Roundtable: Revlon, SAP and VMware Describe Accretive Benefits from Aggressive Adoption of Cloud Computing

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on how cloud and virtualization deliver benefits in cost, efficiency, and agility.

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

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 focused on two prime examples of organizations that have gleaned huge benefits from high degrees of virtualization and aggressive cloud computing adoption.

We're joined by executives from Revlon and SAP, who recently participated in a VMware-organized media roundtable event in San Francisco. The event, attended by industry analysts and journalists, demonstrated how mission-critical applications supported by advanced virtualization strategies are transforming businesses. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We're going to learn more about the full implications of IT virtualization, and how they're being realized -- from bringing speed to business requests, to enhancing security, to strategic disaster recovery (DR), and to unprecedented agility in creating and exploiting applications and data delivery value.

With that, please join me now in welcoming our guests, David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO of Revlon. Welcome back, David.

David Giambruno: Thanks a lot, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Heinz Roggenkemper, Executive Vice President of Development at SAP Labs. Welcome Heinz.

Heinz Roggenkemper: Welcome, Dana.

Gardner: Heinz, let me begin with you, if you don’t mind. Describe for our listeners your internal cloud approach that you've been using to make training and development applications readily available. What's going on with that internal cloud, and why is the speed and agility so important for you?

Roggenkemper: If you look at SAP, you find literally thousands of development systems. You find a lot of training systems. You find systems that support sales activities for pre-sales. You find systems that support our consulting organization in developing customer solutions.

From a developer's perspective, the first order of business is to get access to a system fast. Developers, by themselves, don’t care that much about cost. They want the system and they want it now. For development managers and management in general, it’s a different story.

For training, it's important that the systems are reliable and available. Of course again for management, it's the cost perspective. For people in custom development, they need the right system quickly to build up the correct environment for the particular project that they're working on.

Better supported

Also these requirements are much better supported in the virtualized environment than they were before. We can give them the system quickly. We can give them the systems reliably. We can give them the systems with good performance, and from a corporate perspective, do it at a much better cost than we did before.

Our business agility and ability to respond to market drivers is greatly improved by this.

Gardner: One of the things that was intriguing to me was the training instance, where people were coming in and needed a full stack of SAP applications, perhaps third-party applications that were mission critical. Tell me how the training application in particular, or the use of virtualization in that instance, demonstrates some of the more productive aspects of cloud?

Roggenkemper: The most interesting part about that is that you don’t need a vanilla system, but a system that is prepared for a particular class, which has the correct set of data. You need a system that can be reset to a controlled stage very quickly after the end of a training class, so that it’s ready for the next training class.

So there are two aspects to it. One is the reliable infrastructure on which the systems run, and second part is to get the correct system for that particular class ready in a short period of time.

Gardner: On the issues of control of the data, security, and even licensing, are there unintended consequences or unintended benefits that come when you approach the delivery of these applications through the full virtualization and this cloud model?

One is the reliable infrastructure on which the systems run, and second part is to get the correct system for that particular class ready in a short period of time

Roggenkemper: For unintended benefits, the thing that comes to my mind is that it allows us to take advantage of new computing infrastructure more quickly. We reduce the use of power, which is always a good thing.

For an unintended downside, the only thing that would come to my mind is that when in development, you are tuning for performance. That is a slightly different thing. In some areas, if you do general tuning, where you run a couple of iterations instead of just running to identify where your hotspots are, and if it’s a highly critical component, you might have to go to dedicated hardware to get to the last few percentages.

So in that area, you have to behave differently, but it affects only a small window of your total development time. Most of the time, you still take full advantage of a virtualized environment. Once you go into tuning, then you move the system to dedicated hardware and do your job there. If you average it out, you still have a substantial advantage.

Gardner: This idea of agility when producing these applications with their full data and production ready, even if you are in a training and development environment, where you're not necessarily facing their customers, proves this concept of IT as a service. Do you see it that way, and if so, is it something that you are going to be bringing to other applications within SAP?

Roggenkemper: Absolutely. And obviously, what we use internally benefits our customers as well. To have these systems available in a much shorter period of time for the customer’s development environment is as important for them as it is for us.

Future plans

Gardner: And a question about future plans. It sounds as if this works for you. Then the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) approach of delivering entire client environments with apps, data, and full configuration would be a natural progression. Is that something that you're looking at or perhaps you're already doing?

Roggenkemper: Some things we're already doing, We have a hefty set of terminal servers in our environment, as well, which people, especially if they are on the road or work from home, take full advantage of.

Gardner: David, let’s go to you. I was very interested to hear today your version of IT as a service, really a vision that you painted. I think essentially you're saying that advances in pervasive virtualization and cloud methods are transforming how IT operates, but it’s giving you the ability of, as you said, saying yes when your business leaders come calling. What have you have been able to say yes to that exemplifies this shift in IT?

Giambruno: I can’t equate that to numbers. We've increased our project throughput over the past couple of years by 300. So my job is to say, "yes." I'm just here to help. I'm a service. Services are supposed to deliver. What this cloud ecosystem has delivered for us is our ability to say yes and get more done faster, better, cheaper.

The correlating effect of that is we have seen not only this massive increase in our ability to deliver projects for the business, because that’s really what business alignment is. I do what they want and I give them some counsel along the way.

The second piece is that we've seen a 70 percent reduction in the time it takes us to deliver applications, because we have all of these applications available to us in the task and development site which is part of our DR.

So this ability to move massive amounts of information where everything is just the file, bring that up and let our development teams at it, has added this whole speed, accuracy, and ability to deliver back to the business.

Gardner: So we understood with SAP that they're a very big, global delivery of business applications for all sorts of companies. They have an internal cloud that they're using for some specific training and some specific development activities.

That’s really what business alignment is. I do what they want and I give them some counsel along the way.

But Revlon is also a global company. Tell us a little bit about the role that you have for our listeners who might not be familiar, the extent to which your applications are being used, and the type of mission-critical activities that you're involved in?

Giambruno: It’s probably easier to quantify it this way. We have 531 applications running on our internal cloud. Our internal cloud makes roughly 15,000 automated application moves a month. Our transaction rate is roughly 14,000 transactions a second. Our data change rate is between 17 and 30 terabytes a week. Over 90 percent of our corporate workload sits on our internal cloud, and it runs most of our footprint globally.

Gardner: We're talking about mission-critical apps here -- ERP, manufacturing, warehousing, business intelligence. Did you start with mission-critical apps or did you end up there? How did you progress?

Trust, but verify

Giambruno: I have a couple of "isms" that I live by. The first one is “Crawl, Walk, Run” and the second one is “Trust, but Verify.” When we started our journey roughly five years ago, we started with "Crawl" -- very much "Crawl" and “Trust – but Verify.” At Revlon, we didn’t spend any more to put this in. We changed how we spent our money.

We were going through a server refresh, and instead of buying all the servers, we only bought roughly 20 percent. With the balance of that money, we bought the VMware licenses. We started putting in our storage area network (SAN), and although core component pieces, and we took some of our low-hanging fruit file systems and started moving all that.

As we did that, we started sharing with the business. We showed them what we're doing and that it still worked. Then, we started the walk phase of putting applications on it. We actually ran north of six nines.

System availability went up. Performance went up. And after this "Crawl Walk Run," "Trust and Verify," it became "Just keep Going." We accelerated the whole process and we have these things that we call "fuzzies," things that we can do for the business that they weren't expecting. Every couple of months, we would start delivering new capabilities.

One of the big things that we did was that we internalized all our DR. We kept taking external money that we were spending and were able to give it back to the business and essentially invest in ourselves, because at Revlon I'm not going to be a profit center.

We kept taking external money that we were spending and were able to give it back to the business and essentially invest in ourselves.

For Revlon, the more money R&D has to develop new products to get to our consumers and for marketing to tell that product story and get it out to our channels and use the media to talk about our glamorous products, that really drives growth in Revlon.

What we've done is focused on those things, taking the complexity out, but delivering capability to the business while either avoiding or saving money that that the business can now use to grow.

Gardner: So you've been able to say yes when they come and ask you for new services and capabilities. You've been able to keep your costs at or below the previous levels. That’s pretty impressive. Do you credit that to virtualization, to cloud, to the entire modernization? How do you describe it?

Giambruno: To me it’s the interaction of the entire ecosystem. It is a system. Virtualization is a huge part of that. That’s where all it started. As you look through the transition, it's really been interesting. I'm going to segue back to the saying yes pieces and what it’s allowed us to be.

We have this thing called Oneness. I always talk about being the Southwest [Airlines] of computing, and I live inside of very simple triangle. The triangle has three sides, obviously. One side is our application inventory, the other side is our infrastructure capabilities, and the other side is my skill-sets.

Saying yes

If you're inside that space I can say yes, very quickly. What’s happened inside that space helped us contain cost . When we first started work, our ratio was one physical to seven virtual. A couple years later, we're at 1:35. It’s roughly a 500 percent increase in capacity without any commensurate cost. I give credit to my team for owning the technology and for wielding the technology for the benefit of the business and to get the most out of it.

The frame of reference to keep ourselves grounded is that we make lipstick, and it’s really how much money we can save and how well we can wield that technology to deliver value and do more with less. That’ll enable our company to grow.

We love simplicity and we have this Southwest computing model of taking a very complex ecosystem and making it simple to use. To a large degree it's kind of like an iPad, where the business wants to touch it, but they don’t care what’s going on underneath.

It's our job to deliver that, to deliver that experience and capability back to the business, without them having to think about it. I just want them to ask that we’re here to help and that we can figure a way to deliver it and keep exercising our technical capabilities to wield the technology to do more.

Gardner: I'm intrigued by this notion of the ecosystem being a whole greater than the sum of the parts. One of the things that you've been able to do, in addition to saying yes and keep your costs in line, is to improve your data and manage your data lifecycle, according to what I heard today.

It's our job to deliver that experience and capability back to the business, without them having to think about it.

Tell me about this notion you said of all the data becoming structured. What are some of the upsides on the data, when it comes to this ecosystem approach?

Giambruno: When you were talking to Heinz, you talked about unintended consequences. One of the things that we have is a big gestalt after our cloud was live. We literally had all of our data in one place.

One of the big challenges historically was that we had all these applications geographically dispersed. The ability to touch them, feel them, get access, access controls, all of these things were monumentally challenging. In Revlon, as we went to the Southwest or Oneness model, we organized globally our access controls and those little things.

So when we had all this data and all these applications now sitting at one place, with our ability to look at them and understand them, we started a fairly big effort for our master data model. We’re structuring our data on the way in So when we're trying to query the data, we already know where it is and what it does in its relationships, instead of trying to mine through unstructured data and make reasoning out of it. It’s been this big data structure.

I’d say we "chewed glass." We spent a couple of years chewing glass, structuring all this data, because the change rate is so big, but there's value in information to the business. I joke, if you've missed at this, we’re in the information age. So how well we can wield our information and give our leadership team information to act on is a differentiator. The ability to do this big data and this master data model has been really what we see as the golden egg going forward, the thing that can really make a difference with the business.

Gardner: While we’re on this notion of unintended consequences and unintended benefits, does anything along the lines of security or licensing also come to mind?

Self selection

Giambruno: From a licensing perspective, along the journey we called it self-selection. Licensing is important. Everybody has to make money. We live in capitalism. So from a procurement perspective, we always want to make sure we’re legal, but at the same time, vendors will self-select, depending on their licensing model in the virtualization world. That's our triangle. That's our infrastructure. Through that, we’ve had to manage relationships and we’ve done that.

From a security model, the structuring of all of our infrastructure, putting the in the Southwest model of computing, this Oneness, getting our data, our access controls, all of that plus with greatly simplified security, all of that is completely ubiquitous. There were even some of the crazy things that we did --we restructured the IP-ing of everything in Revlon to make all of our IP blocks contiguous. So when we move things around the world inside our cloud, we move entire blocks of IP addresses.

As you look forward, one of the interesting things that I find is that, as you look at streaming our applications, there is a huge security paradigm shift. Essentially no data will ever leave my data center and sit on a device.

In five years, that would be my goal. I think I can do it in 24 months, but really from a horizon, it’s like five years. At that point, I can literally encrypt my data center. Think about PCI and HIPAA and all the controls around that. Encryption is one of those big first checkmarks. If you can do that, you solve a lot of your compliance challenges.

Second, you have this trusted computing model, where I know the person from an access control. I know the device. I know what that person is supposed to have access to. I've encrypted my entire data center, so when that person comes in, I can let them have access only to what they’re supposed to have in the context that they're supposed to have, and decrypt it on the way out. They’re only viewing a device, and no data ever lives on a device.

They’re only viewing a device, and no data ever lives on a device.

So bring your own device. I wouldn’t care, because there's almost no security concerns at that point. I've encrypted. I know the user. Going one step further, as companies progress, you’re going to look at these internal marketplaces that everyone is going to build.

What the iPad has done is make it so I want to turn it on. I want to click on the app that gives me the information to do my job. I want my workflow, my exception management, the information I need to do for the day or do my planning, whatever I need to do. But they want that information in context.

Roll the tape forward a couple of years, and the capabilities that’s coming out on VMware, we fully expect to take care of that, to adopt that model, and that’s what we’re pushing for.

Gardner: It’s fascinating hearing you talking about large-scale virtualization and internal cloud. This has allowed you to have a much better grasp over your costs and deliver your apps and services readily, so that you can say yes to your business users.

In addition, you're getting master data management (MDM) benefits. You’re getting a better handle on licensing. You’re seeing great improvements in security now, and perhaps more to come, as you stream apps to a more virtualized client model.

Symbiotic relationship

You also mentioned something when it came to disaster recovery (DR) that piqued my interest. It sounds almost as if there is a symbiotic positive relationship between high levels of virtualization and DR. It almost sounds like DR has become the ability to move entire data centers as assets that are fungible, and that that gives you a lot more capability, in addition to being able to recover.

Is that true? Tell me how this DR plays into this larger set of values.

Giambruno: We’ve actually done this. No one was hurt, but last year, our factory in Venezuela burned. It was on a Sunday afternoon and they had what we call a drib. If you look at VMware architecture, they have data center in a box. I always joke that we’re years ahead of them in that. We use dribs, strategically placed throughout the world where we push capacity to for our cloud. They largely run dark.

So our drib "phoned home" that it was getting hot. We were notified that the building was on fire. It took us an hour and 45 minutes, and most of that time was finding one of my global storage guys who was at the beach. We found Ben, and got him to do his part, which was to tell the cloud to move from Venezuela to our disaster site in New Jersey.

So we joke that our model in DR is that we just copy everything. We don’t even think about tiering or anything. It’s this model, sometimes a Casio is just better than a Rolex. Simplicity rules, and not thinking about it ensures that we have all the data available. Again, it goes back to our cloud and virtualization. Everything is just a file. We just copy the deltas all the time. We never stop.

For us it was available in less than 15 minutes. We went in, we broke the synchronization, we made sure everything was up-to-date, and we told our F5s and our info blocks that Venezuela is now New Jersey. Everything swung, we got everything in, we contacted the business units to test everything and verify everything.

It's this whole idea of simplicity, where you're just not putting the complexity into the system.

Then we brought up all the virtual desktops and we used Riverbed mobile devices. We e-mailed their client to everyone. So people either worked from home or we had some very good partners that gave us some office space where people could use the computers. They loaded the Riverbed mobile devices on those computers. They brought the virtual desktops, people went to work, and the business didn’t go away.

Gardner: So you were able to say yes, even when a factory burned to the ground. That's pretty impressive.

Giambruno: This is a real-world example of how you can do it, and it wasn't a lot of effort. It's this whole idea of simplicity, where you're just not putting the complexity into the system. I always go back to this iPad view of the world, where the business just wants to know what's available and we will do the rest underneath.

This high degree of virtualization lets us move all of this data around the world, and it's for DR, development, and a myriad of capabilities that we keep finding new ways to use this capability.

Gardner: I suppose it elevates the concept of fit for purpose to that data-center level?

Redundancy and expense

Giambruno: Correct. And some of the other unintended consequences are interesting. You talk about redundancy and expense. Two is one and one is none in a data center. Do you really need to be fully redundant, because if something happens we'll just switch to the other data center?

I only need one core switch or whatever. You start to challenge all these old precepts of up-time, because it's almost cheaper for me or less-expensive. I can just roll the computer over here for a little while. I get that fixed, if I have a four-hour service-level agreement (SLA) with my vendors for repairs.

You can start to question a lot of the “old ways of doing things” or what was the standard in figuring out new ways to operate. One of the interesting things I love about my job is you can question yourself and figure out what you can do next.

Gardner: One last item that I suppose also fits into this unintended positive consequences issue. You've mentioned something about supply-chain value and getting to the point where you can take your external cloud, push it out to your suppliers and contractors, and begin sharing with permissions and control. This is a much better approach than the old way of virtual private networks (VPNs) and the headaches around access and so forth. So tell me about this extended business-process value that you're starting to explore?

Giambruno: One of the things we realized is that we could start extending our cloud. We spend a lot of time managing security and VPNs, and the audits that have to go around that.

At the end of the day, it's about collaboration with our community of vendors and suppliers, and enabling them to interact with us easily.

If I could just push out a piece of my application or make that available to them, they could update their data, reduce the number of APIs, the number of connections, all of that complexity that goes out there, and extend our MDM.

Then we can interface our MDM through our cloud to do some of this translation for us that they can enter data, or we can take it from their systems, from our cloud edge securely and in context and bring that back into our systems.

We think there are huge possibilities around automating and simplifying. But at the end of the day, it's about collaboration with our community of vendors and suppliers, and enabling them to interact with us easily.

So you're always trying to foster those relationships and get whatever synergies you can. If we make it easier on them to interact with us from a system’s perspective, it just makes everybody happier. We've got some projects slated for deployment this year. Maybe in a year, if you come back, I can tell you how well we’ve done or what we’ve done. But one of the things that we are looking is we can think really change how we operate as a company.

Gardner: That's fascinating. You talked about a lot of efficiency, reducing your footprint on the physical plant, on energy, keeping your cost in line, spinning up more applications and data. But now we are talking about not just efficiencies, but actually doing things entirely differently, things that could not have been done before because of cloud. That to me is really the essence of where we are going to be talking in the next few years.

So, David, thanks so much for your time. We have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with a VMware-organized media roundtable event in San Francisco.

We've been exploring two prime examples of organizations that have gained huge benefits from high degrees of virtualization and aggressive cloud computing adoption with mission-critical applications. The two organizations of course have been Revlon and SAP.

I’d like to thank our guests David Giambruno, Senior Vice President and CIO of Revlon. Thanks so much, David.

Giambruno: My pleasure.

Gardner: We have also been here with Heinz Roggenkemper, Executive Vice President of Development at SAP Labs.

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

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

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on how cloud and virtualization deliver benefits in cost, efficiency, and agility. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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HP Expert Chat Explores How Insight Remote Support and Insight Online Bring Automation, Self-Solving Capabilities to IT Problems

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect expert chat with HP on new frontiers in automated and remote support.

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 new approaches to data center support, remote support, and support automation.

Data centers must do whatever it takes to make businesses lean, agile, and intelligent. Modern support services then need to be able to empower the workers and IT personnel alike to maintain peak control, and to keep the systems and processes performing reliably at lowest cost.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. To help find out more about how to best implement improved and productive IT support processes, I recently moderated an HP Expert Chat session with Tommaso Esmanech, Director of Automation Strategies at HP Technology Services. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Tommaso has more than 16 years of HP IT support experience, and has been a leader in designing new innovations in support automation.

In our discussion now, you’ll hear the latest on how HP is revolutionizing support to offer new innovations in support automation and efficiency.

As part of our discussion, we're also joined by two other HP experts, Andy Claiborne, Usability Lead for HP Insight Remote Support, and Paddy Medley, Director of Enterprise Business IT for HP Technology Services.

Our overall discussion begins now with a brief overview from me of the data center agility market, and need for improved IT support capabilities.

I begin by looking at why industry and business leaders are forcing a rethinking of data centers and their support. Agility is the key nowadays. The speed of business has really never been faster, and it needs to be ever more responsive. It seems that even more time compression is involved in reacting to customers. And reacting to markets now is more than essential, it's about survival. Those that can't keep up are in a pretty tough -- even perilous -- situation.

Modern data centers therefore must serve many masters, but ultimately, it's primarily a tool of business, and it must perform therefore at the speed of business. For example, nowadays the impacts of big data are demanding that decisions are increasingly data-driven. A lot more data needs to be tapped and mined. Decisions need to be made based on data -- and those business decisions need to be conducted with ongoing visibility, performance analytics, and, of course, time is important, so near real-time.

But even as data centers support these new levels of agility and analysis, they also need to become cost-reduction centers. Modern IT must do more for less, and that extends especially to ongoing operations and support, which for many people are their largest long-term costs in their total cost equation.

Big date requirements

But not only are data centers supporting many types of converged infrastructure, and now increasingly virtualized technical workloads, too. They're supporting big data requirements -- as we pointed out, data continues to explode -- but they must do this all efficiently, with increased automation as a key component of that efficiency. And moving towards lower energy costs is increasingly important as well.

To accomplish this high efficiency and to exploit the best in performance management and operational governance, these new requirements are all essential to delivering that never failing reliability. And we can also move now toward proactive types of support -- to continue the ongoing improvement and to maintain systems with those high expectations met.

In a nutshell, data centers must do whatever it takes to make businesses lean, agile and intelligent, as businesses and innovate and excel in their fast-changing markets. Modern support services need to be able to empower the workers and the IT personnel alike need to be able to maintain peak control, even within an ecosystem of support, so constituents can keep these systems and processes performing reliably, at the lowest possible cost.

Fortunately, today's modern data centers are like no others before. For the first time, data centers can accommodate the interrelated short-term tactical imperatives and the long-term strategic requirements demanded by their dynamic business demands and requirements.

By delivering fit-for-purpose utilization and converged infrastructure control -- and by putting a priority on energy conservation and automated support -- total costs are no longer spiraling out of control. By doing all of this correctly -- managing your data center for efficiency and putting in proactive support to continue operational efficiency – you can gain huge payoffs.

Fortunately, today's modern data centers are like no others before.

But there are big challenges in getting there as well. So it's important to execute properly to keep that efficiency continuing and building over time. This is, after all, a journey. So today, we're going to learn about how modern data centers are being built for business demands first and foremost, and we'll see how converged infrastructure methods and technologies are being used to retrofit older data centers into fleet, responsive engines of innovation.

We'll also hear specifically on how HP is redefining modern data-center support, enabling far more insights into performance and operation and modernizing through efficiency projects like Voyager, Moonshot and Odyssey, the big initiatives at HP that we've heard quite a bit about, and that are changing the very definition of the data center.

Moreover, we're going to see how HP Technology Services places a proactive edge on service support. And they’re pioneering support automation and remote support, with all of this designed to make IT more responsive so that the businesses themselves can stay adaptive.

I now have the pleasure of introducing our main speaker, Tommaso Esmanech, Director of Automation Strategies at HP in the Technology Services Group. He's going to provide an overview on how HP is revolutionizing support to offer new innovation in support automation. Tommaso leads the Deployment and Business Impact of Web Services implementation, change management, and technologies intended to distribute faster and more customer-oriented services via the Internet.

Support automation

Tommaso Esmanech: Thank you, Dana, and good day to everyone joining today. Before we dive into how HP is implementing support automation and enabling a new and a next generation of data centers, we need to understand what HP is trying to achieve with support automation.

Our intent is to automate the entire support processes, eliminate minor work, and improve production and activities for the entire enterprise. This involves finding solutions for software and hardware, and making hardware and software work seamlessly together by providing a best-in-class customer experience.

What we need to understand is that the world is changing. Customers are using devices that now are providing a new, innovative experience. Their front end is becoming easier. Customers demand integrated capabilities and are requesting a seamless experience, though the back end, the data center, is still complex, articulated, and provided by multiple vendors.

You have network storage and management software that needs to start working together. We began a the journey about 18 months ago in HP to make that change, and we’ve called it Converged Infrastructure. HP took on the journey, mostly because we're the only provider in the industry that provides all the components to make the data center run seamlessly. We're the only provider for data-center network solutions, storage, servers, and management software.

Let’s put this in context of support automation. When you have hardware and software working together and you’re supplying services within that chemistry, you achieve a powerful position for customers. Furthermore, if you're able to automate the entire support and service process, you provide a win-win situation for you, our customers, our HP partners, and for HP, of course.

When you have hardware and software working together and you’re supplying services within that chemistry, you achieve a powerful position for customers.

Now, let’s sit back and look at how this support has changed throughout the years. Support used to be very manual. A lot of the activities used to reside on site where a very qualified workforce, customer engineers and system engineers, would interact to resolve and manage situations.

In the early '90s, we saw a change with infrastructure support moving from decentralized to centralized global and regional centers, moving routine activities into those centers and providing a new role for the customer engineers by focusing on value-added infrastructure and capabilities.

In the '90s, we saw the explosion of the Internet. The basic task was to move to the Web sales, service, our system knowledge base, chat, support cases and case management. A lot of these activities were still manual, relying on human factor activities, to determine the root cause of a problem.

In 2000, we saw more growth of machine-to-machine diagnostics. Now, imagine that we can completely revolutionize that experience. We can integrate the entire delivery support processes, leveraging the machine experience, incorporating that with customer options of all the information with the customer in control, and really blending a remote support, onsite, phone, Web and machine-to-machine into a new automated experience. We believe that unimaginable efficiency can be achieved.

Gardner: Tommaso, I just have a quick question. As we talk about support automation, how is this actually reaching the customer? How do these technologies get into the sites where they’re needed, and what are some of the proof points that this is making an impact?

Intelligent devices

Esmanech: Let me talk about how we’re bringing the support automation to the customer. It starts with how we build intelligence and connectivity into the devices. You probably followed the announcement in February of our new ProLiant servers, our Generation 8 servers.

We have basically embedded more support capabilities into the DNA. We call it Insight Online. As of December 2012, we will be able to support in a similar fashion the existing installed base. This provides the customer a truly one-stop-shop experience for the entire IT data center.

Now that it is easier to utilize and take advantage of an automated support infrastructure, what are the key points? You don't have to make, or necessarily have to make, a phone call. You don't have to wait for a document provide a description. All those activities are automated, because the machine tells us how it’s feeling and what is its health status.

Furthermore, if we compare our support infrastructure to standard human interaction and technical support, we've seen a 66 percent improvement in problem resolution. All these numbers are great for your business.

How much does it cost in downtime? What if your individual servers are impacting your factory? For us, it's about keeping your systems up and running, making sure that you meet the customer commitments, and delivering your products on time.

If we compare our support infrastructure to standard human interaction and technical support, we've seen a 66 percent improvement in problem resolution.

You may say, “Well, machine-to-machine support automation existed before.” Yes, some of them did. What we added just recently is a new customer experience. The management of the infrastructure, the access to the information, how it’s performing, was very much limited to the local management, with access only to the technical few, and they knew how to use it, they knew how to read it.

With Insight Online, accessible through the Web, we now provide secure, personalized anytime/anywhere access to the information. We're totally changing the dynamics from few who had access to those who need to have access to the information. That reduces high learning times that were necessary before, and moves to the user-friendly, innovative, and integrated content that our customers are requesting.

Furthermore, Insight Online is integrated in real-time with a back end. It's not just a report or dashboard of information that is routinely updated. It truly becomes a management tool, when you can view the infrastructure.

One of the other key aspects with Insight Online, this new Web experience, is that we didn’t want to create a new portal. We had made a conscious decision in integrating it with the existing capabilities that you're using to do basic support tasks like accessing a knowledge base, downloading drivers and patches, downloading documentation, and making the infrastructure run seamlessly. The access to the information has to be seamless.

We've also leveraged HP Passport, the identification methodology that you use within your HP experience, providing one infrastructure and not multiple access points.

Gardner: Tommaso, can you give us a bit more detail about how it all comes together, the server management and the support experience?

Customer connectivity

Esmanech: It starts with the connectivity on the customer side. We have a new Generation 8 with embedded DNA that directly connects to the HP back end through Insight Remote Support. Through Insight Remote Support, we're able to collect information and provide alerts about events, warranty, case-management status, and collect all the information necessary for us to deliver on the customer commitments.

In this new version, we've embedded new functions. For example, we allow you to provide identification on the HP service partner that is working on managing your environment. It could be HP, or it could be a certified HP service partner. We have authentication through HP Passport that allows and permits access to the information on Insight Online. Last but not least, we've been able to achieve a faster installation process, eliminating a lot of those hurdles that made it more difficult. It's now significantly easier to adopt Insight Online.

What's important to recognize is that as we collected the bulk of knowledge and information on how these patches are performing, Insight Remote Support does role matching and event correlation.

It not only provides, as we say, traffic-light alerts. You're able to correlate an event with other events to propose a multipurpose action and, in the end, trigger the appropriate delivery and support processes. For example, we can automatically send the right part to you in case you need to manage the device. We link with the standard support processes.

When information is flowing from the customer side into HP support, they have access to the customer in Insight Online. We have access to a customer through our dashboard. This provides alerts and information about how the devices are performing and automatically links warranties. It informs the staff of when they're going to expire, so you can take more proactive actions about renewing it. They also automatically link support cases to events, and with one click, you can navigate to the website.

We have access to a customer through our dashboard. This provides alerts and information about how the devices are performing.

One new feature of Insight Online is access for our HP partners. I talked about having to identify a partner that is actually working on the device? What we have is now a new partner view, again, through HP servers and Insight Online. This uses a new tab called My Customers, and now others can be part of the entire interaction by being able to manage devices on behalf of the customer.

You don’t have to install any of your own software. You don’t have to develop it. We are providing the tools to be more productive, right from the start, by installing the HP server, HP infrastructure, data network storage, and giving you new tools to give you more efficiency.

HP Support Center with Insight Online also provides access to multiple users. You could be an account manager, managing infrastructure, who is going to meet the customer and you want to talk about that infrastructure, how it's performing. You log onto Insight Online and review the information.

Your HP partner can automatically view the information before even going on site and taking actions on a customer device. You will have everything accessible. If users complain that the infrastructure is not performing, you will view the management software and know what is actually going on.

You can actually gain that without having to be in the environment. It is kind of giving the life back, that is the way I would like you to see. Now, let’s also look at this in terms of security. You have information flowing from your data center back into HP and now accessible online.

Security and privacy

First of all, security and privacy are extremely important. We actually compare our privacy policy against all the countries that we do business in. Security is highly scrutinized. We've been audited and certified for our security, and it’s extremely important for us to take care of your security concerns.

Gardner: Tommaso, one of the things I hear quite a bit from folks is that they’re trying to understand how this all works in a fairly complex environment, like a data center, with many people involved with support. There are individuals working on the customer IT infrastructure internally, self-maintainers as well, within that group.

But they’re also relying on partners, and there are other vendors and other devices and equipment and technologies involved. So how does the support automation capability that you have been describing address and manage a fairly fragmented support environment like that?

Esmanech: It is indeed one of the questions we asked ourselves, when we started looking at how do we solve today's problem? How do we give something more than just management software. It’s all about the users that need to access the information.

As I said before, access through a management console is limited to the few that can have access to that environment, because they're within the network or they have the knowledge how to use the tools. With the new experience, by providing cloud-based service in support automation, we're able to provide tools to the customer to enable access to the right people to do the right job.

We've created a new portfolio of services that is taking advantage of this new knowledge and infrastructure to provide new value to the customer.

HP shares devices or views devices or groups of devices with multiple users through the Web-based capabilities that we have with Insight Online. The customers then create groups. Also all customers manage. So you're in control of setting up those groups, saying who has the right to view the information and what he is able to do with such information.

Another important aspect is the security when employees move on. It's part of life. You have somebody working for you, and tomorrow he’s going to move to another organization. You don’t want that individual to have access to your information any longer. So we've given the ability to control who is accessing information and eventually removing the user's right to go into HP Support Center Insight Online and see your environment. So it’s not only providing access, but also controlling access.

Let me take another look how things are changing. We have this easy-to-adopt Insight Remote Support. You have this new access methodology and you have all this knowledge, information, and content flowing from the customer environment into the hands of the right people to keep the system up and running.

If you are under warranty, which is the minimal requirement to take advantage of this infrastructure, you still have a self-solve capability. You have to figure out what you have to do in some cases. While there's information provided, it's still up to you.

We've created a new portfolio of services that is taking advantage of this new knowledge and infrastructure to provide new value to the customer.

Proactive care

On the technology side, we need to look at proactive care service. First of all, a technical account manager is assigned as a single point of contact for the software. Several components and reports are sent or made available to the customer. Incorporated incident reports are reviewed with a technical account manager.

This allows them to decide configuration, performance, and security, match it against best practices. It allows them to understand what is the current version of software to keep the infrastructure up and running at the optimal level.

I want to close with few takeaways. First of all, products and services have come together to provide an innovative and exciting user experience, helping to guarantee a 24x7 coverage, and providing access to anywhere/anytime cloud-based and secure support, while managing who can receive such information.

We've embedded this also with a new portfolio to take advantage of old HP expertise and knowhow. Now, partners, customers, and HP experts work together to dramatically increase uptime and achieve efficiency at 66 percent.

This concludes our main presentation, and I want to turn it back to you, Dana, for our Q&A session.

Products and services have come together to provide an innovative and exciting user experience, helping to guarantee a 24x7 coverage.

Gardner: Thank you, Tommaso, and I’d like to introduce to our audience a couple of more experts that we have with us today.

We're here with Andrew Claiborne, Usability Lead for HP Insight Remote Support. Andy has developed HP remote support solutions for a half-dozen years within HP’s internal development labs. He also developed portions of the HP Insight Remote Support capabilities with a special focus on usability.

We're also here with Paddy Medley, Director of Enterprise Business IT for HP Technology Services. Paddy has more than 25 years of experience in the R&D of technology solutions for the HP services organization, responsible for the formulation and execution of technology solutions that are underpinning the delivery of HP technology services. Welcome to you both.

Let me start with you, Paddy, about licensing. Do we use the full functions of iLO 4 and the new HP SIM without any licensing issues?

Eliminate licensing issues

Paddy Medley: The good news is, Dana, is that what we’re trying to do with the solution here is to make it as pervasive as possible and to eliminate licensing issues. HP SIM is essentially a product attribute. Once a customer purchases a storage server from HP or they’ve got such device that’s under service contracts, they are actually entitled to HP SIM by default.

With iLO, iLO really comes in two formats, the standard format and advanced format. The standard format is effectively free, and the advanced format is for fee. The advanced format has additional facilities, such as supporting virtual media, directory support, and so on.

Gardner: Thank you. We have a question here directed at Insight Remote Support. It’s about the software. They're asking, is it included, and is it difficult to install?

Medley: The preface of the first answer applies to this answer as well. What we’ve done with our overall solution is make it as easy to install as possible for the huge amount of human factor effort in behind that. At its most basic level, what’s required is Insight Remote Support software, and that needs to be installed on a Windows-based system or a VMware guest or Windows guest. That’s pretty pervasive.

The actual install process is pretty straightforward and very intuitive. As I said, it's an area where we’ve gone through extensive human factors to make that as easy as possible to install.

The actual install process is pretty straightforward and very intuitive.

The other part of that is if the customer has Insight Manager already installed, they'll actually inherit its features, and there is an integration point there. For instance, if Insight Manager has already discovered a number of devices on the customer’s environments, we’ll inherit those with Insight Remote Support, and for pertinent events occurring in those systems, we’ll try to trace them through Insight Manager into Insight Remote Support and back to HP.

Gardner: Andy Claiborne, a question for you. Our viewers say that they're working to modernize their infrastructure and virtualize their environment. They'd like to implement support automation like Insight Remote Support, but they feel the cost is too high. What does it cost to implement this?

Andy Claiborne: Previous versions of Insight Remote Support were very challenging to get installed, especially at large customer sites. Trying to address that has been one of the key features that we've been trying to bake into our latest release of our support automation tools.

If you have just a couple of Gen8 ProLiants that you want to deploy in your environment and support using our support automation solutions, those systems are able to connect directly to HP, and that capability is just baked into their firmware. So it's really straightforward to set those up.

Hosting device

If you have a bunch of legacy devices in your environment, you’d have to set up what we call a hosting device, which is one system that sits in your environment that listens to all of your devices and sends service events back to HP. For our latest release, we've dramatically reduced the amount of time that it takes to set up, install, and configure the hosting device and implement remote support in your environment.

In the labs, we have cases that used to take our expert testers 45 minutes to get through. Our testers can now get through them in five minutes. So it should be a dramatic improvement, and it should be relatively easy.

Gardner: Here's a related question. How soon can we recover the upfront cost of implementing HP support automation? I think this is really getting to the return-on-investment (ROI) equation.

Claiborne: We look at two aspects. What does it cost to deploy it, and what benefit do you get from having remote support? As we said, the cost is greatly reduced from previous releases.

The benefit, as Tommaso mentioned, is in looking at our case resolution data across thousands of cases that have been opened, we see a 66 percent reduction in problem resolution time. When you think about just how incredibly expensive it is if one of your critical system goes down and how much that costs every second that that system is down, the benefits can be huge. So the payoff should be pretty quick.

Through the entire support processes and collection of the data, we're able to provide a great value proposition for our customers.

Gardner: Okay, Tommaso, a question for you. They ask, why is Insight Remote Support mandatory for proactive care?

Esmanech: If you think about the amount of data that we need to collect to deliver against the proactive care, if we were to all do that activity manually, that would definitely make the value proposition of proactive care through event and revision management, almost impossible to manage or to adapt as a value proposition. So we separate those. Through the entire support processes and collection of the data, we're able to provide a price quantity that is very interesting and a great value proposition for our customers.

A customer can choose as a part of our portfolio, foundation care, but of course, the price point and the value it will provide is going to be different.

Gardner: Here is a question that gets to the heart of the issue about your getting data from inside of other people's systems. They ask, our company has very strict security requirements. How does HP ensure the security of this data?

Esmanech: That is really one of the most asked questions. After we start talking with the security experts at the customer sites, we're able to solve all the problems.

Our security is multilayer. It starts with information collected at the customer site. First of all, the customer has visibility into everything that we collect. When we collect it and transfer it to HP’s back end, all that information is encrypted. When we talk about providing access on Insight Online through the Web, the access goes through HTTPS, so it's encrypted access of information.

For a password, for example, a minimum set of characters is required for an alphanumeric password. Also, the customer has knowledge and information about who is accessing his and viewing his devices. Last but not least, we have certified our environment end-to-end for eTrust, which is one of the most important certifications of security for these type of services in infrastructure.

Product support

Gardner: Paddy, a question from an organization with ProLiant servers as well as HP storage and networking products. Will Insight Remote support all of those products, or is it just the ProLiant servers?

Medley: We've had our initial release of the new Insight Remote Support and Insight Online solution. The initial solution covers Gen8 products only. In parallel with that, we're working on the second release, and that will be coming out in the summer.

That will, in effect, provide similar support for all of our legacy devices, network storage, and server spaces with the exception of three private tools, which we are looking at delivering in a future release. Our objective here is to have pervasive coverage across all of our enterprise-based products.

Gardner: Okay, is there an upgrade path for Insight Remote Support, so that older versions can gain some of the new capabilities?

Medley: There is indeed. We have our legacy remote support solution, which has very significant usage in customer sites. We're providing an upgrade path to customers to migrate from that legacy solution to our new solution, and that’s part of the bundle that will go with the summer release that I just spoke about.

We're providing an upgrade path to customers to migrate from that legacy solution to our new solution.

Gardner: Andy, we have a question here from another user. They have a lot of ProLiant servers running Insight Remote Support today and they are purchasing some of the new ProLiant Gen8s. Will different versions of Insight Remote Support interact, and how so, how would that work?

Claiborne: A lot of you might have spent a lot of time and energy deploying our current generation of remote support tools and you're wondering what does it do to the mix when we add a Gen8 ProLiant.

First, if you're happy with your current set of features, you can monitor the Gen8 ProLiants with the current Insight Remote Support tools, just as you would with any other ProLiant using agents running on the operating system. If you want to get some of the benefits of the new HP Insight Online portal or use the baked-in firmware-enabled remote support features of the new Gen8 ProLiants, you would have to upgrade to the latest version of Insight Remote Support, and we’ve tried to make this as easy as possible. Today, we have Remote Support Standard and Remote Support Advanced.

Our next release of Remote Support, Version 7.0.5, will allow most Remote Support Standard customers and some Remote Support Advanced customers to upgrade automatically. We made this upgrade as seamless as possible. It should be hands-off. We will import all of your device data, credentials, site information, contact information, and event history, into our new tool.

Also, we’ve gone through extensive testing to make sure that, for example, if you had an Open Service event in your current Version 5 solution and you upgrade to Version 7, the service event will still be visible in your user interface and you’ll be able to get updates for it.

Hands-off upgrade

For the remainder of Remote Support Advanced customers, if you have mission-critical features -- you're monitoring like an XP Array or a dynamic smartcooling device, things like that -- support for those will come in the subsequent release, Version 7.1. With that, we will also implement a seamless hands-off comprehensive upgrade process.

Gardner: A user asks, Do I need a dedicated server to run Insight Remote Support?

Claiborne: If you're running Insight Remote Support, you have this hosting device in your environment that listens to events from all of your devices in the environment. That doesn't need to be a dedicated server and it doesn't need to be running on HP hardware either. You can run that on any computer that meets the minimum system requirements, and you can even run that on a VMware box.

We end up doing a lot of our testing in the lab in VMware systems, and we’ve realized that a lot of you out there are probably implementing VMware systems in your customer environments. So VMware is supported as well.

The one thing to remember, though, is that this box is the conduit for service events from your environment to HP. So you need to make sure that the box is available and turned on and that it's not a box that’s going to be accidentally powered off over the weekend or something like that.

Gardner: Back to Tommaso, and the question is, what is the difference between Insight Online and Insight Remote Support?

We’ve realized that a lot of you out there are probably implementing VMware systems in your customer environments. So VMware is supported as well.

Esmanech: That’s come up before. The easy way to describe these is that Insight Online is the Web access of Insight Remote Support. It's part of the entire support of the information ecosystem. While we do recognize that Insight Remote Support has a management console, where you can view events and view the devices, that's limited to access within the environment, within the VPN, and only to the few people that know how to manage the environment.

You also have to recognize that Insight Remote Support goes beyond just a management console. It has event correlation and it collects all the data. As Andy said, it's a conduit back to HP. The conduit back to HP leads to Insight Online. The way it is now, there are two systems, and they're part of the same ecosystem.

Gardner: Tommaso, you mentioned self-solve services. What are those, and what did you mean?

Esmanech: The term self-solve we define as those activities and capabilities for which a customer can find a solution of the problem by himself. For example, if you were going on a website for support, you're accessing that knowledge base, finding articles and information on how to troubleshoot or solutions to the problem. If you were just loading drivers, it’d be component of self-solve.

By themselves, they're not services that we sell, but they're part of our services support portfolio. It's about doing business.

Some of the self-solve capabilities may be available to customers with contracts, versus customers who have a warranty, or or don't even have an HP device, but we give the customer the ability to solve problems by themselves.

Future direction

Gardner: Next one to you, Paddy. This is sort of a big question. They are asking, can you predict HP support automation's future direction for the next 10 years? Can you look at your crystal ball and tell us what people should expect in terms of some of the capabilities to come?

Medley: We're seeing a number of trends in the industry. We talked earlier about the converged infrastructure of storage, servers, and networks into single tabs and converged management of that environment.

We’re seeing a move to virtualization. Storage is continuing to grow at a pervasive rate, and hardware continues to become more and more reliable. So when you look at that backdrop, the future is different from the past, in terms of service and service need. We’re seeing this greater need for interoperability, management, revision, configuration management, and for areas like performance and security.

In other words, we're also seeing a move to greater needs that are proactive, as well as reactive, service support. The beauty of the Insight Online solution is that it provides us a framework to go along that path. It provides us the basic framework to provide remote event monitoring or reactive monitoring in the case of subsequent events occurring, and then getting those events back to HP, but also to deliver proactive service.

What we're doing with the solution here is that, as we collect configuration and event information from customer environments, that configuration and event information is securely transported back to HP. Parts are loaded into a database against a defined data model.

We’re bringing convergence of all the reference data associated with the products that we support and then providing a set of analytics that analyze that collected data.

We’re bringing convergence of all the reference data associated with the products that we support and then providing a set of analytics that analyze that collected data against that reference data, producing recommendations and actions and events management. In fact, aggregation and that ability to do that in that aggregated back end, that’s really providing us, we see, with a key differentiator.

And then, all of that information is presented through the Insight Online portal, along with our knowledge bases, forums, and other reference data. So it's that whole aggregation that’s really the sweet spot with this overall solution.

Gardner: Well, that sounds very exciting. I'm afraid we’ll have to leave it there. A huge thanks to Tommaso Esmanech, Andy Claiborne and Paddy Medley.

I’d also like to thank you, our audience, for taking your time, and I hope this was helpful and useful for you. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Goodbye until next time until the next HP expert chat session.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect expert chat with HP on new frontiers in automated and remote support. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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Learn How Enterprise Architects Can Better Relate TOGAF and DoDAF to Bring Best IT Practices to Defense Contracts

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect enterprise IT thought leadership podcast on how governments are using multiple architectural frameworks.

Register for The Open Group Conference
July 16-18 in Washington, D.C.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview series coming to you in conjunction with the Open Group Conference this July in Washington, D.C. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout these discussions.

The conference will focus on enterprise architecture (EA), enterprise transformation, and securing global supply chains. Today, we’re here to focus on EA, and how governments in particular are using various frameworks to improve their architectural planning and IT implementations.

Joining us now to delve into this area is one of the main speakers at the July 16 conference, Chris Armstrong, President of Armstrong Process Group. His presentation will also be live-streamed free from The Open Group Conference.

Chris is an internationally recognized thought leader in EA, formal modeling, process improvement, systems and software engineering, requirements management, and iterative and agile development.

Governments in particular are using various frameworks to improve their architectural planning and IT implementation.

Chris represents the Armstrong Process Group at the Open Group, the Object Management Group (OMG), and Eclipse Foundation. Chris also co-chairs The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF), and Model Driven Architecture (MDA) process modeling efforts, and also the TOGAF 9 Tool Certification program, all at The Open Group.

At the conference, Chris will examine the use of TOGAF 9 to deliver Department of Defense (DoD) Architecture Framework or DoDAF 2 capabilities. And in doing so, we'll discuss how to use TOGAF architecture development methods to drive the development and use of DoDAF 2 architectures for delivering new mission and program capabilities. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

So with that, we now welcome to BriefingsDirect, Chris Armstrong.

Chris Armstrong: Great to be here, Dana.

Gardner: Tell our viewers about TOGAF, The Open Group Architecture Framework, and DoDAF. Where have they been? Where are they going? And why do they need to relate to one another more these days?

Armstrong: First of all, TOGAF we look at as a set of essential components for establishing and operating an EA capability within an organization. And it contains three of the four key components of any EA.

First, the method by which EA work is done, including how it touches other life cycles within the organization and how it’s governed and managed. Then, there's a skills framework that talks about the skills and experiences that the individual practitioners must have in order to participate in the EA work. Then, there's a taxonomy framework that describes the semantics and form of the deliverables and the knowledge that the EA function is trying to manage.

One-stop shop

One of the great things that TOGAF has going for it is that, on the one hand, it's designed to be a one-stop shop -- namely providing everything that a end-user organization might need to establish an EA practice. But it does acknowledge that there are other components, predominantly in the various taxonomies and reference models, that various end-user organizations may want to substitute or augment.

It turns out that TOGAF has a nice synergy with other taxonomies, such as DoDAF, as it provides the backdrop for how to establish the overall EA capability, how to exploit it, and put it into practice to deliver new business capabilities.

Frameworks, such as DoDAF, focus predominantly on the taxonomy, mainly the kinds of things we’re keeping track of, the semantics relationships, and perhaps some formalism on how they're structured. There's a little bit of method guidance within DoDAF, but not a lot. So we see the marriage of the two as a natural synergy.

Gardner: So their complementary natures allows for more particulars on the defense side, but the overall looks at the implementation method and skills for how this works best. What has been the case up until now? Have these not been complementary. Is this something new, or are we just learning to do it better?

Armstrong: I think we’re seeing the state of industry advance and looking at trying to have the federal government, both United States and abroad, embrace global industry standards for EA work. Historically, particularly in the US government, a lot of defense agencies and their contractors have often been focusing on a minimalistic compliance perspective with respect to DoDAF. In order to get paid for this work or be authorized to do this work, one of our requirements is we must produce DoDAF.

A lot of defense agencies and their contractors have often been focusing on a minimalistic compliance perspective with respect to DoDAF.

People are doing that because they've been commanded to do it. We’re seeing a new level of awareness. There's some synergy with what’s going on in the DoDAF space, particularly as it relates to migrating from DoDAF 1.5 to DoDAF 2.

Agencies need some method and technique guidance on exactly how to come up with those particular viewpoints that are going to be most relevant, and how to exploit what DoDAF has to offer, in a way that advances the business as opposed to just solely being to conforming or compliant?

Gardner: Well it has prevented folks from enjoying more of that benefit side, rather than the compliance side. Have there been hurdles, perhaps culturally, because of the landscape of these different companies and their inability to have that boundary-less interaction. What’s been the hurdle? What’s prevented this from being more beneficial at that higher level?

Armstrong: Probably overall organizational and practitioner maturity. There certainly are a lot of very skilled organizations and individuals out there. However, we're trying to get them all lined up with the best practice for establishing an EA capability and then operating it and using it to a business strategic advantage, something that TOGAF defines very nicely and which the DoDAF taxonomy and work products hold in very effectively.

Gardner: Help me understand, Chris. Is this discussion that you’ll be delivering on July 16 primarily for TOGAF people to better understand how to implement vis-à-vis, DoDAF, is this the other direction, or is it a two-way street?

Two-way street

Armstrong: It’s a two-way street. One of the big things that particularly the DoD space has going for it is that there's quite a bit of maturity in the notion of formally specified models, as DoDAF describes them, and the various views that DoDAF includes.

We’d like to think that, because of that maturity, the general TOGAF community can glean a lot of benefit from the experience they’ve had. What does it take to capture these architecture descriptions, some of the finer points about managing some of those assets. People within the TOGAF general community are always looking for case studies and best practices that demonstrate to them that what other people are doing is something that they can do as well.

We also think that the federal agency community also has a lot to glean from this. Again, we're trying to get some convergence on standard methods and techniques, so that they can more easily have resources join their teams and immediately be productive and add value to their projects, because they’re all based on a standard EA method and framework.

Gardner: As I mentioned, The Open Group Conference is going to be looking at EA, transformation, security, and supply-chain issues. Does the ability to deliver DoDAF capabilities with TOGAF, and TOGAF 9 in particular, also come to bear on some of these issues about securing supply chain, transforming your organization, and making a wider and more productive use of EA?

Armstrong: Absolutely, and some of that’s very much a part of the new version of DoDAF that’s been out for a little while, DoDAF 2. The current version is 2.02 and 2.03 is being worked on, as we speak.

One of the major changes between DoDAF 1 and DoDAF 2 is the focusing on fitness for purpose.

One of the major changes between DoDAF 1 and DoDAF 2 is the focusing on fitness for purpose. In the past, a lot of organizations felt that it was their obligation to describe all architecture viewpoints that DoDAF suggests without necessarily taking a step back and saying, "Why would I want to do that?"

So it’s trying to make the agencies think more critically about how they can be the most agile, mainly what’s the least amount of architecture description that we can invest and that has the greatest possible value. Organizations now have the discretion to determine what fitness for purpose is.

Then, there's the whole idea in DoDAF 2, that the architecture is supposed to be capability-driven. That is, you’re not just describing architecture, because you have some tools that happened to be DoDAF conforming, but there is a new business capability that you’re trying to inject into the organization through capability-based transformation, which is going to involve people, process, and tools.

One of the nice things that TOGAF’s architecture development method has to offer is a well-defined set of activities and best practices for deciding how you determine what those capabilities are and how you engage your stakeholders to really help collect the requirements for what fit for purpose means.

Gardner: As with the private sector, it seems that everyone needs to move faster. I see you’ve been working on agile development. With organizations like the OMG and Eclipse is there something that doing this well -- bringing the best of TOGAF and DoDAF together -- enables a greater agility and speed when it comes to completing a project?

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Different perspectives

Armstrong: Absolutely. When you talk about what agile means to the general community, you may get a lot of different perspectives and a lot of different answers. Ultimately, we at APG feel that agility is fundamentally about how well your organization responds to change.

If you take a step back, that’s really what we think is the fundamental litmus test of the goodness of an architecture. Whether it’s an EA, a segment architecture, or a system architecture, the architects need to think thoughtfully and considerately about what things are almost certainly going to happen in the near future. I need to anticipate, and be able to work these into my architecture in such a way that when these changes occur, the architecture can respond in a timely, relevant fashion.

We feel that, while a lot of people think that agile is just a pseudonym for not planning, not making commitments, going around in circles forever, we call that chaos, another five letter word. But agile in our experience really demands rigor, and discipline.

Of course, a lot of the culture of the DoD brings that rigor and discipline to it, but also the experience that that community has had, in particular, of formally modeling architecture description. That sets up those government agencies to act agilely much more than others.

Gardner: On another related topic, The Open Group has been involved with cloud computing. We’ve also seen some reference materials and even movement towards demanding that cloud resources be used by the government at large through NIST.

The cloud platform has a lot to offer both government and private organizations, but without trivializing it too much, it’s just another technology platform.

But, I imagine that the DoD is also going to be examining some of these hybrid models. Is there something about a common architectural approach that also sets the stage for that ability, should one decide to avail themselves of some of these cloud models?

Armstrong: On the one hand, the cloud platform has a lot to offer both government and private organizations, but without trivializing it too much, it’s just another technology platform, another paradigm, and a great demonstration of why an organization needs to have some sort of capability in EA to anticipate how to best exploit these new technology platforms.

Gardner: Moving a bit more towards some examples. When we think about using TOGAF 9 to deliver DoD architecture framework capabilities, can you explain what that means in real terms? Do you know of anyone that has done it successfully or is in the process? Even if you can’t name them, perhaps you can describe how something like this works?

Armstrong: First, there has been some great work done by the MITRE organization through their work in collaboration at The Open Group. They’ve written a white paper that talks about which DoDAF deliverables are likely to be useful in specific architecture development method activities. We’re going to be using that as a foundation for the talk we’re going to be giving at the conference in July.

The biggest thing that TOGAF has to offer is that a nascent organization that’s jumping into the DoDAF space may just look at it from an initial compliance perspective, saying, "We have to create an AV-1, and an OV-1, and a SvcV-5," and so on.

Providing guidance

TOGAF will provide the guidance for what is EA. Why should I care? What kind of people do I need within my organization? What kind of skills do they need? What kind of professional certification might be appropriate to get all of the participants up on the same page, so that when we’re talking about EA, we’re all using the same language?

TOGAF also, of course, has a great emphasis on architecture governance and suggests that immediately, when you’re first propping up your EA capability, you need to put into your plan how you're going to operate and maintain these architectural assets, once they’ve been produced, so that you can exploit them in some reuse strategy moving forward.

So, the preliminary phase of the TOGAF architecture development method provides those agencies best practices on how to get going with EA, including exactly how an organization is going to exploit what the DoDAF taxonomy framework has to offer.

Then, once an organization or a contractor is charged with doing some DoDAF work, because of a new program or a new capability, they would immediately begin executing Phase A: Architecture Vision, and follow the best practices that TOGAF has to offer.

Just what is that capability that we’re trying to describe? Who are the key stakeholders, and what are their concerns? What are their business objectives and requirements? What constraints are we going to be placed under?

As the project unfolds, they're going to discover details that may cause some adjustment to that final target.

Part of that is to create a high-level description of the current or baseline architecture descriptions, and then the future target state, so that all parties have at least a coarse-grained idea of kind of where we're at right now, and what our vision is of where we want to be.

Because this is really a high level requirements and scoping set of activities, we expect that that’s going to be somewhat ambiguous. As the project unfolds, they're going to discover details that may cause some adjustment to that final target.

Gardner: Chris, do you foresee that for a number of these organizations that have been involved with DoDAF mainly in the compliance area being compliant is going to lead them into a larger consumption, use, and exploitation of EA? Or will the majority of organizations that might be trying to move more towards government work as contractors already have a background?

Is there a trend here? It seems to me that if you’re going to have to do this to be compliant, you might as well take advantage of it and extend it across your organization for a variety of very good reasons.

Armstrong: Exactly. We’ve actually had a recent experience with a defense contractor who, for many years, has been required to do program conformance requirement to deliver DoDAF-compliant content. They're actually saying, "We get all that, and that’s all well and good, but through that process, we’ve come to believe that EA, in its own right, is a good thing for us and our organization."

Internalize best practices

So, we're seeing defense contractors being able to internalize some of these best practices, and really be prepared for the future so that they can win the greatest amount of business and respond as rapidly and appropriately as possible, as well as how they can exploit these best practices to affect greater business transformation across their enterprises.

Gardner: Of course the whole notion of fit for purpose ultimately is high productivity, lower cost, and therefore passing on more of those savings to your investors.

Armstrong: A lot of government organizations are really looking at their bottom line, trying to trim costs, and increase efficiency and operation excellence. EA is a proven best practice to deliver that.

Gardner: We mentioned that your discussion on these issues, on July 16 will be live-streamed for free, but you’re also doing some pre-conference and post-conference activities -- webinars, and other things. Tell us how this is all coming together, and for those who are interested, how they could take advantage of all of these.

Armstrong: We’re certainly very privileged that The Open Group has offered this as opportunity to share this content with the community. On Monday, June 25, we'll be delivering a webinar that focuses on architecture change management in the DoDAF space, particularly how an organization migrates from DoDAF 1 to DoDAF 2.

We’ll be talking about things that organizations need to think about as they migrate from DoDAF 1 to DoDAF 2.

I'll be joined by a couple of other people from APG, David Rice, one of our Principal Enterprise Architects who is a member of the DoDAF 2 Working Group, as well as J.D. Baker, who is the Co-chair of the OMG’s Analysis and Design Taskforce, and a member of the Unified Profile for DoDAF and MODAF (UPDM) work group, a specification from the OMG.

We’ll be talking about things that organizations need to think about as they migrate from DoDAF 1 to DoDAF 2. We'll be focusing on some of the key points of the DoDAF 2 meta-model, namely the rearrangement of the architecture viewpoints and the architecture partitions and how that maps from the classical DoDAF 1.5 viewpoint, as well as focusing on this notion of capability-driven architectures and fitness for purpose.

We also have the great privilege after the conference to be delivering a follow-up webinar on implementation methods and techniques around advanced DoDAF architectures. Particularly, we're going to take a closer look at something that some people may be interested in, namely tool interoperability and how the DoDAF meta-model offers that through what’s called the Physical Exchange Specification (PES).

We’ll be taking a look a little bit more closely at this UPDM thing I just mentioned, focusing on how we can use formal modeling languages based on OMG standards, such as UML, SysML, BPMN, and SoaML, to do very formal architectural modeling.

One of the big challenges with EA is, at the end of the day, EA comes up with a set of policies, principles, assets, and best practices that talk about how the organization needs to operate and realize new solutions within that new framework. If EA doesn’t have a hand-off to the delivery method, namely systems engineering and solution delivery, then none of this architecture stuff makes a bit of a difference.

Driving the realization

We're going to be talking a little bit about how DoDAF-based architecture description and TOGAF would drive the realization of those capabilities through traditional systems, engineering, and software development method.

Gardner: Well, great. For those who are interested in learning more about this, perhaps they are coming from the TOGAF side and wanting to learn more about DoDAF or vice-versa, do you have any suggestions about how to get started?

Are there places where there are some good resources that they might use to begin the journey in one direction or the other -- maybe starting from scratch on both -- that would then lead them to better avail themselves of the information that you and The Open Group are going to be providing in the coming weeks.

Armstrong: On APG’s website, we have a free introduction to EA in TOGAF, a web-based tutorial. It’s about 60 minutes, or so, and is designed to get people to have familiarity with some of this content, but would like a little deeper dive. That’s one resource.

EA comes up with a set of policies, principles, assets, and best practices that talk about how the organization needs to operate.

Of course, there is The Open Group’s website. I'm not sure that I would refer people to the TOGAF 9.1 specification as the first starting point, although there is some really good content in the first introduction chapter. But there's also a manager’s guide, or executive guide, that can provide a little bit of a higher-level view of EA from a business perspective, as opposed to a architect practitioner’s perspective.

Of course, there is quite a bit of content out there on the DoD architecture framework and other government frameworks.

Gardner: Thank you so much. I'm afraid we are going to have to leave it there. We’ve been talking with Chris Armstrong, President of the Armstrong Process Group on how governments are using multiple architecture frameworks to improve their architecture planning and IT implementation.

This was a lead-in rather to his Open Group presentation on July 16, which I would like to point out will be live-streamed and free. He's going to be discussing using TOGAF 9 to deliver DoDAF 2 capabilities, and Chris will be exploring the ways at various architecture frameworks, from either perspective, that will be complementing one another as we go forward in this field.

This special BriefingsDirect discussion comes to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference, July 16 - 20 in Washington D.C. You’ll hear more from Chris and many other global leaders on the ways that IT and EA supporting enterprise transformation. His presentation will also be live-streamed free from The Open Group Conference.

A big thanks to Chris Armstrong for this fascinating discussion. I really look forward to your presentation in Washington, and I encourage our readers and listeners to attend that conference and learn more either in person or online. Thank you, sir.

Armstrong: You are more than welcome, Dana, and thanks so much for the opportunity.

Gardner: You’re very welcome. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator through these thought leader interviews. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

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Transcript of a BriefingsDirect enterprise IT thought leadership podcast on how governments are using multiple architectural frameworks. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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