Showing posts with label VMworld. Show all posts
Showing posts with label VMworld. Show all posts

Monday, November 04, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patient experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deeper insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OPEX spend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entire environment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A step further

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rejuvenate legacy

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

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

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

Ericson: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

You may also be interested in:

Monday, September 23, 2013

Navicure Gains IT Capacity Optimization and Performance Monitoring Using VMware vCenter Operations Manager

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how claims clearinghouse Navicure has harnessed advanced virtualization to meet the demands of an ever-growing business.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the 2013 VMworld Conference in San Francisco. We're here the week of August 26 to explore the latest in cloud-computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

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

Our next innovator interview focuses on how a fast-growing healthcare claims company is gaining better control and optimization across its IT infrastructure. We're going to hear how IT leaders at Navicure have been deploying a comprehensive monitoring and operational management approach.

To understand how they're using dashboards and other analysis to tame IT complexity, and gain better return on their IT investments, please join me in welcoming Donald Wilkins, Director of Information Technology at Navicure Inc. in Duluth, Georgia. Welcome, Donald. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Donald Wilkins: Glad to be here.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about why your organization is focused on taming complexity. Is this a focus that's a result of cost, or is it taming complexity, or both?

Wilkins
Wilkins: At Navicure, we've been focused on scaling a fast-growing business. And if you incorporate very complex infrastructure, it becomes more difficult to scale it. So we're focused on technologies that are simple to implement, yet have a lot of upward availability of growth from the storage, the infrastructure, and the software we use. We do that in order to be able to scale that growth we needed to satisfy our business objectives.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about Navicure, what you do, how is that you're growing, and why that's putting a burden on your IT systems.

Wilkins: Navicure has been around for about 12 years. We started the company in about 2001 and delivered the product to our customers in the late 2001-2002 timeframe. We've been growing very fast. We're adding 20 to 30 employees every year, and we're up to about 230 employees today.

We have approximately 50,000 physicians on our system. We're growing at a rate of 8,000 to 10,000 physicians a year, and it’s a healthy growth. We don't want to grow too fast, so as not to water down our products and services, but at the same time, we want to grow at a pace that better enables us to deliver better products for our customers.

Customer service is one of the foundation cornerstones of our business. We feel that our customers are number one, and retaining those customers is one of our primary goals.

Gardner: As I understand it, you're an Internet-based medical claims clearinghouse. Tell us what that boils down to. What is that you do?

Revenue cycle management

Wilkins: Claim clearinghouses have been around for a couple of decades now. We've evolved from that claim-clearinghouse model to what we refer to as revenue cycle management. We pioneered that term early as we started the company.

We take the transactions from physicians and send them to the insurance companies. That’s what the clearinghouse model is. But on that product, we added a lot of value-added services, a lot analytics around those transactions to help the provider generate more revenue for their transactions. They get paid faster, and that they get paid the first time through the system.

It was very costly for transactions to be delayed weeks because of poorly submitted transactions to the insurance company or denials because they coded something wrong.

We try to catch all that, so that they get paid the first time through. That’s the return on investment (ROI) that our customers are looking for when they look at our products, to lower the AR days and to increase their revenue at the bottom line.
We wanted to build a foundational structure that we can just build on as we get go into business and growing the transaction volume.

Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your IT environment. What do you have in your data center? Then, we'll get to how you've been able to better manage it.

Wilkins: The first thing we did at Navicure, when we started the company, is we looked at and decided that we didn't want to be in the data-center business. We wanted to use a colo that does that work at a much higher level than we could ever do. We wanted to focus on our product and let the colo focus on what they do.

They serve us from our infrastructure standpoint, and then we can focus on our products and build a good product. With that, we adopted very early on, the grid approach or the rack approach. This means that we wanted to build a foundational structure that we can just build on as we get go into business and grow the transactions volume.

That terminology has changed over the years, and that can be referred to a software-defined infrastructure today, but back then it was that we wanted to build infrastructure that would have a grid approach to it, so we could plug in more modules and components to add to scale out as we scale up.

With that, we continued to evolve what we do, but that inherent structure is still there. We need to be able to scale our business as our transactional volume doubles approximately every two years.

Gardner: And how did you begin your path to virtualization, and how did that progress into this more of a software-defined environment?

Ramping up fast

Wilkins: In the first few years of the operation of the company, we really had enough headroom in our infrastructure that it wasn't a big issue, but as we got four years into the company, we started realizing that we were going to hit a point where we would have to start ramping-up really fast.

Consolidation was not something that we had to worry about, because we didn’t have a lot to consolidate. It was a very early product, and we had to build the customer base. We had to build our reputation in the industry, and we did that. But then we started adding physicians by the thousands to our system every year.

With that, we started to have to add infrastructure. Virtualization came along at such a time that we could add it virtually faster and more efficiently than we could ever have if we added physical infrastructure.

So it became a product that we put in a test, dev, and production all at the same time, but it was something that just allowed us to meet the demands of the business.
We want to evolve that to be more proactive in our approach to monitoring.

Gardner: Of course, as many organizations have used virtualization to their benefit, they've also recognized that there is some complexity involved. And getting better management means further optimization, which further reduces costs. That also, of course, maintains their performance requirements. How did you then focus in on managing and optimizing this over time?

Wilkins: Well, one of the things we tried to look at, when we look at products and services, was to keep it simple. I have a very limited staff, and the staff needs to be able to drive to the point of whatever issue they're researching and/or inspecting.

As we've added technologies and services, we tried to add those that are very simple to scale, very, very simple to operate. We look at all these different tools to make that happen. This has led us to new products like VMware as they have also tried to drive to the same level, trying to simplify their product offering with their new products.

Gardner: Which products you are using? Maybe you could be more specific about what's working best for you?

Wilkins: For years, we've been doing monitoring with other tools that were network-based monitoring tools. Those drive only so much value. They give us things like up-time alerting and responsiveness that are just about when issues happen. We want to evolve that to be more proactive in our approach to monitoring.

It’s not so much about how we can fix a problem when there is one. It’s more of, let’s keep the problem from happening to start with. That's where we've looked at some products for that. Recently we've actually implemented vCenter Operations Manager.

That product gives us a different twist that other SMNP monitoring tools do. It's a history of what's going on, but also a future analysis of that history and how it will change, based on our historical trends.

New line-up

Gardner: Of course, here at VMworld, we're hearing vSphere improvements and upgrades, but also the arrival of VMware vCloud Suite 5.5 and VMware vSphere with Operations Management 5.5. Is there anything in the new line-up that is particularly of interest to you, and have you had a chance to look at over?

Wilkins: I haven’t had a chance to look over the most recent offering, but we're running the current version. Again, for us, it's the efficiency mechanism inside the product that drives the most value for us to make sure that we can budget a year in advance of the expanding infrastructure that we need to have to meet the demands.

Gardner: What sort of paybacks are there? Do you have any sense on a metrics or ROI basis? What you have been able to gain maybe through virtualization generally, and then the improved operations of those of workloads over time?

Wilkins: Just being able to drive more density in our colo by being virtualized is a big value for us. Our footprint is relatively small. As for an actual dollar amount, it’s hard to pin something on there. We're growing so fast, we're trying to keep up with the demand, and we've been meeting that and exceeding that.
Desktop virtualization is going to be a critical component for that.

Really, the ROI is that our customers aren’t experiencing major troubles with our infrastructure not expanding fast enough. That's our goal, to drive high availability for infrastructure and low downtime, and we can do that with VMware and with their products and service.

Gardner: How about looking to the future, Donald? Do you have any sense of whether things like disaster recovery or mobile support, perhaps even hybrid cloud services, will be something you would be interested in as you grow further?

Wilkins: We're a current customer of Site Recovery Manager. That's a staple in our virtual infrastructure and has been since 2008. We've been using that product for many years. It drives all of the planning and the testing of our virtual disaster recovery (DR) plan. I've been a very big proponent of that product and services for years, and we couldn’t do without it.

There are other products we will be looking at. Desktop virtualization is something that will be incorporated into the infrastructure in the next year or two.

As a small business, the value of that becomes a little harder to prove from a dollar standpoint. Some of those features like remote working come into play as office space continues to be expensive. It's something we will be looking at to expand our operations, especially as we have more remote employees working. Desktop virtualization is going to be a critical component for that.

Gardner: How about some 20/20 hindsight. If there were other folks that were ramping up on virtualization, or getting to the point where complexity was becoming an issue for them, do you have any thoughts on getting started or lessons learned that you could share?

Trusted partner

Wilkins: The best thing with virtualization is to get a trusted partner to help you get over the hurdle of the technical issues that may bring themselves to light.

I had a very trusted partner when I started this in 2005-2006. They actually just sat with me and worked with me, with no compensation whatsoever, to help work through virtualization. They made it such an easy value that it just became, "I've got to do this, because there's no way I can sustain this level of operational expense and of monitoring and managing this infrastructure, if it's all physical."

So, seeing that value proposition from a partner is key, but it has to be a trusted partner. It has to be a partner that has your best interest in mind, and not so much a new product to sell. It’s going to be somebody that brings a lot to the table, but, at the same time, helps you help yourself and lets you learn these products, so that you can actually implement it and research it on your own to see what value you can bring into the company.
It has to be a partner that has your best interest in mind, and not so much a new product to sell.

It’s easy for somebody to tell you how you can make your life better, but you have t to actually see it, because then, you become a passionate person for the technology, and then you become a person that realizes you have to do this and will do whatever it takes to get this in here, because it will make your life easier.

Gardner: How about specific advice for mid-market organizations, not too large. Is there something about dashboard, single pane, ease in getting a sense as the head of IT in your organization, over all the systems? Is there anything in particular that helps on that visualization basis that you would recommend that others perhaps consider?

Wilkins: Well, vCenter Operations Manager is key to understanding your infrastructure. If you don’t have it today, you're going to be very reactive to some of your pains and the troubles you're dealing with.

That product, while it does allow you to do a lot of research for various problems and services to drill down from the cluster level, down into the virtual machine levels and find out where your problems and pain points or, actually allows you to more quickly isolate the issue. At the same time, it allows you to project where you're growing and where you need to put your money into resources, whether that's more storage, compute resources, or network resources.

That's where we're seeing value out of the product, because it allows me to go during budget cycles to say that looking at infrastructure and our current growth, we will be out of resources by this time. We need to add this much, based on our current growth. Barring additional new products and services we may be coming up with, we may be adding to our service, if we don't do anything today. We're growing at this pace and here's the numbers to prove it.

When you have that information in front of you, you can actually build a business case around that that further educates the CFOs and the finance people to understanding what your troubles are and what you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis to operate the business.

Gardner: Must feel good to have some sense of being future proof, no matter what comes down you are going to be prepared for it.

Wilkins: Most definitely.

Gardner: Well, great. We'll have to leave it there. We've been talking about how an organization is gaining better control and optimization over their IT infrastructure, and we have heard how Navicure has been exploring comprehensive, monitoring, and operational management approach.

So a big thank you to our guest. We have been here with Donald Wilkins, the Director of IT at Navicure. Thank Donald.

Wilkins: My pleasure. Thank you.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the recent 2013 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.

I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout the series of VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how claims clearinghouse Navicure has harnessed virtualization to meet the demands of an ever-growing business. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

AT&T Cloud Services Built on VMware vCloud Datacenter Meet Evolving Business Demands for Advanced IaaS

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how telecom giant AT&T is leveraging its networking and cloud expertise to provide advanced cloud services.

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

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Dana Gardner
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how global telecommunications giant AT&T has created advanced cloud services for its customers. We'll see how AT&T has developed the ability to provide virtual private clouds and other computing capabilities as integrated services at scale.

Stay with us now to learn more about building the best infrastructure to handle some of the most demanding network and compute services for one of the world's largest service providers. Here to share her story on building top-performing infrastructure is Chris Costello, Assistant Vice President of AT&T Cloud Services. Welcome, Chris. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Chris Costello: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Just to help us understand, because it's such a large company and you provide so many services, what cloud services generally is AT&T providing now, and why is this an important initiative for you?

Costello: AT&T has been in the hosting business for over 15 years, and so it was only a natural extension for us to get into the cloud services business to evolve with customers' changing business demands and technology needs.

Chris Costello
We have cloud services in several areas. The first is our AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service. This is a hybrid cloud that allows VMware clients to extend their private clouds into AT&T's network-based cloud using a virtual private network (VPN). And it melds the security and performance of VPN with the economics and flexibility of a public cloud. So the service is optimized for VMware's more than 350,000 clients.

If you look at customers who have internal clouds today or private data centers, they like the control, the security, and the leverage that they have, but they really want the best of both worlds. There are certain workloads where they want to burst into a service provider’s cloud.

We give them that flexibility, agility, and control, where they can simply point and click, using free downloadable tools from VMware, to instantly turn up workloads into AT&T's cloud.

Another capability that we have in this space is AT&T Platform as a Service. This is targeted primarily to independent software vendors (ISVs), IT leaders, and line-of-business managers. It allows customers to choose from 50 pre-built applications, instantly mobilize those applications, and run them in AT&T's cloud, all without having to write a single line of code.

So we're really starting to get into more of the informal buyers, those line-of-business managers, and IT managers who don't have the budget to build it all themselves, or don't have the budget to buy expensive software licenses for certain application environments.

Examples of some of the applications that we support with our platform as a service (PaaS) are things like salesforce automation, quote and proposal tools, and budget management tools.

Storage space

The third key category of AT&T's Cloud Services is in the storage space. We have our AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service, and this gives customers control over storage, distribution, and retrieval of their data, on the go, using any web-enabled device. In a little bit, I can get into some detail on use cases of how customers are using our cloud services.

This is a very important initiative for AT&T. We're seeing customer demand of all shapes and sizes. We have a sizable business and effort supporting our small- to medium-sized business (SMB) customers, and we have capabilities that we have tailor-developed just to reach those markets.

As an example, in SMB, it's all about the bundle. It's all about simplicity. It's all about on demand. And it's all about pay per use and having a service provider they can trust.
It's all about simplicity. It's all about on demand.

In the enterprise space, you really start getting into detailed discussions around security. You also start getting into discussions with many customers who already have private networking solutions from AT&T that they trust. When you start talking with clients around the fact that they can run a workload, turn up a server in the cloud, behind their firewall, it really resonates with CIOs that we're speaking with in the enterprise space.

Also in enterprises, it's about having a globally consistent experience. So as these customers are reaching new markets, it's all about not having to stand up an additional data center, compute instance, or what have you, and having a very consistent experience, no matter where they do business, anywhere in the world.

New era for women in tech

Gardner: Let’s look into your role Chris as an IT executive and also a woman. The fact is that a significant majority of CIOs and IT executives are men, and that’s been the case for quite some time. But I'm curious, does cloud computing and the accompanying shift towards IT becoming more of a services brokering role change that? Do you think that with the consensus building among businesses and partner groups being more important in that brokering role, this might bring in a new era for women in tech?

Costello: I think it is a new era for women in tech. Specifically to my experience in working at AT&T in technology, this company has really provided me with an opportunity to grow both personally and professionally.

I currently lead our Cloud Office at AT&T and, prior to that, ran AT&T’s global managed hosting business across our 38 data centers. I was also lucky enough to be chosen as one of the top women in wireline services.
The key to success of being a woman working in technology is being able to build offers that solve customers' business problem.

What drives me as a woman in technology is that I enjoy the challenge of creating offers that meet customer needs, whether they be in the cloud space, things like driving eCommerce, high performance computing environment, or disaster recovery (DR) solutions.

I love spending time with customers. That’s my favorite thing to do. I also like to interact with many partners and vendors that I work with to stay current on trends and technologies. The key to success of being a woman working in technology is being able to build offers that solve customers' business problem, number one.

Number two is being able to then articulate the value of a lot of the complexity around some of these solutions, and package the value in a way that’s very simple for customers to understand.

Some of the challenge and also opportunity of the future is that, as technology continues to evolve, it’s about reducing complexity for customers and making the service experience seamless. The trend is to deliver more and more finished services, versus complex infrastructure solutions.

Gardner: It’s a very interesting period. Do you have any sense of a future direction in terms of IT roles? Does the actual role, whether it’s a man or woman, shift? The leadership in IT, how is that changing?

Costello: I've been in the technology space for a number of years at AT&T and I've had the opportunity to interact with many women in leadership, whether they be my peer group, managers that work as a part of my team, and/or mentors that I have within AT&T that are senior leaders within the business.

I've worked with several women in leadership. I think that trend is going to continue. I also mentor three women at AT&T, whether they be in technology, sales, or an operations role. So I'm starting to see this trend continue to grow.
It enables us to deliver a mobile cloud as well. That helps customers to transform their businesses.

Gardner: You have a lot of customers who are already using your network services. It seems a natural extension for them to look to you for cloud, and now you have created these, as I have seen it termed, virtual private clouds.

From what you're describing, that allows folks to take whatever cloud activities they've got and be able to burst those into your cloud, and that gives them that elasticity. I imagine there are probably some good cost-efficiencies as well.

Costello: Absolutely. We've embedded cloud capabilities into the AT&T managed network. It enables us to deliver a mobile cloud as well. That helps customers to transform their businesses. We're delivering cloud services in the same manner as voice and data services, intelligently routed across our highly secure, reliable network.

AT&T's cloud is embedded in our network. It's not sitting on top of or attached to our network, but it's fully integrated to provide customers a seamless, highly secure, low-latency, and high-performing experience.

Gardner: Let’s look into the VMware solution set, and why you chose VMware. Maybe you can explain the process. Was this a data-driven decision? Was this a pure architecture? Were there other technology or business considerations? I'm just trying to better understand the lead-up to using vCloud Datacenter Services as a core to the AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service. 

Multiple uses

Costello: AT&T uses VMware in several of our hosting application and cloud solutions today. In the case of AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service, we use that in several ways, both to serve customers in public cloud and hybrid, as well as private cloud solutions.

We've also been using VMware technology for a number of years in AT&T’s Synaptic Hosting offer, which is our enterprise-grade utility computing service. We've also been serving customers with server virtualization solutions available in AT&T data centers around the world and also can be extended into customer or third-party locations.

Just to drill down on some of the key differentiators of AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service, it’s two-fold.

One is that we integrate with AT&T private networking solutions. Some of the benefits that customers enjoy as a result of that are orchestration of resources, where we'll take the amount of compute storage and networking resources and provide the exact amount of resources at the exact right time to customers on-demand.

Our solutions offer enterprise-grade security. The fact that we've integrated our AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service with private networking solution allows customers to extend their cloud into our network using VPN.
An engineering firm can now perform complex mathematical computations and extend from their private cloud into AT&T’s hybrid solution instantaneously, using their native VMware toolset.

Let me touch upon VMware vCloud Datacenter Services for a minute. We think that’s another key differentiator for us, in that we can allow clients to seamlessly move workloads to our cloud using native VMware toolsets. Essentially, we're taking technical complexity and interoperability challenges off the table.

How this manifests itself in terms of client solutions is that an engineering firm can now perform computationally intensive complex mathematical modeling on the fly and on demand using AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service.

Medical firms can use our solutions for medical imaging to securely store and access x-rays. Companies that are interested in mobile cloud solution can use AT&T’s Mobile Enterprise Application Platform to offer product catalogs in the cloud with mobile access.

Gardner: It certainly appears to me that we're going to be finding a lot more ways in which the private cloud infrastructure in these organizations can synergistically add value and benefit from public cloud services.

Cloud interaction

Even though we want to distill out the complexities, there’s something about the interactions between the private cloud and the enterprise and the public cloud services, like AT&T, that depend on some sort of a core architecture. How are you looking at making that visible? What are some of the important requirements that you have for making this hybrid cloud capability work?

Costello: One of the requirements for a hybrid cloud solution to be a success, specifically in terms of how AT&T offers the service, is that we have a large base of customers that have private networking solutions with AT&T, and they view their networks as secure and scalable.

Many of our customers that we have today have been using these networks for many years. And as customers are looking to cloud solutions to evolve their data centers and their application environment, they're demanding that the solution be secure and scalable.  So the fact that we let customers extend their private cloud and instantly access our cloud environment over their private network is key, especially when it comes to enterprise customers.

Secondly, with the vCloud Datacenter program that we are part of with VMware, letting customers have access to copy and paste workloads and see all of their virtual machines, whether it be in their own private cloud environment or in a hybrid solution provided by AT&T, providing that seamless access to view all of their virtual machines and manage those through single interface, is key in reducing technical complexity and speeding time to market.

Gardner: I should also think that these concepts around the software-defined datacenter and software-defined networking play a part in that, is that something that you are focused on?
If we start with enterprise, the security aspects of the solution had to prove out for the customers that we do business with.

Costello: Software-defined datacenter and software-defined networks are essentially what we're talking about here with some uniqueness that AT&T Labs has built within our networking solutions. We essentially take our edge, our edge routers, and the benefits that are associated with AT&T networking solutions around redundancy, quality of service, etc., and extend that into cloud solutions, so customers can extend their cloud into our network using VPN solutions.

Gardner: As you moved toward this really important initiative, what were some of the other requirements you had in terms of functionality for your infrastructure? What were you really looking for?

Costello: In terms of functionality for the infrastructure, if we start with enterprise, the security aspects of the solution had to prove out for the customers that we do business with. When you think about clients in financial services, the federal government, and healthcare, as examples, we really had to prove that the data was secure and private. The certifications and audits and compliance that we were able to provide for our customers were absolutely critical to earning customers’ business.

We're seeing more and more customers, who have had very large IT shops in the past, who are now opening the door and are very open to these discussions, because they're viewing AT&T as a service provider that can really help them to extend the private cloud environment that they have today. So security is absolutely key.

As I mentioned earlier, networking capabilities are very attractive to the enterprise customers that we're talking to. They may think. "I've already invested in this global managed network that I have in multiple points around the world, and I'm simply adding another node on my network. Within minutes I can turn up workloads or I can store data in the cloud and only pay for the resources that I utilize, not only the compute and/or storage resources, but also the network resources."

Added efficiency

Previously many customers would have to buy a router and try to pull together a solution on their own. It can be costly and time consuming. There's a whole lot of efficiency that comes with having a service provider being able to manage your compute storage and networking capabilities end to end.

Global scale was also very critical to the customers who we've been talking to. The fact that AT&T has localized and distributed resources through a combination of our 38 data centers around the world, as well as central offices, makes it very attractive to do business with AT&T as a service provider.

Also, having that enterprise-grade customer experience is absolutely critical to the customers who do business with AT&T. When they think of our brand, they think of reliability. If there are service degradation or change management issues, they want to know that they've got a resource that is working on their behalf that has technical expertise and is a champion working proactively on their cloud environment.

Gardner: You mentioned that it's a natural extension for those who are using your network services to move towards cloud services. You also mentioned that VMware has somewhere in the order of 350,000 customers with private-cloud installations that can now seamlessly move to your public-cloud offering.

Tell me how that came about and why the VMware platform, as well as their installed base, has become critical for you?
We learned early on, in working with customers’ managed utility computing environments, that VMware was the virtualization tool of choice for many of our enterprise customers.

Costello: We've been doing business with VMware for a number of years. We also have a utility-computing platform called AT&T Synaptic Hosting. We learned early on, in working with customers’ managed utility computing environments, that VMware was the virtualization tool of choice for many of our enterprise customers.

As technologies evolved over time and cloud technologies have become more prevalent, it was absolutely paramount for us to pick a virtualization partner that was going to provide the global scale that we needed to serve our enterprise customers, and to be able to handle the large amount of volume that we receive, given the fact that we have been in the hosting business for over 15 years.

As a natural extension of our Synaptic Hosting relationship with VMware for many years, it only made sense that we joined the VMware vCloud Datacenter program. VMware is baked into our Synaptic Compute as a Service capability. And it really lets customers have a simplified hybrid cloud experience. In five simple steps, customers can move workloads from their private environment into AT&T's cloud environment.

Think that you are the IT manager and you are coming into start your workday. All of a sudden, you hit 85 percent utilization in your environment, but you want to very easily access additional resources from AT&T. You can use the same console that you use to perform your daily job for the data center that you run in-house.

In five clicks, you're viewing your in-house private-cloud resources that are VMware based and your AT&T virtual machines (VMs) running in AT&T's cloud, our Synaptic Compute as a Service capability. That all happens in minutes' time.

Fantastic discussions

I've been in the hosting business and application management business for many years and have seen lots of fantastic discussions with customers. The whole thing falls apart when you start talking about the complexities of interoperability and having to write scripts and code and not being able to accept tools that the clients have already made investments in.

The fact that we're part of the vCloud Datacenter program provides a lot of benefits for our clients, when you talk to customers about the benefit of running that cloud in AT&T's network. Some of the additional benefits are no incremental bandwidth needed at the data center and no investment in a managed-router solution.

We have patented AT&T technology that completely isolates traffic from other cloud traffic. The network and cloud elasticity work in tandem. So all of this happens on the fly, instantaneously. Then, all of the end-to-end class of service prioritization and QoS and DDOS protection capabilities that are inherent in our network are now surrounding the compute experience as well.

Gardner: We've certainly seen a lot of interest in this hybrid capability. I wonder if you could help me identify some of the use cases that this is being employed with now. I'm thinking that if I needed to expand my organization into another country or to another region of the world, given your 38 data centers and your global reach, I would be able to take advantage of this and bring services to that region from my private cloud pretty rapidly.

Is that one of the more popular use cases, or are there some others that are on the forefront of this hybrid uptake?
We see a lot of customers looking for a more efficient way to be able to have business continuity,  have the ability to fail over in the event of a disaster

Costello: I speak with a lot of customers who are looking to be able to virtually expand. They have data-center, systems, and application investments and they have global headquarters locations, but they don't want to have to stand up another data center and/or virtually expand and/or ship staff out to other location. So certainly one use case that's very popular with customers is, "I can expand my virtual data-center environment and use AT&T as a service provider to help me to do that."

Another use case that's very popular with our customers is disaster recovery. We see a lot of customers looking for a more efficient way to be able to have business continuity,  have the ability to fail over in the event of a disaster, and also get in and test their plans more frequently than they're doing today.

For many of the solutions that are in place today, clients are saying they are expensive and/or they're just not meeting their service-level agreements (SLAs) to their business unit. One of the solutions that we recently put in place for a client is that we put them in two of AT&T's geographically diverse data centers. We wrapped it with AT&T's private-networking capability and then we solutioned our AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service and Storage as a Service.

The customer ended up with a better SLA and a very powerful return on investment (ROI) as well, because they're only paying for the cloud resources when the meter is running. They now have a stable environment so that they can get in and test their plans as often as they'd like to and they're only paying for a very small storage fee in the event that they actually need to invoke in the event of a disaster. So DR plans are very popular.

Another use case that’s very popular among our clients is short-term compute. We work with a lot of customers who have massive mathematical calculations and they do a lot of number crunching.

Data crunching

One customer that comes to mind is one that looks at the probability of natural disasters on large structures, such as bridges, tunnels, nuclear power plants. They came to AT&T, looked at our Synaptic Compute as a Service, and ultimately ran a very large number of VMs in a workload. Because of the large amount of data crunching they had to do, they ran it for two weeks straight on our platform. They finished the report. They were very pleased with the results, and the convenience factor was there.

They didn’t have to stand up an environment temporarily for themselves and now they use us anytime they sign a new client for those bursty type, short-term compute workloads.

Certainly test and development is one that I am seeing CIOs, directors of IT, and other functional managers as one of the most highly adopted use cases, in that it’s lower risk. Over the years, we've gone from, "Will I use the cloud?" to "What workloads are going to fit for me in the cloud?"

For those that are earlier on in their journey, using AT&Ts Synaptic Compute as a Service for their test and development environments certainly provides the performance, the global reach, and also the economics of pay per use. And if a client has private networking solutions from AT&T, they can fully integrate with our private networking solutions.

Finally, in the compute space, we're seeing a lot of customers start to hang virtual desktop solutions off of their compute environment. In the past, when I would ask clients about virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), they'd say, "We're looking at it, but we're not sure. It hasn’t made the budget list." All of a sudden, it’s becoming one of the most highly requested use cases from customers, and AT&T has solutions to cover all those needs.
The fact that we have 38 data centers around the world, a global reach from a networking perspective, and all the foundational cloud capabilities makes a whole lot of sense.
 
Gardner: I'm particularly interested in the spiky applications, where your workload spikes up, but then there is no sense of keeping resources available for it when they're not in use. Do you think that this will extend to some of the big data and analytics crunching that we've heard about or is that hurdle of getting the data to the cloud still a major issue? And does your unique position as a network service provider help pave the way for more of these big-data, spiky types of uses?

Costello: I don’t think anyone is in a better position than AT&T to be able to help customers to manage their massive amounts of data, given the fact that a lot of this data has to reside on very strong networking solutions. The fact that we have 38 data centers around the world, a global reach from a networking perspective, and all the foundational cloud capabilities makes a whole lot of sense.

Speaking about this type of a bursty use case, we host some of the largest brand name retailers in the world. When you think about it, a lot of these retailers are preparing for the holidays, and their servers are going underutilized much of year. So how attractive is it to be able to look at AT&T, as a service provider, to provide them robust SLAs and a platform that they only have to pay for when they need to utilize it, versus sitting and going very underutilized much of the year?

We also host many online gaming customers. When you think about the gamers that are out there, there is a big land rush when the buzz occurs right before the launch of a new game. We work very proactively with those gaming customers to help them size their networking needs well in advance of a launch. Also we'll monitor it in real time to ensure that those gamers have a very positive experience when that launch does occur.

Gardner: I suppose one other area that’s top of mind for lots of folks is how to extend the enterprise out to the mobile tier, to those mobile devices. Again, this seems to be an area where having the network services expertise and reach comes to an advantage.

For an enterprise that wanted to extend more of their apps, perhaps the VDI experience, out to their mobile devices, be they smartphones or tablets, what offerings do you have that might help us grease the skid towards that kind of a value?

Mobility applications

Costello: AT&T has a very successful mobility applications business, and we have a couple of examples of how customers use our cloud services in conjunction with making their mobile applications more productive.

First and foremost, we have a set of experts and consultants who help customers to mobilize their applications. So there might be internal customer proprietary applications, and we can really help them move to an on-demand mobile environment.

Secondly, a couple of cloud examples of how customers will use our capabilities off the shelf. One is our AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service capability. We find that many customers are looking for a secure place to collaborate on data sharing. They're looking to have a place to access their data and store their data to enable a worker on the go scenario, or to enable a field services applications or technicians.

Our AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service capability gives the end-user that ability to store, distribute, share, and retrieve that data on the go using any web-enabled device. Another example is AT&T's Platform as a Service capability, a great foundational tool for users to go in and use any one of our pre-built application and then instantly mobilize that application.

We have a customer who recently used this, because they had a customer meeting and they didn't have a sophisticated way to get surveys out for their customers. They wanted to create a database on the fly and get instantaneous feedback.
We find that many customers are looking for a secure place to collaborate on data sharing.

So they went into AT&T's Platform as a Service -- and this is a marketing person mind you, not a technical user -- they entered the questions that they required of the customers. They sent the quick questionnaire out to the end-users, five simple questions. The clients answered the questions.

Ultimately, that customer had a very sophisticated database with all of that information that they could use for market sensing on how to improve their products, number one. But number two, it made sense to use it as a marketing tool to provide promotional information to those customers in the future.

Gardner: Very good. We've been talking about how global telecommunications giant AT&T has been creating and delivering advanced cloud services for the customers, and we have seen how they view the VMware-centric infrastructure approach to help provide virtual private clouds and other computing capabilities as integrated services at scale.

So thanks to our guest, Chris Costello, Assistant Vice President of AT&T Cloud Services, really appreciate your input.

Costello: Thank you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again to our audience for listening, and do come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how telecom giant AT&T is leveraging its networking and cloud expertise to provide advanced cloud services. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in: