Expert Chat with HP on How IT Can Enable Cloud While Maintaining Control and Governance

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how best to pursue cloud models.

View the full Expert Chat presentation on cloud adoption best practices.

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

Dana Gardner: Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect presentation, a sponsored podcast created from a recent HP expert chat discussion on best practices for implementing cloud computing models.

You know, the speed of business has never been faster, and it's getting even faster. We’re seeing whole companies and sectors threatened by going obsolete due to the fast pace of change and new kinds of competition.

Because of this accelerating speed in business, managing change has become a top priority for many corporations.

And cloud computing has sparked the imagination of business leaders, who see it as a powerful new way to be innovative and gain first-mover advantages -- with or without traditional IT's consent.

This now means that the center of gravity for IT services is shifting toward the enterprise’s boundaries – moving increasingly outside their firewalls. And so how can companies have it both ways -- exploit cloud's promise but also retain rigor and control that internal IT influences and governance enables?

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. To help answer these crucial questions about how to best pursue cloud models, I recently moderated an HP Expert Chat session with Singapore-based Glenn West, the Data Center and Converged Infrastructure Lead for Asia-Pacific and Japan in HP’s Technology Services Organization.

This now means that the center of gravity for IT services is shifting toward the enterprise’s boundaries.

[Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

In our discussion now, you’ll hear the latest recommendations for how IT can support cloud benefits with low risk, and how IT can quickly take on the role of cloud benefits enabler.

We'll look first at why the industry is changing so rapidly due to consumer and business trends. These are forcing cloud and hybrid computing into the mindset of IT, and it's now becoming really a rethinking of data centers as a result.

The modern data center, it turns out, has to serve many masters. It has to be flexible, it's really a primary tool for business, and it needs to be built to last and to serve over a long period of time with ongoing agility, dependability, and manageability.

Difficult Trick

As you begin to cloud-enable your data centers, you'll recognize that you need to pull off a very difficult trick, especially nowadays, and that’s to be both increasing your organization’s speed and agility, but also at the same time reducing cost. This is a very difficult combination, but it's absolutely essential.

The cloud-enabled data center, therefore, is going to require a long journey, but in addition to making these strategies, put them in place and execute on them, you need to demonstrate the economic advantages along the way. That’s important to get the trust and allegiance of the business and the end users who are depending on these services. So proper planning and project management are essential and managing the expectations of users and business leaders is critical.

Speed to serious progress is a given these days in business, because businesses are under so much pressure to adapt and think first of advantages in their respective verticals. In their regions, they are under a lot of competitive pressure. They are also under pressure to show better economic performance themselves.

Disruptions that we are seeing are exacerbated by the slack economy, the requirements around data explosion and information management, and what we now know and refer to as big-data analysis.

Further driving this need for change and adaptability is a big push to mobile computing, and even the increased social interactions that we're seeing in the marketplace and that are having a profound effect, things like social networks and sharing and learning more about business through these interactions.

We're seeing whole companies and sectors grow obsolete these days, if they don't keep up with the new trends.

So the increased speed of business is building a sense of urgency and risk, and the risk is that you don't perform well in the market. But there's a secondary risk, and that is, if you move too quickly to cloud, if you don’t do it properly, it could end up being a problem that reduce whatever the benefits of cloud computing are.

We're seeing whole companies and sectors grow obsolete these days, if they don't keep up with the new trends. We've seen many companies rise and fall rapidly, and it's important to build on the speed, but not so fast that you break the mechanisms and have an insufficient platform support capability in the process.

What's prompting this is businesses looking for innovation, or sometimes, in some cases many times, going around IT, starting to adopt cloud, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and services outside of IT’s knowledge. They think that the cloud drive gets them better results, but it can actually spawn complexity and sprawl, both unintended consequences.

Indeed, Forrester Research reports that business groups are adopting 2.5 times faster than the typical organization's IT groups. This, says Forrester, creates supplier sprawl as procurement of cloud services by these business groups remains separate and beyond the control of IT.

This can create quite a mess, and we have seen instances of this in the past when technologies are adopted without IT’s consent, and it means a mess for CIOs. They need to measure and integrate how these services can be brought in, both to work with existing and legacy application data and platforms, as well as to then bring in the hybrid services enablement.

Low-risk fashion

So the onus is really on the IT people to enable cloud adoption, but to try to do it in a managed, low-risk fashion. This require a discipline, and it also requires flexibility and adaptation to the cultural norms of the day.

Cloud enablement needs to be built in, not just at the technological level, but in ways that business and technology processes are developed, and this means IT thinking anew about being a service enabler, being a service broker, and being in a role of a traffic cop, if you will, allowing what can and can't be used. Not just say no, but learning to say yes, but providing it in a safe fashion. This is what we now refer to as a hybrid services broker function.

It's by no means too late to master services in cloud management, and it's not too early to begin to get really strategic in terms of shaping how the organizations react, thinking about data centers strategically, planning for a hybrid services delivery capability, recognizing also that the way that IT is supported financially is going to change.

People are going to pay as they use, and they're going to look for really good efficiency automation and management, a fixed purpose approach to IT. That means high efficiency and high productivity. It's what businesses and consumers are demanding and it's what IT must deliver or run the risk of becoming obsolete itself.

Cloud, in effect, is forcing a focus and hastening of directive. So what's really been underway for sometime, services orientation, that includes a focus on service-oriented architecture (SOA), business services management, and an increased emphasis on process efficiency. Clear goals are gaining that agility and speed, lowering the total cost, and rethinking IT as a services-delivery function.

The key is to gain IT’s trust, to build IT’s trust, to keep cost coming down, and to show innovation and building success along the way.

We're going to see here today how gaining a detailed sense of where you are across your IT activities is now crucial to being able to navigate a services consumption model, which include private cloud, hybrid cloud, and ultimately a mixture of public clouds. But with existing data centers, they need to know exactly what they have and know the assets that they're going to need to support, and how that will interact and interoperate and essentially integrate with outside services as well.

The key is to gain IT’s trust, to build IT’s trust, to keep cost coming down, and to show innovation and building success along the way, providing businesses with that agility and speed that they are really looking for. It's a very difficult fit, but we're seeing success already in the field from early adopters. They're learning to support automation, elasticity, and that fit for purpose capability across more aspects of IT.

It makes services orientation a mantra that can pay off in terms of efficiency and management, and it also helps reduce that risk by allowing them to remain in control with risk governance management.

We're now going to hear from a HP expert about meeting these challenges and obtaining the payoffs, while making sure that the transition to cloud and data center transformation is done in a safe and managed away. Now is the time to begin making preparations for such successful cloud enablement of your data center.

View the full Expert Chat presentation on cloud adoption best practices.

With that, I would like to now introduce our speaker, Glenn West, the Data Center and Converged Infrastructure Lead for Asia-Pacific and Japan in HP’s Technology Services Organization, based in Singapore. Welcome, Glenn.

Exciting environment

Glenn West: Hi. The Cloud is an incredibly exciting environment and it's changing things in quite incredible ways. We're going to be focused today on how cloud is enabling the data center.

In the data center today, there are quite a few challenges, both from the external world, as well as from internal changes. In the external space, there are regulatory risks, natural disasters, legal challenges, and obviously technologies are changing.

As Dana mentioned, whether the IT department chooses to change or not, businesses are changing anyway. This is putting pressure on the data center. They must adapt and transform. Internally, greater agility and consolidation are needed. Green initiatives to save money and cost are putting great pressure on change.

So all of these things are causing the data center to converge, and this convergence is pushing the cloud.

What is a data center? In HP we have a very holistic approach. We'll start at the bottom from the facility point of view -- the location, the building, the mechanical and the electrical. Data center densities are growing quite rapidly and electrical costs are changing incredibly fast and rising. So the facility is very important in the operational cost of the data center.

Whether the IT department chooses to change or not, businesses are changing anyway. This is putting pressure on the data center.

Next, we go to the more traditional component, the actual infrastructure -- the server, the storage, the networking, both the physical and the virtual component of this. Then, on top of that, the part that drives the business, the applications and the information, and this is incredibly mixed. You have legacy applications, you have internally developed custom applications, as well as the more common ones.

On top of these, you have other facilities, such as critical systems, middleware, data warehouses and big data that are forcing changes. Data is growing very, very rapidly, and the ability to analyze this data is growing rapidly as well.

We next look at the management and operations. If data centers change, the management and the efficient operation become even more important. Then, controlling, governing, and the organization have key parts. Without having the right organizational structure it's very difficult to manage your clouds.

Some people view cloud computing as a fantastic miracle and some people view it as a fact. But actually cloud momentum has been moving quite rapidly, to the point that the whole population is using cloud on a routine basis. Most people are exposed as users to cloud via Amazon, or Facebook. Obviously, there are different types of clouds, and the ones I just mentioned are public clouds.

The next type is private cloud. An organization often has traditional IT. So some people ask if cloud computing is the next dot-com. In reality, cloud computing is an irresistible force. It's moving forward, and things are changing.

Scalable and elastic

So what does cloud mean? Cloud means going to a more service-driven model. It's scalable and it's elastic. Think about the public cloud space. How do you handle it when something is very, very popular? One day, it may have a hundred users and the next day it becomes the next hot thing for that instant in time. Then, the demand goes away.

If we use a traditional model, we can’t afford to have the infrastructure, but this pay-per-use is the foundation of cloud. We start looking at a service concept delivered and consumed over the Internet as needed.

The key word that keeps coming up is service, service orientation, the elasticity and the pay-per-use. Clouds ideally are multi-tenant. That can be within a company or outside a company.

Let's zoom to the next level and start with the private cloud. This is an internal client base. Think about it, for example, as a large company that has a hundred business units. Each business unit is a consumer of services. It's value-based and customized, and this is different than a public cloud.

A public cloud is a huge client base. You're talking about tens of millions or hundreds of millions of the potential subscribers in public clouds. It's very efficient, very data-driven, and based on large volumes.

It's radically different than traditional IT. You move away from managing servers, and you manage services.

Now the part in the middle, the hybrid, is a unique mix. I have a process that happens once in a blue moon, so I really want IT facility for it. The hybrid is a mix of public and private clouds to get even greater elasticity.

In the private cloud, all that is inside the company or inside the firewall, and as a cloud provider to your internal business unit, you start getting infrastructure pools. So you start seeing standardization.

Cloud is for automation, orchestration, automating control and a service catalog. All of a sudden, instead of calling somebody and saying, "I need this done," you have a portal. You say, "I want a SharePoint site," and boom. It’s created.

It's radically different than traditional IT. You move away from managing servers, and you manage services. In a data center, over the next couple of years, focus is going to be on private clouds. There will be public cloud providers for certain things, but the focus is going to be on the private side.

Private will slowly push into a hybrid and then slowly adds additional from the cloud services. The majority initially a private cloud will be infrastructure as a service.

The key drivers of this are agility and speed. When a business unit says they need it tomorrow, they're not joking. The agility that a private cloud provides solves a lot of opportunity in the business. It also solves the pressure of going into a public cloud supplier and getting it outside the IT framework.

Management and processing

The challenges over the next few years are management and the processing. How do we fund and charge back the whole business model concept? Then, building the cloud service interface, the service description. All of this is before the technology. Cloud is more than just the technology. It’s also about people and process.

Only a small portion will fit in the cloud today, but things are rapidly moving. We were talking about the future. Look at the current sprawl that's occurring. If IT doesn’t get in the front, this probably will get worse. But if the cloud is managed properly, then IT sprawl can be reduced, controlled, and slowly moved into a more standardized structure.

This is a journey. It won't happen overnight. IT sprawl is consuming 70 percent for operations and maintenance versus innovation which is only 30 percent. Something is wrong. This should be the other way around, and cloud provides a solution to start reversing this process. It's best when you have 70 percent in innovation and 30 percent in operations.

As we move into the cloud and talk about private cloud, service function of IT starts coming into reality, and this is referred to as hybrid delivery. Hybrid delivery is when you start looking at the different ways of providing services, whether they are outsourced, cloud private-based, or publicly-based.

You start looking at becoming a service broker, which is the point at which you say that for this particular service, it makes best sense to pay it here. Then you start looking to manage it and be able to fully optimize your services.

As we move into the cloud and talk about private cloud, service function of IT starts coming into reality, and this is referred to as hybrid delivery.

Going further out into 2015, 18 percent of all IT delivery will be public cloud, 28 percent will remain as private cloud, and the rest will be in-house or outsourced. You can see the rapid change going forward.

Gardner: What kind of applications do you think we are going to see? When you mention the service enablement, these different cloud models, I think people want to know what sorts of applications will be coming first in terms of applicability to these models?

West: If you're referring to public cloud, the first ones a lot of times are collaboration applications. Those were the first ones that moved into the public cloud space. Things like SharePoint, email, calendaring applications were the early adopter models.

Later we have seen CRM applications move. Slowly but surely, you're seeing more and more application types, especially when you start looking at infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It’s not so much the type of application, but the type of application load.

As you see, the traditional model is all about selling products, fixed costs, fixed assets. Everything is fixed. But when you start looking at a service model, it’s more pay-per-use. It’s flexibility, it’s the choice, but also a bit of uncertainty. In the traditional model you have controls, but when you start looking at the service model, it’s all about adaptability and change.

Big gap

So there's a big gap here. On one side, we're all about things being fixed, and on the next side, we're moving to being cloud ready, to hybrid services, and hybrid service delivery. So how do we get across this great divide? We really need a bridge. We really need a way to move across this great divide and this big change.

The way we change this is through transformation. It's a journey. Cloud is not something that you can wake up one day and say, "We're going to have it executed instantly." You have to look at it as going through levels of maturity.

This maturity model starts at the bottom. Some organizations are already at the beginning of this journey. They've already started standardizing, or they may have started virtualizing, but it’s a process. You have to get to the point where you're looking at moving up. It’s not just about technology.

View the full Expert Chat presentation on cloud adoption best practices.

Obviously, you have to get to the point where you're consuming cloud services. If you look at the movement to cloud, you can look at it as pulling organizations into it. This is driven by the rapid adoption by the masters in cloud. There’s a great push from the business side. Business is gearing their customers to talk about cloud and cloud-based applications. So there is a pull there.

Also from the data center itself, there is a push. The IT sprawl, the difficulty in management, are all pushing towards cloud quite rapidly.

Business is gearing their customers to talk about cloud and cloud-based applications. So there is a pull there.

The question is, where are we now? Right now, a lot of companies are in this environment where they have started virtualizing. They've moved up a bit and they've started doing some optimization. So they're right at the edge of this.

But to move forward you need to look at changing more than just some of the technology. You also need to look at the people, the technology, and the process in order to bring organizational maturity to the point that it’s starting to be service enabled. Then, you're starting to leverage the agility of cloud.

If you are just simply virtualized, then guess what, you're not going to see the benefit that cloud offers. You need to increase in all of these areas.

Gardner: As we look at the continuum, how do organizations continue to cut costs while they're going about this transformation. As I pointed out, that's an essential ingredient to keeping the allegiance, trust, and support of IT going.

West: This journey is quite interesting. To a large degree, the cost optimization is built in. When you start the journey in the standardization process, you start reducing cost there. As you virtualize, you get another level of cost reduction. At each step, when you start going to a shared service model and a service orientation, you start connecting things to business. You start getting the IT concepts dealing with the business cost.

Further optimized

Moving up to the point of elasticity, things are further optimized. This whole process is about optimization, and when you start talking about optimization, you're talking about driving down the costs.

Currently, between the beginning of this journey and the end of this journey, we're reducing cost as we go. Each stage of this is another level of cost reduction.

We mentioned that the cloud isn't just about technology. Obviously, technology is part of it, but it's also about automation and self-service portals. The cloud is about speed. Imagine the old traditional process, you say, "Let me weigh the capital equipment required. Let me get that approved. Let me write the PO."

To get a server under the traditional system, I've seen organizations that take nine months. That's not agility. Agility is getting it in 90 seconds. You log into the portal and say, "I need a SharePoint Server," you're done.

As part of the process, you also have to get into standardization. You have to get into service lifecycle. A cloud that never throws anything away is not an optimized cloud. Having a complete service lifecycle, from beginning to end, is important.

In IT, a cloud without a chargeback model will be a cloud that is over-utilized and running out of control.

Usage and chargeback are key elements as well. Anything that's free always has a long queue. In IT, a cloud without a chargeback model will be a cloud that is over-utilized and running out of control. Having a way of allocating and charging back to the consuming parties, be it an internal customer or outside customer is very important.

Elements often forgotten in cloud are people and having a service orientation. If you look at a traditional IT organization, you have a storage manager and a network manager. If you look at cloud, you have service managers. The whole structure changes. It doesn't necessarily reduce roles or increase roles, but the roles are different. It's about relationship management, capacity management, and vendor management. These are different terms than traditional IT.

If you look at it moving from private cloud, what are the big changes, versus the lower level of maturity? Obviously getting into resource management, looking at standardizing process, getting some automation done, aligning the business, service catalog, self-service, and chargeback. These are the foundations of moving from level 2, where you have done some virtualization, into the beginning of implementation of private cloud.

So what can we do in private cloud? Obviously test and development is the perfect first item into private cloud. New services? Cloud is here. If you're implementing something new, it should be cloud focused.

When you start looking at large batch or batch processing needs, these are things that come and go. If I need some processing power now and I don't need it tomorrow, this really plays to be the key elements of cloud.

Opportunities for cloud

High performance computing, web services, database services, collaboration, high volume, frequently requested standardized and repeatable. That pretty well identifies those great opportunities for private cloud.

Now that we've talked about private cloud, how do we slowly move to more of a hybrid model? For the hybrid model, right off the bat, we need to start looking at adding public cloud services.

Once you start moving into public cloud, you need the ability to understand that things will scale a business, meaning that you need to look at the variability of cost. They need to be tied to the level of business.

Things like backup ability, interoperability and standards, and security are additional things that we need to look at as we move into public cloud services and the hybrid model.

Let's talk about the types of workloads. We need cloud for things that are dynamic, that go on and off at times. On every Monday I need to do this this application. It's going to consume significant resources once a month or once a quarter, or this project is going to run for a moderate amount of time and the demand is coming and going.

Things like backup ability, interoperabilities and standards, and security are additional things that we need to look at as we move into public cloud services and the hybrid model.

The next area that works really good is something that is growing very, very rapidly. Because of the elasticity of cloud, rapid growth is a fundamental ability of cloud. Application workloads that need to be able to grow very rapidly are ideal.

Predictability is another thing. If you have applications with an unpredictable load that works really well. Then, things that are periodic as well. Your fixed cost is low then.

Imagine you have a workflow that is running at 99 percent of the time. There are very few things like that in most organizations, but there are applications like this, and they're not fantastic for cloud.

Let's talk about the things that are pushable to cloud. First, core activities that are essential to the business are not suitable to go to cloud. Those are best in a private cloud. But if you start looking at things that are not unique, immediate, but not a differentiator or are cost-driven, then those are ideal for public cloud.

Basically core activities are very, very good for private cloud and less core activities or that are cost-driven are more ideal for a public cloud offering.

Lock-in and neutrality?

Gardner: Glenn, looking at this notion of moving things around in and out of private and public clouds, perhaps moving from a core and context decision process into actual implementation, what about standards, lock-in, and neutrality?

Where are we now in thinking about being able to move applications and services among and between clouds? What prevents us from getting locked into one cloud and not being able to move out?

West: Gartner actually did a study, and found that HP is one of the most open players in the industry, when it comes to cloud. A significant number of the public cloud suppliers actually use our equipment. We make a point of being totally open.

There are a significant number of cloud standards at every level, and HP does everything it can to remain part of those standards and to support those standards. The cloud industry is moving fast, and if you look at cloud, it's about openness. If you have a private cloud then you cannot have the ability to burst to public cloud.

Guess what, that’s not a viable marketing offering. But the cloud industry as a whole, because of the interoperability requirements, has to be inherently open.

There are a significant number of cloud standards at every level, and HP does everything it can to remain part of those standards and to support those standards.

Gardner: So it's not only important to pick the technologies, but it's very important to pick the partners when you start to get into these strategies?

West: That’s absolutely right. If the viewpoint of the company that you're getting your cloud from is to lock you in, then you're going to get locked in. But if the company is pushing hard to stay open, then you can see it, and there are plenty of materials available to show who is trying to do lock-in and who is trying to do open standards.

What do we need to think about here? Flexibility is obviously important. Interoperability -- and I think Dana nailed that one on the head -- being able to work across multiple standards is important. The cloud is about agility. Having a resource pool and workflow that can move around the resource pools on demand means that you have to have great interoperability.

View the full Expert Chat presentation on cloud adoption best practices.

Data privacy and compliance issues come into play, especially if we move from a private cloud into public cloud or hybrid offerings. Those things are important, especially on the compliance side, where the cloud supports data being anywhere.

Some requirements, depending on the industry, actually restrict the data movement. Skill-sets are important. Recovery and performance management, all of these things can be managed with the right automation and the right tools in cloud as well as the right people.

Greatest flexibility

We've talked about moving forward and now we're getting into the full IT service broker concept. This is where we have the greatest flexibility. One of the things you said very well was about dynamic sourcing. We can look at the workflow and we can push and share these workflows internally and externally to multiple cloud providers and act as a service broker, optimizing as we go.

You should have this even from a corporate point of view. You could be a service provider where you take those services and you broker and manage those services across multiple delivery methodologies.

At this point, you have to get at an organization very good at doing service-level agreement (SLA) management. SLAs, when you are growing cost and managing workflows through this is very important. When we start talking about going across multiple clouds, advanced automation gets to be very important as well.

As we start looking at the future data center, it is very business-driven. You have multiple ways of sourcing your IT services. So you have both, the physical as well as the virtual services and you have the appropriate mix. It’s changing practically on a daily basis, as business needs demand.

As we start looking at the future data center, it is very business-driven. You have multiple ways of sourcing your IT services.

Let's talk about these physical side and the changes in the data center. One of the things that looks quite interesting, if we look at resiliency, is that a lot of data centers are looking at moving further up the resiliency levels, and each level of this has significantly increased cost, practically exponential cost increase.

Once you implement cloud within your data center, you can get a lot more flexibility all of a sudden, because instead of building a single Tier 4 data center, using the efficiency of cloud, you could potentially build Tier 2 data center and have greater resiliency and greater agility.

The big change is in the way data center physical infrastructure is done, but the thing that's changing quite rapidly is density. If you look at it in a traditional data center, infrastructure is reasonably low to moderate density.

When you start looking at cloud enabled data center, high density is the norm. Greater efficiency, power, space, and cooling are all typical of cloud-enabled data centers. This true IT resource is where anything can run anywhere, and it becomes quite different.

The density change is radically different. The power per rack and cooling all change. The next thing with power is that even if you start looking at a traditional data centers, things such as structure, cabling, and power have to have flexibility and have to have the ability to change.

Orchestration also becomes important. If you start looking at a cloud-enabled data center, everything needs to scale. All the cost factors should scale with the amount of business.

Standardization and efficiency

The standardization level also changes as well. Standardizing configurations allows rapid redeployment of equipment. Finally, it’s efficiency -- this dynamic power and cooling during the work loads.

These are pretty radical changes from traditional data centers. Data centers are evolving. If you look at traditional data centers, they were quite monolithic -- one large floor, one large building, that’s pretty well it.

Slowly moving up to multi-tiered data centers, followed by flexible data centers that share resource utilization, and everything can change.

Most organizations when you start looking at the different areas, categories, and types of culture, the technology is there. If you looked at a company today, they will have different levels of maturity. This maturity modeling is a scorecard or a grade card that lets you understand where you are compared to the industry. The thing is that if you look at this example, different areas have different levels of maturity.

The problem is for cloud is that we need to look at something a little different. We need to get an even playing field across all of the areas so that the organizational maturity, the culture, the staff, the best practices are even in the level of maturity for cloud to work.

This maturity modeling is a scorecard or a grade card that lets you understand where you are compared to the industry.

If you bought the best technology, but you didn’t upgrade your governance or the culture, and you didn’t implement the best practices, it won’t work. The best infrastructure without proper service portfolio management, for example, just isn’t going to work. For cloud to work properly, you must actually look at increasing maturity across all areas of your data center, both the people and the process.

Some of the criteria for cloud include technology, consolidation, virtualization, management, governance, the people, process and services, and the service level. Managing the service level can often reduce your cost quite significantly in cloud.

In the process, adopting ITIL and looking at process automation and process management. These organizational structure and roles are quite different in cloud.

Think services. Understand what you have. Decide on what your core and your content are. What is the foundation of your business and what is something that we could start considering moving into public cloud sector?

Get your business units and your businesses on your side. Standardize and look at the automation of processes and explore the infrastructure conversion. Then look at introducing your portal and making sure you have charge back. Start with non-critical or green-field areas. Green field are your new activities. Then, slowly move into a hybrid approach.

Optimize further

Evolve, optimize, benchmark, cycle through -- and optimize further. HP has been doing this for a while. We did a very large transformation ourselves and out of that journey, we've created a huge amount of intellectual property. We have a Transformation Experience Workshop that helps organization understand what changes are needed. We can get people talking and get them moving, creating a vision together.

We have data-center services for looking at optimization, the physical change of data centers. And then we have comprehensive data center transformation services and road map. So get some action going. Let's start at doing the transformation.

A great way to do this is do it a one-day Cloud Transformation Experience Workshop. This is done in panels with key decision makers and it allows you to start building a foundation of how to go through this journey in transformation.

Gardner: Okay. Great. Well, we'll have to leave it there. I really want to thank our audience for joining us. I hope you found it as valuable as I did.

I also thank our guest, Glenn West, the Data Center and Converged Infrastructure Lead for Asia-Pacific and Japan in HP’s Technology Services Organization.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a special BriefingsDirect presentation, a sponsored podcast created from a recent HP expert chat discussion on best practices for cloud computing adoption and use.

Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

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

View the full Expert Chat presentation on cloud adoption best practices.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how best to pursue cloud models. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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Ariba CMO Tim Minahan on How Networked Economy Benefits Spring From Improved Business Commerce and Cloud Processes

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on the upcoming Ariba LIVE Conference and how the networked economy is enabling business success.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba. Register for Arive LIVE.

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 in conjunction with the upcoming Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas, which kicks off April 10, 2012. We're here with Ariba’s Chief Marketing Officer to discuss the networked economy and some of the major developments that Ariba will unveil at LIVE to help companies plug in.

As we consider not only the major business and IT trends of the day -- those being cloud computing, mobile, social, and big data -- we also need to examine the confluence of these developments and how together they impact businesses and business ecosystems.

We need to consider the impacts at a higher abstraction, at the business-process level, but not just inside of companies. We must factor how previously internal processes are now becoming externalized and that we need to do that in a safe and managed way across many enterprises and even service provider partners.

Cloud computing, the force behind a lot of this thinking, has let loose the imagination of businesses to consider anew how to outsource at this business-process level. Mobility advances the thinking of bringing processes to anyone, anywhere, with rich two-way interaction. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Social media is driving more participation by more people into more aspects of commerce, providing in many cases, an explosive viral value to formerly linear or closed workflows. The result is a large-scale rearrangement of the constituent parts of business processes and extended enterprise functions.

The good news is that shaking up the status quo is enabling massive efficiencies with more active market benefits, shared by more participants, as they cooperate and collaborate in entirely new ways.

A large part of this intermingling of shared business processes is enabled by data-driven decisions across advanced business networks, imbuing business decisions with ongoing, real-time visibility and analytics, and making mastery of relationships between buyers and sellers less an art and more of a science.

Register now for the April 10 conference in Las Vegas.

It may not be as romantic as hatching a business plan on a cocktail napkin, but in order to manage the scale, complexity, and required automation of these expansive new business processes, mastery of network processes with control and governance is critical.

Fly by the seat of your pants, manual, and paper-based processes simply can't keep up. As a leader in cloud-based collaborative commerce, Ariba has a unique observation of where this is going, calling it the networked economy.

Networked enterprise

Let's get a better idea of what it means to be a “networked enterprise” and how business networks will drive the future of commerce over the next few years. Let's welcome our guest, Tim Minahan, the Chief Marketing Officer at Ariba. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, Tim.

Tim Minahan: Hi, Dana. Thanks for having me.

Gardner: Tim, it’s no longer a stretch to say that business is changing more rapidly than ever. Change is not just an exception It’s the norm, and you need to master it. I've been surprised by how dramatically this cloud-computing wave has taken off and has seemingly captured the imagination of business leaders.

How did we get here? What’s the lead up to this interesting position that you're finding yourself with your conference?

Minahan: Absolutely, Dana. You did a great job of summarizing it at the beginning of this podcast. If you look throughout history, step-change advances in productivity and business productivity have been driven by previous changes and enhancements in IT infrastructure, such as in the '80s, where you had the advent of client/server technology, desktop applications. That drove employee productivity some limited degree and allowed them to collaborate with other peers within the company.

And then in the '90s and in the 2000s, the World Wide Web spawned a slew of applications. That automated functional-specific information flows and streamlined processes for specific functions, whether it be human capital management (HCM), finance, and even purchasing, into some limited degree allowed collaboration within the enterprise.

The forces that you mentioned are conspiring with this combination of cloud computing, mobility, and collaboration through communities or social networks. We're experiencing another major shift in IT-generated productivity.

The next wave of productivity is going to allow companies to begin to extend those processes, extend that information, and extend alignment of their processes with their external partners.

Today, the next wave of productivity is going to allow companies to begin to extend those processes, extend that information, and extend alignment of their processes with their external partners, whether they be customers that they want to collaborate with more closely, or suppliers that they want to align with better and drive efficiencies with, or other partners, financial partners, logistics partners, etc., that take part in a process that the company needs to collaborate around.

We think this convergence of companies collaborating more efficiently over extended information networks is one that's going to drive this next wave of productivity.

Gardner: It seems that we're at the culmination of 30 years of IT development and advancement and maybe 100 years of business activities and advancements and they're coming together in this networked economy sense. How lofty a goal is this? Is this something that you think is years out? Is this something that we are going to always see on the horizon, but never attain, or are we on the cusp of actually doing a networked economy marketplace?

Minahan: Think about it. It’s here today. We still may be in our infancy, but you've got to think about what’s happening today. Think about it in your personal lives. That’s probably the best example. The magic of Facebook is not in its clean interface or in its news feed feature. The magic of Facebook is that it has created the world’s largest network of personal connections.

Register now for the April 10 Ariba LIVE conference in Las Vegas.

Similarly, the beauty of Amazon.com is not that it offers the best prices on books. It’s that it offers the world’s largest and most convenient network for personal shopping.

Enterprise phenomenon

This is not just a consumer phenomenon. It’s an enterprise one. More and more businesses are looking beyond the four walls of the enterprise to extend their processes and systems, to connect and collaborate more efficiently with their customers, with their suppliers, and other trading partners, whether they're across the street or around the world.

Gardner: What's fascinating to me about that, Tim, is we had Metcalfe’s Law, where the more participants on a network, the more valuable it becomes. We certainly see that with Facebook. But what’s happening in addition is that the amount of activity that these folks do, the commerce, their actions, their priorities, is all data that could be captured and analyzed, not just data individually, but collectively.

So we're not just getting value from the network on participation. We're getting insights that filters back to how we can conduct business. How important is this notion of captured analytics along the way in this networked environment?

Minahan: It’s absolutely critical. We'll go back to those models. If you look at any of the personal networks that we rely on everyday, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Google, Netflix, or Amazon, they have three things in common.

Number one, as you stated earlier, they're in the cloud. These are cloud-based applications. You don’t need to install hardware or custom-configure it. You don’t need to install or manage or maintain software. It is all accessible through a web browser, whether you are in Peoria or Paris.

That gives you an additional level of trust in the purchase decision you're about to make.

The second component, as we just stated, is that all of these are ultimately networks. They are large communities of individuals, and oftentimes companies, that are digitally connected.

Think about Amazon. You don’t think about connecting to each individual merchant. Whether you want to buy a book or a blender, the merchants are all connected for you. You don’t think about settling out with Visa or MasterCard and how to integrate to them. They're all connected in there for you.

And to your last part, you have cloud-based technology, communities, and then capabilities. That's where the intelligence in the community comes in.

Again, think about Amazon. You want to buy something and you get expert opinions on "folks who have bought this product have also bought this product." That's community intelligence that helps you make a more informed decision.

Secondly, you get peer opinions, other participants in the community that rate the product that you are considering buying. That gives you an additional level of trust in the purchase decision you're about to make.

These are the types of things that are only available in a network-based model. These are the types of things that are also available to businesses in a business network-type model.

Behavioral shift

Gardner: Well, we've certainly seen a behavioral shift in people’s adoption, and even enthusiasm for these sorts of activities. We're seeing it in their personal lives. When we now apply this to enterprises, to B2B activities, to commerce, we can find that the processes are uniquely actionable and automated in the cloud, even more so than in an enterprise system of record, which could be fairly brittle.

But we're also seeing -- I think it's fairly unique -- is the ability to adjust on the fly. So we have automation and governance, but we also have exception management. We have a confluence of actionable automation that's governed and managed with insight, but we also can adjust these things on the go. I think that's something also that's fairly new to this networked environment.

Minahan: Absolutely. The power of a network using Metcalfe's Law is that each new member delivers incremental value to every existing member. Part of that is it does allow you as a business to be far more responsive. It allows you to make more informed decisions, as we talked about. You're not just making decisions based on your own input, but you're making decisions based on relationship and transaction history, as well as community opinion of a particular trading partner.

In a networked environment, you can quickly find new peers or partners that can help you execute a process. You can get informed community decision on how that partner or peer has performed in the past, so you can make a educated decision as to when and how to find alternative sources of supply, for example, or find new employees or potential employees that you could be matched with through this network.

Those are the types of things that a network model allows you to do, to make more informed decisions, to be much more responsive, and ultimately, have far greater transparency and visibility into the process.

Ariba is facilitating collaborative business commerce, allowing buyers, sellers, and other parties involved in the commerce process to reach outside their four walls.

Gardner: So we have gone into at least the business level, beyond this notion of individual networks to systems of record and core business functions being networked, being loosely coupled, and therefore part of a larger business process.

Ariba has, I think, some of the critical business functions in its sights to extend further into this networked value. Tell me a little bit about some of the core themes at Ariba LIVE and why networking -- taking advantage of some of these larger trends that we have talked about -- applies to business processes and some of the core business functions that all companies share?

Register now for Ariba LIVE.

Minahan: At the end of the day, Ariba is facilitating collaborative business commerce, allowing buyers, sellers, and other parties involved in the commerce process to reach outside their four walls, to connect their systems and their processes to get greater transparency into that. That's a theme that's carrying through to Ariba LIVE.

Ariba LIVE’s theme will be around this networked enterprise, and how you enable a networked enterprise and what it means for you as a buyer, as a seller, or as a chief financial officer.

Industry leading

When you look across the agenda for Ariba LIVE, it's filled with industry-leading companies that have already embraced this network approach. Whether it's Anglo American, one of the largest mining companies, talking about how they are leveraging a networked model to identify, develop, and collaborate with sources of supply and new suppliers in the most remote regions of the world, driving a sustainable supply chain.

Whether it's Sodexo, one of the largest food-service companies that's creating some innovative ways in which they are using the network to support their highly perishable, fast-churn supply chain, and gain insight, both for them and for their trading partners. Procurement and IT have worked together to develop a networked model that allows them to be highly responsive in a very perishable supply-chain type environment.

Or whether it's GlaxoSmithKline that's leveraging a network-based environment to not only automate its invoicing process, but to help optimize cash flow, both for them and their partners.

In addition, you have a host of other companies, that are driving this network supply chain model.

We have a spotlight keynote that has driven some innovation into the federal sector. The first CIO of the United States, Vivek Kundra, is going to talk about how he developed the Cloud First Policy within the Federal Government.

You have a host of other companies, that are driving this network supply chain model.

That means, not just lowering the TCO of deploying technology to automate existing processes, but creating a new community, a new interface, a new way for the US Federal Government to connect and share information, and big data with their constituents. And that's the type of thing that's going on in the public sector, as well as in the private sector.

Gardner: That's interesting. So we are not going to just talk at the abstraction, we've got people who are putting this into practice, who have metrics of success, that can show how it's done, how this is aiding their businesses, and also supporting their supply chain and sales, marketing, and other ecosystem leveled activity. That's terrific.

Are you going to be on stage again this year, Tim. Are you the MC?

Minahan: I have the honor of being the MC this year, and it is an honor when you look out across the keynotes that we have and see what they've been able to accomplish by adopting this networked model and how it has allowed them to drive not just their supply chain strategy, but their business strategy. We think it's going to be a phenomenal show.

High-profile innovations

In addition to that content, obviously because it is Ariba LIVE, we'll be launching some very interesting and high-profile innovations, as well as partnerships that will help buyers and sellers simplify their commerce process and get more easily connected to their trading partners.

Gardner: So we will see some leading-edge adopters tell the story of what's working for them and how they got there, and some major news and announcements, as well as alliances with more network partners, right? You have to network in order to allow the network to be valuable to your clients?

Minahan: Exactly. And because it's in Las Vegas, there will be a little fun along the way as well. So we are very excited about Ariba LIVE. We encourage any of your audience members that want to attend to register at aribalive.com.

You have to network in order to allow the network to be valuable to your clients.

Gardner: You have been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with the upcoming Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas, the week of April 9. Now, this starts April 10 right, Tim?

Minahan: Yes, it's April 10-12 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Gardner: Thanks, I enjoyed exploring some of these concepts around the networked economy.

So thank you to our guest, Tim Minahan, the Chief Marketing Officer at Ariba.

Minahan: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks to you also, our audience, for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba. Register for Arive LIVE.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on the upcoming Ariba LIVE Conference and how the networked economy is enabling business success. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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• Ariba Live Discussion: How Cloud Alters Landscape for eCommerce, Procurement, and Supply Chain Management
• Cloud-Based Commerce Network Helps Florida Manufacturer MarkMaster Reach New Markets, Streamline Transactions
• Ariba's Jason Kurtz on How IT Financial Trends are Maturing Technology Procurement and Management Needs

Embarcadero Technologies' AppWave Modernizes PC Desktops with App Store Convenience

A sponsored podcast discussion of how enterprise app stores can bridge the gap between software development and improved PC software distribution and maintenance. Learn more about AppWave.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Get free AppWave download. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.

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 productivity gap between modern software and the aging manner in which most enterprises still distribute and manage applications on personal computers.

At a time when business models and whole industries are being upended by improved use of software, we're also seeing mobility, cloud services, and data analytics. IT providers inside of enterprises are still painstakingly provisioning and maintaining PC applications in much the same way they did in the 1990s.

Furthermore, with using these older models, most enterprises don’t even know what PC apps they have in use on their networks and even across thousands, in many cases, of notebook computers. That means they're also lacking that visibility into how, or even if, these apps are being used, and they may even be paying for licenses that they don’t need to pay for.

So while the software inventory and business service management initiatives are helping along these lines, there's a general lack of control over PC applications. I don’t think you can solve that without including new ways to engage the PC users directly. This is really a function about the use and the users, not just the applications and the PC.

To learn more about how things can be done better, I recently interviewed the President and CEO of Embarcadero Technologies, Wayne Williams, to examine the ongoing problems around archaic PC apps management and how new models -- taking a page from the popular app store model -- can rapidly boost the management of PC applications. [Disclosure: Embarcadero Technologies is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Wayne has more than 15 years of experience in founding and leading companies. He was appointed CEO of Embarcadero Technologies in 2007 and he is a former COO, Senior Vice President of Products and CTO at Embarcadero.

I want to welcome you to BriefingsDirect, Wayne. It’s good to have you with us.

Wayne Williams: Good morning. Thanks for having me, Dana.

Gardner: As I said, it’s kind of ironic that, on one hand, we have software taking over in a larger sense how businesses are run and how industries are being innovative in reaching customers in new ways. This has been highlighted recently by Marc Andreessen in some of his writings. At the same time, the corporate PC, also driven by software, is still sort of stodgy and moribund, at least in the perception of how it’s being used productively.

So let’s unpack this a little bit, Wayne. How is it that software is advancing generally, but PCs remain, in a sense, unchanged?

Williams: I've been asking myself that question for many years. I've spent most of my life in software, and I'm embarrassed to say that the industry has really done a poor job at making software available to the users, which is the fundamental issue.

Windows is clearly the dominant PC platform but it has fundamental design flaws, which sowed the seeds for the problem.

Part of the story

But that’s only a small part of the story. Software vendors are so focused on building the next great application and on features and functions in that application that they've lost sight of what really matters, which is making sure that the application that you build gets used, gets in the hands of the users, and that they get their work done.

When I look at the PC industry and where it has come, the applications themselves have improved dramatically. I can’t imagine being as productive as I am without Microsoft Outlook, for example, for email and calendaring. And Adobe Photoshop. I don’t think you can find a photo anywhere that has not been edited with Photoshop. It’s incredibly powerful.

But unfortunately, a lot of the gains that really could be made have been wasted, because it’s very, very tough to get an application from a vendor into a user's hands.

Gardner: It seems to me that while the technology is somewhat unchanged since the '90s, the users are a different breed nowadays. We have different behaviors and different levels of anticipation and expectation around what productivity is all about. We used to call these productivity apps, but now productivity comes from being able to innovate, self-start, even learn from your peers -- that social fabric type of an interplay.

Are these some of the core problems? We're at a dissonance between expectations and behaviors on one hand and the same old local area network (LAN) level of management on the other.

At the end of the day, all technology is about productivity. Software certainly is about productivity.

Williams: Absolutely. That’s a great point. At the end of the day, all technology is about productivity. Software certainly is about productivity. And if you're going to radically increase the productivity of a team, the knowledge that team can share about what tools are used for what job is critical knowledge. That’s why we’ve built in the ability to rate and review apps into AppWave. Team members can find the best tool for the job based on peer feedback.

Gardner: What about this as it applies to application development and deployment? I know that Embarcadero has been involved with that for an awfully long time. Is there something of a disconnect between development, gathering requirements, creating an application, and then the operations, thinking about operations through that adoption pattern, and user expectation and behaviors?

It seems as if we're still stuck in this era, where there's a wall between the two, but some of the activities that you have been up to strike me as trying to close that, or at least create a feedback loop, or a life cycle benefit, between apps, how they're developed, how they're used, and then how they are iterated on.

Williams: There are a few ways to look at it from a development perspective. One way is that software developers are probably the most aggressive in terms of the need for productivity, the most aggressive users of applications and tools and all the issues that surround that.

At the end of the day, software developers, whether at a garage start-up or one of the large software vendors, are passionate about solving a problem, creating software that solves a problem, and getting it into the hands of their users. That’s what really drives developers.

Important disconnect

The problem is that there's a disconnect between creating your software and getting it into the hands of the users. You very rarely are talking about this happening in seconds, which it should. It’s something that happens more on the order of months or quarters in a large company.

Gardner: I have to imagine that this contributes also to the security problems. So many organizations now are really doubling down on what they need to do for security, recognizing that it’s not something you buy out of a box, that it’s really part and parcel of process, methodology, standards, and governance.

There must be some benefits by closing this loop, as you pointed out, when it comes to bringing better security and then making automated changes that bring even better security on an ongoing basis.

Williams: There's a whole host of problems that emanate from the root problem, the root problem that we're talking about, and security is one of them.

You have an environment which is high-friction. It reminds me really of a state of manufacturing before the Industrial Revolution, where you had processes that were slow, expensive, unpredictable, and error-prone. That’s how PC software has operated over the last 20-plus years.

When you have an environment that is so high friction, users will go around it.

When you have an environment that is so high-friction, users will go around it. So you have this process with the PC, where IT tries to get more control and locks down the environment more, and the business users that need to get the work done find ways to get it done.

We have large customers that have a policy: When somebody is hired, all controls are turned off so that they can get their desktop together and get the apps that they need for the first three days. Then they'll lock it down. That’s not a good environment for security.

Gardner: That’s begging for trouble. You mentioned the core problem or the root problem. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind fleshing that out a bit for us. What do you think the real root problem is here?

Williams: The root problem is that software should move at the speed of light, yet it moves at the speed of a glacier.

Let me give you an example. In a mid- to large-sized company, if an employee is looking for a special pen for a new project, they can go to a catalog, take out a pen, and they can usually have it the next day, and that’s a physical good.

Software is virtual. So it could and should move at the speed of light, but for many of our large customers it takes quarters to get software into the user’s hand.

Looking for productivity

Gardner: So we've identified the problem internally. As I said, it's ironic, because when we look to the larger landscape of business, we're still in a tough economic situation around the globe. People are looking for productivity.

Marc Andreessen wrote recently that software is really revolutionizing how we procure things like entertainment and books and how we discover new products and services online. We can do this as a consumer. Doesn’t it seem almost absurd that, at a time when individuals using some of the tools that are available on a retail basis, are leaps and bounds ahead of someone who is just trying to get some basic work done in a large corporation?

Williams: Yes, you can take a fairly simple device like a smartphone from Apple or an Android device and find and run applications literally in seconds. Yet you have this sophisticated environment with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of software sold every year, powerful hardware and processing power, but it's like pulling teeth for a user to get the applications she or he needs.

Gardner: Wayne, you and I have been around long enough to know that the way to instigate change in an enterprise environment is not necessarily to attempt wholesale radical shifts. You need to work with what's in place and recognize that investments have been made and that those investments are going to continue to be leveraged.

So let's start defining the solution at a high level here. We want the applications that have been developed. We want the interfaces and data that folks are used to to continue to benefit them. But we also want to start energizing this new sense of empowerment that people have through their personal lives and their consumer roles and bring some of these things together.

What I see from our big customers is that for every commercial app that they license they will have 10 that are built internally.

Craft for me, if you could, the vision about retaining what's good about the enterprise and what's been invested in and brought to the daily grind, but at the same time start to bring innovation and allow people to exercise their behaviors and their empowerment.

Williams: As far as what's good and what can be retained, there's a great footprint of hardware out there, PC hardware. A massive investment has been made.

It's the same with software. There are tons of software, both licensed and built internally. And the internal part is really important. What I see from our big customers is that for every commercial app that they license they will have 10 that are built internally. And while there is very little visibility into how commercial licenses are used, there is some, but it's little. And there's zero visibility into who’s using internally built software, for the most part.

There have been massive investments made in software, and unfortunately, a lot of the productivity that could have been realized hasn’t been. But the good news is that it can be.

When I look at the opportunities, it's really two constituents, which you described. You talked about the user for a second and then you talked about the investment and what can be reused, and that’s really management, typically IT management, which is centralized. AppWave is about bringing these two stakeholders together.

Gardner: How can we do that? I'm familiar with what you've been doing with developers. Developers have unique requirements, but it seems like you've gained some insight and some technology in serving their needs in a fast-paced, agile environment, and can now bring that to the larger group of consumers within the enterprise.

Removing friction

Williams: If you look at mobile software, the friction between the user and the app is removed, and the results are fantastic. For us, that was a great proof point, because we started on AppWave before anybody had heard of the Apple App Store.

For PCs, the problem is much more difficult and it's much larger. Mobile software is about a $10 billion industry, and PC is somewhere around $300 billion. So the opportunity for productivity gains and overall results is much, much bigger, and the problem is much more difficult. Now, with AppWave the mobile experience -- find, run, rate, review -- comes to the PC. So the agile enterprise has tools to support it.

Gardner: So bringing that mentality of search, discover, share your experience, ease of access when you want to then act on that kind of information, almost instant gratification when the app comes down, being able to run it, and then upgrade it along the way with very little oversight, very little maintenance, certainly very little disruption, you have to ask yourself -- why would I want to do it any other way?

How do we bring these together? How do we bring the app store experience to IT? How do we enable them to bring that to their own constituents, their own users?

Williams: The key is the system. With the enterprise app store we bring two constituents together: users and management.

For users, there are really three principles that drive everything that we do. One of them is self-service, the next is socialization, and the third is instant gratification.

You mentioned a few things that are core principles. For users, there are really three principles that drive everything that we do. One of them is self-service, the next is socialization, and the third is instant gratification.

As a user, when I have a problem to solve and I'm looking for an app to help me solve it, I want to be able to find it myself, quickly. I want to understand what my peers are saying about that app. When I decide I want to try it, I click a button and run it. Everything we do goes through one of those filters. It’s about the user experience.

From a management perspective, for IT they need centralized control and visibility into real usage. So those are two principles that really drive everything we do with AppWave from a management perspective.

People talk about the consumerization of IT now, and initiatives like "bring your own device." The key for IT is to put an environment in place that draws users in and gives them what they're looking for, but you can still maintain overall control and have real visibility into who is using software and when.

Gardner: I'm curious. With AppWave, is there the opportunity to bring down apps fresh, or more frequently than the typical install, lockdown, patch process that we're familiar with now? Is there a hybrid model that incorporates some of the goodness from other trends like software as a service (SaaS) or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), but allows the same PC apps, the rich graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the investments that have been made in the code and logic to remain?

Results is conflict

Williams: This is one of the difficult engineering challenges we had, and it goes back to my first point about Windows sowing the seeds of some of the problems. If you look at Windows, it's designed around the concept of sharing and sort of a utopian view, where applications could all share parts, and typically those are called DLLs in Windows. Unfortunately, the end result of that is conflict.

When a user wants to try a new application, that application is installed and will typically conflict with other applications that were previously installed. The problem gets worse when you get into new versions.

In the PC market, most vendors update their software multiple times a year. For example, we put out new release of every major product once a year and then we will have point releases typically quarterly. You have an awful lot of change, and every time there is a change, you stand to break other things that are already installed on your computer.

That was one of the things we had to tackle, and we did with AppWave. That folds into instant gratification. If I'm a user who has an existing version of a particular application, and I need either the older version or the newer version, I should be able to click a button and be productive. I should be using it in seconds.

Gardner: Well, we've defined our problem. We recognize that it's severe. We recognize that the environment is propelling people for change. We know that people have alternatives in the market for at least some apps, and we have been describing some of what is required of a solution, at least at a high level. So I guess it's time now to really dig in a little bit. Describe for us what AppWave is, what it does, and how it came to be?

At the heart of it, we removed the dependencies that applications would have with other applications and with the environment in general.

Williams: AppWave is an enterprise app store for PCs that provides self-service. Users can very easily type in a search term and get a result. The result is a set of applications. Then they can click and run those applications, read ratings and reviews from their peers, and they can be assured that when they do run those applications, they're not going to disrupt anything else that they have on their PC.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about that problem you mentioned a moment ago, that ability to bring down new or quickly upgrade or change apps, but without losing the config, the importance of the legacy, the use and trail of what that application has done for the user. How did you solve that?

Williams: Years and years of engineering, but at the heart of it, we removed the dependencies that applications would have with other applications and with the environment in general. Each of these applications is able to stand on its own, which means you can have multiple versions of a particular app and move between them painlessly with no concerns.

I think that’s important for just about any knowledge worker. I've seen company after company -- and ours is no different -- afraid to move, for example, to the newest version of Office, because they're not sure if documents from the old version are going to work properly. Problems like that are gone, because you can easily move from version to version with the click of a button.

This is particularly important in R&D,where a tremendous amount of time is spent retooling to go from one configuration of applications for a particular system.

Prior to having AppWave, developers had multiple PCs, one for working on the new release that’s going to come out this year and then one for going back and fixing bugs on last year’s release.

What are the metrics?

Gardner: As you pointed out, Wayne, you've been doing this for some time. A lot of R&D, starting with tools, is probably the hardest category to crack. And you've seen how organizations have adopted and used your AppWave approach, creating this storefront, making those apps available to solve some of these issues that plague PC software distribution.

What have people gained from this? Do we have some metrics? Can we look at some examples? What do you get if you do this properly? How impactful is the shift when you go from say a traditional distribution to an AppWave and an app store distribution model?

Williams: I can give you a few examples. It's been amazing for us certainly. We drink our own champagne. We've made incredible gains, with the biggest gains being in two areas.

One is in R&D, where teams generally produce a daily build of most of the products. Those apps, when they come off the build machine, are now immediately available to all of R&D. It's particularly important for QA, because the downtime that you would have retooling and getting a new app is gone. It’s literally seconds. So we've seen some great gains internally with R&D.

We've also seen it with sales. We've got roughly 20 products. We put out a minor release once a quarter and majors once a year. So if you just looked at the explosion of that set of apps that a salesperson would have to have on their PC, just in two years, it’s 160. That historically has been a problem. It’s just a productivity drain and it’s error prone. Now that problem is gone.

What’s most exciting is when a customer really sees that this can help them get to market quicker.

There are certainly metrics out there as far as productivity and under-utilization of software and over-utilization of software, but I think what’s most exciting is when a customer really sees that this can help them get to market quicker.

A large financial services company had a nine-month rollout cycle for of a new version of a PC app. They had a really pressing business need to get this done before the holidays, their biggest season. It was impossible using their current methods for PC software distribution. With AppWave, users were upgraded to the right version of software in minutes.

The thing that they loved about that whole experience wasn't really the metrics. Certainly they put together their ROIs and they were impressive, but what that really did for them was that it allowed them to move quickly, to solve the business need in a time that would really make a difference.

Gardner: And at a time when software is more important than ever, they're going to gain an advantage by being able to deliver that software, put it in the hands of their employees, and also put it in the hands in the market, learn from that market and adjust, it just seems like you get generally better business agility, particularly when you are in a software intensive field which, as I said, most companies are nowadays.

Williams: One of the things that's frustrating for me, seeing how the software industry has matured and grown over the years, is that everybody talks about ROI. There's nothing wrong with the concept of ROI, but what I see often is a forest-and-trees problem, where people will lose sight of what the real goal is.

Losing sight of the goal

They will get so buried in a metric here and a metric there to build up an ROI, that they will lose sight of the goal. What’s the goal? The goal is to get my product or service to market sooner, better, and with better quality than the competition. That ROI is almost immeasurable.

Apple is a great example. This is a company that was in serious trouble for a number of years. It's the most incredible turnaround success story than any of us have ever seen. And all of that may not have happened if the iPod was a year late. Sony wasn't totally sleeping. They owned consumer electronics, and given a little more time, they probably could have stopped that move.

It’s so important for people to remember that software is going to help you get your product or service to market sooner and better, which is going to help you beat your competition.

Gardner: I'm afraid we are about out of time, Wayne, but I wanted to look just at a couple of the building trends now that point to the future. We're seeing tremendous uptake in mobile devices and tablets. We're seeing people who want to be able to combine their roles as consumers and individuals at home with what they do at work.

This is blurring the lines between on-premises, doing work within a corporate environment, or over a VPN even. But they need this. This is how they're going to be productive. It's putting an onus now, a different level of requirements, on IT, on developers.

It's all about getting the right app in the hands of the user as quickly as possible and that should happen on all relevant platforms.

Is there something about AppWave and what we've been talking about that can be brought into the mobile and even cloud spheres, these trends being sort of locomotives in the market right now, that brings together them and what we have been talking about?

Williams: Absolutely. Our view is that, at the end of the day, it's all about getting the right app in the hands of the users as quickly as possible and that should happen on all relevant platforms. So certainly mobile tablets, Android tablets, and iOS, iPads, are very cool and powerful devices that we are certainly going to support.

The important thing to remember is about getting the app to the user, regardless of what device they're using. So whether it's a tablet, a PC, or it's their own PC, as opposed to the company PC, they should still have access to all the apps that matter, with all the same kind of principles we've talked about, instant gratification, very easy to find. Those are all things that we're covering in AppWave.

Our initial focus was all about solving the PC problem, because in my view that’s the big problem. That’s where so much productivity has been locked away. We've solved that for the PC now and we certainly will support other popular platforms as they emerge.

Gardner: Well, very good. I hate to say we will have to leave it there.

You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity improvements and speed the value benefits for those PC users and across the applications that they are accustomed to. This is something that’s been of interest to IT departments and those users as well.

I'd like to thank our guest. It's been a very intriguing discussion. We've been with Wayne Williams, President and CEO of Embarcadero Technologies. Thanks so much, Wayne.

Williams: Thank you, Dana. Have a good day.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, as always, thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Get free AppWave download. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.

A sponsored podcast discussion of how enterprise app stores can bridge the gap between software development and improved PC software distribution and maintenance. Learn more about AppWave. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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