Enterprises Should Harness the Power of Social Media to Better Know Their Markets, Says Capgemini

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how businesses need to respond to a marketplace changed by social media mechanisms.

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

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

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the impact that social media is having on enterprises. We’ll specifically examine what steps businesses can take to manage social media as a market opportunity, rather than react to it as a hard-to-fathom threat.

Social media and the increased role that communities of users have on issues, discourse, and public opinion are changing the world in many ways, from how societies react such as in the Middle East turmoil, to how users flock to or avoid certain products and services.

The fact is that many people are now connected in new ways and they’re voicing opinions and influencing their peers perhaps more than ever before. Businesses cannot afford to simply ignore these global -- and what now appeared to be long-term -- social media trends.

We'll hear today from an executive at Capgemini on how social media matters and how services are being developed to help businesses to better understand and exploit the potential of social media far better. This is the first in the series of podcasts with Capgemini on social media issues and business process outsourcing. [Disclosure: Capgemini is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Please join me now in welcoming our guest, Paul Cole, Vice President of Customer Operations Management and Business Process Outsourcing at Capgemini. Welcome to the show, Paul.

Paul Cole: Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner: Paul, it seems a bit of a twisted logic when we say that social media can be both a threat and an opportunity. Let’s start at a fairly high level. How could social media be both to your average business?

Cole: It's all in how you decide to respond. Social media, in and of itself, is a neutral topic. It could be viewed as a utensil or a platform, upon which you can do things. And depending on your intent, whether you’re an enterprise or a customer, those activities could be viewed favorably or negatively. And that's true as much in the sociopolitical world as in business.

The important thing is that social media is the platform, not the action itself, and it’s really what you decide to do over that platform that makes the difference in business and in the world at large.

Gardner: We’ve had this kicking around for a few years. Some people really expect this to be a fad, a flash in the pan. I think it’s now safe to say that that's not the case. Do you have any evidence, research, or findings of any sort that bolster this notion that social media is a sea change and not just a blip?

Game changer

Cole: Well, based on a survey we commissioned last winter, somewhat surprisingly, a bit more than one in 10 executives did characterize it as a fad relative to the business world.

However, you can look at it in the everyday world around us and the media as it relates to impact on society and in the sociopolitical spectrum, and there's very little doubt that it’s changing the game there. I believe it will have an equally profound impact on business over time.

Social media has become the bullhorn of the 21st century. It allows people to spread their message, to amplify that message, to mobilize the community, and also to monitor in real time the events as they unfold.

We are having to deal with it across the political, social, and cultural spectrums. Witness, unfortunately, the emergence of something that we’re now calling flash mobs, a case where the platform is being misapplied toward organizing a community of people who have damaging intentions.

So back to your question on threat or opportunity, significant or insignificant impact, it’s all based on the intent and actions of the individuals utilizing the utensil.

It’s all a matter of how you take that information and translate it into actionable insights, against which you can make some smarter business decisions.

Gardner: On one hand, we seem to see a lack of control or at least different aspects to how people behave. We don’t have the necessary tools. But on the other hand, we're seeing a lot more information generated, and information often is the lifeblood of how organizations react and adjust to markets.

So what is it about this information? Maybe it’s being used and applied wrongly in some instances, but the fact is that people are providing more data and information about what it is they do, what they want, who they are. That to me is I think something quite new.

Cole: Information overload is one potential consequence of this. It’s all a matter of how you take that information and translate it into actionable insights, against which you can make some smarter business decisions, and from our perspective, ultimately deliver a better customer experience which will help you grow.

What’s neat about what’s happening in the world of technology, on top of the social environment, is that there is a whole new generation of tools emerging that allow you to develop that insight.

There are four steps that a company can go through to generate social intelligence. First, is listening to what is going on out there. There has not been an earpiece for us to really take the pulse of the market, and what's happening in the virtual world or the internet world until the recent development of some of these social listening tools. So the ability just to know what's going on, who is saying what, who are the influencers, what are their sentiments is an important first step.

Monitoring change

The second step is the ability to monitor that over time and see how attitudes, perceptions, and most importantly, behaviors are changing and what are the impact and implication of that for your business, either from a marketing or a selling or customer service standpoint. In addition to monitoring that, you’re also now able, with text analytics tools to not simply track and describe what happening, but also isolate cause and effect.

So if I'm launching a Twitter campaign, putting a new product out there, running a contest, or engaging in some kind of social care activity, what is the impact it's having in terms of the customer’s behavior and what adjustments can I make to be more successful?

It's being able to get attribution and get to a root cause by applying these analytic tools. So you've listened, monitored, and analyzed. The killer app, if you will, is the last step of closing loop in terms of your ability to respond. So many companies today are putting their toe in the water in the social world by listening with these tools and trying to understand what's being said. It's new enough where not that many have actually industrialized their process for responding.

Ultimately, your ability to now go back into that community and influence the customer or attempt to influence the customer and their behavior is where there is a tremendous upside for companies in terms of generating higher growth and profit.

Gardner: We’ll discuss a bit more of how to do that, whether this is something that’s integrated into existing processes and functions in the business or it's something new. But, before we get into that, I’d like to hear about how Capgemini got involved?

How is Capgemini working toward some solutions on this? Maybe you could give us a little bit of background on the company as a whole, and we’d like to hear about how you got involved with the social media drive as well?

The question then becomes, as a provider of services, how to translate that into sets of offerings that add value for our clients.

Cole: At one level, you could look at social media as a wave or a phenomenon. I’ve been in the professional services, technology services business for 30 years, and we’ve seen the waves come and go, whether that would be CRM or ERP through SAP or eCommerce, which I think this mirrors quite a bit, and Y2K. So there's always an emerging area that people will try to understand, chase, and then capitalize on.

As a global provider of consulting technology and outsourcing services, Capgemini attempts to keep its finger on the pulse of market. You have to be blind and deaf to not recognize that social media has quickly emerged on the scene. The question then becomes, as a provider of services, how to translate that into sets of offerings that add value for our clients.

My particular area of expertise is around customer management. So I look through the lens of how a company acquires, develops, and retains its customers and how can we manage some of that process for them in a faster, better, or cheaper manner. We do that today in traditional forms with managing their call centers or their customer service operations, helping them present stronger web content, providing them with insights through analytical services, and so forth.

What social media started to suggest to us was that there was a new opportunity to bring another service to the market that allowed clients to focus on the business problem that they’re trying to solve and provided us the opportunity to provide them with everything they needed to mobilize around that objective in the social world.

Gardner: Paul, we’ve recognized that having good conversations and communication from customers and markets into the company is important. It's how companies decide what new products and services they're going to undertake, and how to better market the services and products that they already have in production and delivery, and then also they need to communicate back out to the market in the form of helpdesk, service, support, marketing, and sales.

Existing channels

Social media seems to me to be just an amplification on existing channels. What we seem to be seeing is that organizations don't know quite how to execute on that. I think they recognize in many cases the opportunity, but they don't know who in the organization should be responsible, who runs herd on social media, how does it get integrated into these functions, or whether it's ingoing or outgoing communications outreach and support.

Do you have any sense of what's going on in those businesses, as they react to social media? What's the pattern if any in terms of who gets to run with this and what they're doing?

Cole: In and of itself, social media is not going to drive your business forward. As we've discussed, it's really a platform or a utility upon which you can engage customers for one or more activities based on a business objective. It does, at the end of the day, relate back to what you're trying to accomplish.

When I went to school, we were trained on the four Ps in marketing. You develop a product that the marketplace is interested in. You price that product at a level that the consumer or customer perceives value so they want to transact with you. You need to promote that in terms of distinguishing you against your competitors and bring that product to market with some form of distribution. We call that the four Ps.

Obviously you still need to do all those things, but in the social world now, there is a new twist. If you think about the product, we used to take a very linear approach to doing market research, testing concepts, via surveys and focus groups. In today’s social world, you can do that much more dynamically. There's a whole phenomenon around crowd sourcing with which you can solicit people's input and feedback and iterate on that massively, and closer to real time.

There's a whole phenomenon around crowd sourcing with which you can solicit people's input and feedback and iterate on that.

Your ability to get really close to the marketplace is enhanced tremendously by social media. In terms of promoting, it used to be broadcast media, but now you're able to do micro campaigns. You can do tweet campaigns. You can do campaigns through Facebook. Your ability to target the individual that you are trying to influence has gone up exponentially.

We've always talked about the segment of one, but it was very difficult to do. Now, you can get in there and really understand who is driving popular opinion, who are the big influencers, who do you need to convert to be an enthusiast or an advocate of your product, and launch very specific campaigns against them. It's a different form of promotion.

It's the same thing with pricing and distribution. While you still need to do many of the same activities, the way in which you will execute on those activities has evolved and become much more dynamic.

Gardner: How is this showing up in terms of ownership inside the organization?

Cole: Every function within the organization has a potential application in the social world. I don't think it's the kind of thing that any one executive or any one function is going to own per se.

It's a matter of looking at it through the lens of the process that you're responsible for, and trying to understand how to apply new thinking and activities to improve your efficiency or your effectiveness of that area. That could be public relations and the brand, marketing and developing effective positioning, product development and management, selling through more targeted campaigns or, at the end of the value chain, a better servicing of the customer to generate greater loyalty.

Different ways

Gardner: One of the things that concerns me about how organizations adapt and adopt to solving their social media problems and capitalizing on it is that different organizations within the company will go at this in different ways.

This can probably lead to redundancy, probably lead to mixtures of data with different formats and we probably we'll find ourselves back in that same problem we have had with many applications. That is manual processes, different approaches to how to solve problems, and different data approaches. So you have this big integration problem in a couple of years.

Does it make sense for these organizations to look at social media as a platform, as you've been describing, with a common standardized governance and/or data approach, and therefore make those available as services to marketing, to the analytics and business intelligence folks, to the helpdesk and service management? Are we going to repeat history and have a fragmented approach to this or is there a better way?

Cole: You’ve really put your finger on a core issue. It all depends. What is social media? That depends on who you are and what you're trying to accomplish. That’s going to be variable based on your area of responsibility within the enterprise.

There is something to be said for standardization and taking a platform-based approach to avoid the recurring tendency of investing in your own individual solutions and then lacking interoperability or having to face integration issues and so forth.

By buying into a managed service the company can avoid having to make capital investments in the technology, avoid the potential risk of different groups going off and doing their own thing.

While the application of what you do on top of the social platforms may vary, there is potential for the organization to operate as an enterprise on top of a single instance of a platform. That’s part of why we got into offering a managed service.

We allow the client to focus on what they are trying to do in the marketing, selling or customer service world. We provide them with the infrastructure, the technology, the process discipline, the data, and importantly, the social media advocates, the human intelligence layer that is ultimately conducting the monitoring and the analytics and the interpretation of what’s happening there.

By buying into a managed service the company can avoid having to make capital investments in the technology, avoid the potential risk of different groups going off and doing their own thing. They can remain current, because they don’t have to pay attention to this fast paced dynamic technology market and what is the state of the art. That would be our responsibility.

Hopefully, it's the best of both worlds. They can each, as user communities, decide what they want to get out of social media, but be able to leverage the fact that they're all investing in a common platform.

Gardner: Social media isn’t the only trend buffeting up against businesses nowadays. There's cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS), mobility, and increased devices, and these are global trends, not by any stretch relegated to one or two markets or regions.

Commonality with cloud and SaaS

Is there an opportunity here for recognizing that the social media and the cloud and the SaaS approaches have some commonality. Where I'm going with this is that a social media metadata about what users are thinking and doing, could be a cloud resource and better positioned there so that that same data can be delivered and updated and managed.

If you come from a data-management background, you might recognize that having a system of record in a good, clean copy that’s updated and then sharing it is a great thing. Do you have any thoughts about how cloud and social come together to help organizations capture the best data and provide the best services when it comes to social media and its offspring?

Cole: Again, it’s just part of the evaluation of technology. It is a different way of storing, distributing, and accessing the data. What it translates into for us is the ability to provide process as a service. That’s a fundamental shift in the marketplace that’s occurring as a result of the development of cloud capabilities.

Organizations can just tap into a service, and that makes it easier for them to get into a new area. It’s faster, it’s less expensive. We're trying to apply that same concept to social media. We can provide a faster, better, and/or cheaper approach. The client buys the process as a service on a subscription model.

We assure the integrity and security of the data. We provide the data management, the repository, the infrastructure, and the toolset. You're buying a service around a process, whether that be listening to your customers, wanting to launch marketing campaigns, providing social care or whatever.

The whole SaaS cloud phenomenon is just changing the distribution model and also facilitating an easier approach for companies to get up and running in this area.

The whole SaaS cloud phenomenon is just changing the distribution model and also facilitating an easier approach for companies to get up and running in this area.

Gardner: Paul, do we have any examples, use cases that you’re aware of on a named basis or anonymous, or perhaps even how Capgemini itself is using social media to its own effect. Do we have any actual examples of how this works and what it actually can accomplish?

Cole: While we're early in the evolution of social business and its potential impact on profitable growth, there are plenty of examples out there of early successes. We’ve probably done 20 programs. Where it’s proving to be most successful so far is in products and service areas where there is a high degree of passion or involvement.

If we look at hospitality, automobiles, or electronic games, we’re finding a high degree of engagement, involvement of customers, and a high degree of interest in sharing their perspective. We’ve done support for marketing campaigns for a new launch for an adult beverage, where we were able to help our clients tweak their campaign geographically and in terms of the market segment it’s gone after.

Reduce call volume

For another client that supplies gift cards to the big brands, we help them understand customer service in an attempt to reduce the call volume into their call center because we were able to isolate the problem quickly, fix it and broadcast the message.

For a global retailer of furnishings, we were able to isolate on a particular segment that they felt have been underserved and understanding their motivations for using the store, and helping them create a new positioning against that segment.

Gardner: It’s impressive to me that social media can have so many different impacts, that it can be used and/or perhaps come in with a disadvantage, but it’s impactful at so many levels.

It seems to me that this notion of social media management then is really important. It’s not just executing on any one of them, but really having that holistic approach. Maybe you could explain a bit more what you mean by social media management in addition to these ways in which it can be so useful.

Cole: First of all, in terms of its all-encompassing kind of influence, there are strong parallels to the early Internet days, in the '90s, where everyone knew that there was a sea change occurring in the nature of how we could interact and exchange values in business.

We’ve got to do it, but over time it will settle down and companies will interpret it as a platform that they could do all kinds of things on and actually add another channel.

But it wasn’t quite clear yet how that was going to reveal itself. So it was a bit of a fad or a shiny new object, but ultimately it became another channel. It found its equilibrium, and companies learned how to conduct business over the Internet, as opposed to the traditional face to face, over the phone, or whatever, or through the retail channel.

Similarly with social media, at the moment it’s a little bit of a "du-jour" phenomenon. We’ve got to do it, but over time it will settle down and companies will interpret it as a platform that they could do all kinds of things on and actually add another channel.

They need to manage the channel. It may sound somewhat antithetical to say social needs to be managed, because really what we’re talking about in the social world is influencing communities. I'm not sure that it is manageable, but we want to provide them with a service that helps them manage customers' perceptions and actions.

Gardner: Lastly, Paul, I'm interested in how organizations can get started. This seems to be one of those issues where it has so many implications It's rather complex. Getting started, knowing where to actually put a stake in the ground and get moving can be daunting.

Where do you suggest that folks get started on how they pursue social media management and perhaps then look to outsource it and find that platform benefit approach.

Trying to understand

Cole: As evidence of the fact that it is a new phenomenon, you can just notice the volume of conferences that are out there with social media in the title. It just reinforces that companies are trying to understand still what "good" looks like. They’re out there looking for best practices. They are still paying for "PowerPoint," for consultants to come in and help them understand the strategy, the power of social, what that translates into in terms of metrics and governance, and so forth.

The market is very much in its exploratory stage. I'm not sure you can over-architect what social media means to you at the moment. This is something that you have to get in and dip your toe in the water. Instead of "ready, aim, fire," it's probably "fire, fire, aim, ready, fire." This means that you need to iterate.

You don’t know what you don’t know….. until you get in to the market and you start to listen to what is happening out there, identify who the key influencers are, where they're talking about, who are the advocates for the brand, and who are the potential saboteurs who can represent a threat? What are some of the kinds of programs and activities that one can run?

Rather than the grand strategies, the big-bang approach, this particular area is deserving of more experimentation, and iteration. Then, over time, we need the development of a broader strategy. But, you need to get in there, and listen, and learn, and act, and from that you'll figure out what works and what doesn’t work.

Gardner: I suppose it's the targeted pilot program approach and then iterating from that?

Cole: Exactly. Part of what we’re trying to offer our clients is the ability to do that faster than doing it themselves, where they have to go out, acquire the tools, hire the people, and put in place the processes.

In this case, they can say we want to launch a campaign and we’d like to understand how we can use the social world to solve customer service problems or whatever. We provide all the tools and capabilities to do that. They focus on learning and evolving their strategy of what to do in the social world.

Part of what we offer is the ability to bring to them the best of the tools that are out there, and it's an evolving world.

Gardner: It seems pretty clear that these tools and platforms aren’t necessarily themselves differentiators. It's what you do with the information that they provide that is the real business value.

Cole: That is true, but on the other hand, part of what we offer is the ability to bring to them the best of the tools that are out there, and it's an evolving world. We've worked with a myriad of software products in trying to understand what capabilities can be best applied to understanding the customer and engaging with them.

As part of that, in our Social Media Management Solution, we’ve built a joint solution with a company called Attensity, which really comes at the market initially from the text analytics world, but offers a nice suite of applications that enable your ability to listen, monitor, analyze what's being done, and then respond to the customer in terms of workflow and direct customer engagement. So it's what you decide to do, but it's also having the right toolset with which to do it.

Gardner: Are there any places to which we could direct our listeners and readers for additional information, perhaps whitepapers, other research, and/or more information on your services?

Cole: Certainly capgemini.com. We do have a featured social media section on the website. We've recently published a whitepaper called "Harvesting the Fruit from the Social Media Grapevine". We hope that clients will find that insightful. It's a bit of a point-of-view on where the market is today and where it's headed. That can be downloaded off of our website.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how social media matters and how services are being developed to help businesses better manage and understand social media for their advantage, and move beyond the threat.

I want to thank our guest. We’ve been here with Paul Cole, Vice President of Customer Operations Management and Business Process Outsourcing at Capgemini. Thanks so much, Paul.

Cole: Thank you very much, Dana. I appreciate it.

Gardner: This is the first in a series of podcasts with Capgemini on social media and business process outsourcing. Look for additional podcasts on these topics across the BriefingsDirect network.

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

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how businesses need to respond to a marketplace changed by social media mechanisms. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Case Study: CharterCARE Health Partners Leverages Cloud and VDI to Aid Digital Records Management and Regulatory Compliance

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from VMworld 2011 on how a large health-care organization is using the cloud and virtualization to put vital data into the hands of employees.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you in conjunction with the recent VMworld 2011 Conference.

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

Our next VMware case study interview focuses on CharterCARE Health Partners, and how virtualized desktops and thin clients are helping with digital records management and healthcare industry compliance and privacy requirements.

We'll learn how Rhode Island-based CharterCARE has embraced private cloud and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to support its distributed, 579-bed community-based health system.

The organization operates the Roger Williams Medical Center, Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, and several other caregiver facilities. We'll hear how the tag team of private cloud and VDI has provided better data management, security, reliability, and regulatory auditing capabilities. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The infrastructure modernization has also helped CharterCARE move to electronic health records and has helped improve their processes for clinicians.

Here to dig into more detail on the CharterCARE IT infrastructure improvement story is Andy Fuss, Director of Technology and Engineering at CharterCARE Health Partners. Welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy Fuss: Well, thank you very much. Good to be here.

Gardner: I'm interested why data management has been a primary driver for you as you've looked to adopt both the private cloud and VDI. What is it about the data equation that’s made this look like a good solution for you?

Fuss: We need our data to be accessible everywhere, at every time, no matter what provider is at what facility. Even from an engineering and technology standpoint, no matter what system analyst, what network engineer may sit down wherever they are to troubleshoot an issue, we need that common set of tools.

Common repository

We need the common repository of information for a caregiver. That would be the electronic medical information. It could be the x-rays, the slides, the CT scans, or the results that were dictated by a radiologist. Whatever it might be, that information needs to be available in a flexible manner and delivered directly to the deskside experience.

Now, if that’s a desktop, it needs to be on a regular PC, but if we're talking about a tablet, we need to accommodate the tablets that people bring in and have come into the facility and are now actively being used, or zero client technology.

We have all the different technologies and pieces. We're trying to promote these pieces to be used and trying to be flexible with accommodating them and getting people to the information that they need so they can take care of the first priority, which really is patient care.

Gardner: Tell me about the extent of your distributed campus and environment. Not only are you dealing with many different types of data and many different endpoints, but you're also distributing this across a multitude of different environments.

Fuss: Absolutely. We have two main acute hospitals that we're dealing with. We have a nursing home, a cancer center, outpatient care offices, and several different offices all around the community. So the data truly needs to not be resident in one spot.

Where you're accessing that data from or where you're using it is seamless to the end user and provides a solid customer experience.

We also needed to have a secured disaster recovery (DR) facility, so that if anything were to happen to our primary data center that’s on one of the campuses, we could flex seamlessly over.

So building a cloud for us made total sense. That cloud hovers between one of two data centers. One is at one of the acute facilities, and then 100 miles away in another state, we have another data center. Our cloud roams between the two, and we have data flowing from each area.

So the connection really is no longer about where it’s physically located by any restriction. It’s more of just gaining access to the internet and being able to make connections. Where you're accessing that data from or where you're using it is seamless to the end user and provides a solid customer experience.

Gardner: You've used the term cloud, and as you know, many people have differing descriptions and definitions for cloud. When you talk about this moving back and forth across facilities that really to me gets as the heart of what I think of as private cloud. Maybe you could fill us in. What do you mean by private cloud in this case, and why is that important for you to manage it in such a dynamic way?

Fuss: Private cloud, by its very definition, would be that data just roams around between one place and another. So the cloud is just out there.

I tell people to look up in the sky. You might see a rabbit in the cloud, you might see a Volkswagen Bus, or it might be a turtle dove, whatever the image that comes to your head is. That’s really what the data is. It’s just moving, but you can always see it and it’s always there.

Same principle

Take the same principle. We're doing the daydreaming and making animals in the sky as you did when you were a kid laying in the middle of the field. You know where the data is. You know the restrictions of where the cloud rolls to. So the security factor is there.

But you also know that you can access it, whether it be from your home, whether it’s from McDonald’s, if you're stopping for a Happy Meal with the kids and you need to access some critical piece of data, or whether it’s anywhere else that you are. That data is always ready, always available, always online, and always secure.

One of the primary concerns for our electronic medical records is that it’s patient data, financial data, and so needs to be PCI-, and HIPAA-compliant. All the different compliance standards that we need to abide by are all satisfied with the ways that these machines are locked down, by the way the cloud is moving, and where we allow it to move to.

There are a lot of people who can embrace different types of clouds. You've got hybrid clouds, private clouds, public clouds, all with different offerings. For us it made sense to do a private cloud. For others, it may make sense to do hybrid type cloud.

As we move toward the future, I can see that we might be able to offload some of our services toward the public cloud. As we increase the size of some of our data and we have patient care cut over to the side, there might be some other data that does not follow the same guidelines. We can put that into a secure public cloud and attach everything.

I'm not worried about theft of an individual device, because the device has nothing more on it than some connectors to get somewhere.

VMware is coming out with those tools and using those tools to make that kind of continuation project possible to look at. We're very excited about some of the initiatives that we've seen at VMworld -- the vCloud Director, with security, the different layers built into that that could make some of the public cloud usable for us for specific applications.

Gardner: Some folks deal with security and think of the public cloud only, but it sounds as if your private cloud has allowed you to improve security, gain control, and deliver this data as needed to a variety of devices not in a stateful, but in a stateless way so that you can control the access. Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds as if private cloud to you means better security?

Fuss: Oh, it does, most definitely. I'm no longer worried about the endpoint device walking away from us. I'm not worried about theft of an individual device, because the device has nothing more on it than some connectors to get somewhere.

When we were first embracing zero client technology in a lot of places, we did some studies. We talked to some different people who had already embraced it. One particular hospital I spoke to said they had on video someone stealing a zero client device, perhaps thinking that they had stolen some great new utility tool for home, a new PC. They were all excited.

They also have them on video, bringing it back the next morning, because they couldn’t do anything with it when they got to their house. Using cloud, using the technologies that ride in the cloud, like VMware View and access to the data through VMware View, really helps to lock things down and it helps to prevent things.

No data leakage

In the past, somebody could have taken a PC, and let’s say that PC could have had metadata on it or could have had some files on it that were saved in someway. It was comical to hear that story from another person who was in a similar situation as us, where there was no data loss or data leakage, even if that device had never come back. So the cloud really has tightened things down for us.

Gardner: And the cloud wouldn’t have the security benefits if it weren’t for the VDI and that zero client benefit. So are they separate to you, are they intrinsically linked, symbiotic? How do you view private cloud and VDI -- separate, distinct, together? What’s the relationship?

Fuss: They're definitely together. They have to be together. In my opinion, it’s what makes sense. We want to see the data tight. We want to see the integration tight. We can have a cloud where the data roams back and forth, but the connection into the cloud actually uses that data.

As I sit here on a device, a personal device at the office that is connected to my virtual desktop instance, this device doesn't even have to be on my network. I'm utilizing a public network that we have here at the hospital system and I've connected into my virtual desktop. I have full accessibility. I'll flip over here in a few minutes when I go into another meeting. I'll bring my iPad with me, another personal device, and I'll be connected right to that same virtual desktop.

So the cloud has allowed me, with View, to seamlessly move between all these different devices. I no longer am tied to something. I'm no longer tied to a specific physical location, a physical anything. I really am completely mobile. I can work anywhere at any time and have that same common set of tools.

I should no longer call it disaster recovery. I should call it our second data center because even though it really is 100 miles away, I can still sit there and work all day long just like I'm anywhere else.

It doesn't matter if I'm working out of the DR site. I should no longer call it disaster recovery. I should call it our second data center because even though it really is 100 miles away, I can still sit there and work all day long just like I'm anywhere else. That ability is really the value that using a cloud and using View gives you.

I want a physician in his office, out on the road or wherever they might be, at home, in a practice have access to that same data and have a similar look and feel every time they connect from whatever device. That's what these solutions that we've opted for have provided for us.

Gardner: So the synergy between the private cloud and the VDI has provided you with better data management, security adhesion and compliance requirements adhesion -- and now you're talking about DR. So this is yet another snowball-like benefit from adopting this particular kind of infrastructure. How far into the DR phase are you?

Fuss: We're quite a bit down the road. We've implemented SRM part of VMware. We were excited about the changes coming in SRM 5, but we still have our current implementation running. We can flex our domain controllers over to the other data center. We actually do have some servers running out of there -- hot, like I've said. We'll be running all of our mail servers out of there very soon.

Break away from location

But the whole procedure, the whole concept, everything that we're doing allows us not to focus on location, and that's the big thing. We break away from location. So where is the data center? Is it going to be affected by the next hurricane coming up the East Coast? Well, if we have a fear of where the hurricane is, we can move our data center 100 miles inland. Or if we think that inland is going to be more affected, we can keep it in Rhode Island, which is right on the ocean.

So we have that ability, and nobody knows where that data is other than the IT department. We know it's within the system, within the security, but nobody would ever notice the difference or question where the data is running or residing. They might ask, and we could tell them, but nobody says, "Wow, that's slow" or "I can see a difference." None of those kind of calls comes in as the cloud flexes.

Gardner: At VMworld, you've had a chance to look over View 5, and the PC-over-IP benefits there; is that something that’s in your pipeline?

Fuss: Absolutely. We’re blessed to be in the VMware 5 beta test user group, and we’re loving what we see. We like the performance. The PC-over-IP expansion is amazing. They’ve written a great protocol there with their partners, and that is the technology that’s going to continue to drive the reinvention of the desktop.

We’ve gone through the reinvention of the desktop a few times in my career, from somewhat dumb terminals to smart terminals to client server. We seem to be making our way back to where we’re keeping our data safe in data centers and in silos. We’re giving people a great end-user experience to give them a full PC feature-set. We’re doing it all securely and we’re doing it all with products that integrate seamlessly with one another, and that’s really the goal.

We seem to be making our way back to where we’re keeping our data safe in data centers and in silos.

We want the user to sit down and feel comfortable with whatever technology they use, and to have a way to take care of our patients that need our help and take care of what other important administrative business they may do, so we can keep moving forward.

Gardner: Let's look at how the end-user experience is benefiting you. When your clinicians have the opportunity to reach this data through a variety of different endpoints regardless of where they are, how have they adapted to that? How have they made that a part of an improved process or adapted workflows that take advantage of that. Has that benefited the organization appreciably?

Fuss: We can already see the expansion, the use of that technology in different areas. We have some physicians with iPads working throughout the facility, visiting the patient’s bedsides, looking at their charts, all that kind of flex room is great.

I've seen it in our administrative areas, our human resource officer using iPad remotely. We’ve had our Chief Information Officer using an iPad, using a PC at home, and connecting through the View client to her machine.

We’ve gotten support not just from forcing the technology out there, but by people asking for the technology. That’s how you can tell you have a good product. People asking, "Can I be moved to this new product, because the flexibility of my supervisor, director, whoever is using is what I need."

Hit a home run

If the director calls saying, "I need this employee to have this flexibility," you know you've hit a home run with the technology. I haven’t had anybody call asking for another PC at another location for the same person to work. I have people calling saying, "I really need to get them onto this technology as soon as it’s possible, because it's made this employee so efficient. I need to do that for everybody else."

So the benefits are there, and they’re just growing now, as it's integrated and being used more in the clinical areas. We’ve seen some growth recently. Even our pharmacy staff is starting to carry iPads around, when they’re doing inventories of some of the medication machines and being able to get that information right there, but on a device that’s secure. If they were to leave it behind, nobody could connect to anything, and that data all sitting safe inside the data center.

So the adoption is there, the benefits are already there, and it's just growing and growing. Every time I turn around, we’re bumping another 50, another 75, virtual machines, into another pool of machines for a new purpose, and that’s the expansion that I keep wanting to encourage.

So the adoption is there, the benefits are already there, and it's just growing and growing.

Gardner: That’s a very intriguing story, and I'm really impressed with how you've been able to take these modernization activities for infrastructure, put them into real-world use, and expand that very rapidly throughout your organization.

We’ve been talking about how virtualized desktops and thin clients are helping with digital records management and healthcare industry compliance and privacy requirements. We’ve been discussing this with Andy Fuss. He is Director of Technology and Engineering at CharterCARE Health Partners. Thanks so much for your time and insights, Andy.

Fuss: Thank you. Pleasure being here.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you in conjunction with the recent 2011 VMworld Conference.

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

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from VMworld 2011 on how a large health-care organization is using the cloud and virtualization to put vital data into the hands of employees. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Cloud-Mobile Mega Trends Point to Need for Rapid, Radical Applications Transformation, Says HP

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how consumer-driven platform variety and advancing cloud services are requiring enterprises to transform and rationalize their applications portfolios.

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

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

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the rapid and massive shifts confronting enterprises as they adopt more mobile devices and broaden their uses of cloud services.

In many ways, the mobile device explosion and the cloud computing ramp-up reinforce and support each other. Cloud services make mobile devices -- like smartphone and tablets -- more productive, while making users better connected to enterprise resources and work processes. On the other hand, mobile devices -- with their ubiquitous, non-stop wireless access -- make cloud-delivered applications, data, and services more relevant and more instantly available anywhere.

By leverging cloud and mobile, applications can be supported by a common, strategic, architectural, and converged-infrastructure approach. Furthermore, by making cloud-delivered applications and data context-aware, delivering enterprise applications to any device securely can then be done at a reduced cost (when compared to conventional applications infrastructure models). It therefore makes little sense to have unique stacks beneath each application for each application or device type.

So how do enterprises adjust to these mobile-cloud, dynamic-duo requirements in the strategic and a proactive way? How can they leverage and extend their current applications or identify which ones to fold and retire?

It’s clear that radical, not incremental, adjustment is in order to make sure that the cloud-mobile era is a gained opportunity and not a fatal or devastating misfire for IT operators -- and business strategists alike.

We're now joined by a guest from HP to explore the promises and perils of adjusting to the cloud-mobile shift. I'm here with Paul Evans, Global Lead for Application Transformation with HP Enterprise Business. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, Paul. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Paul Evans: Hello, Dana. Good to be here.

Gardner: As I've mentioned, we have a lot of active trends unfolding, and we’ve talked about some of the shifts going on. But it seems that this combination of the move to mobile-device adoption and cloud computing is in some ways an enormous opportunity. Yet it’s also making people befuddled. They’re not sure how to tackle these both at the same time.

Radical transformation

Evans: I don't use these words lightly. We have to go through a radical transformation now in terms of our applications. There are these new technologies, part of the megatrends that are affecting organizations. These megatrends encompass things like evolving business models, a changing workforce, and the introduction of new technology.

And all of those are pressured onto an organization today. People are trying to figure out what’s the best route; which one should I ignore, which one should I exploit, and what should I be doing?

In the technological world, we have the world of cloud, and we have the world of mobile. We cannot ignore them. People can’t abdicate and say, "I'm not going to go do it." It's not going to be that way.

At the same time, the CIOs and senior stakeholders are looking outward and asking what are these new technologies, what could they do for me, how could they improve customer service, and what will my competition do?

They also look also over their shoulder and say, "I spend 70 percent of my IT budget keeping the applications I have today working. I probably don’t have enough budget or resource to do both. So the question is, which one of these should I spend more of my time on?"

The answer is that you really can’t afford not to spend time on either. So it's a balancing act between how I encompass the new and exploit it, and at the same time, what do I need to do with my existing applications.

Although we see the world of cloud and mobile as very new-age, very sexy, and all the rest of it, at the end of the day, people have to sit down and deal with what the environments they have right now. They may not be so exciting. They may not be so new-age, but at the end of the day, they make products, count money, and run the organization as it is today. They are the legacy applications.

Gardner: It also seems that they need to find ways to do this holistically. To go at it piecemeal almost subverts the total benefit, particularly if you look at it from a cost-benefit analysis perspective. Have you found in working with large enterprises, as I know you do, that those that attack this strategically or with a master plan, have an advantage?

Evans: Absolutely. It always pleases me when I sit down with a customer who says, "We have to take stock. We have to make a plan. We're not going to do this one day at a time or a week at a time. We have to appreciate how we are going to exploit cloud.

What applications that we have in the back-end server environments are we going to bring forward to the cloud to service a mobile environment? What we are going to do about the use of mobile within our organization and what we are going to do about serving our customers better through mobile devices and the technologies that go with them?"

Some big traps

It always pleases me when people want to make a plan. I may not be the most strategic person sometimes, but I appreciate it in this instance. There are some really big traps that people can fall into here doing something on the fly and then, in six months time, regretting they ever went down that route. Andy Grove, the former head of Intel said that this is a major inflection point.

This year people are predicting that if you count the amount of smart phones and tablets that will be shipped, i.e. bought, that it will be greater than the number of desktop, laptop, and network PCs. So we're tending now toward an inflection point in the marketplace that says more people will interact using mobile devices than they will static devices.

That trend isn’t just a blip for 2011. That continues as we accelerate, as people just get more comfortable with using that technology, as functionality improves, and security and manageability come under control.

We're at that point now. That’s why we use this term radical transformation, because for the people that really want to exploit this, they're making their plans, they're drawing up their action lists of what they have to do, both at the front end with the mobile and cloud environment, but also with their legacy environment.

Gardner: This is really a departure. In the past we've seen trends and rapid changes in IT, but I don’t think we have seen something that’s happened quite as wide spreading and globally. We're seeing this simultaneously in advanced economies across multiples verticals. It's as if even the organizations or regions of the world that may have been catching up in some other ways are leap-frogging and therefore adopting mobile devices even more rapidly.

This isn’t like, "I'll bring in some additional servers and move toward an n-tier architecture, bring in some applications, have coexistence and migrate them out to a branch office over a two- or three-year ramp up process." This is something that’s happening rapidly, more rapidly than we thought, and perhaps more pervasively globally than we thought.

They want to get things delivered. They want decisions made. More and more of the population has grown up with the ability to do things instantly.

Evans: The term that people are using is the consumerization of IT. I'm not quite sure what that actually means. To me, it’s driven by impatience and that’s not a negative thing. Impatience is not regional, and therefore, no matter where you are in the world, people want it now. They want to order things. They want to get things delivered. They want decisions made. More and more of the population has grown up with the ability to do things instantly.

Their impatience is forcing people to do things right now. Therefore, there's the expectation level of I expect, when I click on a device, I should get a response in an amount of time that may be immeasurable. If you wait a second or two, then people say, it’s running slow. You don't have to think really far back, that if you ordered something on the telephone, let’s say, then the normal period was that you will get it within 28 days. We accepted that. That's gone out of the window, gone.

That puts pressure on enterprises to deliver it, and the consumer is not acting alone. The consumer is saying, "I want you to send me a book. I want to download music. I want to order a holiday. I want to get a confirmation of a bank statement, or whatever it maybe, and I expect it right now."

Therefore, the systems that are serving up that information are the back-end systems. These are not new systems. These are the old systems. So, it’s this radical transformation. It’s dealing with the fact that we have to adjust those back-end systems to deliver up information to a wide plethora of different platform types, whether it will be smart phones, tablets, traditional notebook PCs, or desktop PCs.

This is going to be pervasive. This is the way we're going to do things for the foreseeable future. Therefore, if we don’t get it right now, we stand a risk of making decisions about platform types or architectures, or whatever it may be, that within six months, we’re going to say that it wasn’t such a good idea.

Never been here before

I meet so many customers now that are saying, "We’ve never been here before. We’ve never been with this volume of devices. We’ve never been through the fact that over half of our workforce now brings their own device with them into the office."

They're sending out policy documents that say, "you shall not do this," and it's totally ignored. The changing workforce has a totally different level of expectation as it were, of what's possible, just in terms of the amount of transactions that are performed over the net or 20,000 applications downloads in a minute.

These are transactional rates in volumes that we've never seen before. Despite a lot of our previous experience, you just can’t leave it and say, "It worked five years ago. It’s going to work for the next five years." That's what our customers are dealing with today.

Gardner: This isn’t just happening with applications delivered through an employee local area network (LAN), we’re talking about business-to-business (B2B) applications and data being served up, consumers increasingly being part of the revenue mix when applications are delivered through their mobile devices. It’s increasingly important for the organization to be delivering applications across different types of users, different parts of the globe, different types of device interfaces.

So it gets back to this common notion of a singular comprehensive infrastructure. We have mobile and shifting requirements and we’re also seeing the need for efficiency on how applications are served up.

One of the questions we get all the time is what percentage of my applications or products should I be moving to the cloud?

Paul, what are you seeing in terms of how organizations are putting the numbers together, and say, "What’s hybrid cloud or a hybrid cloud model bringing to the table in terms of how to solve this?"

Evans: There are two critical questions have to get answered. One is the organizations that are going to move applications to a cloud environment are not going to move all of them. One of the questions we get all the time is, What percentage of my applications or products should I be moving to the cloud? And of course the answer is ... It’s not a percentage thing. It’s the type of application.

It’s still formative times, but in HP’s view, clearly applications that probably are not embodying intellectual property would be a type of application that's well served moving into the cloud. And, any form of application including servicing, providing a service across a wide population of users as well, especially those who are obviously in a mobile environment; applications that are productivity-centric.

You really want to drive the cost down as low as possible for any of these productivity applications. There's no sense in running on aging infrastructure where the costs are high. You really want to be getting the cost down, because if it’s a productivity application, it doesn’t differentiate you. And if it doesn’t differentiate you, then why would you spend anything more than the minimal cost?

So put those productivity applications onto the lowest cost environment where you couldn't provision an infrastructure that has this elasticity that the cloud environment provides.

No clear line of sight

That's the first thing, organizations are focusing on and saying, "How are we going to start to bring forward some of our applications that we’ve had buried in the data center?" And some at extremely high-cost. We find working with people that there still are some applications where there may not be a clear line of sight into just how much that application is costing and the infrastructure it’s running on.

You might say we are spring-cleaning a little as we go into organizations and help them understand what are the top candidates for applications to move to the cloud. What we're doing is unearthing the portfolio of application through the work we do, and saying to the CIO saying, "Did you realize that you have this number of applications and that you're spending this amount on those?" Of course, the usual answer is, "No, I didn’t know I had that many." Usually, what we uncover is there is about twice as many as people thought.

They do consume a lot of cash. So, in this spring-cleaning. We're moving applications from back-end environment to the cloud. Then we have an opportunity to rationalize the portfolio. Rationalizing the portfolio had two big impacts. One, it takes cost out, which means that you can consider that as saved money or money that can reinvested in the mobile world.

But also you're taking out complexity. Every organization, I think, would agree at the moment that their environments are too complicated, and by virtue of being to complicated, it makes it difficult to change them, and people are looking for agility and flexibility.

So first things first. When we're talking to organizations, what we're trying to understand is what are the candidates that can move to the cloud, and that’s a big hot topic. A lot of our users and customers say, "We sort of get our head around cloud. That’s okay. We can see it’s a different paradigm. It has a different cost model. It helps me with provisioning. Life’s good."

The technical challenge is to support this environment agnostically and say, 'We don’t care what you're using.'

So they can get their head around that, and as you can tell by just reading the press and listening to what goes on in the world, you would say people are on the move with cloud.

On the other hand, when they are looking from the outside in with mobile, there is less of a precedent there. The sharp customers that we are working with are saying, "We don’t want to fall into traps. We're going to build an environment that suits one type of mobile environment and we are going to be able to test it and manage it." They know that they don’t have that order of control. The days when it was, "You shall use this device, and that device we know how to work," have gone.

If you think back to mainframe days, people had to use a 3270 device. That was it. It was defined by IBM. That’s the way you're going to do it. And if you didn’t have one, then you didn’t get to participate. The world is now totally the other way around.

The technical challenge is to support this environment agnostically and say, "We don’t care what you're using." What we can do is understand how to manage and provide the right level of security to that device, whatever that device may be. Maybe you come inside the network and that’s going to be a high performance network these days, because of the whole issue of impatience.

As I said, the volume and the variety of platforms are unprecedented. Even though we had the PC world, the PC as the client was a single entity. It had some interesting characteristics initially, but there was one brand. What we're dealing with now is many different ways. Therefore, we have to understand this from an agnostic standpoint, so that the consumer can continue to use the device of their choice and can get the services they require from this new cloud and server environment.

Virtuous adoption

Gardner: I've been speaking to some organizations recently where, as they’ve moved to cloud to support these new requirements, they’ve also recognized that there is virtuous adoption benefit in terms of efficiency. As they solve some of these issues around wide area network (WAN), around converged infrastructure supporting applications, transforming applications from their older platforms into new modern ones. And they're also gaining efficiencies through virtualization, and higher utilization rates.

They're able to do disaster recovery more quickly. They're able to reduce the total amount of data, because they're consolidating and they're removing redundancies of data. They're able to remove redundancies of application instances. They were able to license at the data center levels, and so on.

Suddenly, they say, "We're doing more. We're doing it differently, but we're actually doing things at a far more efficient level, and therefore, our costs over time are coming down, particularly if you focus on the operational level." So is there is a daunting challenge to moving to cloud in order to support many different things, including mobile, but in doing so, are you setting yourself up for longer-term efficiency?

Evans: The sharp customers and the sharp organizations out there have realized that already. Over the last 30 or 40 years in computing it's been totally organic. Unfortunately, we as vendors keep bringing out new things. While someone is trying to work with the old, we bring out something new, and they say, "How on the earth are we meant to develop an architecture and understand how to get the best out of this?"

What's happening now is that by virtue of the tidal wave, computing is going to be pervasive. It’s not going to be just the realms with data center and the few selected people that used to get access. Everybody is going to have this. Then it’s not only everybody, but it’s also these 13 trillion devices that are going to be connected to the internet, that don’t have people attached to them at all.

As people look at things like cloud, they're beginning to realize the applications that they can class as productivity.

They are devices that are monitoring things, whether it’s energy usage or whatever and then pumping that data into the Internet. As organizations begin to realize that the world is going to change, their view is going to be "We need architecture."

By virtue of developing an architecture, people are beginning to realize, as they begin to take stock of where they have been spending their money, that they have in the past and may have an opportunity to drive more efficiency and effectiveness into that organization, whilst at the same time delivering innovation.

So I think this inflection point can have some really good signs about it. As people look at things like cloud, they're beginning to realize the applications that they can class as productivity.

We ask them where they run certain productivity applications And everyone would say HR. Invariably we get the answer that it runs on a mainframe. And we ask why they run the HR system on a mainframe? Well, because it’s important. Of course it’s important and it’s vital, but it isn’t differential. It doesn’t give you some competitive advantage in the marketplace. It’s definitely absolutely necessary as a core part of your business. Just provide that service, but it’s not core in the sense that it gives you differentiation.

So you're right. It’s forcing decisions on people now, because the people that appreciate that this radical transformation is something that they can’t stop and they should exploit, rather than trying to ignore. People are actually seeing that there are significant efficiencies to be gained from deploying these new technologies.

Radical nature

Gardner: Let’s revisit the radical nature of this response that organizations need to have. In order to appreciate how rapidly and radically they need to shift, they need to appreciate how their requirements and the demands and their expectation are shifting, and a very good example is the travel industry, because the vertical is clearly needing to respond.

All of us or many of us travel, some more frequently than others. And, we have a sense of how fast things are changing just in a matter of months. We've seen going to the gate at an airport become a different experience with different expectations. People are using mobile devices and not even going near paper anymore, recognizing that a scan device works just fine.

It’s amazing to me how consumers have adopted this very rapidly. They see something that works better and they go to it. It then becomes incumbent upon the airline businesses to support that.

So let’s look at an example of how things are shifting and let’s visit the vertical industry of travel. What would you see happening there that is a harbinger of what others might expect in other businesses?

Evans: What’s interesting is that there are always industry "skews" of technology. We have a tool in HP called the Business Value Framework. What that tries to do is interpret where the business wants to go.

If you can serve people better, if you can give them better information, then there is highly likely that they are going to come back as a repeat customer.

Ignore the technologies for a moment. Where are the line-of-business people wanting to drive their business going forward? If you're in a business where it's relatively difficult to differentiate yourselves, where it’s more commoditized -- and you could argue the airline industry is relatively commoditized -- then what people are going to look for is how we're going to have that small differentiation that makes us better than the rest of the world.

When you look at this business value framework and you look at things like services and transportation, what comes through very loudly is customer service and customer satisfaction is key. If you can serve people better, if you can give them better information, then there is highly likely that they are going to come back as a repeat customer.

You don't want to spend a truckload of money dragging people to your airline and then displeasing them, so they go to somewhere else, because that's makes the whole initial effort worthless.

What people are looking for is obviously loyal and devoted customers who come back and back and back, and that all comes down to deliver customer satisfaction. One of the customers we've been working with, Delta Air Lines, has really put that at the forefront. They can provide very rich, very high quality information, so that people know what's going on.

Range of devices

Working with Delta, they've been providing to a range of mobile devices, like smart phones, tablets, etc., but also to traditional desktop environment, rich information, not only when you're waiting for the plane, but also when you're on the plane by virtue of seat-back videos screens so that people get a continuous feed.

If you're flying from A to B to C, you're going to change planes in the middle. If you're going to miss your connection, you usually sit on the plane, knowing you're going to miss your connection, and then what are you going to do? That means you get off the plane, queue with 500 other people, and then you eventually get another plane -- eventually -- all the time trying to figure out how you can tell your family why you are late and rest of it.

Delta is trying to provide an environment that says while you're on one of your airplane, it's already working out the next connection and it will give you that information on the plane. It will give the e-boarding card. It will send you the vouchers that would allow you to get some refreshment, all to your mobile device, so that all of that stress and angst that you’ve had traditionally gets taken out. In a commodity industry that's the sort of thing you have to do to be different from the rest.

We see that in a number of industries. We see people today delivering and developing mobile applications, particularly in the commodity world, to deliver up a much higher level of customer service and satisfaction.

That's the thing that means we're going to go back again and spend our money with them again, as opposed to a competitor, because in this world of internet it's so easy to switch. Brand loyalty, customer loyalty, may not be things of the past, but something you have to work incredibly hard to achieve. That's what people are utilizing these new technologies for predominantly.

What they value are things like structured workshops, to have an open debate between technology and business.

Gardner: So to recognize that convenience is the killer application, the ability to serve up the data in real-time to any device, to allow the participants in a business process to interact with that process, to make changes, basically what we would call change management, for a consumer is simply convenience.

This requires an awful lot to happen in the back end. What is HP bringing to the table to help organizations like Delta or others that don't have a precedent to fall back on that are finding themselves faced with fairly complex challenges and looking for that strategic view? How is HP adjusting to the market itself in order to accommodate these kinds of clients?

Evans: What we are definitely doing in some respects is using the experience we built up in dealing with people's legacy environments and understanding what they value. What they value are things like structured workshops, to have an open debate between technology and business that says who is leading, who is following, where are we going, and what do we need?

A lot of the things we do in terms of those initial services set the scene, so that we just don't leap in and decide, "Well, we're going to support X device. We're going to provide this app on it." And then, six months later, we're struggling with how we're going to deploy that app over multiple platforms and how we're going to use new technologies like HTML5 etc. to give us that agnostic approach?

It’s this convergence between the mobile world and the traditional world, because we believe that’s the big thing. We can talk about the sexy front end, the smart phones, the pad environment -- and it's great to talk about those -- but at the end of the day, those devices only really get to do what they are paid to do, when they connect to rich and meaningful information at the back end. So for this convergence we sit with users, sit with the CIO, and understand what is it that they're going to be converging in terms of information from the back end and the utilization of the mobile device on the front end.

Put into context

Then, how do we connect those together? How do we sit down and say, "What sort of speed of transaction, what volume of information are we talking about here," and obviously understanding that. That information has to be put into context now for the device of the front-end. If you're delivering this to a smart phone, it has to be represented in a totally different way than if you were going to deliver it to a desktop PC or, in the middle, a pad.

So the point being is we've got to be aware of those. We’ve got to be aware of the user’s context and understand what we can and cannot deliver to them. But I think behind the scenes, and of course, this is where the consumer says, "I don’t really care," but the whole management and security that you put in place, and HP has spent a lot of time, and a lot of effort, and a lot of money in acquisitions and development of technologies that allow people to manage and also provide a secure environment, to those devices that are at the front-end.

Gardner: Of course, this does require the complete view of network storage, hardware, software, integration, hybrid cloud development. It’s really astonishing to me how this really impacts just about everything when it comes to IT. This is not something that’s a bolt-on type of affair.

Evans: Absolutely not. As I said earlier, those are sort of the quick wins that people are saying that you can just bolt-on. "Oh well, we used to send out data to desktop PCs and then laptops or whatever. This is just an extension." This is not. This is different. This is a paradigm shift. This is an inflection point. Whatever managerial business term you want to use, this is a big deal in their mind.

There are serious challenges. I wouldn’t for a second say this is a piece of cake. Just ring us up, and 30 days later you get a solution. It is not like that. This is a big deal. There are serious challenges and therefore they need serious people to fix them. We're into understanding how you get this end-to-end view, because if you only look at a piece of the puzzle, you aren’t going to build what is absolutely necessary.

There are serious challenges. I wouldn’t for a second say this is a piece of cake. Just ring us up, and 30 days later you get a solution. It is not like that.

Gardner: Before we sign off Paul, are there some salient resources to which you could point people to acquaint themselves more with what we've been discussing, particularly on how to solve some of these issues?

Evans: On hp.com -- if you type in hp.com/go/applicationtransformation, there are a plethora of different links there for people to read up on things, watch videos, whatever. We're also developing a digital repository for predominantly video material. We find that our customers are very clear in telling us that they like watching short, sharp pieces of materials that are being videoed, so they can get the message quickly and get offline.

Maybe the days of reading a 20 page white paper are gone, which I am not sure is true, but definitely our clients told us very clearly that they like watching videos. So we're developing a whole series of video-based material, whether it's on application rationalization, application modernization, mobility in the enterprise world, or infrastructure.

The intention here is not to hear from HP, because we will do what we're paid to do, which is trying to convince you we have some very smart people in technologies and products, but also hear from industry experts, hear from our customers about what they're doing, how they're doing it, and the sort of benefits.

So if you stay in touch through hp.com/go/applicationtransformation, we'll always point you to materials that in some instances are not being delivered by HP, but just hear from our customers and hear from industry analysts about really what is now possible.

Gardner: Well, great. You’ve been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on the rapid and massive shifts confronting enterprises as they adopt more mobile devices and also broaden their uses of cloud services. We've heard ways of the cloud mobile era is a potential opportunity, but also has some pitfalls in terms of how to approach this and that are comprehensive and strategic overview, seems to be working for many of the early adopters that are succeeding.

So I want to thank our guest, Paul Evans, Global Lead for Application Transformation at HP Enterprise Business. Thanks, Paul.

Evans: Thanks, Dana.

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

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how consumer-driven platform variety and advancing cloud services are requiring enterprises to transform and rationalize their applications portfolios. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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