VMware-Powered Cloud Adoption Delivers Bevy of Data and Performance Benefits for Revlon, Says CIO David Giambruno

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the VMworld 2012 Conference on how cosmetics giant Revlon has benefited from innovative cloud-based data delivery infrastructure.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the recent 2012 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.

In these conversations we explore the latest in cloud computing and software-defined datacenter infrastructure developments. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I'll be your host throughout this series of VMware sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

It's been a year since the last VMworld Conference in 2011 when we first spoke to Revlon. We heard then about their world-class private cloud as an early adopter of innovative cloud delivery and we decided to go back and see how things have progressed at Revlon.

We'll learn now, a year on, how Revlon’s global and comprehensive cloud has matured, how the benefits from aggressively embracing the cloud have evolved, and perhaps learn about some unintended positive consequences of their data architecture.

To fill us in, we're joined by David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO of Revlon. Welcome back, David.

David Giambruno: Morning, Dana.

Gardner: Now that you've been doing private cloud as an early adopter and at an advanced state, what it has been doing for you? How has it progressed now that there has been a bit of maturity?

Giambruno: We have a couple of fronts. The biggest, which you alluded to, was the unintended consequences, and we've had a couple of them. When you think of Revlon, we're global and we have a huge application portfolio. As we put everything on our cloud and are using our cloud, we realized that all of our data sits in one place now.

So when you think of big-data management, we've been able to solve the problem by classifying all the unstructured data in Revlon and we did that efficiently. We still joke that it's like chewing glass. You've got to go through this huge process.

But, we have the ability to look at all of our data, a couple of petabytes, in the same place. Because the cloud lets us look at it all, we can bring up all of Revlon in our disaster recovery (DR) test environments and have our developers work with it at no cost. We have disconnected that cost and effort.

Once we realized we had this opportunity to start working on our big data, the other unintended consequences was our master data model. On top of our big data, we were able to able to efficiently and effectively build a global master data model.

Chief directive

At Revlon, one of our chief directives from the executive team is to globalize. So we're collapsing 21 enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems into one. The synergies of having this big-data structure and having this master data model is changing how to deploy a global ERP. Loading that data is now just a few clicks of a button. It's highly automated. We're not ETLing data and facing all the old challenges. We're not copying environments. Everything is available to us and it’s constantly updating.

At Revlon, we replicate all of our cloud activity every 15 minutes. You've seen on VMware, where we had disasters and we were able to recover a country quickly and effectively. That replication process and constantly updating allows us to update all these instances at no cost and with little effort.

You have to build the structure and you have to go through that process, but once it's done, it's now automated and you march that out. It's the ability to quickly and effectively manage all your big data coming in. For us, it's point of sale -- roughly 600 million-plus attributes.

For us to provide information to the business teams, to build good products, to sell good products, is a key differentiator in helping them.

Gardner: Well, it seems that a key aspect of the modern enterprise, the integrated enterprise, is having that data and analysis, having a lifecycle approach from the point of sale, to inventory, to planning, and to supply chain. You say that’s an unintended consequence. Why did you do the data the way you did that’s now led to this best cloud architecture for you?

We live in the information age, and to me, the most important thing is delivering information to the business teams.

Giambruno: We started the cloud architecture, and I always joke it's like having a Ferrari that you can take out for a spin. When we were building it, we didn't realize all the things we can do.

So it's really that je ne sais quoi, the little thing that, as you see it, you realize all these things you can do. You are always planning to do those things for the business, because that’s what we do, but it's how you do them.

I've always said the cloud is what the local area network (LAN) was 15 or 20 years ago. The LAN changed the way people dealt with information and applications, and the cloud is doing the same thing. Actually, it's on a bigger geometry, because it really eliminates geography and provides the ability to move data and information around.

We live in the information age, and to me, the most important thing is delivering information to the business teams. That's what we see as one of the big next evolutions in our cloud -- making information out of all this data and delivering that on whatever device they want to be on, wherever they are, securely and effectively, in a context that they can understand. Not in a way that we can understand, but in a way that they can consume.

Gardner: Understanding a bit about how you did this chronologically, for those that are still in the process of getting there with private cloud, did you focus on the data issues first and then application and workloads? Did you do them simultaneously? Is there some lesson to learn about how you did it in an orderly sense that others could benefit from?

First things first

Giambruno: I live in this simple world of crawl, walk, run. Whenever I say that my team starts cringing, because they think, "Oh, there he goes again." But it was literally fix the infrastructure first and then, from an application and data perspective, the low-hanging fruit, the file servers.

It's this progressive capability of learning how to do things -- low risk to high risk. What you end up doing is figuring out how to effectively do those things, because not only do you manage the technology, but you have to manage the people and the process changes, and all those things that have to happen.

But all ships have to rise at the same time. So it's the ability to run these concurrent streams. From a management perspective, it's how not to get overwhelmed and how to take advantage of the technology, the automation, and the capabilities that come along with that to free up work that you used to do and put it towards making the change.

I'm a big believer in not doing big bang. So it's not like, tomorrow we're going to have a private cloud. Throw the switch. It's the small incremental changes that help organizations adapt. It's a little bit every day. You look back, and at the end of six months or a year, you realize how much we've done.

It's been the same in Revlon. I constantly take my team and sit them down and say, "Look what we've done. You're in the forest. You're in the trees. It's time to look at the forest. Step back and look what you guys have done." Because it's a little bit every day, and you don't realize the magnitude or the mass, when you have a team of people doing something every day and going forward.

From a management perspective, it's how not to get overwhelmed and how to take advantage of the technology.

Gardner: For those of our listeners who may not be that familiar with Revlon, at least your IT operations, give us a sense of the scale -- the number of applications, size of data, just so we better appreciate the task that you've accomplished.

Giambruno: I usually quantify it by our cloud, because those are the simple metrics and we seem to be pretty steady, so the metrics are holding. Our cloud makes about 14,000 transactions a second. Our applications move around Revlon 15,000 times a month with no human intervention. Our change rate of data is between 17 and 30 terabytes a week.

We have roughly, depending on the ups and downs, between 97 and 98 of our total compute on our internal cloud, we have some AS/400s and I think one UNIX box left. But that's really the scale of what we do.

All of our geographies are around the world. We sit in all the continents except for Antarctica. We have a global manufacturing facility in Oxford, North Carolina, that produces 72 percent of everything we sell in the world. We have some other factors around the world. And we are delivering north of six nines uptime.

Gardner: An unintended consequence was a benefit for how data can be accessed and consumed, but a lot of people are hoping for consequences around cost. Is there something going on now a year later vis-à-vis your total cost, or maybe even the cost of data? Maybe you have been able to reduce the footprint of data, even while you have accessed more and more quickly. What's the cost equation?

Cost avoidance and savings

Giambruno: There is a history there, as we talked about. We have given back north of $70 million in cost avoidance and cost savings, and we're continuously figuring out how to use everything. My team is highly technical, so I call it turning screws. We are always turning screws on how to more effectively manage everything.

We're always looking at how to not spend money. It's simple. The more money we don't spend, the more that R&D, marketing, and advertising have to grow our company. That's the key to us.

We leverage capability, so one of the big things this year also was our mobile business intelligence (BI) capability. We've disconnected most of the costs for things in Revlon around IT. We only manage at a top line.

But if someone wants to try a new application, generally by the time the business team gets in a meeting with us, it's no cost. We have servers set up. We have the environment. We have the access control set up for the vendor to come in and set everything up. So that's still ongoing.

We have got this huge mobile BI initiative, which is delivering information to business teams and contacts. That's the new thing where we have disconnected the cost. We're not laying out money for it, and we're just now executing around that.

While data keeps growing, we're still figuring out how to manage things better and better in the background.

For me, the cost equation is more and more around cost avoidance and keeping on extending the capability of that cloud.

Gardner: And it seems as if those costs are more of an operational ongoing nature, predictable, recurring, easy to budget, rather than those big-bang types of cost?

Giambruno: Very, very predictable. For the past three years, we have had the same line items. While data keeps growing, we're still figuring out how to manage things better and better in the background, because  the cloud generates lot of data, which we want it to do. Data, information, and how we use that is the competitive weapon.

This cost avoidance, or cost containment, while extending capability, is the little magical thing that happens, that we do for the business. We're very level in our spend, but we keep delivering more and more and more.

Gardner: Because we are here at VMworld in San Francisco, tell me a little bit about the VMware impact for the cloud. How do you view the VMware suite and portfolio vis-à-vis the impact it has had on your maturation and benefits?

Very advanced

Giambruno: We kind of joke with the VMware team that we have what's called Revlonomolies. Revlonomolies is what one of the guys on the helpdesk called it, because when we're calling, we're very advanced. I want to use technology as a competitive weapon. My team masters it. We own it intellectually.

For us, it's where VMware is going. We're always pushing VMware. "What have you got next? What have you got next?" It's up to us to take capability and extend it. I don't mean to be flip or narcissistic or anything like that, but we've got that piece under control. It's about how do you do it better.

Every time there's an upgrade, what features and functionalities can we then take advantage and translate that into a business use? When I say business use, we tell the business teams, "Here's a new capability. You can do this and keep changing the structure of operating."

The new version of vSphere 5.1 came out, and we're in the process of exposing our internal cloud to our vendors and suppliers. We're eliminating all these virtual private networks (VPNs). It's about how we change and how IT operates, changing the model. For me, that's a competitive advantage, and it's the opportunity to reduce structural cost and take people away from managing firewalls.

We did that. We got that. Now we're going to do this a different way. We're going to expose to our vendors securely the information that they need, that they can interact with as easily and effectively.

Changing the model is really the opportunity, making it easier for the auditors to audit and making it easier for your supply chain.

There's even the idea of taking a portion of our apps and presenting those to our suppliers on their iPads and their iPhones so they can update our data and our systems much more cleanly and effectively. We can get the synergies and effectiveness and have our partners like to work with us and make it easy on them as well. It's always a quid pro quo, "It's Revlon. They're good to deal with. Let’s help them."

It's how you create those partnerships and effectiveness to get business done better. It makes it easier on the business teams, contracts go better, and it's cascading. I call it the spiral up effect, changing the way you operate to spiral up and take advantage of capabilities.

Gardner: Is that something we could classify as another unintended consequence -- a benefit that you have been able to enjoy these efficiencies around cloud internally for your enterprise, but now you are taking it to an extended enterprise benefit?

Giambruno: Absolutely. Look at the security complexity around VPNs and managing that and the audits. That's so much fun. Changing the model is really the opportunity, making it easier for the auditors to audit and making it easier for your supply chain, for all of those people to interact with you in a much more effective manner.

It's about enabling procurement to process their information and work with the vendors, because everything is about change. It's about speed of change. If we get a demand signal that changes and we need to buy more raw materials or whatever for our factories, we have the ability for not only our procurement teams, but our vendors to interact with us easily to make those changes. It ensures that we can deliver the right products, to the right stores, to the right peoples, so at the end the consumers are happy. It's about how do you change the model of delivering that.

Technology enabler

VMware has done that for us, and we keep taking advantage of all the stuff. I joke that I'm like a technology enabler: "What have you got for me? What have you got for me?" So I can give it out to the business and my teams, because it keeps people interested. We can say, "We saw you guys, and it was hard for you. Now, you can do this." And it's done.

"What do you mean it's done?" "It's done. Just use it. It's okay. Let us know what you think, if you want us to change something." But it's always being on the front of the bow, saying, "Here's what we can do. Here's how we can help."

That’s the culture of IT in Revlon. I'm merciless about how we're just here to help. We run the technology and own the technology intellectually, so we can help. That’s my only concern.

VMware has done that for us, and we keep taking advantage of all the stuff.

Gardner: Given that we started our conversation about data and the benefits that the cloud architecture has brought to you, is there anything about the VMware approach? They've been focused on virtualization in their history, moving towards fabric approaches to development and deployment in the cloud model. How about data?

Is there something that you'd like to see now that you're going down that path in the nature of the relationship between a cloud and data services, anything that you would like to see change or shift?

Giambruno: My team thinks that there needs to be a cellular approach to applications. What I mean by that is we have had what we call dribs out there. In the press lately, everybody has been talking about POD data centers. In 2009, we were written up in one of the magazines for our Mini Me data centers, essentially our little PODs, and that’s our cloud capacity that we manage around the world.

But when you think about an application architecture, let's take an ERP instance. We want to take a vertical slice of our warehouse management and push that out from a central location into our warehouses. Right now, that’s really hard. You end up with multiple instances or a single global instance, and then you have to deal with network latency and all those fun things.

Internal cloud

But in the future, in my internal cloud, I should be able to take a vertical instance of functionality and push that. To me, that's next. If the vendors can figure out how to do that and have my internal cloud manage those transactions back, but push the pieces of functionality wherever it needs to be, so it sits in those Mini Me data centers and let it be close to people, so I don’t have to deal with latency and then manage those transactions back, that's the next big evolution.

The one other one is mobile computing. What I mean by mobile computing is viewing applications, so data never leaves my data center.

I know a device. I know the person. When they hit the edge of my network, essentially hit my data center, we know their device. We know who they are, and they only get access to information they are supposed to have and they only view it.

I could encrypt my entire data center, and at a hypervisor level, encrypt everything, because if you encrypt the VBK file, the job is done. The compliance and security impact is huge. No more data leakage, audits become easier, all of those things.

We need to slice applications up, move them out, and then view the applications.

Again, it's a completely different way to operate and think about things, but we need to slice applications up, move them out, and then view the applications. That’s a whole new geometry of operating IT in a much more efficient manner.

Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been talking about Revlon’s global and comprehensive cloud and how it has matured, and about the benefits, both intended and unintended, from aggressively embracing the cloud model.

I'd like to thank our guest. We've been here with David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO at Revlon. Thanks so much, David.

Giambruno: Have a nice day.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the 2012 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of podcast discussions. Thank again for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the VMworld 2012 Conference on how cosmetics giant Revlon has benefited from innovative cloud-based data delivery infrastructure. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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Roundtable: Revlon, SAP and VMware Describe Accretive Benefits from Aggressive Adoption of Cloud Computing

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on how cloud and virtualization deliver benefits in cost, efficiency, and agility.

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

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

Today we present a sponsored podcast discussion focused on two prime examples of organizations that have gleaned huge benefits from high degrees of virtualization and aggressive cloud computing adoption.

We're joined by executives from Revlon and SAP, who recently participated in a VMware-organized media roundtable event in San Francisco. The event, attended by industry analysts and journalists, demonstrated how mission-critical applications supported by advanced virtualization strategies are transforming businesses. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We're going to learn more about the full implications of IT virtualization, and how they're being realized -- from bringing speed to business requests, to enhancing security, to strategic disaster recovery (DR), and to unprecedented agility in creating and exploiting applications and data delivery value.

With that, please join me now in welcoming our guests, David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO of Revlon. Welcome back, David.

David Giambruno: Thanks a lot, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Heinz Roggenkemper, Executive Vice President of Development at SAP Labs. Welcome Heinz.

Heinz Roggenkemper: Welcome, Dana.

Gardner: Heinz, let me begin with you, if you don’t mind. Describe for our listeners your internal cloud approach that you've been using to make training and development applications readily available. What's going on with that internal cloud, and why is the speed and agility so important for you?

Roggenkemper: If you look at SAP, you find literally thousands of development systems. You find a lot of training systems. You find systems that support sales activities for pre-sales. You find systems that support our consulting organization in developing customer solutions.

From a developer's perspective, the first order of business is to get access to a system fast. Developers, by themselves, don’t care that much about cost. They want the system and they want it now. For development managers and management in general, it’s a different story.

For training, it's important that the systems are reliable and available. Of course again for management, it's the cost perspective. For people in custom development, they need the right system quickly to build up the correct environment for the particular project that they're working on.

Better supported

Also these requirements are much better supported in the virtualized environment than they were before. We can give them the system quickly. We can give them the systems reliably. We can give them the systems with good performance, and from a corporate perspective, do it at a much better cost than we did before.

Our business agility and ability to respond to market drivers is greatly improved by this.

Gardner: One of the things that was intriguing to me was the training instance, where people were coming in and needed a full stack of SAP applications, perhaps third-party applications that were mission critical. Tell me how the training application in particular, or the use of virtualization in that instance, demonstrates some of the more productive aspects of cloud?

Roggenkemper: The most interesting part about that is that you don’t need a vanilla system, but a system that is prepared for a particular class, which has the correct set of data. You need a system that can be reset to a controlled stage very quickly after the end of a training class, so that it’s ready for the next training class.

So there are two aspects to it. One is the reliable infrastructure on which the systems run, and second part is to get the correct system for that particular class ready in a short period of time.

Gardner: On the issues of control of the data, security, and even licensing, are there unintended consequences or unintended benefits that come when you approach the delivery of these applications through the full virtualization and this cloud model?

One is the reliable infrastructure on which the systems run, and second part is to get the correct system for that particular class ready in a short period of time

Roggenkemper: For unintended benefits, the thing that comes to my mind is that it allows us to take advantage of new computing infrastructure more quickly. We reduce the use of power, which is always a good thing.

For an unintended downside, the only thing that would come to my mind is that when in development, you are tuning for performance. That is a slightly different thing. In some areas, if you do general tuning, where you run a couple of iterations instead of just running to identify where your hotspots are, and if it’s a highly critical component, you might have to go to dedicated hardware to get to the last few percentages.

So in that area, you have to behave differently, but it affects only a small window of your total development time. Most of the time, you still take full advantage of a virtualized environment. Once you go into tuning, then you move the system to dedicated hardware and do your job there. If you average it out, you still have a substantial advantage.

Gardner: This idea of agility when producing these applications with their full data and production ready, even if you are in a training and development environment, where you're not necessarily facing their customers, proves this concept of IT as a service. Do you see it that way, and if so, is it something that you are going to be bringing to other applications within SAP?

Roggenkemper: Absolutely. And obviously, what we use internally benefits our customers as well. To have these systems available in a much shorter period of time for the customer’s development environment is as important for them as it is for us.

Future plans

Gardner: And a question about future plans. It sounds as if this works for you. Then the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) approach of delivering entire client environments with apps, data, and full configuration would be a natural progression. Is that something that you're looking at or perhaps you're already doing?

Roggenkemper: Some things we're already doing, We have a hefty set of terminal servers in our environment, as well, which people, especially if they are on the road or work from home, take full advantage of.

Gardner: David, let’s go to you. I was very interested to hear today your version of IT as a service, really a vision that you painted. I think essentially you're saying that advances in pervasive virtualization and cloud methods are transforming how IT operates, but it’s giving you the ability of, as you said, saying yes when your business leaders come calling. What have you have been able to say yes to that exemplifies this shift in IT?

Giambruno: I can’t equate that to numbers. We've increased our project throughput over the past couple of years by 300. So my job is to say, "yes." I'm just here to help. I'm a service. Services are supposed to deliver. What this cloud ecosystem has delivered for us is our ability to say yes and get more done faster, better, cheaper.

The correlating effect of that is we have seen not only this massive increase in our ability to deliver projects for the business, because that’s really what business alignment is. I do what they want and I give them some counsel along the way.

The second piece is that we've seen a 70 percent reduction in the time it takes us to deliver applications, because we have all of these applications available to us in the task and development site which is part of our DR.

So this ability to move massive amounts of information where everything is just the file, bring that up and let our development teams at it, has added this whole speed, accuracy, and ability to deliver back to the business.

Gardner: So we understood with SAP that they're a very big, global delivery of business applications for all sorts of companies. They have an internal cloud that they're using for some specific training and some specific development activities.

That’s really what business alignment is. I do what they want and I give them some counsel along the way.

But Revlon is also a global company. Tell us a little bit about the role that you have for our listeners who might not be familiar, the extent to which your applications are being used, and the type of mission-critical activities that you're involved in?

Giambruno: It’s probably easier to quantify it this way. We have 531 applications running on our internal cloud. Our internal cloud makes roughly 15,000 automated application moves a month. Our transaction rate is roughly 14,000 transactions a second. Our data change rate is between 17 and 30 terabytes a week. Over 90 percent of our corporate workload sits on our internal cloud, and it runs most of our footprint globally.

Gardner: We're talking about mission-critical apps here -- ERP, manufacturing, warehousing, business intelligence. Did you start with mission-critical apps or did you end up there? How did you progress?

Trust, but verify

Giambruno: I have a couple of "isms" that I live by. The first one is “Crawl, Walk, Run” and the second one is “Trust, but Verify.” When we started our journey roughly five years ago, we started with "Crawl" -- very much "Crawl" and “Trust – but Verify.” At Revlon, we didn’t spend any more to put this in. We changed how we spent our money.

We were going through a server refresh, and instead of buying all the servers, we only bought roughly 20 percent. With the balance of that money, we bought the VMware licenses. We started putting in our storage area network (SAN), and although core component pieces, and we took some of our low-hanging fruit file systems and started moving all that.

As we did that, we started sharing with the business. We showed them what we're doing and that it still worked. Then, we started the walk phase of putting applications on it. We actually ran north of six nines.

System availability went up. Performance went up. And after this "Crawl Walk Run," "Trust and Verify," it became "Just keep Going." We accelerated the whole process and we have these things that we call "fuzzies," things that we can do for the business that they weren't expecting. Every couple of months, we would start delivering new capabilities.

One of the big things that we did was that we internalized all our DR. We kept taking external money that we were spending and were able to give it back to the business and essentially invest in ourselves, because at Revlon I'm not going to be a profit center.

We kept taking external money that we were spending and were able to give it back to the business and essentially invest in ourselves.

For Revlon, the more money R&D has to develop new products to get to our consumers and for marketing to tell that product story and get it out to our channels and use the media to talk about our glamorous products, that really drives growth in Revlon.

What we've done is focused on those things, taking the complexity out, but delivering capability to the business while either avoiding or saving money that that the business can now use to grow.

Gardner: So you've been able to say yes when they come and ask you for new services and capabilities. You've been able to keep your costs at or below the previous levels. That’s pretty impressive. Do you credit that to virtualization, to cloud, to the entire modernization? How do you describe it?

Giambruno: To me it’s the interaction of the entire ecosystem. It is a system. Virtualization is a huge part of that. That’s where all it started. As you look through the transition, it's really been interesting. I'm going to segue back to the saying yes pieces and what it’s allowed us to be.

We have this thing called Oneness. I always talk about being the Southwest [Airlines] of computing, and I live inside of very simple triangle. The triangle has three sides, obviously. One side is our application inventory, the other side is our infrastructure capabilities, and the other side is my skill-sets.

Saying yes

If you're inside that space I can say yes, very quickly. What’s happened inside that space helped us contain cost . When we first started work, our ratio was one physical to seven virtual. A couple years later, we're at 1:35. It’s roughly a 500 percent increase in capacity without any commensurate cost. I give credit to my team for owning the technology and for wielding the technology for the benefit of the business and to get the most out of it.

The frame of reference to keep ourselves grounded is that we make lipstick, and it’s really how much money we can save and how well we can wield that technology to deliver value and do more with less. That’ll enable our company to grow.

We love simplicity and we have this Southwest computing model of taking a very complex ecosystem and making it simple to use. To a large degree it's kind of like an iPad, where the business wants to touch it, but they don’t care what’s going on underneath.

It's our job to deliver that, to deliver that experience and capability back to the business, without them having to think about it. I just want them to ask that we’re here to help and that we can figure a way to deliver it and keep exercising our technical capabilities to wield the technology to do more.

Gardner: I'm intrigued by this notion of the ecosystem being a whole greater than the sum of the parts. One of the things that you've been able to do, in addition to saying yes and keep your costs in line, is to improve your data and manage your data lifecycle, according to what I heard today.

It's our job to deliver that experience and capability back to the business, without them having to think about it.

Tell me about this notion you said of all the data becoming structured. What are some of the upsides on the data, when it comes to this ecosystem approach?

Giambruno: When you were talking to Heinz, you talked about unintended consequences. One of the things that we have is a big gestalt after our cloud was live. We literally had all of our data in one place.

One of the big challenges historically was that we had all these applications geographically dispersed. The ability to touch them, feel them, get access, access controls, all of these things were monumentally challenging. In Revlon, as we went to the Southwest or Oneness model, we organized globally our access controls and those little things.

So when we had all this data and all these applications now sitting at one place, with our ability to look at them and understand them, we started a fairly big effort for our master data model. We’re structuring our data on the way in So when we're trying to query the data, we already know where it is and what it does in its relationships, instead of trying to mine through unstructured data and make reasoning out of it. It’s been this big data structure.

I’d say we "chewed glass." We spent a couple of years chewing glass, structuring all this data, because the change rate is so big, but there's value in information to the business. I joke, if you've missed at this, we’re in the information age. So how well we can wield our information and give our leadership team information to act on is a differentiator. The ability to do this big data and this master data model has been really what we see as the golden egg going forward, the thing that can really make a difference with the business.

Gardner: While we’re on this notion of unintended consequences and unintended benefits, does anything along the lines of security or licensing also come to mind?

Self selection

Giambruno: From a licensing perspective, along the journey we called it self-selection. Licensing is important. Everybody has to make money. We live in capitalism. So from a procurement perspective, we always want to make sure we’re legal, but at the same time, vendors will self-select, depending on their licensing model in the virtualization world. That's our triangle. That's our infrastructure. Through that, we’ve had to manage relationships and we’ve done that.

From a security model, the structuring of all of our infrastructure, putting the in the Southwest model of computing, this Oneness, getting our data, our access controls, all of that plus with greatly simplified security, all of that is completely ubiquitous. There were even some of the crazy things that we did --we restructured the IP-ing of everything in Revlon to make all of our IP blocks contiguous. So when we move things around the world inside our cloud, we move entire blocks of IP addresses.

As you look forward, one of the interesting things that I find is that, as you look at streaming our applications, there is a huge security paradigm shift. Essentially no data will ever leave my data center and sit on a device.

In five years, that would be my goal. I think I can do it in 24 months, but really from a horizon, it’s like five years. At that point, I can literally encrypt my data center. Think about PCI and HIPAA and all the controls around that. Encryption is one of those big first checkmarks. If you can do that, you solve a lot of your compliance challenges.

Second, you have this trusted computing model, where I know the person from an access control. I know the device. I know what that person is supposed to have access to. I've encrypted my entire data center, so when that person comes in, I can let them have access only to what they’re supposed to have in the context that they're supposed to have, and decrypt it on the way out. They’re only viewing a device, and no data ever lives on a device.

They’re only viewing a device, and no data ever lives on a device.

So bring your own device. I wouldn’t care, because there's almost no security concerns at that point. I've encrypted. I know the user. Going one step further, as companies progress, you’re going to look at these internal marketplaces that everyone is going to build.

What the iPad has done is make it so I want to turn it on. I want to click on the app that gives me the information to do my job. I want my workflow, my exception management, the information I need to do for the day or do my planning, whatever I need to do. But they want that information in context.

Roll the tape forward a couple of years, and the capabilities that’s coming out on VMware, we fully expect to take care of that, to adopt that model, and that’s what we’re pushing for.

Gardner: It’s fascinating hearing you talking about large-scale virtualization and internal cloud. This has allowed you to have a much better grasp over your costs and deliver your apps and services readily, so that you can say yes to your business users.

In addition, you're getting master data management (MDM) benefits. You’re getting a better handle on licensing. You’re seeing great improvements in security now, and perhaps more to come, as you stream apps to a more virtualized client model.

Symbiotic relationship

You also mentioned something when it came to disaster recovery (DR) that piqued my interest. It sounds almost as if there is a symbiotic positive relationship between high levels of virtualization and DR. It almost sounds like DR has become the ability to move entire data centers as assets that are fungible, and that that gives you a lot more capability, in addition to being able to recover.

Is that true? Tell me how this DR plays into this larger set of values.

Giambruno: We’ve actually done this. No one was hurt, but last year, our factory in Venezuela burned. It was on a Sunday afternoon and they had what we call a drib. If you look at VMware architecture, they have data center in a box. I always joke that we’re years ahead of them in that. We use dribs, strategically placed throughout the world where we push capacity to for our cloud. They largely run dark.

So our drib "phoned home" that it was getting hot. We were notified that the building was on fire. It took us an hour and 45 minutes, and most of that time was finding one of my global storage guys who was at the beach. We found Ben, and got him to do his part, which was to tell the cloud to move from Venezuela to our disaster site in New Jersey.

So we joke that our model in DR is that we just copy everything. We don’t even think about tiering or anything. It’s this model, sometimes a Casio is just better than a Rolex. Simplicity rules, and not thinking about it ensures that we have all the data available. Again, it goes back to our cloud and virtualization. Everything is just a file. We just copy the deltas all the time. We never stop.

For us it was available in less than 15 minutes. We went in, we broke the synchronization, we made sure everything was up-to-date, and we told our F5s and our info blocks that Venezuela is now New Jersey. Everything swung, we got everything in, we contacted the business units to test everything and verify everything.

It's this whole idea of simplicity, where you're just not putting the complexity into the system.

Then we brought up all the virtual desktops and we used Riverbed mobile devices. We e-mailed their client to everyone. So people either worked from home or we had some very good partners that gave us some office space where people could use the computers. They loaded the Riverbed mobile devices on those computers. They brought the virtual desktops, people went to work, and the business didn’t go away.

Gardner: So you were able to say yes, even when a factory burned to the ground. That's pretty impressive.

Giambruno: This is a real-world example of how you can do it, and it wasn't a lot of effort. It's this whole idea of simplicity, where you're just not putting the complexity into the system. I always go back to this iPad view of the world, where the business just wants to know what's available and we will do the rest underneath.

This high degree of virtualization lets us move all of this data around the world, and it's for DR, development, and a myriad of capabilities that we keep finding new ways to use this capability.

Gardner: I suppose it elevates the concept of fit for purpose to that data-center level?

Redundancy and expense

Giambruno: Correct. And some of the other unintended consequences are interesting. You talk about redundancy and expense. Two is one and one is none in a data center. Do you really need to be fully redundant, because if something happens we'll just switch to the other data center?

I only need one core switch or whatever. You start to challenge all these old precepts of up-time, because it's almost cheaper for me or less-expensive. I can just roll the computer over here for a little while. I get that fixed, if I have a four-hour service-level agreement (SLA) with my vendors for repairs.

You can start to question a lot of the “old ways of doing things” or what was the standard in figuring out new ways to operate. One of the interesting things I love about my job is you can question yourself and figure out what you can do next.

Gardner: One last item that I suppose also fits into this unintended positive consequences issue. You've mentioned something about supply-chain value and getting to the point where you can take your external cloud, push it out to your suppliers and contractors, and begin sharing with permissions and control. This is a much better approach than the old way of virtual private networks (VPNs) and the headaches around access and so forth. So tell me about this extended business-process value that you're starting to explore?

Giambruno: One of the things we realized is that we could start extending our cloud. We spend a lot of time managing security and VPNs, and the audits that have to go around that.

At the end of the day, it's about collaboration with our community of vendors and suppliers, and enabling them to interact with us easily.

If I could just push out a piece of my application or make that available to them, they could update their data, reduce the number of APIs, the number of connections, all of that complexity that goes out there, and extend our MDM.

Then we can interface our MDM through our cloud to do some of this translation for us that they can enter data, or we can take it from their systems, from our cloud edge securely and in context and bring that back into our systems.

We think there are huge possibilities around automating and simplifying. But at the end of the day, it's about collaboration with our community of vendors and suppliers, and enabling them to interact with us easily.

So you're always trying to foster those relationships and get whatever synergies you can. If we make it easier on them to interact with us from a system’s perspective, it just makes everybody happier. We've got some projects slated for deployment this year. Maybe in a year, if you come back, I can tell you how well we’ve done or what we’ve done. But one of the things that we are looking is we can think really change how we operate as a company.

Gardner: That's fascinating. You talked about a lot of efficiency, reducing your footprint on the physical plant, on energy, keeping your cost in line, spinning up more applications and data. But now we are talking about not just efficiencies, but actually doing things entirely differently, things that could not have been done before because of cloud. That to me is really the essence of where we are going to be talking in the next few years.

So, David, thanks so much for your time. We have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with a VMware-organized media roundtable event in San Francisco.

We've been exploring two prime examples of organizations that have gained huge benefits from high degrees of virtualization and aggressive cloud computing adoption with mission-critical applications. The two organizations of course have been Revlon and SAP.

I’d like to thank our guests David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO of Revlon. Thanks so much, David.

Giambruno: My pleasure.

Gardner: We have also been here with Heinz Roggenkemper, Executive Vice President of Development at SAP Labs.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks to our audience for joining, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on how cloud and virtualization deliver benefits in cost, efficiency, and agility. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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From VMworld, Cosmetics Giant Revlon Harnesses the Power of Private Cloud to Produce Impressive Savings and Cost Avoidance

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the VMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here in the week of August 29 to explore the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

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

Today’s consensus is no longer around an "if" for cloud computing, but the "when" and what types of cloud models are best suited for any particular company. The present challenge then is about the proper transitions to leveraging cloud for improved IT and for far better business results. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here at VMworld, as part of the main keynote address, one company and its design and implementation of a private cloud rose above the rest. Revlon and its CIO were in the spotlight for such impressive returns on their cloud. In just two years, Revlon has benefited by nearly $70 million from savings due to cost avoidance and reductions.

Here to tell us about how such savings emerged and to describe one of the most efficient enterprise private cloud implementations in the world is David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO at Revlon. Welcome, David.

David Giambruno: Hello. How are you today?

Gardner: I'm great. We’ve heard so much about your private cloud, and I was really impressed, but something that jumped out of me is that you seem to have jumped into this all-in, rather than piecemeal. Is there a reason for doing private cloud completely, rather than piecemeal? What’s the benefit for doing it that way?

Giambruno: I reference us to Southwest Airlines. What I mean by that is their whole business models were around one plane, one plane to service, and getting very good at that.

From a technology standpoint, we look at ourselves as doing oneness. We pick one way and we get very good at. We own that technology, so we can command it. It’s really about the density of our skill sets and our capability around that order to execute for the business.

When you look at that, it drives a degree of simplicity of execution, because at the end of the day, what we're really focused on is delivering IT capability back to the business faster, cheaper, better. That’s essentially what our cloud was planned to do and has delivered.

Gardner: And this is no small undertaking. It's over 530 applications, 15,000 automated moves a month. Give us a sense of what you’ve done with this singular approach to full competency at this particular data center and your approach to private cloud?

Giambruno: It’s not a data center. It’s the globe. That’s important for everyone to understand. Revlon’s cloud covers all of Revlon’s presences globally. It’s not just a single data center. We have a core data center and then we have little data centers around the world that everything replicates between and things move between.

Entire ecosystem

We’ve built this entire ecosystem to deliver our applications. We started this about five years ago with this whole idea of oneness. We re-ITed the planet. We have one DNS and DHCP structure. We have one global directory. We have one SAN globally. We have one desktop image. We have one server image. That simplicity allowed us to use the cloud as a competitive advantage.

We've saved or avoided $70 million in last two years. If you go by a simple timeline, the first 18 months was laying that oneness foundation. We did that in 18 months. The second 18 months was the virtualization of the servers, the network, and the storage systems globally.

At the end of the 18 months, we were done. That was the first three years. We’ve been running this way for the last two years. We're not in the "I think" mode. We're looking now at how we continually extend the capability of our cloud.

Gardner: Our listeners might be familiar with Revlon, your brand, but tell us more about the scope of your operations and the extent to which IT is supporting your business.

Giambruno: Revlon is a global cosmetics, hair color, beauty tools, fragrance, skincare, anti-perspirant/deodorants, and beauty care company. The vision of Revlon is to deliver glamor, excitement, and innovation through high-quality products at affordable prices.

We didn’t spend any additional money, other than our normal capital refresh. The thing that we did was change the way we're spending our money

We are arguably one of the strongest consumer franchises in the world. Our brand is incredibly powerful. We've got offices around the world. Our global headquarters are in New York. Our flagship manufacturing facility is in Oxford, North Carolina, and our consumers are women around the world. Our products are sold in more than 100 countries.

So we are big, as far as our reach and our capability. Essentially, our cloud delivers roughly 95 percent of all Revlon IT services around the world. We've got a couple of systems that aren’t in there yet. They will be shortly, but for all intents and purposes, we operate everything off of our cloud.

Gardner: Let’s go back to how you got to this point and how you're able to enjoy such significant savings. You have a comprehensive virtualized approach of servers, network, applications, and services. Why is that important?

Giambruno: Again, it’s that density of skill sets. Through this whole implementation, we only used about 10 percent professional services. We didn’t spend any additional money, other than our normal capital refresh. The thing that we did was change the way we're spending our money.

We took that leap to do things differently, because at the end of the day -- I always say this just to keep my and my team’s frame of reference -- we make cosmetics and personal care products. We have lots of brands, but it’s the idea of simplicity.

Faster, better, cheaper

We're not a revenue-generating piece of Revlon. How we can add value back to the business is by doing things faster, better, cheaper? If we're not spending that money, we're avoiding spending money, or giving money back, that means it can go into new product development. It can go into R&D. It can go into marketing. All activities focused on driving profitable growth.

Getting technology to facilitate the business and do things faster and more effectively is really important. To me, it’s the most material thing we’ve done - if you look at your projects. We’ve increased the number of projects we complete every year by 300 percent. When you talk about the business alignment, getting what they want done faster, cheaper, better, to me, that’s it.

Gardner: And you're talking about spanning the cycle from full development to implementation. What’s the role that the cloud has played in terms of increasing the ease in which you move from development to operations?

Giambruno: I've got a couple of buckets. We have reliability. Currently, our cloud has been operating at north of six nines uptime, which has allowed me to take resources out of operations, put them into projects and working with the business.

That’s resulted in speed. If you want a server, if there is a demand for new application or testing something, our cycle time for getting a server up is anywhere from 15-20 minutes and there isn’t the associated cost. For us, a server is just a file. If you want one, great, here you go.

One of the greatest things that we monitor is our ratio of physical to logical servers. When we started this, our server ratio was 1:7. We are now 1:34.

And we manage capacity on the top line. So we essentially move that infrastructure barrier and cost. We’ve disconnected it. One of the greatest things that we monitor is our ratio of physical to logical servers. When we started this, when we first went live three-and-a-half or four years ago, our server ratio was 1:7. We are now 1:34. That’s essentially a 500 percent increase in capacity without the cost.

That makes a material difference in the business not having to pay for things. The speed at which we can nail up applications and the accuracy at which we can do it has made a material difference in our ability to deliver projects to the business.

Gardner: In addition to improving this cycle for development flexibility and resources, you've also devoted significant improvements to disaster recovery (DR). Tell me a little bit about why the private cloud has helped you in DR.

Giambruno: One of the things that we’ve learned very quickly was rate of change. When you're on a cloud, every time someone hits a keystroke on a keyboard, that’s a change in your cloud. Our rate of change is anywhere between 20-30 terabytes a week.

We made a conscious decision as we don’t tier anything in DR; we literally copy everything. There are two pieces of things. I'm most impressed with what my team has done.

Cheaper storage

One is if you take that rate of change and attach it to storage growth, you're roughly at $27 million a year. Through a series of technologies that we employ, we turn that $27 million into $400,000 of storage that we actually have to pay for. So, our shareholders get that benefit, because I don’t think anybody else’s shareholders would have that interest in place.

The second thing is that it does allow us to copy everything. Roughly a month ago, we lost our factory in Venezuela to a fire. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but from the time someone made a phone call, two hours and 40 minutes later -- and roughly two hours of the time of finding people, because it was a Sunday afternoon -- we moved the country of Venezuela up into our DR side, had everything running, and we're giving the users virtual desktops so they could keep working. That’s the power.

Gardner: Peace of mind and trust.

Giambruno: And it’s not fake. We’ve done it. Globally, we are minus-15 minutes replication in their stuff. That’s a little longer or little shorter depending where it is and time of the day, but it goes back to the simplicity. We just copy everything so we don’t have to worry about it.

Gardner: Without going too far down in the weeds, WAN acceleration devices have helped you in a large extent with that in terms of managing that amount and the speed.

Giambruno: Exactly. I don’t think you could run an internal cloud, or much less an external cloud, with the rate of change without those. I'm a huge fan of that.

Gardner: All right. Let’s see metrics wise what this gets for you in data reduction. What sort of volumes have you been able to improve?

We keep finding ways to squeak more out, because, again, the less money we can use, the better for the business.

Giambruno: We’ve run about 96 percent data reduction for everything from compression and de-duplication. As we’ve gone through this, we've also learned that with different storage protocols, block versus CIFS, you get better compression. Running at NFS you pick up 15 percent utilization over block.

Everybody has different business cases for why they need either, but we keep finding ways to squeak more out, because, again, the less money we can use, the better for the business. The more efficient and effective we are, the better for the business, and the less they have to spend on this.

Conversely, we keep leveraging those capabilities in extending our cloud. So we can sling a Windows 7 desktop to an iPad, or we're enabling our cloud so people can use resources wherever they are, regardless of the device. That just makes their lives easier and their ability to do business better, so we can support people growing the company.

Gardner: It’s really impressive to me, David that the more value that you derive from you architecture and approach, the more it contributes to other things. For example, what you’ve described is great for DR, but you’re also reducing your racks, restructuring your server licensing, and also getting to improve asset utilization. So it’s sort of a snowball, but in a virtuous way.

The asset is never cold

Giambruno: It’s interesting because in our DR site we run our test and dev. So the asset is never cold. We're actually using the virtual servers while they are not being used for DR to run all our tests and dev. It just contributes to the uptime. The data is already there.

We reuse assets all the time, and as we go forward, we have plans to go active-active. So now end-of-life servers that are coming out for maintenance, we just throw them in DR, because they can just stay there forever. It doesn’t matter to us if one dies a year. So what? It’s really that ability to keep using those assets to extend capabilities.

Gardner: How about the stack? Can you describe some of your products and what they’ve done for you? Are you venturing to some new areas around either management or governance to try to continue to tweak this to get more bang for the buck?

Giambruno: The bang for the buck for us is that we're working really hard on essentially creating an internal marketplace, like the Apple marketplace or the Android marketplace.

We’ve got desktop virtualization, but we see huge value to the business in creating this internal marketplace. We know a user. We know their devices. We know the applications they're supposed to be using. Depending on the device that they connect, we can format the application they are using and its view to that device to deliver them in context.

To some degree, it’s like going from a LAN to a trusted WAN, where we know the device that’s registered to you. We know you as a user so we can deliver very securely your information, and that information never leaves my data center. So you are only ever viewing the information they are working with.

When that device comes out, our cloud will understand context. We'll be able to deliver that application in the context of the person.

Gardner: If I heard you correctly, you're not only allowing the users to exploit more and better devices, perhaps more suited to what they do in terms of a work style or mobility, but you're also now creating an application marketplace. How does that benefit from your cloud infrastructure?

Giambruno: Our cloud can send them anything. The applications are already running on the cloud. Essentially, when that device comes out, our cloud will understand context. We'll be able to deliver that application in the context of the person. You've got a highly secure environment. We're not moving data anywhere. We’ve got control of the device. We understand who the person is, and so we can deliver in context what they are supposed to have access to, regardless of where they are.

If you have an iPad or anything like that, you have an icon on the front. You’ll have a Revlon marketplace. You open that up, and there will be a list of applications that you have access to that are already authorized for you to have access to, and we will start sending you those applications.

Gardner: It sounds like a real boon to productivity.

Giambruno: We have third-party manufacturers. We have third-party logistics. So we're starting to have the ability to leverage our cloud to deliver applications and have our suppliers and partners work with us much closely.

Management dashboard

The third tangent is the management dashboard -- our ability to deliver information to our management teams so they can make good business decisions faster, because this is essentially all about speed. It's the speed of getting information to our management team so they can make the decisions, understand what’s happening, and ask good questions of the organization in order to make a really good decisions. We're a CPG company and it’s a very competitive environment. To me, our cloud is really about using technology as a competitive advantage.

Gardner: We're about out of time. Any advice for folks listening to our podcast today who might not be fully into this full cloud press that you’ve been describing, but once you start realizing that advantage of a virtuous cycle adoption that gets more efficiency, that gets more improvement, and lower cost. So what’s your advice for folks getting started?

Giambruno: I tend to live by "isms" to make very clear pictures, because I had to move own organization through them. Two things: trust or verify, which maps into the second, which is just try. They are very symbiotic.

Trust and verify that you’re delivering the capabilities that the business needs and that you know they need.

As you look at this, just try, and as you go through that, trust and verify that you’re delivering the capabilities that the business needs and that you know they need. As you go along that path, you can build trust and confidence in yourself and your capabilities, your team can build trust and confidence, and you can show that to your business units.

That's like that snowball that you get rolling. Once everybody realizes that it can be done, it’s more of a human experience thing than it is the technology. The technology works, and we’ve been doing this for a couple of years. I couldn’t imagine operating any other way any longer until the next big geometry train comes, but that’s probably another 10 or 15 years.

Gardner: Great. I really enjoyed your presentation up on the stage. We’ve been talking about successful private cloud and virtualization adoption in a managed and secure way. Joining us right after his VMworld keynote address is David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO at Revlon. Thanks so much, David.

Giambruno: Thank you very much.

Gardner: We’ve been joined here for a special podcast coming to you from the 2011 VMworld Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of podcast 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: VMware.

Transcript of a podcast discussion from the VMworld 2011 Conference on how Revlon has leveraged the cloud to obtain $70 million in savings and cost avoidance in only two years. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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