HP's Kevin Bury on How Cloud and SaaS Will Help Pave the Way to Increased Efficiency in IT Budgets for 2011, and Beyond

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

We're here in early December, 2010 to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations, making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I’ll be your host throughout this series of Software Universe Live discussions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We are now joined by two executives from HP to discuss the software as a service (SaaS) market. Please welcome Kevin Bury, Vice President and General Manager of HP Software as a Service. Welcome.

Kevin Bury: Dana, it’s great to be here.

Gardner: We are also here with Neil Ashizawa, Manager of Products for HP Software as a Service. Welcome back, Neil.

Neil Ashizawa: Hi. Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Let’s start with you, Kevin. Tell me a little bit about the market. We’re seeing a lot of interest in SaaS, we are also hearing a lot about cloud. Are people already using cloud? Are they confusing SaaS and cloud? What is, in a sense, the continuum in real world practice now with SaaS and cloud?

Bury: We are seeing a lot of interest in the market today for SaaS and cloud. I think it’s an extension of what we've seen over the last decade, of companies looking at ways that they can drive the most efficiency from their IT budgets. And as they are faced especially in these trying economics times of trying to do as much as they can, they're looking for ways to optimize on their investment.

When you look at what they are doing with SaaS, it gives them the ability to outsource applications, take advantage of the cloud, take advantage of web technologies to be able to deliver those software solutions to their customers or constituents inside of the business, and do it in a way where they can drive speed to value very, very quickly.

They can take advantage of getting more bang for their buck, because they don’t have to have their people focused on those initiatives internally and they're able to do it in a financial model that gives them tremendous value, because they can treat it as an operating expense as opposed to a capital expense. So, as we look to the interest of our customers, we're seeing a lot more interest in, "HP, help us understand what is available as a service."

Various components then include SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), certainly platform as a service (PaaS), with the ultimate goal of moving more and more into the cloud. SaaS is a stepping stone to get there, and today about half of all of the cloud types of solutions start with SaaS.

Gardner: Neil, how do you see that? Are folks well into this, or is it still in the planning stages?

Somewhere in between

Ashizawa: We're somewhere in between, to be quite honest. About a year, year-and-a-half ago, it was a lot earlier, and people were still trying to get their minds wrapped around this idea of cloud. We're at a stage now where a lot of organizations are actually adopting the cloud as a sourcing strategy or they are building other strategies to adopt it. We're probably past early adopter and more into mainstream. I anticipate it will continue to grow and gain momentum.

Gardner: Neil, is there a confusion in the market between SaaS and cloud? Are some thinking that they are doing cloud computing, and is there something that’s still being done outside the purview of IT? Or, is IT now becoming more involved in perhaps a gatekeeper role with SaaS and/or cloud?

Ashizawa: Now, IT is becoming much more involved. I would say that they are actually becoming more of a broker. Before, when it came to providing services to drive business, they were more focused on build. Now, with this cloud they're acting in a role as a broker, as Kevin said, so that they can build the business benefits of the cloud.

Gardner: Kevin, when we hear that cloud word, a lot falls underneath it. We're hearing, of course, SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. How do you see the market evolving? Are we going to move in a continuum? Is there overlap? What’s the relationship between companies as they adopt SaaS, as perhaps their development organizations work with PaaS, and ultimately will they be engaging with infrastructure services off the wire?

Bury: That's a question I get asked quite frequently by our customers. Where is this thing going? When is it going to end? Is it going to end? I don’t believe it is. I think it’s an ongoing continuum, to use your word. It’s really an evolution of what services their constituents are trying to consume, and the business is responding by looking for different alternatives to provide those solutions.

For example, if you look at where SaaS got started, it got started because business departments were frustrated, because IT wasn’t responsive enough. They went off and they made decisions to start consuming application service provider (ASP) source solutions, and they implemented them very, very quickly. At first, IT was unaware of this.

Now, as IT has become more aware of this, they recognize that their business users are expecting more. So, they're saying, "Okay, we need to not only embrace it, but we need to bring it in-house, figure out how we can work with them to ensure that we are still driving standardization, and we're still addressing all of the compliance and security issues."

Corporate data is absolutely the most valuable asset that most companies have, and so they have seen now that they have to embrace it. But, as they look down the road, it moves from just SaaS into now looking at a hybrid model, where they're going to embrace IaaS and Platform as a Service, which really formed the foundation of what the cloud is and what we can see of it today. But, it will continue to evolve, mature, and offer new things that we don’t even know about yet.

Gardner: Well, if the past is a prologue and if we learn anything from history, we’ve seen how applications have been adopted in fits and starts over the past decades. Then, integration has had to come in, and it’s often been an issue in terms of cost and complexity. Are there some best practices that organizations should examine and consider now, as they move toward these newer ways of distributing and using SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS?

Where should you be thinking, where should you be going, if you want to head off even more complexity and/or pain down the road?

The promise and the hype

Bury: This topic often gets lost, because organizations can become overwhelmed by the promise and the hype of cloud and what it can offer. My recommendation is usually to start with something small. I go out and spend a lot of time talking to our customers and prospective customers. There are a couple of very common bits of feedback that I hear that CXOs are looking at, when they view where to start with a cloud or as a service type of initiative.

The first of these is, is it core to my business? If a business process is absolutely core to what they are doing, it’s probably not a great place to start. However, if it’s not core, if it’s something that is ancillary or complimentary to that, it’s something that may make some sense to look at outsourcing, or moving to the cloud.

The second is if it’s mission-critical or not. If it’s mission-critical and it’s core, that’s something you want to have your scarce resource, your very highly valued IT resources working on, because that’s what ultimately drives the business value of IT. Going back to what Neil said earlier, IT is becoming a broker. They only have so much bandwidth that they can deliver to those solutions and offerings to their customers. So, if it’s not core and it’s not critical, those are good candidates.

We recommend starting small. Certainly, IT needs to be very involved with that. Then, as you get more-and-more comfortable and you’re seeing more value, you can continue to expand. In addition, we see projects that make a lot of sense, things like testing as a service, where the IT organizations can leverage technology that’s available through their partners, but deliver via a cloud or a SaaS solution, as opposed to bringing it in-house. So, those are a couple of other examples.

Gardner: It sounds like the crawl, walk, run approach to cloud activities, stepping stones, learning as you go pilot projects -- but along the way isn’t there the need for considering integration, security, and governance? I'm thinking too about the need -- not only to allow applications that are from the cloud or SaaS to interoperate -- but also thinking about how those might interoperate with legacy applications and data.

You need to also make sure that the service levels are going to be what your business users' desire and that you can enforce.

I guess it’s the big integration question. Neil, what should IT be thinking about in terms of trying to get on top of this integration issue sooner rather than later?

Ashizawa: Clearly they should make sure that, if they are going to adopt the SaaS solution, that they vet out the integration possibilities -- to get out in front that. Also, integration doesn’t just stop at the technical level. There are also the business aspects of integration as well. You need to also make sure that the service levels are going to be what your business users' desire and that you can enforce, and also integration from the support model.

If the user needs help, what’s the escalation? What’s the communication point? Who is the person who is actually going to help them, given the fact that now there is a cloud vendor in the mix, as well as the cloud consumer.

Gardner: It sure sounds like this is not something I want to get done at any strategic level without IT being involved. The more you think it through, the more you see that this becomes something that requires all of the usual benefits, governance, and manageability from traditional IT. But, let’s take a step back and look at where SaaS is creeping in, so that we might know where then to head it off in order to protect IT and the organization from future complexity.

Kevin, where do you see the market segmentation for SaaS? Are we seeing it by application, are there breakouts by region around the globe, or is this strictly based on the personality, if you will, of one enterprise versus another?

Developing patterns

Bury: In the early stages, it was very much dictated by the personality or the willingness to embrace new technologies of the overall organization or the CIO or the business leaders of a company. But, now a decade into this market trend, we're definitely seeing some patterns start to develop.

I mentioned earlier this movement toward those applications or those areas of the business that are not core and critical that they are looking to move outside of their data center. So that’s certainly something, when we look at things like complementing what IT does around things like testing as a service. Security as a service is a big area that we are seeing growth in. Project portfolio management (PPM), helping those IT organizations manage their business, the day-to-day business, are some of the areas that we are seeing a lot of growth.

When I look geographically, it’s interesting. Some of the early adopters were companies in the more developed nations, the U.S., England, and Germany. Now, what we're seeing is a tremendous amount of interest out of some of the more developing nations, certainly in Asia, Pacific, Japan. Down in the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand are embracing SaaS as the primary vehicle for newest initiatives inside of IT. When we look at the BRIC countries, we're seeing a lot of interest coming out of those more developing nations more so than the developed nations.

In the developed nations, they have already embraced SaaS and they're starting to embrace cloud more, but they're now starting because of the IT governance requirement. So, to your point earlier, we're looking for much more specialized or vertical types of solutions, where we can come in and add value, because the breadth of our portfolio has offerings for them. When you look at the developing countries, they're saying, "We need to look at this from a more holistic approach," and they want to partner with someone like HP because of all the breadth we can bring in there.

Gardner: So, suffice it to say, Kevin, SaaS is really strategic, very important to HP as a company.

In the traditional license play, they can consume the license and pay maintenance or, if they want to treat as an operating expense, it will be via the SaaS model.

Bury: Absolutely. We see SaaS as one of the key drivers, one of the strategic initiatives for HP to embrace. As I talk with my peers on the leadership team, we recognize SaaS as one of only two consumption model customers have for obtaining software from HP. In the traditional license play, they can consume the license and pay maintenance or, if they want to treat as an operating expense, it will be via the SaaS model.

As we look to what we need to do, we're investing very heavily in making all of our applications SaaS ready, so that customers can stand them up in their own data center and our data center or via a hybrid, where we may involve either a combination of those or even include a third-party.

For example, they may have a managed service provider that is providing some of the testing services. To your point earlier about the integration, HP, because of our breadth and our depth of our applications, can provide the ability to integrate that three-way type of solution whereas other companies don’t have that type of depth to be able to pull that off.

Gardner: It shows that perhaps bigger is better in this regard.

Bury: Absolutely. It’s interesting. I've been in the SaaS space now for about nine years. In the early days, the agility and the ability to being nimble was great for the smaller vendors. But, as SaaS now becomes much more mainstream and much more mature, big customers are now looking to companies like HP, because of the fact that we have the size, the depth, and the breadth of the solutions.

Looking for a relationship

They're looking for that relationship that is going to transcend this solution and is going to be part of the overall relationship between HP and their organization over the long haul. So, size definitely matters when it comes to cloud and SaaS.

Gardner: What’s interesting about the SaaS and cloud services is that there is something new about it, but there’s also something very reminiscent. We’ve been here before. We’ve talked about ASPs for decades plus, and there’s been managed services for even longer.

Neil, tell me a little bit about how this works as a segue, as a progression. For those organizations already deeply involved with ASPs, managed services, or hosting, how do they now best proceed toward the adoption of what we now call cloud?

Ashizawa: It’s very much of an evolution. Ten years ago they started with ASPs, moved into more of a managed service, and now here we are at cloud. Clearly, organizations that did adopt ASP and managed service are probably more comfortable with the jump to cloud.

One of the key differentiators, as it’s evolved, in the way I see it, is really in the economic principles behind cloud versus managed service and ASP. With cloud, as Kevin mentioned earlier, you basically leverage your operation expense budgets and reduce that capitalization that typically you would still need to do in a historic ASP or managed service.

Cloud brings to the table a very compelling economic business model that is very important to large organizations.

Cloud brings to the table a very compelling economic business model that is very important to large organizations.

Bury: If I could add to that, Dana, Neil makes a couple of great points. The thing that’s important to note here is that this is an evolution or a maturation. It’s interesting, having been in this phase for so long, to see what customers are now looking at. And it’s something where, as I start to look out to the future and speculate about where they want to go next, I'm seeing a lot of indications toward a model where customers will want to consume this idea of everything as a service. We’ve even seen recently customers say, "You're already doing this for us," whatever that as-a-service solution might be.

"Can you also take some of our people, put them back into that, and then just charge us that monthly or annual fee?" Neil and I spent a lot of time contemplating this idea of business process as a service. That’s what we're speculating could be a next generation of SaaS or cloud. It’s the idea of customers who wanted to consume business processes as service, which is just another step toward consuming everything as a service.

Gardner: I was starting to think about that, when we described how you integrate both among and between different types of services that are sourced from cloud or SaaS with your ongoing legacy applications as services. It really does get elevated to the process level, and it’s at the process level where you get the agility and where you could start to get toward your Instant-On Enterprise benefits, regardless of where these were sourced.

Delivering on the promise

Bury: That's one of the big things that we're looking at. How will companies in the future really be able to deliver on the promise of what is and what we are recognizing as the Instant-On type of enterprise? It’s the ability to take in data very, very quickly and then be able to analyze it, make assessments on it, make decisions and to be, in the term you use, very agile in the way that they are reacting to these inputs.

In the past, companies generally have been very siloed. Information would come in and they didn’t have the access nor the visibility into it from another division or another department. When you look at what the instant enterprise is going to, it’s the ability to consume information very, very quickly, analyze it, then make decisions, and make directional changes to what’s going on inside of their environment.

As-a-service and cloud are very much enablers of that, because it gives you the ability to take advantage of technology as an enabler, as opposed to the past when they were just to serve one solution or one business process in the past. Now, they're able to have that stratify the entire organization. So, they have the insight and the agility to make real-time types of decisions.

Gardner: So it sounds like this is going to be a journey for some time, with lots of potential opportunity. But, it also sounds like something you need to do quite carefully. Given that, what are some of the best practices? What are some of the things that you ought to have lined up within IT in order to progress toward some of these larger business process level goals?

Bury: It’s like any IT project. The single-most important thing is not to go into it with expectations, any preconceived expectations that it’s going to be nirvana, or that it’s going to be easy. Moving a difficult business process from in house to out of house, right into the cloud, doesn’t mean that the problem goes away or that the challenges go away from it. You still need to approach it with discipline, rigor, and formal types of processes and methodologies, which is what IT is really good at.

Moving a difficult business process from in house to out of house, right into the cloud, doesn’t mean that the problem goes away or that the challenges go away.

The key is to get engaged early, learn as much as you can about the cloud and about as a service, and then look to companies like HP that have the experience in doing this. We’ve been doing it for more than 10 years. We’ve got a lot of success stories that we can point to on how we can help companies take advantage of the cloud and also what to avoid when you move into the cloud.

Gardner: Neil, any thoughts also on best practices in terms of getting yourself prepared for this new wave?

Ashizawa: I very much agree with what Kevin just said. I think what Kevin was also saying is that you really want to look for trust. If you are going to be outsourcing business processes to a vendor, you really want to have that trust. What we're seeing is that there is a strong linkage between your compliance levels that you have in your organizations and the trust that your cloud vendor can also provide you a solution that can help you maintain your compliance and standards.

So, at the end of the day, you really want to just make sure that you go into this with a trusted vendor that has a proven experience, that can really make sure that they understand your need and your requirements, and they have a SaaS solution that can really fit your organization.

Gardner: Very good. We've been discussing the future of the SaaS market and how to get started responsibly, and move forward from a legacy and a managed services and/or ASP heritage. We’ve been talking with Kevin Bury, Vice President and General Manager for HP SaaS. Thank you, Kevin.

Bury: Thank you, Dana, this has been great.

Gardner: We’ve also been joined by Neil Ashizawa, Manager of Products for HP SaaS. Thank you, Neil.

Ashizawa: Thanks very much, Dana.

Dana Gardner: I want to thank also our listeners for joining the special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

Look for other podcasts from this event on the hp.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect network.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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Case Study: Automated Client Management from HP Helps Vodafone Standardize in 30 Countries

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

We're here in early December to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations, making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I’ll be your host throughout this series of Software Universe Live discussions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Our customer case study now focuses on Vodafone and how they worked toward improved client management and automation of client management. I'm here with two executives from their IT organization. Please join me in welcoming Michael Janssen, the Manager of Deployment Automation with Vodafone group in Düsseldorf. Welcome.

Michael Janssen: Thank you.

Gardner: We're also here with Michael Schroeder, also Manager of Deployment Automation at Vodafone. Welcome.

Michael Schroeder: Hello.

Gardner: Tell me first, Michael Janssen, what is the nature of the problem? How big was the issue you had, when it comes to PC client sprawl?

Janssen: The problem within Vodafone was that Vodafone had independent countries that operated their environments by themselves. So, we had 30 countries worldwide with all the solutions in place. That meant 30 times software deployment, 30 times application packaging, 30 times Active Directory, and so on.

Vodafone decided in 2006 to go for a global IT project and centralization in terms of client automation. It came down to us to evaluate the current solutions in place in all these countries and then come up with a solution which would be the best solution for the new global environment. That was our main problem.

Gardner: And what was the major solution? How did you think about what you needed to bring in, in order to solve this major problem?

Standardization and reducing cost

Janssen: If you're starting a centralization process, then it’s all about standardization and reducing cost. That meant reducing cost by reducing effort of the solutions and make as much as possible automated and self-service. That was the main reason we started this exercise.

Gardner: Michael Schroeder, any thoughts from your perspective on what was necessary, an important ingredient for the solution?

Schroeder: As Michael Janssen said, the most important thing was that administration should be very easy. It shouldn’t be too complex in the end and it should fit every need in every country.

Gardner: Give me a sense of the scale, the scope of what you were dealing with? Were there many different types of devices and platforms? What was the sheer scale of the effort?

Schroeder: At that time, we had a whole zoo of hardware and software products. We had about 8,000 different software applications in place at that time. We tried to reduce that as much as we could.

The most important thing was that administration should be very easy. It shouldn’t be too complex in the end and it should fit every need in every country.

Gardner: And, how far through this effort are you. Is this complete or near completion? To what degree have you progressed?

Schroeder: The overall number of clients in Vodafone is 65,000, and at the moment, we've finished the transition for 52,000 clients. Nearly 80 percent is done after four years. Of course, there is a long wait with the smaller countries, and we need to migrate 15 other countries that are still in the loop.

Gardner: You mentioned that cost savings were an important factor in this. Do you have any metrics of how well this has gone and how well it’s benefited you?

Schroeder: In the past, in each of these 30 countries, we had one to four people working within the client automation environments. Today, we have five people left doing that globally. You can imagine 30 times a minimum of two persons. That was 60 people working for client deployment, and that's now reduced to five for the global solution.

Gardner: Has this had any impact on the end users? Do you feel that there is a productivity benefit as well?

Always pros and cons

Schroeder: Of course. There are always pros and cons with standardization and with centralization. The consensus takes a little bit longer, because there are no strict processes to bring new applications. But, the main advantage is that much of the applications are already there for any country. We test it once and can deploy to many, instead of doing this 30 times, like we did that in the past, and we avoid any double spend of money.

Then, of course, with the global environment, the main advantage is that now we are all connected, which was not possible in the past, because all the networks were independent and all the applications were independent. There was no unified messaging or anything like that. This is the major benefit of the global environment.

Gardner: Had there been any security or other benefits, aside from the strictly technical and productivity? Are you able to better enforce policies across all of these devices and has that therefore meant a more secure, more managed and governed environment?

Schroeder: Security is one big thing we're now dealing with. For example, if we are talking about client automation, we're talking about patch management as well. We're able to bring out patches -- for example, security patches from Microsoft -- within two days, if it’s a real hot-fix, or even within 24 hours, if it’s a major issue.

Countries that used HP Client Automation had much higher success rate, 90 percent or higher, in deploying application and patches, than the others.

Gardner: Back to Michael Janssen. Now, we have heard about what you did. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how. How did you make this happen?

Janssen: First, there was the evolution phase, where we studied all the countries. What were the products that they used in the past? Then we decided what was the best way forward. For us, that was a major split between countries that already used the HP Client Automation solution and the other countries that used other deployment suites.

That was also one of the major criteria for the final decision. Countries that used HP Client Automation had much higher success rate, 90 percent or higher, in deploying application and patches, than the others, where they were on average at 70 percent. So, this was the first big decision point.

The second was countries using HP Client Automation had less operational staff than the others. It was mainly one to two full-time employees fewer than in countries that operated with other tools.

Gardner: And Michael Schroeder, any other thoughts about the HP solutions and why they seem work well for you?

Policy-based technology

Schroeder: If we're talking about the Client Automation Suite from HP, we're talking about policy-based or a desired state technology. That is one of the criteria. Everything is done every day. For example, if you're trying to deploy applications to clients, this is done every day. It's controlled every day, managed every day, and without any admin or user interaction. That’s a great point for us.

Gardner: Okay, Michael Janssen, tell me what you might recommend, having done this now 80 percent through, for those other organizations that might be considering more of a managed client and an automated client management capability. What lessons did you learn that you might share with them?

Janssen: What I can recommend is that there are two main issues that you need to overcome. First, you only can deploy what you receive from the business. We already were experienced in the Vodafone-Germany organization, where we did the same exercise five years ago. You need to have a strict software standardization process in place. There is one main rule for that.

Also, in the global environment, that means that if there is a business application, then the business needs to have an application owner for that. Otherwise, the application does not exist in the whole company.

We gave that function or that responsibility back to the business, and now they're all responsible and they finally approve before application goes live.

The application owner is responsible for the whole application lifecycle, including describing the application installation documents, doing the final testing and approval after packaging, his responsibility is to look after security issues of the application, look after upgrades or version or release changes, and so on.

It's not not the packaging team, the client team, or the central IT team that is responsible for all the applications and their functionality. We gave that function or that responsibility back to the business, and now they're all responsible and they finally approve before application goes live.

Gardner: It sounds as if there are both benefits of centralization vis-à-vis standards and policy, but also some benefits of decentralization in terms of how self-use, self-help can work. Maybe you could share, Michael Schroeder, a little bit about that self-use from the end-user, when they could get applications and manage them on their own. How effective was that?

Schroeder: Very effective. We got a thing in place called self-service, which is a web application. You can go to a store and choose different applications to install on your machine, depending on your needs. You can choose an application, just click a box, and the application request goes to your line manager who has to approve the license costs, if there are any. Then, the policy will go back to your machine and the installation of this specific application goes straight to your machine. The user experience with it is very good.

Gardner: So, there are workflow and business process benefits that you can now exploit or leverage as a result of having this baseline set of client automation and management capabilities. Would you agree with that, Michael?

Janssen: The self-service web shop is not only for software. We use that also for other user needs, like access rights, permissions on some projects, mobile device management and so on. This is a global web shop solution, but very effective. It avoids any help desk calls for new applications, paperwork to approve licenses, and so on. It’s very efficient and, of course, one of our main parts of this new global solution.

Gardner: Wonderful. We've been hearing about client management and automation through the experiences of Vodafone. I want to thank our speakers, Michael Janssen, Manager of Deployment Automation with Vodafone Group in Düsseldorf. Thank you, sir.

Janssen: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

Gardner: And also Michael Schroeder, also a Manager of Deployment Automation at Vodafone Group too. Thank you.

Schroeder: Yeah, thanks.

Gardner: Great. I want to thank also our listeners for joining the special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

Look for other podcasts from this event on the hp.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect network.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• HP rolls out ALM 11 in Barcelona to expand managed automation for modern applications
• HP's new ALM 11 helps guide IT through shifting landscape of modern application development
  
• Dave Shirk details how HP's Instant-On Enterprise initiative takes aim at shifting demands on business and governments
  
• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications

WAN Governance and Network Unification Make or Break Successful Cloud and Hybrid Computing Implementations

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on meeting the challenges of network management and operations in the age of cloud computing.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Ipanema Technologies.

Get a free white paper on WAN Governance for Cloud Computing.

Get the free Cloud Networking Report.

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

Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion on the rapidly escalating complexity and consequent need for network management innovation in the age of hybrid computing.

And the emphasis nowadays is on "networks," not "network." Long gone are the days when a common and controlled local area network (LAN) served as the workhorse for critical applications and data delivery. With the increased interest in cloud, software as a service (SaaS), and mobile computing, applications are jockeying across multiple networks, both in terms of how services are assembled, as well in how users in different environments access and respond to these critical applications.

Indeed, cloud computing forces a collapse in the gaps between the former silos of private, public, and personal networking domains. Since the network management and governance tasks have changed and continue to evolve rapidly, so too must the ways in which solutions and technologies address the tangled networks environment we all now live and work in.

Automated network unification and pervasive wide area networking (WAN) governance are proving essential to ensure quality, scale, and manage security across all forms of today's applications use. We're here to explore the new and future path to WAN governance and to better understand how Ipanema Technologies is working to help its customers make clear headway, so that the next few years bring about a hybrid cloud computing opportunity and not a hastening downward complexity spiral.

We're here now to discuss the new reality of networks and applications delivery performance. Please join me in welcoming our guests, Peter Schmidt, Chief Technology Officer, North America, for Ipanema Technologies. Welcome, Peter.

Peter Schmidt: Hey, Dana. It's nice to be here.

Gardner: We are also here with David White, Vice President of Global Business Development at Ipanema. Hello, David.

David White: Hi, Dana. Looking forward to this chat.

Gardner: Let's look at this whole issue of the pain now in networking. The trends around cloud are raising the stakes. Tell us how things have shifted, Dave, over the last several years.

White: Over the last several years, most enterprise customers that we've talked to and, in fact, most enterprise customer in the industry, have moved to using SaaS applications. For example, Salesforce.com is the largest, and is used by most large enterprise companies as a part of their sales force automation. Also, Amazon is doing hosting for hundreds of different businesses providing SaaS applications to enterprises. Peter, do you have any comments?

Schmidt: Another really important trend is that enterprises have added extra networks. They've been building single private networks based on MPLS converted from older technologies like Frame Relay. Over the past few years, we've seen a real trend, where enterprises have been going to the Internet as a backup link for a lot of their offices.

Cheap bandwidth

The Internet is cheap bandwidth and it gives some benefits of additional reliability. But now, they've got all this bandwidth lying around, they're paying for it, and they'd like to find a way to make use of that.

As soon as you start using multiple networks, you're in the cloud, because now you're making use of resources that are outside the control of your own IT organization and your service provider. Whether people think about it or not, just by adding a second network, they're taking their first steps into the cloud.

White: I absolutely agree and, as part of that, a lot of customers are looking at things over the Internet that they can use as applications, like Google Apps, that they never could have used even two years ago.

Schmidt: You're suddenly delivering significant applications from Google’s servers over the Internet as an enterprise IT organization. How you get your arms around that is a big question.

Gardner: And, Peter, when we had just internal applications and we are worrying about performance issues with that, that was plenty complex enough, particularly when we want to consider how we brought in new services and new employees, or expanding our organization out to branch offices and whatnot. Give me a sense of how much more complex this is from a network performance management situation.

Even as little as three years ago, the focus was on how to get the most performance for your applications out of your single MPLS network.

Schmidt: That’s an excellent point, Dana. I speak at conferences fairly often, and over the past few years, the hot topic has changed a little bit. Even as little as three years ago, the focus was on how to get the most performance for your applications out of your single MPLS network. I am talking enterprises where all of their applications are hosted on their property. They’ve got a single MPLS network from one service provider and they're still struggling to deliver reliable application performance across the infrastructure.

Now, we throw in multiple places to host applications. You have SaaS, Salesforce, and Google Docs. You have platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). People’s critical applications can be hosted in numerous locations, many of which are beyond their control. Then, as I mentioned, these are being accessed via multiple networks, and you have the legacy MPLS plus the Internet.

There are increasing numbers or diversity of models of those networks, whether the Internet connection gets to a service provider POP and then via MPLS to their own data center, or what is the impact of content delivery networks? So we've got a situation where enterprises who are struggling to master the complexity with one data center and one network are now using multiple data centers and multiple networks. Something is going to have to give.

Gardner: For a lot of companies, as they try to push applications out, but retain more central control, perhaps to cut costs with a more consolidated data center strategy, the branch office approach maybe gives them some sense of what to expect as they move toward cloud. In your opinion, Dave, the branch office is sort of a stepping stone to what networking in the cloud ecology or ecosystem is about.

White: Absolutely. It's really all focused once again on the branch for the last five to seven years. We’ve had server consolidation where we try to remove any type of issues for the branch and remove intelligence from the branch. As cloud computing has come in, and we are going through what we have just described regarding usage of the Internet and SaaS applications, we are now putting more stress on the branch.

Managing traffic

We're not necessarily putting intelligence out there, but we're having 2, 3, 4, 5, or more networks, all coming into the branch at the same time, and that traffic has to be managed. It’s something a lot of people haven’t thought about.

Schmidt: That’s the unknown piece of the cloud story. Most of the cloud marketing and innovation that you read about in the past couple of years is really being focused on a data center. It's as if everything to do with the application happened in the data center. We know it's only the half of the story. You have the network and then the branch itself. As long as the majority of workers are out in branch offices, which is true for a large percentage of especially larger enterprises, making that work is obviously critical for the productivity of the whole business.

White: And, interest going up too. When you look at the announcements that have been coming out and the hype on cloud in the industry, it's all focused on the data center. That’s because most of the vendors say, "That’s where the big bucks are being made. We are going to make money out of the data center."

Ipanema, on the other hand, is focused on application acceleration, and in order to do that, you have to take care of what goes on in the branch and manage it.

Gardner: So, it seems that automating network unification, bringing more governance to this whole WAN, even if it's a complex stew of networks, that's the key. Help me understand what it is at a high level that we need to do to beat this, so that we can do cloud computing and get that return on investment (ROI) in that data center, but without stumbling at the network stage.

White: I'd be happy to. At a high level, the first thing you have do is provide some type of WAN governance, simply meaning that we are going to make sure that you have taken care of the management of your business. Because that’s what WAN governance means -- providing the type of control over your business to allow it to continue to be productive, as you're making changes to your WAN.

Simply put, you first of all have to find out what's going on in the network.

Simply put, you first of all have to find out what's going on in the network. You have to understand what's happening on those 4, 5, or 6 different flows that are all going in from different sources to your branch. You have to be able to control those flows and manage them, so that you don't have your edge device or edge router getting congested.

You have to be able to guarantee performance and, very importantly, you also have to then unify, balance, and optimize the performance over those multiple network points that are coming into your branch.

If you're doing it the right way, at least what we would say is the right way, it needs to be dynamic, automatic and, in Ipanema terminology, autonomic, meaning that not only does it happen automatically, but the network learns and manages itself. It doesn’t require extra human intervention.

Schmidt: That's a really critical point. The way the enterprise is going to get its arms around this increasingly complex environment is not through throwing people at it. Throwing people at network management has never worked and, now that the environment is more complex, it's going to work even less.

Quickly and automatically

The whole point of cloud is that you're going to use virtualization and automation to bring up instances of servers quickly and automatically, and that's where this order of magnitude improvement potential comes from. But, if you don't want the multiple networks to be the bottleneck, then you have to apply automation in that domain as well. That's what we've done. We've made it possible for the network to run itself to meet the businesses’ objectives.

The effect that has in a branch office with multiple network connections is really to hide all the complexity that that multiplicity brings, because the system is managing them all in a unified way. That's what we're getting at when we're talking about network unification. The details that bedeviled traditional management just kind of disappear.

Gardner: Thanks, Peter. I see the term WAN governance used a lot, I wonder if either of you could give me a quick primer. What do you really mean by WAN governance?

White: I just mentioned it and I probably should have defined it a little more. We look at WAN governance as really a piece of ISO standard for IT governance, which is an official ISO standard. There is a section in there on WAN governance. In a way, it talks about what you have to do to manage your wide area.

Ipanema strongly believes the WAN governance is really a standard that should be put on the books, but isn't yet. If you're really going to have governance over your IT, since the network is a strategic asset to promote enterprise customers, you need to have governance over the wide area as well.

We've made it a particular issue, as far as we're concerned, in delivery of service. We want to make sure that our customers can have governance over the wide area.

We've made it a particular issue, as far as we're concerned, in delivery of service. We want to make sure that our customers can have governance over the wide area. Peter, have you got more comments on that?

Schmidt: WAN governance is what the CIO wants to buy. CIOs don’t want to buy a WAN, and they certainly don't want to buy WAN optimization controllers. What they want to buy is reliable application performance across their infrastructure with the best possible performance and lowest possible cost. My high-level definition of WAN governance is that it's the technology and techniques that allow the CIO to buy that.

White: Excellent.

Gardner: So, as we look at cloud computing and then hybrid computing, there is also a simultaneous trend around mobile computing. As you’ve pointed out Peter, when I've spoken to you in the past, there seems to be this removal of the boundaries between private, public, and personal computing.

Tell me how that's impacting things. I know that a lot of the enterprises I talk to are rapidly moving toward mobile. They want to be able to use mobile apps. They want to be able to have their workforce engaging with applications as part of the business process 24X7 no matter where they are.

Schmidt: Absolutely. Anybody who carries a smartphone is experiencing the personal, private, public boundary of operations themselves. But what seems natural to somebody carrying an iPhone or Blackberry is a tremendous challenge to the traditional models of IT.

iPhone app

We're about to release our first iPhone app to provide an interface into our central management system, and it's terrific. It's exactly the kind of thing the CIO would want to have in their hand. That just shows the value of pushing IT to be democratized and put into the hands of all of the people tied to the enterprise.

How does it challenge traditional IT? Control is something that is IT's responsibility, and it doesn't matter that these technological innovations are making that harder. They still have that responsibility.

We think you need to use technology to fight technology. The Ipanema system is designed to provide the full control by giving the enterprise IT organization not just visibility in reporting on every user's access to their IT infrastructure, but also to automatically control all of that traffic in accordance with various policies.

We don't see any other way around it. You're not going to do this manually. You've got to build smarter systems. We happen to think that we are a huge piece of that puzzle in terms of how we control things at the network level.

White: Dana, most of us hire those mobile remote users ourselves. We're all on the road or at home working, which is probably typical for 80 percent of all the people in the U.S. My wife, for example, works for a real estate agency. You wouldn’t think she works at home, but she does, and most everybody does. What's important is that you have to provide full guaranteed performance, regardless of where your users are, because a lot of your users are now remote and mobile and they are accessing critical applications.

It allows enterprises to have control and management over the objectives they have set for application performance down to my desktop.

So if you have a mobile agent that is a part of your network, all the services need to be integrated for the visibility and control of the applications even to a mobile user. That's what the mobile client does. It's integrated into the whole network and it's nothing separate. It allows enterprises to have control and management over the objectives they have set for application performance down to my desktop.

Schmidt: Or your laptop in the hotel room.

White: Or my laptop in the hotel room, absolutely.

Gardner: And the pace has changed so rapidly, who knows? In two years there might be a totally new class of device out there, right?

Schmidt: One thing that's clear is that putting into people’s hands more power that they're going to be using more often and in more places is the obvious trend. I don't know in which ways smartphones will get smarter, but I'm pretty sure that they will become the dominant end user device over time for all IT needs -- personal, private, and public.

White: If we look at the projections for smartphones, in the next couple of years they're going to have the intelligence that the current laptops we're using now have. That means they're really going to have the performance of a laptop, and they will have applications running the same as we do now on our laptops.

Interface limitations

Schmidt: The limitations of the interface versus a laptop are such that it's going to put pressure on some of the more sophisticated computing happening into the back end of the cloud. So, the two really work off each other.

White: I completely agree.

Gardner: While we think about mobile computing now as a B2E, that is to say, how I empower my employees, we're also seeing a lot of enterprises thinking about how to deliver applications to their end users, their clients, their customers, and even finding new classes of customers. This is about application delivery, not just for productivity internally, but increasingly as the means to new revenue and new business. Any thoughts about that?

Schmidt: That really represents a merging of the traditional e-commerce model with the traditional IT. Now we have a similar value delivery mechanism, the app, being used by different constituents of the same enterprise.

For example, we've been talking to a very large, worldwide, well-known consumer brand. Their concern is how do they make the thousands of employees of their enterprise productive using their mobile apps? Also, how do they bring their customers to their website and have them buy that way.

We're talking to both groups at the same time, because it's ultimately a common infrastructure. They need a way to solve that issue from a common platform. That's why they came to us, because we're the only ones who have that platform.

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Gardner: Let's look at the ways that we approach these. We've clearly defined that there are a lot of challenges and tremendous opportunities as well. This isn't something that many companies can afford to ignore. This is a problem that needs to be solved. How do we get at this? What are the WAN governance, the autonomic, and the hybrid network unification approaches that we need to consider?

Schmidt: It starts with a change in philosophy, honestly. Traditional network management was done from a very bottoms-up technical orientation. We worried about sites, we worried about routers, we worried about network connection, and we hoped to build from the bottom-up a relatively reliable, relatively well-functioning network infrastructure.

Since you're no longer building big chunks of that infrastructure to move to the cloud, there's an obvious limitation right there in a bottom-up approach. You're going to be buying a service with some sort of service level agreement (SLA). There's a wrapper around that. You don't have those details. In fact, that's what exciting about the cloud. Now you don't have to worry about managing those details.

You've got to go the rest of the way, and Ipanema has pioneered a unique approach that stems from the idea that all that matters is that end users are able to get good performance from their applications, because that’s when they are most productive. When application performance slows down, end users start surfing the web. So, ensuring the performance of the application is critical. That’s what the enterprise needs to reorient itself toward.

The fundamental input into our system is a list of applications and their performance. The system itself is intelligent enough to monitor and dynamically control all of the traffic to achieve those objectives on behalf of the business. So, it’s imposing the business’s will on the network.

The first step

The first step is the change in orientation to understand that application performance is the fundamental thing you want to buy, and to realize that it could be achieved top-down through a system like ours.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about the history of Ipanema. How did you get to this point? Dave, what’s the history that led up to your innovation and ability to look at this a little differently?

White: It starts with our three founders who got together and took a look at what the needs were from an application perspective. Their goal was to find a way to ensure that, as users, we all had the performance we needed and that enterprises could deliver performance from an application perspective to their users.

That’s what they started out with. Then they took a look at how you would deliver that service and recognized the best way to provide for the delivery of the right type of consistent application performance is to do it over the wide area and to look what happens over the WAN.

They were very visionary in recognizing that application performance over the wide area is going to be the single most critical piece of the puzzle, when it comes to taking a look at how we as users of enterprise deliver service and do it in conjunction with major service providers and network providers, because they are the ones that deliver the wide area connections.

When they started out, they were told that they were wrong and weren't looking at it the right way. When you see what’s happened to the network and how it’s evolved, particularly now that we are moving into the cloud generation, they were focused exactly in the right area. Although we have a lot of new features, the basic architecture has been there for years and it’s been proven in major service provider networks and is installed on a global basis.

The basic architecture has been there for years and it’s been proven in major service provider networks and is installed on a global basis.

Gardner: Peter, we are going to get into some more technical detail about Ipanema’s approach in an additional podcast, but just to round this out for our discussion today, what is a little bit of the secret sauce? What is it that differentiates you technically in terms of being able to accomplish autonomic networking and hybrid network unification?

Schmidt: There are a couple of things that are the secret sauce, but the easiest one to explain probably is the fact that our appliances actually cooperate with each other, and this is unique. Our appliances know about not just the traffic that’s impinging on their network interfaces, but they actually know about the flows that are active everywhere on the network.

It’s actually not that that simple. They really only need to know about the flows that might conflict with the flows that they are managing. But conceptually, every device on the network knows about all the other flows it needs to know about. They are constantly communicating with each other -- what flows are active and what performance those flows are getting from the infrastructure, which includes the whole WAN, but also the data center and the service. So what does that enable?

Global perspective

Sharing this information means that all of the decisions made by an individual device are made from a global perspective. They're no longer making a local optimization decision. They each run the same algorithm and can come to the same result. And that result is a globally optimum traffic mix on the network.

When I say globally optimum, that’s a valid technical term as opposed to a marketing term, because the information has been collected globally from the entire system. In terms of optimum, what I mean is the best possible performance from the most applications using the given network infrastructure and its status at that point in time. So, it’s a hard definition of what optimum means.

Gardner: It sounds like you are taking metadata in a real-time environment, almost applying business intelligence to what’s going on in the network. Is that what you mean by WAN governance or am I overstepping the definition here?

Schmidt: Forgive me, Dana, but that’s how a data center guy would describe what we are doing in the network. We're network guys. From what I know about metadata and the applications built back in the data center, that sounds pretty good. The fundamental point is that the traditional approach to network management required a human being in the loop, and the human being had to look at low level metrics, like what percent full was a particular circuit, what was the ping time between two sites, and then try make a judgment about what that meant in terms of the health of the infrastructure.

Their primary indicator about the health of the infrastructure was, and remains, helpdesk calls. I was at Interop speaking at a panel last year, and the analyst who was monitoring the panel and said, "Everybody in the audience whose first knowledge of an application performance problem is a call to the helpdesk, raise your hands." Three quarters of the IT professionals in that audience raised their hand -- and the other quarter were lying -- because it's really impossible with traditional network approaches to understand what's going on at the application level from the network.

If you are looking at it the way you’ve done for the last 10 or 20 years, there is no way that you can see everything.

There are a couple of theoretical reasons for that, but Ipanema said, "That’s too hard. It's probably not even theoretically possible. So, let's do something different. Let's measure the application performance directly and then share those measurements" -- and that’s the key.

White: The point I'd like to make is that it's absolutely impossible to measure it in a cloud environment as an enterprise network manager, because you only see a piece of the network. Unless you’ve done something different, which is what we provide, than the way you are going to look at your network, if you are looking at it the way you’ve done for the last 10 or 20 years, there is no way that you can see everything.

The closing point here is that the first step is visibility into the network, and the next step is providing the control. You need to do that in the cloud environment, and that's what Ipanema does.

Gardner: When Peter mentioned that he thinks about things of course from a networking perspective, I tend to think more at a data center level, but these two worlds need to stop colliding or being separate to come together. How does what Ipanema does can allow that? Can we bridge this cultural gap between the data center mentality and the network mentality, because I think that’s what's going to be essential for cloud computing?

Schmidt: It's all about application delivery. The enterprise is beginning to understand that. We talked about the founders’ insight in realizing that what really matters is good application performance across the WAN and how the WAN is a critical asset and it's the most highly variable asset, especially in the cloud. So, there is a lot of value to getting control there.

Complex environment

But, the data center is its own highly complex environment with networks and multiple tiers of different computing going on. Clearly, a huge amount of work and innovation has gone on in there by companies other than Ipanema to master that complexity, and in fact, automate all sorts of interesting activities to make the data center a much more responsive, flexible, on-demand infrastructure.

But, the thing that needs to happen is that there needs to be an end-to-end view of how to deliver the best possible application performance to the end user, given the resources that have been deployed or could be turned on, because that’s the new dimension here. In the data center, we can now turn on more servers dynamically. Ipanema has the ability to dynamically send the traffic over multiple network paths. So, there's an affinity there that we need to exploit. In fact, we're actively working on partnerships to help realize that connection.

Gardner: We are just about out of time, but I would like to look at the future and even through the lens of the user. Is there someone that you are aware of, a use case that perhaps is a bellwether of what more organizations will be dealing with looking at this architectural perspective, the visibility, but also with this being so essential to their business having a real impact on the bottom line?

Is there an example that might illuminate where other people are going to find themselves in the few years?

Schmidt: We have an excellent example right now. A very large enterprise, a major logistics company, is in the process of a multi-year IT project that is critically strategic to their entire business. They're moving from a legacy IBM mainframe infrastructure that's running their entire business today -- order taking to warehouse management to truck dispatch, the whole nine yards.

The fact that our platform has become the basis for a proven globally deployed intelligent application based managed service gave them a lot of confidence that this is really going to work for them.

They're moving to an SAP system. A critical enabler of that is the fact that they're going to buy a managed service from a global service provider that’s partner of Ipanema’s, BT. BT has an intelligent managed service on top of the Ipanema platform. So what are the benefits the customer is buying?

Well, the number one thing caused them to adopt this approach was their concern that if there is poor application performance with this SAP suite of applications, it's not a theoretical productivity reduction. It's a measurable, millions of dollars per hour or more, hit to their bottom line. So there is a very high value of having full control over their application performance on their WAN.

I think the fact that they could buy it as a service from a major service provider was also a big attraction to them. They're a very large company. They're used to dealing with very large IT service providers. The fact that our platform has become the basis for a proven globally deployed intelligent application based managed service gave them a lot of confidence that this is really going to work for them.

Although this example is a case of going from mainframe to a modern SAP distributed implementation, I see the benefit that they are looking for being the same as people who move into the cloud are looking for. They're looking for revolutionary improvements in their IT infrastructure, whether that turns into a factor of 10 cost reduction or a factor of 10 up-time or reliability improvement or whatever the other strategic metric may be. The promise of cloud is that by using this new model, you can revolutionize your IT.

One of the big risks there, of course, is that you step into this world of greater complexity and you can have the productivity gains completely undone by the fact that it is complex and you need to be able to figure out how to manage that. So, this company is actually a pretty good example of what people are going to be struggling with as they move into the future and look at cloud -- how they migrate their critical business activities into a new distributed infrastructure -- and we have a piece of that answer with WAN governance.

Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. It was a very interesting discussion. We've been talking about automated network unification and pervasive WAN governance as essential ingredients to quality, scale, and managed security across the many forms of today's applications use, working more towards cloud and hybrid models.

I want to thank our guests. We've been joined by Peter Schmidt. He is the Chief Technology Officer, North America, for Ipanema Technologies. Thank you, Peter.

Schmidt: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And David White, Vice President of Global Business Development at Ipanema. Thanks so much, Dave.

White: Thanks, Dana. It was a pleasure.

Gardner: This is Dana Gartner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

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Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Ipanema Technologies.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on meeting the challenges in networks management in the age of cloud computing. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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