Take a Deep Dive on How Enterprise App Stores Help Drive Productivity

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the growing importance of enterprise app stores in moving organizations to a self-service model that reduces both complexity and delays in getting applications to end users.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.

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

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity and speed-to-value benefits for PC users and IT departments alike.

We’ll specifically examine what steps businesses can take to build and develop their own enterprise app stores for mainstream use. We'll further see what rapid and easy access to self-service apps on PCs and notebook computers through such app stores is doing for businesses.

The popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, on one hand, has energized users, but on the other hand it’s caused IT and business leaders to scramble to adjust to new models of applications delivery.

We’ll explore here how app stores are part of the equation for improved work and process success on and off the job. We’ll see how Embarcadero’s AppWave solution brings the mobile apps experience to millions of PC users in their workplace in the enterprise.

We’ll also hear from the author of a recent Ovum white paper on why app stores are so important for enterprises, as they consider ways to better track, manage, and distribute all of their applications.

The popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, on one hand, has energized users, but on the other hand, it’s caused IT and business leaders to scramble to adjust to new models of applications delivery.

Please join me now in welcoming our panel. We're joined today by Tony Baer, Principal Analyst at Ovum. Welcome back to the show, Tony.

Tony Baer: Hey, Dana. Good to be here.

Gardner: We’re also here with Michael Swindell, Senior Vice President of Products and Marketing at Embarcadero Technologies. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Swindell: Hi. Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And we’re also here with Richard Copland, Principal Innovation Consultant at Logica. Welcome, Richard. [Disclosure: Embarcadero is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Richard Copland: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: Tony, let me start with you. You've written a white paper in the recent past on app stores and why they’re important in enterprises. Were you surprised in any way at how broad this app store model can be used and is starting to be used for all sorts of applications?

Concept leap

Baer: I was a little bit surprised because there is certainly a concept leap from a $1.99 little applet that you pull down from the iPhone app store or from the Android marketplace to a full-blown enterprise desktop application.

That being said, it’s not surprising, given that there’s been a huge demand from the bottom-up, from the people in the workplace. So it’s a phenomenon that’s probably better known as the consumerization of IT -- "I have these sophisticated mobile devices and tablets. Why can’t I get that easy to use experience on my regular machine for my day job?"

Therefore, the demand for the comfort and convenience of that was inevitably bound to spread into the enterprise environment. You've seen that manifested in a number of ways. For example, companies have basically embraced more social collaboration. And you’re also starting to see some use of many of these new form factors.

So again, what Embarcadero has been starting to introduce is symbolic in a way that’s really not surprising.

Gardner: Richard Copland, any thoughts on this as well? Tell us a bit about your organization, Logica, and your role as a Principal Innovation Consultant.

Copland: My role as a Principal Innovation Consultant is effectively twofold. It's to find new things and introduce new things to our clients. Something innovative to me is something that's new to you and provides a benefit. This can be cash, people, or green ideas. I spend my day looking at cool new stuff, which means ways of working, technologies, partners, and even wacky research coming out of the various universities here in Europe.

I get involved in schedules of client discussions, and people look to me and my team to bring ideas to life, to help answer that question, which is a challenge where there must be a better way. An example of that is the enterprise app store being a better way for things. Then, it’s unpacking that and exploring how you might help create that vision of the answer and empower them to believe that these things are possible now.

A bit about Logica: We're a business and technology service company. We provide business consulting, system integration, and outsourcing to our clients around the world including many of Europe’s largest businesses.

Last year, we did just under £4 billion globally with 800 million of that being here in the UK. We create value by successfully integrating people, business, technology, and a key part of this is the innovation piece. Clients look to us to bring innovation and innovative things, and Embarcadero's AppWave and the concept of the business application certainly falls into that category.

In terms of those larger trends, which are driving or almost overseeing the consumerization of IT, I step it back, and say that it’s almost as we are as a service concept which is the fragmentation and segmentation of people looking to get more and more value being directed to them, specifically to their needs, and as a result of that, it’s the on-demand concept.

Generation Next

For me, it’s also the whole Generation Next piece which is about a whole new generation that is educated and tech-savvy. They're multitasking all the time. They work as consumers. They're purchasing products and customize them to their needs in terms of their lifestyles. So they’re regularly sharing insight and comment on things which are good for them.

That’s playing out in terms of lifestyle and that's being brought into the business scenario, whereby the formal and informal hierarchies of organizations are blurring.

Another trend that I see, and a lot of our clients in the conversations that we have see, is this whole global talent contest, by which clients are struggling to maintain, obtain, and keep satisfied Generation Next with the latest technology. Why should they legitimately step back in time in the tools that they will use in their role, if it doesn’t provide and support their last stop. It’s a real challenge for them.

Gardner: Michael Swindell, when we see longer term trends, and then new innovations, one of those trends has been the need to rationalize applications. Almost every enterprise I talk to rarely knows how many applications they have, rarely knows to what degree they’re being used, and has no clue as to how to sunset them or bring this sprawl under control. It seems that that’s a long-term trend trying to rationalize apps, but at the app store model, innovation brings some sanity to that and buy-ins from the users.

Is there a win-win possibility here with app stores helping organizations manage their apps better, and yet, getting the buy-in from the users to accelerate how that goes about by them voting and either installing and uninstalling these apps rather rapidly?

Swindell: There are really two sides to the benefit of using the app store methodology for those problems. There's an organizational side of understanding application usage, as you said maybe sunsetting applications, understanding how applications are used within their organization, so that they can make good decisions.

Then we have the user side, where users have a lot more information that they can provide that’s very useful for both the organization and other users.

The app store metaphor works very well in sharing that type of information. It gives the organization usage information and statistics, and the demand information that's valuable for the organization to plan and understand their application usage. It also provides information to other users on the applicability of applications for certain scenarios, whether applications are good or bad for a particular scenario.

This has worked well in the mobile space with public app stores, and we see that there's a lot of applicability inside the firewall, inside organizations, to be able to use this information and create more value out of their applications and to help users get more value and understanding about their applications.

Gardner: Tony, back to you. In your white paper, it seems that there's an economic value here, that we're just sort of scratching the surface of. It seems that we know that the consumers like app stores, based on how they vote with their dollars, whether it's $0.99 or more. It’s just a huge success for Apple and others are jumping on the bandwagon.

But it seems to me that getting the transparency, seeing the trends, and being able to sunset and better manage their apps has got a fairly significant economic value to it. Furthermore, users perhaps will only be using resources based on their needs. So there is sort of an efficiency aspect to this. Is that what you've found?

Traditional model

Baer: We've not done any scientific studies, but compare this model to the traditional application deployment model.

Number one, it's a much more of a long-fused process. There is elaborate planning of the rollout. You're trying to figure out all the different client targets that you're trying to address. Even if you do have locked-down machines, you're still going to have issues. Then, package the release,. Then, regression test it to death. Then distribution, and you actually get the thing installed. Hopefully, it's up during some off hour, let's say, at 3 a.m. Then, you prepare for all the support calls.

That's a pretty involved process. That consumes a lot of time both for the end user, who is waiting for the functionality that he or she may want -- or not. And it's also, of course, a considerable overhead in the IT organization.

If you take that all away into a more modular model, more like a radio broadcast model, essentially it becomes a lot more efficient. You lose all this lead time, and as Michael was talking about, you then get all the visibility for all these apps being consumed. End users have more sway. As long as they are authorized to use these apps, they have this choice.

So it's not that all of a sudden they have a whole number of apps that are loaded on their machine, whether they like it or not. We haven't done anything to quantify this, because trying to quantify productivity is like asking “what's the cost of downtime?” And in a lot of sectors that can be a very subjective number. But intuitively, this model, if it scales out, should basically provide a much lower cost of ownership and much greater satisfaction.

This model, if it scales out, should basically provide a much lower cost of ownership and much greater satisfaction.

Gardner: Richard, in your looking over the landscape for additional innovations, I can see how services orientation and cloud computing certainly dovetail with this, but it also seems to me that the need is for organizations to encourage users to change their habits. Maybe it's around the process level, instead of an application level or maybe simply adopting new applications quickly, rather than having to go through a long period of adjustment.

Is there something about the app store model that you think will encourage faster buy-in and perhaps a lot of organizations would incentivize or use social mechanisms to encourage users to adopt new technologies and new applications faster?

Copland: Undoubtedly. The whole socialization and the social trend which I see as probably the biggest driver behind this is for the way in which people use software and the way in which people comment on a software.

The organization will cluster around the toolkits for which the feedback from the users is positive. I can think of one large global financial organization here that has 5,000 apps within their world. They would look to simplify their landscape by over 60 percent, because they recognize that they've got so many kinds of individual pockets of activity going on in the organization.

And you need to support those individual pockets of activity that, in terms of your users in the tail effect, they’ll be the mainstream enterprise apps, such as Windows-based or Office-based, which the majority will use. But if you could tap into an environment, in which you are giving the people what they want, then the return on investment (ROI) from that is going to be a lot faster.

Cultural incentive

Gardner: We’ve certainly seen how the incentive is there from a cultural and popularity perspective, given what we’ve seen in the mobile space. There's a strong economic and productivity rationale for this in terms of both long-term IT trends, like rationalizing applications, and shorter-term trends, like incentivizing people to use the social mechanisms and adopt newer applications or processes or methods faster.

Now the question is: how do you do this? How do you take a legacy of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of applications written for the PC, written across different platforms and different iterations over time and maturity levels of those platforms, and make them available through an app store?

Michael Swindell, tell me a little bit about AppWave and what it takes for an IT organization to make the transition from that long process that Tony outlined to a more streamlined app-store approach.

Swindell: The best way to describe AppWave is that it’s just a pretty simple three-step process. The first step is taking traditional software, which is traditionally complex for end users and for organizations to manage. This includes things like installations, un-installations, considerations about applications, of how they affect the users’ environment.

Then, converting those traditional software applications into the concept of apps where they are self-contained, don’t require installation, can be streamed and run to a user anywhere they are, and really delivering the mobile-like experience of mobile software to the more complex traditional desktop PC software.

AppWave has tooling that allows users to take their applications and convert them into apps. And that’s any type of application- commercial application or internally developed.

AppWave has tooling that allows users to take their applications and convert them into apps. And that’s any type of application -- commercial application or internally developed.

That's the first step. The second is to centralize those apps in an app store, where users can get to them, and where organizations can have visibility into their usage, manage access to them, etc. So the second step is simply centralizing those apps.

The third is the user experience. One of the key drivers behind the success of apps in the mobile space has been the visibility that users have into application availability. It’s very easy for users to search and find an app as they need it.

Think about how a user uses a mobile phone to come up with an app. Maybe they’re walking down the street, they see a business, and they have an idea, or they want directions to something. They can simply search in an app store on their mobile device and immediately get an app to solve that problem.

If you look in the business space and inside the workplace, when a user has a problem, they don’t really have a mechanism to sit down and search to solve a problem and then get an application to solve it immediately.

As we talked about earlier, and Tony really well-described that the process, once they identify an application to solve a problem, that can take weeks or months to roll out. so you don’t have that instant feedback.

Instantaneous experience

The user experience has to be instantaneous. An area that we focused on very heavily with AppWave is to provide the users an ability to search, find apps based on the problems that they’re trying to solve, and instantly run those apps, rather than having to go through a long process.

Gardner: Michael, I’d like to hear more about how you go about that. But before we do, let me check in with our other panelists.

Tony, this sounds like it’s something quite new. As you pointed out, in the past and for the most part, in the present, in an enterprise, a user might have a need, wish they had a tool, a utility, a macro, any kind of a helping hand. Rather than go to IT and wait in line, sign some sort of a requisition, or go through a PO process, they probably just said, "Oh, the heck with it. I'll make do with what I have."

But now, we're giving people the opportunity to self-serve, search in the moment of need, and then satisfy that need with the click of a button. It sounds to me that it’s going to really enhance user productivity, the user's ability to innovate themselves, rather than just sit back and go with the flow. Am I overstating it?

Baer: From the end-user standpoint, there certainly is quite a win to this. But we also have to look at the fact that this is going to change the way IT serves the organization. At least this aspect of it is really going to become more of a service provider. And there are a lot of implications for that.

From the end-user standpoint, there certainly is quite a win to this. But we also have to look at the fact that this is going to change the way IT serves the organization.

For one thing, IT has to be more responsive but they also have to work on more of a shorter fuse, almost like a just-in-time type of model.

That being said, there's no free lunch in all this, and it still requires management. For example, we still need to worry about dealing with security governance, managing consumption, and also making sure that you lock down, or secure the licensing issues. As I said, there’s no free lunch, but compare that to the overhead of the traditional application distribution and deployment process.

So again, from the end user standpoint, it should be a win-win, but from the IT standpoint, it's going to mean a number of changes. Also, this is breaking new ground with a number of the vendors. What they need to do is check on things such as licensing issues, because what you're really talking about is a more flexible deployment policy.

Long-term, it's definitely a win-win. Short-term, there are adjustments to be made by IT and also by the software industry.

Gardner: Just as a quick observation, managing licenses is so difficult. Many organizations will just pay a blanket fee, not even bother to audit, or do anything they can to avoid the vendor audit. With the app-store approach, they would have real data, know exactly who is using what, and pay only what they had to. So I think that there's a hurdle to adjust to on the licensing, but there might actually be a strong benefit.

Changing the dynamic

Back to Richard Copland. On this notion that users, when empowered to download and find apps based on search, based on the library, based on what other users are passing along as what’s worked for them as users in the organization, it strikes me as really changing the dynamic itself.

Do you follow my thread on this? Do you think I'm going too far, and can we perhaps make the association that app stores can fundamentally change the way workers behave in an innovation sense?

Copland: Absolutely. You’re on the money with regard the direction of travel. We talked a little bit about looking at the mobile aspects of it and moving to this on-demand usage and the challenges for the organization to do that.

Certainly, the components within the AppWave solution give you the opportunity to move to more of what I would describe as smart working or remote working, by which the user doesn't necessarily have to come into the office to access the tools, which are traditionally being provided to them at their desk in their environment.

If you start remote working or are given a broader range of remote access, then you can be operating a much stronger work-life balance. So if you're in a situation where you’ve got a young family and you need to take the kids to school, you can come on and go off the company network and use the tools which are provided to you in a much more user-friendly flexible environment. That would be certainly from the user's perspective.

If you start remote working or are given a broader range of remote access, then you can be operating a much stronger work-life balance.

From the business’s perspective, I start moving to a scenario where I don't necessarily need to maintain a real estate where if I’ve got 5,000 users, I need to have 5,000 desks. That certainly becomes quite empowering across the rest of the organization, and other stakeholders -- the facility’s officers, business managers -- start taking real notice of those types of savings and the nature of how work is achieved.

Gardner: Back to how this can work for organizations. Michael Swindell at Embarcadero, tell me about AppWave, and let's learn a bit about its heritage. It seems to me that this has been something that's not just a flash in the pan new for you. It's really an evolution of something you've been doing in the application development arena with tools. So perhaps it's time to learn a little bit about the legacy and history of how AppWave has evolved?

Swindell: This is the AppWave 2.0 platform, which is really the second generation of the platform. The original 1.0 platform was designed to help deliver Embarcadero's own products to its users. And the reason it was developed was that Embarcadero, as many ISVs have, has a portfolio of different products, over 20 tools in our portfolio. We wanted to provide those to customers so that they were much easier for the users to find and use the applications as they had a need.

As a problem arises, you didn't have to worry about whether or not software is already installed or whether or not you have it. You simply need to be able to search on the problem and then be able to pull up the Embarcadero application to solve that problem.

The first generation of this technology was designed specifically for those 20 products. We created app versions of our software. Then came the idea of the centralized app store and the user experience to search, find, and run those apps.

Gardner: This is fairly proven. How long this has been in use in terms of a technology and a platform itself?

Licensing core

Swindell: Two years for the platform. Then, the licensing core, which is really an important part. We talked a little bit about earlier about how license management is important in access control. The license core that provides both licensing and access control has actually been around for quite some time and managed the licenses. We've been developing the licensing technology for almost 10 years.

Gardner: So you're taking this and focusing it beyond that core 2.0 that you started with. Now we're looking at what custom apps, legacy apps, cross platform, what is it that an enterprise was interested in moving in an app store direction, and they are going to examine something like AppWave. How far and why can this be applicable in terms of their legacy, their installed base of apps?

Swindell: Our vision is any type of application in the organization will eventually be supported by AppWave. The initial support is for PC apps in organizations, which is the vast majority of productivity applications that end users need. It also is where the largest problem set is, both from an end-user perspective and from an organization's perspective.

So we're tackling the hardest problem first and then our plan is to roll in other type of apps, web apps, and applications that you might be using in an organization, using other types of delivery technologies.

But the idea is to take any type of these applications and present them as an app inside the AppWave ecosystem. So a user can have a centralized way to search for any type of app whether it’s a corporate HR, a web application, a hosted software as a service (SaaS ) application, or a PC application. Certainly, mobile would be an obvious direction as well.

The idea is to take any type of these applications and present them as an app inside the AppWave ecosystem.

Gardner: It seems that we’re also moving now to being able to manage our applications, not just in their entirety and in their traditional state, but perhaps even decomposing them and getting into more of a modular applications transformation benefit.

Tell me how the companies that you’re working with that are using AppWave are using this, not only to just repurpose existing apps, but to even transform those apps and present them in new and interesting ways.

Swindell: There's a variety of ways that organizations are delivering applications to users today. The wider variety of applications and different ways and repositories that they have for apps really makes it confusing for end users to be able to know where to find what applications are available.

When I talk to end users and to customers, if you ask them where they find their applications, you’ll get a different answer, depending on who you talk to in the organization or what type of application they’re thinking of.

One of the things that AppWave and the app store concept can do is to help create a centralized app view of the different types of applications and even the different types of services in your organization, and to be able to understand what’s available.

Common presentation

There are also opportunities for the same types of socialization and sharing of information and knowledge about services using the app store concept, as there is with apps.

The important thing is to take these different types of applications and present them in a common way in the same place, so that it really doesn’t matter whether the app is a web app or it’s a PC app. Users can find them, run them, and share information about them at the same place.

Gardner: Just to be clear, your technology allows for not only ISV-packaged apps, but also custom apps designed for your organization, by your organization. These can now also be brought into this corral more of a common denominator of all sorts of apps. Is that correct?

Swindell: Correct. And those apps can be comprised of a variety of different services, different types of technologies, but they’re presented to the end user in the same way as a Windows app or a Web app.

Gardner: Is there an additional technical benefit here in terms of sometimes what we see with SaaS and multitenancy in that the patching and the security and management of that application can be conducted centrally. Then, each time the user brings it down from the store, for example, he gets a fresh updated version. Is there a lifecycle benefit to how apps are managed as part and parcel with this?

Some applications or some data may be dependent on a particular version of an app or an application. By using apps and AppWave, you can roll back three versions and open that up without having to install it, find it, or anything.

Swindell: It makes it a lot easier for end users, because they don’t have to think about it. When they log into their app store environment, updates are automatic, and it’s also very visible. They can see what’s happening very similar to into a mobile device. You always know when there are updates available because you get an icon that tells you how many updates are available.

There's an additional benefit, especially with software modularization and compatibility between different versions, that AppWave can provide. By compartmentalizing applications, it allows apps to run side-by-side across multiple versions.

So some applications or some data may be dependent on a particular version of an app or an application. By using apps and AppWave, you can roll back three versions and open that up without having to install it, find it, or anything. So the isolation and the idea of apps can really help in that regard.

Gardner: Richard Copland, as someone who is out there hunting down innovations that they can bring to their user organization and their clients, was there anything about AppWave or app stores in general for enterprise use that was interesting and attractive to you that we perhaps haven’t hit on yet?

Copland: In AppWave and the Embarcadero team, we have a global innovation venture partner program. They were our recent winner. They went up against competition from around the world. We believe that the app store concept has got so much within it in terms of the user experience, the socialization aspects, and the collaboration aspects of it.

Bridging point

The area which we haven't touched on so much is that it's a bridging point between your legacy systems and your more visionary cloud-type solutions where you really are SaaS, on-demand and pay-per-click.

Gardner: I guess on-demand isn't so much concerned with where the app resides and how it's delivered across the wire, but really with the notion of organizations being able to allow their users to go into a process, find a solution, apply it, and even create new types of innovative work and workflows. It's really about choice, freedom and applicability rapidly, rather than over a long time that is the actual benefit around on-demand.

Copland: The thing that will kill innovation is just operating slowly. One of the biggest blockers that organizations face with regard to innovation is the nature of how that sets out and the speed at which they react to what are their internal ideas.

Swindell: You can look at this as being in a way -- and Dana and Richard you're hinting on that -- a cultural preparation for transition to the cloud, if indeed the cloud is suitable for specific parts of your application portfolio.

Gardner: Michael Swindell, for those organizations that are looking at cloud but are bit nervous and see some risk and lack of governance security control, is there something about app store that makes that bridging effect that Richard was alluding to, but in a way that is more enterprise ready. That is, something that gives command and control in terms of access, privilege, governance and management but also fosters that innovation and freedom.

You can look at this as being a cultural preparation for transition to the cloud, if indeed the cloud is suitable for specific parts of your application portfolio.

Swindell: It certainly is a way of operating that's very attractive, that there's a lot of interest in, and has a lot of obvious benefits. But there's also concern around the areas that you bring up. Having an on-premise private app store that runs within your organization that is on site really addresses a lot of those concerns and uses the cloud simply to deliver new applications and apps from ISVs and from other vendors.

Once they are inside your organization, they're operating within your security and governance environment. So you don't really have to worry about those concerns, but it still delivers a lot of the benefits of the user experience of cloud and the on-demand nature.

Gardner: I know this is going a little bit out further into the future and perhaps into the hypothetical. It sounds as if you can effectively use this app store model and technology and approach like AppWave to be a gateway for your internal PC apps, but that same gateway might then be applicable for all these other services.

But if the gateway app store model works for a class of apps, it might work for all apps. It really could be a governance and management capability well beyond just the ability to package and deliver apps in this fashion. What are your thoughts on that, Michael?

Driven by demand

Swindell: The foundation is there, and I think it will be demand driven by users. Every time we talk to a customer with AppWave, the list of possibilities and where customers want to use and take the environment is exciting, and the list continues to grow on how they can use it in the long-term.

So we're building facilities today to connect the private AppWaves into our cloud infrastructure, so that we can deliver certainly apps but there could be other types of services that connect into that as well.

Gardner: Okay, and just to be clear. AppWave is available now. I believe we have a 30-day free trial, is that correct?

Swindell: Yes, there is a free trial, and we also offer free version of AppWave that organizations can download and use today with free apps. There's an entire catalog of free apps that are included and are streamed down from our cloud.

So you can get set up and started with AppWave, using free apps in your organization. What can be added then is your own internal custom apps or commercial licenses that organizations have. So if you've hundreds of commercial licenses, you can add those in or add your own internally developed apps.

Once they are inside your organization, they're operating within your security and governance environment. So you don't really have to worry about those concerns.

Gardner: Very good, and where would one go to find out more about this?

Swindell: You can go to www.embarcadero.com/appwave and try it for free.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we're out of time. You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity and speed-to-value benefits for PC users and IT departments of like. I’d like to thank our guests: Tony Baer, Principal Analyst at Ovum. Thank you so much, Tony.

Baer: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We've also been here with Michael Swindell, Senior Vice President of Products and Marketing for Embarcadero Technologies. Thank you, Michael.

Swindell: Thanks, Dana. It was a pleasure.

Gardner: And Richard Copland, Principal Innovation Consultant at Logica. Thanks so much, Richard.

Copland: Cheers, Dana. Cheers, guys.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. As always, thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Embarcadero.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the growing importance of enterprise app stores in moving organizations to a self-service model that reduces both complexity and delays in getting applications to end users. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Enterprises Should Harness the Power of Social Media to Better Know Their Markets, Says Capgemini

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how businesses need to respond to a marketplace changed by social media mechanisms.

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

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

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the impact that social media is having on enterprises. We’ll specifically examine what steps businesses can take to manage social media as a market opportunity, rather than react to it as a hard-to-fathom threat.

Social media and the increased role that communities of users have on issues, discourse, and public opinion are changing the world in many ways, from how societies react such as in the Middle East turmoil, to how users flock to or avoid certain products and services.

The fact is that many people are now connected in new ways and they’re voicing opinions and influencing their peers perhaps more than ever before. Businesses cannot afford to simply ignore these global -- and what now appeared to be long-term -- social media trends.

We'll hear today from an executive at Capgemini on how social media matters and how services are being developed to help businesses to better understand and exploit the potential of social media far better. This is the first in the series of podcasts with Capgemini on social media issues and business process outsourcing. [Disclosure: Capgemini is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Please join me now in welcoming our guest, Paul Cole, Vice President of Customer Operations Management and Business Process Outsourcing at Capgemini. Welcome to the show, Paul.

Paul Cole: Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner: Paul, it seems a bit of a twisted logic when we say that social media can be both a threat and an opportunity. Let’s start at a fairly high level. How could social media be both to your average business?

Cole: It's all in how you decide to respond. Social media, in and of itself, is a neutral topic. It could be viewed as a utensil or a platform, upon which you can do things. And depending on your intent, whether you’re an enterprise or a customer, those activities could be viewed favorably or negatively. And that's true as much in the sociopolitical world as in business.

The important thing is that social media is the platform, not the action itself, and it’s really what you decide to do over that platform that makes the difference in business and in the world at large.

Gardner: We’ve had this kicking around for a few years. Some people really expect this to be a fad, a flash in the pan. I think it’s now safe to say that that's not the case. Do you have any evidence, research, or findings of any sort that bolster this notion that social media is a sea change and not just a blip?

Game changer

Cole: Well, based on a survey we commissioned last winter, somewhat surprisingly, a bit more than one in 10 executives did characterize it as a fad relative to the business world.

However, you can look at it in the everyday world around us and the media as it relates to impact on society and in the sociopolitical spectrum, and there's very little doubt that it’s changing the game there. I believe it will have an equally profound impact on business over time.

Social media has become the bullhorn of the 21st century. It allows people to spread their message, to amplify that message, to mobilize the community, and also to monitor in real time the events as they unfold.

We are having to deal with it across the political, social, and cultural spectrums. Witness, unfortunately, the emergence of something that we’re now calling flash mobs, a case where the platform is being misapplied toward organizing a community of people who have damaging intentions.

So back to your question on threat or opportunity, significant or insignificant impact, it’s all based on the intent and actions of the individuals utilizing the utensil.

It’s all a matter of how you take that information and translate it into actionable insights, against which you can make some smarter business decisions.

Gardner: On one hand, we seem to see a lack of control or at least different aspects to how people behave. We don’t have the necessary tools. But on the other hand, we're seeing a lot more information generated, and information often is the lifeblood of how organizations react and adjust to markets.

So what is it about this information? Maybe it’s being used and applied wrongly in some instances, but the fact is that people are providing more data and information about what it is they do, what they want, who they are. That to me is I think something quite new.

Cole: Information overload is one potential consequence of this. It’s all a matter of how you take that information and translate it into actionable insights, against which you can make some smarter business decisions, and from our perspective, ultimately deliver a better customer experience which will help you grow.

What’s neat about what’s happening in the world of technology, on top of the social environment, is that there is a whole new generation of tools emerging that allow you to develop that insight.

There are four steps that a company can go through to generate social intelligence. First, is listening to what is going on out there. There has not been an earpiece for us to really take the pulse of the market, and what's happening in the virtual world or the internet world until the recent development of some of these social listening tools. So the ability just to know what's going on, who is saying what, who are the influencers, what are their sentiments is an important first step.

Monitoring change

The second step is the ability to monitor that over time and see how attitudes, perceptions, and most importantly, behaviors are changing and what are the impact and implication of that for your business, either from a marketing or a selling or customer service standpoint. In addition to monitoring that, you’re also now able, with text analytics tools to not simply track and describe what happening, but also isolate cause and effect.

So if I'm launching a Twitter campaign, putting a new product out there, running a contest, or engaging in some kind of social care activity, what is the impact it's having in terms of the customer’s behavior and what adjustments can I make to be more successful?

It's being able to get attribution and get to a root cause by applying these analytic tools. So you've listened, monitored, and analyzed. The killer app, if you will, is the last step of closing loop in terms of your ability to respond. So many companies today are putting their toe in the water in the social world by listening with these tools and trying to understand what's being said. It's new enough where not that many have actually industrialized their process for responding.

Ultimately, your ability to now go back into that community and influence the customer or attempt to influence the customer and their behavior is where there is a tremendous upside for companies in terms of generating higher growth and profit.

Gardner: We’ll discuss a bit more of how to do that, whether this is something that’s integrated into existing processes and functions in the business or it's something new. But, before we get into that, I’d like to hear about how Capgemini got involved?

How is Capgemini working toward some solutions on this? Maybe you could give us a little bit of background on the company as a whole, and we’d like to hear about how you got involved with the social media drive as well?

The question then becomes, as a provider of services, how to translate that into sets of offerings that add value for our clients.

Cole: At one level, you could look at social media as a wave or a phenomenon. I’ve been in the professional services, technology services business for 30 years, and we’ve seen the waves come and go, whether that would be CRM or ERP through SAP or eCommerce, which I think this mirrors quite a bit, and Y2K. So there's always an emerging area that people will try to understand, chase, and then capitalize on.

As a global provider of consulting technology and outsourcing services, Capgemini attempts to keep its finger on the pulse of market. You have to be blind and deaf to not recognize that social media has quickly emerged on the scene. The question then becomes, as a provider of services, how to translate that into sets of offerings that add value for our clients.

My particular area of expertise is around customer management. So I look through the lens of how a company acquires, develops, and retains its customers and how can we manage some of that process for them in a faster, better, or cheaper manner. We do that today in traditional forms with managing their call centers or their customer service operations, helping them present stronger web content, providing them with insights through analytical services, and so forth.

What social media started to suggest to us was that there was a new opportunity to bring another service to the market that allowed clients to focus on the business problem that they’re trying to solve and provided us the opportunity to provide them with everything they needed to mobilize around that objective in the social world.

Gardner: Paul, we’ve recognized that having good conversations and communication from customers and markets into the company is important. It's how companies decide what new products and services they're going to undertake, and how to better market the services and products that they already have in production and delivery, and then also they need to communicate back out to the market in the form of helpdesk, service, support, marketing, and sales.

Existing channels

Social media seems to me to be just an amplification on existing channels. What we seem to be seeing is that organizations don't know quite how to execute on that. I think they recognize in many cases the opportunity, but they don't know who in the organization should be responsible, who runs herd on social media, how does it get integrated into these functions, or whether it's ingoing or outgoing communications outreach and support.

Do you have any sense of what's going on in those businesses, as they react to social media? What's the pattern if any in terms of who gets to run with this and what they're doing?

Cole: In and of itself, social media is not going to drive your business forward. As we've discussed, it's really a platform or a utility upon which you can engage customers for one or more activities based on a business objective. It does, at the end of the day, relate back to what you're trying to accomplish.

When I went to school, we were trained on the four Ps in marketing. You develop a product that the marketplace is interested in. You price that product at a level that the consumer or customer perceives value so they want to transact with you. You need to promote that in terms of distinguishing you against your competitors and bring that product to market with some form of distribution. We call that the four Ps.

Obviously you still need to do all those things, but in the social world now, there is a new twist. If you think about the product, we used to take a very linear approach to doing market research, testing concepts, via surveys and focus groups. In today’s social world, you can do that much more dynamically. There's a whole phenomenon around crowd sourcing with which you can solicit people's input and feedback and iterate on that massively, and closer to real time.

There's a whole phenomenon around crowd sourcing with which you can solicit people's input and feedback and iterate on that.

Your ability to get really close to the marketplace is enhanced tremendously by social media. In terms of promoting, it used to be broadcast media, but now you're able to do micro campaigns. You can do tweet campaigns. You can do campaigns through Facebook. Your ability to target the individual that you are trying to influence has gone up exponentially.

We've always talked about the segment of one, but it was very difficult to do. Now, you can get in there and really understand who is driving popular opinion, who are the big influencers, who do you need to convert to be an enthusiast or an advocate of your product, and launch very specific campaigns against them. It's a different form of promotion.

It's the same thing with pricing and distribution. While you still need to do many of the same activities, the way in which you will execute on those activities has evolved and become much more dynamic.

Gardner: How is this showing up in terms of ownership inside the organization?

Cole: Every function within the organization has a potential application in the social world. I don't think it's the kind of thing that any one executive or any one function is going to own per se.

It's a matter of looking at it through the lens of the process that you're responsible for, and trying to understand how to apply new thinking and activities to improve your efficiency or your effectiveness of that area. That could be public relations and the brand, marketing and developing effective positioning, product development and management, selling through more targeted campaigns or, at the end of the value chain, a better servicing of the customer to generate greater loyalty.

Different ways

Gardner: One of the things that concerns me about how organizations adapt and adopt to solving their social media problems and capitalizing on it is that different organizations within the company will go at this in different ways.

This can probably lead to redundancy, probably lead to mixtures of data with different formats and we probably we'll find ourselves back in that same problem we have had with many applications. That is manual processes, different approaches to how to solve problems, and different data approaches. So you have this big integration problem in a couple of years.

Does it make sense for these organizations to look at social media as a platform, as you've been describing, with a common standardized governance and/or data approach, and therefore make those available as services to marketing, to the analytics and business intelligence folks, to the helpdesk and service management? Are we going to repeat history and have a fragmented approach to this or is there a better way?

Cole: You’ve really put your finger on a core issue. It all depends. What is social media? That depends on who you are and what you're trying to accomplish. That’s going to be variable based on your area of responsibility within the enterprise.

There is something to be said for standardization and taking a platform-based approach to avoid the recurring tendency of investing in your own individual solutions and then lacking interoperability or having to face integration issues and so forth.

By buying into a managed service the company can avoid having to make capital investments in the technology, avoid the potential risk of different groups going off and doing their own thing.

While the application of what you do on top of the social platforms may vary, there is potential for the organization to operate as an enterprise on top of a single instance of a platform. That’s part of why we got into offering a managed service.

We allow the client to focus on what they are trying to do in the marketing, selling or customer service world. We provide them with the infrastructure, the technology, the process discipline, the data, and importantly, the social media advocates, the human intelligence layer that is ultimately conducting the monitoring and the analytics and the interpretation of what’s happening there.

By buying into a managed service the company can avoid having to make capital investments in the technology, avoid the potential risk of different groups going off and doing their own thing. They can remain current, because they don’t have to pay attention to this fast paced dynamic technology market and what is the state of the art. That would be our responsibility.

Hopefully, it's the best of both worlds. They can each, as user communities, decide what they want to get out of social media, but be able to leverage the fact that they're all investing in a common platform.

Gardner: Social media isn’t the only trend buffeting up against businesses nowadays. There's cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS), mobility, and increased devices, and these are global trends, not by any stretch relegated to one or two markets or regions.

Commonality with cloud and SaaS

Is there an opportunity here for recognizing that the social media and the cloud and the SaaS approaches have some commonality. Where I'm going with this is that a social media metadata about what users are thinking and doing, could be a cloud resource and better positioned there so that that same data can be delivered and updated and managed.

If you come from a data-management background, you might recognize that having a system of record in a good, clean copy that’s updated and then sharing it is a great thing. Do you have any thoughts about how cloud and social come together to help organizations capture the best data and provide the best services when it comes to social media and its offspring?

Cole: Again, it’s just part of the evaluation of technology. It is a different way of storing, distributing, and accessing the data. What it translates into for us is the ability to provide process as a service. That’s a fundamental shift in the marketplace that’s occurring as a result of the development of cloud capabilities.

Organizations can just tap into a service, and that makes it easier for them to get into a new area. It’s faster, it’s less expensive. We're trying to apply that same concept to social media. We can provide a faster, better, and/or cheaper approach. The client buys the process as a service on a subscription model.

We assure the integrity and security of the data. We provide the data management, the repository, the infrastructure, and the toolset. You're buying a service around a process, whether that be listening to your customers, wanting to launch marketing campaigns, providing social care or whatever.

The whole SaaS cloud phenomenon is just changing the distribution model and also facilitating an easier approach for companies to get up and running in this area.

The whole SaaS cloud phenomenon is just changing the distribution model and also facilitating an easier approach for companies to get up and running in this area.

Gardner: Paul, do we have any examples, use cases that you’re aware of on a named basis or anonymous, or perhaps even how Capgemini itself is using social media to its own effect. Do we have any actual examples of how this works and what it actually can accomplish?

Cole: While we're early in the evolution of social business and its potential impact on profitable growth, there are plenty of examples out there of early successes. We’ve probably done 20 programs. Where it’s proving to be most successful so far is in products and service areas where there is a high degree of passion or involvement.

If we look at hospitality, automobiles, or electronic games, we’re finding a high degree of engagement, involvement of customers, and a high degree of interest in sharing their perspective. We’ve done support for marketing campaigns for a new launch for an adult beverage, where we were able to help our clients tweak their campaign geographically and in terms of the market segment it’s gone after.

Reduce call volume

For another client that supplies gift cards to the big brands, we help them understand customer service in an attempt to reduce the call volume into their call center because we were able to isolate the problem quickly, fix it and broadcast the message.

For a global retailer of furnishings, we were able to isolate on a particular segment that they felt have been underserved and understanding their motivations for using the store, and helping them create a new positioning against that segment.

Gardner: It’s impressive to me that social media can have so many different impacts, that it can be used and/or perhaps come in with a disadvantage, but it’s impactful at so many levels.

It seems to me that this notion of social media management then is really important. It’s not just executing on any one of them, but really having that holistic approach. Maybe you could explain a bit more what you mean by social media management in addition to these ways in which it can be so useful.

Cole: First of all, in terms of its all-encompassing kind of influence, there are strong parallels to the early Internet days, in the '90s, where everyone knew that there was a sea change occurring in the nature of how we could interact and exchange values in business.

We’ve got to do it, but over time it will settle down and companies will interpret it as a platform that they could do all kinds of things on and actually add another channel.

But it wasn’t quite clear yet how that was going to reveal itself. So it was a bit of a fad or a shiny new object, but ultimately it became another channel. It found its equilibrium, and companies learned how to conduct business over the Internet, as opposed to the traditional face to face, over the phone, or whatever, or through the retail channel.

Similarly with social media, at the moment it’s a little bit of a "du-jour" phenomenon. We’ve got to do it, but over time it will settle down and companies will interpret it as a platform that they could do all kinds of things on and actually add another channel.

They need to manage the channel. It may sound somewhat antithetical to say social needs to be managed, because really what we’re talking about in the social world is influencing communities. I'm not sure that it is manageable, but we want to provide them with a service that helps them manage customers' perceptions and actions.

Gardner: Lastly, Paul, I'm interested in how organizations can get started. This seems to be one of those issues where it has so many implications It's rather complex. Getting started, knowing where to actually put a stake in the ground and get moving can be daunting.

Where do you suggest that folks get started on how they pursue social media management and perhaps then look to outsource it and find that platform benefit approach.

Trying to understand

Cole: As evidence of the fact that it is a new phenomenon, you can just notice the volume of conferences that are out there with social media in the title. It just reinforces that companies are trying to understand still what "good" looks like. They’re out there looking for best practices. They are still paying for "PowerPoint," for consultants to come in and help them understand the strategy, the power of social, what that translates into in terms of metrics and governance, and so forth.

The market is very much in its exploratory stage. I'm not sure you can over-architect what social media means to you at the moment. This is something that you have to get in and dip your toe in the water. Instead of "ready, aim, fire," it's probably "fire, fire, aim, ready, fire." This means that you need to iterate.

You don’t know what you don’t know….. until you get in to the market and you start to listen to what is happening out there, identify who the key influencers are, where they're talking about, who are the advocates for the brand, and who are the potential saboteurs who can represent a threat? What are some of the kinds of programs and activities that one can run?

Rather than the grand strategies, the big-bang approach, this particular area is deserving of more experimentation, and iteration. Then, over time, we need the development of a broader strategy. But, you need to get in there, and listen, and learn, and act, and from that you'll figure out what works and what doesn’t work.

Gardner: I suppose it's the targeted pilot program approach and then iterating from that?

Cole: Exactly. Part of what we’re trying to offer our clients is the ability to do that faster than doing it themselves, where they have to go out, acquire the tools, hire the people, and put in place the processes.

In this case, they can say we want to launch a campaign and we’d like to understand how we can use the social world to solve customer service problems or whatever. We provide all the tools and capabilities to do that. They focus on learning and evolving their strategy of what to do in the social world.

Part of what we offer is the ability to bring to them the best of the tools that are out there, and it's an evolving world.

Gardner: It seems pretty clear that these tools and platforms aren’t necessarily themselves differentiators. It's what you do with the information that they provide that is the real business value.

Cole: That is true, but on the other hand, part of what we offer is the ability to bring to them the best of the tools that are out there, and it's an evolving world. We've worked with a myriad of software products in trying to understand what capabilities can be best applied to understanding the customer and engaging with them.

As part of that, in our Social Media Management Solution, we’ve built a joint solution with a company called Attensity, which really comes at the market initially from the text analytics world, but offers a nice suite of applications that enable your ability to listen, monitor, analyze what's being done, and then respond to the customer in terms of workflow and direct customer engagement. So it's what you decide to do, but it's also having the right toolset with which to do it.

Gardner: Are there any places to which we could direct our listeners and readers for additional information, perhaps whitepapers, other research, and/or more information on your services?

Cole: Certainly capgemini.com. We do have a featured social media section on the website. We've recently published a whitepaper called "Harvesting the Fruit from the Social Media Grapevine". We hope that clients will find that insightful. It's a bit of a point-of-view on where the market is today and where it's headed. That can be downloaded off of our website.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how social media matters and how services are being developed to help businesses better manage and understand social media for their advantage, and move beyond the threat.

I want to thank our guest. We’ve been here with Paul Cole, Vice President of Customer Operations Management and Business Process Outsourcing at Capgemini. Thanks so much, Paul.

Cole: Thank you very much, Dana. I appreciate it.

Gardner: This is the first in a series of podcasts with Capgemini on social media and business process outsourcing. Look for additional podcasts on these topics across the BriefingsDirect network.

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

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how businesses need to respond to a marketplace changed by social media mechanisms. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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• Capgeminim CSC Line Up for AppLabs
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• I Collaborate, Therefore I Think, Therefore I Am ... An Enterprise

Case Study: CharterCARE Health Partners Leverages Cloud and VDI to Aid Digital Records Management and Regulatory Compliance

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from VMworld 2011 on how a large health-care organization is using the cloud and virtualization to put vital data into the hands of employees.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you in conjunction with the recent VMworld 2011 Conference.

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

Our next VMware case study interview focuses on CharterCARE Health Partners, and how virtualized desktops and thin clients are helping with digital records management and healthcare industry compliance and privacy requirements.

We'll learn how Rhode Island-based CharterCARE has embraced private cloud and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to support its distributed, 579-bed community-based health system.

The organization operates the Roger Williams Medical Center, Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, and several other caregiver facilities. We'll hear how the tag team of private cloud and VDI has provided better data management, security, reliability, and regulatory auditing capabilities. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The infrastructure modernization has also helped CharterCARE move to electronic health records and has helped improve their processes for clinicians.

Here to dig into more detail on the CharterCARE IT infrastructure improvement story is Andy Fuss, Director of Technology and Engineering at CharterCARE Health Partners. Welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy Fuss: Well, thank you very much. Good to be here.

Gardner: I'm interested why data management has been a primary driver for you as you've looked to adopt both the private cloud and VDI. What is it about the data equation that’s made this look like a good solution for you?

Fuss: We need our data to be accessible everywhere, at every time, no matter what provider is at what facility. Even from an engineering and technology standpoint, no matter what system analyst, what network engineer may sit down wherever they are to troubleshoot an issue, we need that common set of tools.

Common repository

We need the common repository of information for a caregiver. That would be the electronic medical information. It could be the x-rays, the slides, the CT scans, or the results that were dictated by a radiologist. Whatever it might be, that information needs to be available in a flexible manner and delivered directly to the deskside experience.

Now, if that’s a desktop, it needs to be on a regular PC, but if we're talking about a tablet, we need to accommodate the tablets that people bring in and have come into the facility and are now actively being used, or zero client technology.

We have all the different technologies and pieces. We're trying to promote these pieces to be used and trying to be flexible with accommodating them and getting people to the information that they need so they can take care of the first priority, which really is patient care.

Gardner: Tell me about the extent of your distributed campus and environment. Not only are you dealing with many different types of data and many different endpoints, but you're also distributing this across a multitude of different environments.

Fuss: Absolutely. We have two main acute hospitals that we're dealing with. We have a nursing home, a cancer center, outpatient care offices, and several different offices all around the community. So the data truly needs to not be resident in one spot.

Where you're accessing that data from or where you're using it is seamless to the end user and provides a solid customer experience.

We also needed to have a secured disaster recovery (DR) facility, so that if anything were to happen to our primary data center that’s on one of the campuses, we could flex seamlessly over.

So building a cloud for us made total sense. That cloud hovers between one of two data centers. One is at one of the acute facilities, and then 100 miles away in another state, we have another data center. Our cloud roams between the two, and we have data flowing from each area.

So the connection really is no longer about where it’s physically located by any restriction. It’s more of just gaining access to the internet and being able to make connections. Where you're accessing that data from or where you're using it is seamless to the end user and provides a solid customer experience.

Gardner: You've used the term cloud, and as you know, many people have differing descriptions and definitions for cloud. When you talk about this moving back and forth across facilities that really to me gets as the heart of what I think of as private cloud. Maybe you could fill us in. What do you mean by private cloud in this case, and why is that important for you to manage it in such a dynamic way?

Fuss: Private cloud, by its very definition, would be that data just roams around between one place and another. So the cloud is just out there.

I tell people to look up in the sky. You might see a rabbit in the cloud, you might see a Volkswagen Bus, or it might be a turtle dove, whatever the image that comes to your head is. That’s really what the data is. It’s just moving, but you can always see it and it’s always there.

Same principle

Take the same principle. We're doing the daydreaming and making animals in the sky as you did when you were a kid laying in the middle of the field. You know where the data is. You know the restrictions of where the cloud rolls to. So the security factor is there.

But you also know that you can access it, whether it be from your home, whether it’s from McDonald’s, if you're stopping for a Happy Meal with the kids and you need to access some critical piece of data, or whether it’s anywhere else that you are. That data is always ready, always available, always online, and always secure.

One of the primary concerns for our electronic medical records is that it’s patient data, financial data, and so needs to be PCI-, and HIPAA-compliant. All the different compliance standards that we need to abide by are all satisfied with the ways that these machines are locked down, by the way the cloud is moving, and where we allow it to move to.

There are a lot of people who can embrace different types of clouds. You've got hybrid clouds, private clouds, public clouds, all with different offerings. For us it made sense to do a private cloud. For others, it may make sense to do hybrid type cloud.

As we move toward the future, I can see that we might be able to offload some of our services toward the public cloud. As we increase the size of some of our data and we have patient care cut over to the side, there might be some other data that does not follow the same guidelines. We can put that into a secure public cloud and attach everything.

I'm not worried about theft of an individual device, because the device has nothing more on it than some connectors to get somewhere.

VMware is coming out with those tools and using those tools to make that kind of continuation project possible to look at. We're very excited about some of the initiatives that we've seen at VMworld -- the vCloud Director, with security, the different layers built into that that could make some of the public cloud usable for us for specific applications.

Gardner: Some folks deal with security and think of the public cloud only, but it sounds as if your private cloud has allowed you to improve security, gain control, and deliver this data as needed to a variety of devices not in a stateful, but in a stateless way so that you can control the access. Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds as if private cloud to you means better security?

Fuss: Oh, it does, most definitely. I'm no longer worried about the endpoint device walking away from us. I'm not worried about theft of an individual device, because the device has nothing more on it than some connectors to get somewhere.

When we were first embracing zero client technology in a lot of places, we did some studies. We talked to some different people who had already embraced it. One particular hospital I spoke to said they had on video someone stealing a zero client device, perhaps thinking that they had stolen some great new utility tool for home, a new PC. They were all excited.

They also have them on video, bringing it back the next morning, because they couldn’t do anything with it when they got to their house. Using cloud, using the technologies that ride in the cloud, like VMware View and access to the data through VMware View, really helps to lock things down and it helps to prevent things.

No data leakage

In the past, somebody could have taken a PC, and let’s say that PC could have had metadata on it or could have had some files on it that were saved in someway. It was comical to hear that story from another person who was in a similar situation as us, where there was no data loss or data leakage, even if that device had never come back. So the cloud really has tightened things down for us.

Gardner: And the cloud wouldn’t have the security benefits if it weren’t for the VDI and that zero client benefit. So are they separate to you, are they intrinsically linked, symbiotic? How do you view private cloud and VDI -- separate, distinct, together? What’s the relationship?

Fuss: They're definitely together. They have to be together. In my opinion, it’s what makes sense. We want to see the data tight. We want to see the integration tight. We can have a cloud where the data roams back and forth, but the connection into the cloud actually uses that data.

As I sit here on a device, a personal device at the office that is connected to my virtual desktop instance, this device doesn't even have to be on my network. I'm utilizing a public network that we have here at the hospital system and I've connected into my virtual desktop. I have full accessibility. I'll flip over here in a few minutes when I go into another meeting. I'll bring my iPad with me, another personal device, and I'll be connected right to that same virtual desktop.

So the cloud has allowed me, with View, to seamlessly move between all these different devices. I no longer am tied to something. I'm no longer tied to a specific physical location, a physical anything. I really am completely mobile. I can work anywhere at any time and have that same common set of tools.

I should no longer call it disaster recovery. I should call it our second data center because even though it really is 100 miles away, I can still sit there and work all day long just like I'm anywhere else.

It doesn't matter if I'm working out of the DR site. I should no longer call it disaster recovery. I should call it our second data center because even though it really is 100 miles away, I can still sit there and work all day long just like I'm anywhere else. That ability is really the value that using a cloud and using View gives you.

I want a physician in his office, out on the road or wherever they might be, at home, in a practice have access to that same data and have a similar look and feel every time they connect from whatever device. That's what these solutions that we've opted for have provided for us.

Gardner: So the synergy between the private cloud and the VDI has provided you with better data management, security adhesion and compliance requirements adhesion -- and now you're talking about DR. So this is yet another snowball-like benefit from adopting this particular kind of infrastructure. How far into the DR phase are you?

Fuss: We're quite a bit down the road. We've implemented SRM part of VMware. We were excited about the changes coming in SRM 5, but we still have our current implementation running. We can flex our domain controllers over to the other data center. We actually do have some servers running out of there -- hot, like I've said. We'll be running all of our mail servers out of there very soon.

Break away from location

But the whole procedure, the whole concept, everything that we're doing allows us not to focus on location, and that's the big thing. We break away from location. So where is the data center? Is it going to be affected by the next hurricane coming up the East Coast? Well, if we have a fear of where the hurricane is, we can move our data center 100 miles inland. Or if we think that inland is going to be more affected, we can keep it in Rhode Island, which is right on the ocean.

So we have that ability, and nobody knows where that data is other than the IT department. We know it's within the system, within the security, but nobody would ever notice the difference or question where the data is running or residing. They might ask, and we could tell them, but nobody says, "Wow, that's slow" or "I can see a difference." None of those kind of calls comes in as the cloud flexes.

Gardner: At VMworld, you've had a chance to look over View 5, and the PC-over-IP benefits there; is that something that’s in your pipeline?

Fuss: Absolutely. We’re blessed to be in the VMware 5 beta test user group, and we’re loving what we see. We like the performance. The PC-over-IP expansion is amazing. They’ve written a great protocol there with their partners, and that is the technology that’s going to continue to drive the reinvention of the desktop.

We’ve gone through the reinvention of the desktop a few times in my career, from somewhat dumb terminals to smart terminals to client server. We seem to be making our way back to where we’re keeping our data safe in data centers and in silos. We’re giving people a great end-user experience to give them a full PC feature-set. We’re doing it all securely and we’re doing it all with products that integrate seamlessly with one another, and that’s really the goal.

We seem to be making our way back to where we’re keeping our data safe in data centers and in silos.

We want the user to sit down and feel comfortable with whatever technology they use, and to have a way to take care of our patients that need our help and take care of what other important administrative business they may do, so we can keep moving forward.

Gardner: Let's look at how the end-user experience is benefiting you. When your clinicians have the opportunity to reach this data through a variety of different endpoints regardless of where they are, how have they adapted to that? How have they made that a part of an improved process or adapted workflows that take advantage of that. Has that benefited the organization appreciably?

Fuss: We can already see the expansion, the use of that technology in different areas. We have some physicians with iPads working throughout the facility, visiting the patient’s bedsides, looking at their charts, all that kind of flex room is great.

I've seen it in our administrative areas, our human resource officer using iPad remotely. We’ve had our Chief Information Officer using an iPad, using a PC at home, and connecting through the View client to her machine.

We’ve gotten support not just from forcing the technology out there, but by people asking for the technology. That’s how you can tell you have a good product. People asking, "Can I be moved to this new product, because the flexibility of my supervisor, director, whoever is using is what I need."

Hit a home run

If the director calls saying, "I need this employee to have this flexibility," you know you've hit a home run with the technology. I haven’t had anybody call asking for another PC at another location for the same person to work. I have people calling saying, "I really need to get them onto this technology as soon as it’s possible, because it's made this employee so efficient. I need to do that for everybody else."

So the benefits are there, and they’re just growing now, as it's integrated and being used more in the clinical areas. We’ve seen some growth recently. Even our pharmacy staff is starting to carry iPads around, when they’re doing inventories of some of the medication machines and being able to get that information right there, but on a device that’s secure. If they were to leave it behind, nobody could connect to anything, and that data all sitting safe inside the data center.

So the adoption is there, the benefits are already there, and it's just growing and growing. Every time I turn around, we’re bumping another 50, another 75, virtual machines, into another pool of machines for a new purpose, and that’s the expansion that I keep wanting to encourage.

So the adoption is there, the benefits are already there, and it's just growing and growing.

Gardner: That’s a very intriguing story, and I'm really impressed with how you've been able to take these modernization activities for infrastructure, put them into real-world use, and expand that very rapidly throughout your organization.

We’ve been talking about how virtualized desktops and thin clients are helping with digital records management and healthcare industry compliance and privacy requirements. We’ve been discussing this with Andy Fuss. He is Director of Technology and Engineering at CharterCARE Health Partners. Thanks so much for your time and insights, Andy.

Fuss: Thank you. Pleasure being here.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you in conjunction with the recent 2011 VMworld Conference.

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/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from VMworld 2011 on how a large health-care organization is using the cloud and virtualization to put vital data into the hands of employees. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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