Cloud Services Brokerages Add Needed Elements of Trust and Oversight to Complex Cloud Deals

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a cloud services brokerage can help small and medium-size businesses make best use of cloud computing.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Duncan, LLC.

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

Gardner

Our discussion today focuses on an essential aspect of helping businesses make the best use of cloud computing.

We're examining the role and value of cloud services brokers with an emphasis on small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), regional businesses, and government, and looking for attaining the best results from a specialist cloud service brokerage role within these different types of organizations.

Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org

No two businesses have identical needs, and so specialized requirements need to be factored into the use of often commodity-type cloud services. An intermediary brokerage can help companies and government agencies make the best use of commodity and targeted IaaS clouds, and not fall prey to replacing an on-premises integration problem with a cloud complexity problem.

To learn more about the role and value of the specialist cloud services brokerage, we're now joined by our panel, Todd Lyle, President of Duncan, LLC, a cloud services brokerage in Ohio. Welcome, Todd.

Todd D. Lyle: Well hello, Dana. It's a pleasure to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with Kevin Jackson, the Founder and CEO of GovCloud Network in Northern Virginia. Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin L. Jackson: Thank you very much. Looking forward to the discussion.

Gardner: Let’s start with you, Todd. Tell me little bit about why there's a difference between the good part of cloud, which is a commodity set of services, a utility approach to computing -- and the gulf between that and a company's culture of traditional IT acquisition? How do we get regular companies to effectively start using these new cloud services?

Lyle: Through education. That’s our first step. The technology is clearly here, the three of us will agree. It's been here for quite some time now. The beauty of it is that we're able to extract bits and pieces for bundles, much like you get from your cell phone or your cable TV folks. You can pull those together through a cloud services brokerage.

Lyle

So brokerage firms will go out and deal with the cloud services providers like Amazon, Rackspace, Dell, and those types of organizations. They bring the strengths of each of those organizations together and bundle them. Then, the consumer gets that on a monthly basis. It's non-CAPEX, meaning there is no capital expenditure.

You're renting these services. So you can expand and contract as necessary. To liken this to a utility environment, utility organizations that do electric and do power, you flip the switch on or turn the faucet on and off. It’s a metered service.

That's where you're going to get the largest return on your collective investment when you switch from a traditional IT environment on-premises, or even a private cloud, to the public cloud and the utility that this brings.

Government agencies

Gardner: Kevin you're involved more with government agencies. They've been using IT for an awfully long time. How is the adjustment to cloud models for them? Is it easier, is it better, or is it just a different type of approach, and therefore requires only adjustment?

Jackson: Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, I've been focused on providing advanced IT to the federal market and Fortune 500 businesses for quite a while. The advent of cloud computing and cloud services brokerages is a double-edged sword. At once, it provides a much greater agility with respect to the ability to leverage information technology.

Jackson

But, at the same time, it brings a much greater amount of responsibility, because cloud service providers have a broad range of capabilities. That broad range has to be matched against the range of requirements within an enterprise, and that drives a change in the management style of IT professionals.

You're going more from your implementation skills to a management of IT skills. This is a great transition across IT, and is something that cloud services brokerages can really aid. [See Jackson's recent blog on brokerages.]

Gardner: Todd, it sounds as if we're moving this from an implementation and a technology skill set into more of a procurement, governance, contracts, and creating the right service-level agreements (SLAs). These are, I think, new skills for many businesses. How is that coaching aspect of a cloud service’s brokerage coming out in the market? Is that something you are seeing a lot of demand for?

Lyle: It’s customer service, plain and simple. We hear about it all the time, but we also pass it off all the time. You have to be accessible. If you're a 69-year-old business owner and embracing a technology from that demographic, it’s going to be different than if you are 23 years old, different in the approach that you take with that person.

As we all get more tenured, we'll see more adaptability to new technologies in a workplace, but that’s a while out. That's the 35-and-younger crowd. If you go to 35-and-above, it's what Kevin mentioned -- changing the culture, changing the way things are procured within those cultures, and also centralizing command. That’s where the brokerage or the exchange comes into place for this. [See Lyle's video on cloud brokerages.]

Change management is a key aspect of being able to have an organization take on change as a normal aspect of their business.

Gardner: One of the things that’s interesting to me is that a lot of companies are now looking at this as not just as a way of switching from one type of IT, say a server under a desk, to another type of IT, a server in a cloud.

It’s forcing companies to reevaluate how they do business and think of themselves as a new process-management function, regardless of where the services reside. This also requires more than just how to write a contract. It's really how to do business transformation.

Does that play into the cloud services brokerage? Do you find yourselves coaching companies on business management?

Jackson: Absolutely. One of the things cloud services is bringing to the forefront is the rapidity of change. We're going from an environment where organizations expect a homogenous IT platform to where hybrid IT is really the norm. Change management is a key aspect of being able to have an organization take on change as a normal aspect of their business.

This is also driving business models. The more effective business models today are taking advantage of the parallel and global nature of cloud computing. This requires experience, and cloud services brokerages have the experience of dealing with different providers, different technologies, and different business models. This is where they provide a tremendous amount of value.

Different types of services

Gardner: Todd, this notion of being a change agent also raises the notion that we're not just talking about one type of cloud service. We're talking about software as a service (SaaS), bringing communications applications like e-mail and calendar into a web or mobile environment. We're talking about platform as a service (PaaS), if you're doing development and DevOps. We're talking about even some analytics nowadays, as people try to think about how to use big data and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud.

Tell me a bit more about why being a change agent across these different models -- and not just a cloud implementer or integrator -- raises the value of this cloud service brokerage role?

Lyle: It’s a holistic approach. I've been talking to my team lately about being the Dale Carnegie of the cloud, hence the specialist cloud services brokerage, because it really does come down to personalities.

In a book that I've recently written called Grounding the Cloud, Basics and Brokerages, I talk about the human element. That's the personalities, expectations, and abilities of your workforce, not only your present workforce but your future workforce, which we discussed just a moment ago, as far as demographics were concerned.

It's constant change. Kevin said it, using a different term, but that's the world we live in. Some schools are doing this, where they're adding this to their MBA programs. It is a common set of skills that you must have, and it's managing personalities more than you're managing technology, in my opinion.

It's about the human element, our personalities, and how to make these changes so that the companies actually can speed up.

Gardner: Tell me a bit more about this book, Todd, it’s called Grounding the Cloud. When is it available and how can people learn more about it?

Lyle: It’s available now on Amazon, and they can find out more at www.groundingthecloud.org. This is a layman’s introduction to cloud computing, and so it helps business men and women get a better understanding of the cloud -- and how they could best maximize their time and their money, as it associates to their IT needs.

Gardner: Does the book get into this concept of the specialist cloud services brokerage (SCSB), as opposed to just a general brokerage, and getting at what's the difference?

Lyle: That’s an excellent question, Dana. There are a lot of perceptions, you have one as well, of what a cloud services brokerage is. But, at the end of the day -- and we've been talking about this in the entire discussion -- it's about the human element, our personalities, and how to make these changes so that the companies actually can speed up.

We discuss it here in the "flyover country," in Ohio. We meet in the book with Cleveland State University. We meet with Allen Black Enterprises, and then even with a small landscaping company to demonstrate how the cloud is being applied from six and seven users, all the way up to 25,000 users. And we're doing it here in the Midwest, where things tend to take a couple of years to change.

User advocate

Gardner: How is a cloud services brokerage different from a systems integrator? It seems there's some commonality. But you are not just a channel, or reseller, you are really as much an advocate for the user.

Lyle: A specialist cloud services brokerage is going to be more like Underwriters Laboratories (UL). It’s going to go out, fielding all the different cloud flavors that are available, pick what they feel is best, and bring it together in a bundle. Then, the SCSB works with the entity to adapt to the culture and the change that's going to have to occur and the education within their particular businesses, as opposed to a very high-level vertical, where some things are just pushed out at an enterprise level.

Jackson: I see this cloud services brokerage and specialist cloud services brokerage as the new-age system integrator, because there are additional capabilities that are offered.

For example, you need a trusted third-party to monitor and report on adherence to SLAs. The provider is not going to do that. That’s a role for your cloud services brokerage. Also you need to maintain viable options for alternative cloud-service providers. The cloud services brokerage will identify your options and give you choices, should you need the change. A specialist cloud services brokerage also helps to ensure portability of your business process and data from one cloud service provider to another.

Management of change is more than a single aspect within the organization. It’s how to adapt with constant change and make sure that your enterprise has options and doesn't get locked into a single vendor.

Lyle: It comes to the point, Kevin, of building for constant change. You're exactly right.

Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org

Gardner: You raise an interesting point too, Kevin, that one shouldn’t get lulled into thinking that they can just make a move to the cloud, and it will all be done. This is going to be a constant set of moves, a journey, and you're going to want to avail yourself of the cloud services marketplace that’s emerging.

We're seeing prices driven down. We're seeing competition among commodity-level cloud services. I expect we'll see other kinds of market forces at work. You want to be agile and be able to take advantage of that in your total cost of computing.

Jackson: There's a broad range of providers in the marketplace, and that range expands daily. Similarly, there's a large range of requirements within any enterprise of any size. Brokers act as matchmakers, avoiding common mistakes, and also help the organizations, the SMBs in particular, implement best practices in their adoption of this new model.

Gardner: Also, when you have a brokerage as your advocate, they're keeping their eye on the cloud marketplace, so that you can keep your eye on your business and your vertical, too. Therefore, you're going to have somebody to tip you off when things change and they will be on the vanguard for deals. Is that something that comes up in your book, Todd, of the public service brokerage being an educated expert in a field where the business really wants to stick to its knitting?

Primary goal

Lyle: Absolutely. That’s the primary goal, both at a strategic level, when you're deciding what products to use -- the Rackspaces, the Microsofts, the RightSignatures, etc. -- all the way down to the tactical one of the daily operation. When I leave the company, how soon can we lock Todd out? How soon can we lock him down or lock him out? It becomes a security issue at a very granular level. Because it's metered, you turn it off, you turn Todd off, you save his data, and put it someplace else.

That’s a role that, requires command and control and oversight, and that's a responsibility. You're part butler. You're looking out for the day-to-day, the minute issues. Then you get up to a very high level. You're like UL. You're keeping an eye on everything that’s occurring. UL comes to mind because they do things that are tactile and those things that you can't touch, and definitely the cloud is something you can’t touch.

Jackson: Actually, I believe it represents the embracing of a cooperative model of my consumers of this information technology, but embracing with open eyes. This is particularly of interest within the federal marketplace, because federal procurement executives have to stop their adversarial attitude toward industry. Cloud services brokerages and specialist cloud services brokerages sit at the same the table with these consumers.

This is particularly of interest within the federal marketplace, because federal procurement executives have to stop their adversarial attitude towards industry.

Lyle: Kevin, your point is very well taken. I'll go one step further. We were talking up and down the scales, strategic down to the daily operations. One of the challenges that we have to overcome is the signatories, the senior executives, that make these decisions. They're in a different age group and they're used to doing things a certain way.

That being said, getting legislation to be changed at the federal level, directives being pushed down, will make the difference, because they do know how to take orders. I know I'm speaking frankly, but what's going to have to occur for us to see some significant change within the next five years is being told how the procurement process is going to happen.

You're taking the feather; I'm taking the stick, but it’s going to take both of those to accomplish that task at the federal level.

Gardner: We know that Duncan, LLC is a specialized cloud services brokerage. Kevin, tell us a little bit about the GovCloud Network. What is your organization, and how do you align with cloud brokerages?

Jackson: GovCloud Network is a specialty consultancy that helps organizations modify or change their mission and business processes in order to take advantage of this new style of system integrator.

Earlier, I said that the key to transition in a cloud is adopting and adapting to the parallel nature and a global nature of cloud computing. This requires a second look at your existing business processes and your existing mission processes to do things in different ways. That's what GovCloud Network allows. It helps you redesign your business and mission processes for this constant change and this new model.

Notion of governance

Gardner: I'd like to go back to this notion of governance. It seems to me, Todd, that when you have different parts of your company procuring cloud services, sometimes this is referred to as shadow IT. They're not doing it in concert, through a gatekeeper like a cloud broker. Not only is there a potential redundancy of efforts in labor and work in process, but there is this governance and security risk, because one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing.

Let's address this issue about better security from better governance by having a common brokerage gatekeeper, rather than having different aspects of your company out buying and using cloud services independently.

Lyle: We're your trusted adviser. We’re also very much a trusted member of your team when you bring us into the fold. We provide oversight. We're big brother, if you want to look at it that way, but big brother is important when you are dealing with your business and your business resources. You don’t want to leave a window open at night. You certainly don't want to leave your network open.

There's a lot going on in today's world, a lot of transition, the NSA and everything we worry about. It's important to have somebody providing command and control. We don’t sit there and stare at a monitor all day. We use systems that watch this, but we can tell when there's an increase or decrease out of the norm of activities within your organization.

We're big brother, if you want to look at it that way, but big brother is important when you are dealing with your business and your business resources.

It really doesn't matter how big or how small, there are systems that allow us to monitor this and give a heads up. If you're part of a leadership team, you’d be notified that again Todd Lyle has left an open window. But if you don't know that Todd even has the window, then that’s even a bigger concern. That comes down to the leadership again -- how you want to manage your entity.

We all want to feel free to make decisions, but there are too many benefits available to us, transparent benefits, as Kevin put it, to using the cloud and hiding in plain sight, maximizing e-mail at 100,000 plus users. Those are all good things but they require oversight.

It's almost like an aviation model, where you have your ground control and your flight crew. Everybody on that team is providing oversight to the other. Ultimately, you have your control tower that's watching that, and the control tower, both in the air and on the ground, is your cloud services brokerage.

Jackson: It’s important to understand that cloud computing is the industrialization of information technology. You're going from an age where the IT infrastructure is a hand-designed and built work of art to where your IT infrastructure is a highly automated assembly-line platform that requires real-time monitoring and metering. Your specialist cloud services brokerage actually helps you in that transition and operations within this highly automated environment.

Lyle: Well said, Kevin.

Gardner: We've talked about this a little bit in the abstract, and it's made a tremendous amount of sense to me. A powerful way to cement understanding is to show examples and understand what others have gone through.

Todd, you mentioned that you have some examples in your new book. I’d like to hear in more detail about when someone has used a specialized cloud brokerage attuned to their business, their industry, or their vertical. What do they get for it and how has it worked out for them? Can you run us through a use case of where this works well?

Three narratives

Lyle: Okay, in my book, we have three narratives, as I mentioned earlier. I talk about Cleveland State University (CSU) and education because this is what this whole program is about, education. It's not offensive -- it's not business, it's not government, it’s education.

With technology, there are so many options out there today as we’re discussing. It's so exciting, but we have to get "Iris" to change her way of thinking.

A couple of things occurred at CSU, cementing my theory on demographics and change in speaking computing as a first language. CSU switched to Microsoft 365 from onsite Lotus Notes, and for anybody who's been on Lotus Notes, it's always been a challenge to use. To get to 365, some education had to occur, and some heads-up had to occur.

People need to be involved in the process at some point, and others excluded for business reasons, and I don't mean that a bad way. I mentioned Iris, because Iris was a lady who works on the third floor of Rhodes Tower at Cleveland State and was very unhappy about losing her desktop printer.

What we do as a specialist cloud services brokerage is making sure that people are included in the process, being educated, giving access to communication and then being available when the time comes.

They went from 2,100 printers down to 300 with the help of not only Bill Wilson and the IT team, but Xerox. Xerox was able to bring tremendous savings at the granular level, but it took a great deal of education and patience, because Iris wasn't happy about losing her printer. She wanted to know why Bill Wilson wasn’t going to lose his.

It really discusses it at a very personal level, because we can all relate to printers and ancillary equipment and our way of doing business. It discusses again, on the great Lake Erie, how change has occurred and how they were able to address it from a human element perspective, again, Iris.

What we do as a specialist cloud services brokerage is making sure that people are included in the process, being educated, giving access to communication and then being available when the time comes. Make sure you answer that phone for the person who needs someone on the phone and make sure that you have the Wiki available and up to date for the person who is going to reach out to that Wiki.

Gardner: Kevin, any examples from your vantage point on the role of the cloud services brokerage and some concrete ways that it’s helped a specific organization?

Jackson: Absolutely. About three years ago I responded to a requirement from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), where they were having issues working with allies with respect to exchange of geospatial information and data. Everyone had their maps and everyone had their own system for distributing and sharing that, but they didn't work together. The NGA wanted to have a more effective and efficient means for exchanging geospatial information.

So they reached out to the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) to see if this industry organization had any good ideas for addressing this mission-critical requirement. I was serving as the head of the cloud-computing working group, and the team came up with an idea of using cloud as an inner-space in order to translate different types and formats of geospatial information and data amongst the participants.

Brokered platform

We did this by use of a brokered cloud platform that came to be known as the Geospatial Community Cloud. The cloud services brokerage acted as an intermediary to allow for a real-time change or identification of capabilities for geospatial interoperability. It's a very successful demonstration.

The Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board also leveraged a cloud services brokerage paradigm when they were required to stand up very quickly to manage their hundreds of billions of dollars during the financial crisis. The CIO there, Shawn Kingsberry, knew that he wouldn't be able to respond to the requirements of monitoring, metering, and managing these large sums of money without an IT infrastructure.

Instead of taking the traditional acquisition process within the Federal Government, which would take years, he instead became a cloud services brokerage for his own agency and adopted multiple cloud services. This also was a very successful implementation. So even the Federal Government can adopt cloud services brokerage and respond in a very quick and efficient and effective manner.

Gardner: Todd, we spoke earlier about how we're moving from implementation to procurement. We've also talked about governance being important, SLAs, and managing a contract across variety of different organizations that are providing cloud type services. It seems to me that we're talking about financial types of relations.

So even the Federal Government can adopt cloud services brokerage and respond in a very quick and efficient and effective manner.

How does the cloud services brokerage help the financial people in a company. Maybe it's an individual who wears many hats, but you could think of them as akin to a chief financial officer, even though that might not be their title?

What is it that we are doing with the cloud services brokerage that is of a special interest and value to the financial people? Is it unified billing or is it one throat to choke? How does that work?

Lyle: Both, and then some. Ultimately it's unified billing and unified management from daily operations. It's helping people understand that we're moving from a capitalized expense, the server, the software, things that are tactile that we are used to touching. We're used to being able to count them and we like to see our stuff.

So it's transitioning and letting go, especially for the people who watch the money. We have a fiduciary responsibility to the organizations that we work for. Part of that is communicating, educating, and helping the CFO-type person understand the transition not only from the CAPEX to the OPEX, because they get that, but also how you're going to correlate it to productivity.

It's letting them know to be patient. It's going to take a couple months for your metering to level up. We have some statistics and we can read into that. It's holding their hand, helping them out. That's a very big deal as far as that's concerned.

Gardner: Let's start to think about how to get started. Obviously, every company is different. They're going to be at a different place in terms of maturity, in their own IT, never mind the transition to cloud types of activities. Would you recommend the book as a starting point? Do you have some other materials or references? How do you help that education process get going. I'm thinking about organizations that are really at the very beginning?

Gateway cloud

Lyle: We've created a gateway cloud in our book, not to confuse the cloud story. Ultimately, we have to take in consideration our economy, the world economy today. We're still very slow to move forward.

There are some activities occurring that are forcing us to make change. Our contracts may be running out. Software like XP is no longer supported. So we may be forced into making a change. That's when it's time to engage a cloud services brokerage or a specialist cloud services brokerage.

Go out and buy the book. It's available on Amazon. It gives you a breakdown, and you can do an assessment of your organization as it currently is and it will help you map your network. Then, it will help you reach out to a cloud services brokerage, if you are so inclined, through points of interest for request for proposal or request for information.

The fun part is, it gives you a recipe using Rackspace, Jungle Disk, and gotomeeting.com, where you get to build a baby cloud. Then, you can go out and play with it.

This is written for the layperson. I've been told it’s entertaining, which is the most important part, because you’re going to read it then.

You want to begin with three points: file sharing, remote access, and email. You can be the lighthouse or you can be a dry-cleaners, but every organization needs file sharing, remote access, and email. We open-sourced this recipe or what we call the industrial bundle for small businesses.

It's not daunting. We’ve got some time yet, but I would encourage you to get a handle on where your infrastructure is today, digest that information, go out and play with the gateway cloud that we've created, and reach out to us if you are so inclined.

We’d love for you to use one of our organizations, but ultimately know that there are people out there to help you. This book was written for us, not for the technical person. It is not in geek speak. This is written for the layperson. I've been told it’s entertaining, which is the most important part, because you’re going to read it then.

Jackson: I would urge SMBs to take the plunge. Cloud can be scary to some, but there is very little risk and there is much to gain for any SMB. The using, leveraging, taking advantage of the cloud gateway that Todd mentioned is a very good, low risk, and high reward path towards the cloud.

Gardner: I would agree with both of what you all said. The notion of a proof of concept and dipping your toe in. You don't have to buy it all at once, but find an area of your company where you’re going to be forced to make a change anyway and then to your point, Kevin, do it now. Take the plunge earlier rather than later.

Jackson: Before you're forced.

Large changes

Gardner: Before you’re forced, but you want to look at a tactical benefit and where to work toward strategic benefit, but there is going to be some really large changes happening in what these cloud providers can do in a fairly short amount of time.

We're moving from discrete apps into the entire desktop, so a full PC experience as a service. That’s going to be very attractive to people. They're going to need to make some changes to get there. But rather than thinking about services discreetly, more and more of what they're looking for is going to be coming as the entire IT services experience, and more analytics capabilities mixed into that. So I am glad to hear you both explaining how to do it, managed at a proof-of-concept level. But I would say do it sooner rather than later.

I'm afraid we have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on helping businesses make the best use of cloud computing. We've seen how the role and value of a cloud services brokerage brokerage -- with an emphasis across the different types of businesses, whether it's small to medium, regional, government -- makes a tremendous amount of sense.

This is going to help companies and government agencies make the best use of the commodity and targeted-cloud services, but not fall prey to replacing on-premises integration problems with cloud complexity and management problems.

So a huge thank you to our guests, Todd Lyle, President of Duncan, LLC, a cloud services brokerage in Ohio. Thank you, Todd.

Lyle: You're welcome. Thanks for having me, Dana.

Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org

Gardner: And thanks also to Kevin Jackson, the Founder and CEO of GovCloud Network in Northern Virginia. Thanks, Kevin.

Jackson: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.

Gardner: And also a huge thank you to our audience for joining. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for being with us, and don't forget to come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Duncan, LLC.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a cloud services brokerage can help small and medium-size businesses make best use of cloud computing. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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HP Service Virtualization Eases Developer and Operations Lifecycle Support for Shunra Software

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the benefits to software development from greater use of service and network virtualization.

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

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

Gardner

Once again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance, deliver better user experiences, and boost business results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the recent HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.

We’re here to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data, mobile, and cloud -- along with converged infrastructure -- are supporting their goals in new and interesting ways.

Our next innovation case study highlights how Shunra Software uses service virtualization to help its developer users to improve the distribution, creation, and lifecycle of software applications. To learn how, we're joined by Todd DeCapua, Vice President of Channel Operations and Services at Shunra Software, based in Philadelphia. Welcome, Todd.

Todd DeCapua: Thank you, Dana. It's great to be here with you.

Gardner: Let's think a little bit about this market. There are a lot of trends affecting software developers. They have mobile on their minds. They have time constraints issues. They have to be faster, better, and cheaper along the apps lifecycle way. What among the trends is most important for developers?

DeCapua

DeCapua: One of the biggest ones -- especially around innovation and thinking about results, specifically business results -- is Agile. Agile development is something that, fortunately, we've had an opportunity to work with quite a bit. Our capabilities are all structured around not only what you talked about with cloud and mobile, but we look at things like the speed, the quality, and ultimately the value to the customers.

We’re really focusing on these business results, which sometimes get lost, but I try to always go back to them. We need to focus on what's important to the business, what's important to the customer, and then maybe what's important to IT. How does all that circle around to value?

Gardner: With mobile we have many more networks, and people are grasping at how to attain quality before actually getting into production. How does service virtualization come to bear on that?

Distributed devices

DeCapua: As you look at almost every organization today, something is distributed. Their customers might be on mobile devices out in the real world, and so are distributed. They might be working remotely from home. They might have a distribution center or a truck that has a mobile device on it.

There are all these different pieces. You’re right. Network is a significant part that unfortunately many organizations have failed to notice and failed to consider, as they do any type of testing.

Network virtualization gives you that capability. Where service virtualization comes into play is looking at things like speed and quality. What if the services are not available? Service virtualization allows you to then make them available to your developers.

In the early stage, where Shunra has been able to really play a huge difference in these organizations is by bringing network virtualization in with service virtualization. We’re able to recreate their production environments with 100 percent scale -- all prior to production.

Getting back to the idea of innovation, some people are seeing these as innovations of a test environment. When we think about the value to the business, now you’re able to deliver the product working. So, it is about the speed to market, quality of product, and ultimately value to your customer and to your business.

Gardner: And another constituency that we should keep in mind are those all-important operators. They’re also dealing with a lot of moving parts these days -- transformation, modernization, and picking and choosing different ways to host their data centers. How do they fit into this and how does service virtualization cut across that continuum to improve the lives of operators?

Service virtualization and network virtualization can benefit them is by being able to recreate these scenarios.

DeCapua: You’re right, because as the delivery has sped up through things like Agile, it's your operations team that is sitting there and ultimately has to be the owners of these applications. Service virtualization and network virtualization can benefit them by being able to recreate these in-production scenarios.

Unfortunately, there are still some reactive actions required in production today, so you’re going to have a production incident. But, you can now understand the network in production, capture those conditions, and recreate that in the test environment. You can also do the same for the services.

We now have the ability to quickly and easily recreate a production incident in a prior-to-production environment. The operations team can be part of the team that's fixing it, because again, the ultimate question from CIOs is, “How can you make sure this never happens again?”

We now have the way to quickly and confidently recreate incidents and fix it the first time, not having to change code in production, on the fly. That is one of the scariest moments in any of the times when I've been at the customer site or when I was an employee and had to watch that happen.

Agile iterations

Gardner: As you mentioned earlier, with Agile, we’re seeing many more iterations on applications as they need to be rapidly improved or changed. How does service and network virtualization aid in being able to produce many more iterations of an application, but still maintain that high quality?

DeCapua: One of our customers actually told us that -- prior to leveraging network virtualization with service virtualization -- he was doing 80 percent of his testing in-production, simply because he knew the shortcomings, and he needed to test it, but he had no way of re-creating it. Now, let's think about Agile. Let's think about how we shift and get the proven enterprise tools in the developer’s hands sooner, more often, so that we can drive quality early in the process.

That's where these two components play a critical role. As you look at it more specifically and go just a hair deeper, how in integrated environments can you provide continuous development and continuous deployment? And with all that automated testing that you’re already doing, how you can incorporate performance into that? Or, as I call it, how do you “build performance in” from the beginning?

As a business person, a developer, a business analyst, or a Scrum Master, how is it that you’re building performance into your user scenarios today? How is it that you’re setting them up for understanding how that feature or function is going to perform? Let's think about it as we’re creating, not once we get two or three sprints into use and we have our hardening sprint, where we’re going to run our performance scenario. Let's do it early, and let's do it often.

Get the proven enterprise tools in the developer’s hands sooner, more often, so that we can drive quality early in the process.

Gardner: If we’re really lucky, we can control the world and the environment that we live in, but more often than not these days, we’re dealing with third-party application programming interfaces (APIs). We’re dealing with outside web services. We have organizational boundaries that are being crossed, but things are happening across that boundary that we can't control.

So, is there a benefit here, too, when we’re dealing with composite applications, where elements of that mixed service character are not available for your insight, but that you need to be able to anticipate and then react quickly should a change occur?

DeCapua: I can't agree with you more. It’s funny, I am kind of laughing here, Dana, because this morning I was riding the metro in Barcelona and before I got to the stop here, I looked down to my phone, because I was expecting a critical email to come in. Lo and behold, my phone pops up a message and says, “We’re sorry, service is unavailable.”

I could clearly see that I had one out of five bars on the Orange network, and I was on the EDGE network. So, it was about a 2.5G connection. I should still have been able to get data, but my phone simply popped up and said, “Sorry, cannot retrieve email because of a poor data connection.”

I started thinking about it some more, and as I was engaging with other folks today at the show, I asked them why is it that the developer of the application found it necessary to alert me three times in a row that it couldn’t get my email because of a poor data connection? Why didn’t it just not wait 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds until it did, and then have it reach out and query it again and pull the data down?

Changing conditions

This is just one very simple example that I had this morning. And you’re right, there are constantly changing conditions in the world. Bandwidth, latency, packet loss and jitter are those conditions that we’re all exposed to every day. If you’re in a BMW driving down the road at 100 miles per hour, that car is now a mobile phone or a mobile device on wheels, constantly in communication. Or if you’re riding the metro or the tube and you have your mobile device on your hands, there are constantly changing conditions.

Network virtualization and service virtualization give you the ability to recreate those scenarios so that you can build that type of resiliency into your applications and, ultimately, the customers have the experience that you want them to have.

Gardner: Todd, tell us a bit about Shunra and your application-performance engineering solutions?

DeCapua: So, application performance engineering (APE) is something that was created within the industry over a number of years. It's meant to be a methodology and an approach. Shunra plays a role in that.

A lot of people had thought about it as testing. Then people thought about it as performance testing. At the next level, many of us in the industry have defined it is application engineering. It’s a lot more than just that, because you need to dive behind the application and understand the in’s and the out’s. How does everything tie together?

Understanding APE will help you to reduce those types of production incidents.

You’d mentioned some of the composite applications and the complexities there -- and I’m including the endpoints or the devices or mobile devices connecting through it. Now, you introduce cloud into the equation, and it gets 10 times worse.

Thinking about APE, it's more of an art and a skill. There is a science behind it. However, having that APE background knowledge and experience gives you the ability to go into these composite apps, go into these cloud deployments, and leverage the right tools and the right process to be able to quickly understand and optimize the solutions.

Gardner: It's fairly obvious to me, but I do get this question from time to time. Why aren’t the older scripting and test-bed approaches to quality control good enough? Why can't we keep doing what we've been doing?

DeCapua: This question is very often asked of me, too. In the United States recently, October 1 of 2013, there was a large healthcare system being rolled out across the country. Unfortunately, they used the old testing methodologies and have had some significant challenges. HP and Shunra were both engaged on October 2 to assist.

Understanding APE will help you to reduce those types of production incidents. All due to inaccurate results in the test environment, using the current methodologies, about 50 percent of our customers come to us in a crisis mode. They say, “We just had this issue, I know that you told us this is going to happen, but we really need your help now.”

They’re also thinking about how to shift and how to build performance in all these components -- just have it built in, have it be automatic, and get the results that are accurate.

Coming together

Gardner: Of course HP has service virtualization, you have network virtualization. How are they coming together? Explain the relationship and how Shunra and HP together go to market?

DeCapua: To many people's surprise, this relationship is more than a decade old. Shunra’s network-virtualization capability has, for a long time, been built in to HP LoadRunner, also is now being built into HP Performance Center.

There are other capabilities that we have that are built into their Unified Functional Testing (UFT) products. In addition, within service virtualization, we’re now building that product into there. It’s one that, when you think about anything that has some sort of distribution or network involved, network virtualization needs to come into play.

Some people have a hard time initially understanding the service virtualization need, but a very simple example I often use is an organization like a bank. They’ll have a credit check as you’re applying for a loan. That credit check is not going to be a service that the bank creates. They’re going to outsource it to one of the many credit-check services. There is a network involved there.

In your test environment, you need to recreate that and take that into consideration as a part of your end-to-end testing, whether it's functional, performance, or load. It doesn’t matter.

In your test environment, you need to recreate that and take that into consideration as a part of your end-to-end testing, whether it's functional, performance, or load.

As we think about Shunra, network virtualization and the very tight partnership that we've had with HP for service virtualization, as well as their ability to virtualize the users, it's been an OEM relationship. Our R and D teams sit together as they’re doing the development so that this is a seamless product for the HP customer to be able to get the benefit and value for their business and for their customers.

Gardner: Let's talk a little bit about what you get when you do this right. It seems to me the obvious point is getting to the problem sooner, before you’re in production, extending across network variables, across other composite application-type variables. But, I’m going to guess that there are some other benefits that we haven't yet hit on.

So, when you've set up you're testing, when you have virtualization as your tool, what happens in terms of paybacks? Not just the obvious ones, but it seems to me that this becomes a strategic benefit, influencing your business in terms of your overall performance, not just your application's performance.

DeCapua: There are many benefits there, which we have already covered. There are dozens more that we could get into. One that I would highlight, being able to pull all the different pieces that we've been talking about, are shorter release times.

TechValidate did a survey in February of 2013. The findings were very compelling in that they found a global bank was able to speed up their deployment or application delivery by 30 to 40 percent. What does that mean for that organization as compared to their competitor? If you can get to market 30 to 40 percent faster, it means millions or billions of dollars over time. Talk about numbers of customers or brands, it's a significant play there.

Rapid deployment

There are other things like rapid deployment. As we think about Agile and mobile, it's all about how fast we get this feature function out, leveraging service virtualization in a greater way, and reducing associated costs.

In the example that I shared, the customer was able to virtualize the users, virtualize the network, and virtualize the services. Prior to that, he would never have been able to justify the cost of rebuilding a production environment for test. Through user virtualization, network virtualization, and service virtualization, he was able to get to 100 percent at a fraction of the cost.

Time and time again we mention automation. This is a key piece of how you can test early, test often, ultimately driving these accurate results and getting to the automated optimization recommendations.

Gardner: How about getting started for organizations that have been doing traditional testing? Perhaps they’ve been using some HP products but they’ve been resisting going the full service virtualization monty, if you will. Any suggestions about skills, organization, how do you get started?

Let's start with that small scale, doing it right, and delivering that speed, quality, and value.

DeCapua: The most fun piece for me is that you actually need to do something. I can't tell you how many times I get started, and people say, “Yeah, this is a great idea. Yeah, it's wonderful.” They walk out of one of the session at HP Discover and they say, “Yes, I love it. Yeah, I've got my next three things that I need to do.”

It’s more than a tool. It’s really about the people. How is it that you can get this vision? Maybe it starts with one simple business case. Let's go through what that business case is to help me to understand what's the value to your organization. Can we calculate out some return on investment (ROI)? Can we get to what is the break-even point of this investment?

I hate to start talking about business and I hate to start talking about metrics. But as we look at the history of innovation, or what it means with the new style of IT, being able to improve IT performance, delivering the better user experience, and ultimately, who is paying the bill -- it's the business. So, if we can't deliver better business results, this is all for naught.

To get started, there are a number of different pieces that I recommend. But rather than create this huge strategy and everything else, what I would recommend doing is -- I hate to use the term “minimum viable product,” but really that's what I hear when I am in the smaller startup organizations.

It's, “What is that minimum viable product? How can we deliver the most value with the least investment in the shorter period of time, show that incremental value, and then start expanding it more?” It could be expanding it to other teams. It could be expanding it into the other business units, and then it could be going to the entire enterprise. But, let's start with that small scale, doing it right, and delivering that speed, quality, and value.

Gardner: Before we wrap it up, I’d like to just look a bit into the future. Things have been moving so rapidly. What comes next in terms of software productivity? Where should organizations be thinking in terms of vision?

Slow down

DeCapua: I see Agile, mobile, and cloud. There are some significant risks out in the marketplace today. As organizations look to leverage these capabilities to benefit their business and the customers, maybe they need to just slow down for a moment and not create this huge strategy, but go after “How can I increase my revenue stream by 20 percent in the next 90 days?” Another one that I've had great success with is, “What is that highest visibility, highest risk project that you have in your organization today?”

As I look at The Wall Street Journal, and I read the headlines everyday, it's scary. But, what's coming in the future? We can all look into our crystal balls and say that this is what it is. Why not focus on one or two small things of what we have now, and think about how we’re mitigating our risk of  looking at larger organizations that are making commitments to migrate critical applications into the cloud?

You’re biting off a fairly significant risk, which that there isn’t a lot there to catch you when you do it wrong, and, quite frankly, nearly everybody is doing it wrong. What if we start small and find a way to leverage some of these new capabilities? We can actually do it right, and then start to realize some of the benefits from cloud, mobile, and other channels that your organization is looking to.

Gardner: I guess, too, the role of software keeps increasing in many organizations. It's not a tool. It's becoming the business itself and, as a fundamental part of the business, requires lots of tender love and care, right?

The more that we can think about that and tune ourselves and make ourselves lean and focused on delivering better quality products, we’re going to be in the winning circle more often.

DeCapua: You got it. The only other bit that I would add on to that is looking at the World Quality Report that was presented this morning by HP, Capgemini, and Sogeti, they highlighted that there is an increased spend from the IT budget, and a rather significant increase in spend from last year in testing.

It’s exactly what you’re saying. Organizations didn’t enter the market thinking of themselves as a software house. But time and time again, we’re seeing how people who treat what they do as a software house ultimately is improving not only life for their internal customers, but also their external customers.

So I think you’re right. The more that we can think about that and tune ourselves and make ourselves lean and focused on delivering better quality software products, we’re going to be in the winning circle more often.

Gardner: Well, very good. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been learning about how Shunra Software is improving its network virtualization and service virtualization in partnership with HP for overall improved software-development quality. Please join me in thanking our guest Todd DeCapua, Vice President of Channel Operations and Services at Shunra Software. Thank you, Todd.

DeCapua: Thank you very much, Dana. I appreciate the opportunity, and thank you all.

Gardner: Yes, thanks to our audience for joining the special discussion coming to you from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this on-going series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the benefits to software development from service and network virtualization. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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AT&T Cloud Services Built on VMware vCloud Datacenter Meet Evolving Business Demands for Advanced IaaS

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how telecom giant AT&T is leveraging its networking and cloud expertise to provide advanced cloud services.

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

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

Dana Gardner

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how global telecommunications giant AT&T has created advanced cloud services for its customers. We'll see how AT&T has developed the ability to provide virtual private clouds and other computing capabilities as integrated services at scale.

Stay with us now to learn more about building the best infrastructure to handle some of the most demanding network and compute services for one of the world's largest service providers. Here to share her story on building top-performing infrastructure is Chris Costello, Assistant Vice President of AT&T Cloud Services. Welcome, Chris. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Chris Costello: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Just to help us understand, because it's such a large company and you provide so many services, what cloud services generally is AT&T providing now, and why is this an important initiative for you?

Costello: AT&T has been in the hosting business for over 15 years, and so it was only a natural extension for us to get into the cloud services business to evolve with customers' changing business demands and technology needs.

Chris Costello

We have cloud services in several areas. The first is our AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service. This is a hybrid cloud that allows VMware clients to extend their private clouds into AT&T's network-based cloud using a virtual private network (VPN). And it melds the security and performance of VPN with the economics and flexibility of a public cloud. So the service is optimized for VMware's more than 350,000 clients.

If you look at customers who have internal clouds today or private data centers, they like the control, the security, and the leverage that they have, but they really want the best of both worlds. There are certain workloads where they want to burst into a service provider’s cloud.

We give them that flexibility, agility, and control, where they can simply point and click, using free downloadable tools from VMware, to instantly turn up workloads into AT&T's cloud.

Another capability that we have in this space is AT&T Platform as a Service. This is targeted primarily to independent software vendors (ISVs), IT leaders, and line-of-business managers. It allows customers to choose from 50 pre-built applications, instantly mobilize those applications, and run them in AT&T's cloud, all without having to write a single line of code.

So we're really starting to get into more of the informal buyers, those line-of-business managers, and IT managers who don't have the budget to build it all themselves, or don't have the budget to buy expensive software licenses for certain application environments.

Examples of some of the applications that we support with our platform as a service (PaaS) are things like salesforce automation, quote and proposal tools, and budget management tools.

Storage space

The third key category of AT&T's Cloud Services is in the storage space. We have our AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service, and this gives customers control over storage, distribution, and retrieval of their data, on the go, using any web-enabled device. In a little bit, I can get into some detail on use cases of how customers are using our cloud services.

This is a very important initiative for AT&T. We're seeing customer demand of all shapes and sizes. We have a sizable business and effort supporting our small- to medium-sized business (SMB) customers, and we have capabilities that we have tailor-developed just to reach those markets.

As an example, in SMB, it's all about the bundle. It's all about simplicity. It's all about on demand. And it's all about pay per use and having a service provider they can trust.

It's all about simplicity. It's all about on demand.

In the enterprise space, you really start getting into detailed discussions around security. You also start getting into discussions with many customers who already have private networking solutions from AT&T that they trust. When you start talking with clients around the fact that they can run a workload, turn up a server in the cloud, behind their firewall, it really resonates with CIOs that we're speaking with in the enterprise space.

Also in enterprises, it's about having a globally consistent experience. So as these customers are reaching new markets, it's all about not having to stand up an additional data center, compute instance, or what have you, and having a very consistent experience, no matter where they do business, anywhere in the world.

New era for women in tech

Gardner: Let’s look into your role Chris as an IT executive and also a woman. The fact is that a significant majority of CIOs and IT executives are men, and that’s been the case for quite some time. But I'm curious, does cloud computing and the accompanying shift towards IT becoming more of a services brokering role change that? Do you think that with the consensus building among businesses and partner groups being more important in that brokering role, this might bring in a new era for women in tech?

Costello: I think it is a new era for women in tech. Specifically to my experience in working at AT&T in technology, this company has really provided me with an opportunity to grow both personally and professionally.

I currently lead our Cloud Office at AT&T and, prior to that, ran AT&T’s global managed hosting business across our 38 data centers. I was also lucky enough to be chosen as one of the top women in wireline services.

The key to success of being a woman working in technology is being able to build offers that solve customers' business problem.

What drives me as a woman in technology is that I enjoy the challenge of creating offers that meet customer needs, whether they be in the cloud space, things like driving eCommerce, high performance computing environment, or disaster recovery (DR) solutions.

I love spending time with customers. That’s my favorite thing to do. I also like to interact with many partners and vendors that I work with to stay current on trends and technologies. The key to success of being a woman working in technology is being able to build offers that solve customers' business problem, number one.

Number two is being able to then articulate the value of a lot of the complexity around some of these solutions, and package the value in a way that’s very simple for customers to understand.

Some of the challenge and also opportunity of the future is that, as technology continues to evolve, it’s about reducing complexity for customers and making the service experience seamless. The trend is to deliver more and more finished services, versus complex infrastructure solutions.

Gardner: It’s a very interesting period. Do you have any sense of a future direction in terms of IT roles? Does the actual role, whether it’s a man or woman, shift? The leadership in IT, how is that changing?

Costello: I've been in the technology space for a number of years at AT&T and I've had the opportunity to interact with many women in leadership, whether they be my peer group, managers that work as a part of my team, and/or mentors that I have within AT&T that are senior leaders within the business.

I've worked with several women in leadership. I think that trend is going to continue. I also mentor three women at AT&T, whether they be in technology, sales, or an operations role. So I'm starting to see this trend continue to grow.

It enables us to deliver a mobile cloud as well. That helps customers to transform their businesses.

Gardner: You have a lot of customers who are already using your network services. It seems a natural extension for them to look to you for cloud, and now you have created these, as I have seen it termed, virtual private clouds.

From what you're describing, that allows folks to take whatever cloud activities they've got and be able to burst those into your cloud, and that gives them that elasticity. I imagine there are probably some good cost-efficiencies as well.

Costello: Absolutely. We've embedded cloud capabilities into the AT&T managed network. It enables us to deliver a mobile cloud as well. That helps customers to transform their businesses. We're delivering cloud services in the same manner as voice and data services, intelligently routed across our highly secure, reliable network.

AT&T's cloud is embedded in our network. It's not sitting on top of or attached to our network, but it's fully integrated to provide customers a seamless, highly secure, low-latency, and high-performing experience.

Gardner: Let’s look into the VMware solution set, and why you chose VMware. Maybe you can explain the process. Was this a data-driven decision? Was this a pure architecture? Were there other technology or business considerations? I'm just trying to better understand the lead-up to using vCloud Datacenter Services as a core to the AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service. 

Multiple uses

Costello: AT&T uses VMware in several of our hosting application and cloud solutions today. In the case of AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service, we use that in several ways, both to serve customers in public cloud and hybrid, as well as private cloud solutions.

We've also been using VMware technology for a number of years in AT&T’s Synaptic Hosting offer, which is our enterprise-grade utility computing service. We've also been serving customers with server virtualization solutions available in AT&T data centers around the world and also can be extended into customer or third-party locations.

Just to drill down on some of the key differentiators of AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service, it’s two-fold.

One is that we integrate with AT&T private networking solutions. Some of the benefits that customers enjoy as a result of that are orchestration of resources, where we'll take the amount of compute storage and networking resources and provide the exact amount of resources at the exact right time to customers on-demand.

Our solutions offer enterprise-grade security. The fact that we've integrated our AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service with private networking solution allows customers to extend their cloud into our network using VPN.

An engineering firm can now perform complex mathematical computations and extend from their private cloud into AT&T’s hybrid solution instantaneously, using their native VMware toolset.

Let me touch upon VMware vCloud Datacenter Services for a minute. We think that’s another key differentiator for us, in that we can allow clients to seamlessly move workloads to our cloud using native VMware toolsets. Essentially, we're taking technical complexity and interoperability challenges off the table.

How this manifests itself in terms of client solutions is that an engineering firm can now perform computationally intensive complex mathematical modeling on the fly and on demand using AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service.

Medical firms can use our solutions for medical imaging to securely store and access x-rays. Companies that are interested in mobile cloud solution can use AT&T’s Mobile Enterprise Application Platform to offer product catalogs in the cloud with mobile access.

Gardner: It certainly appears to me that we're going to be finding a lot more ways in which the private cloud infrastructure in these organizations can synergistically add value and benefit from public cloud services.

Cloud interaction

Even though we want to distill out the complexities, there’s something about the interactions between the private cloud and the enterprise and the public cloud services, like AT&T, that depend on some sort of a core architecture. How are you looking at making that visible? What are some of the important requirements that you have for making this hybrid cloud capability work?

Costello: One of the requirements for a hybrid cloud solution to be a success, specifically in terms of how AT&T offers the service, is that we have a large base of customers that have private networking solutions with AT&T, and they view their networks as secure and scalable.

Many of our customers that we have today have been using these networks for many years. And as customers are looking to cloud solutions to evolve their data centers and their application environment, they're demanding that the solution be secure and scalable.  So the fact that we let customers extend their private cloud and instantly access our cloud environment over their private network is key, especially when it comes to enterprise customers.

Secondly, with the vCloud Datacenter program that we are part of with VMware, letting customers have access to copy and paste workloads and see all of their virtual machines, whether it be in their own private cloud environment or in a hybrid solution provided by AT&T, providing that seamless access to view all of their virtual machines and manage those through single interface, is key in reducing technical complexity and speeding time to market.

Gardner: I should also think that these concepts around the software-defined datacenter and software-defined networking play a part in that, is that something that you are focused on?

If we start with enterprise, the security aspects of the solution had to prove out for the customers that we do business with.

Costello: Software-defined datacenter and software-defined networks are essentially what we're talking about here with some uniqueness that AT&T Labs has built within our networking solutions. We essentially take our edge, our edge routers, and the benefits that are associated with AT&T networking solutions around redundancy, quality of service, etc., and extend that into cloud solutions, so customers can extend their cloud into our network using VPN solutions.

Gardner: As you moved toward this really important initiative, what were some of the other requirements you had in terms of functionality for your infrastructure? What were you really looking for?

Costello: In terms of functionality for the infrastructure, if we start with enterprise, the security aspects of the solution had to prove out for the customers that we do business with. When you think about clients in financial services, the federal government, and healthcare, as examples, we really had to prove that the data was secure and private. The certifications and audits and compliance that we were able to provide for our customers were absolutely critical to earning customers’ business.

We're seeing more and more customers, who have had very large IT shops in the past, who are now opening the door and are very open to these discussions, because they're viewing AT&T as a service provider that can really help them to extend the private cloud environment that they have today. So security is absolutely key.

As I mentioned earlier, networking capabilities are very attractive to the enterprise customers that we're talking to. They may think. "I've already invested in this global managed network that I have in multiple points around the world, and I'm simply adding another node on my network. Within minutes I can turn up workloads or I can store data in the cloud and only pay for the resources that I utilize, not only the compute and/or storage resources, but also the network resources."

Added efficiency

Previously many customers would have to buy a router and try to pull together a solution on their own. It can be costly and time consuming. There's a whole lot of efficiency that comes with having a service provider being able to manage your compute storage and networking capabilities end to end.

Global scale was also very critical to the customers who we've been talking to. The fact that AT&T has localized and distributed resources through a combination of our 38 data centers around the world, as well as central offices, makes it very attractive to do business with AT&T as a service provider.

Also, having that enterprise-grade customer experience is absolutely critical to the customers who do business with AT&T. When they think of our brand, they think of reliability. If there are service degradation or change management issues, they want to know that they've got a resource that is working on their behalf that has technical expertise and is a champion working proactively on their cloud environment.

Gardner: You mentioned that it's a natural extension for those who are using your network services to move towards cloud services. You also mentioned that VMware has somewhere in the order of 350,000 customers with private-cloud installations that can now seamlessly move to your public-cloud offering.

Tell me how that came about and why the VMware platform, as well as their installed base, has become critical for you?

We learned early on, in working with customers’ managed utility computing environments, that VMware was the virtualization tool of choice for many of our enterprise customers.

Costello: We've been doing business with VMware for a number of years. We also have a utility-computing platform called AT&T Synaptic Hosting. We learned early on, in working with customers’ managed utility computing environments, that VMware was the virtualization tool of choice for many of our enterprise customers.

As technologies evolved over time and cloud technologies have become more prevalent, it was absolutely paramount for us to pick a virtualization partner that was going to provide the global scale that we needed to serve our enterprise customers, and to be able to handle the large amount of volume that we receive, given the fact that we have been in the hosting business for over 15 years.

As a natural extension of our Synaptic Hosting relationship with VMware for many years, it only made sense that we joined the VMware vCloud Datacenter program. VMware is baked into our Synaptic Compute as a Service capability. And it really lets customers have a simplified hybrid cloud experience. In five simple steps, customers can move workloads from their private environment into AT&T's cloud environment.

Think that you are the IT manager and you are coming into start your workday. All of a sudden, you hit 85 percent utilization in your environment, but you want to very easily access additional resources from AT&T. You can use the same console that you use to perform your daily job for the data center that you run in-house.

In five clicks, you're viewing your in-house private-cloud resources that are VMware based and your AT&T virtual machines (VMs) running in AT&T's cloud, our Synaptic Compute as a Service capability. That all happens in minutes' time.

Fantastic discussions

I've been in the hosting business and application management business for many years and have seen lots of fantastic discussions with customers. The whole thing falls apart when you start talking about the complexities of interoperability and having to write scripts and code and not being able to accept tools that the clients have already made investments in.

The fact that we're part of the vCloud Datacenter program provides a lot of benefits for our clients, when you talk to customers about the benefit of running that cloud in AT&T's network. Some of the additional benefits are no incremental bandwidth needed at the data center and no investment in a managed-router solution.

We have patented AT&T technology that completely isolates traffic from other cloud traffic. The network and cloud elasticity work in tandem. So all of this happens on the fly, instantaneously. Then, all of the end-to-end class of service prioritization and QoS and DDOS protection capabilities that are inherent in our network are now surrounding the compute experience as well.

Gardner: We've certainly seen a lot of interest in this hybrid capability. I wonder if you could help me identify some of the use cases that this is being employed with now. I'm thinking that if I needed to expand my organization into another country or to another region of the world, given your 38 data centers and your global reach, I would be able to take advantage of this and bring services to that region from my private cloud pretty rapidly.

Is that one of the more popular use cases, or are there some others that are on the forefront of this hybrid uptake?

We see a lot of customers looking for a more efficient way to be able to have business continuity,  have the ability to fail over in the event of a disaster

Costello: I speak with a lot of customers who are looking to be able to virtually expand. They have data-center, systems, and application investments and they have global headquarters locations, but they don't want to have to stand up another data center and/or virtually expand and/or ship staff out to other location. So certainly one use case that's very popular with customers is, "I can expand my virtual data-center environment and use AT&T as a service provider to help me to do that."

Another use case that's very popular with our customers is disaster recovery. We see a lot of customers looking for a more efficient way to be able to have business continuity,  have the ability to fail over in the event of a disaster, and also get in and test their plans more frequently than they're doing today.

For many of the solutions that are in place today, clients are saying they are expensive and/or they're just not meeting their service-level agreements (SLAs) to their business unit. One of the solutions that we recently put in place for a client is that we put them in two of AT&T's geographically diverse data centers. We wrapped it with AT&T's private-networking capability and then we solutioned our AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service and Storage as a Service.

The customer ended up with a better SLA and a very powerful return on investment (ROI) as well, because they're only paying for the cloud resources when the meter is running. They now have a stable environment so that they can get in and test their plans as often as they'd like to and they're only paying for a very small storage fee in the event that they actually need to invoke in the event of a disaster. So DR plans are very popular.

Another use case that’s very popular among our clients is short-term compute. We work with a lot of customers who have massive mathematical calculations and they do a lot of number crunching.

Data crunching

One customer that comes to mind is one that looks at the probability of natural disasters on large structures, such as bridges, tunnels, nuclear power plants. They came to AT&T, looked at our Synaptic Compute as a Service, and ultimately ran a very large number of VMs in a workload. Because of the large amount of data crunching they had to do, they ran it for two weeks straight on our platform. They finished the report. They were very pleased with the results, and the convenience factor was there.

They didn’t have to stand up an environment temporarily for themselves and now they use us anytime they sign a new client for those bursty type, short-term compute workloads.

Certainly test and development is one that I am seeing CIOs, directors of IT, and other functional managers as one of the most highly adopted use cases, in that it’s lower risk. Over the years, we've gone from, "Will I use the cloud?" to "What workloads are going to fit for me in the cloud?"

For those that are earlier on in their journey, using AT&Ts Synaptic Compute as a Service for their test and development environments certainly provides the performance, the global reach, and also the economics of pay per use. And if a client has private networking solutions from AT&T, they can fully integrate with our private networking solutions.

Finally, in the compute space, we're seeing a lot of customers start to hang virtual desktop solutions off of their compute environment. In the past, when I would ask clients about virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), they'd say, "We're looking at it, but we're not sure. It hasn’t made the budget list." All of a sudden, it’s becoming one of the most highly requested use cases from customers, and AT&T has solutions to cover all those needs.

The fact that we have 38 data centers around the world, a global reach from a networking perspective, and all the foundational cloud capabilities makes a whole lot of sense.

 
Gardner: I'm particularly interested in the spiky applications, where your workload spikes up, but then there is no sense of keeping resources available for it when they're not in use. Do you think that this will extend to some of the big data and analytics crunching that we've heard about or is that hurdle of getting the data to the cloud still a major issue? And does your unique position as a network service provider help pave the way for more of these big-data, spiky types of uses?

Costello: I don’t think anyone is in a better position than AT&T to be able to help customers to manage their massive amounts of data, given the fact that a lot of this data has to reside on very strong networking solutions. The fact that we have 38 data centers around the world, a global reach from a networking perspective, and all the foundational cloud capabilities makes a whole lot of sense.

Speaking about this type of a bursty use case, we host some of the largest brand name retailers in the world. When you think about it, a lot of these retailers are preparing for the holidays, and their servers are going underutilized much of year. So how attractive is it to be able to look at AT&T, as a service provider, to provide them robust SLAs and a platform that they only have to pay for when they need to utilize it, versus sitting and going very underutilized much of the year?

We also host many online gaming customers. When you think about the gamers that are out there, there is a big land rush when the buzz occurs right before the launch of a new game. We work very proactively with those gaming customers to help them size their networking needs well in advance of a launch. Also we'll monitor it in real time to ensure that those gamers have a very positive experience when that launch does occur.

Gardner: I suppose one other area that’s top of mind for lots of folks is how to extend the enterprise out to the mobile tier, to those mobile devices. Again, this seems to be an area where having the network services expertise and reach comes to an advantage.

For an enterprise that wanted to extend more of their apps, perhaps the VDI experience, out to their mobile devices, be they smartphones or tablets, what offerings do you have that might help us grease the skid towards that kind of a value?

Mobility applications

Costello: AT&T has a very successful mobility applications business, and we have a couple of examples of how customers use our cloud services in conjunction with making their mobile applications more productive.

First and foremost, we have a set of experts and consultants who help customers to mobilize their applications. So there might be internal customer proprietary applications, and we can really help them move to an on-demand mobile environment.

Secondly, a couple of cloud examples of how customers will use our capabilities off the shelf. One is our AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service capability. We find that many customers are looking for a secure place to collaborate on data sharing. They're looking to have a place to access their data and store their data to enable a worker on the go scenario, or to enable a field services applications or technicians.

Our AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service capability gives the end-user that ability to store, distribute, share, and retrieve that data on the go using any web-enabled device. Another example is AT&T's Platform as a Service capability, a great foundational tool for users to go in and use any one of our pre-built application and then instantly mobilize that application.

We have a customer who recently used this, because they had a customer meeting and they didn't have a sophisticated way to get surveys out for their customers. They wanted to create a database on the fly and get instantaneous feedback.

We find that many customers are looking for a secure place to collaborate on data sharing.

So they went into AT&T's Platform as a Service -- and this is a marketing person mind you, not a technical user -- they entered the questions that they required of the customers. They sent the quick questionnaire out to the end-users, five simple questions. The clients answered the questions.

Ultimately, that customer had a very sophisticated database with all of that information that they could use for market sensing on how to improve their products, number one. But number two, it made sense to use it as a marketing tool to provide promotional information to those customers in the future.

Gardner: Very good. We've been talking about how global telecommunications giant AT&T has been creating and delivering advanced cloud services for the customers, and we have seen how they view the VMware-centric infrastructure approach to help provide virtual private clouds and other computing capabilities as integrated services at scale.

So thanks to our guest, Chris Costello, Assistant Vice President of AT&T Cloud Services, really appreciate your input.

Costello: Thank you.

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

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how telecom giant AT&T is leveraging its networking and cloud expertise to provide advanced cloud services. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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