T-Mobile Swaps Manual Cloud Provisioning for Services Portal, Gains Lifecycle Approach to Cloud Across Multiple Platforms and Data Centers

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major telecom company has improved its IT performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for its businesses and end users alike.

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

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

Gardner

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

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how wireless services provider T-Mobile US, Inc. improved how it delivers cloud- and data-access services to its enterprise customers. We'll see how T-Mobile walked back use of manual cloud provisioning services and delivered a centralized service portal to manage and deploy infrastructure better and also improve their service offerings across multiple platforms and across multiple data centers.

To learn more about how T-Mobile enabled a lifecycle approach to delivering advanced cloud services, please join me in welcoming our guest, Daniel Spurling, Director of IT Infrastructure at T-Mobile US, Inc. Welcome.

Daniel Spurling: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Tell me about the trends that are driving your business now. We know T-Mobile as a mobile provider, but is this speed, is this competition? What are some of the big top-of-mind issues for you and your market?

Spurling: To answer that question, I'm going to frame up a little history and go into where T-Mobile has come from in the last few years and what has driven some of that business shift in our space.

As many know, in 2011 AT&T attempted to acquire T-Mobile. When that dissolved, there was a heavy recognition that we needed to drive greater innovation on our business side. We had received a generous donation, we’ll call it, of $4 billion dollars and a lot a spectrum. We drove a lot of innovation on our network side, on the RF side, but the IT side also had to evolve.

We, as an IT group, were looking at where we needed to start evolving within the infrastructure space, we recognized that manual processes are a very rudimentary way of delivering servers or compute storage, etc. This was not going to meet the agility needs that our business was exhibiting. So we started on this path of driving a significant cultural shift, and mindset shift as well as the actual technological shift in the infrastructure space, with cloud as one of the core anchor points within that.

Gardner: When you decided that cloud was the right model to gain this agility, what were some of the problems that you faced in terms of getting there?

Not a surprise

Spurling: When you talk about cloud, you have to define what cloud is. We recognize that cloud is almost like a progression of where we've been going within IT. It is not like it is a surprise.

Spurling

We've been trying to figure out how to enable more self-service. We've been trying to figure out how to drive greater automation. We've been trying to figure out how to utilize those ubiquitous network access points, the ubiquitous services, external or internal of the company, but in a more standardized and consolidated fashion.

It wasn't so much that we were surprised and said, "Oh, we need to go cloud." It was more on the lines of we recognized that we needed to double down our efforts in those key tenets within cloud. For T-Mobile, those key tenets really were how we drive greater standardization consolidation to enable greater automation and then to provide self-service capabilities to our customers.

Gardner: Were there particular types or sets of applications that you identified as being the first and foremost to go into this new model?

Spurling: That's a great question. A lot of people look at the applications, as either an application play or an infrastructure play, because of the ecosystem that existed when the cloud ecosystem was kind of birthing, a year-and-a-half ago, two years ago. We started more on the infrastructure side. So we looked at it and said, "How do we enable the application growth that you are talking about? How do we enable that from an infrastructure perspective?"

We recognized that we needed to double down our efforts in those key tenets within cloud.

And we saw that we needed to focus more on the infrastructure side and enable our partners within our IT teams -- our development partners, our application support partners, etc. -- to be able to transform the application stacks to be more cloud-capable and cloud-aware.

We started giving them the self-service capability on the infrastructure side, started on that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) type capability, and then expanded into the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capability across our database, application, and presentation layers.

Gardner: The good news with cloud is that you do away with manual processes and you have self-service and automation. The bad news is that you have self-service and automation, and they can get very complex and unwieldy, and like with virtual machines (VMs), sometimes there is a sprawl issue. How did you go about this in such a way that you didn’t suffer in terms of these new automation capabilities?

Spurling: I'm going to break it into two parts. Look at the complexity of an IT organization today, especially for a company of T-Mobile's size. T-mobile has 46,000 employees, around 43 million customers. It's not a small entity. The complexity that we have in the IT space mirrors that large complexity that we have in the business space.

Tough choices

We recognized on the infrastructure side, as well as in the application, test and support sides, that we cannot automate everything. We had to really drive heavy consolidation and standardization. We had to make some tough choices about the stuff that we were -- for lack of a better term -- going to pare off our infrastructure tree: different operating systems, different hardware platforms, and data centers that we were going to shut down.

We had to drive that heavy rationalization across all of the towers within our IT space, in order to enable the automation you talked about, without creating a significant amount of complexity.

On the sprawl question though, we made a conscious decision that we were going to allow or permit some level of sprawl, because of the business agility that was gained.

When you look at server sprawl, there are concerns around licensing, computer utilization, and stranding resources or assets. There are a lot of concerns around sprawl, but when you look at how much business benefit we got from enabling that agility or that speed to deliver and speed to market, the minimal amount of sprawl that was incurred was worth it from a business perspective.

You have to continue to deliver for your customers, but you need to prioritize what you are doing in that maintenance space.

We still try to manage it. We still make sure that we're utilizing our compute storage data centers, etc., as efficiently as possible, but we've almost back-burnered the sprawl issue in favor of enabling business.

Gardner: So with multiple platforms -- Windows, Linux, AIX, Unix -- and multiple data centers across large geographies, how can you do that without a larger staff? Do you find the centralization possible or is it really pie in the sky?

Spurling: It’s a bit of both. When you look at how much work there is to enable an automation solution, you almost have to be -- and my team hates it when I use the term -- ambidextrous. On one hand, you have to continue to deliver for your customers, but you need to prioritize what you are doing in that maintenance space and shave off a bit to invest in the innovation space.

You're going to have to make some capital investments, and maybe some resource investments as well, to drive that innovation the next step forward. But you almost have to do it within the space that you are coexisting in that maintains and innovates at the same time, because you can't drop one in favor of the other.

We did have to make some tradeoffs on the maintenance side, in order to take some qualified and some bright resources that we are excited about in our burgeoning cloud future, and then invest those resources to continue driving us forward in the technological and also cultural space. We made a significant cultural change too.

Gardner: That was going to be my next question. When it comes to making these transitions in technology, platform, and approach, I often hear companies say they have a lagging cultural shift as well. What did that involve in terms of your internal IT department making that shift more of a service bureau supporting your business like a business within a business?

Buggy whips

Spurling: A lot of times when you talk about evolution in either business context or kind of an academic context, you hear the story about the buggy whip. The buggy whip, back in the day, was something that everybody knew. About 125 years ago, everybody probably knew someone who made buggy whips or who sold buggy whips. Today, no one knows anybody who makes or sells buggy whips.

The buggy whip industry went away, but a brand-new industry emerged in the automobile space. In the same context. the old IT way of manually building servers, provisioning storage, and loading applications may be going away, but there is a brand-new environment that's been created in a higher value space.

As to the cultural shift you talked about, we had to make significant investments in our leadership to be able to help set a vision, show our employees where that vision intersected with their personal careers and how they continue to move on.

Then, you lead and help them to do that kind of emotional change. I'm not a server builder anymore. I'm now a consultant with the business on delivering a value, I'm now an automation engineer, or I'm now delivering future value and looking at new products that we can drive further automation into. That cultural change is ongoing, and it’s certainly not done.

Gardner: And given that this transition and transformation is fairly broad in terms of its impact, you don’t just buy this out of a box with your professional services. How did the combination of people, process, technology and outside your knowledge come together?

With those tools, with HP professional services, and with our own internal team members, we created a tactical team that went out there and "attacked cloud."

Spurling: When we started down the path, we had a lot of people in our teams who were really excited about making IT better. T-Mobile is full of people who are dedicated and excited about making T-Mobile the best wireless company out there. They're starting to change the conversation to make T-Mobile the best company that is enabling people to get access to the Internet, to their friends, to data, etc.

So the people were excited to jump on, but we still had a knowledge gap. We knew that, from a leadership perspective, we weren’t going to get the time to market that we wanted, by training our resources, helping them learn and make mistakes. We had to rely on professional services. So we partnered with HP very heavily to drive greater, instant-on services in our cloud solution.

On the technology side, we have everybody under the sun from a tooling perspective, but we do have a significant investment in HP software. We made a decision to move forward with the HP Cloud Suite. Pieces like HP Operations Orchestration (HPOO) or Cloud Service Automation (CSA), and building out those platforms to be the overarching cloud solution that, for lack of a better term, created that federation of loosely coupled systems that enabled cloud delivery.

With those tools, with HP professional services, and with our own internal team members, we created a tactical team that went out there and "attacked cloud," delivered that, and continues to deliver that now.

Paybacks

Gardner: Before we close out, and it might be too early in your journey to measure this, but are there any paybacks? Can you look at results, either business, technological, or financial from going to a cloud model, provisioning with that automation, advancing the technology, making those cultural hurdles? What do you get for it?

Spurling: I could talk for hours on this one question. When you break out all of the advances that we've made internally and all the business benefits that have been realized, you can break them into so many different categories, in green-dollar and blue-dollar saves, in resource saves, etc. I’ll highlight a few.

When we look at the cloud opportunity and the agility that has been gained, the ability to deliver things in an almost immediate fashion, one of the byproducts that we may not exactly have intended was that our internal customers have demanded in the past a lot of complexity or a lot of significant specific systems.

When we said, you can get that significant system, whatever it is, in a couple of weeks or you can get this cloud solution that delivers 95 percent of what you ask in a couple of hours, almost always those things that we thought were hard requirements melted away. The customer said, "You know what, I'm okay with this 95-percent deal because it gets me to my business objective faster."

Because of the investments we made in standardization and automation, our cloud portfolio, we were able to build out that capacity in record time.

Though we as IT thought you had to have that complexity, we're realizing now that that complexity may not have been required all along, because we are able to deliver so quickly. The byproduct of that is that we're seeing massive amounts of standardization that we could never have thought would organically be possible.

From an agility perspective, there's time to market. We had a significant launch with the iPhone, a big event in T-Mobile’s history, probably one of the largest launches that we've had. That required a significant amount of investment in our back-end systems because of the load that was put in our activations and payment inside our systems.

Because of the investments we made in standardization and automation, our cloud portfolio, we were able to build out that capacity in record time, in days versus what would have taken in weeks or months two years previously. We were able to support our business with very little lead time, and the results were very impressive for us as a business. So those two areas, that standardization and consolidation and that rapid ability to deliver on business objectives, are the two key ones that we take away.

Gardner: Daniel, let’s close out on the future. When you look to unforeseen events in your business, it could be mergers, acquisitions, changes in the market, new products, new applications, do you feel that the investments you’ve made in cloud also puts you in a position to be able to move rapidly? What future direction do you have in mind for your cloud trajectory?

Spurling: As I said in the beginning, we're just starting with cloud. That’s not fair to say. We are just continuing with cloud. We've done it in the past. We've used mainframes to distribute it.

Just one step

We’ve done application hosting with the Internet craze into software as a service (SaaS), that we now are seeing PaaS external to our internal organizations. We're seeing software to find everything starting to have a role. And there is a really interesting play that says, there is no end. Cloud is just one step in continuing to evolve IT to be more of a business partner.

That's really how we are looking at it. We're making great strides in that space. You talked about new applications or business mergers, etc. In every single area, we're setting ourselves up to be closer to the business, to move that self-service capability. I'm not just talking about a webpage. I am talking about being able to consume an IT service as a business leader in a simple way. We're moving that closer-and-closer to the business and we are being less and less of a gatekeeper for technology, which is super-exciting for us to see in the organization.

For us specifically, we're recognizing that the investments we made in our PaaS plays as well as test automation as well as some of the dev platforms. We're seeing those start to have payoffs in the fact that we're developing cloudware applications that are now scalable in a way that we've never seen before, without massive human invention.

So we're able to tell our business, "Go ahead and have a great marketing idea, and let’s move it forward. Let’s try that thing out. If it doesn't work, it’s not going to hurt IT. It's not going to take 18 months to deliver that." We're seeing IT able to respond about as fast as the business wants to go.

In every single area, we're setting ourselves up to be closer to the business, to move that self-service capability.

We are not there yet today. It’s a continuing journey, but that’s our trajectory in the next 6 to 12 months, and then who knows what’s going to happen, and we are excited to see.

Gardner: Well, great, I'm afraid we have to leave it there. We've been learning about how wireless services provider T-Mobile US, Inc. improved how it delivers cloud and data and applications to its enterprise customers, and we've seen how T-Mobile walked back the use of manual cloud provisioning and in order to move to a more advanced and automated approach and that has delivered some very impressive results.

So join me in thanking our guest, Daniel Spurling, Director of IT Infrastructure at T-Mobile US. Thanks so much.

Spurling: Thanks, Dana. It’s my pleasure.

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

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

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major telecom company has improved their IT performance to deliver better experiences and payoffs for their businesses and end users alike. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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

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

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solution trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

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

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

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

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

Michael Cooper: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Significant company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Near-perfect availability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Streamlined process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planning and strategy

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

Gardner: Monday morning quarterback for you, Michael?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chennaian: Thank you. Very excited to be here.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of User Experience Discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how awarding-winning communications company T-Mobile improved application quality, while setting up two data centers. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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T-Mobile Ramps Up Quality-Based Business Rewards from Applications Testing Improvements

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas during the week of June 15, 2009.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you on location from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas. We’re here in the week of June 15, 2009 to explore the major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations that are making news across the global HP ecology of customers, partners and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this special series of HP Sponsored Software Universe live discussions.

This customer interview is with another HP Software and Solutions Excellence Award winner, T-Mobile USA. Please join me in welcoming Michael Cooper, director of enterprise quality management at T-Mobile. Welcome back, Michael.

Michael Cooper: Good afternoon, Dana.

Gardner: When you're serving over 33 million mobile customers, you have a lot of apps that are or would be things that those customers need. They become pretty mission critical. You also have a lot of internal apps. Your enterprise resource maintenance applications also, of course, are classified as mission critical.

In order to get apps, customized apps, and new apps out the door in good shape, so that you don’t have downtime, the testing and quality assurance process is pretty important. Tell us a little bit about how you wanted to improve that process and what were the problems that you needed to address?

Cooper: You’re absolutely right. The problem that we needed to address was that testing was expensive. It took a lot of time, and, because we were doing it manually, the tests were not always consistent and repeatable. What we wanted to get to was an automated framework and we decided to focus on the business process that was important to our customers.

Gardner: We often hear that people, process, and product are what all come together to make these things repeatable, more efficient, and effective. Of course, being more efficient these days is top of mind. Tell me little bit more about the test methodologies. When you looked for solutions, what were your requirements or criteria?

Cooper: We were looking for something that was easy to use and that was an industry standard. We were looking for something that would give us good traceability. And, we were looking for something that would allow us to automate and be reusable. So we chose the Business Process Testing (BPT) framework.

Gardner: Tell me more about how that works?

Automating business processes

Cooper: We thought about what our real business processes are -- for example, ordering a phone, activating a phone, sending out bills. We organized components that describe these business processes. We extended those by automating them and used them for our regression testing primarily.

Gardner: So, in order to accomplish that, what actual products did you put in place?

Cooper: The actual products we have put in place were BPT, both for manual and automated testing, quality center and it’s all the modules of quality center. We extended that to leverage those scripts for monitoring with Business Availability Center (BAC). In some cases where we had service-orientated architecture (SOA), we actually used Service Tester, and for our performance testing we used Performance Center and LoadRunner.

Gardner: What were some of the results? Did you have any metrics of success that stick out in your mind as worthy of mentioning?

Cooper: The success metrics were really around time savings.

I would focus on defect prevention rather than defect detection. I would automate your test for reusability and consistency. And, I would like to say that HP has been a great partner in this journey.

We saved about 50 percent of each regression cycle each month. We cut the testing time in half. The second thing, and this is probably the most important one, we reduced the post-production defects by 75 percent. The benefit of that is that it reduced our cost of fixing those plus our operations cost.

Gardner: And that also translates into a lot of more satisfied customers, less churn, and that’s the name of the game, right?

Cooper: Exactly.

Gardner: What advice would you offer to others who are also looking to move from manual and siloed, or at least inconsistent approaches, to app testing and who are looking for a more holistic complete, repeatable methodologically consistent approach?

Cooper: I would focus on defect prevention rather than defect detection. I would automate your test for reusability and consistency. And, I would like to say that HP has been a great partner in this journey.

Gardner: You mentioned SOA. One of the tenets of that is repeatability and reuse. Did you find that using scripts across this more consistent environment saved you money, because those scripts could be used again and again and perhaps across multiple application-development activities?

Cooper: You’re absolutely right. Not only did we use them with each release, it allowed us to use it for monitoring as well.

Gardner: Great. We've been talking about moving to more efficient development test, and therefore, better post-production quality applications. We've been discussing that with the winner at the Awards of Excellence competition here, the HP Software and Solutions Awards, and the winner is T-Mobile, USA. Thanks very much. We've been joined by Michael Cooper, director of enterprise quality management. Thanks, Michael.

Cooper: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Thanks for joining us for this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you on location from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of HP-sponsored Software Universe Live Discussions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas during the week of June 15, 2009. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.