Tampa Bay Rays Hit Home Run with Virtualization That Enables Tablets Applications Delivery in the Field

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from WMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas on how a major league baseball team is streamlining operations with virtual technology.

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

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

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

Today’s consensus is no longer around an "if" for cloud computing and large-scale virtualization, but the "when," and what types of cloud models are best suited for any particular business.

The present challenge then is about the proper transitions to improved IT for better business results. Our next VMworld case study interview focuses on the Tampa Bay Rays, a Major League Baseball team that's using an extensive amount of virtualization.

They're also extending the value of virtualization into disaster recovery (DR). And they have just started bringing more and more of their applications, data, and processes out to the mobile tier using virtualization and thin-client approaches to make the mobile device, the tablet, super powerful for them.

Please join me now in welcoming Juan Ramirez, Senior Director for Information Technology with the Tampa Bay Rays. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Juan. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Juan Ramirez: Thank you. How are you?

Gardner: I'm doing great. We know that you're a baseball team. People understand the sports side of things, but obviously there's a lot more to a baseball franchise these days when it comes to technology and media and distribution. So we're going to hear some more about how that works. Tell me a little bit first about the size of your IT organization. What does it take to support a major league team?

Ramirez: First of all, coming from a small-market team, we don’t have the luxury to have a large IT department to support the 300 plus users that we currently have. So it’s very important for us to be very proactive and be ahead of the game.

It is a 24×7 operation, especially during the season, which as we all know, is one of the longest in professional sports, with 162 games per year, not counting playoffs. So it is challenging for us, but I believe that we have a great team.

We also have great resources that we've implemented in the last five or six years and we're on top of it. Without VMware and the different products that we deploy, I think today we'd be in a lot of trouble if we wouldn’t have gone that route.

Gardner: I'm glad that you're optimistic that you're going to be there for the full length of the season, well into the playoffs, perhaps even longer.

Why has virtualization, in general, been good for you? As you say, you're trying to get a lot of bang for your buck. You probably don’t want to be dealing with administration issues, time in and out, day in and day out. Why has virtualization been good for your organization?

A lot of issues

Ramirez: Back in 2007 when we first looked out at virtualization, we had a lot of issues. Our main data center was located at our stadium in Saint Petersburg, Fla. We were actually running out of space. Electricity was a huge problem. We kept hearing from our operations department that our data centers and our equipment were just consuming too much energy.

We had to come up with a new data center. We needed to build something else, because we were just basically outgrowing it. We needed a plan to say, "You know what, this is going to be our new data center. We're going to be there 5 to 10 years," without going back and requesting additional space or consuming more electricity.

That's when everything started. We went from a two-room data center room to basically just using half of that room with virtualization. We started very small -- four hosts to manage our own infrastructure. Now we have 10 hosts in production and growing.

Another dilemma that we had was every time we needed to provision servers, or a new application needed to be introduced, it would have taken weeks, if not a month, for us to procure the proper hardware and software to make this available for different departments. So we needed to cut time on that and make things happen faster. It is a fast business.

Gardner: So I understand that virtualization has been good for you, but to what degree have you actually delved into it? Are you at 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent virtualization?

Without VMware and the different products that we deploy, I think today we'd be in a lot of trouble if we wouldn’t have gone that route.

Ramirez: Currently, we're at 95 percent. We had certain goals to start -- about 50 percent -- and gradually every year just adding more and more resources. At 95 percent, you can see that we really value this, and this is the route that our business is going to.

Gardner: Clearly it's working for you. Tell me about how many apps you're supporting? What sort of workloads have you have got? To what degree can we help our listeners understand what it takes to support a major league baseball team from the IT perspective?

Ramirez: From the applications perspective, we have everything from our scanning application, which is homegrown SQL back-end, Windows application front-end, and web-based front-end to our finance departments, Great Plains, Microsoft Great Plains 2010.

We also have our customer relationship management (CRM) system, which runs on a proprietary application from Ticketmaster, to homegrown application. Close to 10-30 applications are used on a daily basis from every department and different aspect, which is incredible.

Our email system, Microsoft Exchange 2010, is 100 percent virtualized. And every new application that comes up in our pipeline is basically virtualized. Going forward, nothing resides in our physical server, which is tremendous for us.

Popular website

Gardner: And of course you are supporting your ball club, so that would be sort of the B2E side of things, but you also have a very big and popular website. Increasingly, I have to imagine, the way that you interact with your fans is as much or more online as it is at the ballpark or on the road, right?

Ramirez: Yes. Our front-end to our fans, raysbaseball.com, is actually managed through MLBAM, a division of MLB.com.

Gardner: Right, so it's sort of a federated, almost a cloud approach I suppose, right?

Ramirez: Correct.

Gardner: Let's get back to what you're doing with virtualization. How has the VMware suite, the stack, helped you out? What have you been using in order to get to that really impressive 95 percent level?

Ramirez: When we started it, we wanted to go slow and to make sure that everyone throughout the organization had a good feel for it, a good vibe. Once we earned the trust from the different departments and other department heads, we introduced it, we showed them and we trained them. It was a no-brainer. Everyone was on board. Everyone loved the technology. Just loved the fact that while it previously took weeks and months for them to provision anything from our department, it's now hours, at the most, which is great.

It also helps us big time with DR. Our second data center is located in our Port Charlotte Spring Training facility. It's easier for us to move workloads, depending on where we're at in the season and the time of the year. We can move a machine from the production main data center to the backup data center and provide those resources over to our different departments.

Gardner: That’s interesting. For your DR, how long have you been doing that, and what have you been using to manage that. That could be kind of a thorny problem for folks to decide what resources to allocate and what to keep in which data center and so forth?

Ramirez: When we started it, it was a very tough decision, because we wanted to do everything automated, but management did not see the need for it. So we actually started with manual processes. We started building a data center down in Port Charlotte. We did some migrations and that didn’t work out too well. So we came back to the drawing board and said, we need a tool that can help us automate this process. This has to be 100 percent automated.

We came back to the drawing board and said, we need a tool that can help us automate this process. This has to be 100 percent automated.

Our recovery manager had just come out and we wanted to test it. We actually beta tested it and received some eval licenses. We put together a quick product to show administration and management how good the product was and how important it was to us, especially in the location that we are at.

The rest is basically history. We have pretty much 100 percent coverage on everything that is virtualized. We're able to take periodic snaps and move them over to the VR facility, where we do a weekly test of each individual virtual machine (VM).

Gardner: Yes. So that must make you sleep a little better during hurricane season I imagine?

Ramirez: Absolutely. It used to be nightmare from June to the end of September around here, but not anymore.

Gardner: Let's move into this other innovative area you have been experimenting with, and it's the use of VMware View 4.6, the latest version. You've been involved with moving into thin clients, virtualized desktops, and I understand also using mobile apps on tablets. Tell me why that's been important for you and what you've done?

250 remote users

Ramirez: Throughout the year, we've grown tremendously. We now have close to 250 remote users. All those remote users need to be equipped with very expensive laptops. It's very expensive and very hard to manage.

We're a small IT department. It's very hard to track down 250 users throughout the year. It's very hard to keep older machines up-to-date. When something goes wrong, it gets ugly pretty fast. We needed to get an alternative and come up with a plan where it would be easier to manage, where it would be easier for them to conduct their work.

We started very basic by putting the in VMware View client. First of all, we set up a lab here and asked a few of our key guys to test and give us some feedback. The feedback was overwhelming. We started with five or six guys, and now we probably have close to 65 users using it on a daily basis.

Users have come back and handed in their laptops. Now, they're strictly on iPad or Android tablet, which is tremendous for us. It's easier for my department to manage. It's easier for them to go out there on the field and just use a lightweight device to connect and conduct business with it.

So it's big for us right now. It should be a huge hit in the upcoming year. With our development department, everything that we are projecting is basically basing it on VMware View.

Users have come back and handed in their laptops. Now, they're strictly on iPad or Android tablet, which is tremendous for us.

Gardner: In addition to VMware View, you also seem to be using an iPad app, how did that come about? How does that fit into the equation?

Ramirez: That came as we started adding more users and receiving feedback. I started using it for my daily management show, introduced a few key personnel to it, and they liked the idea. Now, everyone is basically using that app to connect and do most of their work.

We decided to introduce other departments and show them the capability and how easy it is to connect and get their business done without turning on their laptop -- waiting for it to boot, the VPN, the password, and all that stuff that sometimes gets in the way.

Gardner: I understand you have scouts, managers, you have lots of folks out in the field. They're at ballparks. They're watching ballplayers. They're in the field, and can they just download an iPad app and then sign into VMware View. How do they actually connect in, and what are the logistics for really linking your resources and apps out to that field?

Everyone wants a tablet

Ramirez: Everyone in the organization, I guess, wants a tablet. They come to us, which helps us big time. Normally we do the procurement for them, or if they go out there and buy it, they will just bring it over to us, and by default our installation and process includes that application. It's the first application that they're introduced to.

My department is able to figure the necessary settings on the application and just leave it ready for them and let them know that right now you can just use your iPad application to connect into your resources and conduct, and use most of the applications that you will be using on a daily basis. It's a big plus for us and for the user. They just love the fact that they have a small application, a small tablet, and one application to deal with. Everything else is handled from our end.

Gardner: So this is productivity for you, because you're supporting more users in the way that they want to work, probably with fewer resources when it all comes down to it, when you can consolidate. And then they're getting that added productivity of access to the data and the apps wherever they are, whenever they want to use it. So it's kind of a win-win.

Ramirez: Absolutely. From a management perspective, it’s great, it's awesome, getting apps for a better application and a better system to have deployed.

We've had nightmares throughout the years, lost laptops with very sensitive information. We have to protect users, and there are so many things that goes on on a daily basis. Now if there's an issue, it just takes seconds to correct, and the users just go back in and continue doing their work.

From a management perspective, it’s great, it's awesome, getting apps for a better application and a better system to have deployed.

Gardner: Let’s look at some of the metrics of success here. We've talked about virtualization in general. We've talked about disaster recovery and also the thin apps and iPad tablet mobile-tier benefit.

Do you have any statistics of what any of these have done for you, maybe in the form of hardware expenses or energy use or even real estate? What’s been the return on investment (ROI) for you moving in these directions?

Ramirez: The ROI has been huge. We used to buy 10-15 servers on a yearly basis. Now, we just procure our servers every three or four years. We get hit from left and right with different departments. They have different needs -- we need 10 servers, we need 15 servers. We no longer have to procure those and spend all that money right away. We have resources allocated for it.

So the ROI has been there. As a matter of fact, we did research two years ago and have discovered that on our initial investment for both data centers the return on investment was 24 months, which was probably more than we thought. We didn’t realize how fast we were able to recoup our investment and how much flexibility we had moving forward.

For DR, we were coming from a situation where we had nothing. Everything was in one data center, and if a storm came by, we would basically be out of business. Having a fully automated system in place is huge for us.

Very important

I don’t even know where to start and what number to tag this with, but it is very important to us. It has helped with insurance cost. It has helped with just the ease of everyone knowing that if something happens near our stadium, we have our data and we can still conduct business moving forward.

Gardner: Other than the anecdotal side of the productivity from your end-users, are there any hard numbers that you can apply to the mobile? Are you buying fewer laptops, for example?

Ramirez: Yes, we are buying fewer laptops. We no longer need all the extra services that with 250 laptops can get very costly. Instead of ordering an $1,800 laptop for a user, which normally lives 12-24 months, now we can just buy an iPad or have the users use their own iPad, and connect. That makes a big saving for us going forward.

Gardner: Juan, we're almost out of time. I was curious about what your next steps are. Maybe you're thinking about private cloud. Maybe you're going to take that high virtualization and utilization rate and extend it into more of a fabric for your applications or even hybrid activities. Any thoughts around where you're going to take your goals around productivity and efficiency next?

Ramirez: We have very big plans to move ahead and try to be 99 percent virtualized. Private cloud is very important. It's high for us. We keep growing, and our needs and demands are huge. So we definitely have a lot of plans.

We have very big plans to move ahead and try to be 99 percent virtualized. Private cloud is very important.

Coming down the line, we're counting big on the upcoming vSphere 5 and SRM 5. That’s going to help us tremendously. It has some features there that are must-have for us.

Again, moving forward, application development and everything will hopefully be based on a thin app and ease of use and administration for our users. VMware View is another big component for us.

Gardner: We've been talking about some successful implementations of virtualization in general, advancing into disaster recovery, and then also enjoying thin app and virtualized desktop benefits with a view to the cloud in the future.

We've been talking with Juan Ramirez, Senior Director of Information Technology with the Tampa Bay Rays. Juan, thanks so much for your time.

Ramirez: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the 2011 VMworld Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from WMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas on how a major league baseball team is streamlining operations with virtual technology.Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Enterprise App Store Trends Point to Need for Better Applications Marketplace for ISVs, Service Providers, Mobile Business Ecosystems

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the development of enterprise app stores and application marketplaces for ISVs to extend and modernize the applications delivery model to better serve employees, customers, and partners.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Request an app marketplace demo. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

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

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the fast moving trends supporting the escalating demand for enterprise app stores. As enterprises and most business users have rapidly adopted smartphones and made them mission critical to their work and lives, tablets are fast on their heels as a similar major disruptor.

RIM, Apple’s iOS, and Google Android devices are rapidly changing the way the world does business ... and does software. Riding along on the mobile device wave is the complimentary App Store model pioneered by Apple. The App Store is rapidly gaining admiring adopters from many quarters, thanks to its promise of reducing cost of distribution and of updates, and also of creating whole new revenue streams and even deeper user relationships.

Those seeking to make application store benefits their own -- and fast, before someone else does -- come from a diverse lot. They include vendors, service providers, and communication service providers. Interestingly, though, it’s the users that have shown the way to adoption by demonstrating a comfort, a willingness, and an affinity for a self-selection process for downloadable mobile (and increasingly enterprise) applications and services.

The users are really quite happy with paying for what they have on the spot, as long as that process is quick, seamless, and convenient. So the onus is now on a variety of business service providers and enterprises to come up with some answers for app stores of their own and to serve their employees, customers, and partner ecosystems in new ways.

This can't be done haphazardly. The new app stores also must stand up to the rigors of business-to-business (B2B) commerce requirements, not just consumer-driven games.

So to learn more about how the enterprise app store market will shape up, I'm here with a panel to delve into the market and opportunity for enterprise app stores, and to find out how they could be created quickly and efficiently to strike, as it were, while the app store iron is hot.

Please join me now in welcoming our guests. We're here with Michele Pelino, a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Welcome, Michele.

Michele Pelino: Hi, how are you?

Gardner: I'm great. We are also here with Mark Sochan, the CEO of Partnerpedia. Hi, Mark.

Mark Sochan: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: And we're here also with Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. Hi there, Sam.

Sam Liu: How are you doing, Dana?

Gardner: I'm great. Michele, let's go to you first. This whole applications marketplace concept is something we hadn’t even thought of perhaps two or three years ago, and it's moving very rapidly. The trend is also happening across categories.

Usually we can sort of slice and dice these things, but we are looking at consumer, business, enterprise, and service providers seeking app stores. Maybe you could sort of paint a picture for what's going on with business applications, now that we have seen the app store model really pick up and become attractive to consumers.

Importance of mobility

Pelino: In order to provide some context around the momentum that we're seeing on the app store side of the world, it’s really important to take a step back and recognize how important mobility has become to enterprises overall, as they are interacting with their employees and their customers and their partners and providers as well.

We do surveys at Forrester of enterprises in both North America and Europe to better understand those priorities and how mobility fits into overall technology initiatives. We find that three of the top priorities that are being focused on by many enterprises are related to mobility.

That includes deploying new devices to their employees. It includes supporting more types of applications for not just the employees that are working outside of the office and the road warriors that we all think about when we are thinking about mobile workers, but also expanding applications for workers who are actually in the office.

So this broadening of mobility includes many types of workers and applications that address not just the traditional email/calendaring applications, which are widely deployed by most companies, but is also pushing those applications down into line of business worker types of applications, which are tied to particular types of employees in an organization.

They're applications that may be designed for the sales team, customer service, support, or marketing. They also might be applications that are tied to the needs of particular vertical industry’s logistics or supply chain management or enterprise asset management types of applications.

Many firms are broadening the types of applications that they're deploying to their customers, partners, and suppliers, as well as to their employees.

All of these applications are where we're seeing the momentum today. Ultimately, many firms are broadening the types of applications that they're deploying to their customers, partners, and suppliers, as well as to their employees, and this momentum is continuing.

The other thing that’s driving some of this momentum is that individuals, not just employees, are going out and buying lots of different smartphone devices and mobile devices. You touched on that in your earlier comments around tablets, slates, and different types of smartphones that are out there. So, this momentum isn’t just happening within the corporation. It’s actually happening outside of that, and it's what we would call the consumerization of IT.

This means that many individuals, consumers, are driving requirements into the corporation and into the IT organization to get new types of applications on their devices, whether those devices are personally owned or ones that the corporation has as well.

This consumerization trend is also happening to drive these requirements into the organization and to really generate more momentum around applications in general as well as smartphone devices, tablets, and other types of mobile devices.

Gardner: So we have the consumers, the users, very much aligned with this trend. They seem to have adapted to it rather easily. We've also seen an ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) involved, where they see opportunities to create direct relationships or marketplaces and get new revenue. We've even seen some companies like Zynga and some of the other gaming corporations, taking off based on this apps model.

What's the last leg on the stool? It seems to me that their will be new types of app store providers. Michele, for those organizations thinking of doing this, what do they need to consider? What's important from a B2B perspective of doing an app store?

A lot of momentum

Pelino: One of the things to think about, when you are doing an app store, is to recognize that there's a lot of momentum around app stores in general and that came from the initial foray that we had seen from the device manufacturers like Apple and RIM. All the different device manufacturers have application stores tied initially to a consumer-oriented perspective.

The momentum around those app stores has driven corporations to start thinking about what they can do to more effectively and efficiently support their requirements around applications.

The thing with corporations is that IT organizations still want to control which version of the applications are in there and what types of apps an employee might have access to in a corporate environment, as opposed to what they might be doing in their personal world. Security is always a key issue here.

All of these things are really driving the need for these application stores -- but at an enterprise level. More and more applications are not just coming from what the IT organization wants to put out there, but also line-of-business workers within the organization are driving more and more application requirements.

By implementing these application stores, I, as an individual employee with a particular role will have access to certain applications. Another employee may have access to other applications that are tied to their role in the organization. And you could broaden that concept out to interacting with partners, suppliers, and customers as well.

The IT group is getting pushed by the end users and organizations that have become very comfortable with how they can search, browse, try, download, and purchase applications.

That’s where this momentum for application stores is coming from. It's not just coming from the IT organization, but it’s coming from line of business workers who want to have applications out there for their customers, employees, and partners.

Gardner: Mark Sochan at Partnerpedia, there's a need now for an IT department or an enterprise organization to take advantage of this trend, but to do it in a way that’s amenable to them, that suits their requirements. Is this a big opportunity for IT to do something differently but perhaps even do something better than the way they have distributed software in the past?

Sochan: Absolutely, Dana. Adding to some of the comments that Michele made about IT consumerization, there is no doubt that the IT group is getting pushed by the end users and organizations that have become very comfortable with how they can search, browse, try, download, and purchase applications. As a result, that has raised the expectations of how those same workers would like to be able browse, search, and download applications that could help them in their business world and with their productivity.

But, there are some pretty big differences between the consumer world of buying a 99-cent Angry Birds game versus downloading business applications. So some of the things that IT groups are having to think about and sort out are security and data governance, and how data that is specific to the device can be managed and, if need be, removed.

There are also issues about how the IT group can enable worker productivity and increase the satisfaction of the user base. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Savings and efficiencies

Finally, there's a need to try and find cost savings and efficiencies. If you had everyone just buying individual applications, then you wouldn’t have the benefit of bulk license purchasing or the ability to purchase through normal corporate buying processes that result in larger scales of economy.

Gardner: Michele, back to you. I know this is still early and this is a very fast-moving and dynamic marketplace, but do we have any sense of how big this is going to be? Not necessarily numbers, but do you think that most enterprises are going to want to adopt this sort of a model?

Also, this all reminds me of a couple of years ago, when we talked in services oriented architecture (SOA) terms about registry and repository, making a list items of services and/or applications, and then users could pick and choose and start beginning to make processes from them. Is this something that you at Forrester expect to be pervasive or is this going to be on the fringe?

Pelino: This is the beginning of a pretty key momentum driver in this area. What we're seeing now is that some of these key drivers, are coming together for large, medium, small enterprises who must figure out how to expand their applications and capabilities. What we're seeing now is that some of these key drivers are coming together for large, medium, small enterprises who must figure out how to expand their applications and capabilities.

Also, as Mark said, you still have to have some control over this. You have to deal with corporate requirements around purchasing and all of the requirements internally as well. All of those factors are coming together.

About 30 percent of enterprises are using application stores do deploy some of their applications at some level.

Our surveys say that about 30 percent of enterprises -- that’s medium, large, as well as small enterprises -- are using app stores do deploy some of their applications at some level. It’s not that they're doing everything that way today. That’s the early stage of this, because this is an evolutionary path. It started on the consumer side and now it’s going into the enterprise.

As I think about what our survey data would say going into 2011, I have a feeling that, that percentage will jump pretty dramatically. More enterprises are dealing with that pain-point of the complexity of getting these applications out there, of having to have some control over which version, monitoring them, tracking what's going on with the apps, ensuring that everybody is getting the application that they should ... or not.

Those kinds of things are very important, certainly at a corporate level, and so this is driving a lot of that momentum as well, and security can't be lost in that picture either.

Gardner: Sam Liu at Partnerpedia, how do we help enterprises step into this? Is there a path? Is there some methodology, or track record involved? If I were an IT manager, I am thinking, okay, I have to build, I have to buy, or I have to partner -- or some combination to get an app store up and running.

If I have an app store that’s serving my employees, the chances are that I'm going to need to have one that’s going to be able to stand up to the rigors of delivering apps and services and business value out to my customer end-users as well.

How does an organization like an enterprise, a vendor, or a communication service provider start the process of thinking about architecting and providing an app store?

Early stages

Liu: We've talked to a number of different enterprises and various industries, and most of them are in the early stages of researching and trying to figure out what this means to them. They know that tablets are coming, but actually today’s problems have as much to do with just devices already in-house, such as smartphones.

What we're hearing in terms of platforms is that the top three platforms they're trying to figure out are iOS, Android, and the platform coming from RIM.

In that research phase, some of the issues that they're concerned about are more traditional IT policies and compliance issues. They understand the motivation from the user standpoint and the value of that, but they're really trying to understand the landscape in terms of those more traditional issues around IT control and compliance, such as security.

The other thing is that they're also more open to outsourced or cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solutions, as opposed to something that may be completely managed in-house via traditional software. The issue there is that they want to make sure that it actually can connect to the very secure session in the corporate environment, and that by outsourcing they are not giving that up in terms of the security and control.

What we recommend is to start with a scoped project. Don’t try to solve all of your problems at once. Figure out what you need today and build up a roadmap for how you want to get there tomorrow. So you might want to start with the current devices, such as phones and focus on maybe internal applications or select third-party applications. Deploy a project from that and then figure out how you want to evolve that towards other devices and other platforms. [Request an app marketplace demo.].

They're looking for some blended model between complete end-user autonomy and some better corporate control.

Gardner: Mark Sochan, this isn't just about the technology of being able to serve up an application. This is also about billing, invoicing, the money trail, and then making that auditable. In certain industries, it’s a bit more of an integration issue.

How do you walk into an enterprise or a vendor and help them sort through, not just the delivery of these apps, but also the management of the charge-backs and/or processing of credit cards or other means of billing?

Sochan: At Partnerpedia we've been working with a number of the leading tablet vendors and some of the largest enterprise customers to understand what are the business problems and what are the priorities that need to be solved.

Overwhelmingly, what we're hearing is that most customers are not satisfied with just having an open marketplace that you might see from, say, the Google Apps Marketplace. They're looking for some blended model between complete end-user autonomy and some better corporate control. That’s the first piece of feedback we are hearing.

The second piece is that there is a need to have some sort of branding. Most enterprise companies want to have some branding, so that it’s very clear to their users that this is their marketplace, this is their store. And that store has a combination of third-party built applications, similar to what you might see if you went into an Apple App Store or into the Google Android marketplace.

Custom built

But, you also see applications that have been custom built specifically for that corporation. That is, bite-size pieces of applications and business process productivity that is specific to a person’s role in that organization. Plus, some higher-end applications are coming from some of their business partners.

Because there are a variety of different sources of these applications, there are different business models that need to be addressed. The one that may be most familiar to all of us would be the ones that are the similar kinds of applications that we might find in the Apple App Store or the productivity type things, whether it’s news and information or time management or calendaring.

Then, as we move to the custom-built applications or the in-house applications, it’s also important to be able to have a way to side-load those applications and make sure that those applications are available and discoverable by the people in the organization that they are relevant to.

There's a whole idea of personalization that goes far beyond what we've seen on the consumer side, where basically everyone is presented a very similar experience in the enterprise side.

It’s very important to personalize much further to a marketing executive, for example. That’s going to be a very different set of applications that have been pre-approved and that are relevant to that marketing executive, versus someone who is on the production floor.

There's a need to have a lot of control and flexibility for the corporation to either pre-purchase those licenses and to manage those licenses effectively.

Finally, depending on the type of application and the user, there's a need to have a lot of control and flexibility for the corporation to either pre-purchase those licenses and to manage those licenses effectively. Then, they can both purchase and manage the distribution of those license, and be able to reclaim them as employees leave the organization or devices are lost, as well as allowing, as appropriate flexibility for the end-users to actually make purchases directly based on their budget. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Gardner: Michele Pelino with Forrester Research, I don’t know if this is a bit outside of your field, but it seems to me that that from an IT procurement perspective we have been talking about smartphones and tablets.

When you think about the app store model as a way to distribute and manage applications to all devices -- including PCs -- you can start to get better efficiencies over licensing. You can really meter who gets applications and how often they're used and use that to decide what apps to keep or what to throw out. You can also have a better means of updating and adding security patches in a way that’s automated and centralized, rather than going from point to point.

Do have any thoughts about the IT efficiency aspects of an app store model, if we take it beyond smartphones and tablets to the entire endpoints the users use?

Evolving over time

Pelino: That is how this could evolve over time. We've been starting on the mobile device side of the world -- smartphones and tablets, those types of devices. But, at a corporate level, there are other types of endpoints that you need to manage and deploy applications to, and you want the same kind of control. You also want to have a sense of how much you are spending.

Sam mentioned, as a service type of delivery model or a per user type of delivery model, you can use different kinds of models here to keep control of the cost and have efficiencies around cost that you might not have today, because there is lots of overlap happening.

There are benefits as well, when you're thinking about individual end users who might have devices that they use in certain situations. When they're at their desk, maybe they have their laptops or desktops there. So, ultimately, you could have the same environment to integrate what an individual end-user or an employee could get in terms of the apps that they're able to get and always have a consistent experience for that.

The other side of that is just having a recognition that at the IT level, as much as they would love to control this, there are lots of devices around the bend. So even in the mobile world the devices we see today are not the ones that are going to be here tomorrow and there is more and more, almost on a day-to-day basis, being announced and put out there for end-users, whether it be enterprises or consumers to use.

How do I keep that in line? This app-store model is certainly one way to do it. But, when you think about it at the IT organization level, it’s not just about mobility. They have to think about the endpoints across the organization and this could certainly be relevant in that case as well.

The ability to create a very rich catalog of information makes it much more compelling and gains a lot more commitment from your partners.

Gardner: Mark, we're hearing about the benefits for an internal app store where IT, for example, might get better software distribution benefits. I know that Partnerpedia has been working with a number of early adopters on storefronts and branding around app stores. Are you finding that there is a capability here that you can, in effect, create the same app store for internal distribution as well as external, where you would be taking apps and services out to a wider audience, be it B2B or business-to-consumer (B2C)? [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Sochan: Absolutely. If you look at the core essence of an app store, there is a repository or catalog of information that makes it very easy for a company’s customers be able to find, browse, and look for products and services, not only from the vendor, but also related products and services that are of value from that vendor's ecosystem.

It almost doesn’t matter what kind of company it is. Most companies have some extended ecosystem of value-added partners. The ability to create a very rich catalog of information that your customers can browse and search and look for related products and services makes it much more compelling and gains a lot more commitment from your partners.

Because you're now providing them with of a go-to-market benefit directly to the customers, and from the customer’s perspective, they see tremendous value in your company’s products and services, because they see the richness of the ecosystem around it.

At the heart of it is this catalog that can be highly personalized. You can imagine that if you're now able to personalize this for your customers, where your customers are coming into this marketplace and they are not just seeing a generic marketplace, they are actually seeing a marketplace that’s been personalized to them.

Marketplace knows

This means that the marketplace already knows which products your customers have purchased from you and therefore is making a pre-selection or presenting them with information that’s very specific and related to the footprint that, that customer already has of your products.

In some cases, in a more consumer-oriented world, you may want to actually go to a transaction and actually enable purchasing. But, our enterprise customers are telling us that, equally important, if not more important, in the first steps is to have a very sophisticated lead capture engine, so that you can capture that interest that your customer has expressed, and been browsing and expressed interest in a particular product.

Then, you can route that, as appropriate, into whatever customer relationship management (CRM) system is being used and more effectively follow up with that customer, either with your own direct sales force or with passing that lead to your partners for the appropriate follow up.

Gardner: This is interesting. App stores in the enterprise seem to be the gift that keeps giving. We have distribution benefits, but now we are looking at some marketing and business intelligence (BI) benefit, where we can segment and provide a different façade or set of applications and services to different constituencies, know who they are, create a relationship, gather metadata about their activities, and then better serve them with the next round.

Back to you, Michele. Is there a marketing and a BI benefit through the app store model that allows for an efficiency in gathering information and delivering products and services significantly better than some of the past models, where these have all been in sort of similar silos and it has been difficult to integrate and pull them together?

As you have all of your customers, partners, and suppliers accessing these application stores, as well as your employees, you can then target those individuals with appropriate information.

Pelino: You can imagine that now, with the capabilities that you have, you're going to be able to track and understand better what individuals are doing. Are they using certain applications? What they are doing? When they are doing it? As well as better understanding how you might be able to package and put together capabilities that might be more valuable to your customers in a manner that will be useful, in an individualized manner, not just basic bundles or combinations of services.

From the BI side of this, we've only started scraping the surface, because we are in the earlier stages. But as you have all of your customers, partners, and suppliers accessing these application stores, as well as your employees, you can then target those individuals with appropriate information. Not necessarily marketing all the time, but appropriate information, if it’s for employees and partners and suppliers, and for the customers, certainly marketing and promotional activities could be tied in here as well.

Gardner: It sounds very good in theory. Mark, tell us a little bit about some of the ways that this is actually being used now. I know you can’t always tell us the names of the folks you're working with, because you are an OEM supplier and they may still be in pilot in terms of their own app stores, but how are these ideas really coming into fruition? What’s really going on on the street? Some use cases for this enterprise app store concept?

Sochan: What’s happening on the street is that a number of tablet vendors are seeing that having a branded app store capability around their tablets is a critical checkbox item to creating a whole product that is valuable to the enterprise. That’s the first thing that we see happening through our direct relationships with our vendors and customers.

The second thing is that the enterprise customers and consumers of these tablets are looking and starting pilots right now, where they're setting up their own branded app store to make it easier for their internal users to be able to browse and find and demo'd applications and these pilots are starting now. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Gardner: Do you have any metrics of success? Are we too soon into this? Have you got any users that have put some of this into practice and said, "We did blank and then we got blank in return. There was a percent increase in this or a decrease in that?" Do we have any metrics that demonstrate what the payoffs from doing this are?

Trove of data

Sochan: As Michele motioned, there is a really exciting rich trove of data and BI that you get, because now you can see what users are interested in. You see what they are browsing.

All of us are very familiar with the Amazon-like model, where you rate products and services. The exact same thing is now enabled in these branded app stores, where the users are in real time rating the number of stars for that application. More importantly, they are giving their comments about what they found useful and areas that they would like to see improvements, which creates this very exciting innovation cycle.

Where previously you had very complex monolithic applications that got delivered and had a couple of year cycle, now you're seeing bite-size pieces of innovation that gets immediate feedback from the end-users. The developer sees that feedback almost instantly and is able to immediately respond with either bug fixes or feature enhancements.

What’s really exciting to me is just how fast the innovation and that feedback loop happens that just spurs more innovation.

Gardner: Before we wrap up, maybe we could step out a little bit into the future and think about some of the implications for this.

It's bringing up the value of the information into making better business decisions, and that business intelligence I think should not be underestimated.

Michele, how far do you think this can go? We've talked about how it could come back and affect the PCs. I am thinking that it really could change the way businesses operate in terms of their revenue, relationships with their customers, central repository and means of managing both marketing and innovation and then distribution.

Pelino: If you think about the evolution of where this could head, you're starting with the central piece of the value proposition to many of these mobile devices and tablets, which is the application, and that’s absolutely critical.

You're going to be proving out the value of the applications in these app stores. But, benefits that can be achieved are efficiencies around cost. You've got benefits around having all this information about your customers, your partners, your suppliers, your employees, or anybody interfacing with these application stores -- depending on how you're implementing them -- that you can now use to leverage and broaden out your relationships with them at various levels.

This is absolutely critical. It's bringing up the value of the information into making better business decisions, and that business intelligence I think should not be underestimated. The other side of it is, when you think about the complexities that are facing the IT organization at a real tangible level, that’s not going to go away.

As we look to the future, the complexities around these devices, around the tablets, the slates, the smartphones, the other devices that are the more traditional devices and endpoints that companies have to manage and deal with, that complexity is going to continue.

Managing complexity

When you think about where this can head, recognizing that companies are going to be looking for more efficient ways to manage that complexity, these application stores are one way to do that, and they provide a pretty cost effective way potentially, because, as Sam mentioned earlier, some of these are dealt with as a service, per user basis, per use basis, and so there is efficiencies around this that you can’t underestimate either.

Gardner: You almost want to throw another acronym out there, which would be something like "business services as a service."

Pelino: That’s not a bad idea. But, as you think of the future, there are a lot of opportunities to really build this out and have a critical impact on the strategic initiatives of the organization. It may not be just a tactical thing that the IT organization is implementing. It’s a very strategic potential for an organization to implement these stores.

Gardner: Mark Sochan, are you talking at that executive level with some of your customers? First, maybe you ought to quickly summarize what it is that the Partnerpedia is delivering to the market and then follow on with are you selling this to IT people or to strategic thinkers who are really looking at this as a business strategy.

Sochan: The core of the Partnerpedia offering is a white label, cloud-based, branded app store, that allows very efficient discovery and delivery of applications. The internal benefits for the internal facing app store is the capability for IT members to be able to pre-purchase select applications that they want their users have available to them. And also providing the capability to brand that app store so that it follows the company’s logo and it has a very consistent corporate look and feel.

The internal benefits for the internal facing app store is the capability for IT members to be able to pre-purchase select applications that they want their users have available to them.

Then, giving a way for users to be able to very easily search, browse, and look for applications that are specific to their role in the organization.

Finally, the license management of that software, allowing the IT department to be able to track licenses that have been purchased and downloaded, as well as be able to reclaim those licenses as is appropriate, when an employee either no longer needs that license or has left the organization or has lost the device.

And looking more to the future, we are also working very closely with customers that are building a private branded marketplace. And I distinguish between an app store and a marketplace in that a marketplace is much broader than just applications. It can be hard goods, products, services, or offerings from partners and provides just a much richer way for customers to discover value-added offerings from a company. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Gardner: Who are the folks who seem to be most interested in this? Is this something you're selling at multiple levels, or do you really have the ears yet of that business strategy?

Sochan: We're seeing it in a few different industries. Certainly high-tech is an area where this lends itself very well, because most companies are moving to a cloud services world and so they're looking for new and more innovative ways to combine and recombine multiple solution offerings to come up with more valuable offerings to their customers.

Driving opportunities

This is also driving opportunities for innovation and business models. how the customer pays for it. Having these bite-size pieces of innovation lends itself to new ideas and new business models in which there can be not only just actual new sources of revenue that can come out of this, because now it’s a channel to the market.

Gardner: Michele, are there any resources at Forrester that you could point people to, if they wanted to explore this a bit more? Are there some reports, some URLs, any place that you would suggest people go to at Forrester to learn more?

Pelino: As I was talking I was referencing a few points of data from various reports that might be relevant, and you can get to those links through the Forrester site.

There's one report that sets up the complexity that’s facing many organizations that I touched on very early on, called "Managing Mobile Complexity."

There's another report that’s coming out very soon around mobility in the cloud. We've been talking about these delivery mechanisms, cloud-based delivery mechanisms for applications and services, especially around mobile devices and applications and services.

Having these bite-size pieces of innovation lends itself to new ideas and new business models.

Gardner: Mark Sochan at Partnerpedia, are there some reports, resources, white papers, ways in which people can learn more about your approach to the market and this notion of the white label in the cloud app store as a service?

Sochan: We have some great white papers that people can access from our website at partnerpedia.com, that will give very useful insights into some of the best leading practices in this area.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on the fast moving trend supporting the escalating demand for enterprise app stores.

I'd like to thanks our guests, Michele Pelino, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Thanks, Michele.

Pelino: Thanks so much.

Gardner: And Mark Sochan, CEO at Partnerpedia. Thank you, Mark.

Sochan: My pleasure.

Gardner: And also Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. Thanks, Sam.

Liu: Thanks, Dana.

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

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Request an app marketplace demo. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the development of enterprise app stores and application marketplaces for ISVs to extend and modernize the applications delivery model to better serve employees, customers, and partners. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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