SaaS PPM from HP Helps Deloitte-Australia Streamline Top-Level Decision Making

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a BriefingsDirect podcast on Deloitte-Australia, and how their business has benefited from leveraging the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for project and portfolio management (PPM) activities.

We spoke to Deloitte-Australia at a recent conference to explore some major enterprise software and 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 as we learn more about Deloitte’s innovative use of SaaS hosting for non-core applications. First, please join me in welcoming Ferne King, director within the Investment and Growth Forum at Deloitte-Australia in Melbourne. Welcome.

It’s the only solution that we found in the marketplace that would help us support and have visibility into the investments we were going to make.

Ferne King: Thank you.

Gardner: Tell me, Ferne, what led up to the use of SaaS for PPM? Why did this particular model seem to make sense?

King: The SaaS model made sense to us, because we had a strategic direction in our firm that any non-core application’s strategic intent was to have them as SaaS.

Gardner: What is it about PPM, in particular, that made this a leading candidate for that initiative?

King: It’s the only solution that we found in the marketplace that would help us support and have visibility into the investments we were going to make for ourselves internally around the growth and the maintenance of what we did internally within our own firm.

Gardner: Perhaps for our listeners’ benefit, you could explain a little bit about what you do there at Deloitte in Australia and the extent to which you went with this PPM solution. How far and wide?

King: Deloitte-Australia is approximately 5,000 practitioners. In 2010, our revenue was A$850 million. We provide professional services to public and private clients, and we are now globally the largest professional services firm. We utilize PPM internally within the firm, and that helps us to understand that portfolio and prioritization. Deloitte-UK practice and Deloitte-America practice in their consulting areas use PPM to go to the market and help manage deliver investments with their client base.

Gardner: From a high level, what have been some of the benefits of PPM in general, but furthermore, the SaaS deployment method?

Three benefits

King: The three benefits of PPM, primarily for us has been understanding that portfolio and linking that to our strategy. For example, our executive will have a series of business objectives they want to achieve in the Australian practice.

By utilizing PPM, we can understand what is going on within the firm that’s meeting those objectives, and then, more importantly for them, with the gap, and then they can take the action on the gap. That’s the number one priority. The number two priority is being able to communicate to our people within the practice the particulars of change.

For example, over the next quarter, what will our practitioners in the firm see as a result of all of these myriad of initiatives going on, whether it’s a SaaS service HR system or whether it’s a new product and service that they can take to market. Whatever change is coming, we can better communicate that to them within their organization.

Our third priority which the PPM product helps with discipline is our area of delivery. So, in our project management methodology, it helps us improve our disciplines. We had a journey of 18 months of doing things manually and then we brought PPM to technology enable what we were doing manually.

From a SaaS perspective, the benefit we’ve achieved there is that we can focus our people on the right things. Instead of having our people focused on what hardware, what platform, what change request, what design do we need to be happening, we can focus on what our to-be process should be, what our design should be. Then we basically hand that over the fence to the SaaS team, which then help execute that.

We don’t have to stand in a queue within our own IT group and look for a change window. We can make changes every Wednesday, every Sunday, 12 months of the year, and that works for us.

Gardner: Great. Now you described how you’ve decided on the prioritization of moving to SaaS as non-core. But, forgive me, PPM, the way you described it, it sounds rather mission critical. How was it that you decided on this, even though it seems so pertinent and perhaps it forms mortar to other types of business processes?

King: We would say it’s non-core, but high value. Just because it’s non-core, doesn’t mean that it’s not a top priority. Our firm has approximately 2,500 applications within our Australian practice. PPM, at our executive level, is seen as one of our top 10 applications to help our executive, our partners, the senior groups of our firm register ideas to help our business grow and be maintained.

So, it’s high value but it’s not part of our core practice suite. It doesn’t bring in revenue and it doesn’t keep the lights on, but it helps us manage our business.

Gardner: Could you give me a sense of the timeline? Is this something that is relatively new, something that you're well into, something that you're looking at through the rear-view mirror and assessing? Where are we within your roll-out of this PPM for SaaS?

The roadmap

King: I’d answer that in the question of where are we in our roadmap of strategic enterprise portfolio management. In that journey, we're four years in and we are two years into technology enablement. We undertook the journey four years ago to go down strategic portfolio management and we lasted about 18 months to 2 years, manually developing and understanding our methodology, understanding the value where we wanted to go to.

In our second year we technology enabled that to help us execute more effectively, speed to value, time to value, and now we are entering our third year into the maturity model of that.

Gardner: When you describe this as something that doesn’t directly impact your bottom-line, it certainly sounds as if it’s impacting the users within your organization. What’s been the feedback from the front lines, those who are involved with are actually using this? Has this been something that they’ve embraced or something they needed to learn to embrace over time?

King: Fantastic results, particularly at the executive levels who are the ones who pay for us to create the time to work on this. Deloitte itself has taken the transformation over the years, If anybody in the market follows the professional services, industry group areas, Deloitte globally is 160,000 practitioners and over 250 billion of revenue on FY10. We're coming together and have been taking a journey for some time to be as one.

So, if you're a client in the marketplace, you don’t have to think about what door you need to enter the Deloitte world. You enter one door and you get service from whatever service group you need.

PPM has enabled us to help the executive achieve their vision of firm-wide visibility of the enterprise investments we are making to improve our growth and support our maintenance.

If I take the example of three years ago, our tax group would only be interested in what’s happening in their tax group. Our consultant group would really only be interested in what’s happening in the consultant group.

Now that we are acting as one, the tax service line lead and the consulting service line lead would like visibility of what’s happening firm wide. PPM is now enabling us to do that.

What I would summarize there is that PPM has enabled us to help the executive achieve their vision of firm-wide visibility of the enterprise investments we are making to improve our growth and support our maintenance.

Gardner: Tell me if you could, Ferne, a little bit about how you came to the HP solution. What was it that you were looking for in a solution and what requirements did you feel were most important in leading up to that choice?

King: First of all, probably, 27 years experience with project delivery, coming from an engineering construction background, getting very detailed knowledge over the years about the one-on-one delivery components and dealing with a lot of vendors over the years in the client marketplace.

So, well-versed in what we needed and well-versed in what was available out there in the marketplace. When we went to market looking for a partner and a vendor solution, we were very clear on what we wanted. HP was are able to meet that.

I actually took my own role out of the scoring process. We helped put scripts together, scenarios for our vendors to come and demonstrate to us how we were going to achieve meeting our objectives. Then, we brought people around the table from that business with a scoring method, and HP won on that scoring method.

Gardner: With you being fully into this project and for those listening who might be considering moving to a more holistic PPM approach and perhaps evaluating the different sourcing options, is there anything in hindsight that you could offer in terms of advice when beginning such a project?

When we went to market looking for a partner and a vendor solution, we were very clear on what we wanted. HP was are able to meet that.

King: Understand the method or the approach that you want to use PPM for. You cannot bring PPM and expect it to answer 80 percent of your issues. It can support and help direct resolution of issues, but you need to understand how you are expecting to do that. An example would be if you want to capture ideas from other business units or groups or the technology department on what they'd like to do to improve their application or improve product development, any area of the business, understand the life-cycle of how you want that to be managed. Don’t expect PPM to have preset examples for you.

Gardner: Very good. We’ve been discussing how Deloitte-Australia has benefited from leveraging SaaS as a model for delivery of project and portfolio management activities. I’d like to thank our guest, Ferne King, Director within the Investment and Growth Forum at Deloitte-Australia. Thanks so much.

King: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And I’d also like to thank our listeners in joining us with this BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you from a recent HP conference.

I'm 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 and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11. 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: Seagate Ramps Up Dev-Ops Benefits With HP Application Lifecycle Management Tools

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2011 on how Seagate Technology is leveraging HP's ALM tools to conduct development and dev-ops faster, better and cheaper.

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. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We’re here now with an HP customer and an aggressive adopter of modern application development techniques, someone who is beginning to span the dev-ops divide and gaining some value from agile development methodologies. Please join me in welcoming Steve Katz, Manager of Software Performance and Quality at Seagate Technology. Welcome.

Steve Katz: Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner: You know, we’ve heard a lot here about integration and converged infrastructure and we’ve certainly heard in the past from HP about the need for a solid integrated system of record when it comes to application lifecycle management (ALM). At Seagate, what you do and who are you? Then, what’s the problem? What are you trying to solve by adopting some of these newer development methodologies and products?

Katz: First of all, Seagate is one of the largest manufacturers of rotating media hard disks and we also are into the solid state and hybrids. Last quarter, we shipped about 50 million drives. That continues to grow every quarter.

As you can imagine, with that many products -- and we have a large product line and a large supply chain -- the complexities of making that happen, both from a supply chain perspective and also from a business perspective, are very complicated and get more complicated every day.

The Holy Grail for us would definitely be an integrated approach to doing software development that incorporates the development activities, but also all of the test, monitoring, provisioning, and all of the quality checks and balances that we want to have to make sure that our applications meet the needs of our customers.

In the last couple of years, with the explosion with cloud, with the jump to virtual machines (VMs), virtualization of your data center, and also global operations, global development teams, new protocols, and new applications, most of what we do, rather than developing from scratch, is integrate other people’s third-party applications to meet our needs. That brings to the table a whole new litany of challenges, because one vendor’s Web 2.0 protocol standard is completely different than another vendor’s Web 2.0 protocol standard. Those are all the challenges.

Also, we're adopting, and have been adopting, more of the agile techniques, because we can deliver quanta of capability and performance at different intervals, so we can start small, get bigger, and keep adding more functionality. Basically, it lets us deliver more, more quickly, but also gives us the room to grow and be able to adapt to the changing customer needs, because in the market, things change every day.

So for us, our goal has been the ability to get all those things together early in the program and have a way to collaborate and ultimately have the collaboration platform to be able to get all the different stakeholders’ views and needs at the very beginning of the program, when it’s the cheapest and most effective to do it. We’re not there. I don’t know if anybody will ever be there, but we’ve made a lot of efforts and feel like we’ve made a lot of ground.

Early adoption

The dev-ops perspective has really interested us, and we have been doing some of the early adoption, the early engagement with our customers, in our business projects very early in the game for performance testing.

We get into the project early and we start understanding what the requirements are for performance and don’t just cross our fingers and hope for the best down the road, but really put some hard metrics around what it is the expectations are for performance. What’s the transfer function? What’s the correlation between performance and the infrastructure that need to deliver that performance? Finally, what are the customer needs and how do you measure it?

That’s been a huge boon for us, because it’s helped us script that early in the project and actually look at the unit-level pieces, especially in each different iteration of the agile process. We can break down the performance and do testing to make sure that we’ve optimized that piece of it to be as good as possible.

Now when you add in the needs for VM provisioning, storage, networking, and databasing, the problem starts to mushroom and get more complex. So, for a long time, we've been big users of HP Quality Center (QC), which is what we use to gather requirements, build test plans, and link those requirements to the test plans ultimately to successful tests and defects. We have traceability from what the need of the customer is to our ability to validate that we deliver that need. And, it worked well.

Then, we have the performance testing which was an add-on to that. And now, with the new ALM 11, which by the way, marries the QC functionality and Performance Center functionality. They're not two different things any more. It’s the same thing, and that’s the beauty for us.

Having the QC and performance testing closer together has made a lot of sense for us and allowed us to go faster and cheaper, and end up with something that, in fact, is better.

That’s what we’ve been preaching and trying to work with our project teams on, to say that it’s just a requirement. Any requirement is just a requirement and how we decide to implement, fulfill, and test that is our choice. But, having the QC and performance testing closer together has made a lot of sense for us and allowed us to go faster and cheaper, and end up with something that, in fact, is better.

Gardner: Let’s get a sense of the scale here. How many applications do you have in production and how many at any given time are in your development phases, going from the requirements to development and test?

Katz: The major number of applications we have in production is in the 300-500 range, but as far as mission critical, probably 30. As far as some things that are on everybody’s radar, probably 50 or 60. In Business Servive Management (BSM), we monitor about 50 or 60 applications, we also have the lower-level monitors in place that are looking at infrastructure. Then, our data all goes up to the single pane, so we can get visibility into what the problems are.

The number of things we monitor is less important to us than the actual impact that these particular applications have, not only on the customers experience, but also on our ability to support it. We need to make sure that whatever it is that we do is, first of all, faster. I can’t afford to get a report every morning to see what broke in the last 24 hours. I need to know where the fires are today and what’s happening now, and then we need to have direct traceability out to the operator.

As soon as something goes wrong, the operator gets the information right away and either we’re doing auto-ticketing, or that operator is doing the triage to understand where the root cause is. A lot of that information comes from our dashboards, BSM, and Operations Manager. Then, they know what to do with that issue and who to send it to.

SaaS processes

We’ve subscribed to a number of internal cloud services that are software-as-a-service (SaaS) processes and services. For those kind of things, we need to first make sure it’s not us before we go looking to find out what our software service providers are going to do about the problems. And both of our applications, all the BSM and all the dev-ops has helped us get to that point a little better.

The final piece of the puzzle that we’re trying to implement is the newer BSM and how we get that built into the process as well, because that’s just another piece of the puzzle.

Gardner: As you’re moving towards this adoption of the newer products and binding together dev and ops, what sort of paybacks are you expecting? Is this just allowing the green light to stay on more, where your performance and reliability are strong? Or are there some other benefits in terms of reducing the cycle time for development, agility, and being able to cut costs in some ways?

Katz: It’s two things for us. One is the better job you do up front, the better job you’re going to do in the back end. Things are a lot cheaper and faster, and you can be a whole lot more agile to react a problem. So the better job we do up front, understand what the requirements are and not just what this application is or what it’s supposed to do, but how is it supposed to affect the rest of our infrastructure, how is it supposed to perform under stress, and what are the critical quality, the quality of service, the quality of experience aspects that we need to look at.

Defining that up front helps us to be better and helps us to develop and launch better products. In in doing that, we find issues earlier in the process, when it’s a lot cheaper to fix them and a lot more effective.

The better job you do up front, the better job you’re going to do in the back end. Things are a lot cheaper and faster, and you can be a whole lot more agile.

On the back end, we need to be more agile. We need to get information faster and we need to be able to react to that information. So, when there’s a problem, we know about it as soon as possible, and we’re able to reduce our root-cause analysis and time to resolution.

Gardner: You’ve mentioned that you’re being aggressive with SaaS. I imagine you’re increasingly looking at cloud, and then, of course, everyone is thinking about mobile these days as well. Is there something about tying together dev-ops, creating a better ALM capability, that allows you to adopt technologies more rapidly?

Is there a sense of complexity and inertia in adopting some of these things, that you could move to them more rapidly and enjoy some productivities resolved because of what you’ve been doing with ALM?

Katz: I look at that like a baseball team. My kids are in Little League right now. We’re in the playoffs. When a team does well, you get this momentum. Success really feeds momentum, and we’ve had a lot of success with the dev-ops, with pulling in ALM performance management and BSM into our application development lifecycle. Just because of the momentum we've got from that, we’ve got a lot more openness to explore new items, to pull more information into the system, and to get more information into the single pane.

Before we had the success, the philosophy was. "I don’t have time to fix this. I don’t have time to add new great things." Or, "I've got to go fix what I got." But when you get a little bit of that momentum and you get the successes, there is a lot more openness to it and willingness to see what happens. We’ve had HP helping us with. They’re helping us to describe what the next phase of the world looks like.

Gardner: Well, great. We’ve been hearing about adopting more modern and agile development methodologies and adopting some integrated systems of record to do that. We’ve been joined by Steve Katz. He is the Manager of Software Performance and Quality at Seagate Technology. Thanks so much.

Katz: Thanks, Dana. I always appreciate it.

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 Seagate Technology is leveraging HP's ALM tools to conduct development and dev-ops faster, better and cheaper. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Case Study: How McKesson Develops Software Faster and Better with Innovative Use of New HP ALM 11 Suite

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

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

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

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

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

Our customer case study today focuses on McKesson and how their business has benefited from advanced application lifecycle management (ALM). To learn more about McKesson's innovative use of ALM and its early experience with HP's new ALM 11 release, I'm here with Todd Eaton, Director of ALM Tools and Services at McKesson. Welcome, Todd.

Todd Eaton: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: I know you've been involved with ALM for quite some time, but what is it about ALM now in your business that makes it so important and beneficial?

Eaton: In our business at McKesson, we have various groups that develop software, not only for internal use, but also external use by our customers and software that we sell. We have various groups within McKesson that use the centralized tools, and the ALM tools are pretty much their lifeblood. As they go through the process to develop the software, they rely heavily on our centralized tools to help them make better software faster.

Gardner: Is ALM something you use within the groups -- and then also to bind those groups; that is to say, there is a tactical ... and then even strategic benefit as well?

Eaton: Yes. The ALM suite that HP came out with is definitely giving us a bigger view. We've got QA managers that are in the development groups for multiple products, and as they test their software and go through that whole process, they're able to see holistically across their product lines with this.

We've set up projects with the same templates. With that, they have some cohesion and they can see how their different applications are going in an apples-to-apples comparison, instead of like the old days, when they had to manually adjust the data to try to figure out what their world was all about.

Gardner: At this point, are there any concrete benefits, either in terms of business benefits, or in the IT application development side of the business that you can point to that these ALM innovations have supported?

Better status

Eaton: There are a couple of them. When HP came up with ALM 11, they took Quality Center and Performance Center and brought them together. That's the very first thing, because it was difficult for us and for the QA managers to see all of the testing activities. With ALM, they're able to see all of it and better gauge where they are in the process. So, they can give their management or their teams a better status of where we are in the testing process and where we are in the delivery process.

The other really cool thing that we found was the Sprinter function. We haven't used it as much within McKesson, because we have very specific testing procedures and processes. Sprinter is used more as you're doing ad hoc testing. It will record that so you can go back and repeat those.

How we see that being used is by extending that to our customers. When our customers are installing our products and are doing their exploratory testing, which is what they normally do, we can give them a mechanism to record what they are doing. Then, we can go back and repeat that. Those are a couple of pretty powerful things in the new release that we plan to leverage.

Gardner: How would you describe the problem that we need to solve here? Is this a problem of communication, of measurement, perhaps workflow management, or all the above? How would you characterize what's wrong with how application development has been done? I don't mean to point to you as falling short on this at all. This is a general issue, but what is the problem that you think ALM is really addressing?

Eaton: That's a good point. When we're meeting at various conferences and such, there's a common theme that we hear. One is workflow. That's a big piece. ALM goes a long way to be able to conquer the various workflows. Within an organization, there will be various workflows being done, but you're still able to bring up those measurements, like another point that you are bringing up, and have a fairly decent comparison.

They can find those defects earlier, verify that those are defects, and there is less of that communication disconnect between the groups.

With the various workflows in the past, there used to be a real disparate way of looking at how software is being developed. But with ALM 11, they're starting to bring that together more.

The other piece of it is the communication, and having the testers communicate directly to those development groups. There is a bit of "defect ping-pong," if you will, where QA will find a defect and development will say that it's not a defect. It will go back and forth, until they get an agreement on it.

ALM is starting to close that gap. We're able to push out the use of ALM to the development groups, and so they can see that. They use a lot of the functions within ALM 11 in their development process. So, they can find those defects earlier, verify that those are defects, and there is less of that communication disconnect between the groups.

Gardner: It sounds like it’s beginning to quicken the pace of how you go about these things, but in addition to that, are you exploiting agile development practices, and is this something that's helping you if you are?

Eaton: We have several groups within our organization that use agile development practices. What we're finding is that the way they're doing work can integrate with ALM 11. The testing groups still want to have an area where they can put their test cases, do their test labs, run through their automation, and see that holistic approach, but they need it within the other agile tools that are out there.

It's integrating well with it so far, and we're finding that it lends itself to that story of how those things are being done, even in the agile development process.

Gardner: You're a large organization, a large healthcare provider and insurer. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about McKesson, where you're based, and the size and extent of your application development organization.

Company profile

Eaton: McKesson is a Fortune 15 company. It is the largest health-care services company in the U.S. We have quite a few R&D organizations and it spans across our two major divisions, McKesson Distribution and McKesson Technology solutions.

In our quality center, we have about 200 projects with a couple of thousand registered users. We're averaging probably about 500 concurrent users every minute of the day, following-the-sun, as we develop. We have development teams, not only in the U.S, but nearshore and offshore as well.

We're a fairly large organization, very mature in our development processes. In some groups, we have new development, legacy, maintenance, and the such. So, we span the gamut on all the different types of development that you could find.

Gardner: Well, that's interesting, because I wanted to explore the size of the organization. It sounded a moment ago as if you were able to support different styles, different cultures, different maturity levels, as you have mentioned, among and between these different parts of your development cycle, all using the same increasingly centralized ALM approach. Is that fair?

Eaton: Yeah, that's fair. That's what we strive for. In my group, we provide the centralized R&D tools. ALM 11 is just one of the various tools that we use, and we always look for tools that will fit multiple development processes.

They have to adapt to all that, and we needed to have tools that do that, and ALM 11 fits that bill.

We also make sure that it covers the various technology stacks. You could have Microsoft, Java, Flex, Google Web Toolkit, that type of thing, and they have to fit that. You also talked about maturity and the various maturity models, be it CMMI, ITIL, or when you start getting into our world, we have to take into consideration FDA.

When we look at tools, we look at those three and at deployment. Is this going to be internally used, is this going to be hosted and used through an external customer, or are we going to package this up and send it out for sale?

We need tools that span across those four different types, four different levels, that they can adapt into each one of them. If I'm a Microsoft shop that’s doing Agile for an internal developed software, and I am CMMI, that's one. But, I may have a group right next door that's waterfall developing on Java and is more an ITIL based, and it gets deployed to a hosted environment.

They have to adapt to all that, and we needed to have tools that do that, and ALM 11 fits that bill.

Gardner: So, it's the benefits of decentralized and the benefits of centralized in terms of the system-of-record approach, having at least a metaview of what's going on, even though there is still flexibility at the edge.

Eaton: Correct. ALM 11 had a good foundation. The test cases, the test set, the automated testing, whether functional or performance, the source of truth for that is in the ALM 11 product suite. And, it's fairly well-known and recognized throughout the company. So, that is a good point. You have to have a source of truth for certain aspects of your development cycle.

Gardner: Of course, your industry has significant level of regulation and compliance issues. Is ALM 11 something that's been a benefit in that regard?

Partner tools

Eaton: It has been a benefit. There are partner tools that go along with ALM 11 that help us meet those various regulations. Something that we're always mindful of, as we develop software, is not only watching out for the benefit of our customers and for our shareholders, but also we understand the regulations. New ones are coming out practically every day, it seems. We try to keep that in mind, and the ALM 11 tool is able to adapt to that fairly easily.

Gardner: You've been an early adopter. You've implemented certain portions of ALM 11, and you have a great deal of experience with ALM as a function. Looking back on your experience, what would you offer as advice to someone who might just be getting their feet wet in regard to either ALM or specifically ALM 11?

Eaton: When I talk to other groups about ALM 11 and what they should be watching out for, I tell them to have an idea of how your world is. Whether you're a real small shop, or a large organization like us, there are characteristics that you have to understand. How I identify those different stacks of things that they need to watch out for; they need to keep in mind their organization’s pieces that they have to adapt to. As long as they understand that, they should be able to adapt the tool to their processes and to their stacks.

Most of the time, when I see people struggling, it's because they couldn’t easily identify, "This is what we are, and this is what we are dealing with." They usually make midstream corrections that are pretty painful.

Gardner: And your title is interesting to me, Todd: Director of ALM Tools and Services. This is an organizational question, I suppose. Do you think it is a good policy, now that you have had experience in this, to actually devoting an individual or maybe a team to just overseeing the ALM tools, which in fact oversees the ALM process?

They look to us to be able to offload that and have a team to do that.

Eaton: That's an interesting point, and something that we've done at McKesson that appears to work out real well. When I deal with various R&D vice presidents and directors, and testing managers and directors as well, the thing that they always come back to is that they have a job to do. And one of the things they don't want to have to deal with is trying to manage a tool.

They've got things that they want to accomplish and that they're driven by: performance reviews, revenue, and that type of thing. So, they look to us to be able to offload that, and to have a team to do that.

McKesson, as I said, is fairly large, thousands of developers and testers throughout the company. So, it makes sense to have a fairly robust team like us managing those tools. But, even in a smaller shop, having a group that does that -- that manages the tools -- can offload that responsibility from the groups that need to concentrate on creating code and products.

Gardner: Well, great. Thank you for sharing your experiences. We've been hearing about ALM best practices and the use of HP's new ALM 11 by an early adopter and his experience, Todd Eaton, Director of ALM Tools and Services at McKesson. Thank you, Todd.

Eaton: You're welcome, Dana. It was nice talking to you.

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

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

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

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

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

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• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Priestley: Hi, Dana. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supporting services

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working together

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CIO annual report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Priestley: Thanks very much indeed, Dana.

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

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

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

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

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

You may also be interested in:

• HP rolls out ALM 11 in Barcelona to expand managed automation for modern applications
• HP's new ALM 11 helps guide IT through shifting landscape of modern application development
  
• Dave Shirk details how HP's Instant-On Enterprise initiative takes aim at shifting demands on business and governments
  
• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications