Columbia Sportswear Sets Torrid Pace for Reaping Global Business Benefits From Software-Defined Data Center

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how a major sportswear company has leveraged virtualization, SDDC and hybrid cloud to reap substantial business benefits.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you directly from the recent VMworld 2014 Conference. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of BriefingsDirect IT Strategy Discussions.

Gardner

We’re here in San Francisco to explore the latest developments in hybrid cloud computing, end-user computing, and software-defined data center (SDDC).

Our next innovator case study interview focuses on Columbia Sportswear in Portland, Oregon. We're joined by a group from Columbia Sportswear, and we'll learn more about how they've made the journey to SDDC. We'll see how they’ve made great strides in improving their business results through IT, and where they expect to go next with their software-defined efforts.

To learn more, please join me in welcoming our guests, Suzan Pickett, Manager of Global Infrastructure Services at Columbia Sportswear; Tim Melvin, Director of Global Technology Infrastructure at Columbia, and Carlos Tronco, Lead Systems Engineer at Columbia Sportswear. Welcome.

Gardner: People are familiar with your brand, but they might not be familiar with your global breadth. Tell us a little bit about the company, so we appreciate the task ahead of you as IT practitioners.

Pickett: Columbia Sportswear is in its 75th year. We're a leader in global manufacturing of apparel, outdoor accessories, and equipment. We're distributed worldwide and we have infrastructure in 46 locations around the world that we manage today. We're very happy to say that we're 100 percent virtualized on VMware products.

Pickett

Gardner: And those 46 locations, those aren't your retail outlets. That's just the infrastructure that supports your retail. Is that correct?

Pickett: Exactly, our retail footprint in North America is around 110 retail stores today. We're looking to expand that with our joint venture in China over the next few years with Swire, distributor of Columbia Sportswear products.

Gardner: You're clearly a fast-growing organization, and retail itself is a fast-changing industry. There’s lots going on, lots of data to crunch -- gaining more inference about buyer preferences --  and bringing that back into a feedback loop. It’s a very exciting time.

Tell me about the business requirements that you've had that have led you to reinvest and re-energize IT. What are the business issues that are behind that?

Global transformation

Pickett: Columbia Sportswear has been going through a global business transformation. We've been refreshing our enterprise resource planning (ERP). We had a green-field implementation of SAP. We just went live with North America in April of this year, and it was a very successful go-live. We're 100 percent virtualized on VMware products and we're looking to expand that into Asia and Europe as well.

So, with our global business transformation, also comes our consumer experience, on the retail side as well as wholesale. IT is looking to deliver service to the business, so they can become more agile and focused on engineering better products and better design and get that out to the consumer.

Gardner: To be clear, your retail efforts are not just brick and mortar. You're also doing it online and perhaps even now extending into the mobile tier. Any business requirements there that have changed your challenges?

Pickett: Absolutely. We're really pleased to announce, as of summer 2014, that Columbia Sportswear is an AirWatch customer as well. So we get to expand our end-user computing and our VMWare Horizon footprint as well as some of our SDDC strategies.

We're looking at expanding not only our e-commerce and brick-and-mortar, but being able to deliver more mobile platform-agnostic solutions for Columbia Sportswear, and extend that out to not only Columbia employees, but our consumer experience.

Gardner: Let’s hear from Tim about your data center requirements. How does what Suzan told us about your business challenges translate into IT challenges?

Melvin

Melvin: With our business changing and growing as quickly as it is, and with us doing business and selling directly to consumers in more than 100 countries around the world, our data centers have to be adaptable. Our data and our applications have to be secure and available, no matter where we are in the world, whether you're on network or off-premises.

The SDDC has been a game-changer for us. It’s allowed to take those technologies, host them where we need them, and with whatever cost configuration makes sense, whether it’s in the cloud or on-premises, and deliver the solutions that our business needs.

Gardner: Let's do a quick fact-check in terms of where you are in this journey to SDDC. It includes a lot. There are management aspects, network aspects, software-defined storage, and then of course mobile. Does anybody want to give me the report card on where you are in terms of this journey?

100 percent virtualized

Pickett: We're 100 percent virtualized with our compute workloads today. We also have our storage well-defined with virtualized storage. We're working on an early adoption proof of concept (POC) with VMware's NSX for software-defined networking.

It really fills our next step into defining our SDDC, being able to leverage all of our virtual workloads, being able to extend that into the vCloud Air hybrid cloud, and being able to burst our workloads to expand our data centers our toolsets. So we're looking forward to our next step of our journey, which is software-defined networking via NSX.

Gardner: Taking that network plunge, what about the public-cloud options for your hybrid cloud? Do you use multiple public clouds, and what's behind your choice on which public clouds to use?

Melvin: When you look at infrastructure and the choice between on-premise solutions, hybrid clouds, public and private clouds, I don't think it's a choice necessarily of which answer you choose. There isn't one right answer. What’s important for infrastructure professionals is to understand the whole portfolio and understand where to apply your high-power, on-premises equipment and where to use your lower-cost public cloud, because there are trade-offs in each case.

What’s important for infrastructure professionals is to understand the whole portfolio and understand where to apply your high-power, on-premises equipment and where to use your lower-cost public cloud

When we look at our workloads, we try to present the correct tool for the correct job. For instance, for our completely virtualized SAP environment we run that on internal, on-premises equipment. We start to talk about development in a sandbox, and those cases are probably best served in a public cloud, as long as we can secure and automate, just like we can on-site.

Gardner: As you're progressing through SDDC and you're exploring these different options and what works best both technically and economically in a hybrid cloud environment, what are you doing in terms of your data lifecycle. Is there a disaster recovery (DR) element to this? Are you doing warehousing in a different way and disturbing that, or are you centralizing it? I know that analysis of data is super important for retail organizations. Any thoughts about that data component on this overall architecture?

Pickett: Data is really becoming a primary concern for Columbia Sportswear, especially as we get into more analytical situations. Today, we have our two primary data centers in North America, which we do protect with VMWare’s vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM), a very robust DR solution.

We're very excited to work with an enterprise-class cloud like vCloud Air that has not only the services that we need to host our systems, but also DR as a service, which we're very interested in pursuing, especially around our remote branch office scenarios. In some of those remote countries, we don't have that protection today, and it will give a little more business continuity or disaster avoidance, as needed.

As we look at data in our data centers, our primary data centers with big data, if you will, and/or enterprise data warehouse strategies, we've started looking at how we're replicating the data where that data lives. We've started getting into active data center scenarios -- active, active.

We're really excited around some of the announcements we've heard recently at VMworld around virtual volumes (VVOLs) and where that’s going to take us in the next couple of years, specifically around vMotion over long-distance. Hopefully, we'll follow the sun, and maybe five years from now, we'll able to move our workloads from North America to Asia and be able to take those workloads and have them follow where the people are using them.

Geographic element

Gardner: That’s really interesting about that geographic element if you're a global company. I haven't heard that from too many other organizations. That’s an interesting concept about moving data and workloads around the world throughout the day.

We've seen some recent VMware news around different types of cloud data offerings, Cloud Object Store for example, and moving to a virtual private cloud on demand. Where do you see the next challenge is in terms of your organization and how do you feel that VMware is setting a goal post for you?

vCloud Air, being an enterprise-class offering, gives us the management capability and allows us to use the same tools that we would use on site.

Tronco: The vCloud Air offerings that we've heard so much about are an exciting innovation.

Public clouds have been available for a long time. There are a lot of places where they make sense, but vCloud Air, being an enterprise-class offering, gives us the management capability and allows us to use the same tools that we would use on-site.

It gives us the control that we need in order to provide a consistent experience to our end-users. I think there is a lot of power there, a lot of capability, and I'm really excited to see where that goes.

Gardner: How about some of the automation issues with the vRealize Suite, such Air Automation. Where do you see the component of managing all this? It becomes more complex when you go hybrid. It becomes, in one sense, more standardized and automated when you go software-defined, but you also have to have your hands on the dials and be able to move things.

Tronco

Tronco: One of the things that we really like about vCloud Air is the fact that we'll be able to use the same tools on-premises and off-premises, and won't have to switch between tools or dashboards. We can manage that infrastructure, whether it's on-premise or in the public cloud, will be able to leverage the efficiencies we have on-premise in vCloud Air as well.

We also can take advantage of some of those new services, like ObjectStore, that might be coming down the road, or even continuous integration (CI) as a service for some of our development teams as we start to get more into a DevOps world.

Customer reactions

Gardner: Let’s tie this back to the business. It's one thing to have a smooth-running, agile IT infrastructure machine. It's great to have an architecture that you feel is ready to take on your tasks, but how do you translate that back to the business? What does it get for you in business terms, and how are you seeing reactions from your business customers?

Pickett: We're really excited to be partnering with the business today. As IT comes out from underground a little bit and starts working more with the business and understanding their requirements -- especially with tools like VMware vRealize Automation, part of the vCloud Suite -- we're now partnering with our development teams to become more agile and help them deliver faster services to the business.

We're working on one of our e-commerce order confirmation toolsets with vRealize Automation, part of the vCloud Suite, and their ability to now package and replicate the work that they're doing rather than reinventing the wheel every time we build out an environment or they need to do a test or a development script.

By partnering with them and enabling them to be more agile, IT wins. We become more services-oriented. Our development teams are winning, because they're delivering faster to the business and the business wins, because now they're able to focus more on the core strategies for Columbia Sportswear.

Gardner: Do you have any examples that you can point to where there's been a time-to-market benefit, a time-to-value faster upgrade of an application, or even a data service that illustrates what you've been able to deliver as a result of your modernization?

Our development teams are winning, because they're delivering faster to the business and the business wins, because now they're able to focus more on the core strategies.

Pickett: Just going back to the toolset that I just mentioned. That was an upgrade process, and we took that opportunity to sit down with our development team and start socializing some of the ideas around VMware vRealize Automation and vCloud Air and being able to extend some of our services to them.

At the same time, our e-commerce teams are going through an upgrade process. So rather than taking weeks or months to deliver this technology to them, we were able to sit down, start working through the process, automate some of those services that they're doing, and start delivering. So, we started with development, worked through the process, and now we have quality assurance and staging and we're delivering product. All this is happening within a week.

So we're really delivering and we're being more agile and more flexible. That’s a very good use case for us internally from an IT standpoint. It's a big win for us, and now we're going to take it the next time we go through an upgrade process.

We've had this big win and now we're going to be looking at other technologies -- Java, .NET, or other solutions -- so that we can deliver and continue the success story that we're having with the business. This is the start of something pretty amazing, bringing development and infrastructure together and mobilizing what Columbia Sportswear is doing internally.

Gardner: Of course, we call it SDDC, but it leads to a much more comprehensive integrated IT function, as you say, extending from development, test, build, operations, cloud, and then sourcing things as required for a data warehouse and applications sets. So finally, in IT, after 30 or 40 years, we really have a unified vision, if you will.

Any thoughts, Tim, on where that unification will lead to even more benefits? Are there ancillary benefits from a virtuous adoption cycle that come to mind from that more holistic whole-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts IT approach?

Flexibility and power

Melvin: The closer we get to a complete software-defined infrastructure, the more flexibility and power we have to remove the manual components, the things that we all do a little differently and we can't do consistently.

We have a chance to automate more. We have the chance to provide integrations into other tools, which is actually a big part of why we chose VMware as our platform. They allow such open integration with partners that, as we start to move our workloads more actively into the cloud, we know that we won't get stuck with a particular product or a particular configuration.

The openness will allow us to adapt and change, and that’s just something you don't get with hardware. If it's software-defined, it means that you can control it and you can morph your infrastructure in order to meet your needs, rather than needing to re-buy every time something changes with the business.

Gardner: Of course, we think about not just technology, but people and process. How has all of this impacted your internal IT organization? Are you, in effect, moving people around, changing organizational charts, perhaps getting people doing things that they enjoy more than those manual tasks? Carlos, any thought about the internal impact of this on your human resources issues?

Tronco: Organizationally, we haven’t changed much, but the use of some thing like vRealize Automation allows us to let development teams do some of those tasks that they used to require us to do.

Now, we can do it in an automated fashion. We get consistency. We get the security that we need. We get the audit trail. But we don’t have to have somebody around on a Saturday for two minutes of work spread across eight hours. It also lets those application teams be more agile and do things when they're ready to do them.

We can all leverage the tools and configurations. That's really powerful.

Having that time free lets us do a better job with engineering, look down the road better with a little more clarity, maybe try some other things, and have more time to look at different options for the next thing down the road.

Melvin: Another point there is that, in a fully software-defined infrastructure, while it may not directly translate into organizational changes, it allows you to break down silos. Today, we have operations, system storage, and database teams working together on a common platform that they're all familiar with and they all understand.

We can all leverage the tools and configurations. That's really powerful. When you don't have the network guys sitting off doing things different from what the server guys are doing, you can focus more on comprehensive solutions, and that extends right into the development space, as Carlos mentioned. The next step is to work just as closely with our developers as we do with our peers and infrastructure.

Gardner: It sounds as if you're now also in a position to be more fleet. We all have higher expectations as consumers. When I go to a website or use an application, I expect that I'll see the product that I want, that I can order it, that it gets paid for, and then track it. There is a higher expectation from consumers now.

Is that part of your business payback that you tie into IT? Is there some way that we can define the relationship between that user experience for speed and what you're able to do from a software-defined perspective?

Preventing 'black ops'

Pickett: As an internal service provider for Columbia Sportswear, we can do it better, faster, and cheaper on-premise and with our toolsets from our partners at VMware. This helps prevent black ops situations, for example, where someone is going out to another cloud provider outside the parameters and guidelines from IT.

Today, we're partnering with the business. We're delivering that service. We're doing it at the speed of thought. We're not in a position where we're saying "no," "not yet," or "maybe in a couple of weeks," but "Yes, we can do that for you." So it's a very exciting position to be in that if someone comes to us or if we're reaching out, having conversations about tools, features, or functionality, we're getting a lot of momentum around utilizing those toolsets and then being able to expand our services to the business.

Tronco: Using those tools also allows us to turn around things faster within our development teams, to iterate faster, or to try and experiment on things without a lot of work on our part. They can try some of it, and if it doesn’t work, they can just tear it down.

Today, we're partnering with the business. We're delivering that service. We're doing it at the speed of thought.

Gardner: So you've gone through this journey and you're going to be plunging in deeper with software-defined networking. You have some early-adopter chops here. You guys have been bold and brave.

What advice might you offer to some other organizations that are looking at their data-center architecture and strategy, thinking about the benefits of hybrid cloud, software-defined, and maybe trying to figure out in which order to go about it?

Pickett: I'd recommend that, if you haven’t virtualized your workloads -- to get them virtualized. We're in that no-limit situation. There are no longer restrictions or boundaries around virtualizing your mission-critical or your tier-one workloads. Get it done, so you can start leveraging the portability and the flexibility of that.

Start looking at the next steps, which will be automation, orchestration, provisioning, service catalogs, and extending that into a hybrid-cloud situation, so that you can focus more on what your core offerings are going to be your core strategies. And not necessarily offload, but take advantage of some of those capabilities that you can get in VMware vCloud Air for example, so that you can focus on really more of what’s core to your business.

Gardner: Tim, any words of advice from your perspective?

Melvin: When it comes to solutions in IT, the important thing is to find the value and tie it back to the business. So look for those problems that your business has today, whether it's reducing capital expense through heavy virtualization, whether it's improving security within the data center through NSX and micro-segmentation, or whether it's just providing more flexible infrastructure for your temporary environments like SAN and software development through the cloud.

Find those opportunities and tie it back to a value that the business understands. It’s important to do something with software-defined data centers. It's not a trend and it's not really even a question anymore. It's where we're going. So get moving down that path in whatever way you need to in order to get started. And find those partners, like VMware, that will support you and build those relationships and just get moving.

20/20 hindsight

Gardner: Carlos, advice, thoughts about 20/20 hindsight?

Tronco: As Suzan said, it's focusing on virtualizing the workloads and then being able to leverage some of those other tools like vRealize Automation. Then you're able to free staff up to pursue activities and add more value to the environment and the business, because you're not doing repeatable things manually. You'll get more consistency now that people have time. They're not down because they're doing all these day two, day three operations and things that wear and grate on you.

Gardner: I suppose there's nothing like being responsive to your business constituents. That, then, enables them to seek for more help, which then adds to your value, when we get into that virtuous cycle, rather than a dead end of people not even bothering to ask for help or new and innovative ideas in business.

It’s important to do something with software-defined data centers. It's not a trend and it's not really even a question anymore.

Congratulations. That sounds like a very impactful way to go about IT. We've been learning about how Columbia Sportswear in Portland, Oregon has been adjusting to the software-defined data center strategy and we've heard how that's brought them some business benefits in their fast-paced retail organization worldwide.

So a big thank you to our guests, Suzan Pickett, Manager of Global Infrastructure Services at Columbia Sportswear; Tim Melvin, Director of Global Technology Infrastructure, and Carlos Tronco, Lead Systems Engineer at Columbia Sportswear. Thanks so much.

And a big thank you to our audience for joining us for this special discussion series, coming to you directly from the recent 2014 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.

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

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how a major sportswear company has leveraged virtualization, SDDC and hybrid cloud to reap substantial business benefits. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Millennium Pharmacy Takes SaaS Model to New Heights Via Policy-Driven Operations Management and Automation

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major healthcare provider has used advanced IT management and operational efficiency processes and systems to keep applications up to date, compliant, performant, and protected.

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.

Gardner

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how an online pharmaceutical services provider Millennium Pharmacy Systems, Inc. has implemented a variety of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and then managed them through a more automated and efficient operational approach.

We'll learn how Millennium Pharmacy has used advanced IT management and operational efficiency processes and systems to keep applications up to date, compliant, performant, and protected.

To hear more detail on how automation and operational efficiencies help them improve their business results and customer retention, please join me in welcoming Leon Ravenna, Vice President of IT and Operations and Information Security Officer at Millennium Pharmacy Systems, Inc., based in Cranberry Township Pennsylvania. Welcome, Leon. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Leon Ravenna: Good afternoon.

Gardner: We're glad you could join us. Tell us a little bit about your IT state. What was the situation in your organization that made it clear that the way you had been doing it in the past was not holding up and that some new level of optimization, organization automation, improvement was needed?

Ravenna: I'll be happy to. I've been here about 14 months. One of the things that we looked at doing right, when I came in, is taking both the data centers that we have -- one is owned and one is a co-located facility -- and eliminating a lot of the older hardware that we had.

We are now about 85 percent virtualized. Our  primary datacenter is for our customer-facing application, a SaaS application, built on SQL/.Net and Silverlight, for about 250 nursing care facilities on the East Coast. This basically controls all of the medications that a patient would need. It does our medical reordering and passes that information in an entirely integrated fashion back to our in-house systems for billing and filling of prescriptions.

What we looked to doing first was consolidating, getting rid of the older hardware, and moving us to a much better state. One of the nice things about VMware is that it’s just rock solid. We're kind of weary of knocking on wood, but it’s rock solid for us. It gives us the ability to move applications on an as-needed basis. We can upgrade things on the fly. In one data center, we are currently on 5.1, and we're moving the other data center to 5.1.

On our SaaS application, I have 250 separate SQL databases on seven SQL servers, running in a VMware environment and that helps me dramatically cut my licensing cost for SQL server and helps to manage them in a high availability way.

Gardner: Leon, before we get more into what you do and why you have certain requirements, I'd like to get a bit more information about what was different before you went to high virtualization. Everybody talks about the efficiency in cost utilization, but what about the management? Is there something about the way you've done this that has allowed you to be 24x7 up and keeping the performance where it need to be?

More efficient

Ravenna: We had a couple of older Dell blade chassis, and inevitably you would lose the power supply or a server, and I just don’t have that. From an operational standpoint, it just helps to be more efficient. It has the ability to turn new servers up faster. It’s not something that we do all the time, but it helps me be much more efficient. I have a fairly small staff, and my goal is to let them sleep at night.

By having more VMware in place, about 85 percent virtualized, it allows me to do that. If the server fails, they applications move to a different server. I have the ability to upgrade the servers on the fly. It allows me, from an operational standpoint, to be more secure in what we're doing.

And it helps me lower my cost, because I am not as worried about my HVAC. I have less equipment to worry about. I have less break-fix to worry about. All in all, it helps me be remarkably more efficient.

Gardner: Let’s learn a bit more about Millennium Pharmacy. You're in the healthcare field which of course has already got pretty stringent requirements in terms of compliance, regulations, cost, audit trails, and making sure that data is available. Tell us about what you do and then perhaps a bit about why your requirements are pretty dramatic.

Ravenna: As I said, we host a system for about 250 nursing-care facilities. As a patient, you don’t have much time with your nurse. The nurse is typically gathering your drugs. We have our own pharmacies that service those homes. We deliver, in a cellophane sealed package, your medications.

We're working to implement the new HIPAA regulations so we can be even tighter in that space.

These packages say, "Mr. Smith, take this at dinner time." There's a barcode for every drug, and when the nurse gives them the drug, they use a wireless scanner to scan that barcode and it automatically reorders the next set of drugs. We give patients about a three- or four-day supply, as opposed to 45- or 90-day supply, which cuts the cost for the nursing care facility itself. Then, we manage all of that data back to our other systems, that manage the filling of new prescriptions and billing and then we deliver every day.

The healthcare space is fairly stringent, and and getting more so with the new HIPAA regulations. New ones just came out on March 26 of this year, and the enforcement and penalties are much greater. There’s some significant items that have  changed, but really it’s the enforcement and penalties, things around encryption, and protecting customers' data.

We also have to protect confidential information and so we need to be very secure. We're working to implement the new HIPAA regulations so we can be even tighter in that space.

Gardner: This is all done through SaaS and cloud. There are no on-premises installations of your application. Is that right?

Ravenna: Only one facility of our 250 that has their own system. They are large, and one of their requirements was to have their own, but we support the rest of them, approximately 250, all cloud based. They can get to it from their Internet connection.

All SaaS

Depending on what the customer needs, we may set up the entire environment for them, networks, wireless, scanners, and printers, or they get to us through their own equipment and internet connections. But yes, it's all SaaS. 

Gardner: We're talking about being highly mission critical, people getting their medicine. We're also talking about being highly efficient. What were some of the requirements in terms of the infrastructure, particularly as we look now towards managing so many different instances and the ability to be agile and fire up new versions of VMware and to get those apps up and running? What were some of your requirements just from a management perspective?

Ravenna: It had to be easy. I have three system engineers. I only have a couple of network engineers. We support, on the network side, approximately 250 VPN tunnels out to customers, and as you said, it's mission critical. If people don’t get their drugs, it’s a bad day. We take that mission very seriously, making sure those systems are up and running.

From an operational or management standpoint, we really need to be monitoring to know what’s happening and when. Having VMware in that mix gives us the ability to make things consistent, but it also helps to  reduce our cost from a licensing standpoint and helps us manage them better, because we can see what’s happening at any given moment.

Gardner: So as a mid-market organization, you're resource constrained, you just don’t have a huge stuff, and you need automation. You need to have the ability to manage things, perhaps remotely.

It lets us be a lot more efficient with what we are doing. It lets us manage more efficiently.

So it's this notion of total approach to management, rather than silos, rather than integration of different management approaches and products together. That just wouldn’t fly. What have you done? What have you experimented with, as you move towards this more complete notion of management, one-stop shop, one pane of glass type thing?

Ravenna: There are a couple of things that we've done. We're evaluating vCenter Operations Management Suite. One of the things that it has  let us do is dramatically reduce the size of our virtual machines (VMs).

Typically, if you're moving from a physical environment, VMware is a lot more efficient and it’s really kind of surprising seeing some of the reports that come back from vCenter Operations Management that tell you, realistically, you are running this server with six gigabytes of memory, but you are only really using one.

It’s a little bit spooky to look at it and ask if we really want to go that far. In some cases we would say, "Yes, let’s go ahead and do that," and it’s been, for the most part, dead-on. We've looked at a couple of things where our gut didn't say it was the right thing, even though it probably was. There's still a little bit of that old-school mentality that says you need to get more resources, when in fact the server may not even need them.

It lets us be a lot more efficient with what we are doing. It lets us manage more efficiently, because I can put more databases or more servers on each VM host.

Move quickly

Gardner: So when you look at the total picture, you need to be agile and able to move your resources quickly. You have a small staff. You need to be compliant in the tough confines of the healthcare regulatory environment.

Where do you look to go next? Is there a higher vision that you develop? We hear about the software-defined datacenter, for example. We hear about cloud computing where you can actually mirror your entire data center from one location to another, maybe it’s for disaster recovery (DR), maybe it’s just for operational efficiency. Is that on your radar? Is that what you like to see?

Ravenna: Absolutely. I have an overriding philosophy, after doing this for last 20 plus years. The simpler I can make it, the more I get to sleep. Sleep is a recurring theme and realistically, that means fewer calls during the night.

We're looking to move to vCloud Suite, in particular Site Recovery Manager (SRM), and using the vCenter Operations Management Suite to allow us to be more efficient. It just helps us work better and faster. Some of the key components will help me to be as efficient as possible. I may eventually need  to build out virtual data centers, so the VMware vCloud Director helps me.

Those are some of the key things I'm looking for in the future. For me, having multiple data centers, the ability to have VMware SRM, is just a great thing. It’s getting ready to thunderstorm here, and having the ability to move my services to a different data center that’s about 35 miles away is key.

I'm very leery about putting my data just in a cloud with everybody else. It would have to be very specific to the healthcare space.

Gardner: It’s pretty interesting that the notion a one-size-fits-all, plain vanilla, public cloud wouldn’t be attractive to you. What would you like to see and what have you heard from VMware that might lead to believe that they would be in a position to offer such as cloud service?

Ravenna: I don’t know that VMware has that today, but it’s a trusted brand, and I'm very leery about putting my data just in a cloud with everybody else. It would have to be very specific to the healthcare space, because you end up signing a business associate agreement with me.

It would have to be what I would term carrier-class facilities that can prove they are in the healthcare space, dedicated to being there, and abide by all the HIPAA Rules. We have all of the things like PCI and SSAE 16. Those type things really need to be there and geared towards the healthcare space specifically for me to be able to look at them.

Gardner: And completely invisible to the end user. They're still getting their meds, making their orders, and everything is up and running. That’s a great vision. Do you see the vCenter Operations Management Suite as a key stepping stone to getting there? It seems to me that you can’t get to that vision until you really rationalize, organize, and lock down your operational integrity of what you have to play.

Ravenna: Yes. It will be key component. In concert, the VMware Operations Management Suite and the vCloud Suite will help me get there. My whole goal is to be able to make things as simple as possible and as easy as possible to manage, and these tools let me do that and be more efficient.

No choice

I'm not a guy who wants to understand electricity or heating and ventilation, but unfortunately in the world that we live today, in the mid-market space, you have your own data centers. You have no choice. You have to play in that game. Anything that I can do that helps me to address those issues to run cooler or run with less equipment is just all goodness.

Gardner: As you have attained 85 percent virtualization and you're looking for efficiencies in your storage and your resource utilization, is there a payback that you can take to your higher ups? When it comes time to invest and go further down this journey, with that fully realization of cloud and ease of moving payloads, workloads across distances that, do you have metrics? Can you say, "Listen, I'm saving x percent?" How do you convince the bean counter that this is the right thing to do?

Ravenna: It’s not necessarily a metric, but when you're spending less year over year on equipment, that’s evidence. Every server you buy is going to be in the roughly $5-$10,000 range. If I'm not doing that, I'm agile and nimble in being able to say that I can accommodate that.

That's opposed to the old process which was, get the capital done, go to finance, and wait six weeks to get a server, and then put it in. Inevitably there is something that’s constrained. So that six-week lead time becomes eight or ten weeks. It just helps me to move faster and spend a lot less capital money.

One of the things that I mentioned a little bit ago was licensing from a SQL standpoint, but things like backup that are running on a per-processor standpoint within VM drop my overall cost.

Anything that I can do that helps me to address those issues to run cooler or run with less equipment is just all goodness.

One of the things that it’s helpful as well is the dashboarding ability to be able to show what’s going on, what’s happening, and what the environment looks like. vCenter Operations Management Suite gives me that and it's all goodness.

Gardner: Leon, for those folks who might not be quite at 85 percent and who are trying to get there for some of the reasons you just mentioned, what advice would you give them? What are some of things that you’ve learned along the way to smooth that path to more managed, automated and agile?

Ravenna: One of the things that you will inevitably hear is -- and this may be kind of an old school thing -- the application won’t do that. You know what, it probably will. You can’t take no for an answer.

Most of the applications that we have, our applications are all custom .NET and SQL. But a lot of the other applications we have just moved there, because it made sense to us.

It make operations easier for me, but realistically, part of it is not taking no for an answer. If you're comparing the cost of, say, a two processor server, and you are going to go buy four, five, or six servers, take one of those servers and put that investment into VMware and vCenter Operations Management. You're going to be happier in the long term.

Managing the manager

Gardner: It sounds like you've made a lot of progress and I wish you well. My last area of questions is around managing the manager, the vCenter Operations Management Suite. Have you had to do a lot of training yourself? Did you go through it? How do you manage the personnel side in an organization like yours, where you do have still jacks-of-all-trades working in IT? What was the ramp-up in terms of the skills and the running of the management system?

Ravenna: For vCenter Operations Management Suite, it wasn’t too bad at all. We were talking to VMware, and they said it would be potentially beneficial. We started up, ran it, and there really wasn’t that much training that was necessary.

The harder thing was when they came back and said we were over provisioned. That was  making that rationalization that VMware is a lot more efficient than physical hardware. It meant taking some of our servers from 4 GB RAM down to one half that, because that’s where they needed to be. In some cases, you want to be a little bit safe. You ultimately find out that the tool was right, and you were being gun shy.

We started up, ran it, and there really wasn’t that much training that was necessary.

Gardner: So you have more information at your finger tips, but sometimes it can be challenging to know what to do with it. I certainly understand that.

Ravenna: Yeah, a lot of it's interpretation.

Gardner: Great. We've been talking about how online pharmaceutical services provider Millennium Pharmacy Systems has implemented a variety of SaaS and other applications, virtualized them, and then managed that virtualization more to an automated operations approach. And we learned how this advanced IT management operation efficiency can keep these mission-critical applications up-to-date, performant, compliant and protective.

I want to thank our guest for joining us. Leon Ravenna. He is Vice President of IT Operations as well as the Information Security Officer there at Millennium Pharmacy Systems. Thanks so much, Leon.

Ravenna: Sure. Happy to help.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. I want to thank our audience as well for listening, and don’t forget to come back next time. 

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major healthcare provider has used advanced IT management and operational efficiency processes and systems to keep applications up to date, compliant, performant, and protected. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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Thomas Duryea’s Journey to the Cloud: Part One

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how one Australian IT integrator has escalated cloud infrastructure development to provide a portfolio of new public 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 leading Australian IT services provider Thomas Duryea Consulting has made a successful journey to cloud computing. We'll learn why a cloud-of-clouds approach is providing new types of IT services to Thomas Duryea’s many Asia-Pacific region customers.

Our discussion kicks off a three-part series on how Thomas Duryea (TD) designed, built, and commercialized a vast cloud infrastructure. The first part of our series addresses the rationale and business opportunity for TD to create their cloud-services portfolio built on VMware. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Stay with us now to learn more about implementing the best cloud technology to deliver and commercialize an adaptive and reliable cloud services ecosystem. Here to share their story on this journey, we're joined by Adam Beavis, General Manager of Cloud Services at Thomas Duryea in Melbourne, Australia. Welcome Adam.

Adam Beavis: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Gardner: Why cloud services for your consulting and business customers now? Have they been asking for it? Has the market shifted in some way that led you to begin this journey?

Beavis: Certainly, the customers are the big driver while we are moving into cloud services. Being a traditional IT integrator, we've been very successful showing a lot of data-center solutions to our customers, but more and more we're seeing customers finding it harder to get CAPEX and new projects and they are really starting to look at the cloud alternative.

Gardner: Why then have you looked at moving toward cloud services as a commercial offering, rather than going yourself to a public cloud and then availing yourself of their services? Why build it yourself?

Beavis: We reviewed all the possibilities and looked at moving to some of the larger cloud providers, but we've got a strong skill set, a strong heritage, and good relationships with our customers, and they forced our hand in many ways to move down that path.

They were concerned about telcos looking after some of their cloud services. They really wanted to maintain the relationship that they had with us. So we reviewed it and understood that, because of the skill sets we have and the experience in this area, it would work both commercially and then relationship-wise. The best move for us was to leverage the existing relationships we have with the vendors and build out our own cloud.

Gardner: So who are these eager customers? Could you describe them? Do they fall into a particular category, like a small to medium-size business (SMB) type of clientele? Is it a vertical industry? Where is the sweet spot in the market?

No sweet spot

Beavis: That’s probably the one thing that surprised me the most. As we've been out talking to customers and selling the cloud, there really is no sweet spot. Organizations that you talk to will be doing it for different reasons. Some of them might be doing it for environmental insurance reasons, because having their data center in their building is costing them money, and there are now viable opportunity to move it out.

Adam Beavis

But if I were to identify one or two, the first one would be independent software vendors (ISVs). Cloud solutions are bringing to ISVs something they've looked for for a long time, and that’s the ability to run test and development environments. Once they've done that, they can host their applications out of a service provider and not have to worry about the underlying infrastructure, which is something, as a application developer, they're not interested in.

So we're seeing them, and we're working with quite a few. One, an Oracle partner, will actually run their tests in their environments in a cloud, and then be able to deliver those services back to some of their customers. In other cases they'll run up the development in their cloud and then import that to an on-premise cloud afterward.

The other area is with SMBs. We're certainly seeing them, for a financial reasons, want to shift to cloud. It's the same old story of OPEX versus CAPEX, reduced budgets, and trying to do more with less.

The cloud is now in a position where it can offer that to SMB customers. So we're seeing great opportunities appear, where not only are we taking their infrastructure into the cloud, but also adding on top of that managed-service capability, where we will be managing all the way up to the application.

We see us being able to provide it to anyone, from a small reseller to an ISV, someone who develops their own applications.

Gardner: Based on this mixture of different types of uses, it sounds like you're going to be able to grow your offerings right along with what this market demands. Perhaps some of those ISVs might be looking for a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) direction, others more of a managed services, just for specific applications. Was that important for you to have that sort of Swiss Army knife for cloud advancement?

Beavis: Exactly right, Dana. Each one is addressing a different pain point. For example, some of them are coming to us for disaster recovery (DR) as a service, because the cost of renewing their DR site or managing or putting that second site out is too expensive. Others, as you said, are just looking for a platform to develop applications on. So the whole PaaS concept is something near and dear to us on our roadmap.

Each one continues to evolve, and it's usually the customers that start to drive you as a cloud provider to look at your own service catalog. That’s probably something that’s quite exciting -- how quickly you need to evolve as a service provider. Because it's still quite a new area for a lot of people, and customers do ask for varying things that they expect the cloud to be or what a cloud is. We're constantly evolving and looking at new offerings to add into our service catalog.

Gardner: In my introduction I mentioned a cloud-of-clouds ecosystem. Does that make sense? Is that the sort of goal that you are ultimately going to reach with your journey?

Beavis: It definitely is. We see it being more than just one offering in our eyes. We see us being able to provide it to anyone, from a small reseller to an ISV, someone who develops their own applications. Or, it's someone who works specifically with applications and they're not just interested anymore in running their own infrastructure on their site or caring for it. They just want to provide that platform for their developers to be able to work hassle-free.

Gardner: So this means that you've got to come up with an infrastructure that can support many different type of uses, grow, scale, and increase adaptability to the market. What were some of the requirements, when you started looking at the vendors that you were going to partner with to create this cloud offering?

Understanding customers' needs

Beavis: The first thing that was important for us was, as you said, understanding our customers’ needs initially and then matching that to what they required. Once we had that, those words you mentioned, scale and everything, had to come into play. Also the cost to build these things certainly doesn’t come cheap. So we had to make sure we could use the existing resources we had.

We really went in the end with the VMware product, because we have existing skill sets in that area. We knew we would have a lot of support, with their being a tier-1 vendor and us being a tier-1 partner for them. We needed someone that could provide us with that support from both a services perspective, sales, marketing, and really come on the journey with us to build that cloud.

And then obviously our other vendors underneath, like EMC, who are also incredibly supportive of us, integrate very well with those products, and Cisco as well.

It had to be something that we could rapidly build, I won't say out of the box, because it’s a lot that goes around building a cloud, but something that we knew had a strong roadmap and was familiar to all our customers as well.

The move to cloud is something that is new to them, it's stressful, and they're wondering how to do it. In Australia, 99 percent of customers have some sort of VMware in their data center. To be able to move to a platform that they were familiar with and had used in the past makes a big difference, rather than saying, "You're moving to cloud, and here is a whole new platform, interface, and something that you've never seen before."

Needless to say, we're very good partners with some of the other providers as well. We did review them all, but it was a maturity thing and also a vision thing.

The story of the hybrid cloud was something we sat down and saw had a lot of legs: The opportunity for people to stick their toe in the water and get used to being in the cloud environment. And VMware’s hybrid cloud model, connecting your on-premise into the public cloud, was also a big win for us. That’s really a very strong go-to-market for us.

Gardner: As a systems integrator for some time, you're very familiar with the other virtualization offerings in the market. Was there anything in particular that led you away from them and more toward VMware?

Beavis: Not really. It was definitely a maturity thing. We remember when Paul Maritz got on stage four years ago and defined the cloud operating system. The whole industry followed after that. VMware led in this path. So being a market leader certainly helped.

Needless to say, we're very good partners with some of the other providers as well. We did review them all, but it was a maturity thing and also a vision thing. The vision of a software-defined datacenter really came into play as we were building Cloud 2.0 and that was a big winner for us. That vision that they have now around that is certainly something that we believe in as well.

Gardner: Of course, they've announced new and important additions to their vCloud Suite, and a lot of that seems to focus on folks like yourself who need to create clouds as a business to be able to measure, meter, build, manage access, privacy, and security issues. Was there anything about the vCloud Suite that attractive you in terms of being able to run the cloud as a business itself?

Product integration

Beavis: The fact it was packing stuff as a suite was a big one for us. The integration of the products now is something that’s happening a lot more rapidly, and as a provider, that’s what we like to see. The concept of needing different modules for billings, operations, even going back 12 months ago, made it quite difficult.

In the last 12 months with the Suite, it has come a long way. We've used the component around Chargeback, vCenter Operations Management, and Capacity Management. The concept now of software-defined security, firewalls, and networking, has become very, very exciting for us, to be able to all of a sudden manage that through a single console, rather than having many different point solutions doing different things. As a service provider that’s committed to that VMware product, we find it very, very important.

Gardner: Margins can be a little tricky with this business. As you say, you had a lot of investment in this. How do you know when you are succeeding? Is there a benchmark that you set for yourself that would say, "We know we're doing this well when "blank?" Or is this a bit more of a crawl, walk, run approach to this overall cloud business?

Beavis: Obviously that comes with a lot of the backend work we're doing. We take a lot of time. It’s probably the most important part. Before we even go and build the cloud, it’s getting all that right. You know your direction. You know what your forecast needs to be. You know what numbers you need to hit. We certainly have numbers and targets in mind.

That’s from a financial perspective, but also customers are coming into the cloud, because just like physical to virtual, people will come, initially, just with small environment and then they'll continue to grow.

If you provide good service within your cloud, and they see that risk reduced, cost reduced, and it’s more comfortable, they will continue to move workloads into your cloud

If you provide good service within your cloud, and they see that risk reduced, cost reduced, and it’s more comfortable, they will continue to move workloads into your cloud, which obviously increases your bottom line.

Initially it’s not just, "Let’s go out and sell as much as we can to one or two customers, whatever it might be." It’s really getting as many logos into the cloud as we can, and then really work on those relationships, building up that trust, and then over time start to migrate more and more workloads into the cloud.

Gardner: Adam, help us understand for those listening who might want to start exploring your services, when do these become available? When are you announcing them, and is there any roadmap that you might be able to tease us with a little bit about what might be coming in the future?

Beavis: We've got Cloud 1.0 running at the moment, which is a cloud where we provide cloud services to customers. We have the automation level that we are putting in Cloud 2.0. Our backup services, where people no longer have to worry about tapes and things on site, backup as a service where they can just point to our data center and backup files, is available now.

Also DR as a service is probably our biggest number one seller cloud service at the moment, where people who don’t want to run those second sites, can just deploy or move those workloads over into our data center, and we can manage their DR for them.

New cloud suite

But there's a big one we're talking about. We're on stage at vForum next Wednesday, November 14, here in Australia, launching our new cloud suite built on VMware vCloud Director 5.1.

Then on the roadmap, the areas that are starting to pop up now are things like desktop as a service. We're exploring quite heavily with big data on the table, business intelligence as a service, and the ability for us to do something with all that data that we're collecting from our customers. When we talk about IT as a service, that's lifting us up to that next level again.

As I said earlier, it's continuously changing and new ideas evolve, and that’s the great thing working with an innovative company. There are always plenty of people around driving new concepts and new ideas into the cloud business.

Gardner: It's very exciting, and we look forward to learn more. We've been talking about how leading Australian IT services provider Thomas Duryea Consulting has made a successful journey to cloud computing.

It's continuously changing and new ideas evolve, and that’s the great thing working with an innovative company.

Our discussion today kicks off a three-part series on how TD designed, built, and commercialized an adaptive and reliable cloud services ecosystem. The next part of our series will delve more deeply into the how and what, rather than focusing, as we did today, on more of the business rationale for this cloud infrastructure journey.

With that, I'd like to thank our guest for being here on BriefingsDirect today, Adam Beavis, General Manager of Cloud Services at Thomas Duryea Consulting in Melbourne, Australia. Thanks so much, Adam.

Beavis: Thank you, Dana. Absolute pleasure.

Gardner: And I'd like to thank our audience for joining and listening and invite them to come back next time.

This is Dana Gardner, your host and moderator, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks so much again for joining. Bye for now.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how one Australian IT integrator has escalated cloud infrastructure development to provide a portfolio of new public cloud services. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• VMware-Powered Cloud Adoption Delivers Bevy of Data and Performance Benefits for Revlon, Says CIO David Giambruno
• Services Provider BancVue Leverages VMware Server Virtualization to Generate Private-Cloud Benefits and Increased Business Agility
• Roundtable: Revlon and SAP executives describe accretive benefits from aggressive cloud adoption
• From VMworld, cosmetics giant Revlon harnesses the power of private cloud to produce impressive savings and cost avoidance
• VMware CTO Steve Herrod on How the Software-Defined Datacenter Benefits Enterprises
• Case Study: Strategic Approach to Disaster Recovery and Data Lifecycle Management Pays Off for Australia's SAI Global