Thursday, December 09, 2010

WAN Governance and Network Unification Make or Break Successful Cloud and Hybrid Computing Implementations

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on meeting the challenges of network management and operations in the age of cloud computing.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Ipanema Technologies.

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

Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion on the rapidly escalating complexity and consequent need for network management innovation in the age of hybrid computing.

And the emphasis nowadays is on "networks," not "network." Long gone are the days when a common and controlled local area network (LAN) served as the workhorse for critical applications and data delivery. With the increased interest in cloud, software as a service (SaaS), and mobile computing, applications are jockeying across multiple networks, both in terms of how services are assembled, as well in how users in different environments access and respond to these critical applications.

Indeed, cloud computing forces a collapse in the gaps between the former silos of private, public, and personal networking domains. Since the network management and governance tasks have changed and continue to evolve rapidly, so too must the ways in which solutions and technologies address the tangled networks environment we all now live and work in.

Automated network unification and pervasive wide area networking (WAN) governance are proving essential to ensure quality, scale, and manage security across all forms of today's applications use. We're here to explore the new and future path to WAN governance and to better understand how Ipanema Technologies is working to help its customers make clear headway, so that the next few years bring about a hybrid cloud computing opportunity and not a hastening downward complexity spiral.

We're here now to discuss the new reality of networks and applications delivery performance. Please join me in welcoming our guests, Peter Schmidt, Chief Technology Officer, North America, for Ipanema Technologies. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Schmidt: Hey, Dana. It's nice to be here.

Gardner: We are also here with David White, Vice President of Global Business Development at Ipanema. Hello, David.

David White: Hi, Dana. Looking forward to this chat.

Gardner: Let's look at this whole issue of the pain now in networking. The trends around cloud are raising the stakes. Tell us how things have shifted, Dave, over the last several years.

White: Over the last several years, most enterprise customers that we've talked to and, in fact, most enterprise customer in the industry, have moved to using SaaS applications. For example, Salesforce.com is the largest, and is used by most large enterprise companies as a part of their sales force automation. Also, Amazon is doing hosting for hundreds of different businesses providing SaaS applications to enterprises. Peter, do you have any comments?

Schmidt: Another really important trend is that enterprises have added extra networks. They've been building single private networks based on MPLS converted from older technologies like Frame Relay. Over the past few years, we've seen a real trend, where enterprises have been going to the Internet as a backup link for a lot of their offices.

Cheap bandwidth

The Internet is cheap bandwidth and it gives some benefits of additional reliability. But now, they've got all this bandwidth lying around, they're paying for it, and they'd like to find a way to make use of that.

As soon as you start using multiple networks, you're in the cloud, because now you're making use of resources that are outside the control of your own IT organization and your service provider. Whether people think about it or not, just by adding a second network, they're taking their first steps into the cloud.

White: I absolutely agree and, as part of that, a lot of customers are looking at things over the Internet that they can use as applications, like Google Apps, that they never could have used even two years ago.

Schmidt: You're suddenly delivering significant applications from Google’s servers over the Internet as an enterprise IT organization. How you get your arms around that is a big question.

Gardner: And, Peter, when we had just internal applications and we are worrying about performance issues with that, that was plenty complex enough, particularly when we want to consider how we brought in new services and new employees, or expanding our organization out to branch offices and whatnot. Give me a sense of how much more complex this is from a network performance management situation.

Even as little as three years ago, the focus was on how to get the most performance for your applications out of your single MPLS network.



Schmidt: That’s an excellent point, Dana. I speak at conferences fairly often, and over the past few years, the hot topic has changed a little bit. Even as little as three years ago, the focus was on how to get the most performance for your applications out of your single MPLS network. I am talking enterprises where all of their applications are hosted on their property. They’ve got a single MPLS network from one service provider and they're still struggling to deliver reliable application performance across the infrastructure.

Now, we throw in multiple places to host applications. You have SaaS, Salesforce, and Google Docs. You have platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). People’s critical applications can be hosted in numerous locations, many of which are beyond their control. Then, as I mentioned, these are being accessed via multiple networks, and you have the legacy MPLS plus the Internet.

There are increasing numbers or diversity of models of those networks, whether the Internet connection gets to a service provider POP and then via MPLS to their own data center, or what is the impact of content delivery networks? So we've got a situation where enterprises who are struggling to master the complexity with one data center and one network are now using multiple data centers and multiple networks. Something is going to have to give.

Gardner: For a lot of companies, as they try to push applications out, but retain more central control, perhaps to cut costs with a more consolidated data center strategy, the branch office approach maybe gives them some sense of what to expect as they move toward cloud. In your opinion, Dave, the branch office is sort of a stepping stone to what networking in the cloud ecology or ecosystem is about.

White: Absolutely. It's really all focused once again on the branch for the last five to seven years. We’ve had server consolidation where we try to remove any type of issues for the branch and remove intelligence from the branch. As cloud computing has come in, and we are going through what we have just described regarding usage of the Internet and SaaS applications, we are now putting more stress on the branch.

Managing traffic

We're not necessarily putting intelligence out there, but we're having 2, 3, 4, 5, or more networks, all coming into the branch at the same time, and that traffic has to be managed. It’s something a lot of people haven’t thought about.

Schmidt: That’s the unknown piece of the cloud story. Most of the cloud marketing and innovation that you read about in the past couple of years is really being focused on a data center. It's as if everything to do with the application happened in the data center. We know it's only the half of the story. You have the network and then the branch itself. As long as the majority of workers are out in branch offices, which is true for a large percentage of especially larger enterprises, making that work is obviously critical for the productivity of the whole business.

White: And, interest going up too. When you look at the announcements that have been coming out and the hype on cloud in the industry, it's all focused on the data center. That’s because most of the vendors say, "That’s where the big bucks are being made. We are going to make money out of the data center."

Ipanema, on the other hand, is focused on application acceleration, and in order to do that, you have to take care of what goes on in the branch and manage it.

Gardner: So, it seems that automating network unification, bringing more governance to this whole WAN, even if it's a complex stew of networks, that's the key. Help me understand what it is at a high level that we need to do to beat this, so that we can do cloud computing and get that return on investment (ROI) in that data center, but without stumbling at the network stage.

White: I'd be happy to. At a high level, the first thing you have do is provide some type of WAN governance, simply meaning that we are going to make sure that you have taken care of the management of your business. Because that’s what WAN governance means -- providing the type of control over your business to allow it to continue to be productive, as you're making changes to your WAN.

Simply put, you first of all have to find out what's going on in the network.



Simply put, you first of all have to find out what's going on in the network. You have to understand what's happening on those 4, 5, or 6 different flows that are all going in from different sources to your branch. You have to be able to control those flows and manage them, so that you don't have your edge device or edge router getting congested.

You have to be able to guarantee performance and, very importantly, you also have to then unify, balance, and optimize the performance over those multiple network points that are coming into your branch.

If you're doing it the right way, at least what we would say is the right way, it needs to be dynamic, automatic and, in Ipanema terminology, autonomic, meaning that not only does it happen automatically, but the network learns and manages itself. It doesn’t require extra human intervention.

Schmidt: That's a really critical point. The way the enterprise is going to get its arms around this increasingly complex environment is not through throwing people at it. Throwing people at network management has never worked and, now that the environment is more complex, it's going to work even less.

Quickly and automatically

The whole point of cloud is that you're going to use virtualization and automation to bring up instances of servers quickly and automatically, and that's where this order of magnitude improvement potential comes from. But, if you don't want the multiple networks to be the bottleneck, then you have to apply automation in that domain as well. That's what we've done. We've made it possible for the network to run itself to meet the businesses’ objectives.

The effect that has in a branch office with multiple network connections is really to hide all the complexity that that multiplicity brings, because the system is managing them all in a unified way. That's what we're getting at when we're talking about network unification. The details that bedeviled traditional management just kind of disappear.

Gardner: Thanks, Peter. I see the term WAN governance used a lot, I wonder if either of you could give me a quick primer. What do you really mean by WAN governance?

White: I just mentioned it and I probably should have defined it a little more. We look at WAN governance as really a piece of ISO standard for IT governance, which is an official ISO standard. There is a section in there on WAN governance. In a way, it talks about what you have to do to manage your wide area.

Ipanema strongly believes the WAN governance is really a standard that should be put on the books, but isn't yet. If you're really going to have governance over your IT, since the network is a strategic asset to promote enterprise customers, you need to have governance over the wide area as well.

We've made it a particular issue, as far as we're concerned, in delivery of service. We want to make sure that our customers can have governance over the wide area.



We've made it a particular issue, as far as we're concerned, in delivery of service. We want to make sure that our customers can have governance over the wide area. Peter, have you got more comments on that?

Schmidt: WAN governance is what the CIO wants to buy. CIOs don’t want to buy a WAN, and they certainly don't want to buy WAN optimization controllers. What they want to buy is reliable application performance across their infrastructure with the best possible performance and lowest possible cost. My high-level definition of WAN governance is that it's the technology and techniques that allow the CIO to buy that.

White: Excellent.

Gardner: So, as we look at cloud computing and then hybrid computing, there is also a simultaneous trend around mobile computing. As you’ve pointed out Peter, when I've spoken to you in the past, there seems to be this removal of the boundaries between private, public, and personal computing.

Tell me how that's impacting things. I know that a lot of the enterprises I talk to are rapidly moving toward mobile. They want to be able to use mobile apps. They want to be able to have their workforce engaging with applications as part of the business process 24X7 no matter where they are.

Schmidt: Absolutely. Anybody who carries a smartphone is experiencing the personal, private, public boundary of operations themselves. But what seems natural to somebody carrying an iPhone or Blackberry is a tremendous challenge to the traditional models of IT.

iPhone app

W
e're about to release our first iPhone app to provide an interface into our central management system, and it's terrific. It's exactly the kind of thing the CIO would want to have in their hand. That just shows the value of pushing IT to be democratized and put into the hands of all of the people tied to the enterprise.

How does it challenge traditional IT? Control is something that is IT's responsibility, and it doesn't matter that these technological innovations are making that harder. They still have that responsibility.

We think you need to use technology to fight technology. The Ipanema system is designed to provide the full control by giving the enterprise IT organization not just visibility in reporting on every user's access to their IT infrastructure, but also to automatically control all of that traffic in accordance with various policies.

We don't see any other way around it. You're not going to do this manually. You've got to build smarter systems. We happen to think that we are a huge piece of that puzzle in terms of how we control things at the network level.

White: Dana, most of us hire those mobile remote users ourselves. We're all on the road or at home working, which is probably typical for 80 percent of all the people in the U.S. My wife, for example, works for a real estate agency. You wouldn’t think she works at home, but she does, and most everybody does. What's important is that you have to provide full guaranteed performance, regardless of where your users are, because a lot of your users are now remote and mobile and they are accessing critical applications.

It allows enterprises to have control and management over the objectives they have set for application performance down to my desktop.



So if you have a mobile agent that is a part of your network, all the services need to be integrated for the visibility and control of the applications even to a mobile user. That's what the mobile client does. It's integrated into the whole network and it's nothing separate. It allows enterprises to have control and management over the objectives they have set for application performance down to my desktop.

Schmidt: Or your laptop in the hotel room.

White: Or my laptop in the hotel room, absolutely.

Gardner: And the pace has changed so rapidly, who knows? In two years there might be a totally new class of device out there, right?

Schmidt: One thing that's clear is that putting into people’s hands more power that they're going to be using more often and in more places is the obvious trend. I don't know in which ways smartphones will get smarter, but I'm pretty sure that they will become the dominant end user device over time for all IT needs -- personal, private, and public.

White: If we look at the projections for smartphones, in the next couple of years they're going to have the intelligence that the current laptops we're using now have. That means they're really going to have the performance of a laptop, and they will have applications running the same as we do now on our laptops.

Interface limitations

Schmidt: The limitations of the interface versus a laptop are such that it's going to put pressure on some of the more sophisticated computing happening into the back end of the cloud. So, the two really work off each other.

White: I completely agree.

Gardner: While we think about mobile computing now as a B2E, that is to say, how I empower my employees, we're also seeing a lot of enterprises thinking about how to deliver applications to their end users, their clients, their customers, and even finding new classes of customers. This is about application delivery, not just for productivity internally, but increasingly as the means to new revenue and new business. Any thoughts about that?

Schmidt: That really represents a merging of the traditional e-commerce model with the traditional IT. Now we have a similar value delivery mechanism, the app, being used by different constituents of the same enterprise.

For example, we've been talking to a very large, worldwide, well-known consumer brand. Their concern is how do they make the thousands of employees of their enterprise productive using their mobile apps? Also, how do they bring their customers to their website and have them buy that way.

We're talking to both groups at the same time, because it's ultimately a common infrastructure. They need a way to solve that issue from a common platform. That's why they came to us, because we're the only ones who have that platform.

Get a free white paper on WAN Governance for Cloud Computing.

Get the free Cloud Networking Report.

Gardner: Let's look at the ways that we approach these. We've clearly defined that there are a lot of challenges and tremendous opportunities as well. This isn't something that many companies can afford to ignore. This is a problem that needs to be solved. How do we get at this? What are the WAN governance, the autonomic, and the hybrid network unification approaches that we need to consider?

Schmidt: It starts with a change in philosophy, honestly. Traditional network management was done from a very bottoms-up technical orientation. We worried about sites, we worried about routers, we worried about network connection, and we hoped to build from the bottom-up a relatively reliable, relatively well-functioning network infrastructure.

Since you're no longer building big chunks of that infrastructure to move to the cloud, there's an obvious limitation right there in a bottom-up approach. You're going to be buying a service with some sort of service level agreement (SLA). There's a wrapper around that. You don't have those details. In fact, that's what exciting about the cloud. Now you don't have to worry about managing those details.

You've got to go the rest of the way, and Ipanema has pioneered a unique approach that stems from the idea that all that matters is that end users are able to get good performance from their applications, because that’s when they are most productive. When application performance slows down, end users start surfing the web. So, ensuring the performance of the application is critical. That’s what the enterprise needs to reorient itself toward.

The fundamental input into our system is a list of applications and their performance. The system itself is intelligent enough to monitor and dynamically control all of the traffic to achieve those objectives on behalf of the business. So, it’s imposing the business’s will on the network.

The first step

The first step is the change in orientation to understand that application performance is the fundamental thing you want to buy, and to realize that it could be achieved top-down through a system like ours.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about the history of Ipanema. How did you get to this point? Dave, what’s the history that led up to your innovation and ability to look at this a little differently?

White: It starts with our three founders who got together and took a look at what the needs were from an application perspective. Their goal was to find a way to ensure that, as users, we all had the performance we needed and that enterprises could deliver performance from an application perspective to their users.

That’s what they started out with. Then they took a look at how you would deliver that service and recognized the best way to provide for the delivery of the right type of consistent application performance is to do it over the wide area and to look what happens over the WAN.

They were very visionary in recognizing that application performance over the wide area is going to be the single most critical piece of the puzzle, when it comes to taking a look at how we as users of enterprise deliver service and do it in conjunction with major service providers and network providers, because they are the ones that deliver the wide area connections.

When they started out, they were told that they were wrong and weren't looking at it the right way. When you see what’s happened to the network and how it’s evolved, particularly now that we are moving into the cloud generation, they were focused exactly in the right area. Although we have a lot of new features, the basic architecture has been there for years and it’s been proven in major service provider networks and is installed on a global basis.

The basic architecture has been there for years and it’s been proven in major service provider networks and is installed on a global basis.



Gardner: Peter, we are going to get into some more technical detail about Ipanema’s approach in an additional podcast, but just to round this out for our discussion today, what is a little bit of the secret sauce? What is it that differentiates you technically in terms of being able to accomplish autonomic networking and hybrid network unification?

Schmidt: There are a couple of things that are the secret sauce, but the easiest one to explain probably is the fact that our appliances actually cooperate with each other, and this is unique. Our appliances know about not just the traffic that’s impinging on their network interfaces, but they actually know about the flows that are active everywhere on the network.

It’s actually not that that simple. They really only need to know about the flows that might conflict with the flows that they are managing. But conceptually, every device on the network knows about all the other flows it needs to know about. They are constantly communicating with each other -- what flows are active and what performance those flows are getting from the infrastructure, which includes the whole WAN, but also the data center and the service. So what does that enable?

Global perspective

Sharing this information means that all of the decisions made by an individual device are made from a global perspective. They're no longer making a local optimization decision. They each run the same algorithm and can come to the same result. And that result is a globally optimum traffic mix on the network.

When I say globally optimum, that’s a valid technical term as opposed to a marketing term, because the information has been collected globally from the entire system. In terms of optimum, what I mean is the best possible performance from the most applications using the given network infrastructure and its status at that point in time. So, it’s a hard definition of what optimum means.

Gardner: It sounds like you are taking metadata in a real-time environment, almost applying business intelligence to what’s going on in the network. Is that what you mean by WAN governance or am I overstepping the definition here?

Schmidt: Forgive me, Dana, but that’s how a data center guy would describe what we are doing in the network. We're network guys. From what I know about metadata and the applications built back in the data center, that sounds pretty good. The fundamental point is that the traditional approach to network management required a human being in the loop, and the human being had to look at low level metrics, like what percent full was a particular circuit, what was the ping time between two sites, and then try make a judgment about what that meant in terms of the health of the infrastructure.

Their primary indicator about the health of the infrastructure was, and remains, helpdesk calls. I was at Interop speaking at a panel last year, and the analyst who was monitoring the panel and said, "Everybody in the audience whose first knowledge of an application performance problem is a call to the helpdesk, raise your hands." Three quarters of the IT professionals in that audience raised their hand -- and the other quarter were lying -- because it's really impossible with traditional network approaches to understand what's going on at the application level from the network.

If you are looking at it the way you’ve done for the last 10 or 20 years, there is no way that you can see everything.



There are a couple of theoretical reasons for that, but Ipanema said, "That’s too hard. It's probably not even theoretically possible. So, let's do something different. Let's measure the application performance directly and then share those measurements" -- and that’s the key.

White: The point I'd like to make is that it's absolutely impossible to measure it in a cloud environment as an enterprise network manager, because you only see a piece of the network. Unless you’ve done something different, which is what we provide, than the way you are going to look at your network, if you are looking at it the way you’ve done for the last 10 or 20 years, there is no way that you can see everything.

The closing point here is that the first step is visibility into the network, and the next step is providing the control. You need to do that in the cloud environment, and that's what Ipanema does.

Gardner: When Peter mentioned that he thinks about things of course from a networking perspective, I tend to think more at a data center level, but these two worlds need to stop colliding or being separate to come together. How does what Ipanema does can allow that? Can we bridge this cultural gap between the data center mentality and the network mentality, because I think that’s what's going to be essential for cloud computing?

Schmidt: It's all about application delivery. The enterprise is beginning to understand that. We talked about the founders’ insight in realizing that what really matters is good application performance across the WAN and how the WAN is a critical asset and it's the most highly variable asset, especially in the cloud. So, there is a lot of value to getting control there.

Complex environment

But, the data center is its own highly complex environment with networks and multiple tiers of different computing going on. Clearly, a huge amount of work and innovation has gone on in there by companies other than Ipanema to master that complexity, and in fact, automate all sorts of interesting activities to make the data center a much more responsive, flexible, on-demand infrastructure.

But, the thing that needs to happen is that there needs to be an end-to-end view of how to deliver the best possible application performance to the end user, given the resources that have been deployed or could be turned on, because that’s the new dimension here. In the data center, we can now turn on more servers dynamically. Ipanema has the ability to dynamically send the traffic over multiple network paths. So, there's an affinity there that we need to exploit. In fact, we're actively working on partnerships to help realize that connection.

Gardner: We are just about out of time, but I would like to look at the future and even through the lens of the user. Is there someone that you are aware of, a use case that perhaps is a bellwether of what more organizations will be dealing with looking at this architectural perspective, the visibility, but also with this being so essential to their business having a real impact on the bottom line?

Is there an example that might illuminate where other people are going to find themselves in the few years?

Schmidt: We have an excellent example right now. A very large enterprise, a major logistics company, is in the process of a multi-year IT project that is critically strategic to their entire business. They're moving from a legacy IBM mainframe infrastructure that's running their entire business today -- order taking to warehouse management to truck dispatch, the whole nine yards.

The fact that our platform has become the basis for a proven globally deployed intelligent application based managed service gave them a lot of confidence that this is really going to work for them.



They're moving to an SAP system. A critical enabler of that is the fact that they're going to buy a managed service from a global service provider that’s partner of Ipanema’s, BT. BT has an intelligent managed service on top of the Ipanema platform. So what are the benefits the customer is buying?

Well, the number one thing caused them to adopt this approach was their concern that if there is poor application performance with this SAP suite of applications, it's not a theoretical productivity reduction. It's a measurable, millions of dollars per hour or more, hit to their bottom line. So there is a very high value of having full control over their application performance on their WAN.

I think the fact that they could buy it as a service from a major service provider was also a big attraction to them. They're a very large company. They're used to dealing with very large IT service providers. The fact that our platform has become the basis for a proven globally deployed intelligent application based managed service gave them a lot of confidence that this is really going to work for them.

Although this example is a case of going from mainframe to a modern SAP distributed implementation, I see the benefit that they are looking for being the same as people who move into the cloud are looking for. They're looking for revolutionary improvements in their IT infrastructure, whether that turns into a factor of 10 cost reduction or a factor of 10 up-time or reliability improvement or whatever the other strategic metric may be. The promise of cloud is that by using this new model, you can revolutionize your IT.

One of the big risks there, of course, is that you step into this world of greater complexity and you can have the productivity gains completely undone by the fact that it is complex and you need to be able to figure out how to manage that. So, this company is actually a pretty good example of what people are going to be struggling with as they move into the future and look at cloud -- how they migrate their critical business activities into a new distributed infrastructure -- and we have a piece of that answer with WAN governance.

Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. It was a very interesting discussion. We've been talking about automated network unification and pervasive WAN governance as essential ingredients to quality, scale, and managed security across the many forms of today's applications use, working more towards cloud and hybrid models.

I want to thank our guests. We've been joined by Peter Schmidt. He is the Chief Technology Officer, North America, for Ipanema Technologies. Thank you, Peter.

Schmidt: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And David White, Vice President of Global Business Development at Ipanema. Thanks so much, Dave.

White: Thanks, Dana. It was a pleasure.

Gardner: This is Dana Gartner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Get a free white paper on WAN Governance for Cloud Computing.

Get the free Cloud Networking Report.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Ipanema Technologies.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on meeting the challenges in networks management in the age of cloud computing. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Jonathan Priestley Recaps the News and Events at HP's Software Universe 2010 in Barcelona

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

We were here last week to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations, making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I’ll be your host throughout this series of Software Universe Live discussions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

To better understand HP’s latest vision and strategy for software and solutions, we're now joined by Jonathan Priestley, Director of Marketing for HP Software and Solutions, Europe, Middle-East, and Africa (EMEA). Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan Priestley: Hi, Dana. Thank you.

Gardner: Well, we’ve had quite a few very interesting developments. We’ve had news. We’ve had presentations on the stage. Pulling this together from those main stage or keynote announcements, how would summarize? How would you put this together for those who didn’t have a chance to attend?

Priestley: Well, we’ve had two great results to start with. The first is the weather. We got very lucky this time of the year. We have sunshine and blue skies out there, which is very good. The second is that we’ve got 3,500 attendees here, which is a super result. We exceeded our goals. I'm absolutely delighted, and the whole team is really excited, as you can imagine.

But, let me tell you about main stage, because we had some really good presenters on main stage this year. We started out with Anton Knolmar. Now, Anton is a veteran of this event. For 10 years now, he has been presenting here. He started out with a traditional flamenco dance, and you really had to be there to see that, in all his glory, as he came out with a rose between his teeth. It was a super start to the event and very appropriate here in Barcelona.

We moved on to Robin Purohit, the Vice President and General Manager of the R&D organization within software, to take us through the new strategy and vision for HP software. This was a really big one for us, because it’s the first time that the whole strategy and vision has had a public airing. It was exciting to see customers’ reaction to that.

We followed Robin with Jonathan Rende, Vice President and General Manager of our Application Solutions. This was really the news point for our main stage, the launch of Application Lifecycle Management 11 (ALM 11). This is probably the biggest news point we’ve had in the last six months or so. And we saved it especially for the show.

Gardner: Now, you mentioned the new strategy that Robin aired. Maybe you can encapsulate that for our listeners. What is this new strategy and why is it so important?

Priestley: It’s really important for us because, for the first time, we've got a really good story that ties together the history of our organically built technology, as well as the acquisitions that we’ve made. We’ve constructed this around those areas that we see our customers working with in their IT organizations today, as they deliver the solutions that drive their businesses. We see that breaking out into these areas.

Supporting services

Build -- how you actually put the applications that support the services out there. Operate -- how you supply the infrastructure that supports those applications. Secure -- how you make sure that you’ve got the right kind of security in place. Store -- how you make sure that this enormous information explosion we're all dealing with today is capable and managed. Finally, analyze -- how you take the business data that you're collecting in real-time and get decision-making data and information out of it.

Gardner: And, ALM 11 consists of a number of parts. How does that aid and abet that vision? How does it fit in? Is it a hub, a spoke, the foundation? How would you relate ALM 11 to this larger strategy?

Priestley: This is the culmination of two years worth of engineering time. This is a massive innovation for the marketplace and for us.

For the first time, you’ve got something that goes not just across the traditional software lifecycle, as we know it -- develop, test, deploy, and manage -- but across the entire lifecycle of an application.

This includes one of those things that we don’t like to talk about in IT, which is retirement, when we actually get rid of something, because we are not real good at that in this industry. Of course, it is a key part as we go forward. One of the fundamental reasons organizations can’t reduce their data or application load is because they never get to the point of being able to retire anything.

One of the key benefits of ALM is that we’ve unified a complete view, a single view, of that whole process.



One of the key benefits of ALM is that we’ve unified a complete view, a single view, of that whole process. Now, the people who are responsible for each of those siloed areas -- the business analysts, developers, testers, and operational people -- who have to support and maintain the applications can actually see, from one place, how each of those areas hand off to each other to ensure that they can manage it effectively.

And, of course, the final piece is how I make sure I’ve got security engineered into the application before I deploy it. That whole piece fits together under ALM. So, you can see why we're so excited about it.

Gardner: Obviously, yes. Every day we're hearing about new impacts on the enterprise and governments. We’ve got cloud computing, mobile computing, social networks, and social mobility.

You’ve just come out recently with some Instant-On Enterprise initiatives, and I understand that we need to try to factor how IT can get involved and help the business better serve this imperative around Instant-On. So, maybe we could come back around full circle. How does ALM 11 help IT provide an Instant-On Enterprise?

Priestley: If we go back to the strategy and vision I just described, we talked about that in terms of the areas in which we see the IT people within an organization working. But, if you take that up a level and think about the challenges that these large enterprising business and government are facing, we see that breaking down into five core areas, something we call Converged Infrastructure. This is all of the elements of the infrastructure working together.

Working together

Enterprise security -- not just thinking about the individual components, but looking at it from across the entire delivery mechanism.

Application transformation -- something that all our customers are telling us they are facing today, and obviously, that’s one of the key areas where ALM fits in.

Information optimization -- another key, when we talk about the information explosion and the challenges with that. This ensures that you can manage not just data, but the information you want to get out of that hybrid delivery.

It addresses probably the hottest topic in the industry, if I want to put my enterprise resources on premise, running locally, versus putting it somewhere in a cloud, which I am running privately, or putting it in a public cloud. Our expectation is that all large enterprises will be facing those kinds of sourcing decisions and we call that "hybrid delivery."

Gardner: We understand that you're hearing some new and interesting things here from the users. We're in EMEA, so they are from far and wide, many different cultures and languages, many different types of markets. You created a new executive track. Tell me a little bit about that and what you're hearing from this large and varied audience?

It’s very difficult for them to figure out how to put innovation into their own organizations, but particularly how to remove the barriers to innovation.



Priestley: We put a lot of effort into the program and I am calling it a program, versus a track, this year, because instead of thinking as a single standalone event, we're thinking of it as a program that runs across the entire year. The launch point has been here at Software Universe.

We started out by taking an agenda from what our CIOs have told us are the key things that they are looking to try and get some help with.

The first is innovation, how they actually put innovation into their own organizations and how can they remove the barriers to that innovation. This is a key one, because it’s very difficult for them to figure out how to put innovation into their own organizations, but particularly how to remove the barriers to innovation. We’ve done a lot of work around showing them how to go through a discovery exercise to look for those opportunities.

The second thing is that the CIOs themselves are always measuring themselves against their peer groups, and that’s something else we’ve helped them with today. We're bringing in some expertise from outside to look at what are the skill-sets that make the perfect CIO, because we see that role changing.

We talked a bit about hybrid delivery and sourcing options. The actual skill-set roles of a CIO could very well change, and that’s one of the things we’ve tried to explore with them today.

CIO annual report

A
nd as we go across the rest of the year, we'll be looking at something like an annual report. Every company or business today delivers an annual report on how they perform. CIOs are looking for the same kind of the thing themselves. How do they produce an annual report that shows how IT is performing and what kind of service it’s delivering back to the business? That’s something we will be taking that journey with them through the whole year.

So we're really excited about that program, and we’ve had some great feedback from the CIOs, that this is really hitting the hot spots for them, particularly on innovation and how they plan themselves going forward.

Gardner: Moving back to the main stage and some of the themes we’ve heard, we saw a great vibrancy around the follow-through for many years now on this fictitious enterprise. It encapsulates a lot of the issues the folks are dealing with. So being in EMEA, being inclusive in many markets, tell me about this presentation and why, in a sense, it illustrates a lot of what we've been talking about so far?

Priestley: This is our live-action main stage event. It’s just fabulous. It’s been running for 10 years and it’s a great showcase for us. It’s built by our own pre-sales organization, and over the 10 years we have taken our solutions and we demo'd them live. That takes pretty serious confidence in your own technology to demonstrate anything live on a main stage.

But, today, we were celebrating our ten-year anniversary by showing just how the HP software solutions can help with ALM, of course -- that was our focus for the show -- but also how to use the solutions in a cloud environment, which is also a big message we're trying to get across today.

We were celebrating our ten-year anniversary by showing just how the HP software solutions can help with ALM, but also how to use the solutions in a cloud environment.



Ulrich Pfeiffer, our CTO in EMEA, who sets up the whole main stage event, pulled together pre-sales people from across the region. You could hear all the different accents and nationalities working together, and it was the perfect example of what our customer organizations face in working with multi nationalities across the geography.

We even had a bouncing Volkswagen Beetle out there today, Dana, which was pretty interesting for us, because in rehearsals last night, if I can share a little backstage secret with you, it managed to smash through the main stage. So, we were up until quite late last night repairing the main stage, but, as ever, the show went perfectly on the day.

Gardner: Very good. We've been hearing more about the vision and strategy for software and solutions here in Barcelona. I want to thank our guest Jonathan Priestley, Director of Marketing for HP Software and Solutions, EMEA. Thank you Jonathan.

Priestley: Thanks very much indeed, Dana.

Gardner: I want to thank also our listeners for joining the special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

Look for other podcasts from this event on the hp.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect network.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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Friday, December 03, 2010

Case Study: AIG Insurance Group Leverages ALM to Attain IT Performance Architecture Advantage

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

We're here in the week of November 29, 2010 to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live Discussions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Our customer case study today focuses on AIG-Chartis insurance and how their business has benefited from ongoing application transformation and modernization projects.

To learn more about AIG-Chartis insurance’s innovative use of IT consolidation and application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, please join me in welcoming Abe Naguib, Director of Global Performance Architecture and Infrastructure Engineering at AIG-Chartis in Jersey City, NJ. Welcome to the show, Abe.

Abe Naguib: Hello, Dana. Nice to be here.

Gardner: Abe, tell me a little bit about the scope of your organization and the type of applications activities that you are undergoing and why moving toward some newer products made sense?

Naguib: Let me step back for a second, Dana, and give you a background on AIG and its applications. AIG is a global insurance firm, supporting worldwide international insurance of different varieties.

We're structured with 1,500 companies and roughly about eight lines of businesses that manage those companies. Each group has their own CIO, CTO, COO structure, and I report to the global CTO.

What we look at is supporting their global architecture and performance behavioristics, if you will. One of the key things is how to federate the enterprise in terms of architecture and performance, so that we can standardize the swing over into the Java world, as well as middleware and economy of scale.

Gardner: Given the breadth and depth of the organization, where are you in terms of your applications? What are some of your goals in terms of improving how things are done?

Proliferation of middleware

Naguib: I started about 10 years back, when I came on board to standardize architecture, and I saw there was a proliferation of various middleware technologies. As we started going along, we thought about how to standardize that architecture.

As we faced more and more applications coming into the Java middleware world, we found that there’s a lot of footprint waste and there’s a lot of delivery cycles that are also slipped and wasted. So, we saw a need to control it.

After we started the architectural world, we also started the production support world and a facility for testing these environments. We started realizing, again, there were things that impacted business service level agreements (SLAs), economy of scale, even branding. So, we asked, how do we put it together?

One of the key things is, as we started the organizational performance, we were part of QA, but then we realized that we had to change our business strategy, and we thought about how to do that. One key thing is we changed our mindset from a performance testing practice to a performance engineering practice, and we've evolved now to performance architecture.

The engineering practice was focused on testing and analyzing, providing some kind of metrics. But, the performance architectural world now has influence into strategies, design practices, and resolution issues. We're currently a one-man or one-army team, kind of a paratrooper level. We're multi-skilled, from architecture, to performance, to support, and we drive resolution in the organization.

Gardner: What is your role in that team?

Naguib: I manage the organization in terms of deliveries. We hold internal best-practice discussions. We catch trends and metrics in our knowledge base. We influence design. We even influence vendors that come in. We partner with a lot of the products that come in.

So, we meet with IBM, HP, and Oracle products, and as we influence and capture trends, we work back with the product development teams to figure out how to first resolve internal development, as well as the product that we build on.

Gardner: And as you were making the transition to this performance architecture, what were some of the important considerations you had in terms of making that more holistic, more managed, and more comprehensive?

Naguib: One of the biggest things was the time to market. We also saw that resolution had to happen quickly and effectively. Carnegie Mellon did a study about five years ago and it said that post-live application resolution of performance issues was seven times the cost of pre-live [performance application resolution].

In other words, we realized that the faster we resolved issues, the faster to market, the faster we can address things, the less disruption to the delivery practices.

Too many people involved

In normal firefighting mode, architecture is involved, development is involved, and infrastructure is involved. What ends up happening is there are too many people involved. We're all scrambling, pointing fingers, looking at logs. So, we figured that the faster we get to resolution, the better for everyone to continue the train on the track.

We built a practice with architectural engineers and DBAs to get to issues and resolve them faster.

Gardner: So, when you've got multiple teams and then fairly large numbers of people involved with these teams, they're probably distributed as well. What’s the overall umbrella concept? What did you need to pull that all together and to give you that view into these activities to make that performance, integrity, and speed come together?

Naguib: The key thing is that we started working with the CIOs at that level, and figuring out a strategy to develop a service-level target, if you will. As we went along, we began working with the development teams to build a relationship with the architectural teams and the infrastructure teams.

We became more of a team model, building more of a peace-maker model. We regrouped the organization, so that rather than resolve and point fingers at each other, we resolved issues a lot faster.

Now, we're able to address the issue. We call it "isolate, identify, and resolve." At that point, if it’s a database issue, we work directly with the DBA. If it’s an infrastructure or architecture issue, we work directly with that group. We basically cut the cycle down in the last two or three years by about 70 percent.

A lot more CIOs have started bringing in more applications. We see a trend growth internally of roughly about 20-30 percent every year.



Gardner: And as you're increasing your goals of speed and integrity are you also able to handle more applications at once? Does this improve the volume of applications going through your pipeline?

Naguib: Absolutely. Because there is a change in our philosophy, in our strategy to focus more on business value, a lot more CIOs have started bringing in more applications. We see a trend growth internally of roughly about 20-30 percent every year.

I have a staff of nine. So, it’s a very agile, focused team, and they're very delivery-conscious. They're very business value-conscious, and we translate our data, the metrics that we capture, into business KPIs and infrastructure KPIs.

Because of that metric, the CIOs love what we do, because we make them look good with the business, which helps foster the relationship with the business, which helps them justify transformation in the future.

Gardner: Can you share with us any of those KPIs, what’s the report card that you could bring back to your superiors in a business sense? What’s the business case and rationale you can provide?

Footprint is key

Naguib: If you look at ITSM model, Service Level Delivery, one of the key things is the footprint of applications. One thing that organizations are starting to realize now is that software drives the hardware. For example, the cost of IBM WebSphere on hardware is much more expensive than actually buying a server.

In traditional firefighting mode, people tend to hire consultants, bring in hardware, and end up increasing their cost. What we found is that, if you address the software angle of it, then you can improve your TCO and ROI.

By taking a looking at correlating business transactions to a footprint on a server, and improving those transactions and their consumption rate, you're actually effectively improving the consumption of that application particularly. And as you improve that, there is more room for capacity. When there's more room for capacity, your economy of scale goes up. So, if TCO improves, ROI improves, and your technical debt actually gets resolved a lot faster.

Gardner: It sounds as if managing the development, test and deployment cycle effectively really is almost like the head of a pyramid -- and affects the entire IT economic equation.

Naguib: Absolutely. There is a new paradigm now, they call it the "Escalator Message." In 60 seconds or less, we can talk to a CIO, CTO, COO, or CFO about our strategy and how we can help them shift from the firefighting mode to more of an architecture mode.

In 60 seconds or less, we can talk to a CIO, CTO, COO, or CFO about our strategy and how we can help them shift from the firefighting mode to more of an architecture mode.



If that’s the case, the more they can salvage their delivery, the more they can salvage their effective costs, and the more they can now shift to more of an IT-sensitive solutions shop. That helps build a business relationship and helps improve their economy of scale.

Gardner: We're hearing a lot here at Software Universe about ALM 11, a new launch by HP. You've been a beta user of at least some of the components of that. Tell us how that started and what you experienced?

Naguib: Sure. My background is that I dealt with the Mercury products back in the late 1990s. I have experience with Quality Center and the improvements that have gone on over the years. Because of our focus, we built our paradigm out of QA and into the performance world, and we started focusing on improving that process.

The latest TruClient product, which is a LoadRunner product, has been a massive groundbreaking point solution. In the last two years, frankly, with HP and Mercury getting adjusted, there’s been kind of a lag, but I have to give kudos to the team.

One of the key things is that they have opened up their doors in terms of the delivery, in terms of their roadmap. I've worked extensively for the last roughly year with their product development team, and they have done quite a bit of improvement in their solution.

Good partnership role

They have also improved their service support model; the help desk actually resolves questions a lot faster. And we also have a good partnership role, and we actually work with things that we see, and to the influence of their roadmap as well.

This TruClient product has been phenomenal. One of the key things we're seeing now is BPM solutions are more Ajax-based, and there are so many varieties of Ajax frameworks out there than we know how to deal with. One of the key things with the partnership is that we're able to target what we need, they are able to deliver, and we are able to execute.

Gardner: So, trying to fit that into our larger equation, the test and development deployment scenario is very important to the overall IT equation economically. How does this product, TruClient, fit into that in terms of aiding and abetting your goals?

Naguib: One of the key things is how to build partnerships across the organization, internally and externally. LoadRunner and TruClient allow us to get in front of the console, work with the business team, capture their typical use cases in a day-in-the-life scenario, and automate that. That gets buy-in and partnership with the business.

We're also able to execute a test case now and bring that in front of the IT side and show them the actual footprint from a business perspective and the impact and the benefits. What ends up happening is that now we're bringing the two teams together. So, we're bridging the gap basically from execution.

Frankly, nobody really cares as much about the footprint cost, until they start realizing the dollars that are spent.



Gardner: And as an early adopter and user, is there any 20-20 hindsight advice that you might offer to others who would be going down this trail as well?

Naguib: I would definitely send the message out to think in business value. Frankly, nobody really cares as much about the footprint cost, until they start realizing the dollars that are spent.

Also, now, business wants to see us more involved from the IT side, in terms of solutions, top-line improvements, and bottom-line improvements. As the performance teams expand and mature and we have the right toolsets, innovative toolsets like TruClient, we're able to now shift the cost of waste into a cost of improvements, and that’s been a huge factor in the last couple of years.

Last, I would say that in 8,000+ engagements -- we're actually closing in on now 10,000 events this year -- we've seen roughly $127 million in infrastructure savings that we have recouped. Again, that helps to benefit the firm. Instead of waste, now we're able to leverage that into more improvement side.

Gardner: So, the unfortunate reality for IT is they often have to do more with less. You've found a way to actually make that happen and perhaps continue it on an ongoing basis.

Naguib: Absolutely. I am excited about what I do. We have a great team and a great strategy. The support from my CEOs is fantastic. And again, we are seeing that just the whole partnership model across both the vendor side and internally has been a super benefit to the organization as well as the industry.

Gardner: Well, great. We've been discussing IT consolidation, applications lifecycle best practices with Abe Naguib, Director of Global Performance Architecture and Infrastructure Engineering at AIG Chartis insurance. Thanks so much, Abe.

Naguib: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Gardner: We're here in Barcelona at HP's Software Universe 2010 Conference. Look for this podcast and others on the HP.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect network.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

Case Study: Enel Green Power Uses PPM to Gain Visibility, Orchestrate Myriad Energy Activities Across 16 Countries

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

We're here in the week of November 29, 2010 to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live Discussions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Our customer case-study today focuses on Enel Green Power and how their Italian utility business has benefited from improved management of core business processes and gained visibility into new energy projects, also adhering to compliance through better planning and the ability to scope out new projects comprehensively.

To learn about Enel Green Power’s innovative use of project and portfolio management (PPM), please join me now in welcoming Massimo Ferriani, CIO of Enel Green Power in Rome. Welcome.

Massimo Ferriani: Thank you.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about your issues, your strategy, when it came to managing such a large and diversified company. Perhaps you could start by describing Enel Green Power and where you operate?

Ferriani: Enel Green Power is one of the leaders in the renewables market. We're fighting with the Spanish Iberdrola Renewables every day in order to find out who is the leader of this market.

We have some important differences, compared to the other competitors. First of all, we operate in 16 countries. The next one operates in 12 countries. So, we have 30 percent more, but it's important for us in order to decide our strategy and how we have to invest.

All of the other competitors basically work on a couple of renewable technologies -- wind and solar. Enel Green Power works in all the most mature technologies such as hydro, geothermal, wind, and solar.

If you think about a matrix to cross technologies and countries, we have a lot of trouble, because we operate four technologies in 16 countries. This is very important for the IT strategy as well, because we're slightly different compared to conventional generation, which is arithmetically easy to pace from carbon combustion to the energy product.

Asset portfolio

For renewables, it's difficult, because we have more than 300 plants all around the world with four technologies. So, it's an asset portfolio that we have to operate, and we have to reduce the risks. When we decided to deploy IT platforms, we didn’t think that it was a good idea to deploy conventional generation IT platforms, but to build up new platforms more fitted to renewables' needs.

We thought about the main objective in deploying these platforms and said, "Okay, maybe we have to deploy platforms that permit Enel Green Power to minimize the portfolio risk, in order to know exactly what production should be." For us, knowing the production is a condition. It's not a main output. There's no sense in knowing the exact production of a plant on a small island in Greece. That may be irrelevant, considering all the plants we have.

We have to know production, but we have to know exactly the production that we're promising to sell to the market.

Gardner: You have many different types of renewable sites. This left you with many different choices on those sites, but it seems to me you need it to centralize. You need to have a single PPM solution. Tell me a little bit about why centralization and control became important?

Ferriani: This follows the business strategy. The business strategy is to manage centrally and operate locally. So, IT had to follow the strategy. Our main IT platforms are developed with the objective to be global. Global doesn’t mean managing everything centralized, but to manage the IT platform as centralized, because it's better for synergies and in terms of costs. But, because we have to fit local needs, we we have to localize these platforms in 16 countries.

For PPM, as well, we decided to have a global, centralized, unique platform, in order to gather and collect all the data that we get from the field. This is one of the problems that we frequently have because, in effect, the operation is located everywhere. And, it’s not easy to collect information from each field operation.

It’s important to have global IT platforms, because one of our main objectives is that all our people have to work in the same way.



We have lot of plants in the middle of nowhere -- in the middle of the Nevada desert and in the middle of the Mato Grosso in Brazil. We have to gather information from these plants. So, it’s important to have global IT platforms, because one of our main objectives is that all our people have to work in the same way and because this market is so strange.

It depends a lot on the regulations in a country. It could be that a country that wasn't interesting for us some months ago will become absolutely interesting. This is the case today of Romania. Romania adopted a regulatory incentive scheme so interesting for us that we decided to switch 500 million euros from other countries to Romania.

The whole company has to follow that, but it’s important for us that all the people could work in the same way on the systems. If we have to move people from other countries to Romania, it’s important that they keep on working on the same tools.

Gardner: Very good. So when you looked into what PPM tools and platform would be the right choice, what were the criteria? What were the service level agreements (SLAs) or requirements that you were interested in getting the right choice for your PPM?

Setting the main goals

Ferriani: First of all, it’s important to set the main goal of the PPM solution. Now, the PPM solution lets Enel Green Power manage its own worldwide portfolio initiatives, both business development side and the plant construction Phase 2, because we have to remember that the business development hands over the construction of the project.

We have to do it through building a unique centralized integrated platform, valuable to all the countries, designed to certify the market value of the pipeline and the potential future production related to that pipeline. For us, it's absolutely important to forecast better, to make budgets, and so on. It had to be designed to support people, our colleagues, in activities like planning, project development, reporting, document management, and so on.

So when we decided to deploy this platform, we had a lot of work for a couple of reasons.

First of all, because we wanted to develop an integrated in-house platform in order to map the AGP core processes of the project, and at the same time to implement algorithms to develop a portfolio evaluation.

The second was to investigate adopting a standard solution available on the market that allowed us, with little customization, to fit the need of the business. It's important to underline that, when we started this project, it was the end of May, 2010. We already knew we were going to have an IPO. We didn’t know the time exactly, but we had to be ready for the end of October, the estimated date of the IPO.

A few days after the IPO, the result of the third quarter were to be presented. So, it was very important to have the platform ready at the end of October in order to certify the value of the pipeline after the IPO -- and we did it.

We adopted the HP solution, because the HP people convinced us that with a minimal set of customization we would be ready for the end of October -- and we did it.



Gardner: So this was very important for your company, but the time had to be quick in order for you to reach your financial objectives and, in a sense, create the right value for your company. Tell me how you were able to do this so quickly.

Ferriani: In the market, there is a great variety of PPM solutions. We decided not to make our own solution, because, in general, we prefer to buy standard solutions in the market. Considering the level of centralization of this project we decided to adopt a standard solution with only a set of customizations that permitted us to reach our goals and be ready for the end of October.

We adopted the HP solution, because the HP people convinced us that with a minimal set of customization we would be ready for the end of October -- and we did it.

We chose HP because of the elements important to deploy such a platform. First of all, strong automation in the collection of the data. As I said before, also important for us were simplicity and flexibility. Also, with reference to our geographical distribution everywhere, the adoption of a solution supported with global support was another constraint and was absolutely important.

We needed a standard technology accessible from a lot of countries and with integration with other applications that we have, for example Microsoft Project. We also required scalability and platform growth -- and HP has a strength on this point -- because we are adopting a web service architecture. And, we wanted the viability of a unique homogenous view of mandating KPIs.

Gardner: What were the results? You had an awfully big challenge and you had a little bit of time to do it. Tell me how it worked out in the end?

A long life ahead

Ferriani: First of all, it's important to say that we are in the first phase of the project. So the project has a long life ahead.

We're only in the first phase in order to support the IPO and to support the certification of the market value of the pipeline. But, the main benefits of this platform for the business are acquisition and centralization of the data.

This is, as I said, for the certification of the market value of the portfolio initiatives in general, both business development and construction as well. Knowing that these steps that would flow is very important to a lot of the departments in this value chain. One is procurement, because they have to plan all the purchasing in relation of the progress state of the pipeline and the operation. And, it’s important for the operations, when you think of switching investments from one country to another one.

Business development has decided to switch a big part of the pipeline from North America to Romania. That's absolutely huge to manage. It’s important for the automation to monitor all the steps of the workflow, of the individual steps of the process, to manage the workflow authorization of the individual steps, and monitor progress of the individual steps. All these data have to support us in order to plan the strategy. So, there are plenty of benefits and maybe more benefits in the future with the evolution of this platform.

Gardner: Very good. Is there anything in particular about the PPM platform from HP that has really impressed you? Is there anything that you didn’t expect but have been surprised?

For us, the flexibility was one of the three main strengths on this platform and the reasons we chose HP.



Ferriani: Yes, the flexibility. For us, the flexibility was maybe one of the three main strengths on this platform and the reasons we chose HP. But, the best one, as I said before, was the minimum customization we needed in order to fit the first phase. It’s not easy to have only three months time to set 64 workflows, because the local business development wants to fit their workflow on these needs. It is not easy, because the central business development wanted to manage centrally.

So, the ability to mix this central point of view with the local ones was another strength of HP Solution.

Gardner: Well great. We have been hearing about how Enel Green Power’s innovative use of project and portfolio management has benefited their business. It sounds as if you’ve got in quite a bit of upfront completeness and yet flexibility that’s allowed you to balance the needs of your local organizations with the demands of your central organization. Thank you so much.

Ferriani: Thank you very much.

Gardner: We've been joined by Massimo Ferriani, the CIO of Enel Green Power in Rome. This is Dana Gardner coming to you from a BriefingsDirect live podcast in Barcelona at the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference.

Look for this and other podcasts from this event at the HP.com website as well as via the BriefingsDirect network. Thanks for joining, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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