Application Development Efficiencies Drive Agile Payoffs for Healthcare Tech Provider TriZetto

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major healthcare software provider is using HP tools to move from waterfall to agile.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving their services' performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end users alike, and this time we're coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

We’re here the week of June 10 to explore some award-winning case studies from leading enterprises. And we’ll see how a series of innovative solutions and IT transformation approach to better development and test and deployment of applications is benefiting these companies.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how TriZetto has been improving its development processes and modernizing its ability to speed the applications development process, and bring better tools for its internal developers as well as support a lifecycle approach to software.

To learn more about how TriZetto is modernizing its development and deployment capabilities, please join me in welcoming Rubina Ansari, Associate Vice President of Automation and Software Development Lifecycle Tools at TriZetto. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Rubina Ansari: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We hear a lot about improving software capabilities, and Agile of course is an important part of that. Tell me where you are in terms of moving to Agile processes, and we’ll get more into how you're enabling that through tools and products?

Ansari: TriZetto currently is going through an evolution. We’re going through a structured waterfall-to-scaled-Agile methodology. As you mentioned, that's one of the innovative ways that we're looking at getting our releases out faster with better quality, and be able to respond to our customers. We realize that Agile, as a methodology, is the way to go when it comes to all those three things I just mentioned.

We're currently in the midst of evolving how we work. We’re going through a major transformation within our development centers throughout the country.

Gardner: And software is very important to your company, tell us why and then a little bit about what TriZetto does?

Ansari: TriZetto is a healthcare software provider. We have the software for all areas of healthcare. Our mission is to integrate different healthcare systems to make sure our customers have seamless information. Over 50 percent of the American insured population goes through our software for their claims processing. So, we have a big market and we want to stay there.

Leaner and faster

Our software is very important to us, just as it is to our customers. We're always looking for ways of making sure we’re leaner, faster, and keeping up with our quality in order to keep up with all the healthcare changes that are happening.

Gardner: You've been working with HP Software and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) products for some time. Tell us a little bit about what you have in place, and then let's learn a bit more about the Asset Manager capabilities that you're pioneering?

Ansari

Ansari: We've been using HP tools for our testing area, such as the QTP Products Performance Center and Quality Center. We’ve recently went ahead with ALM 11.5, it has a lot of cross-project abilities. As for agile, we're now using HP Agile Manager.

This has helped us move forward fairly quickly into scaled agile using HP Agile Manager, while integrating with our current HP tools. We wanted to make sure that our tools were integrated and that we didn’t lose that traceability and the effectiveness of having a single vendor to get all our data.

HP Agile Manager is very important to us. It's a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, and it was very easy for us to implement within our company. There was no concept of installing, and the response that we get from HP has been very fast, as this is the first experience we’ve had with a SaaS deliverable from HP.

It's very lightweight, it's web-based SaaS and it integrates with their current tool suite.

They're following agile, so we get releases every three months. Actually, every few weeks, we get enhancements for defects we may find within their product. It's worked out very well. It's very lightweight, it's web-based SaaS and it integrates with their current tool suite, which was vital to us.

Gardner: And how large of an organization are you in terms of developers, and how many of them are actively using these products?

Ansari: We have between 500 and 1,000 individuals that make up development teams throughout United States. For Agile Manager, the last time we checked, it was approximately 400. We're hoping to get up to 1,000 by end of this year, so that way everyone is using Agile Manager for all their agile/scrum teams and their backlogs and development.

Gardner: Tell us a bit also about how paybacks are manifesting themselves. Do you have any sense of how much faster you're able to develop? What are the paybacks in terms of quality, traceability, and tracking defects? What's the payback from doing this in the way you have?

Working together

Ansari: We’ve seen some, but I think the most is yet to come in rolling this out. One of the things that Agile Manager promotes is collaboration and working together in a scrum team. Agile Manager, having the software work all around the agile processes, makes it very easy for us to roll an agile methodology.

This has helped us collaborate better between testers and developers, and we're finding those defects earlier, before they even happen. We’ll have more hard metrics around this as we roll this out further. One of the major reasons we went with HP Agile Manager is that it has very good integration with the development tools we use.

They integrate with several development tools, allowing our testers to be able to see what changes occurred, what piece of code has changed for each defect enhancement that the tester would be testing. So that tight integration with other development tools was a very pivotal factor in our decision of going forward with that HP Agile Manager.

Gardner: So Rubina, not only are you progressing from waterfall to agile and adopting more up-to-date tools, but you’ve made this leap to a SaaS-based delivery for this. If that's working out well as you’ve said, do you think this is going to lead to doing more with other SaaS tools and tests and capabilities and maybe even look at cloud platform as a service opportunity?

We're also looking at offering some of our products in a SaaS model. So we realize what's involved in it.

Ansari: Absolutely. This was our first experience and it is going very well. Of course, there were some learning curves and some learning pains. Being able to get these changes so quickly and not having it do it ourselves was kind of a mind shift change for us. We're reaping the benefits from it obviously, but we did have to have a little more scheduled conversations, release notes, and documentation about changes from HP.

We're not new to SaaS. We're also looking at offering some of our products in a SaaS model. So we realize what's involved in it. It was great to be on the receiving end of a SaaS product, knowing that TriZetto themselves are playing that space as well.

Gardner: Tell us what the future holds. Are you going to be adding any additional lifecycle elements moving on this journey, as you've described it? What's next?

Ansari: There's always so much more to improve. What we’re looking for is how to quickly respond to our customers. That means also integrating HP Service Manager and any other tools that may be part of this software testing lifecycle or part of our ability to release or offer something to our clients.

We'll continue doing this until there is no more space for efficiency. But, there are always places where we can be even more effective.

Mobile development

Gardner: How about mobile development? Is that something that’s on your radar and that you’ll be doing more of, given that devices are becoming more popular? I imagine that’s true of your customers too?

Ansari: We've talked about it, but it's really not on our roadmap right now. It hasn't been one of our main priorities.

Gardner: I suppose that you're in a good position to be able to move in that direction should you decide to.

Ansari: Absolutely. There's no doubt. The technologies that we’re advancing towards as well will allow us to easily go into the mobile space once we plan and do that.

The technologies that we’re advancing towards as well will allow us to easily go into the mobile space.

Gardner: Well great. I'm afraid we’ll leave it there. We’ve been learning about how TriZetto has been moving to a more agile methodology for its development and using a variety of HP software products for Application Lifecycle Management.

So please join me in thanking our guest. We’ve been here with Rubina Ansari, Associate Vice President of Automation and Software Development Lifecycle Tools at TriZetto. Thank you.

Ansari: Thank you. The pleasure was all mine.

Gardner: And I'd also like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this special HP Discover Performance Podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner. Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for joining, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major healthcare software provider is using HP tools to move from waterfall to agile. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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Case Study: T-Mobile's Massive Data Center Transformation Journey Wins Award Using HP ALM Tools

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how awarding-winning communications company T-Mobile improved application quality, while setting up two new data centers.

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 Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solution trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

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

Our latest user case study focuses on an award-wining migration and transformation and a grand-scale data center transition for T-Mobile. I was really impressed with the scope and size and the amount of time -- in terms of being short -- for you all to do this.

We're here with two folks who are going to tell us more about what T-Mobile has done to set up two data centers, and how in the process they have improved their application quality and the processes behind their application lifecycle management (ALM). [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

So join me in welcoming Michael Cooper, Senior Director of Enterprise IT Quality Assurance at T-Mobile. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Cooper: Thank you.

Gardner: We're also here with Kirthy Chennaian, Director Enterprise IT Quality Management at T-Mobile. Welcome.

Kirthy Chennaian: Thank you. It's a pleasure.

Gardner: People don’t just do these sorts of massive, hundred million dollar-plus activities because it's nice to have. This must have been something that was really essential for you.

Cooper: Absolutely. There are some definite business drivers behind setting up a world-class, green data center and then a separate disaster-recovery data center. Just for a little bit of a clarification. The award that we won is primarily focused on the testing effort and the quality assurance (QA) effort that went into that.

Gardner: Kirthy, tell me why you decided to undertake both an application transformation as well as a data center transformation -- almost simultaneously?

Chennaian: Given the scope and complexity of the initiative, ensuring system availability was primarily the major driver behind this. QA plays a significant role in ensuring that both data centers were migrated simultaneously, that the applications were available in real-time, and that from a quality assurance and testing standpoint we had to meet time-frames and timelines.

Gardner: Let's get a sense of the scope. First and foremost, Michael, tell me about T-Mobile and its stature nowadays.

Significant company

Cooper: T-Mobile is a national provider of voice, data, and messaging services. Right now, we're the fourth largest carrier in the US and have about 33 million customers and $21 billion in revenue, actually a little bit more than that. So, it's a significant company.

We're a company that’s really focused on our customers, and we've gone through an IT modernization. The data center efforts were a big part of that IT modernization, in addition to modernizing our application platform.

Gardner: Let's also talk about the scope of your movement to a new data center, and then we can get into the application transformation parts of that. In a nutshell, what did we do here? It sounds like we've set up two modern data centers, and then migrated your apps and data from an older one into those.

Chennaian: Two world-class data centers, as Michael had pointed out. One in Wenatchee, Washington and the other one is Tempe, Arizona. The primary data center is the one in Wenatchee, and the failover disaster-recovery data center is in Tempe, Arizona.

Cooper: What we were doing was migrating more than 175 Tier 1 applications and Tier 0, and some Tier 2 as well. It was a significant effort requiring quite a bit of planning, and the HP tools had a big part in that, especially in the QA realm.

Gardner: Now, were these customer-facing apps, internal apps, logistics? Are we talking about retail? Give me a sense of the scope here on the breadth and depth of your apps?

Chennaian: Significant. We're talking critical applications that are customer-facing. We're talking enterprise applications that span across the entire organization. And, we're also talking about applications that support these critical front-end applications. So, as Michael pointed out, 175 applications needed to be migrated across both of the data centers.

For example, moving T-Mobile.com, which is a customer-facing critical application, ensuring that it was transitioned seamlessly and was available to the customer in real-time was probably one of the key examples of the criticality behind ensuring QA for this effort.

Gardner: IT is critical for almost all companies nowadays, but I can't imagine a company where technology is more essential and critical than T-Mobile as a data and services carrier.

What's the case with the customer response? Do you have any business metrics, now that you’ve gone through this, that demonstrate not just that you're able to get better efficiency and your employees are getting better response times from their apps and data, but is there like a tangible business benefit, Michael?

Near-perfect availability

Cooper: I can't give you the exact specifics, but we've had significant increases in our system up-time and almost near-perfect availability in most areas. That’s been the biggest thing.

Kirthy mentioned T-Mobile.com. That’s an example where, instead of the primary and the backup, we actually have an active-active situation in the data center. So, if one goes down the other one is there, and this is significant.

A significant part of the way that we used HP tools in this process was not only the functional testing with Quick Test Professional and Quality Center, but we also did the performance testing with Performance Center and found some very significant issues that would have gone on to production.

This is a unique situation, because we actually got to do the performance testing live in the performance environments. We had to scale up to real performance types of loads and found some real issues that -- instead of the customers facing them, they didn’t have to face them.

The other thing that we did that was unique was high-availability testing. We tested each server to make sure that if one went down, the other ones were stable and could support our customers.

We were able to deliver application availability, ensure a timeframe for the migration and leverage the ability to use automation tools.

Gardner: Now, this was a case where not only were you migrating apps, but you were able to go in and make sure that they were going to perform well within this in new environment. As you pointed out, Michael, you were able to find some issues in those apps in the transition, and at the same time simultaneously you upgraded to the more recent refreshes of the HP products to do that.

So, this was literally changing the wings on the airplane when it was still flying. Tell me why doing it all at once was a good thing.

Chennaian: It was the fact that we were able to leverage the additional functionality that the HP suite of products provide. We were able to deliver application availability, ensure a time-frame for the migration and leverage the ability to use automation tools that HP provides. With Quick Test Professional, for example, we migrated from version 9.5 to 10.0, and we were able to leverage the functionality with business process testing from a Quality Center standpoint.

As a whole, from an application lifecycle management and from an enterprise-wide QA and testing standpoint, it allowed us to ensure system availability and QA on a timely basis. So, it made sense to upgrade as we were undergoing this transformation.

Cooper: Good point, Kirthy. In addition to upgrading our tools and so forth, we also upgraded many of the servers to some of the latest Itanium technology. We also implemented a lot of the state-of-the-art virtualization services offered by HP, and some of the other partners as well.

Streamlined process

Using HP tools, we were able to create a regression test set for each of our Tier 1 applications in a standard way and a performance test for each one of the applications. So, we were able to streamline our whole QA process as a side-benefit of the data migration, building out these state-of-the-art data centers, and IT modernization.

Gardner: So, this really affected operations. You changed some platforms, you adopted the higher levels of virtualization, you're injecting quality into your apps, and you're moving them into an entirely new facility. That's very impressive, but it's not just me being impressed. You've won a People's Choice Award, voted by peers of the HP software community and their Customer Advisory Board. That must have felt pretty good.

Cooper: It feels excellent. In 2009, we won the IT Transformation Award. So, this isn't our first time to the party. That was for a different project. I think that in the community people know who we are and what we're capable of. It's really an honor that the people who are our peers, who read over the different submissions, decided that we were the ones that were at the top.

Gardner: And I hear that you've won some other awards as well.

Cooper: We've won lots of awards, but that's not what we do it for. The reason why we do the awards is for the team. It's a big morale builder for the team. Everybody is working hard. Some of these project people work night and day to get them done, and the proof of the pudding is the recognition by the industry.

Our CIO has a high belief in quality and really supports us in doing this. It's nice that we've got the industry recognition as well.

Honestly, we also couldn't do without great executive support. Our CIO has a high belief in quality and really supports us in doing this. It's nice that we've got the industry recognition as well.

Gardner: Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. You've got some metrics here. They were pretty impressive in turns of availability, cost savings, reduction in execution time, performance and stability improvements, and higher systems availability.

Give me a sense, from an IT perspective, if you were to go to some other organization, not in the carrier business, of course, and tell them what this really did for you, performance and in the metrics that count to IT, what would you tell them?

Cooper: The metrics I can speak to are from the QA perspective. We were able to do the testing and we never missed one of the testing deadlines. We cut our testing time using HP tools by about 50 percent through automation, and we can pretty accurately measure that. We probably have about 30 percent savings in the testing, but the best part of it is the availability. But, because of the sensitive nature and competitive marketplace, we're not going to talk exactly about what our availability is.

Gardner: And how about your particular point of pride on this one, Kirthy?

Chennaian: For one, being able to get recognized is an acknowledgement of all the work you do, and for your organization as a whole. Mike rightly pointed out that it boosts the morale of the organization. It also enables you to perform at a higher level. So, it's definitely a significant acknowledgment, and I'm very excited that we actually won the People's Choice Award.

Gardner: A number of other organizations and other series of industries are going to be facing the same kind of a situation, where it's not just going to be a slow, iterative improvement process,. They're going to have to go catalytic and make wholesale changes in the data center, looking for that efficiency benefit.

You've done that. You've improved on your QA and applications lifecycle benefits at the same time. With that 20-20 hindsight, what would you have done differently, or at least what could you advise people who are going to face a similar large, complex, and multifaceted undertaking?

Planning and strategy

Chennaian: If I were to do this again, I think there is definitely a significant opportunity with respect to planning and investing in the overall strategy of QA and testing for such a significant transformation. There has to be a standard methodology. You have to have the right toolsets in place. You have to plan for the entire transformation as a whole. Those are significant elements in successful transformation.

Gardner: Monday morning quarterback for you, Michael?

Cooper: We did a lot of things right. One of the things that we did right was to augment our team. We didn’t try to do the ongoing work with the exact same team. We brought in some extra specialists to work with us or to back-fill in some places. Other groups didn’t and paid the price, but that part worked out for us.

Also, it helped to have a seat at the table and say, "It's great to do a technology upgrade, but unless we really have the customer point of view and focus on the quality, you're not going to have success."

We were lucky enough to have that executive support and the seat at the table, to really have the go/no-go decisions. I don't think we really missed one in terms of ones that we said, "We shouldn't do it this time. Let's do it next time." Or, ones where we said, "Let's go." I can't remember even one application we had to roll back. Overall, it was very good. The other thing is, work with the right tools and the right partners.

Gardner: With data center transformation, after all, it's all about the apps. You were able to maintain that focus. You didn’t lose focus of the apps?

It's great to do a technology upgrade, but unless we really have the customer point of view and focus on the quality, you're not going to have success.

Cooper: Definitely.The applications do a couple of things. One, the ones that support the customers directly. Those have to have really high availability, and we're able to speed them up quite a bit with the newest and the latest hardware.

The other part are the apps that people don't think about that much, which are the ones that support the front lines, the ones that support retail and customer care and so forth. I would say that our business customers or internal customers have also really benefited from this project.

Gardner: Well great. We've been talking about a massive undertaking with data center transformation and application QA and lifecycle improvements and the result was a People's Choice Award won here at the Discover Show in Las Vegas. It's T-Mobile, the winner. We've been talking with their representatives here. Michael Cooper, the Senior Director of Enterprise IT Quality Assurance. Thanks again, Michael.

Cooper: Thank you, and we're very proud of the team.

Gardner: We are also here with Kirthy Chennaian, the Director of Enterprise IT Quality Management at T-Mobile. Thanks.

Chennaian: Thank you. Very excited to be here.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of User Experience 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 BriefingsDirect podcast on how awarding-winning communications company T-Mobile improved application quality, while setting up two data centers. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Discover Case Study: How Cardinal Health Uses SaaS Tools to Improve ALM, Quality, Development Productivity

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the experience of Cardinal Health in using software-as-a-service tools from HP to develop and test applications.

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 Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solution trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

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

We're now going to look at how software as a service (SaaS) is impacting the application lifecycle through the experience of Cardinal Health. I'm here with Don Jackson, a Senior Engineer in the Testing Center of Excellence within the Performance Engineering Group at Cardinal Health, in Dublin, Ohio. Welcome to the show, Don. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Don Jackson: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: Tell me, from a high-level perspective, why SaaS is appealing to you. Just on general terms, why SaaS, even for applications or in development-testing? What makes it appealing to you?

Jackson: SaaS is a service offering, not just for testing and for development, but as a simple service offering, that allows us to focus on our primary core competencies and on what our clients and customers need, rather than focusing on trying to learn how to handle this particular application that we may have purchased from a vendor like HP. So, we can really focus on those core competencies. [View the slides from Don's HP Discover presentation on Fundamentals of Testing.]

Gardner: And you haven't had any complaints about things like security, performance, or latency. It all it seems work for you?

Jackson: There are some trade-offs, obviously, that you're going to have from a security standpoint, and the HP guys can tell you about this as well. They can go through all the details, but we did go through their security documentation to make sure that it was adequate for what we needed.

If there are compliance issues that you have to take into account, they’ll work with you. It's a very secure environment. So, we were pleasantly surprised when we started looking at that.

Gardner: Before we dig more deeply into how you're doing SaaS and how you've gone involved with it, tell me a bit about Cardinal Health, what kind of organization you are, and maybe even some details about your IT organization.

Industry leader

Jackson: At Cardinal Health, our slogan is "Essential to Healthcare." We want to be a healthcare industry leader providing a diverse, inclusive work environment that reflects the marketplace and communities where we do business, while maximizing our competitive advantage through innovation, profit, and adaptability.

Some facts about Cardinal Health: we’ve got 32,000-plus employees. We are number 17 on the Fortune 500 list. So, we're a very large company. The latest estimate that I saw on our public website cardinalhealth.com was that we'll do about $100 billion in revenue this fiscal year. Our fiscal year ends in June, so we're pretty confident at this point that we're going to hit that number. We deliver to 60,000 different healthcare sites each day.

Think about the healthcare industry. If you go into a hospital say, all the different products that you might consume or use or may be used upon you, whether you're having a procedure done or whatever, that could have been manufactured, developed, or just distributed with some of our suppliers through Cardinal Health.

For example, half of all surgeries in the United States last year, used at least one product of ours. We deliver more than 25 percent of all medications prescribed in the US each day. That’s just to give you a rough example.

Gardner: I certainly can appreciate that the need for scale is there. Tell me about the IT support now and your role in making sure these applications are performing and are safe and reliable. What kind of scale are you dealing with?

Half of all surgeries in the United States last year used at least one product of ours. We deliver more than 25 percent of all medications prescribed in the US each day.

Jackson: We work very tightly with our business analyst community. Our group specifically doesn’t actually interface directly with our customers, but we interface very closely with our business analysts to generate requirements both from the functional and non-functional.

Our group specifically, focuses on non-functional in the performance engineer realm to establish good service level agreements (SLAs) beforehand. On the HP website, there is a webinar that I did for them a year ago, where we talk about back to basics for performance engineering and focusing on planning.

If you don't plan right, your chances of success are very minimal even in a performance realm, and you end up not meeting what the customer or your client needs. Whereas, when you work with them and develop a good non-functional requirements you have the opportunity to deliver really what they need and want instead of what they think they want.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about first, your experience with HP products, and then second, your experience in moving into SaaS delivery?

Y2K testing

Jackson: I was a former Mercury customer way back in the day. I started in 1997 working on the HP products -- Mercury products back then. I worked on WinRunner 2000, when we're all doing Y2K testing which was an absolute joy -- if you'll pardon the sarcasm -- as you all remember Y2K was for IT folks. It was a lot of work.

It's funny how the general public thinks it was just a big sham because nothing happened. Well, that's because of a lot of IT professionals spent a lot of man-years effort to make it so that that happened.

I've used the functional testing products, functional automation. When I moved into Cardinal, there was a recognized gap. Our network engineers did our performance testing, and network engineering's focus wasn't what we thought it needed to be. So, we took that over and started doing that. With that also came a relationship that we already had with HP's SaaS organization, back when it was called ActiveWatch.

I don't know if you remember that, but ActiveWatch was what today is business process monitoring through a hosted service. I took that over back in late 2002 or early 2003. And initially my reaction was probably what a lot of people listening to this reaction would be when they think about SaaS. What can I do and how quickly can I bring it in-house? That was my initial reaction, and I had a very wise manager at the time. He said, "Just give it six months before you do it." He told me to get myself familiar with it and go from there.

So, I spent six months and I just kind let it be how it was and I got to work with our technical account manager at the time. It became a situation where not only did I feel that it was valuable to keep it that way, but I started realizing that I was able to focus on our core competencies.

Do I have FDA validation concerns? Do I have to put this into a validated environment? Do I have HIPAA compliance concerns? Do I have SaaS compliance concerns?

We went from just having BSM through SaaS. I'm trying to use the current HP acronyms, because they like to change names on us. At the time, it was just BSM that we had through SaaS. Now, we've Quality Center through SaaS, BSM through SaaS, and Performance Center through SaaS.

I spoke here at the conference about how leveraging SaaS, not only can we focus on our core competencies, but time to market is a huge benefit. [View the slides from Don's HP Discover presentation on Fundamentals of Testing.]

When you look at a healthcare industry, you have to look at new applications when you stand them up. Do I have FDA validation concerns? Do I have to put this into a validated environment? Do I have HIPAA compliance concerns? Do I have SaaS compliance concerns? All that kind of stuff.

It's almost at a turnkey level when you work with SaaS, assuming that you've established a good relationship with your sales staff and your client account manager. We were able to stand up Performance Center, which is an enterprise application, in one week. From the time we signed the deal until the time we were live, executing performance tests, was one week, and I think that's very powerful.

Gardner: And of course, upgrades, patches, these things also happen rapidly and without too much thought on your part?

Jackson: Absolutely. I'm sure no one has ever experienced any problems with any upgrades at all because it's such a seamless and easy way to do it.

Another layer of testing

The SaaS organization takes another layer of testing that they do before they even recommend to us that we should start looking at it and potentially upgrade. The SaaS guys work with us very closely, for example, with ALM 11. It's a radical shift from the Performance Center, Quality Center days. It really is, and we're still not on ALM 11. We've chosen that because we want to make sure that it's ready and do our due diligence to make sure that it's ready.

The SaaS organization is doing a lot of testing on it right now to make sure that in a multi-tenant environment it will perform and function the way that we need it to. Once they feel it's ready then they are going to provide a testing environment for us, so that we can do our own testing in-house to make sure it's ready.

All of that stuff, all of that set up, all that conversion is done by them. I don't have to worry about it. I'll have to go through the plan. From my perspective, once they feel it's ready, then we do some testing, and I can scale back the level of testing that I have to do, because a lot of that's already been covered by them, and off we go.

A great example – we upgraded point releases of BSM, when we went from 7.5 to 7.51 to 7.52 and 7.55. I got a notification from them that they were putting in this point release and I wasn't going to have any downtime. I came in Monday morning, and instead of 7.51, it now said 7.55.

That's really powerful, and that goes back to my core competencies. I don't have to focus or be concerned about that. I can let the guys who are specialists and really know in-depth the HP tools, which would be HP, focus on that, and I can focus on what my customers' or clients' need.

SaaS is a type of cloud. It's now new. We're just calling it "cloud."

Gardner: This is probably a question for an enterprise architect, but I'll ask you, given your depth of experience and your trust and results from SaaS. We're hearing a lot about cloud and we're hearing a lot about moving toward dev-ops. Do you think that what work you've done, the experience you've established, would lead to an easier path for you to do more SaaS and perhaps even start using private or hybrid clouds for operations and deployment?

Jackson: It's definitely something that our CIO has been talking about. Let's be honest, SaaS is a type of cloud. It really is a type of cloud. It's now new. We're just calling it "cloud." It's another one of those marketing terms. But, cloud is a huge thing.

Vendors, come in and talk about different capabilities, not just HP but other vendors obviously. We're a big company and we deal with a lot of vendors. We typically will ask them, can this be implemented through SaaS or through a cloud model?

Once again, for the same reasons, you're the expert in your tool. You know your tool. If we think it can bring value to us, let's work on that value realization instead of us trying to become an expert in your tool.

Gardner: Well great. We've been hearing about Cardinal Health and their vision and use of SaaS in the application requirements and development, deployment and test phases, and it sounds like perhaps this is a harbinger of more SaaS and cloud activities for them.

I want to thank our guest, we've been joined by Don Jackson. He is Senior Engineer in the Testing Center for Excellence in the Performance Engineering Group at Cardinal Health. Thanks so much, Don.

Jackson: Thank you again, it was a pleasure. [View the slides from Don's HP Discover presentation on Fundamentals of Testing.]

Gardner: And, I also want to thank our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of User Experience 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 BriefingsDirect podcast on the experience of Cardinal Health in using software-as-a-service tools from HP to develop and test applications. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Discover Case Study: Genworth Financial Looks to HP Executive Scorecard to Improve Applications Management, Reliability, Costs

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect case study podcast on how Genworth Financial uses ALM and Performance Management tools from HP to improve IT's track record.

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 Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solutions, trends, and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

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

We're now going to focus on Genworth Financial, and talk about a number of different products used to improve application delivery, performance testing, and also operational integrity. Then, we'll look at the transition to a more comprehensive role for those tools, working in concert, and eventually with the opportunity to have an Executive Scorecard view into operations vis-à-vis these products and solutions.

We're here to talk about Genworth Financial’s experience with Tim Perry, Chief Technology Officer for the Retirement and Protection Division at Genworth Financial in Richmond, Virginia. Welcome to the show, Tim. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Tim Perry: Thanks. Good to be here.

Gardner: Tell me about your stock in trade? What is Genworth Financial and why is technology so important to you?

Perry: Genworth Financial is an insurance company that covers many different areas like life insurance, long-term care insurance, mortgage insurance, wealth management, and things like that, and we're here for a number of reasons. We use HP for helping us just maintain and keep a lot of our applications alive.

Gardner: Could you give us a sense of your operations, the scope of your IT organization?

Perry: Our IT organization is, depending on the division, hundreds of employees, but then we also have contractors that work internationally on our behalf. So, throughout the world, we’ve got developers in different places.

Gardner: How about some metrics around the number or types of applications that you're using?

Perry: We have a gazillion applications, like every big company has, but for our division alone, we have around 50 applications that are financially important, and we track them more than any of the others. So that gives you a feel for the number of applications. There are a lot of small ones, but 50 big ones.

Gardner: Let’s take a tour through the way in which you are using HP products, you have ALM, PPM, Performance Monitoring, and BSM. Give me some perspective on what you are doing with these HP products?

Requirements management

Perry: Let me start with a little bit of a roadmap. We brought in Quality Center, way back before ALM. We brought that in mainly for requirements management and for testing. That one has evolved over the years to the point where we really wanted to get traceability for developers, testers, business analysts, everything. That’s what we're hoping for in the ALM stack of things on its own.

PPM came in for a lot of different reasons. Project Portfolio Management was a piece of it. We had a very raw portfolio of what we are working on. Since then it’s become a service request management within our division, much like what you do with the helpdesk, but for our division in applications, everything from account request to marketing, workflow approvals, things like that. So PPM has taken on life of its own.

The newest one is performance engineering, and performance engineering to us means performance monitoring and performance testing. We’ve had performance testing for a while but we’ve not been great at monitoring and keeping track of our applications as they are living and breathing.

Those are the three big silos for us, and I just want to mention that’s the reason this HP Performance Suite that we are about to talk about is intriguing to us because it starts to glue all of this together.

Gardner: On June 1, HP announced its IT Performance Suite, and a number of people are taking a really deep look at it here at Discover. Tell me what your initial perceptions are and what your potential plans are?

The Executive Scorecard is probably the epitome of it, the top of it, that talks to these executives about where things are, the health of the applications, how we're doing on projects.

Perry: Just like our own internal applications, it felt as if up until now a lot of these suites that HP provides stood on their own and didn't have a lot of integration with each other. What I am starting to see is a lot of synergy around good integrations. The Executive Scorecard is probably the epitome of it, the top of it, that talks to these executives about where things are, the health of the applications, how we're doing on projects, all those things that are the key performance indicators that we live and breathe.

That’s cool, but in order to get the scorecard, that implies data is available to the scorecard and integrations are there in place. That combination is the magic we're looking for.

Gardner: And how about the KPIs? That would bring some standardization and allow you to be able to start doing apples-to-apples comparisons and getting a stronger bead on what is the reality of your IT and therefore, how you can improve on it.

Important indicators

Perry: It appears that HP has looked at 170 or so KPIs that the industry, not just HP, but everybody, has said are important indicators. We can pick and choose which ones are important to us to put them on the scorecard. Those are the ones that we can focus on from an integration standpoint. It’s not like we have to conquer world hunger all at once.

Gardner: I’ve heard folks say that the scorecard is of interest, not just for IT, but to bring a view of what’s going on in IT to the business leadership and the financial leadership in the organization, and therefore, make IT more integral rather than mysterious.

Perry: I have to say this. Our IT organization is part of operations. Last year, at this same event, we had more operations folks here than IT. I think HP should take the IT moniker off and start talking more about "business operations." That’s just my personal view of this, and I agree, this helps us not just roll up information to IT executives, but to our actual operations folks.

Gardner: Do you have any sense of what the integration and the continued evolution of a lifecycle approach to IT and quality has done for you? Do you have any metrics of success, either from a business value perspective or just good old speeds-and-feeds and cost perspective?

The piece that's missing right now is the developer integration, and we just saw a lot of that this week. I'm looking forward to evolving that even more. That’s been a big deal.

Perry: Without having actual numbers in front of me, it’s hard to quantify. But let’s just say this, with Quality Center in particular, it’s helped us a lot with traceability between the business requirements and the actual testing that we are doing. I don’t know how to measure it here, but it’s been a big thing for us. The piece that's missing right now is the developer integration, and we just saw a lot of that this week. I'm looking forward to evolving that even more. That’s been a big deal.

Gardner: Perhaps if I ask you that same question a year from now, at Discover 2012, you’ll have some hard numbers in metrics, right?

Perry: Oh, I’d love to be able to go and have a presentation at one of the sessions that we’ve had such great experience with Performance Suite. I’ll be here talking a lot about it. I’d love to do that.

Gardner: Okay, great. We’ve been talking about how IT performance measurement and application lifecycle management improvements are coming together for a "whole greater than the sum of the parts" and looking forward to more of a scorecard and performance metrics viewpoint and comparison capability in the near future.

We’ve been talking with Tim Perry, Chief Technology Officer for the Retirement and Protection Division at Genworth Financial. Thank you, Tim.

Perry: It’s good to be here, and thank you.

Gardner: And I’d like to thank our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of user experience 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 BriefingsDirect case study podcast on how Genworth Financial uses ALM and Performance Management tools from HP to improve IT's track record. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• HP delivers applications appliance solutions that leverage converged infrastructure for virtualization, data management
• HP takes plunge on dual cloud bursting: public and-or private apps support comes of age
  
• HP rolls out EcoPOD modular data center, provides high-density converged infrastructure with extreme energy efficiency
• HP at Discover releases converged infrastructure products and services aimed at helping IT migrate rapidly to the future
  
• HP's IT Performance Suite empowers IT leaders with unified view into total operations, costs
• HP Delivers NMC 9.1 as New Demands on Network Management Require Secure, Integrated, and Automated Response

Discover Case Study: Holistic ALM Helps Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida Break Down Application Inefficiencies, Redundancy

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida gains better visibility into application lifecycles for improved operational efficiency and reliability.

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 Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solutions, trends, and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

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

We're now going to focus on Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida and a case study about how they’ve been able to improve their applications' performance -- and even change the culture of how they test, provide, and operate their applications.

We're here today with Victor Miller, Senior Manager of Systems Management at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida in Jacksonville. Welcome. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Victor Miller: Thank you.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about this cultural dynamic? When you shift from one way of doing applications, you do employ technology, you do employ products. There are methodologies and process, but I am interested about how you changed your vision of how applications should be done.

Miller: The way we looked at applications was by their silos. It was a bunch of technology silos monitoring and managing their individual ecosystems. There was no real way of pulling information together. We didn’t represent what the customer is actually feeling inside the applications.

One of the things we started looking at was that we have to focus on the customers, seeing exactly what they were doing in the application to bring the information back. We were looking at the performance of the end-user transactions or what the end-users were doing inside the app, versus what Oracle database is doing, for example.

When you start pulling that information together, it allows you to get full traceability of the performance of the entire application from a development, test, staging, performance testing, and then also production side. You can actually compare that information to understand exactly where you're at. Also, you're breaking down those technology silos, when you're doing that. You move more toward a proactive transactional monitoring perspective.

Gardner: It sounds as if you started looking at the experience of the application, rather than the metrics or the parts. Is that fair?

Miller: That’s correct. We're looking at how the users are using it and what they're doing inside the applications, like you said, instead of the technology around it. The technology can change. You can add more resources or remove resources, but really it's all up to the end-user, what they are doing in their performance of the apps.

Overcome hurdles

Gardner: In order to make this shift and to enjoy better performance and experience with your applications, you had to overcome some hurdles. Maybe you could explain what Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida is. I think I have a pretty good idea, but you can probably do a better job than I. After we learn a bit about your organization, what were some of the hurdles you had to overcome to get toward this improved culture?

Miller: Blue Cross and Blue Shield is one of the 39 independent Blue Crosses throughout the United States. We're based out of Florida. We've been around since about 1944. We're independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. One of our main focuses is healthcare.

We do sell insurance, but we also have our retail environment, where we're bringing in more healthcare services. It’s really about the well-being of our Florida population. We do things to help Florida as a whole, to make everyone more healthy where possible.

Gardner: Let’s look at that problem set. In order to have a better experience for the health and welfare of your clients and constituents, what was the problem? What did you need to change?

Miller: Well, when we started looking at things we thought we were doing fine until we actually started bringing the data together to understand exactly what was really going on, and our customers weren’t happy with IT performance of their application, the availability of their applications.

From an availability perspective, we weren’t looking very good. So, we had to figure out what we could do to resolve that.

We started looking at the technology silos and bringing them together in one holistic perspective. We started seeing that, from an availability perspective, we weren’t looking very good. So, we had to figure out what we could do to resolve that. In doing that, we had to break down the technology silos, and really focus on the whole picture of the application, and not just the individual components of the applications.

Gardner: So this sounds like you had to go deeper into the network, looking at the ecosystem of the applications. What did you have to do to start to get that full picture?

Miller: Our previous directors reordered our environment and brought in a systems management team. It’s responsibility is to monitor and help manage the infrastructure from that perspective, centralize the tool suites, and understand exactly what we're going to use for the capabilities. We created a vision of what we wanted to do and we've been driving that vision for several years to try to make sure that it stays on target and focused to solve this problem.

Gardner: And how did you go about choosing the products and the management capabilities you're going to employ?

Miller: We were such early adopters that we actually chose best-in-breed. We were agent-based monitoring environment, and we moved to agent-less. At the time, we adopted Mercury SiteScope. Then, we also brought in Mercury’s BAC and a lot of Topaz technologies with diagnostics and things like that. We had other capabilities like Bristol Technology’s TransactionVision.

Umbrella of products

HP purchased all the companies and brought them into one umbrella of product suites. It allowed us to bind the best-of-breed. We bought technologies that didn’t overlap, could solve a problem, and integrated well with each other. It allowed us to be able to get more traceability inside of these spaces, so we can get really good information about what the performance availability is of those applications that we're focusing on.

Gardner: In addition to adopting these products, I imagine you also had to change some of your processes and methodologies like ITIL. Tell me about the combination of the products and the processes that led you to some pretty impressive results?

Miller: One of the major things was that it was people, process, and technology that we were focused on in making this happen. On the people side, we moved our command center from our downtown office to our corporate headquarters where all the admins are, so they can be closer to the command center. If there were a problem that command center can directly contact them and they go down in there.

We instituted what I guess I’d like to refer to as "butts in the seat." I can't come with a better name for it, but it's when the person is on call, they were in the command center working down there. They were doing the regular operational work, but they were in the command center. So if there was an incident they would be there to resolve it.

In the agent-based technologies we were monitoring thousands of measurement points. But, you have to be very reactive, because you have to come after the fact trying to figure out which one triggered. Moving to the agent-less technology is a different perspective on getting the data, but you’re focusing on the key areas inside those systems that you want to pay attention to versus the everything model.

In doing that, our admins were challenged to be a little bit more specific as to what they wanted us to pay attention to from a monitoring perspective.

In doing that, our admins were challenged to be a little bit more specific as to what they wanted us to pay attention to from a monitoring perspective to give them visibility into the health of their systems and applications.

Gardner: I imagine that this is translated back into your development earlier into the requirements. Is there a feedback loop of sorts now that you can look to that perhaps you didn’t have in the past?

Miller: Yeah, there is a feedback loop and the big thing around that is actually moving monitoring further back into the process.

We’ve found out is if we fix something in development, it may cost a dollar. If we fix it in testing, it might cost $10. In production staging it may cost $1,000 It could be $10,000 or $100,000, when it’s in production, because that goes back to the entire lifecycle again, and more people are involved. So the idea is moving things further back in the lifecycle has been a very big benefit.

Also, it involved working with the development and testing staffs to understand that you can’t throw application over the wall and say, "Monitor my app, because it’s production." We have no idea which is your application, or we might say that it’s monitored, because we're monitoring infrastructure around your application, but we may not be monitoring a specific component of the application.

Educating people

The challenge there is reeducating people and making sure that they understand that they have to develop their app with monitoring in mind. Then, we can make sure that we can actually give them visibility back into the application if there is a problem, so they can get to the root cause faster, if there's an incident.

Gardner: This is all well and good, and it sounds fabulous for a handful of apps. But I imagine you have to scale this. How do you take what you’ve been describing in terms of this journey, but make it for dozens or hundreds of applications? What is it that you rely on to automate this?

Miller: We’ve created several different processes around this and we focused on monitoring every single technology. We still monitor those from a siloed perspective, but then we also added a few transactional monitors on top of that inside those silos, for example, transaction scripts that run at the same database query over-and-over again to get information out of there.

At the same time, we had to make some changes, where we started leveraging the Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) or Run-time Service Model to bring it up and build business services out of this data to show how all these things relate to each other. The UCMDB behind the scenes is one of the cornerstones of the technology. It brings all that silo-based information together to create a much better picture of the apps.

Gardner: Some people call that a system of record.

Miller: That’s correct. We don’t necessarily call it the system of record. We have multiple systems of record. It’s more like the federation adapter for all these records to pull the information together. It guides us into those systems of record to pull that information out.

We’ve created several different processes around this and we focused on monitoring every single technology.

Gardner: What does this get for you? Are there any metrics or examples you can point to that validate that how effective this can be?

Miller: About eight years ago when we first started this, we had incident meetings where we had between 15 and 20 people going over 20-30 incidents per week. We had those every day of the week On Friday, we would review all the ones for the first four days of the week. So, we were spending a lot of time doing that.

Out of those meetings, we came up with what I call "the monitor of the day." If we found something that was an incident that occurred in the infrastructure that was not caught by some type of monitoring technology, we would then have it monitored. We’d bring that back, and close that loop to make sure that it would never happen again.

Another thing we did was improve our availability. We were taking something like five and six hours to resolve some of these major incidents. We looked at the 80:20 rule. We solved 80 percent of the problems in a very short amount of time. Now, we have six or seven people resolving incidents. Our command center staff is in the command center 24 hours a day to do this type of work.

Additional resources

When they needed additional resources, they just pick up the phone and call the resources down. So, it’s a level 1 or level 2 type person working with one admin to solve a problem, versus having all hands on deck, where you have 50 admins in a room resolving incidents.

I'm not saying that we don’t have those now. We do, but when we do, it’s a major problem. It’s not something very small. It could be a firmware on a blade enclosure going down, which takes an entire group of applications down. It's not something you can plan for, because you're not making changes to your systems. It's just old hardware or stuff like that that can cause an outage.

Another thing that is done for us is those 20 or 30 incidents we had per week are down to one or two. Knock on wood on that one, but it is really a testament to a lot of the things that our IT department has done as a whole. They're putting a lot of effort into into reducing the number of incidents that are occurring in the infrastructure. And, we're partnering with them to get the monitoring in place to allow for them to get the visibility in the applications to actually throw alerts on trends or symptoms, versus throwing the alert on the actual error that occurs in the infrastructure.

Gardner: Now, we started talking earlier about your philosophy and the experience of the user. Are there any metrics or anecdotes from the welfare and benefit of your end-customers that have developed from the way that you’ve been able to improve your applications?

Miller: Customer satisfaction for IT is a lot higher now than it used to be. IT is being called in to support and partner with the business, versus business saying, "I want this," and then IT does it in a vacuum. It’s more of a partnership between the two entities to be able to bring stuff together. Operations is creating dashboards and visibility into business applications for the business, so they can see exactly what they're doing in the performance of their one department, versus just from an IT perspective. We can get the data down to specific people now.

Customer satisfaction for IT is a lot higher now than it used to be. IT is being called in to support and partner with the business.

Gardner: Because these activities are a journey, you never perhaps get to an end destination. What are you looking forward to next? What’s the roadmap for improving even beyond where you are now?

Miller: Some of the big things I am looking at are closed-loop processes, where I have actually started to work with making some changes, working with our change management team to make changes to the way that we do changes in our environment where everything is configuration item (CI) based, and doing that allows for that complete traceability of an asset or a CI through its entire lifecycle.

You understand every incident, request, problem request that ever occurred on that asset, but also you can actually see financial information. You can also see inventory information and location information and start bringing the information together to make smart decisions based on the data that you have in your environment.

Gardner: That sounds like it could lead to some significant cost savings in the long run?

Miller: That’s my hope. The really big thing is really to help reduce the cost of IT in our business and be able to do whatever we can to help cut our cost and keep a lean ship going.

Gardner: Well, great. We’ve been hearing about a user case study, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, and how they’ve been improving their application performance and the user experience, and then ultimately providing a better visibility for IT and the perception of IT along with overall reduction in total cost. We’ve been hearing this story from Victor Miller, Senior Manager of Systems Management at Blue and Cross Blue Shield of Florida in Jacksonville. Thank you.

Miller: Thank you.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of user experience 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 BriefingsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida gains better visibility into application lifecycles for improved operational efficiency and reliability. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• HP delivers applications appliance solutions that leverage converged infrastructure for virtualization, data management
• HP takes plunge on dual cloud bursting: public and-or private apps support comes of age
  
• HP rolls out EcoPOD modular data center, provides high-density converged infrastructure with extreme energy efficiency
• HP at Discover releases converged infrastructure products and services aimed at helping IT migrate rapidly to the future
  
• HP's IT Performance Suite empowers IT leaders with unified view into total operations, costs
• HP Delivers NMC 9.1 as New Demands on Network Management Require Secure, Integrated, and Automated Response