Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how two companies are enhancing their
services and transforming their businesses using VMware cloud-computing
infrastructure and a unified approach to cloud-infrastructure
management.
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
2013 VMworld Conference
in San Francisco. We're here 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 the series of VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.
Our next innovator panel interview focuses on how two companies are using aggressive
cloud-computing strategies to deliver applications to their end users. We'll hear how healthcare patient-experience improvement provider
Press Ganey and
project and portfolio management provider
Planview are both exploiting cloud efficiencies and agility.
To understand how, please join me now in welcoming our guests,
Greg Ericson, Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Press Ganey Associates in South Bend, Indiana, and
Patrick Tickle, Executive Vice President of Products at Planview Inc. in Austin, Texas. [Disclosure:
VMware is a sponsor of
BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
We're hearing a lot about cloud computing here at VMworld, and you're
going at it a little differently, thinking about making the best use of
infrastructure and services on-premises, off-premises and hybrid. Let's
start with you, Greg. Tell us a bit about the type of cloud approach
you’re taking, and then we’ll want to learn a little bit more about your
businesses as well.
Greg Ericson: We started this
journey in July of 2012 and we set out to achieve multiple goals. Number
one, we wanted to position Press Ganey's software as
solution products of the next generation and have a platform that was able to support
them.
We went through a journey of consolidating multiple
data centers. We consolidated 14 different
storage arrays
in our process and, most importantly, we were able to position our
analytic solutions to be able to take on exponentially more data and
provide that to our clients.
Gardner: Tell us a little about your company, what you do, and how people benefit from these applications.
Patient experience
Ericson: Press Ganey is the
leader in a patient-experience analytics.
We focus on
providing deep insight into the patient experience in healthcare settings. We have more than 10,000 customers within the healthcare
environment that look to us and partner with us around
patient-experience improvement within the healthcare setting.
Gardner:
Patrick, how has cloud helped you at Planview? You were, at one time, a fully a
non-cloud organization. Tell us about your journey.
Patrick Tickle: I'll answer a
little bit
about the company, because it sets the context for what we're
doing. Planview has been an enterprise software vendor, a classic
best-of-breed focused enterprise software vendor, in this project and
portfolio and resource management space for over 20 years.
We have a big global customer base of on-premise
customers that built up over the last 23 years. Obviously, in the world
of software these days, there's a fairly seismic big shift about being
in
software as a service (SaaS) and how you get to the cloud, the business models, and all those kinds of things.
Conventional
wisdom is for a lot it was that you can't get there unless you start
from scratch. Obviously, because this is the only thing we do, it was
pretty imperative that we figure out a way to get there.
So
two or three years ago, we started trying to make the transition. There
were a lot of things we had to go through, not just from an
infrastructure standpoint, but from a business model and delivery
standpoint, etc.
The essence was here. We didn’t have
time to rewrite a code base in which we've invested 10-plus years and
hundreds of thousands of hours of customer experience to be a
market-leading product in our space. It could take five years to rewrite
it. Compared to where we were 10 years ago, when you and I first met,
there are a lot more tools in the bag for people to get to the cloud
that there were then.
So we really went after
VMware
and did the research sweep much more aggressively. We started out with
our own kind of infrastructure that we bolted together and moved to a
FlexPod in our second generation.
We have
vCloud Hybrid Services
now, and leveraging our existing code base, and then the whole suite of
VMware products and services, we have
transformed the company into a cloud provider. Today, 90 percent of all our new Planview customers are
SaaS customers.
It's been a big transition for us, but the technology from VMware has been right in the center of making it happen.
Business challenges
Gardner:
Greg, tell us a little bit about some of the business challenges that
are driving your IT requirements that, in turn, make the cloud model
attractive. Is this a growth issue? Is this a complexity issue? What are
your business imperatives that make your IT requirements?
Ericson:
That’s a great question. Press Ganey is a 25-year-old organization. We
pioneered the concept of patient experience and the analytics, and
insight into the patient experience, within the healthcare setting. We
have an organization that's steeped in history, and so there are
multiple things that we're looking at.
Number one, we have one of the largest
protected health information (PHI)
databases in the United States. So we felt that we had to have a very
secure and robust solution to provide to our clients, because they trust
us with their data.
Number two, with the healthcare
reform, the focus on patient experience is somewhat mandatory, whereas
before, it was somewhat voluntary. Now, it's regulated or it's part of
the healthcare reform. When you look at organizations, some were
actually coming to us and saying, "We want to get however many patient
surveys out that we need to satisfy our threshold."
Our scientists are also finding a correlation between the patient experience results and clinical and quality outcomes.
Our
philosophy is why would you want to do that? We believe that if you can
understand and leverage the different media to be able to fill that
out, you can survey your entire population of patients that are coming
into not only your institution but, in the accountable care
organization, the entire ecosystem that you’re serving. That gives you
tremendous insight into what's going on with those patients.
Our
scientists are also finding a correlation between the patient
experience results and clinical and quality outcomes. So, as we can tie
those data sets together in those episodic events, we're
finding very interesting kinds of new thought, leading thought, out there for our
clients to look at.
So for us, going from minimally
surveying your population to doing census survey, which is your entire
population, represents an exponential growth. The last thing is that,
for our future, in terms of going after some of those new analytics,
some of the new insight that we want to provide our clients, we want to
position the technology to be able to take us there.
We believe that the VMware
vCloud Suite
represents a completeness of vision. It represents a complete a single
pane of glass into managing the enterprise and, longer-term, as we
become more sophisticated in identifying our data and as the industry
matures, we think that a public cloud, a
hybrid cloud, is in the future
for us, and we're preparing for that.
Gardner:
And this must be a challenge for you, not only in terms of supporting
the applications, but also those data sets. You're getting some larger
data sets and they could be distributed. So the cloud model suits your
data needs over time as well?
Deeper insights
Ericson:
Absolutely. It gives us the opportunity to be able to apply technology
in the most cost-value proposition for the solutions that we’re serving
up for our customers.
Our current environment is around 600 server instances. We have about 300
terabytes (TB)
running in 20 SaaS applications, and we're growing exponentially each
month, as we continue to provide that deeper insight for our customers.
Gardner: Patrick, for your organization what are some of the business drivers that then translate into IT requirements?
Tickle:
As I talked about, obviously the macro trend of SaaS was just a
tectonic shift in software. So it was not just an issue of how Planview would
evolve as a company in that space, but certainly as someone who has
always viewed themselves as market leader, we want to make sure we're as
relevant as we possibly can be. More and more customers and prospects
were starting to either demand, or at least want to look at, SaaS as an
option in our space.
So it was really important, at the
end of the day, for us to be able to address the largest addressable
market for our solution. If we weren’t going to have a SaaS option, we
were going to take big piece of the market off the table.
We had to move from an IT culture to an OPs culture and all the things that go along with that, performance and up time.
That
was probably the biggest driver. From an IT perspective, it changed the
culture of the company, moving from being a on-premise perpetual kind
of "ship the software and have a customer care organization that focuses
on bug and break-fix" to a service-delivery model. There were a lot of
things that rippled through that whole thing.
At the
end of the day, we had to move from an IT culture to an operations culture and
all the things that go along with that, performance and up-time. Our
customer base is global. So it was being able to provide that around the
globe is. All those things were pretty significant shifts from an IT
perspective.
We went from a company that had a corporate IT group to a company that has a hosting and
DevOps and Ops team that has a little bit of spend in corporate IT.
Gardner:
Because your resource management and planning activities span many
vertical industries, a large geographic area of many users, how have you
made the transition to SaaS in terms of deployment? You have a single
data center. You do
colo. Do you have any plans for hybrid? How does it translate into the best, most efficient way to support all those users?
Tickle: Out of the gate, the first step at Planview was moving to colo.
SunGard
has been a great partner for us over the last couple of years as our
ping, power, and pipe. Then, in our first generation, as I may have said
before, we bolted together some of our storage and computer
infrastructure because it wasn’t quite all the way there. Then, in our
most recent incarnation of the infrastructure we’re using FlexPods at
SunGard in Austin, Texas and London.
OPEX spend
We're
always having to evaluate future footprints. But ultimately, like many
companies, we would like to convert that infrastructure investment from a
capital spend into an
OPEX spend. And that’s what’s compelling with
vCloud Hybrid Service.
What
we've been excited about
hearing from VMware is not just providing the
performance and the scalability, but the compatibility and the economic
model that says we’re building this for people who want to just move
virtual machines (VMs).
We understand how big the opportunity is, and that’s going to open up
more of a public cloud opportunity for us to evaluate for a wide variety
of use cases going forward.
Gardner: Greg,
back to your situation at Press Ganey with cloud. What are some of the pay offs? Are
these soft payoffs of productivity and automation or are there hard
numbers about
return on investment (ROI) or moving more to a operation cost versus capital cost? What do you get when you do cloud right?
Ericson:
We justify the investment based on consolidation of our data centers,
consolidation and retirement of our storage arrays, and so on. That’s
from a hard-savings perspective. From a soft-savings perspective,
clearly in an environment that was not
virtualized, virtualizing the environment represented a significant cost avoidance.
Our focus is on a complete solution that allows us to really focus in on
what's important for us, what's important for our clients.
Longer-term,
we're looking at how to position the organization with a robust,
virtual secured infrastructure that runs with a minimum amount of
technical resources, so that we can focus most of our efforts on
delivering innovative applications to our clients.
The
biggest opportunity for us is to focus there. As you look at the size
of the data set and the growth of those data sets, positioning
infrastructure to be able to stay with you is exciting for us and it’s a
value proposition for our clients.
Gardner:
It’s interesting that you're both saying that you don't want to be too
much in the weeds, that you want to focus on your businesses, on your
logic and data and find the means to transition IT to a more modern
infrastructure.
You've said, Greg, that you like the
fact that VMware is giving you options across the board. It's not your
bolt-on to someone else's, or you go find someone else to integrate what's more of a complete package. Tell me a little bit about this
whole
greater than the sum of the parts benefit, Greg.
Ericson:
That’s an excellent point, at least from my experience. In fact, most
recently, I spent tens of thousands of dollars troubleshooting
open-source products, and we've had some kernel issues that caused us a significant amount of pain.
So
for us, the level of resources and the technical cost of the resources
to be able to assemble the components does not represent a value-add to
our clients. Our focus is on a complete solution that allows us to
really focus in on what's important for us, what's important for our
clients.
Entire environment
With
a minimum amount of staff, we were able to move in nine months and
virtualize our entire environment. When you talk about 600 servers and
300 TB of data, that's a pretty sizable enterprise and we're fully
leveraging the
vCloud Suite.
Our network is
virtualized, our storage is virtualized, and our servers are
virtualized.
The release of vCloud Suite 5.5 and some of the
additional network functionality and storage functionality that’s coming out with
that is rather exciting. I think it's going to continue to add more
value to our proposition.
Gardner: Some people say that a single point of management, when you have that comprehensive suite approach, comes in pretty handy, too.
Ericson:
It does, because it gives you the capability of managing through a
single pane of glass across your environments. I was going to accentuate
that we’re about 50 percent complete in building on our catalog.
For
our next steps, number one is that we’re looking at building upon the excellence of Press Ganey and
building our
next-generation enterprise data warehouse. We’re looking at
leveraging from a DevOps perspective the VMware vCloud Suite, and we already
have some pilots that are up and running. We'll continue to build that
out.
Not only are we maximizing our assets in delivering a secure environment
for our clients, but we're also really working toward what I call
engineering to zero.
As we deploy, not only are
we maximizing our assets in delivering a secure environment for our
clients, but we're also really working toward what I call engineering to
zero. We’re completely automating and virtualizing those deployments
and we're able to move those deployments, as we go from dev to test, and
test to user acceptance testing, and then into a production
environment.
Tickle: As we all know, there are lot of
hypervisors
out there. We can all get that technology from a wide variety of
sources. But to your question about the value with the stack, that’s
what's we look at and again. What's important now is not just the
product stack, but the services stack.
We look at a company like VMware and say, "
Site Recovery Manager in conjunction with vCloud Hybrid Services brings a
disaster recovery (DR) solution to me as SaaS vendor and that fits with my architecture and brings that service stack plus."
There's
no comparing another hypervisor vendor to build out that stack of
service. Again, we could probably talk about probably numerous, but
that’s when I listen to the things that go on at the event and get to
spend time with the people at VMware. That whole value stack that VMware
is investing in is what looks so much more compelling than just picking
pieces of technology.
Gardner: So we've heard
how a data strategy aligns well with the stack. We've heard how software
development is moving to more iterations and rapid Agile deployment
aligns with the stack. We've heard about how moving toward hybrid cloud
models also would align with the stack.
It sounds as
if there's a common theme here. Looking to the future, Greg, based on
what you've heard here at VMworld about the general availability of
vCloud Hybrid Services and the upgrade to the suite of private cloud
support, what has you most excited? Was there something that surprised
you? What is in the future road map for you?
A step further
Ericson: A couple of different things. The next release of
NSX
is exciting for us. It allows us to be able to take the virtualization
of our network a step further. Also to be able to connect hypervisors
into a hybrid-cloud situation is something that, as we evolve our
maturity in terms of managing our data, is going to be exciting for us.
One
of the areas that we're still teasing out and want to explore is how to
tie in that accelerator for a big-data application into that. Probably,
in 2014, what we're looking at is how to take this environment and
really move from a DR kind of environment to a high-availability
environment. I believe that we’re architected for that and because of
the virtualization we can do that with a minimum amount of investment.
Gardner: Patrick, you talked about how you like the notion of what I call fungibility of being able to move workloads.
We can't afford to have half of the company’s OPEX go into IT, while
we’re trying to make customers as successful as they possibly can.
Tickle: We
talked about fungibility a long time ago. That word has been in our vocabulary for many, many years.
Gardner:
So you transformed your business, moving from client-server
to SaaS. What's interesting to you and your future when you can take
these work loads, choose where they're going to be, and get that built
in DR and business continuity benefit?
How big a deal is it when we can, with just a click of a mouse, move workloads to any support environment we want?
Tickle:
It's a huge deal. Whether it’s a production environment or DR
environment, at the end of the day it's a big deal for both of us. For a
SaaS company the only matter is renewals. It’s happy customers that
renew. That transition from perpetual-plus maintenance to a renewal
model, where you're on the customer service watch at another level, and
it's every minute of every day.
Everything that we can
do to make the customer experience, not just from our UI and our
software, but obviously the delivery of the service, as compelling as
possible, allows us to run our business. That can be a disaster scenario
or just great performance across our geography where we have customers
and then to do that in a cost effective way that operates inside our
business model, our profit and loss.
So our
shareholders are equally pleased with their turn off. We can't afford to
have half of the company’s OPEX go into IT, while we’re trying to make
customers as successful as they possibly can. We continue to be
encouraged that we’re on a great path with the stack that we're seeing
to get there.
Gardner: I think it's fair to say
that cloud is not just repaving old cow paths, that cloud is really
transforming your entire business. Do you agree, Greg?
Rejuvenate legacy
Ericson: I agree. It allows us, especially an organization that’s 25 years steeped in history, to be able to rejuvenate our
legacy applications
and be able to deliver those with maximum speed, maximizing our
resources, and delivering them in a secure environment. But it also
allows us to be able to grow, to flex, and to be able to rejuvenate and
organically transform the organization. It's pretty exciting for us and
it adds a lot of value to our clients indirectly.
Gardner:
Well, great, I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been
talking about how healthcare patient-experience improvement firm Press
Ganey and portfolio and project management provider Planview are
enhancing their services and even transforming their businesses
vis-à-vis cloud-computing infrastructure and a unified approach to
cloud-infrastructure management.
So a big thanks to our
guests, Greg Ericsson, Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation
Officer at Press Ganey Associates. Thanks, Greg.
Ericson: Thank you.
Gardner: And also Patrick Tickle, Executive Vice President of Products at Planview. Thanks, Patrick.
Tickle: Absolutely. It's great to be here.
Gardner:
And thanks also to our audience for joining this special podcast coming
to you directly from the recent 2013 VMworld Conference in San Francisco. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host
throughout this series of VMware sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.
Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.
Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how two companies are enhancing their
services and transforming their businesses using VMware cloud-computing
infrastructure and a unified approach to cloud-infrastructure
management. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights
reserved.
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