IT Operations Modernization Helps Energy Powerhouse Exelon Acquire Businesses

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how a large utility operation uses HP tools to get better insight into IT operations.

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 Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as better business results.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Exelon Corporation, based in Chicago, has been employing a great deal of technology and process to improve their operations and also to help manage a merger and acquisition transition period, as well as bring outsourced IT operations back in house.

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To learn more about how Exelon, a leading energy provider in the US with a family of companies having $23.5 billion in annual revenue, accomplishes these goals we're joined by Jason Thomas, Manager of Service, Asset and Release Management at Exelon. He's based in Baltimore. Welcome, Jason.

Jason Thomas: Thank you, Dana. Its a pleasure to be here.

Gardner: I gave a brief overview of Exelon, but tell us a little bit more. It's quite a large organization that you're involved with.

Thomas: We are vast and expansive. We have a large nuclear fleet, around 40-odd nuclear power plants in three utilities, ComEd in Chicago, in the Illinois space; PECO out of Philadelphia; and BG and E in Baltimore.

So we have large urban utilities center. We also have a large retail presence with the Constellation brand and the sale of power both to corporations and to users. So there's a lot of that we do obviously in the utility space, and there are some element of the trade, the commodity trading side, as well in trading power in these markets.

Gardner: I imagine it must be quite a large IT organization to support all that?

Thomas: There are 1,200 to 1,300 IT employees across the company.

Gardner: Tell us about some of the challenges that you've been facing in managing your IT operations and making them more efficient. And, of course, we'd like to hear more about the merger between Constellation and Exelon back in 2012.

Merger is a challenge

Thomas: The biggest challenge is the merger. Obviously, our scale and the number of, for lack of a better word, things that we had to monitor, be aware of, and know about vastly increased. So we had to address that.

Thomas

A lot of our efforts around the merger and post-merger were around bringing everything into one standard monitoring platform, extending that monitoring out, leveraging the Business Service Management (BSM) suite of products, leveraging Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB).

Then there was a lot around consolidating asset management. In early 2013, we moved to Asset Manager as our asset manager platform of choice, consolidating data from Exelon from their tool, the Cergus CA Argis tool, into Asset Manager in support of moving to new IT billing that would be driven out of the data and Asset Manager in leveraging some of the executive scorecard and financial manager pieces to make that happen.

There was also a large effort through 2013 to move the company to a standardized platform to support our service desk, incident management, and also our service catalog for end-users. But a lot of this was driven last year around the in-sourcing of our relationship with Computer Sciences Corporation for our IT operations.

This was to basically realize a savings to the company of $12 to $15 million annually from the management of that contract, and also to move both the management and the expertise in house and leverage a lot of the processes that we built up and that had grown through the company as a whole.

Gardner: So knowing yourself well in terms of your IT infrastructure and all the elements of that is super important, and then bringing in-sourcing transition to the picture, involves quite a bit of complexity.

You've leveled the playing field and you have that common set of tools that you're going to drive to take you to the next level.

What do you get when you do this well? Is there a sense of better control, better security, or culture? What is it that rises to the top of your mind when you know that you have your IT service management (ITSM) in order, when you have your assets and configuration management data in order. Is it sleeping better at night? Is it a sense of destiny you have fulfilled -- or what?

Thomas: Sleeping better at night. There is an element of that, but there's also sometimes the aspect of, "Now what's next?" So, part of it is that there's an evolutionary aspect too. We've gotten everything in one place. We're leveraging some of the integrations, but then what’s next?

It's more restful. It's now deciding how we better position ourselves to show the value of these platforms. Obviously, there's a clear monetary value of what we did to in-source, but now how do we show the business the value that we have done? Moving to a common set of tools helps to get there. You've leveled the playing field and you have that common set of tools that you're going to drive to take you to the next level.

Gardner: What might that next level be? Is it a cloud transition? Is it more of a hybrid sourcing for IT? Is this enabling you to take advantage of the different devices in terms of mobile? Where does it go?

Automation and cloud

Thomas: A lot of it is really around automation, the intermediate step around cloud. We've looked at cloud. We do have areas where the company has leveraged it. IT is still trying to wrap their heads around how we do it, and then also how we expose that to the rest of the organization.

But the steps we’ve done around automation are very key in making leaner operations, IT operations, but also being able to do things in an automated fashion, as opposed to requiring the manual elements that, in some cases, we had never done prior to the merger.

Gardner: Any examples? You mentioned $15 million in savings, but are there any other metrics of success or key performance indicator (KPI)-level paybacks that you can point to in terms of having all this in place for managing and understanding your IT?

Thomas: We're still going through what it is we're going to measure and present. There's been a standard set of things that we've measured around our availability and our incidents and whether these incidents are caused by IT, by infrastructure.

One of the key things is how you're changing and how you do IT operations.

We've done a lot better operationally. Now it's taking some of those operational aspects and making them a little bit more business-centric. So for the KPIs, we're going through that process of determining what we're going to measure ourselves against.

Gardner: Jason, having gone through quite a big and complex undertaking in getting your ITSM and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) activities, what comnes next? Maybe a merger and acquisition is going to push you in a new direction.

Thomas: We recently announced the intent to acquire Pepco Holdings, which is the regional utility in Washington, DC area, that further widens our footprint in the mid-Atlantic area. So yeah, we get to do it all over again with a new partner, bringing Pepco in and doing some elements of this again.

Gardner: Having gone through this and anticipating yet another wave, what words of wisdom might you provide in hindsight for those who are embarking on a more automated, streamlined, and modern approach to IT operations?

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Thomas: One of the key things is how you're changing and how you do IT operations. Moving towards automation, tools aside, there's a lot of organizational change if you're changing how people do what they do or changing people's jobs or the perception of that.

You need to be clear. You need to clearly communicate, but you also need to make sure that you have the appropriate support and backing from leadership and that the top-down communication is the same message. We certainly had that, and it was great, but there's alway going to be that challenge of making sure everybody is getting that communication, getting the message, and getting constant reinforcement of that.

Organizational changes resulting from a large merger or acquisition are huge. It's key to show the benefits, even to the people who are obviously going to reap some of these immediate benefits,  those in IT. You know the business is going to see some. It's couching that value in the means or method appropriate for those actors, all of those stakeholders.

Full circle

Gardner: Of course, you have mentioned working through a KPI definition and working the executive scorecard. That makes if full circle, doesn’t it?

Thomas: Defining those KPIs, but also having one place where those KPIs can be viewed, seen easily, and drilled into is big. To date, it's been a challenge to provide some of that historiography around that data. Now, you have something where you can even more readily drill into it to see that data -- and that’s huge.

Presenting that, being able to show it, and being able to show it in a way that people can see it easily, is huge, as opposed to just saying, "Well, here's the spreadsheet with some graphs" or "Here’s a whiz-bang PowerPoint doc."

Gardner: And, Jason, I suppose this points to the fact that IT is really maturing. Compared to other business services and functions in corporations, things that had been evolving for 80 or 100 years, IT is, in a sense, catching up.

Now, you have something where you can even more readily drill into it to see that data -- and that’s huge.

Thomas: It's catching up, but I also think it's more of a reflection. It's reflection of a lot of the themes of the new style of IT. A lot of that is that consumerization aspect. In fact,  if you look at the last 10 years ago, the wide presence of all of these, your smart devices and your smartphones, is huge.

We have brought to most people something that was never easily accessible. And having to take that same aspect and make it part of how you present what you do in IT is huge. You see it in how you're manifesting it in your various service catalogs and some of the efforts that we're undertaking to refine and better the processes that underlie our technical service catalog to have a better presentation layer.

That technical service catalog will refer to what we've seen with Propel. It's an easier, nicer, friendlier way to interact, and people expect that. Why can’t this be more like my app store, or why can't this be more like X.

Is IT catching up or has IT become more reachable, has become more warm and fuzzy as opposed to something that’s cold, hard, and stored away somewhere? You kind of know about it, and perhaps the guys in the basement are the ones who are doing all the heavy lifting, and it's more tangible.

Gardner: Humanization of IT perhaps.

Thomas: Absolutely.

Gardner: All right, one last area I want to get into before we sign off. We've heard quite a bit  about The Machine, HP unveiling more detail from its labs activities. It’s not necessarily on a product roadmap yet, but it’s described through a lower footprint, much more rapid ability to join compute and memory, and then  reduce the size of the data center down to a size of a refrigerator.

I know that it's on the horizon, but how does that strike you, and how interesting is that for you?

Ramp up/ramp down

Thomas: It's interesting, because it allows you to get to bit more ability to ramp up or ramp down, based on what you need, as opposed to you having x amount of servers and x amount of storage that's always somewhere. It gives you a lot more flexibility and, to some extent, gives you a bit more tenability. It's directly applicable to certain aspects of the business, where you need that capability to ramp up and ramp down much more easily.

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I had a conversation with one of my peers about that. We were talking about how both that and the Moonshot aspect and the ability to have that for a lot of the customer-facing websites, and the ability to tie them, in particular, the utility customer-facing websites whose utilization tends to spike during weather events.

While they don't spike all at the same time, there is the potential opportunity in the Mid-Atlantic of all the utilities spiking at the same time around a hurricane or Sandy-esque event. There's obviously a need to able to respond to that kind of demand, and that technology positions you with the flexibility to do that rather quickly and easily.

It gives you a lot more flexibility and, to some extent, gives you a bit more tenability.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been talking with Exelon Corporation, based in Chicago, about their journey towards a better handling of IT and transitions through mergers and acquisitions as a result of having a much deeper sense of their IT operations.

So a big thank you to our guest, Jason Thomas, Manager of Service Asset and Release Management at Exelon. Thank you, sir.

Thomas: Thank you, Dana. My pleasure.

Gardner: And also a big thank you to our audience for joining us for this special new style of IT discussion. I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how a large utility operation uses HP tools to get better insight into IT operations. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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How Waste Management Builds a Powerful Services Continuum Across Operations, Infrastructure, Development, and IT Processes

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a large environmental services company uses HP BSM tools to provide always-on, always-available services to customers and internal users.

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 Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how Waste Management in Houston, Texas is improving the quality of their services and operations in IT for a variety of their users, both internal and external.
To help us learn more about Waste Management’s experience, we're here with Gautam Roy, Vice President of Infrastructure, Operations and Technical Services at Waste Management. Welcome.

Gautam Roy: Hi. Thank you.

Gardner: You're a very large organization across North America with more than 20 million customers. This size and scale requires an awful lot of IT. Tell us about the scope and size of your operation.

Roy: Water Management is an environmental services company. We have primarily three lines of business. First is waste service. This is our traditional waste pickup, transfer, and disposal. Our second line of business is renewable energy or green energy, and our third is recycling.

Roy

What makes Waste Management different from others in the waste industry is that we also invest quite a lot of effort in next-generation waste technology. We invest in companies like Agilyx, which converts very hard-to-recycle waste, such as plastic, into crude oil. We convert organic food waste into natural gas. We pressurize, scrub, and dry municipal solid waste into solid fuel, which burns cleaner than coal.

And we're quite diverse, a global company. We have operations in the US and Canada, Asia, and Europe. We have our renewable energy plants. There is quite a large array of technology and IT to support these business processes to ensure consistent business-services availability.

Gardner: As with many organizations, gaining greater visibility into operations -- having earlier detection of problems, and therefore earlier remediation -- means better performance. What were some of the drivers for your organization specifically to mature your IT operations?

Business transformation

Roy: I'll give a few business reasons, and a couple of technology reasons. From the business side, we began business transformation a couple of years ago. We wanted to ensure that we unlocked the value for our customers and for us, and to institutionalize the benefits for Waste Management.

Customer care, providing outstanding, world-class customer service is aligned completely with our business strategy. Business services availability is crucial, it's in our DNA. Our IT business service availability scorecard a few years ago wasn't too good. So we had to put the focus on people, process, and technology to ensure that we provide a very consistent service set to our customers.

Gardner: Moving across the spectrum of development, test, and operations can be challenging for many organizations. You have put in place standardized processes to measure, organize, and perform better across the DevOps spectrum. Tell us how you accomplished that. How did you get there?

Roy: That's a very good question. For us, IT business-service availability is really not about having a great monitoring solution. It starts even before the services are in production. It starts with partnership with our business and business requirements. It starts with having a great development methodology and a robust testing program. It starts with architecture processes, standardization, and communication. All those things have to be in place. And you have to have security services and a monitoring solution to wrap it up.

We try to approach it from the front end, instead of chasing it from the back end.

What we are trying to do is to not fight the issue at the back-end. If a service is down, our monitoring software picks it up, our operational team and engineering team jumps on it, we are able to fix the problem ASAP before it impacts the customer. Great. But, boy, wouldn’t it be nice if those services aren't going down in the first place? So we try to approach it from the front-end, instead of just chasing it from the back-end.

Gardner: So it’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Business Service Management (BSM), not one or the other, but really both -- and simultaneously?

Roy: Exactly, ALM, BSM, testing, and security products. We also want to make sure that the services are not down from intentional disruption. We want to make sure that we produce code with quality and velocity, and code that is consistent with the experience of our customer.

With our operational processes, ITIL and Lean IT, we want to make sure that the change management and incident management are followed to our prescription. We want to make sure that the disaster-recovery (DR) program, the high-availability (HA) program, the security operation center (SOC), the network operation center (NOC), and the command centers are all working together to ensure that the services are up 24/7, 365.

Gardner: And when you do this well, when you have put in place many of the capabilities that we have been describing, do you have any sense of payback? Do you keep score?

Availability scorecard

Roy: A few years ago, when we were not as good at it, we started rebuilding this all from the ground up, and our availability scorecard was pretty bad. Our services were down. At times, we didn’t know that our services were down. Our first indication of a problem was from customers calling us.

Now, fast-forward a few years, with making the appropriate choices and investments in technology -- such as in people and processes --  and our scorecard is very good. We know of the problems rapidly. We proactively detect problems and fix the problems before they impact our customers.

We have 4 9s availability for our critical applications. We're able to provide services to our customers via wm.com, our digital channel, and it has been quite a success story. We still have work to cover, but it has been following the right trajectory.

Gardner: Here at HP Discover, are there any developments that you're monitoring closely? Are there some things that you're particularly interested in that might help you continue to close the gap on quality?

We want to provide optimal solutions at a right price point for our customers and our business.

Roy: Sure. Things like understanding what's happening in the world of big data and HP’s views and position on that. I want to understand and learn about testing, software testing, how to test faster and produce better code, and to ensure, on a continuous basis that we're reducing the cost of running the business. We want to provide optimal solutions at a right price point for our customers and our business.

Gardner: On that topic of big data, are you referring to the data generated within IT, in your systems, to be able to better analyze and react to that? Or perhaps also the data from your marketplace, things that your customers might be saying in social media, for example? Or is it all of the above?

Roy: It’s all of the above. We have internal data that we're harvesting. We want to understand what it’s telling us. And we'd like to predict certain trends of our system, across the use of our applications.

Externally, we have 18 call centers. We get user calls. We also want to know our customer better and serve them the best. So we want to move into a situation where we can take their issues, frame them into solutions, and proactively service them the best in our industry.

Gardner: I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing how Waste Management improves their IT operations across the BSM spectrum, from development through operations, and then embarking on more use of big data to analyze their business requirements as well as their marketplace.

So a big thank you to Gautam Roy, Vice President of Infrastructure, Operations and Technical Services at Waste Management in Houston. Thanks so much.

Roy: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thank you, too, to our audience for joining this special HP Discover new style of IT discussion.

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.

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Advanced IT Monitoring Delivers Predictive Diagnostics Focus to United Airlines

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how HP tools helped facilitate a giant airline merger that brought many IT systems and application together.

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 recent HP Discover 2013 Conference in Las Vegas.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how United Airlines demanded better performance and monitoring from IT -- and got it. We'll see how United not only had to better track thousands of systems and applications from its newly merged company, but it also had to dig deeper and orchestrate an assortment of management elements to produce the right diagnostic focus, and thereby reduce outages from hours to mere minutes.

We'll learn more about how United has gained predictive monitoring and more effective and efficient IT performance problem solving from our guest, Kevin Tucker, Managing Director of Platform Engineering at United Airlines. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Kevin Tucker: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: We're glad you're here. It seems that your situation could be easily summed up as an issue of scale. You have thousands of applications. You had major companies, big, big companies coming together, with Continental and United.

Tell me about how IT also was a scale issue. You're not only dealing with applications and platforms. You're dealing with IT staff, culture, and departments. Maybe you can help us understand the challenge that you faced as you tried to make things better and your performance improve.

Tucker: As you stated, the airline industry is one of the most complex IT environments in existence. I think it's really difficult for the average flyer to understand all of the logistics that have to happen to get a flight off the ground.

Tucker

There are millions of messages moving through the system, from weight and balance, to reservation changes. There's the Network Operations Center (NOC) that has to make sure that we're on time with slots. There are fuel concerns. We have to ensure that with all of the connections that are happening out there that, the flights that feed into our hubs carrying our passengers get in on time, so that folks can make their connecting flights.

Moving people around is a very serious business. I have had people say, "Why do you guys take it so seriously? You're not launching nukes, or you are not curing cancer." But at the end of the day, people are counting on us to get them from point A to B.

That might be the CEO that’s trying to go out and close a big business deal. It might be someone trying to get to see an ailing family member, or someone who's lined up for what could be a life-changing interview. It's our job to get them there on time, in a stress-free manner, and reliably.

Gardner: Back to the scale issue, it's obviously a daunting task, but to an IT department, what are you dealing with in order to pull all these resources together, to make the applications that really are what drive many of these processes?

Complex environments

Tucker: We've had a very challenging last couple of years. We recently took two large, complex IT environments and merged them. We picked some applications from Continental, some applications from United, and we had to make these applications interface with each other when they were originally never designed to do so. In the process, we had to scale many of these systems up, and we did that at an incredible pace.

Over and above that, with the complex challenges of merging the two IT systems, we had this phenomenon that's building in the environment that can't be denied, and that's the explosion of mobile. So it was really a perfect storm for us.

We were trying to integrate the systems, as well as stay out in front of our customer demands with respect to mobile and self-service. It became a daunting challenge, and it became very apparent to us going in, that we needed good vital signs for us to be able to survive, for us to be able to deliver that quality of service our customers come to expect from us.

From my perspective, I have several customer sets. I have the executives. We don’t really know how we're doing if we can't measure something. So we need to be able to provide them metrics, so that they understood how we were running IT.

I have the United employees, and that could be the line mechanic, to the gate agent, to the lobby agent. And then we have our flyers. And all of those people deserve reliable data and systems that are available at all times. So when you factor all of that in, we knew we needed good vital signs, so that we could ensure these applications were functioning as designed.

We brought HP to the table and told them that we don't want to be average. We want to be world-class.

We didn't get there as fast as we would like. It was quite a feat to integrate these systems and we landed on a collapsed Passenger Service System (PSS) system back in March of 2012. Unfortunately, given that we were a little late to the game, we had some tough days, but we rallied. We brought HP to the table and told them that we don't want to be average. We want to be world-class.

We created a battle plan. We got the troops energized. We deployed the power that's available to us within the HP Management Suite. We formed a battle plan and we executed that.

It wasn't without challenge, but we are very proud of the work that we've done in a very short period of time. Within an eight-month journey, we have gone from being average at best, to I think one of the best around, with the stuff we have gotten after.

So it can be done. It just takes discipline, commitment, and a will to be the best. I'm very proud of the team and what they've accomplished.

Gardner: Kevin, I like the way you refer to this as "vital signs." When you put in place the tools, the ability to get diagnostics, when you had that information at your fingertips, what did you see? Was it a fire hose or a balanced scorecard? What did you get and what did you need to do in order to make it more actionable?

Using all the tools

Tucker: We own quite a bit of the HP product set. We decided that in order to be great, we need to use all of the tools on our tool belt. So we had a methodical approach. We started with getting the infrastructure covered. We did that through making sure SiteScope was watching servers for health. We made sure the storage was monitored, the databases are monitored, the middleware components, the messaging queues, etc., as well as all of the network infrastructure.

What really started to shine the light on how we were performing out there, as we started rolling all of those events up and correlating them into BSM, was that we were able to understand what impact we were having throughout the environment, because we understood the topology-based event correlation. That was sort of the first model we went at.

You mentioned diagnostics. We started deploying that very aggressively. We have diagnostics deployed on every one of our Java application servers. We also have deployed diagnostics on our .NET applications.

What that has done for us is that we were able to proactively get in front of some of these issues. When we first started dabbling in diagnostics, it was more of a forensics type activity. We would use that after we were in an incident. Now we use diagnostics to actually proactively prevent incidents.

In many cases we have gotten many of those restorals down in under five minutes, where before it was way north of an hour.

We're watching for memory utilization, database connection counts, and time spent in garbage collection, etc. Those actually fire alerts that weave their way through BSM. They cut a Service Manager ticket, and we have automation that picks that Service Manager ticket up, assumes ownership, goes out and does remediation, and refreshes the monitor. When that’s successful, we close the ticket out, all the while updating the Service Manager ticket to ensure we're ITIL compliant.

In many cases we have gotten many of those restores down in under five minutes, where before it was way north of an hour.

Through the use of these tools, we have certainly gained better insight into how our applications are using database connections and how much time we're spending in garbage collection. It really helps us tune, tweak, and size the environments in a much more predictive fashion versus more of a guess. So that's been invaluable to us.

You're probably picking up on a theme that's largely operationally based. We've begun making pretty good inroads into DevOps, and that's very important for us. We're deploying these agents and these monitors all the way back in the development lifecycle. They follow applications from dev to stage, so that when we get to prod, the monitors we know are solid. Application teams are able to address performance issues in development.

These tools have really aided the development teams that are participating in the DevOps space with us.

Gardner: HP does have a lot of product on the development test and deploy side of things, and also a lot of management and capabilities on the production side. Is there something about the ability for HP to span across these activities that led you to choose them and how did you decide on them versus some of the other alternatives?

Clear winner

Tucker: When we merged and got through the big integration I spoke of last year, clearly, we were two companies. We had two products. It became very clear to us without a doubt that because HP's depth and width that they could provide us across stacks and within those stacks, being able to go up and down, they were the clear winner.

Then when you start further looking at, well, why are we reinventing the wheel once something gets to production. When you look at the LoadRunner scripts, VuGen scripts that are created back in the development and the quality assurance (QA) cycle. Well, those are your production monitors and it prevents us from having to perform double work, if you will.

That's a huge benefit that we see in the suite. When you couple that with the diagnostic type information I referred to, that's giving our development teams great insight way back in the development cycle. As you look at the full lifecycle, the HP toolset allows you to span development stage into production and provide a set of dashboards that allow for the developers to understand how their sets of service are running.

We were very quickly able to bring them on board, because at the end of the day, there's the human factor that sets in. What's in it for me? I hear you ops and engineering guys telling me we need to monitor your application, but when you peel it back, I'm harkening back to my days when I used to run software.

Developers are busy and when you show them value that the director of the middleware services or business services has a dashboard, he can go look at how his services are performing. They very quickly identify that value and they're very keen on not getting those calls at 3 o’clock in the morning.

There was no doubt in our mind as we started down our journey that the HP toolset just couldn't be rivaled in that space.

It's a slam-dunk for us, and as I say, there was no doubt in our mind as we started down our journey that the HP toolset just couldn't be rivaled in that space.

Gardner: You’ve been able to take problem times from hours to minutes. HP has recognized that, and you’ve won an award here at HP Discover. Tell me a little about that and how you are sharing some of the responsibility. You mentioned your team and you're proud of it.

Tucker: Yes, we're very proud of our accomplishment. We're living proof. We're in a complex, fast-moving industry. We were starting from much further behind than we would have liked to, and we bought off and believed in the tools. We used them partnering with HP and we were able to come a long way.

What really started moving the dial for us with respect to remediation time and lowering mean time to restore (MTTR) and drastically improving our availability is the use of diagnostics. It's automated restores for things that we can. We can't restore everything automatically, but if we can take the noise away so our operations teams can focus on the tough stuff, that's what it's all about with the BSM TBEC (Topology Based Event Correlation) views, the event-based correlation.

Before, as we were making our journey, we started very quickly getting good at identifying an issue before the customer called in. That was not always the case. And that's step one. You never want a customer calling in and saying, "I want to let you know your application is down," and you say, "Thank you very much. We'll take a look at that."

Very difficult

That shaves a few minutes, but honestly then the Easter egg hunt starts. Is it a server, a network, a switch, the SAN, a database, or the application? So you start getting all of these people on the phone, and they start sifting through logs and trying to understand what this alert means with respect to the problem at hand. It's very difficult when you have thousands of servers and north of a thousand applications spread across five data centers. It's just very difficult.

Through the use of correlated views, understanding the dependencies, and the item within the infrastructure that's causing the problem turning red and bubbling up to the other applications that are impacted, allows us to zero in and fix that issue right off the bat, versus losing an hour of getting people on checking things to figure out is it them or is it not.

So through automating what can be automated with restore and having the event-based correlation that is what caused our operational performance we go from what I would call maybe a D- to an A+.

Gardner: Congratulations on the award. It's very impressive. Let's also talk about some other types of paybacks. From the investments you make, you're getting payback in terms of your brand being better preserved, customer satisfaction, speed, and performance. When people click and they can buy a ticket, that's revenue, and that’s very clear to measure.

It's allowed us to step back and start working on engineering with respect to how we utilize our assets.

But it seems to me that this lifecycle approach across DevOps, puts you in a better position to avail yourself of things like hybrid cloud models, where you need to move workloads to other types of environments or security, where now you are able to look in your systems when there is an event correlation that has a security issue attached, rather than just performance, or both.

Are you really now in a better position to move into some other areas around the types of the environments for your production, as well as security or maybe there are some others that I haven’t thought of that you're now able to pursue because of what you've been doing?

Tucker: As we've matured and have insight into our environment with metrics, we're able to stop the firefighting mode. It's allowed us to step back and start working on engineering with respect to how we utilize our assets. With all of this data, we now understand how the servers are running. We understand, through getting engaged early in DevOps with some of the rich information we get through load testing and whatnot, we're able to size our environments better.

As part of that, it gives us flexibility with respect to where we place some of these applications, because now we're working with scientific data, versus gut feel and emotion. That's enabling us to build a new data center and, as part of that, we're definitely looking at increasing our geographic disbursement.

The biggest benefit we're seeing, now that we have gotten to more or less a stable operation, is that we're able to focus in on the engineering and strategically look at what our data center of the future looks like. As part of that, we're making a heavy investment in cloud, private right now.

We may look at bursting some stuff to the public side, but right now, we're focused on an internal cloud. For us, cloud means automated server build, self-service, a robot that’s building the environment so that the human error is taken out. When that server comes online, it's an asset manager, it's got monitors in place, and it was built the same way.

Now that we are moving out of the firefighting mode and more into the strategic and engineering mode, that's definitely paying big dividends for us.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been learning about how United Airlines has demanded better performance from its IT organization and has gotten it. And we've seen how they have orchestrated an assortment of management elements to produce the right diagnostic focus and reduce outages from hours to mere minutes.

So join me in thanking our guest, Kevin Tucker, Managing Director of Platform Engineering at United Airlines. Thank so much.

Tucker: Thank you. It’s great to be with you.

Gardner: And thanks you to our audience for joining 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 HP tools helped facilitate a giant airline merger that brought many IT systems and application together. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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