Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

The next BriefingsDirect case study discussion targets how biotechnology services provider Acorda Therapeutics has implemented a strategic disaster recovery (DR) capability to protect its highly virtualized IT operations and data.

See  how Acorda Therapeutics’ use of advanced backup and DR best   practices  and products has helped it to manage rapid growth, cut energy   costs,  and gain the means to recover and manage applications and data   faster.  Also learn how these advanced DR benefits have led to   other data center flexibly and even migration benefits.

Sharing more detail on how modernizing DR has helped improve many aspects of Acorda Therapeutics’ responsiveness is Josh Bauer, Senior Manager of Network Operations at Acorda Therapeutics  in Hawthorne, NY. The discussion was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What do you perceive as being  different today about DR than  just a few years ago? Is this really a  fast-moving area?

Bauer: One of the most prominent changes is recovery time.   You no longer need to restore from physical tape and see recovery  times  of upwards of 24 hours, something that we hadn’t seen until  recently.  We implemented Site Recovery Manager (SRM) from VMware and we can now do that same recovery in about four hours.

We're  constantly replicating   using RecoverPoint and we can get data up to  the minute, versus tape,   where you are at the whim of whether the  backup completed on time -- did   everything go to tape, and when was it  done? It could have been two   days ago, versus now, when it's data  that’s 100 percent synced up to a   minute ago.

When we had about 80 employees, we probably barely had a terabyte, and now with 350 employees we easily have over 14 terabytes.

Gardner: I am also wondering, because you are   in the healthcare and  biotechnology field, are there aspects of the new DR   that appeal to  you from a compliance or regulatory perspective as well?

Bauer: Definitely. Four times per year we have to prove that we can recover    all of our software and data by doing a DR test. Until we had SRM, we    had to do it all from tape, from a cold facility, and it would take us  a   day, sometimes a day-and-a-half. That’s just not the best way to do    things. But now, with SRM, we can always do these tests on the fly,  even   from our office, from home, or from wherever.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit more about Acorda Therapeutics.    You were founded in 1995. Tell us what you do, so our audience can    understand the type of company you are and type of products and services    you provide.

Recent growth

Bauer: We create treatments for people with multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries, or other neurological disorders. We have two marketed drugs in the market right now, the most recent of which, Ampyra,    helps people with multiple sclerosis walk better, and it has been a    huge success. And that's the main reason we've been growing so much    lately.

Prior to virtualization, we were spending a   lot of time managing our infrastructure, with all those physical servers.    Once we virtualized everything, we spent way less time managing the    infrastructure and could spend more time helping the business.

In    fact, the IT department itself has become less like a computer repair    shop and more like a strategy center. I'm constantly being brought  into   projects to help the business make the right decisions when it  comes  to  any type of technology.

The next logical step would be  to  have my  team spend less time doing these four-times-a-year DR  drills  the way I  described before. With SRM it’s a few clicks. We're  saving so  much time  and we are able to do other things.

Gardner: Tell me how you got to the point today, where you can deal   with  something like 14 terabytes and moment-by-moment backup  capability?

Strategic partner

Bauer: It all really started at VMworld.    That’s been a fantastic way for me to learn what's out there, what's    coming up, and just staying in the know. That’s actually where I met International Computerware, Inc. (ICI), who is one of our strategic partners for storage and virtualization.

I    had approached them with the growth issue. We had already started   doing  virtualization on our own. I had used it at a previous company,   but I  wasn’t familiar with SRM, and it looked like it might be a nice   fit for  improving our DR. So ICI came in and they sort of held our   hands and  helped us with that project.

Specific to storage, they   have also  helped us make sure that we do better management of growth,   anticipate  our growth, and show that we have more than what we're  going  to need,  before the growth happens, and they've done some  analysis on  like what  we have. We brought them in before things got  too bad.

Since using VMware, we've noticed uptime  upwards  of three nines  monthly. Before that, when we were mostly a  physical  environment, it was  nowhere near that much. We had physical  servers  going down all the  time.

VMware immediately gained our  trust,  seeing that they came  out with this product for DR. It was a  name that  we trusted. Then, we  played with it for a while, and it  worked out  fantastically.

It's  all about trusting VMware and  then, again,  ICI, working with them. They  just know their stuff. We  have a lot of  different partners we work  with, but we prefer to use  ICI, because  they really focus on doing  things properly. It's more  about working  with someone that really knows  what they are doing. They  understand  that we have some skills, as well.  They're not trying to  sell us  something we don’t need.

95 percent virtualized

We  are 95 percent virtualized here. The only thing that’s not virtual   is  our fax server, which requires a physical fax board and that’s about    it. Everything else is virtual.

Gardner: So this is across all tiered apps, tier one, three, four?

Bauer: That’s correct, our SQL apps, our Exchange, everything you can think of is virtualized.

Gardner: I understand you're using vSphere 5. You're on vCenter SRM 5. That only came out towards the end of last year. So you just jumped right on that.

Bauer: Oh, I didn’t waste any time. We were very excited about it, especially this new option of using a failback, which wasn’t really part of SRM Version 4.

If  you ever have the very unlikely event of a a disaster, when you do a    recovery, you're now operating off of the disaster equipment or    recovery equipment. While that’s happening, people are still saving    files and generating new data. If you were to just simply turn on the    original equipment again, all that data would be lost. So you need to    fail back to re-sync everything.

With SRM Version 4, you had to    configure two one-way recovery systems. So it would take a lot more    time. But now with failback, it's a lot more smooth, kind of built-in.

Gardner: Do you actually have separate data centers that you are backing up to? What's the topology or architecture that you're using?

Bauer: We have two separate data centers, recovery and production. At the  moment they're only a few towns apart, but we are shopping   around for a  data center much further away. We hope to do that in the   next six  months or so.

Gardner: Looking to the future, one other area I wanted to hit on, which is    important to a lot of folks, especially in some overseas markets, is    this issue about energy. Did you have any impact on energy and/or    storage costs associated with the total life cycle of the data?

Bauer: We reduced the footprint by easily 75 percent by not needing so many    physical servers. That’s a pretty huge shout-out to VMware there.  Also,   we're not using that much power. We don’t need as big a data  center.  Not  as much cooling is needed. There's a whole assortment of  things,  when  you take out all the physical servers.

Gardner: Now,   looking to the future, other areas that people have described as  a  segue  from going to high virtualization, exploiting the latest   technologies  in DR, is to start thinking about desktop virtualization infrastructure (VDI) and desktop-as-a-service. They're even looking at cloud and hybrid-cloud models for hosting apps, then backing them up and recovering them in    different data centers, which you've alluded to. Do you have any    thoughts about where this could possibly lead?

Bauer: In   fact, if you were going to ask me what my next initiative was  going to   be, and you didn’t mention desktops, that’s the first thing  that would   have come to mind. We're starting to explore replacing our  laptops with   virtual desktops. I'm hoping this is something that we  could implement   next year.

Right way to go

This seems like the right way to go, because our helpdesk team spends too much time swapping out laptops or replacing laptops that are dropped on the ground. You're looking at a small thin client,    which is the fraction of the cost of a laptop. Plus, the data is no    longer kept in a laptop. There are no security or compliance issues.  You   can l just give them a thin client, and they are back in business.

It  makes everybody in this company, especially at the   top-level, nervous  to know that some sensitive data still does make it   out to the  laptops. We tell people to save everything to their network   drives,  but without using thin clients and virtual desktops, there's no   other  way to force that.

Gardner: How  about advice for   those folks that might be moving towards a more  modern DR journey, as   you described it? What would you advise to them  as they begin, and what   lessons might you have learned that you could  share?

Bauer: First off, do it. You're going to be glad that you did. The good thing    about this is that you can do it in parallel with your current DR   plans.  You don’t have to change your existing recovery plans. You can   take as  much time as you want to set it up right. And the key is to set   up a  demonstration for the key business owners and players that are   going to  make the decision on the change.

Set it up right with a   handful  of important apps, important VMs, and then just show it to   people. Once  they see how great it works, you're definitely going to   want to change.

It's always helpful to have some outside  help. No matter how skilled   you are, it's always good to have a second  pair of eyes look at the work   that you did, if for nothing more than  to confirm that you've done   everything you could and your plans are  solid. It's helpful to have a   partner like ICI.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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Gardner: Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, particularly in regard to things like security,    performance and how your brands and businesses are perceived across   the  globe. Many of the companies that I deal with day in and day out   are up  at 80 percent and even 90 percent virtualized.

When they think about virtualization, they go beyond just server virtualization. It’s really now looking at storage, applications, networks and even the end-user desktop experience, or desktop as a service (VDI).

Successful  virtualization is no longer just about servers, it’s about managing  complexity when you get beyond the 20   percent or 30 percent level and  expand into converged infrastructure virtualization without failures.

So  how to take advantage of the best things  about virtualization? Part of  that means allowing your IT team to have  access to other experienced  support teams, from HP and VMware,  around  the world, 24×7, to help  keep systems up and running. Such support also  allows your IT team to  progress, to learn as they go,  and to be able to  take advantage of  more virtualization benefits over time.

Expert panel

So    how do you go about attaining such benefits? How do you keep the    positive side of virtualization on track? And how do you put in place an    insurance policy around service and support?

Manderson: We have several different packages. Our highest level is the mission-critical.   In this particular process, you're assigned a team that are across the   technology that you have in your environment. But you also get a set  of  folks who would actually look at not just the  reactive support and  even  some of the proactive, but how actually your  entire business is  running according to the ITIL standard.

That    is coupled with keeping you up and running, and we also can work with   you on a  type that would be best suited for your environment.

Our   critical and  independent support includes onsite resources from HP   that also include a  lot of proactive support. In addition, they're more   focused on specific  management, but that would be more of an ITSM technology. We can look at that for you.

... We  also have the hardware and software support. One of the cool things we have  with our hardware support is support automation, our Insight for remote support.   That can notify HP that you're having a disk  drive failure. Or we  will  call you and say that we know that disk drive is  failing, or  something  on a buffer server and storage is about to.

You can   even take  that a step further to look inside at the Windows operating  system.   We're hardware agnostic on that operating system. We don't  care about   the vendor -- and I believe we are looking at expanding  that automation  to  other operating systems. We have installation and  startup services  that  we can actually go out and set up and configure  the hardware and   software at a site.

So    we definitely integrate across all the multi-vendor services. We run    the gamut between all the x86 operating systems, as well as our  proprietary operating systems, our servers and storage. Again, we're no  stranger to multi-vendor support and keeping the entire environment up and  running.

... One of our most creative services would be Proactive Select,    a core product series of credits. You can use these credits for maybe    planning on migration and upgrade. You can say you need some  consulting   time. You can use these credits and work with upgrade and  migration.  You  may need some performance or you may need some type of   environmental  assessment, and these credits can be used for that.

Gardner: When people do employ these services,  how do they measure what the payoff is, the value of these services?

IDC study

Manderson: In 2010, IDC did a study. They went out and looked at the methodology, and this is  out on our website.   They saw that the customers who have the  mission-critical services,   reduce their downtime by over 70 percent, and  increase their return on investment (ROI) quite high, over 400 percent. The main benefit was in problem    management as well as help desk calls, because these were alleviated due    to the proactive nature, a lot of looking at the entire environment,    and looking at the business processes.

So take a look at the  study.   It shows IDC's methodology. So looking at things proactively and these   support processes can  certainly help you reduce that downtime.

... I've been in the multi-vendor space  for many, many years -- from applications to operating systems -- all  with HP.

In   2002, when VMware came on the scene, HP actually  became alliance   partners with them. In 2003, we became a reseller, and  thus began our   support partnership with them. It would only extend  recent in 2005, we   also became an OEM.  We have thousands of trained and certified Microsoft engineers and Linux professionals, too.

But    we have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We're    also have the largest global VMware off-site training center. So HP  also  does  education on these technologies as well. We’ve  trained over   20,000 students in the VMware space alone.

And we have had   this  very strong collaboration with VMware for many years and have   support  teams around the globe. In addition, we also offer the same   level of  training that VMware support engineers do. We actually go to   their  facilities and train right alongside them, too.

We further  do  this training virtually. The training is then recorded and made    available on demand for reference, for folks who are not able to attend    a scheduled course. There's definitely a very strong partnership, and    as you see from our history with the other vendors as well as VMware,  we   are no strangers to multi-vendor support.

With all of the VMware products that HP sells, we do provide support across them all. It runs the gamut from the vSphere operating system that will install on the x86 server, through the enterprise management to the vCenter, and virtual desktop infrastructure products like VMware ThinApp. We also support the converter product getting into vCloud Director.

In    addition to that, we have the ability to access our peers on the  other   teams across HP hardware support. This includes servers and   storage,  and our networking chain. We are quickly able to collaborate   with them  and pull together a virtual team in to focus on the   customer's whole  environment, to provide a one-stop shop.

Expertise across technologies

Additionally,   you saw that we’ve been in this multi-vendor support business for so   many years, with many experts across the other technologies, such as   Microsoft and Linux. Of course, the virtual machines (VMs) are running these operating systems. So if the contract is also with    them, we can easily pull them in to help us work an end-to-end  solution  and support it.

Gardner: Let’s think about what happens when there are  different levels of support at work. How does that shake-out?

Manderson: We're in a reactive support business. If the customer has a  problem,   they can either call in at their local region telephone number  --   whether they are in America, Europe, or Asia Pacific. There are    different phone numbers for them to call.

They can also log in    via the web, and they'll get to our next developer Level 1 engineer.    They're a great organization and have solved over 85 percent of their    cases.

If they have issues where they have to escalate, first    they will be collaborating with us. We also have an online chat tool,    where we are all in a virtual room, the Level 1 engineers, Level 2    engineers, etc. So we’ll be consulting and collaborating with them   before they  even get to a point of escalation.

If    the case does end up needing escalation, chances are they're already   collaborating with the first person, and will then end up taking the   case. That  saves a lot of information transfer, as far as what type of   server you  have, what’s the firmware, what build level, and what’s the   problem  there, etc.

Once it reaches Level 2 support, as far as   we can continue  to collaborate, we can reach our teammates and the   hardware teams, too, so  we can look at the server and make sure that   the environment is what we  need it to be. If we can't resolve it, we   can also go to Level 3 with  VMware at an offline service-partner level.

We   have a great  relationship with the folks that we work alongside with   and would escalate  calls to at VMware. We’re obviously not going into   Level 1 at VMware because we’ve  already done all that work, and we are  a  service partner. They'll go  right up to our peers over at VMware  and  then we work together, while  always owning the solution that we  provide  back to the customer.

Another  part of our infrastructure-as-a-support-organization is that  we  have a  single customer database. I can give an example. A call  came  into our  Level 1 French engineer. When this call came in, for the   European  folks, it was already the end of their day, and the French   engineer  could not speak English. It was a critical down, their VMs were    offline.

HP Virtual Room

So    we worked in a virtual room and they talked to us, and brought the    case to us here in America’s time zone. We worked with this case and    another tool called HP Virtual Room, where we could actually all look at the customers' desktops in real time. They happened to have EVA storage, and we quickly got an EVA engineer engaged. Of course, we  had   to find a resource in the Americas because the European folks had    already left. So we're all looking in real-time at the customer’s    environment and found out that they had locked the storage.

The    EVA engineer helped to get back online, while we all watched and the    French engineer was translating in French for the customer in order to   get it all resolved. We got it back online, and the customers were ready   to  home.

We gave instructions on getting log files and we   placed a  call for follow-up for the daytime hours in Europe the next   day. So our  counterparts in European support teams picked that up and   worked with  the customers to resolution, to analyze exactly what   happened and  prevent it in the future.

We have another  process in HP that can   actually go with top organizations, our  escalation  manager process. I  was lead source for a particular case  where we had a  field team  assisting a customer deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) design. They had a third-party VDI vendor. They had HP hardware,    servers, and virtual connects. They had our storage, and we didn’t quite    know where the bottleneck was. They were having performance issues   by  trying to have this VDI at two different locations with the hardware  at   one site.

The escalation manager was able to get the local   office  to borrow equipment, and then try to get performance and    network traces. They had the Engineering Problem Management Resource    (EPMR) lab in Houston trying to duplicate the problems.

Our    escalation manager was able to drive the issue to completion across not    only the solution standards, but the local office, to owning the  actual   escalation with all the action items to keep this all on track.  We  knew  where we were going to go. That was about a six-month case,  but we  did  finally find was that the customer was on the technological  edge,  and the  "pipe" to have that performance just did not exist.

Site visits

Pat  Lampert is a technical account manager and does site  visits. The   technical account managers do go out on site. So we’re  aware of the   environment. We have the information of your environment  documented  into  the database. When you call, we’re not saying, "Now  what kind of  server  is this? What’s the firmware?"    We know this because we already have it documented. We could be   calling  them to say, "Server 3 is running a little off." We already   which know  VMware version this is on, because we have that information.

And    because we have that, we can also offer proactive advice. We can know    that there's a new firmware update, or VMware just came out with a  new   build, and we have a place where you can go find the latest that's    specific to your environment. So this helps to reduce further  incidents,   because we can be more proactive to help you maintain your  business.

Gardner: What are some of the the most frequent questions you receive from the field?

Reddy: I'll address two questions that are frequently showing up. One is, what is the difference between the VMware ESXi image and an HP ESXi image?

Basically,    HP takes the same ESXi image that VMware provides to the customers.  It   then adds HP thin components for hardware management, and it also  adds   any latest fibre channel and network drivers. Once it's tested and  certified, it's available for download both from HP and VMware websites.

Major differences

And   one of the major difference between the two images is that VMware  image  is disk installable only, whereas HP image can be installed on a  disk, USB key, or a SD card.

The other question we're getting nowadays is how to upgrade from VCA4 to VCA5.    As with any major upgrades, planning helps. The first thing I would  do   is understand the difference between ESX 4 and ESX 5, because  starting   with ESX 5, we have no service console. So we need to  understand what   the architectural differences are.

Also learn about the new licensing policies. Then, use the System Analyzer that VMware provides to evaluate the current environments, and    download, check, and complete the checklist. Once this is done,    hopefully the upgrade will go smoothly.

Lampert: Another question that has come up from customers has to do with the   added value  of getting support directly from HP. It was partly   addressed during the  presentation we just gave. First of all, VMware   does have a fine  support organization. I have a couple of friends who work in VMware  Support, and they do a good job of supporting their product.

HP,    in addition to a similar level of expertise in the product, also   offers  our expertise in HP hardware, especially if you have systems   based on HP Blades.    The infrastructure behind that often is tied very closely to the    performance and availability of your ESX host. So when you call us, you    will have not only someone who is very familiar with the VMware   product,  but also is familiar with the HP hardware and able to pull in   the  proper resourced results, problems you might encounter with  running   vSphere on HP hardware especially.

In addition to that,  we have  a  partnership agreement with VMware, and when you call in for  support   through HP, you're getting that same level of service when we  have to  go  to VMware to get answers to questions or fixes.

One  other   question that has come up is about our lab ability to reproduce    problems. We have two global labs, one in India and one in the United    States. We have several static vSphere cluster configurations with a    number of different types of servers already in those configurations,    and the ability, when needed, to add specific models, if there is a    problem that’s specific to a particular Blade or rack-mounted server    model, or a particular card or something like that. So we're quite able    to reproduce most problems that come in. We even have some Dell and IBM equipment in our lab also.

Gardner: What other issues are users grappling with?

Reddy: One question I can answer is how to troubleshoot server crashes. When something goes wrong in ESX, we call it the "Purple Screen of Death."    Often, these are results of hardware failure, but we still need to   rule  out the software. So we collect all the logs, and look at it to   see if  it's a software issue. If it's not a software issue, then we   engage the  hardware team to see how we can get to the root cause and   fix the issue.

Lampert: To dovetail  with Sumithra’s  comment there, one of the questions I get  frequently  is what to do if  you don’t have a dump. Say the host hangs,  and that  seems to be almost  more common than the Purple Screen of Death.  Some  customers are't aware  that through HP’s Integrated Lights-Out  Management, there is the ability to generate a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) just by pressing a button, and by saving a certain environment variable ahead of time in your ESX host.

KB article

There is a KB article on this, by the way, if you just search on NMI and core dumping in    VMware. But with that setup, you can force a dump while a system is in a    hung state, and that will assist us usually in troubleshooting and    isolating what caused the hang, whether it be hardware or a problem with    the ESX host software.

One question that came up ahead  of time is what HP suggests as far as   getting a handle on our  inventory of VMs? I happened to be involved in   field testing some new  tools from HP that will be available in January   and February regarding  vSphere.

One of them is a Holistic Blade   and Firmware Analysis  that takes into account the VMware environment on   our Blade systems  which we are working on having ready soon. We have   just completed  field tests.

And the second is a really nifty   Inventory Report  HP has just put together. We're just completing field   tests on that  now. It will be available soon. Basically, we install a   small Perl script in the customer environment on any machine that has access to the vCenter host and has a vSphere CLI installed.

This Perl Script crawls through the VMware environment and builds an XML file, which we then feed into a report generator here at HP. This can    be used for us to gather information on customers, so we have ahead  of   time a clear picture of the environment. But also it will be sold  as a   service to customers.

The   report is really quite nice,  with all sorts of charts and showing   availability of machines and  availability of memory and also disk space.   It's a very nice report.

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Gardner: What is it about private cloud that made the  most  sense for SAP?

Krips: Expanding a bit on the use case, there is a specific challenge here. In  the training business,   people book their courses, and we know only on  Friday evening who is   attending the course on Monday. So we have only  a very short amount  of  time over the weekend to set up the systems. That was one of the big   challenges that we had to solve.

The  second challenge is that,  at  the same time, these systems become more  and more mission critical.   Customers are saying, "If the system isn't  available during the course,   I'm not willing to pay." Maybe the  customer will rebook the course.   Sometimes he doesn’t. That means that  if the systems aren't available,   we have an immediate revenue impact.

You  can imagine that if we   have to set up a couple of hundred, or  potentially a couple of thousand,   systems over the weekend, we need a  high degree of automation to do   that. In the past, we had homegrown scripts,    and there was a lot of copying and stuff like that going on. We were    looking into other technologies and opportunities to make life easier    for us.

A couple of challenges were that the scripts and the    automation that we had before were dependent on the specific hardware    that we used, and we can't use the same hardware for each of the    courses. We have different hardware platforms and we had to adopt all    the scripts to various hardware platforms.

When we virtualized and used virtualization technology, we could make use of linked cloning technology, which    allowed us to set up the systems much faster than the original copying    that we did.

The second thing was that by introducing the    virtualization layer, we became almost hardware independent, and that    cut the effort in constructing or doing the specific automation    significantly.

Gardner: What did you need to put in place, and how difficult was  it?

The important piece

Krips: Luckily, we already had some experience. The big thing in setting up the cloud is not getting, say, vSphere in place and the basic virtualization technology. It's the    administration and making it available in self-service or the automation    of the provisioning. That is the important piece, as most would have    guessed.

We had some experience with the Lifecycle Manager and the Lab Manager before. So we said at that time because we did this last year, we set    up a Lab Manager installation and worked with that to realize this  kind   of private cloud.

In this specific cloud, typically we have between a couple of hundred  and a couple of thousand VMs running. Overall, at SAP we're running more  than 20,000 virtual machines (VMs). And, in fact, I have about 25 private cloud  installations.

... As I mentioned, this cloud has to  work. If this goes down, it’s  not  like some kind of irrelevant test  system is down -- or test system  pool  -- and we can take up another one.  Potentially a lot of training   courses are not happening. With respect to  mission criticality, this   cloud was essential.

Gardner: We often hear similar  requirements being applied to a test and  development environment. Are some of your clouds involved  with the test  and development as well?

Krips: As I mentioned before, we have 25 private-cloud installations,   and in  fact, most of them are with development. We also have cloud    installations in the demo area. So if sales people are providing demos,    there are certain landscapes or resource pools where we are    instantiating demo systems.

SAP wants to shorten the innovation   cycles. Internally, we've  moved internally to a development  model,  where every six weeks  development provides potentially a  shippable  release. It doesn’t mean  that the release gets shipped, but  we’re  running through the whole  process of developing something,  testing it,   and validating it. There  is a demonstrable release  available every  six weeks.

In    the past, with a traditional model, if we were provisioning physical    hardware, it took us about 30 days or so to provision a development    system. Now, if you think about a development cycle of six weeks and    you’re taking about nearly the same amount of time for provisioning the    development system, you’ll see that there is a bit of a mismatch.

Moving to the private cloud and doing this in self-service, today we can provision development systems within hours.

Gardner: That’s what I hear from a number of organizations,   and it's very  impressive. When you had a choice of different   suppliers, vendors, and  professional services organizations, was there   everything that led you  specifically to VMware, and how has that  worked  out?

Krips: I can give you a fairly straightforward  answer. At the time we  started  working with private cloud and  private-cloud installations,  VMware was  the most advanced provider of  that technology, and I'd  argue that it is  still today.

Gardner: How about security and management benefits?

Very reluctant

Krips: From   our perspective, we wanted to have the advantages of cloud with   respect  to flexibility, provisioning speed, but we didn’t want to have   more  security headaches than we already had. That’s why we said,  "Let's  get  our arms first around a private cloud."

Gardner: Is there something about a standardized  approach to your cloud stack   that makes that hybrid potential, when  you’re ready to do it, when  it's  the right payload, something that  you'll be pursuing?

Krips: That’s one of our biggest problems that we're having. Clearly, if one had a standard cloud interface like a vCloud interface, and it was the industry norm, that would be extremely    helpful. The issue is that, as you can imagine, there are a couple of    workloads that we also want to test in some other well known clouds. I'm  having a bit of a headache over how to connect to multiple   clouds.

... Now, if a couple of interesting providers had a standardized   cloud interface, it would be very nice for me.

Gardner: Any thoughts about what your experience and benefits with cloud might  mean for your future vision around client devices and mobility?

Krips: Dana, the thing is pretty clear. If you look at the strategy that SAP  pursues, mobility is an integral part.   We also think that not only that  business process mobility is more   important, but what we’re also seeing,  and I mentioned that before,   with the agility and development. So for  instance, there are people who   are working every couple of months in new  teams. For us, it's very   important that we separate the user data and  the desktop from the   device. We’re definitely pushing very strongly into  the topic of desktop virtualization (VDI).

SaaS application

The    big challenge that we’re currently having is that when you’re moving   to  VDI, you take everything that’s on the user's desktop today, then   you  make out of that more or less  a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. As you can imagine, if you’re doing that to development,    and they are doing some complex development for the user interfaces  or   stuff like that, this puts certain challenges on the latency that you can have to the data center or the processing power that you need to have in the back-end.

From    our side, we’re interested in technologies similar to that view, and    where you can check out machines and still run on a VDI client, but    leverage the administrative and provisioning advantages that you have    through the cloud provisioning for virtual desktops. So it's a pretty    interesting challenge.

We understand what kind of benefits we’re    getting from the cloud operations, as I said, the center provisioning,    application patching, improved license management, there are a lot of things that are very, very important to us and that we want to leverage.

Particularly for us, the VDI, the benefits, are very much in the kind  of   centralized provisioning. Just to give you an example, imagine how   easy  it would be if you’re doing desktop virtualization, to move from Windows 7 to Windows 8. You could basically flip a switch.

On    the other hand, we have to solve the issue that we’re not blowing the    business case, because the processing power and the storage that you    have at the end point is relatively cheap. That’s why we were so  interested in VDI technologies. That would allow us also to take care of    all of our mobile users.

But we’re confident that we can get the business case to work.

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Gardner: Why were virtual desktops such an important direction for you? Why did it make sense for your organization?

Karbginski: In our organization, we’re talking about 580 travel agencies all over the country,    all over Germany, with 2,300 physical desktops, which were not in our    control. We had life cycles out there of about 4 or 5 years. We had  old   PCs with no client backups.

The    biggest reason is that recovery times at our workplace were 24 hours    between hardware change and bringing back all the software    configuration, etc. Desktop virtualization was a chance to get the    desktops into our data center, to get the security, and to get the controls.

DER  in Germany   is the number one in travel agencies. As I said, we're  talking about   580 branches. We’re operating as a leisure travel agency  with our   branches, Atlasreisen and DER, and also, in the business travel sector with FCm Travel Solutions.

IT-intensive business

Gardner: This is a very IT-intensive business now. Everything in travel is done though networked applications and cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services. So a very intensive IT activity in each of these branches?

Karbginski: That’s right. Without the reservation systems, we can’t do any flight    bookings or reservations or check hotel availability. So without IT,  we   can do nothing.

Gardner: And tell me about the problem you  needed to solve. You had four  generations of PCs.  You couldn’t control them. It  took a lot of time  to recover if there was  a failure, and there was a  lot of different  software that you had to  support.

Karbginski: Yes. We had no domain integration no  control and we had those  crashes,  for example. All the data would be  gone. We had no backups  out there.  And  we changed the desktops about  every four or five  years. For  example, when the reservation system  needed more memory, we  had to buy  the memory, service providers were  going out there, and  everything was  done during business hours.

We now have  nearly about 100 percent virtualization. ... So it's about 99 percent  virtualization. ... So the data is under our control in the data    center, and important company information is not left in an office out    there. Security is a big thing.

Gardner: What were some of the things that you had to do in   order to enable this to work properly?

Karbginski: There   were some challenges during the rollout. The bandwidth was a  big thing.   Our service provider had to work very hard for us, because  we needed   more bandwidth out there. The path we had our offices was 1  or 2-Mbit   links to the headquarters data center. With desktop  virtualization, we   need a little bit more, depending on the number of  the workplaces and we   needed better quality of the lines.

So bandwidth was one thing. We also had the network infrastructure. We found some 10-Mbit half-duplex switches. So we had to change it. And we also had some hardware    problems. We had a special multi-card board for payment to read out    passports or to read out credit card information. They were very old and    connected with PS/2.

Fixed a lot of problems

So    there were a lot of problems, and we fixed them all. We changed the    switches. Our service provider for Internet VPN connection brought us    more quality. And we changed the keyboards. We don’t need this old  stuff   anymore.

Gardner: How has this worked out in  terms of  productivity, energy savings, lowering costs, and even  business  benefits?

Karbginski: Saving was our big thing  in planning  this project. The desktops have  been running out there now  about one  year, and we know that we have up  to 80 percent energy  saving, just from  changing the hardware out  there. We’re running the Wyse P20 Zero Client instead of physical PC hardware.

We needed more energy for the server side in the data center, but if    you look at it, we have 60 up to 70 percent energy savings overall. I    think it’s really great.

Gardner: That’s very good. So   what else comes in terms of productivity?

Karbginski: In the past, the updates came during the business hours. Now, we can   do  all software updates at nights or at the weekends or if the office   is  closed. So helpdesk cost is reduced about 50 percent.

... We're using Dell servers with two sockets, quad-core, 144-gigabyte RAM. We're also using EMC Clariion SAN with 25 terabytes. Network infrastructure is Cisco, based on 10 GB Nexus data center switches. At the beginning the project, we had View 4.0 and we upgraded it last month to 4.6.

The people side

Gardner: What were some of the challenges in terms of working this through the    people side of the process? We've talked about process, we've talked    technology, but was there a learning curve or an education process for    getting other people in your IT department as well as the users to    adjust to this?

Karbginski: There  were some unknown   challenges or some new challenges we had during the  rollout. For   example, the network team. The most important thing was  understanding of   virtualization. It's an enterprise environment now,  and if someone,  for  example, restarts the firewall in the data center, the desktops in our offices were disconnected.

It's really important to inform the other departments and also your own help desk.

...  The first thing that the end users told us was that the selling    platform from Amadeus, the reservation system, runs much faster now.    This was the first thing most of the end users told us, and that’s a    good thing.

The next is that the desktop follows the user. If the    user works in one office now and next week in another office, he gets    the same desktop. If the user is at the headquarters, he can use the    same desktop, same outlook, and same configuration. So desktop follows    the user now. This works really great.

Gardner: Looking to the future, are you going to be doing this following-the-user capability to more devices, perhaps mobile devices or at home PCs?

Karbginski: We plan to implement the security gateway with PCoIP support for home  office users or mobile users who can access their   same company desktop  with all their data on it from nearly every   computer in the world to  bring the user more flexibility.

Gardner: If you were advising  someone on what to learn from  your experience  as they now move toward  desktop virtualization, any  thoughts about  what you would recommend for  them?

Inform other departments

Karbginski: The most important thing is to get in touch with the other  departments   and inform them about the thing you're doing. Also, inform  the user  help  desk directly at the beginning of the project. So take  time to  inform  them what desktop virtualization means and which  processes will  change,  because we know most of our colleagues had a  wrong  understanding of  virtualization.

They think that  with virtualization, everything will change and we'll   need other  support servers, and it's just a new thing and nobody needs   it. If you  inform them what you're doing that nothing will be changed   for them,  because all support processes are the same as before, they   will accept  it and understand the benefits for the company and for the   user.

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Gardner: You've been successful with server virtualization, but what made it important for you now to   extend virtualization to the desktop?

Brames: One of the things that is important to our district we noticed when doing an assessment   of our infrastructure:  We have aging endpoints. We had a need to  extend  the refresh rate of  our desktop computers from what was typical  -- for a  lot of school  districts typical is about a 5-year refresh rate  -- to  getting  anywhere from 7 to 10, maybe even 12 years, out of a desktop computer.

By going to a thin client model and connecting those machines to a virtual desktop, we're able   to  achieve high quality results for our end users, while still giving   them  computing power that they need and allowing us to have the cost   savings  by negating the need to purchase new equipment every five   years.

By going with   virtual environment, the problem that we  were looking to solve was   really just that -- how do we provide  extended refresh rate for all of our devices?

Supporting 5,500 computers

We're  located about 12 miles west of Indianapolis, Indiana, and we have 13  instructional   buildings. We're a pre-K-to-12 institution and we have  approximately   8,700 students, nearing 10,000 end-users in total. We’re  currently   supporting about 5,500 computers in our district.

...  Currently  have  400 View desktop licenses. We’re seeing utilization of  that  license pool  of 20-25 percent right now, and the primary reason  that  we’re seeing  that utilization is because we’re really just  beginning  that phase, with  this being our first year for our virtual  desktop roll  out. We’re  really in the second year, but the first year  of more  widespread use.

We’re  training teachers on how to  adequately and  effectively use this  technology in their classroom with  kids It's been  very highly received  and is being adopted very well in  our classrooms,  because people are  seeing that we were able to  improve the computing  experience for them.

Lantz: With that many devices, getting out there and installing software, even  if it’s a push, locally, or what have you, there's a big management  overhead there. By using VMware View and having that in our data center,    where we can control that, the ability to have your golden image that    you can then push out to a number of devices has made it a lot easier   to  transition to this type of model.

We’re finding that we can   get  applications out quicker with more quality control, as far as   knowing  exactly what’s going to happen inside of the virtual machine (VM) when you run that application. So that’s been a big help.

A lot of our  applications are Web-based, Education City.  It’s a lot of  graphics and video. And we found that  we're still able  to run those in  our View environment and not have  issues.

Gardner: What are you  running in terms of servers? What is  your desktop  virtualization  platform, and what is it that allows you to  move on  this so far?

Lantz: On the server side, we're running VMware vSphere 4.1.  On the desktop side, we're running View 4.6.   Currently in our server  production, as we call it, we have three   servers. And we're adding a  fourth shortly. On the View side of things,   we currently have two  servers and we’re getting two more in the next   month or so. So we’ll  have a total of four.

Access from anywhere

Gardner: Now one of the nice things about the desktop virtualization and this    BYOD is it allows people to access these activities more freely    anywhere. How do you manage to take  what was once confined to the  school network and allow the  students and  other folks in your  community to do what they need to do,  regardless of  where they are,  regardless of the device?

Brames: We’re a  fairly affluent community. We have kids who were requesting to   bring in  their own devices. We felt as though encouraging that model   in our  district was something that would help students continue to use    computers that were familiar to them and help us realize some cost    savings long term.

So by connecting to virtual desktops in our    environment, they get a familiar resource while they're within our walls    in the school district, have access to all of their shared drives,    network drives, network applications, all of the typical resources that    are an expectation of sitting down in front of a school-owned piece of    equipment. And they're seeing the availability of all of those things   on  their own device.

... A typical   classroom for us contains  four student computing stations, as well as,   depending upon the  building size, three to five labs available. We’re   not focusing our  desktop virtualization on those labs. We’re focusing on   the classroom  computing stations right now. Potentially, we'll also be   in labs, as  we go into the future.

Then, in addition to those   student  computing stations, we’re seeing those applications where our    administrative team or principals and our district-level administrators    are able to begin using virtual desktops to access while they’re   outside  of the district and growing familiar with that, so that   whenever we  enter into that phase where we’re allowing our students to   access from  outside of our network, we have that support structure in   place.

... We’re also seeing an influx of more mobile-type devices such as tablets and even smartphones and things like that. The percentage of our users that are using    tablets and smartphones right now for powerful computing or their    primary devices is fairly low. However, we anticipate over time that the    variety of devices we’ll have connecting to our network because of    virtual desktops is going to increase.

Gardner: How is that hand-off  happening? Are you able to provide a unified experience  yet?

Lantz: That’s part of phase two of our approach that  we’re implementing  right  now. We’ve gotten it out into the classrooms to  get the students   familiar with it, so that they understand how to use  it. The next  step  in that process is to allow them to use this at home.

We    currently have administrators that are using it in this fashion. They    have tablets and are using the View client they connect in and get the    same experience if they're in school or out of school.

So we’re    to that point. Now that our administrators understand the benefits,  now   that our teachers have seen it in the classrooms, it’s a matter of    getting it out there to the community.

One of the other ways  that   we’re making it available is that at our public library, we have a  set   of machines that students can access as well, because as you  know, not   every student has access to high-speed Internet, but they  are able to  go  to library, check out these machines, and be able to  get into the   network that way. Those are some of the ways that we’re  trying to bridge   that gap.

Huge win-win

Technology Integration Group has resources that allow us to see what other school districts are    doing and what are some of the things that they’ve run into. Then, they    bring back here and we can discuss how we want to roll it out in our    environment. They’ve been very good at giving us ideas of what has    worked with other organizations and what hasn’t. That’s where they've    come in. They’ve really helped us understand how we can best use this in    our environment.

Gardner: I  often hear from   organizations, when they move to desktop  virtualization, that there are   some impacts on things like network or  storage that they didn’t fully   anticipate. How has that worked for  you? How has this roll out movement   towards increased desktop  virtualization impacted you in terms of what   you needed to do with  your overall infrastructure?

Lantz: Luckily for us we’ve had a lot of growth in the last two to three   years,  which has allowed us to get some newer equipment. So our network    infrastructure is very sound. We didn’t run into a lot of the issues    that commonly you would with network bandwidth and things like that.

On the storage side, we did increase our storage. We went with an EqualLogic box for that, but with View, it doesn’t take up a ton of storage  space   with link clones and things like that. So having seen a huge  impact   there, now as we get further into this, storage requirements  will get   greater, but currently that hasn’t been a big issue for us.

Gardner: On the flip-side of that, a lot of organizations I talk to, who moved    to desktop virtualization, gained some benefits on things like  backup,   disaster recovery, security, and control over data and assets,  and even   into compliance and regulatory issues. Has there been an  upside that  you  could point to in terms of being a more centralized  control of the   desktop content and assets?

Difficult to monitor

Lantz: When you start talking about students bringing in their own devices,    it's difficult to monitor what's on that personally owned device.

We   found that  by giving them a View desktop, we know what's in our   environment and we  know what that virtual machine has. That allows us   to have more secure  access for those students without compromising   what's on that student’s  machine, or what you may not know about what's   on that student’s  machine. That’s been a big benefit for us allowing   students to bring in  their own devices.

Gardner: Do we have any metrics of success either in business or, in this  case,   learning terms and/or IT cost savings? What has this done for  you? I   know it's a little early, but what's the early results?

Brames: You did mention that it is a little bit early, but we believe that as    we begin using virtual desktops more so in our environment, one of  the   major cost savings that we’re going to see as a result is  licensing  cost  for unique learning applications.

Typically in our district we would have purchased x    number of licenses for each one of our instructional buildings  because   they needed to utilize that with students in the classroom.  They may   have a certain number of students that need access to this  application,   for example, but they're not all accessing it during the  same time of   the day or it's on a machine that’s on a fat client, a  physical machine   somewhere in the building, and it's difficult for  students to have   access to it.

By creating these pools of  machines that have   specialty software on them we’re able to  significantly reduce the number   of titles we need to license for  certain learning applications or   certain applications that improve  efficiencies for teachers and for   students.

So that’s one area  in which we know we’re going to see   significant return on our  investment. We already talked about extending   the endpoints, and with  energy savings, I think we can prove some   results there as well.  Anything to add, Jason?

Lantz: One    of the ones that’s hard to calculate is, as you mentioned, maintenance    or management of this piece and technology, as we all know you’re  doing   more with less. This really gives you the ability to do that.  How you   measure that is sometimes difficult, but there are definitely  cost   savings there as well.

Gardner: I know budgets are really important in just about any school    environment. Do you have any   sense of the delta there between what it  would be if you stuck to   traditional cost structures, traditional  licensing, fat client, to get   to that one to one ratio, compared to  what you’re going to be able to do   over time with this virtualized  approach?

Brames: Our Advanced    Learning Center is the school building that has primarily senior    students and advanced placement students. There are about 600 students    that attend there.

Last year, 75 percent of those students were    using school-owned equipment and 25 percent of them were bringing  their   own laptops to school. This year, what we have seen is that 43  percent   of our students are beginning to bring their own devices to  connect to   our network and have access to network resources.

If  that trend   continues, which we think it will, we’ll be looking at  certainly over  50  percent next year, hopefully approaching 60-65  percent of our  students  bringing their own devices. When you consider  that that is  approximately  400 devices that the school district did  not need to  invest in, that’s a  significant saving for us.

Gardner: If you could do this over   again, a little bit of 20/20 hindsight,  what might you want to tell others   in terms of being prepared?

Lantz: One thing that’s   important is that when you explain this to users,  the words "virtual   desktop" can be a little confusing to teachers and  your end-users. What   I've done is taken the approach of it’s no  different than having a   regular machine and you can set it up to where  it looks exactly the   same.

No real difference

When    you start talking with end users about virtual, it gets into, okay,   "So  it’s running back here, but what problems am I going to encounter?"   and  those sort of things. Trying to get that end user to realize that   there  really isn’t a difference between a virtual desktop and a real   desktop  has been important for us for getting them on board and making   them  understand that it’s not going to be a huge change for them.

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Gardner: It seems a bit of a twisted logic when we say that social media  can be both a threat and an opportunity. How could social media be both?

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

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

Gardner: Do you have  any evidence, research, or findings of any sort that  bolster this  notion that social media is a sea change and not just a blip?

Game changer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monitoring change

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

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

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

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

Gardner: How is Capgemini working toward some solutions on this?

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

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

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

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

Marketing enhancement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different ways

Gardner: Are we going to repeat history and have a fragmented   approach to this or is there a better way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What it translates  into  for us is the ability to provide  process as a service. That’s a   fundamental shift in the marketplace  that’s occurring as a result of the   development of cloud capabilities.

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

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

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

Gardner: How are organizations getting started?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gardner: Why  has virtualization been good for your organization?

Ramirez: Back in 2007 when we first looked out at virtualization, we had a lot of issues. Our main   data center was located at our stadium in Saint Petersburg, Fla. We  were  actually  running out of space. Electricity was a huge problem. We  kept  hearing  from our operations department that our data centers and  our  equipment  were just consuming too much energy.

We had to come up with a new data center.    We needed to build something else, because we were just basically    outgrowing it. We needed a plan to say, "You know what, this is going to    be our new data center. We're going to be there 5 to 10 years,"   without  going back and requesting additional space or consuming more    electricity.

That's when everything started. We went from a    two-room data center room to basically just using half of that room with    virtualization. We started very small -- four hosts to manage our own infrastructure. Now we have 10 hosts in production and growing.

Another dilemma that we had was every time we needed to provision servers, or a new application needed to be introduced, it would have    taken weeks, if not a month, for us to procure the proper hardware and    software to make this available for different departments. So we  needed   to cut time on that and make things happen faster. It is a fast    business.

Gardner: To what degree have you actually embraced virtualization?

Without    VMware and the different products that we deploy, I think today  we'd    be in a lot of trouble if we wouldn’t have gone that route.

Ramirez: Currently, we're at 95 percent. We had certain goals to start --  about   50 percent -- and gradually every year just adding more and more    resources. At 95 percent, you can see that we really value this, and    this is the route that our business is going to.

Gardner: What  IT does it take to support a major league team?

Ramirez: First of all, coming from a small-market team, we don’t have the luxury  to have a large   IT department to support the 300 plus users that we  currently have. So   it’s very important for us to be very proactive and  be ahead of the   game.

It is a 24×7 operation, especially  during the season, which   as we all know, is one of the longest in  professional sports, with 162   games per year, not counting playoffs.  So it is challenging for us,  but I  believe that we have a great team.

We  also have great  resources  that we've implemented in the last five or  six years and  we're on top of  it. Without VMware and the different  products that we  deploy, I think  today we'd be in a lot of trouble if  we wouldn’t have  gone that route.

Gardner: Clearly it's working for you. Tell me about how many apps you're   supporting. What sort of workloads have you?

Ramirez: From the applications perspective, we have everything from our scanning application, which is homegrown SQL back-end, Windows application front-end, and web-based front-end to our finance departments, Great Plains, Microsoft Great Plains 2010.

We also have our customer relationship management (CRM) system, which runs on a proprietary application from Ticketmaster,    to homegrown application. Close to 10-30 applications are used on a    daily basis from every department and different aspect, which is    incredible.

Our email system, Microsoft Exchange 2010, is 100    percent virtualized. And every new application that comes up in our    pipeline is basically virtualized. Going forward, nothing resides in our    physical server, which is tremendous for us.

Products enrich the roster

When  we started, we wanted to go slow and to make sure that  everyone   throughout the organization had a good feel for it, a good  vibe. Once   we earned the trust from the different departments and other  department   heads, we introduced it, we showed them and we trained  them. It was a   no-brainer. Everyone was on board. Everyone loved the  technology.  Just  loved the fact that while it previously took weeks and  months for  them  to provision anything from our department, it's now  hours, at  the most,  which is great.

It also helps us big time  with  disaster recovery (DR). Our second  data center is located in our Port  Charlotte Spring  Training facility.  It's easier for us to move  workloads, depending on  where we're at in the  season and the time of  the year. We can move a  machine from the  production main data center  to the backup data center  and provide those  resources over to our  different departments.

When  we  started with DR, it was a  very tough decision because we wanted to do   everything automated, but  management did not see the need for it. So we   actually started with  manual processes. We started building a data   center down in Port  Charlotte. We did some migrations and that didn’t   work out too well.  So we came back to the drawing board and said, we   need a tool that can  help us automate this process. This has to be 100   percent automated.

We    came back to the drawing board and said, we need a tool that can help     us automate this process. This has to be 100 percent automated.

Our    recovery manager had just come out and we wanted to test it. We    actually beta tested it and received some evaluation licenses. We put  together   a quick product to show administration and management how  good the   product was and how important it was to us, especially in the  location   that we are at.

The rest is basically history. We  have pretty   much 100 percent coverage on everything that is  virtualized. We're able   to take periodic snaps and move them over to  the VR facility, where we   do a weekly test of each individual virtual machine (VM).

Gardner: So that must make you sleep a little better during hurricane season?

Ramirez: Absolutely. It used to be nightmare from June to the end of September around here, but not anymore.

Gardner: Let's move into this other innovative area you have been experimenting with, and it's the use VMware View 4.6. You've been involved with moving into thin   clients,  virtualized desktops, and I understand also using mobile apps   on  tablets. Tell me why that's been important for you and what you've    done.

250 remote users

Ramirez: Throughout the year, we've grown tremendously. We now have close to   250  remote users. All those remote users need to be equipped with very    expensive laptops. It's very expensive and very hard to manage.

We're    a small IT department. It's very hard to track down 250 users    throughout the year. It's very hard to keep older machines up-to-date.    When something goes wrong, it gets ugly pretty fast. We needed to get  an   alternative and come up with a plan where it would be easier to   manage,  where it would be easier for them to conduct their work.

We    started very basic by putting the in VMware View client. First of  all,   we set up a lab here and asked a few of our key guys to test and  give  us  some feedback. The feedback was overwhelming. We started with  five  or  six guys, and now we probably have close to 65 users using it  on a  daily  basis.

Users have come back and handed in their laptops. Now, they're strictly on iPad or Android tablet, which is tremendous for us. It's easier for my department to    manage. It's easier for them to go out there on the field and just use  a   lightweight device to connect and conduct business with it.

So    it's big for us right now. It should be a huge hit in the upcoming   year.  With our development department, everything that we are   projecting is  basically basing it on VMware View.

Users have come back and handed in their laptops. Now, they're strictly on iPad or Android tablet, which is tremendous for us.

Gardner: In addition to VMware View, you also seem to be using an iPad app, how  did that come about? How does that fit into the equation?

Ramirez: That came as we started adding more users and receiving feedback. I    started using it for my daily management show, introduced a few key    personnel to it, and they liked the idea. Now, everyone is basically    using that app to connect and do most of their work.

We decided    to introduce other departments and show them the capability and how  easy   it is to connect and get their business done without turning on  their   laptop -- waiting for it to boot, the VPN, the password, and all that stuff that sometimes gets in the way.

Gardner: I understand you have scouts, managers, you have lots of folks out in    the field. They're at ballparks. They're watching ballplayers.  They're   in the field, and can they just download an iPad app and then  sign into   VMware View. How do they actually connect in, and what are  the  logistics  for really linking your resources and apps out to that  field?

Everyone wants a tablet

Ramirez: Everyone in the organization wants a tablet. They come to  us,  which  helps us big time. Normally we do the procurement for them,  or if   they go out there and buy it, they will just bring it over to us,  and   by default our installation and process includes that application.  It's   the first application that they're introduced to.

My   department  is able to figure the necessary settings on the application   and just  leave it ready for them and let them know that right now you   can just  use your iPad application to connect into your resources and   conduct,  and use most of the applications that you will be using on a   daily  basis. It's a big plus for us and for the user. They just love   the fact  that they have a small application, a small tablet, and one   application  to deal with. Everything else is handled from our end.

Gardner: So this is productivity for you, because you're supporting more users    in the way that they want to work, probably with fewer resources when   it  all comes down to it, when you can consolidate. And then they're    getting that added productivity of access to the data and the apps    wherever they are, whenever they want to use it. So it's kind of a    win-win.

Ramirez: Absolutely. From a  management   perspective, it’s great, it's awesome, getting apps for a  better   application and a better system to have deployed.

We've  had   nightmares throughout the years, lost laptops with very sensitive    information. We have to protect users, and there are so many things  that   goes on on a daily basis. Now if there's an issue, it just takes    seconds to correct, and the users just go back in and continue doing    their work.

From    a management perspective, it’s great, it's awesome, getting apps  for  a   better application and a better system to have deployed.

Gardner: What’s  been the  return on investment (ROI) for you moving in these directions?

Ramirez: The ROI has been huge. We used to buy 10-15 servers on a yearly basis. Now, we just procure our servers every three or   four  years. We get hit from left and right with different departments.   They  have different needs -- we need 10 servers, we need 15 servers.  We  no  longer have to procure those and spend all that money right  away.  We  have resources allocated for it.

So the ROI has been  there.  As a  matter of fact, we did research two years ago and have  discovered  that  on our initial investment for both data centers the  return on  investment  was 24 months, which was probably more than we  thought. We  didn’t  realize how fast we were able to recoup our  investment and how  much  flexibility we had moving forward.

For  DR, we were coming  from a  situation where we had nothing. Everything  was in one data  center, and  if a storm came by, we would basically be  out of business.  Having a  fully automated system in place is huge for  us.

Very important

I don’t even know where to start and what number to tag this with, but   it  is very important to us. It has helped with insurance cost. It has    helped with just the ease of everyone knowing that if something  happens   near our stadium, we have our data and we can still conduct  business   moving forward.

We are buying fewer laptops.    We no longer need all the extra services that with 250 laptops can  get   very costly. Instead of ordering an $1,800 laptop for a user,  which   normally lives 12-24 months, now we can just buy an iPad or have  the   users use their own iPad, and connect. That makes a big saving  for us   going forward.

We have very big plans to move  ahead and try to be 99 percent   virtualized. Private cloud is very  important. It's high for us. We keep   growing, and our needs and  demands are huge. So we definitely have a  lot  of plans.

We have very big plans to move ahead and try to be 99 percent virtualized. Private cloud is very important.

Coming down the line, we're counting big on the upcoming vSphere 5 and SRM 5. That’s going to help us tremendously. It has some features there that are must-have for us.

Again,    moving forward, application development and everything will hopefully    be based on a thin app and ease of use and administration for our   users.  VMware View is another big component for us.

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