implementation of Hadoop. Hadoop is all unstructured data. In between these two things there is PolyBase. So I can query the two together and I can join structured and unstructured data together.

Then, since Microsoft created this APS specification, HPE then implemented that in a box that they call a ConvergedSystem 300. Sogeti has used that to build our IP against. We can consume data from all these different areas, put it into the APS, and deliver that data to an end user through a simple interface like Excel or Power BI or some other visualization tool.

Significant scale

Gardner: Just to be clear for our audience, sometimes people hear appliance and they don't think necessarily big scale, but the HPE ConvergedSystem 300 for the Microsoft APS is quite significant with server storage, networking technologies, and large amounts of data, up to 6 petabytes. So we're talking about some fairly significant amounts of data here, not small fry.

LeRoy: And they put everything into that one rack. We think of appliance as something like a toaster that we plug in. That’s pretty close to where they are, not exactly, but you drop this big rack into your data center, give it an IP address, give it some power, and now you can start to take existing data and put it in there. It runs extremely well because they've incorporated the networking and the computing platforms and the storage all within a single environment, which is really effective.

Gardner: Of course, one of the big initiatives at Microsoft has been cloud with Azure. Is there a way in which the HPE Converged Infrastructure in a data center can be used in conjunction with a cloud service like Azure or other cloud, public cloud, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud or even data warehousing cloud services that accelerates the ability to deliver this fast and/or makes it more inclusive or more types of data for more places? How does the public cloud fit into this?

One of the great things about the solution that Microsoft and HPE put together is it’s very much a converged system that allows us to bridge on-prem and the cloud together.

LeRoy: You can distribute the solution across that space. In fact, we take advantage of the cloud delivery as a model. We use a tool called Power BI from Microsoft that allows you to do visualizations.

The system from HPE is a hybrid solution. So we can distribute it. Some of it can be in the cloud and some of it can be on-prem. It really depends on what your needs are and how your different systems are already configured. It’s entirely flexible. We can put all of it on-prem, in a single rack or a single appliance or we can distribute it out to the cloud.

One of the great things about the solution that Microsoft and HPE put together is it’s very much a converged system that allows us to bridge on-prem and the cloud together.

Gardner: And of course, Bob, those end users that are doing those queries, that are getting insights, they probably don’t care where it's coming from as long as they can access it, it works quickly, and the costs are manageable.

LeRoy: Exactly.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about where we take this model next -- clearly healthcare, big demand, huge opportunity to improve productivity through insights, improve outcomes, while also cutting costs.

You also have a retail solution approach in that market, in that vertical. How does that work? Is that already available? Tell us a little bit about why the retail was the next one you went to and where it might go next in terms of industries?

Four major verticals

LeRoy: Sogeti is focused on four major verticals: healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and life sciences. So we are kind of going across where we have expertise.

The healthcare one has been out now for nine months or so. We see retailers in another place. There are point solutions where people have solved part of this equation, but they haven’t really dug deep in understanding how to get it from end to end, which is something that Sogeti has done now. From the point a person walks into a store, we would be alerted through all of these analytics that we have. We would be alerted that the person arrived and take action against that.

We do what we can to increase our traffic and our sales with individuals and then aggregate all of that data. You're looking at things like customers, inventory, or sales across an organization. That end-to-end piece is something that I think is very unique within the retail space.

After that, we're going to go to manufacturing. Everybody likes to talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) today. We're looking at some very specific use cases on how we can impact manufacturing so IoT can help us predict failures right on a manufacturing line. Or if we have maybe heavy equipment out on a job site, in a mine, or something like that, we could better predict when equipment needs to be serviced, so we can maximize the manufacturing process time.

We're looking at some very specific use cases on how we can impact manufacturing so IoT can help us predict failures right on a manufacturing line.

Gardner: Any last thoughts in terms of how people who are interested in this can acquire it? Is this something that is being sold jointly through these three organizations, through Sogeti directly? How is this going to market in terms of how healthcare organizations can either both learn more and/or even experiment with it?

LeRoy: The best way to do it is search for us online. It's mostly being driven by Sogeti and HPE. Most of the healthcare providers that are also heavy HPE users could be aware of it already, and talking to an HPE rep or to a Sogeti rep is certainly the easiest path to move forward on.

We have a number of videos that are out on YouTube. If you search for Sogeti Labs and Data Driven Decisions, you will certainly find my name and a short video that shows it. And of course sales reps and customers are welcome to contact me or anybody from Sogeti or HP.

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Gardner: Once again, the official name of this initiative is the Data Driven Decisions for Healthcare. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing how a triumvirate of big players -- Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft, and Sogeti -- have teamed to deliver a rapid and efficient analysis capability across disparate data types for the healthcare industry.

And we've learned how this new type of big data implementation model quickly and affordably delivers innovative and game changing insights across ecosystems of providers, patients and payers in healthcare, and it looks like it’s going to soon be doing interesting productivity benefits for retail, manufacturing, and life sciences as well.

So join me please in thanking our guest, Bob LeRoy, Vice President in the Global Microsoft Practice and Manager of the HPE Alliance at Sogeti USA, based in Cincinnati. Thank you, Bob.

LeRoy: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And I'd also like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this big data innovation discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how a triumvirate of big players have teamed to deliver a rapid and efficient analysis capability for healthcare data. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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