Enterprise Mobile and Client Management Demands a Rethinking of Work, Play and Productivity, Says Dell Executive

Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on the new landscape sculpted by the increasing use of mobile and BYOD, and how Dell is helping companies navigate that terrain.

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

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 the recent and rapid evolution of mobile and client management requirements have caused considerable complexity and confusion.

We’ll examine how incomplete solutions and a lack of a clear pan-client strategy have hampered the move to broader mobile support at enterprises and mid-market companies alike. This state of muddled direction has put IT in a bind, while frustrating users who are eager to gain greater productivity and flexibility in their work habits, and device choice.

To share his insights on how to better prepare for a mobile-enablement future that quickly complements other IT imperatives such as cloud, big data, and even more efficient data centers, we’re pleased to welcome our special guest, Tom Kendra, Vice President and General Manager, Systems Management at Dell Software. [Disclosure: Dell is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Welcome, Tom. How are you?

Tom Kendra: Hey, Dana. I am doing very well, and with that intro, it sounds like you’ve pretty much got the answers, my friend.

Gardner: Well, we have the questions, Tom. The answers are what people are looking for.

Kendra: I think that you’ve laid it out quite well in your opening comments. There is an enormous amount of conversation in this area and it’s moving very, very rapidly. Similar to many of your listeners, I imagine, the number of invitations we get to attend conferences on mobility or bring your own device (BYOD) is off the charts.

Every day my inbox is filled with new invites. So there’s a lot of conversation around it. Part of that, Dana, is around the fact that this is an evolving space. There are a lot of moving parts, and hopefully, in the next few minutes, we’ll be able to dive into some of those.

Gardner: I suppose, Tom, looking at this from a historical perspective, people have been dealing with a fast-moving client environment for decades. Things have changed rapidly with the client. We went through the Web transition and client-server. We’ve seen all kinds of different ways of getting apps to devices. It’s always been a fast-moving target.

I wonder, from your perspective, what’s different about the mobile and BYOD challenges today?

Speed and agility

Kendra: Our industry is characterized by speed and agility. Right now, the big drivers causing the acceleration can be put into three categories: the amount and type of data that’s available, all the different ways and devices for accessing this data, as well as the evolving preferences and policies for dictating who, what, and how data is shared.

Kendra

For example, training videos, charts and graphs versus just text, and the ability to combine these assets and deliver them in a way that allows a front-line salesperson, a service desk staffer or anyone else in the corporate ecosystem to satisfy customer requests much more efficiently and rapidly.

The second area is the number of devices we need to support. You touched on this earlier. In yesterday’s world -- and yesterday was a very short time ago -- mobility was all around the PC. Then, it was around a corporate-issued device, most likely a business phone. Now, all of a sudden, there are many, many, many more devices that corporations are issuing as well as devices people are bringing into their work environment at a rapid pace.

We’ve moved from laptops to smartphones that were corporate-issued to tablets. Soon, we’ll get more and more wearables in the environment and machine-to-machine communications will become more prevalent. All of these essentially create unprecedented opportunities, yet also complicate the problem.

The third area that’s driving change at a much higher velocity is the ever-evolving attitude about work and work-life balance. And, along with that ... privacy. Employees want to use what they’re comfortable using at work and they want to make sure their information and privacy rights are understood and protected. These three items are really driving the acceleration.

Employees want to use what they’re comfortable using at work and they want to make sure their information and privacy rights are understood and protected.

Gardner: And the response to this complexity so far, Tom, has been some suite, some mobile device management (MDM) approaches, trying to have multiple paths to these devices and supporting multiple types of infrastructure behind that. Why have these not yet reached a point where enterprises are comfortable? Why have we not yet solved the problem of how to do this well?

Kendra: When you think about all the different requirements, you realize there are many ways to achieve the objectives. You might postulate that, in certain industries, there are regulatory requirements that somewhat dictate a solution. So a lot of organizations in those industries move down one path. In industries where you don’t have quite the same regulatory environment, you might have more flexibility to choose yet another path.

The range of available options is wide, and many organizations have experimented with numerous approaches. Now, we’ve gotten to the point where we have the unique opportunity -- today and over the next couple of years -- to think about how we consolidate these approaches into a more integrated, holistic mobility solution that elevates data security and mobile workforce productivity.

None of them are inherently good or bad. They all serve a purpose. We have to ask, “How do I preserve the uniqueness of what those different approaches offer, while bringing together the similarities?”

More efficient

How can you take advantage of similarities, such as the definition of roles or which roles within the organization have access to what types of data? The commonalities may be contextual in the sense that I’m going to provide this kind of data access if you are in these kinds of locations on these kinds of devices. Those things we could probably pull together and manage in a more efficient way.

But we still want to give companies the flexibility to determine what it means to support different form factors, which means you need to understand the characteristics of a wearable device versus a smartphone or an iPad.

I also need to understand the different use cases that are most prevalent in my organization. If I’m a factory worker, for example, it may be better to have a wearable in the future, rather than a tablet. In the medical field, however, tablets are probably preferred over wearables because of the need to enter, modify and view electronic medical records. So there are different tradeoffs, and we want to be able to support all of them.

Gardner: Looking again at the historical perspective, in the past when IT was faced with a complexity --  too many moving parts, too many variables -- they could walk in and say, “Here’s the solution. This is the box we’ve put around it. You have to use it this way. That may cause you some frustration, but it will solve the bigger problem.” And they could get away with that.

Today, that’s really no longer the case. There’s shadow IT. There’s consumerization of IT. There are people using cloud services on their own volition without even going through any of the lines of business. It's right down to the individual user. How does IT now find a way to get some control, get the needed enterprise requirements met, but recognize that their ability to dictate terms is less than it used to be?

Line-of-business owners are coming forward to request that different employees or organizational groups have access to information from a multitude of devices.

Kendra: You’re bringing up a very big issue. Companies today are getting a lot of pressure from individuals bringing in their own technology. One of the case studies you and I have been following for many months is Green Clinic Health System, a physician-owned community healthcare organization in Louisiana. As you know, Jason Thomas, the CIO and IT Director, has been very open about discussing their progress -- and the many challenges -- encountered on their BYOD journey. 

As part of Green Clinic’s goal to ensure excellent patient care, the 50 physicians started bringing in different technologies, including tablets and smartphones, and then asked IT to support them. This is a great example of what happens when major organizational stakeholders -- Green Clinic’s physicians, in this case -- make technology selections to deliver better service. With Green Clinic, this meant giving doctors and clinicians anytime, anywhere access to highly sensitive patient information on any Internet-connected device without compromising security or HIPAA compliance requirements. 

In other kinds of businesses, similar selection processes are underway as line-of-business owners are coming forward to request that different employees or organizational groups have access to information from a multitude of devices. Now, IT has to figure out how to put the security in place to make sure corporate information is protected while still providing the flexibility for users to do their jobs using preferred devices.

Shadow IT often emerges in scenarios where IT puts too many restrictions on device choice, which leads line-of-business owners and their constituents to seek workarounds. As we all know, this can open the door to all sorts of security risks. When we think about the Green Clinic example, you can see that Jason Thomas strives to be as flexible as possible in supporting preferred devices while taking all the necessary precautions to protect patient privacy and HIPAA regulations.

Similar shift

Gardner: When we think about how IT needs to approach this differently -- perhaps embracing and extending what's going on, while also being mindful of those important compliance risk and governance issues -- we’re seeing a similar shift from the IT vendors.

I think there’s such a large opportunity in the market for mobile, for the modern data center, for the management of the data and the apps out to these devices, that we are seeing vendor models shifting, and we’re seeing acquisitions happening.

What's different this time from the vendor perspective? When you’re trying to bring out a solution, like with IT operators, you don’t have the same ability to just plop down a product and say, “Here’s what you do. Here’s how you buy it.” Is this is something that’s closer to an ecosystem or solution type of approach?

Kendra: An excellent point again. The types of solutions Dell is bringing to the market embrace what’s needed today while being flexible enough to accommodate future applications and evolving data access needs.

The goal is to leverage customers’ existing investments in their current infrastructures and find ways to build and expand on those with foundational elements that can scale easily as needs dictate. You can imagine a scenario in which an IT shop is not going to have the resources, especially in the mid-market, to embrace multiple ways of managing, securing, granting access, or all of these things.

The industry has to move from a position of providing a series of point solutions to guiding and leading with a strategy for pulling all these things together.

The industry has to move from a position of providing a series of point-solutions to guiding and leading with a strategy for pulling all these things together. Again, it comes down to giving companies a plan for the future that keeps pace with their emerging requirements, accommodates existing skill sets and grows with them as mobility becomes more ingrained in their ways of doing business. That’s the game -- and that’s the hard part.

We were at MobileCON two months ago in San Jose and we spoke about how companies need to think through this as they move forward. There are a couple of important points we think need to be taken into consideration. First of all, it is not just a line-of-business, IT, legal, security, or HR discussion. It's getting all those teams together to think about their current and future requirements. These conversations are critical and they need to happen in context with what’s happening across the business while taking into account the intersections and correlations with the various stakeholders.

Line of business has to step forward and say, “This is what I think allows me to drive customer value. This is what I think I need to do.” HR needs to think about it and have a say in giving employees what they need to achieve ideal work-life balance while ensuring that policies address the impact on current and future employees, contractors and consultants.

And IT needs to say, “Here is how I have to leverage the investments we’re making.” That conversation has to happen, and it happens in some organizations at a much more rapid rate than others.

Long-term affair

Gardner: That’s why I think this is easily going to be a three- to five-year affair. Perhaps it will be longer, because we’re not just talking about plopping in a mobile device management capability. We’re really talking about rethinking processes, business models, productivity, and how you acquire working skills. We’re no longer just doing word processing instead of using typewriters. We’re not just repaving cow paths. We’re charting something quite new.

There is that interrelationship between the technology capabilities and the work. I think that’s something that hasn’t been thought out. Companies were perhaps thinking, “We'll just add mobile devices onto the roster of things that we support.” But that’s probably not enough. How does the vision from that aspect work, when you try to do both a technology shift and a business transformation?

Kendra: You’ve hit again on a really important point. You used the term “plop in a MDM solution.” It's important to understand that the efforts and the initiatives that have taken place have all been really valuable. We’ve learned a lot. The issue is, as you are talking about, how to evolve this strategy and why.

Equally important is having an understanding of the business transformation that takes place when you put all these elements together—it’s much more far-reaching than simply “plopping” in a point solution for a particular aspect.

In yesterday's world, I might have had the right or ability to wipe entire devices. Let’s look at the corporate-issued device scenario. The company owns the device and therefore owns the data that resides or is accessed on that device.  Wiping the device would be entirely within my domain or purview. But in a BYOD environment, I’m not going to be able to wipe a device. So, I have to think about things much differently than I did before.

Users, based on their roles, need to have access to applications and data, and they need to have it served up in a very easy, user-friendly manner.

As companies evolve their own mobility strategies, it’s important to leverage their learnings, while remaining focused on enhancing their users’ experiences and not sacrificing them. That’s why some of the research we’ve done suggests there is a very high reconsideration rate in terms of people and their current mobility solutions.

They’ve tried various approaches and point solutions and some worked out, but others have found these solutions lacking, which has caused gaps in usability, user adoption, and manageability. Our goal is to address and close those gaps.

Gardner: Let's get to what needs to happen. It seems to me that containerization has come to the fore, a way of accessing different types of applications, acquiring those applications perhaps on the fly, rather than rolled out for the entire populace of the workforce over time. Tell us a little bit more about how you see this working better, moving toward a more supported, agile, business-friendly and user-productivity vision or future for mobility.

Kendra: Giving users the ability to acquire applications on the fly is hugely important as users, based on their roles, need to have access to applications and data, and they need to have it served up in a very easy, user-friendly manner.

The crucial considerations here are role-based, potentially even location-based. Do I really want to allow the same kinds of access to information if I’m in a coffee house in China as I do if I am in my own office? Does data need to be resident on the device once I’m offline? Those are the kinds of considerations we need to think about.

Seamless experience

What’s needed to ensure a seamless offline experience is where the issue of containerization arises. There are capabilities that enable users to view and access information in a secure manner when they’re connected to an Internet-enabled device.

But what happens when those same users are offline? Secure container-based workspaces allow me to take documents, data or other corporate information from that online experience and have it accessible whether I’m on a plane, in a tunnel or outside a wi-fi area.

The container provides a protected place to store, view, manage and use that data. If I need to wipe it later on, I can just wipe the information stored in the container, not the entire device, which likely will have personal information and other unrelated data. With the secure digital workspace, it’s easy to restrict how corporate information is used, and policies can be readily established to govern which data can go outside the container or be used by other applications.

The industry is clearing moving in this direction, and it’s critical that we make it across corporate applications.

Heretofore, it's been largely device-centric and management-centric, as opposed to user productivity role-centric.

Gardner: If I hear you correctly, Tom, it sounds as if we’re going to be able to bring down the right container, for the right device, at the right time, for the right process and/or data or application activity. That’s putting more onus on the data center, but that’s probably a good thing. That gives IT the control that they want and need.

It also seems to me that, when you have that flexibility on the device and you can manage sessions and roles and permissions, this can be a cost and productivity benefit to the operators of that data center. They can start to do better data management, dedupe, reduce their storage costs, and do backup and recovery with more of a holistic, agile or strategic approach. They can also meter out the resources they need to support these workloads with much greater efficiency, predict those workloads, and then react to them very swiftly.

We’ve talked so far about all how difficult and tough this is. It sounds like if you crack this nut properly, not only do you get that benefit of the user experience and the mobility factor, but you can also do quite a bit of a good IT blocking and tackling on the backend. Am I reading that correctly or am I overstating that?

Kendra: I think you’re absolutely on the money. Take us as individuals. You may have a corporate-issued laptop. You might have a corporate-issued phone. You also may have an iPad, a Dell tablet, or another type of tablet at home. For me, it’s important to know what Tom Kendra has access to across all of those devices in a very simple manner.

I don’t want to set up a different approach based on each individual device. I want to set up a way of viewing my data, based on my role, permissions and work needs. Heretofore, it's been largely device-centric and management-centric, as opposed to user productivity role-centric.

Holistic manner

The Dell position -- and where we see the industry going -- is consolidating much of the management and security around those devices in a holistic manner, so I can focus on what the individual needs. In doing so, it’s much easier to serve the appropriate data access in a fairly seamless manner. This approach rings true with many of our customers who want to spend more resources on driving their businesses and facilitating increased user productivity and fewer resources on managing a myriad of multiple systems.

Gardner: By bringing the point of management -- the point of power, the point of control and enablement -- back into the data center, you’re also able to link up to your legacy assets much more easily than if you had to somehow retrofit those legacy assets out to a specific device platform or a device's format.

Kendra: You’re hitting on the importance of flexibility. Earlier, we said the user experience is a major driver along with ensuring flexibility for both the employee and IT. Reducing risk exposure is another crucial driver and by taking a more holistic approach to mobility enablement, we can address policy enforcement based on roles across all those devices. Not only does this lower exposure to risk, it elevates data security since you’re addressing it from the user point of view instead of trying to sync up three or four different devices with multiple user profiles.

Gardner: And if I am thinking at that data center level, it will give me choices on where and how I create that data center, where I locate it, how I produce it, and how I host it. It opens up a lot more opportunity for utilizing public cloud services, or a combination that best suits my needs and that can shift and adapt over time.

Kendra: It really does come down to freedom of choice, doesn’t it? The freedom to use whatever device in whichever data center combination that makes the most sense for the business is really what everyone is striving for. Many of Dell’s customers are moving toward environments where they are taking both on-premise and off-premise compute resources. They think about applications as, “I can serve them up from inside my company or I can serve them up from outside my company.”

We’re a very trusted brand, and companies are interested in what Dell has to say.

The issue comes down to the fact that I want to integrate wherever possible. I want to serve up the data and the applications when needed and how needed, and I want to make sure that I have the appropriate management and security controls over those things.

Gardner: Okay, I think I have the vision much more clearly now. I expect we’re going to be hearing more from Dell Software on ways to execute toward that vision. But before we move on to some examples of how this works in practice, why Dell? What is it about Dell now that you think puts you all in a position to deliver the means to accomplish this vision?

Kendra: Dell has relationships with millions of customers around the world. We’re a very trusted brand, and companies are interested in what Dell has to say. People are interested in where Dell is going. If you think about the PC market, for example, Dell has about an 11.9 percent worldwide market share. There are hundreds and hundreds of millions of PCs used in the world today. I believe there were approximately 82 million PCs sold during the third quarter of 2013.

The point here is that we have a natural entrée into this discussion and the discussion goes like this: Dell has been a trusted supplier of hardware and we’ve played an important role in helping you drive your business, increase productivity and enable your people to do more, which has produced some amazing business results. As you move into thinking about the management of additional capabilities around mobile, Dell has hardware and software that you should consider.

Now, given that we’ve been a trusted supplier for a long time, when getting into the discussion of our world-class technology around hardware, software and services, most people are willing to listen. So we have a natural advantage for getting into the conversation.

World-class technologies

Once we’re in the conversation, we can highlight Dell’s world-class technologies, including end-user computing, servers, storage, networking, security, data protection, software, and services.

As a trusted brand with world-class technologies and proven solutions, Dell is ideally suited to help bring together the devices and underlying security, encryption, and management technologies required to deliver a unified mobile enablement solution. We can pull it all together and deliver it to the mid-market probably better than anyone else.

So the Dell advantages are numerous. In our announcements over the next few months, you’ll see how we’re bringing these capabilities together and making it easier for our customers to acquire and use them at a lower cost and faster time to value.

Gardner: One of the things that I'd like to do, Tom, is not just to tell how things are, but to show. Do we have some examples of organizations -- you already mentioned one with the Green Clinic -- that have bitten the bullet and recognized the strategic approach, the flexibility on the client, leveraging containerization, retaining control and governance, risk, and compliance requirements through IT, but giving those end-users the power they want? What's it like when this actually works?

Kendra: When it actually works, it's a beautiful thing. Let’s start there. We work with customers around the world and, as you can imagine, given people's desire for their own privacy, a lot of them don't want their names used. But we’re working with a major North American bank that has the problems that we have been discussing.

The concept of an integrated suite of policy and management capabilities is going to be extremely important going forward.

They have 20,000-plus corporate-owned smartphones, growing to some 35,000 in the next year. They have more than a thousand iPads in place, growing rapidly. They have a desktop virtualization (VDI) solution, but the VDI solution, as we spoke about earlier, really doesn't support the offline experience that they need.

They are trying to leverage an 850-person IT department that has worldwide responsibilities, all the things that we spoke about earlier. And they use technology from companies that haven’t evolved as quickly as they should have. So they're wondering whether those companies are going to be around in the future.

This is the classic case of, “I have a lot of technology deployed. I need to move to a container solution to support both online and offline experiences, and my IT budget is being squeezed.” So how do you do this? It goes back to the things we talked about.

First, I need to leverage what I have. Second, I need to pick solutions that can support multiple environments rather than a point solution for each environment. Third, I need to think about the future, and in this case, that entails a rapid explosion of mobile devices.

I need to mobilize rapidly without compromising security or the user experience. The concept of an integrated suite of policy and management capabilities is going to be extremely important to my organization going forward.

Mobile wave

This reminds me of some information we reviewed from a Lopez Research report. In their “Mobile Management: A Foundation for the New Mobile Ecosystem,” Maribel Lopez shared that more than half the firms interviewed as part of custom CIO research plan to mobile-enable business apps and processes. The mobile wave is coming and it’s coming fast.

This large financial institution fits that profile. They're moving rapidly. They’re thinking about how to give greater access to applications and data and they need streamlined ways to accomplish that. It’s a typical customer scenario that we are seeing these days.

Gardner: Tom, who gets to do this faster, better, cheaper? Is it the large enterprise that's dragging a long legacy and has a thousand IT people to either help them or hinder them -- or the mid-size organization that can look to a myriad of sourcing options and wants to get out of the data center or facilities business? Is there some sort of a natural advantage, in some way -- a leapfrog type of an effect -- for those mid-market organizations with this?

Kendra: The mid-market has the advantage of not having giant deployments and huge teams, which gives them a certain advantage in being able to move fast and nimbly. On the flip side, the mid-market organization often is resource constrained in terms of budget and skills. Let’s face it, a 10-person IT shop will likely have deep skills in certain areas, but they have to have more generalized experiences.

For them, finding solutions that address multiple problems quickly is an absolute imperative, so they can rollout simple solutions while maximizing economies of scale to the fullest extent. That’s not to say that large enterprises don’t have similar priorities, but they often have complex legacy issues that exacerbate their issues. Dell is equally adept at helping those organizations work through those issues and devise a plan for what to move, when and how without losing sight of longer-term plans and business directions.

You’ll see more from us detailing how those integrated solutions come together to deliver fast time to value.

There are advantages and disadvantages with each. Both need agile solutions and want to leverage their resources to the fullest extent. Both are striving to lower costs and eliminate risks. Both groups are interested in very much the same things but often take different approaches to achieving those goals.

Gardner: It certainly sounds as if Dell is approaching this enterprise mobility manager market with an aggressive perspective, recognizing a big opportunity in the market and an opportunity that they are uniquely positioned to go at. There’s not too much emphasis on the client alone and not just emphasis on the data center. It really needs to be a bridging type of a value-add these days. Can you tease us a little bit about some upcoming news? What should we expect next?

Kendra: The solutions we announced in April essentially laid out our vision of Dell’s evolving mobility strategies. We talked about the need to consolidate mobility management systems and streamline enablement. We focused on the importance of leveraging world-class security, including secure remote access and encryption. And the market has responded well to Dell's point of view.

As we move forward, we have the opportunity to get much more prescriptive in describing our unified approach that consolidates the capabilities organizations need to ensure secure control over their corporate data while still ensuring an excellent user experience.

You’ll see more from us detailing how those integrated solutions come together to deliver fast time to value. You'll also see different delivery vehicles, giving our customers the flexibility to choose from on premise, software-as-a-service (SaaS) based or cloud-based approaches. You'll see additional device support, and you'll see containerization.

Leverage advantages

We plan to leverage our advantages, our best-in-class capabilities around security, encryption, device management; this common functionality approach. We plan to leverage all of that in upcoming announcements.

As we take the analyst community through our end-to-end mobile/BYOD enablement plans, we’ve gotten high marks for our approach and direction. Our discussions involving Dell’s broad OS support, embedded security, unified management and proven customer relationship all have been well received.

Our next step is to make sure that, as we announce and deliver in the coming months, customers absolutely understand what we have and where we're going. We think they're going be very excited about it. We think we're in the sweet spot of the mid-market and the upper mid-market in terms of what solutions they need to ease their mobile enablement objectives.

We also believe we can provide a unique point-of-view and compelling technology roadmaps for those very large customers who may have a longer journey in their deployments or rollout.

We also believe we can provide a unique point-of-view and compelling technology roadmaps for those very large customers who may have a longer journey in their deployments or rollout.

We're very excited about what we're doing. The specifics of what we're doing play out in early December, January, and beyond. You'll see a rolling thunder of announcements from Dell, much like we did in April. We’ll lay out the solutions. We’ll talk about how these products come together and we’ll deliver.

Gardner: Very good. I’m afraid we'll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on how the recent rapid evolution of mobile and client management requirements and approaches have caused complexity and confusion, but we have now heard Dell's vision for how mobile enablement should be able to quickly complement other IT imperatives and allow for the IT department do what it does best and for end-users to innovate and do what they do best as well.

So a big thank you to our guest, Tom Kendra, Vice President and General Manager, Systems Management at Dell Software. Thanks so much, Tom.

Kendra: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And also a big thank you to our audience for joining this insightful discussion. 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. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Dell Software.

Transcript of a Briefings Direct podcast on the new landscape sculpted by the increasing use of mobile and BYOD, and how Dell is helping companies navigate that terrain. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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As Big Data Pushes Enterprises into Seeking More Data Types, Standard and Automated Integrations Far Outweigh Coded Connections

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how creating big-data capabilities are new top business imperatives in dealing with a flood of data from disparate sources.

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

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 the top new business imperatives: Creating big-data capabilities and becoming a data-driven organization.

We’ll examine how business-intelligence (BI) trends are requiring access and automation across data flows from a variety of sources, formats, and from many business applications.

Our discussion focuses on ways that enterprises are effectively harvesting data in all its forms, and creating integration that fosters better use of data throughout the business process lifecycle.

Here now to share their insights into using data strategically by exploiting all of the data from all of the applications across business ecosystems, we’re joined by Jon Petrucelli, Senior Director of Hitachi Solution Dynamics, CRM and Marketing Practice, based in Austin, Texas. Welcome, Jon.

Jon Petrucelli: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We’re also here with Rick Percuoco, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Trillium Software in Bedford, Mass. Welcome, Rick.

Rick Percuoco: Hi, Dana. Thank you.

Gardner: And we're also joined by Betsy Bilhorn, Vice President of Product Management at Scribe Software in Manchester NH. Welcome, Betsy. [Disclosure: Scribe Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Betsy Bilhorn: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Betsy, let me start with you. We know that more businesses are trying to leverage and exploit their data, helping them to become more agile, predictive, and efficient. What's been holding them back from gaining access to the most relevant data? What's the roadblock here?

Bilhorn: There are a couple of things. One is the explosion in the different types and kinds of data. Then, you start mixing that with legacy systems that have always been somewhat difficult to get to. Bringing those all together and making sense of that are the two biggest ones. Those have been around for a long, long time.

Bilhorn

That problem is getting exponentially harder, given the variety of those data sources, and then all the different ways to get into those. It’s just trying to put all that together. It just gets worse and worse. When most people look at it today, it almost seems somewhat insurmountable. Where do you even start?

Gardner: Jon, how about your customers, at Hitachi? What are you seeing in terms of the struggle that they're facing in getting better data for better intelligence and analytics?

Legacy systems

Petrucelli: We work with a lot of large enterprise, global-type customers. To build on what Betsy said, they have a lot of legacy systems. There's a lot of data that’s captured inside these legacy systems, and those systems were not designed to be open architected, with sharing their data with other systems.

When you’re dealing with modern systems, it's definitely getting easier. When you deal with middleware software like Scribe, especially with Scribe Online, it gets much easier. But the biggest thing that we encounter in the field with these larger companies is just a lack of understanding of the modern middleware and integration and lack of understanding of what the business needs. Does it really need real-time integration?

Petrucelli

Some of our customers definitely have a good understanding of what the business wants and what their customers want, but usually the evaluator, decision-maker, or architect doesn’t have a strong background in data integration.

It's really a people issue. It's an educational issue of helping them understand that this isn't as hard as they think it is. Let's scope it down. Let's understand what the business really needs. Usually, that becomes something a lot more realistic, pragmatic, and easier to do than they originally anticipated going into the project.

In the last 5 to 10 years, we've seen data integration get much easier to do, and a lot of people just don’t understand that yet. That’s the lack of understanding and lack of education around data integration and how to exploit this big-data proliferation that’s happening. A lot of users don't quite understand how to do that, and that’s the biggest challenge. It’s the people side of it. That’s the biggest challenge for us.

Gardner: Rick Percuoco at Trillium, tell us what you are seeing when it comes to the impetus for doing data integration. Perhaps in the past, folks saw this as too daunting and complex or involved skill sets that they didn't have. But it seems now that we have a rationale for wanting to have a much better handle on as much data as possible. What's driving the need for this?

Percuoco: I would definitely agree with what Betsy and Jon said. In dealing with that kind of client base, I can see that a lot of the principles and a lot of the projects are in their infancy, even with some of the senior architects in the business. Certain companies, by their nature, deal with volume data. Telecom providers or credit card companies are being forced into building these large data repositories because the current business needs would support that anyway.

Percuoco

So they’re really at the forefront of most of these. What we have are large data-migration projects. There are disparate sources within the companies, siloed bits of information that they want to put into one big-data repository.

Mostly, it's used from an analytics or BI standpoint, because now you have the capability of using big-data SQL engines to link and join across disparate sources. You can ask questions and get information, mines of information, that you never could before.

The aspect of extract, transform, load (ETL) will definitely be affected with the large data volumes, as you can't move the data like you used to in the past. Also, governance is becoming a stronger force within companies, because as you load many sources of data into one repository, it’s easier to have some kind of governance capabilities around that.

Higher scales

Gardner: Betsy, it sounds that as if the technology has moved in such a way that the big-data analytics, the platform for doing analysis, has become much more capable in dealing at higher scales, faster speeds at lower costs. But we still come back to that same problem of getting to the data, putting it in a format that can be used, directing it, managing that flow, automating it, and then, of course, dealing with the compliance, governance, risk, and security issues.

Is that the correct read on this, that we've been able to move quite well in terms of the analytics engine capability, but we're still struggling with getting the fuel to that engine?

Bilhorn: I would absolutely agree with that. When you look at the trends out there, when we talk about big data, big analytics and all of that, that's moved much faster than capturing those data sources and getting them there. Again, it goes back to all of these sources Jon was referring to. Some of these systems that we want to get the data from were never built to be open. So there is a lot of work just to get them out of there.

The other thing a lot of people like to talk about is an application programming interface (API) economy. "We will have an API and we can get through web services at all this great stuff," but what we’ve seen in building a platform ourselves and having that connectivity, is that not all of those APIs are created equal.

The vendors who are supplying this data, or these data services, are kind of shooting themselves in the foot and making it difficult for the customer to consume them, because the APIs are poorly written and very hard to understand, or they simply don’t have the performance to even get the data out of the system.

The vendors who are supplying this data, or these data services themselves, are kind of shooting themselves in the foot and making it difficult for the customer to consume them.

On top of that, you have other vendors who have certain types of terms of service, where they cut off the service or they may charge you for it. So when they talk about how it's great that they can do all these analytics, in getting the data in there, there are just so many show stoppers on a number of fronts. It's very, very challenging.

Gardner: Let's think about what we are doing in terms of expanding the requirements for business activities and values here. Customer relationship management (CRM), I imagine, paved the way where we’re trying to get a single view of the customer across many different data type of activities. But now, we’re pushing the envelope to a single view of the patient across multiple healthcare organizations or a single view of a process that has a cloud part, an on-premises part, and an ecosystem supply-chain part.

It seems as if we’ve moved in more complexity here. Jon Petrucelli, how are the systems keeping up with these complex demands, expanding concentric circles of inclusion, if you will, when it comes to a single view of an object, individual, or process?

Petrucelli: That’s a huge challenge. Some people might call it data taxonomy, data structuring, or data hygiene, but you have to be able to define a unique identifier for your primary object in the data. That’s what we see. Sometimes, businesses have a hard time deciding on that, but usually it jumps out at you.

The only things that will transact business with you in the world are people or organizations, generally speaking. A dog, a tree, or an asset is not going to actually transact business with you.

Master key

We have specialists on our team that do this taxonomy, architects that help our organizations, figure out what a master key is, a master global unique identifier for an object. Then, you come up with a schema that allows you to either use one that’s existing or you concatenate a bunch of the data together to create one. That becomes the way that you relate all of the objects to each other that sets the foreign key that they hook up to.

Gardner: I think that helps illustrate how far you can go with this. It seems, though, as if you have to get your own house in order -- your own legacy applications, your own capabilities -- before you can start to expand and gain some of these competitive advantages. It seems that the more data you can bring it to bear on your analytics, the more predictive, the more precise, and the more advantageous your business decisions will be.

I think we understand the complexity, but let's take it back inside the organization. Rick, tell us first about what Trillium Software does and how you're seeing organizations take the steps to begin to get the skills, expertise, and culture to make data integration and data lifecycle management happen better.

Percuoco: Trillium Software has always been a data-quality company. We have a fairly mature and diverse platform for data that you push through. Because for analytics, for risk and compliance, or for anything where you need to use your data to calculate some kind of risk quotient ratios or modeling whereby you run your business, the quality of your data is very, very important.

With the advent of big data and the volume of more and varied unstructured data, the problem of data quality is like on steroids now.

If you’re using that data that comes in from multiple channels to make decisions in your business, then obviously data quality and making that data the most accurate that it can be by matching it against structured sources is a huge difference in terms of whether you'll be making the right decisions or not.

With the advent of big data and the volume of more and varied unstructured data, the problem of data quality is on steroids now. You have a quality issue with your data. If anybody who works in any company is really honest with themselves and with the company, they see that the integrity of the data is a huge issue.

As the sources of data become more varied and they come from unstructured data sources like social media, the quality of the data is even more at risk and in question. There needs to be some kind of platform that can filter out the chatter in social media and the things that aren't important from a business aspect.

Gardner: Betsy Bilhorn, tell us about Scribe Software and how what Trillium and Hitachi Solutions are doing helps data management.

Bilhorn: We look at ourselves as the proverbial PVC pipe, so to speak, to bring data around to various applications and the business processes and analytics. Where folks like Hitachi leverage our platform is in being able to make that process as easy and as painless as possible.

We want people to get value out of their data, increase the pace of their business, and increase the value that they’re getting out of their business. That shouldn’t be a multi-year project. It shouldn’t be something that you’re tearing your hair out over and running screaming off a bridge.

As easy as possible

Our goal here at Scribe is to make that data integration and to get that data where it needs to go, to the right person, at the right time, as easily and simply as possible for companies like Hitachi and their clients.

Working with Trillium, one of the great things with that partnership is obviously that there is the problem of garbage in/garbage out. Trillium provides that platform by which not only can you get your data where you need it to go, but you can also have it clean and you can have it deduped. You can have a better quality of data as it's moving around in your business. When you look at those three aspects together, that’s where Scribe sits in the middle.

Petrucelli: We used to do custom software integration. With a lot of our customers we see lot of custom .NET code or other types of codesets, Java for example, that do the integration. They used to do that, and we still see some bigger organizations that are stuck on that stuff. That’s a way to paint yourself into a corner and make yourself captive to some developer.

We highly recommend that people move away from that and go to a platform-based middleware application like Scribe. Scribe is our preferred platform middleware, because that makes it much more sustainable and changeable as you move forward. Inevitably, in integration, someone is going to want to change something later on.

When you have a custom code integration someone has to actually crack open that code, take it offline, or make a change and then re-update the code and things like -- and its all just pure spaghetti code.

We highly recommend that people move away from that and go to a platform-based middleware application like Scribe.

With a platform like Scribe, its very easy to pick up industry-standard training available online. You’re not held hostage anymore. It’s a graphical user interface (GUI). It's literally drag-and-drop mappings and interlock points. That’s really amazing, being this nice capability in their Scribe Online service. Even children can do an integration. It’s a teaching technique that was developed at Harvard or MIT about how to put puzzle pieces together through integration. If it doesn’t work, the puzzle pieces don’t fit.

They’ve done a really amazing job of making integration for rest of us, not just for developers. We highly recommend people to take a look at that, because it just brings the power back to the business and takes it away from just one developer, a small development shop, or an outsourced developer.

That’s one thing. The other thing I want to add is that we see integration as critical to all of the successor projects at the high levels of adoption and return on investment (ROI). Adoption by the users and then ultimately ROI by the businesses is important, because integration is like gas in the sports car. Without the gas, it's not going to go.

We want to give them one user experience or one user interface to productive users -- especially sales reps in the CRM world and customer service reps. You don’t want them all tabbing between a bunch of different systems. So we bring them into one interface, and with a platform like Microsoft CRM, they can use their interface of choice.

They can move from a desktop, to a laptop, to a tablet, to a mobile device and they’re seeing one version of the truth, because they’re all looking into windows looking into the same realm. And in that realm, what is tunneled in comes through pipes that are Scribe.

Built-in integration

What we do for a lot of customers is intentionally build integration into it using Scribe, because we know that if we can take them down from five different interfaces, you're looking at getting a 360-degree view of the customer that’s calling them or that they’re about to call on. We can take that down to one interface from five.

They’re really going to like that. Their adoption is going to be higher and their  productivity is going to be higher. If you can raise the productivity of the users, you can raise the top line of the company when you’re talking about a sales organization. So, integration is the key to drive high level of adoption and high level of ROI and high levels of productivity.

Gardner: Let's talk about some examples of how organizations are using these approaches, tools, methods, and technologies to improve their business and their data value. I know that you can’t always name these organizations, but let's hear a few examples of either named or non-named organizations that are doing this well, doing this correctly, and what it gets for them.

If you can raise the productivity of the users, you can raise the top line of the company when you’re talking about a sales organization.

Petrucelli: One that pops to mind, because I just was recently dealing with them, is the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA basketball team. I know that they’re not a humongous enterprise account, but sometimes it's hard for people to understand what's going on inside an enterprise account.

Most people follow and are aware of sports. They have an understanding of buying a ticket, being a season ticket holder, and what those concepts are. So it's a very universal language.

The Thunder had a problem where they were using a ticketing system that would sell the tickets, but they had very little CRM capabilities. All this ticketing was done at the industry standard for ticketing and that was great, but there was no way to track, for example, somebody's preferences. You’d have this record of Jon Petrucelli who buys season tickets and comes to certain games. But that’s it; that’s all you’d have.

They couldn’t track who my favorite player was, how many kids I have, if I was married, where I live, what my blog is, what my Facebook profile  is. People are very passionate about their sports team. They want to really be associated with them, and they want to be connected with those people. And the sports teams really want to do that, too.

So we had a great project, an award winning project. It's won a Gartner award and Microsoft awards. We helped the Oklahoma City Thunder to leverage this great amount of rich interaction data, this transactional data, the ticketing data about every seat they sat in, and every time they bought.

Rich information

That’s a cool record and that might be one line in the database. Around that record, we’re now able to wrap all the rich information from the internet. And that customer, that season ticket holder, wants to share information, so they can have a much more personalized experience.

Without Scribe and without integration we couldn’t do that. We could easily deploy Microsoft CRM and integrate it into the ticketing system, so all this data was in one spot for the users. It was a real true win-win-win, because not only did the Oklahoma City Thunder have a much more productive experience, but their season ticket account managers could now call on someone and could see their preferences. They could see everything they needed to track about them and see all of their ticketing history in one place.

And they could see if they’re attending, if they are not attending, everything about what's going on with that very high-value customer. So that’s a win for them. They can deliver personalized service. On the other end of it, you have the customer, the season ticket holder and they’re paying a lot of money. For some of them, it’s a lifelong dream to have these tickets or their family has passed them down. So this is a strong relationship.

Especially in this day and age, people expect a personalized touch and a personalized experience, and with integration, we were able to deliver that. With Scribe, with the integration with the ticketing system, putting that all in Microsoft CRM where it's real-time, it's accessible and it's insightful.

It’s not just data anymore. It's real time insights coming out of the system. They could deliver a much better user experience or customer experience, and they have been benchmarked against the best customer organizations in the world. The Oklahoma City Thunder are now rated as the top professional sports fan experience. Of all professional sports, they have the top fan experience -- and it's directly relatable to the CRM platform and the data being driven into it through integration.

It’s not just data anymore. It's real time insights coming out of the system.

Gardner: Great. You can actually see where there is transformational benefit. They’re not just iterative or nice to have. It really changes their business in a major way. Rick Percuoco, any thoughts there at Trillium Software of some examples that exemplify why these approaches are so powerful?

Percuoco: I’ve seen a couple of pretty interesting use cases. One of them is with one of our technical partnerships. They have a data platform also where they use a behavior account-sharing model. It's very interesting in that they take multiple feeds of different data, like social media data, call-center data, data that was entered into a blog from a website. As Jon said, they create a one-customer view of all of those disparate sources of data including social media and then they map for different vertical industries behavioral churn models.

In other words, before someone churns their account or gets rid of their account within a particular industry -- like insurance, for example -- what steps do they go through before they churn their account? Do they send an e-mail to someone? Do they call the call center? Do they send social media messages? Then, through statistical analysis, they build these behavioral churn models.

They put data through these models of transactional data, and when certain accounts or transactional data fall out at certain parts, they match that against the strategic client list and then decide what to do at the different phases of the account churn model.

I've heard of companies, large companies, saving as much as $100 million in account churn by basically understanding what the clients are doing through these behavioral churn models.

Sentiment analysis

Probably the other most prevalent that I've seen with our clients is sentiment analysis. Most people are looking at social media data, seeing what people are saying about them on social media channels, and then using all different creative techniques to try and match those social media personas to client lists within the company to see who is saying what about them.

Sentiment analysis is probably the biggest use case that I've seen, but the account churn with the behavioral models was very, very interesting, and the platform was very complex. On top, it had a productive analytics engine that had about 80 different modeling graphs and it also had some data visualization tools. So it was very, very easy to create shots and graphs and it was actually pretty impressive.

Gardner: Betsy, do you have any examples that also illustrate what we're talking about when it comes to innovation and value around data gathering analytics and business innovation.

Bilhorn: I’m going to do a little bit of a twist here on that problem. We have had a recent customer, who is one of the top LED lighting franchisors in United States, and they had a different bit of a problem. They have about 150 franchises out there and they are all disconnected.

Sentiment analysis is probably the biggest use case that I've seen.

So, in the central office, I can't see what my individual franchises are doing and I can't do any kind of forecasting or business reporting to be able to look at the health of all my franchises all over the country. That was the problem.

The second problem was that they had decided on a standardized NetSuite platform and they wanted all of their franchises to use these. Obviously, for the individual franchise owner, NetSuite was a little too heavy for them and they said overwhelmingly they wanted to have QuickBooks.

This customer came to us and said, “We have a problem here. We can't find anybody to integrate QuickBooks to our central CRM system and we can't report. We’re just completely flying blind here. What can you do for us?”

Via integration, we were able to satisfy that customer requirement. Their franchises can use QuickBooks, which was easy for them, and then through all of that synchronized information back from all of these franchises into central CRM, they were able to do all kinds of analytics and reporting and dashboarding on the health of the whole business.

The other side benefit, which also makes them very competitive, is that they’re able to add franchises very, very quickly. They can have their entire IT systems up and running in 30 minutes and it's all integrated. So the franchisee is ready to go. They have everything there. They can use a system that’s easy for them to use and this company is able to have them up and are getting their data right away.

Consistency and quality

So that’s a little bit different. Big data is not social, but it’s a problem that a lot of businesses face. How do I even get these systems connected so I can even run my business? This rapid repeatable model for this particular business is pretty new. In the past, we’ve seen a lot of people try to wire things up with custom codes, or every thing is ad hoc. They’re able to stand up full IT systems in 30 minutes, every single time over and over again with a high level consistency and quality.

Gardner: Well we have to begin to wrap it up, but I wanted to take a gauge of where we are on this. It seems to me that we’re just scratching the surface. It’s the opening innings, if you will.

Will we start getting these data visualizations down to mobile devices, or have people inputting more information about themselves, their devices, or the internet of things? Let's start with you, Jon. Where are we on the trajectory of where this can go?

Petrucelli: We’re working on some projects right now with geolocation, geocaching, and geosensing, where when a user on a mobile device comes within a range of a certain store, it will serve that user up, if they have downloaded the app. It will be an app on their smartphone and they have opted into those. It will serve them up special offers to try to pull them into the store the same way in which, if you’re walking by a store, somebody might say, “Hey, Jon.” They know who I am and know my personalization, when I come in a range, it now knows my location.

Integration is really the key to drive high levels of adoption, which drives high levels of productivity.

This is somebody who has an affinity card with a certain retailer, or it could be a sports team in the venue that the organization knows during the venue, it knows what their preferences are and it puts exactly the right offer in front of the right person, at the right time, in the right context, and with the right personalization.

We see some organizations moving to that level of integration. With all of the available technology, with the electronic wallets, now with Google Glass, and with smart watches, there is a lot of space to go. I don’t know if it's really relevant to this, but there is a lot of space now.

We’re more in the business app side of it, and I don’t see that going away. Integration is really the key to drive high levels of adoption, which drives high levels of productivity which can drive top line gain and ultimately a better ROI for the company that’s how we really look it integration.

Gardner: Where are we on the trajectory here for using these technologies to advance business?

Percuoco: You mentioned specifically location information, and, as Jon mentioned, it is germane to this discussion. There’s the concept of digital marketing, marketing coupons to people in real-time over their smartphones as they’re walking by businesses, and so forth. That’s definitely one of the very prevalent use cases for location objects.

Shopping patterns

There’s also an interesting one that kind of goes on top of that, where you evaluate web traffic shopping patterns of people, using Google location objects. For large ticket items, you can actually email them, in real time, competitor coupons. For example, a mile down the street, this one company has something for $100 or $200 less.

It's another interesting use case kind of intelligent marketing through digital media in the mobile market. I also see the mobile delivery of information being critical as we move forward.

Pretty much all data integration or BI professionals are basically working parents. It’s very, very important to be able to deliver that information, at least in a dashboard format or a summary format on all the mobile devices. You could be at your kid’s Little League game or you could be out to dinner with your wife, but you may have to check things.

The delivery of information through the mobile market is critical, although the user experience has to be different. There needs to be a bunch of work in terms of data visualization, the user experience, and what to deliver. But the modern family aspects of life and people working are forcing the mobile market to come up to speed.

It’s very, very important to be able to deliver that information, at least in a dashboard format or a summary format on all the mobile devices.

The other thing that I would say is in terms of integration methods and what Jon was talking about. You do have to watch out for custom APIs. Trillium has a connectivity business as does Scribe.

As long as you stick with industry-standard handshaking methods, like XML or JSON or web services and RESTful APIs, then usually you can integrate packages fairly smoothly. You really need to make sure that you're using industry-standard hand-offs for a lot of the integration methods. You have four or five different ways to do that, but it’s pretty much the same four or five.

Those would be my thoughts on the future. I also see cloud computing, platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) really taking hold of the market. Even Microsoft and some of the other platform tools like Office 365 and the email systems in CRM, are all cloud-based applications now, and to be honest, they’re better. The service is better, and there’s no on-premise footprint. I really see the market moving toward PaaS and SaaS to the cloud computing market.

Gardner: What is Scribe Software's vision, and what are the next big challenges that you will be taking your technology to?

Bilhorn: Ideally, what I would like to see, and what I’m hoping for, is that with mobile and consumerization of IT you’re beginning to see that business apps act more like consumer apps, having more standard APIs and forcing better plug and play. This would be great for business. What we’re trying to do, in absence of that, is create that plug-and-play environment to, as Jon said, make it so easy a child can do it.

Seamless integration

Our vision in the future is really flattening that out, but also being able to provide seamless integration experience between this break systems, where at some point you wouldn’t even have to buy middleware as an individual business or a consumer.

The cloud vendors and legacy vendors could embed integration and then be able to have really a plug and play so that the individual user could be doing integration on their own. That’s where we would really like to get to. That’s the vision and where the platform is going for Scribe.

Gardner: Well, great. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on how business intelligence and big-data trends are requiring improved access and automation to data flows from a variety of sources.

We've learned of ways that enterprises are effectively harvesting data in all it's forms and creating integrations that foster better use of data throughout the entire lifecycle. The result has been the ability to exploit data strategically among more aspects of enterprise businesses and across more types of applications and processes.

So a huge thanks to our guests Jon Petrucelli, Senior Director of Hitachi Solutions Dynamic CRM and Marketing Practice. Thanks so much Jon.

Petrucelli: Thank you, glad to be here.

Percuoco: Also Rick Percuoco, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Trillium Software. Thank you so much, Rick.

Percuoco: You’re welcome, Dana.

Gardner: And Betsy Bilhorn, Vice President of Product Management at Scribe Software. Thank you, Betsy.

Bilhorn: Thank you again, Dana.

Gardner: And also a huge thank you to our audience for joining this insightful discussion. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Don’t forget to come back and listen next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how creating big-data capabilities are new top business imperatives in dealing with a flood of data from disparate sources. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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Service Virtualization Solves Bottlenecks Amid Complex Billing Process for German Telco

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a large telco in Germany has optimized the testing and development procedure with advanced service virtualization tools from HP.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation and applications transformation.

Gardner

Once again, we're focusing on how software testing improvements and advanced service virtualization solutions are enabling IT leaders to deliver better experiences for businesses and end users alike.

Today, we’re here to learn how German telco EWE TEL has solved performance complexity across an extended enterprise billing process by using service virtualization. In doing so, EWE has significantly improved applications performance and quality for their end users, while also gaining predictive insights in the composite application services behavior.

Here to explain, how EWE is leveraging service virtualization technologies and techniques for composite applications, we're joined by Bernd Schindelasch, Leader for Quality Management and Testing at EWE TEL based in Oldenburg, Germany. Bernd will be presenting on this use-case next week at the HP Discover conference in Barcelona. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Bernd.

Bernd Schindelasch: Hi, Dana. Thank you for having me. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Gardner: First, tell us a little bit about EWE TEL, what it does and what you do there.

Schindelasch

Schindelasch: EWE is a telecommunications company. We operate the network for EWE and we provide a large range of telecommunications services. So we invest a lot of money into infrastructure and we supply the region with high-speed Internet access. EWE TEL was founded in 1996, is a fully owned subsidiary of EWE, and has about 1,400 employees.

Gardner: Your software and IT systems are obviously so important. This is how you interact with your end-users. So these applications must be kept performing.

Schindelasch: Yes, indeed. Our IT systems are very important for us to fulfill our customers’ needs. We have about 40 applications, which are involved in the process of a customer, starting from customer self-service application, to the activation component, and the billing system. It’s a quite complex infrastructure and it’s all based on our IT systems.

Gardner: What have you done over the past several years to put together a team or a process through which you can make sure that your applications are performing and continue to perform time and time again?

Schindelasch: We have a special situation here. Because the telecommunications business is very specialized, we need very customized IT solutions. Often, the effort to customize standard software is so high that we decided to develop a lot of our applications on our own.

Developed in house

Nearly half of our applications are developed in house, for example, the customer self service portal I just mentioned, or our customer care system or Activation Manager.

We had to find a way to test it. So we created a team to test all those systems we developed on our own. We recruited personnel from the operating departments and added IT staff, and we started to certify them all as testers. We created a whole new team with a common foundation, and that made it very easy for us to agree on roles, tasks, processes, and so on, concerning our tests. 

Gardner: Today, we’re interested in hearing about how you adopted service virtualization as a technology and a process. Tell me about the problem that led you to discover service virtualization as a solution?

Schindelasch: When we created this new team, we faced the problem of testing the systems end to end. When you have 40 applications and have to test an end-to-end process over all of those applications, all the contributing applications have to be available and have to have a certain level of quality to be useful.

We created a whole new team with a common foundation, and that made it very easy for us to agree on roles, tasks, processes, and so on, concerning our tests. 

What we encountered was that the order interface of another service provider was often unavailable and responses from that system were faulty. So we hadn’t been able to test our processes end to end.

We once tried to do a load test and, because of the bottleneck of that other interface, we experienced the failure of that other interface and weren’t able to test our own systems. That’s the reason we needed a solution to bypass this problem with the other interface. That was the initial initiative that we had.

Gardner: I think you’re representative of many more companies that are dealing with extended enterprise applications and services, ones they can’t fully control, can’t access, and can't get to, but they have to continue to be responsible for the quality of the end process. It can be a quite difficult problem to solve.

Why weren’t traditional testing or scripting technologies able to help you in this regard?

Schindelasch: We tried it recently. We developed diverse simulations based on traditional mockup scripts. These are very useful for developers to do unit testing, but they weren’t configurable for testers to be used to create the right situations for positive and negative tests.

Additionally, there was a big effort to create these mockups, and sometimes the effort to create the mockup would have been bigger than the real development effort. That was the problem we had.

Complex and costly

Gardner: So any simulations you were approaching were going to be very complex and very costly. It didn't really seem to make sense. So what did you do then?

Schindelasch: We constantly analyzed the market and searched for products that might be able to help us with our problem. In 2012, we found such solutions and finally made a proof of concept (POC) with HP Service Virtualization.

We found that it supported different protocols, all the protocols we needed, and with a rule set to predict the responses. During the POC we found that benefits were both for developers and testers. Even our architects found it to be a good solution. So in the end, we decided to purchase that software this year.

Gardner: Tell us how you’ve implemented HP Service Virtualization and how this pilot project has proceeded.

Schindelasch: We implemented service virtualization in a pilot project and we virtualized even that order interface we talked about. We had to integrate service virtualization as a proxy between our customer care system and the order system. The actual steps you have to take vary by the used protocols, but you have to put it in between them and let the system work as a proxy. Then, you have the ability to let it learn.

That reduced our efforts and cost in development and testing and it’s the basis for further test automation at low testing cost.

It’s in the middle, between your systems, and records all messages and their responses. Afterward, you can just replay this message response or you can improve the rules manually. For example, you can add data tables so you can configure the system to work with the actual test data you are using for you test cases to be able to support positive and negative tests. 

Gardner: For those folks that aren’t familiar with HP Service Virtualization for composite applications, how has this developed in terms of its speed and its cost? What are some of the attributes of it that appeal to you?

Schindelasch: Our main objective was to find a way to do our end-to-end testing to optimize it, but we were able to gain more benefits by using service virtualization. We’ve reduced the effort to create simulations by 80 percent, which is a huge amount, and have been able to virtualize services that were still under development.

So we have been able to uncouple the tests of the self service application from a new technical feasibility check. Therefore, we’ve been able to test earlier in our processes. That reduced our efforts and cost in development and testing and it’s the basis for further test automation at low testing cost.

In the end, we’ve improved quality. It’s even better for our customers, because we’re able to deliver fast and have a better time to market for new products. 

Future attributes

Gardner: Are there other attributes that you’d like to see in future products, perhaps with network-virtualization attributes? I know that you’ve been doing this with certain middleware, messaging, and workflow technology. What would you like to see next?

Schindelasch: One important thing is that development is shifting to agile more and more. Therefore, the people using the software have changed. So we have to have better integration with development tools.

From a virtualization perspective, there will be new protocols, more complex rules to address every situation you can think of without complicated scripting or anything like that. I think that’s what’s coming in the future.

Gardner: And, Bernd, has the use of HP Service Virtualization allowed you to proceed toward more agile development and, as well, to start to benefit from DevOps, more tight association and integration between development and deployment and operations?

Service virtualization has the potential to change the performance model, so you can let your application answer slower or faster.

Schindelasch: We already put it together with our development, I think it’s very crucial to cooperate with development and testing, because there wouldn’t be a real benefit to virtualize the service after development already mocked up in an old-fashioned way.

We brought them together. We had the training for a lot of developers. They started to see the benefits and started to use service virtualization the way the testers already did.

We’re working together more closely and earlier in the process. What’s coming in the future is that the developers will start to use service virtualization for their continuous integration, because service virtualization has the potential to change the performance model, so you can let your application answer slower or faster.

If you put it into fast mode, then you use it in continuous integration. That’s a really big benefit for the developers, because their continuous integration will be faster and therefore they will be able to deploy faster. So for our development, it’s a real benefit.

Gardner: I should think that for an organization like yours, where you’re a services provider, being able to meet your service-level agreements (SLAs) is important to you. This could probably have a very positive impact on that.

Schindelasch: Yes, definitely.

Lessons learned

Gardner: Before we end our discussion, I wonder if you could maybe offer some insights to those who are considering the use of service virtualization with composite applications now that you have been doing it. Are there any lessons learned? Are there any suggestions that you would make for others as they begin to explore new service virtualization in the testing phase?

Schindelasch: One thing I’ve already mentioned is that it’s important to work together with development and testing. To gain maximum benefit from HP Service Virtualization, you have to design your future solutions. What service do you want to virtualize, which protocols will you use, and where are the best places to intercept? Do I want to replace real systems or create the whole environment as virtualized? In which way do I want to use performance model and so on?

It’s very important to really understand what your needs are before you start using the tools and just virtualize everything. It’s easy to virtualize, but there is no real benefit if you virtualize a lot of things you didn’t really want. As always, it’s important to think first, design your future solutions, and then start to do it.

It’s very important to really understand what your needs are before you start using the tools and just virtualize everything.

Gardner: I am afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been learning how German telco EWE has solved performance complexity across an extended enterprise billing process using HP Service Virtualization.

We have heard how EWE has significantly improved applications performance and quality for their end users, while also gaining predictive insights in the composite applications services behavior, even back into the development phases. Bernd will be presenting on this use case next week at the HP Discover conference in Barcelona.

I’d like to thank our supporter for the series, HP Software, and reminder our audience to carry on the dialogue through the IT Strategy & Performance group on LinkedIn. You can always access this and another episodes in our HP Discover podcast series on iTunes under BriefingsDirect.

And so a big thanks to our guest. We’ve been joined by Bernd Schindelasch, Leader for Quality Management and Testing at EWE TEL based in Oldenburg, Germany. Thank you so much, Bernd.

Schindelasch: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT innovation. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a large telco in Germany has optimized the testing and development procedure with advanced service virtualization tools from HP. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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