VMware Accelerate

Authors: Michael Hubbard / W. Eric Ledyard

Accidental Platform

Today, many IT organizations are finding themselves suddenly being compared to external cloud service providers through the lenses of cost and/or level of service provided. Whether they ever had aspirations of providing their organization with “a platform as a service,” they now find themselves being compared with providers that are architected solely to provide similar IT services “as a service.” The Accelerate team calls this phenomenon “Accidental Platform,” and it is a very common occurrence today. Many times, we work with organizations that we hear saying things like, “The business owners want to compare us directly to what they can get from Amazon or Google, but what they don’t realize is that we are not built in the same way they are, so it is an unfair comparison.”

Unfortunately, this is not going to keep these folks from making these comparisons and as a result, many IT organizations are now being challenged to provide detailed explanations to the company’s executive team as to why external providers can provide (a perceived) higher level of service at a much lower cost. Whether or not there is any truth to the external providers’ claims, the challenge that we typically see is that the internal IT organization is not even speaking the same ‘service language’, let alone functioning in the same operational manner, which can put them at a significant disadvantage when having these conversations with senior leadership.

Becoming an agent of change

“Well, what do we do—we aren’t built that way, and we do not see ourselves as having a service provider infrastructure?”

The first step toward success is to become an agent of change — start seeing yourself as a service provider to the organization and begin acting like it. For years now, your IT organization has been providing services to the rest of the company. You may not call yourself a service provider based on what your perception of what that phrase may or may not mean, but the fact is you are providing a service, and now the organization is going to compare you to other providers. You need to be armed to have the same type of conversation these providers will have when talking to your executive teams. For example, if you are speaking the same type of service-oriented language and measuring yourself against the same key performance indicators (KPIs) that service providers do, you will be able to explain much more eloquently and succinctly why you are or are not the best provider for a given service.

Accelerate the transformation of your IT organization

“That sounds great to say, but we have a very large IT organization, and it will take forever to get anything to change in how we function in our daily operations.”

You are not alone. Every IT organization faces these same issues and challenges today as cloud computing gains more and more momentum. In fact, because of this trend, VMware has invested heavily in creating an organization that can help you accelerate your transformation efforts. By putting together a team of experts who have lived and breathed these same challenges in the market at executive levels, VMware’s Accelerate Advisory Services has created a broad portfolio of services designed specifically towards addressing each of the challenges that an IT organization faces when trying to move from a traditional IT structure to an internal IT service provider. We have tackled the challenges of measuring, transforming, and building an ongoing strategy for all our clients and can do the same for your environment. The result will be a complete plan for how you can move from an accidental platform to a true service provider in as little time as possible.

We believe that there are three key stages in transforming your IT organization, and we have built the following service offerings aligned to achieving this process:

1.)     Accelerate Benchmarking Services: Only by measuring where you are today can you create a plan for transforming your environment to meet your end-state goals. We have created a number of offerings that allow you to quickly measure your organization and provide you with clear visibility on where you are today and what gaps exist in achieving your goals.

2.)     Transformation Readiness Services: We provide a number of service offerings that help you transform the organizational, operational, and financial aspects of your IT organization to enable the transition from the traditional environment to a service-provider environment.

3.)     IT Strategy Services: We then work with you to design a transformation strategy across seven key areas of your organization to get you to a point where you are running your I.T. environment as a service (ITaaS).

There are many examples where we have seen success working with large organizations. One that is very relevant is an organization where after meeting with the CIO, he came to the realization that he “…didn’t have a technology problem, he had a mentality problem.” It was at that point that we gathered 25 of his mid-level IT leaders, some HR people, plus a few business line leads and performed a morning workshop of mission alignment. We brought everyone together on the same goals of the organization, and held an afternoon workshop with the better-aligned team to understand and catalog the capability gaps on what was stopping them from acting in a different manner. Was it an issue of permission, capability, budget, skills, and so forth? From this point, we were able to help the CIO by re-aligning his leaders toward a common goal, identifying roadblocks to their success that he could help them overcome, and by providing a strategy for achieving overall success.

Another great example of how we have helped organizations is one where we helped a financial company achieve 100% of its cloud capabilities by shedding light on areas that were previously unseen, which would have been detrimental for the IT organization reaching its business goals. In this example, the CIO was supportive of virtualization but wanted more transparency around what the IT organization was accomplishing through its efforts. The VP of Infrastructure shared a common industry misperception that “...virtualization saves us so much money; we don’t even need to measure it. We know it works and is a positive thing.”

Despite that misperception, the Accelerate team worked with the reticent blessing of the VP to gather detailed KPIs from his team and environment to define the exact amount of impact – financial and operational – that virtualization and entry-level automation was having on the capability and cost profiles of Infrastructure within their organization. While directionally the data was not a surprise to the VP at all, quantitatively there were two bold “ah-ha moments” for the VP and his infrastructure organization. First, the overall savings were 4X what the VP had estimated and second, that he was leaving 75% of the savings on the table.

At this point in their journey, the team was only 25% of the way to its goal of a full private cloud—and that had taken them three years to achieve. Did the VP really want to continue on a 12-year journey to realize his team’s goals, or did the Accelerate team have the proof needed to “accelerate” the completion of their direction? In fact we did — through a data-driven, historical approach that would show the financial opportunity and address risk by bringing a balanced approach of technology and strategy to achieve what other VMware customers were achieving.

The other compelling impact we had within this organization was in discovering that their current budget proposal (that was in the process of being whittled down by Finance) would not allow the organization to complete its journey — in its current state, their budget would only be able to take them from 25% of their goal to around 50% of where they wanted to be. When the CIO saw this and understood the ramifications, he took ownership to champion a larger capital request to the Board of Directors for a full set of budget, resources, consulting, and training to get the organization to 100% of the desired-state goal. By taking a data-driven approach to analyzing their environment, the CIO was able to gain sponsorship and buy-in of his peers, paving the way to take the steps necessary to ensure successful completion of their projects.

 Hope is not a strategy

Don’t find yourself caught unprepared to have this conversation with your stakeholders when the time comes. If you have not been approached yet with these questions or challenges, consider yourself lucky and take a proactive approach towards transforming your IT organization. If you have already been hit with these requests and are wondering where to start, know we have worked with some of the world’s largest organizations and have helped drive impactful results for them through our proven methods of IT assessment, transformation and strategy.  By transforming their people, process, and technology elements, we have enabled their IT teams to drive business agility throughout the IT organization and become the preferred service provider.

Let us show you how we can help you accelerate your IT transformation efforts and help you turn your “accidental platform” into a true IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) organization.

accelerate@vmware.com

(Read today’s press release) 

AUTHOR: Eric Ledyard

“Historically, enterprise IT organizations have been the builders and managers of the physical IT infrastructure supporting business processes. What we’ve worked with VMware and the Accelerate team on, is how I can look to shift my team’s view of metrics from things like availability and uptime, and more toward IT’s contribution to business growth; the ability to speed innovation; improving customer satisfaction; and lowering risk and cost.”

- Paul Lewis, Vice President of Technology, Architecture and Security, Davis + Henderson Corporation

Today, VMware “officially” announced the formation of Accelerate Advisory Services—a practice that will work with customers like Davis + Henderson Corporation’s Paul Lewis, quoted above, to help support their IT transformation. What VMware is doing is leveraging the extensive customer experience and knowledge its services professionals have developed from years of working with customers and coupling it with the methodical hiring of business and strategy experts like me and others just joining the team.

For those of you who follow this blog, you know its contributors as business and strategy experts who bring in-depth experience as former CIOs, CTOs and industry consultants. It’s very clear to us and should be to you, too, that VMware is seriously committed to invest in and grow its capabilities to help customers around the world accelerate IT and business transformation.

The services we offer really are different—different from anything previously available to CIOs from VMware or from any other vendor. Many of the customers we work with have adopted VMware virtualization solutions for server and data center consolidation, and are happy with the capex savings.  But, when they’re ready to deploy a cloud computing platform based on a virtual IT infrastructure, guess what—their IT strategy isn’t aligned to business outcomes, and they face big gaps enterprise architecture, governance, operational best practices.

To operationalize a cloud computing platform at scale, it’s the people and process considerations that are paramount to deliver opex benefits as well as those capex benefits that made them happy in the past. VMware understands those needs— and Accelerate brings the content, thought leadership, resources and experts together to work with our customers to layout a long term plan for IT transformation in a thoughtful, programmatic way that’s going to deliver greater business value.

You might recall recent articles covering such topics as measurement methods, benchmarking, and key performance indicators (KPIs) — all required to quantify, measure, and analyze your journey to virtualization and cloud implementation. We’re focused on meaningful measurement, market perspective, and actionable strategy. And, our body of virtualization benchmark data and understanding of the current and best-in-class IT transformation performance indicators is unrivaled.

We’ve also acquired certain assets of Virginia-based Info Tech Health Check (iTHC), which will enhance our already robust benchmarking service to include:

• The addition of 3,500 metrics, building a view that includes multiple perspectives, making sure the exercise is relevant and focused.
• The inclusion of 20 industries, providing insight into a broader set of comparisons across organizations and functional peers.
• Data covering four key geographies, giving an all-important perspective of international business operations and challenges.

Stay tuned as we continue to grow Accelerate, and check out our new presence on VMware’s public website: www.vmware.com/go/accelerate (and readers, you know you can always contact us via e-mail at: accelerate@vmware.com)

AUTHOR: W. Eric Ledyard

“What would be really useful for us throughout this process is to understand how we have been doing in our current IT transformation efforts and provide us a baseline of measurement for tracking our improvement throughout our future IT transformation efforts.” ~Accelerate Customer 2011

This is a common request of many IT organizations as they are moving through their IT transformation projects with us in the Accelerate team. Another question we receive from customers and other groups within VMware and the industry is: How do you measure ITaaS and cloud?

We feel that it is possible to measure how ‘cloudy’ an organization is by gathering data on a specific set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that reflect where that company is in their journey towards ITaaS. In order to perform this, the Accelerate team has put together a diagnostic offering that will measure a customer’s environment and provide a clear result of the customer’s current state measured against what we know as a fully-optimized ITaaS environment and also provides them with a measurement against where their desired state is in the future. We call this tool the ATA Scale, which stands for “Accelerate Transformation Assessment” Scale.

We have also put together a white paper that explains the scale in much more detail than this blog will and that is attached to this message here: Download VMW-WP-ACCELERATE-TRANS-ASSMNT-SCALE-USLET-103-WEB

What I would like to address in this blog is a quick list of questions that we have been getting from companies and other teams at VMware that will help you understand what the scale is, what it isn’t, who can benefit from it, and how to interpret the results. We are going to present and answer these in a somewhat FAQ style below.

Q: What is the ATA Scale and how does it fit into other offerings that the VMware Accelerate team offers?

A: We have, roughly, around 14 different offerings that the VMware Accelerate team offers organizations that are looking to pursue the journey of IT transformation. We break those into 3 major groupings: Diagnostic Offerings, Transformative Efforts, and Strategic Engagements. While this is not meant to explain our entire organization in detail, the ATA Scale falls into the portfolio under our diagnostic offerings. A diagnostic offering is one that is typically done at the beginning of the transformative process and provides a quick, high-level understanding of the environment which will provide visibility into where the organization is starting from. This is then used as a starting point for determining which of our other offerings would benefit the organization most in helping them achieve their future-state goals. The ATA scale is a scale used to quickly determine where an organization is starting from across 4 major areas of: Business Alignment, Process and Systems Management, Application Modernization, and Infrastructure. Because of our unique industry position, we have a very clear picture of what a fully-optimized ITaaS environment looks like and we can measure an organization’s progress towards achieving their goals towards this environment.

Q: Does the ATA Scale have benchmarking components within it that would compare how we are doing as an organization relative to other corporations in our industry?

A: No. We built the ATA Scale to have a very specific function. To provide an absolute scale for measuring ITaaS within an organization and to provide scoring relative to progress along the path of transformation. It is not meant to be a grade, or a comparable scoring methodology, but a measure of progress towards the organization’s target goals as well as their progress towards a fully-optimized environment. As an organization, we have a team that is dedicated to benchmarking services which are designed to measure your organization against other organizations in your industry. Craig Stanley leads this team and has multiple blogs thus far explaining what they do and how they can help. He builds relative scales used to measure organizations that are pursuing this goal.

Q: Does the ATA Scale provide financial impact analysis of what the benefits of IT transformation will be as the organization matures?

A: No. As we mentioned earlier, the ATA Scale is very myopic in its design. It is used as a diagnostic tool for measuring progress on the journey of ITaaS for an organization. Financial analysis (if done correctly) takes a much deeper level of assessment and knowledge than what is required to map progress for ITaaS and is something that we can provide through strategic offerings that the Accelerate team offers. Those will be outlined in future blog posts in more detail, but they are built to specifically measure what the financial implications will be if an organization is able to progress from where they are currently to where they want to go in the future. The ATA Scale is typically used in the beginning of this process to provide us a high-level picture of where we are starting from, but a more detailed assessment needs to be done by our strategic teams in order to provide detailed financial analyses on the benefits of undertaking the transformative efforts.

Q: Why does the ATA Scale provide 2 score results?

A: This came from feedback that we received during the playback of the results from the first couple of these that we performed while the scale was being developed. When we first designed the scale, we were measuring organizations only against a fully-optimized ITaaS environment. This was fine in theory, but the feedback that we received was that: “We do not see a ton of value in measuring ourselves against a fully-optimized ‘perfect’ environment, since we know the feasibility of us ever getting to ‘perfect’ is next to impossible.” As we digested that feedback, we realized that most organizations do not have the budgets or resources that would be required to achieve that ‘perfect’ environment and to make the scale more valuable to all organizations, we modified the scale to measure not only their progress towards ‘perfect’ but also their progress towards a feasible desired-state. This is why there are 2 results now in the ATA scale. Where are we when compared to ‘perfect’? Where are we in regards to where we know we can feasibly go as an organization? The analogy that I used to explain this is, imagine that I take it upon myself to improve my time running a mile. We all know that a perfect time for the mile is around the 4-minute mark. My current mile time (if being chased by a rabid dog) is probably somewhere in the 12-minute category. I could measure myself and my future improvement against a perfect mile, but it is not at all feasible that I could ever reach the 4-minute mile mark. So, in order to provide a more useful measure of my journey, we also measure my progress towards a more feasible level of attainment for me, personally, which would be somewhere in the 8-minute range. It makes quite a difference in the results from a mathematic perspective. If I am currently running the mile in 12 minutes, that is 33% of the way towards a perfect 4-minute mile but it is 67% of the way towards my 8-minute future-state goal.

Q: Why would any organization not reach for a fully-optimized IT environment?

A: Not all organizations have a need to reach ITaaS ‘perfect’ because it does not make sense to the organization financially or there are other factors such as governance and compliance which make it impossible in the current state of the industry to achieve perfection. Many times, I have heard specific people within organizations say: “Why wouldn’t we shoot for perfect?” and for the most part, I applaud the optimism and energy. However, there are many other organizations that say to me: “Why would we measure ourselves against ITaaS ‘perfect’ when we know we can never attain that level?” They also have a very valid point. The beautiful thing about the scale is: We can do both or either by asking the same set of questions. And we do. This way, depending on what makes sense to your organization’s needs, we can provide you a measurement that is applicable to you no matter what your goals are.

Q: What if we set our future-state goals too low?

A: This actually happens fairly often in my humble opinion. Most of the time, this is due to the fact that not everyone that gets interviewed has a complete view of what is possible in IT currently so the ideas that we know as ‘perfect’ are seen as completely unattainable. The challenge for anyone in today’s IT industry is keeping up with the exponential acceleration of technology enablers which an organization can take advantage of when transforming to a ITaaS environment. Many organizations are still struggling with concepts of virtualization, so discussing an environment where you can move a running ‘server’ from one datacenter to another across geographically disperse locations is quite a leap from where they are currently. Because of this technology gap, I feel (and this is at this point completely my own personal observation and in no way reflects that of VMware corporate’s) many companies believe that the strategic objectives of ITaaS perfect are very far away and are very complex, when in fact they aren’t as ‘sci-fi’ as they seem. The good news is, the VMware Accelerate team can help with this. We are involved in every ATA scale that is performed and we will be looking at the results and helping present areas where we feel an organization may be able to do better than they think they can and structuring a strategy for helping them attain the most efficient environment possible.

Well, that about wraps it up for now. I will continue to compile questions that we receive and shed light on future development efforts as they come available. In the meantime, if you have read this and think: “I sure would love to see how we are doing, how do I get this started in my environment?” Please reach out to our team and we can help. You can contact us via e-mail at: accelerate@vmware.com .

I recently read a blog post discussing feedback from CIOs regarding the benefit of chargeback. Specifically, there were comments on both sides of the issue: some saying the costs of metering outweigh any benefits, while others say it’s impossible to manage without controls. To be fair, the shared services model does present a set of challenges.

1. How can I tie a particular shared resource to the ROI or business case of a particular project?
2. How can I make sure the resources are best deployed for the overall benefit of the enterprise?
3. How can I best and most fairly calculate the rates I should charge back?
4. How do I communicate the billings or charges back to internal subscribers?
5. How can I do this without the process itself exceeding the value of measuring usage in the first place?

If we consider ourselves IT as a Service Provider (ITaaSP), then we begin to realize these problems have already been solved by a lot of ISPs and we can use the same kinds of solutions employed by ISPs to set and manage rates. But is there merit to the argument that metering IT’s resources is a fool’s errand?

I suggest that having no measurement or chargeback system can only lead to ultimate chaos and inefficient resource utilization. Any resource that is not infinite or practically infinite must be, and will be prioritized and rationed by some distribution methodology such as:

1. Economics – this is the rationing system employed the most, which is simply based on the ability and desire to pay for the products or services.

2. Influence/Power – this rationing system is based on the political power/influence structure of the organization where the 800 pound gorillas get what they want regardless of financial or other justification.

3. Most Vocal/Need – this system rations products and services by who makes the most noise or can best represent need, but the determination of need is often subjective and can change as louder and more pressing requests come in. At best, this is a reactive rationing methodology.

4. First Come/First Served – this rationing system is simply who gets there first, but in reality would probably quickly degrade into the power system. This can also lead to a hoarding mentality to grab resources while they’re there for the taking.

Since IT’s budget and resources are not infinite (in most cases), chargeback is a necessity to ensure efficient allocation of resources for the benefit of the organization. IT leaders who say they do not have chargeback or need it, do in fact allocate or ration services by one of the four methods above. From my experience, it usually tends to be options two and three in those cases.

The bottom line is that since IT’s resources are economically constrained, i.e. IT does not have an infinite budget, it logically makes sense to manage that rationing by the same system under which resources are acquired: economic chargeback. This won’t eliminate the “influence” option from being used, but it should help manage it by providing IT with a defense against it. And it doesn’t matter if real budget dollars cross the table but there must be a fair method of “keeping score” of the monetary resource depletion. Without that chargeback methodology, one of the other three less efficient rationing systems will be used and the business as a whole pays for the inefficiency.

Craig Stanley is the Benchmarking Practice Lead for VMware Accelerate Advisory Services. You can follow him on Twitter @benchmarkguru.

AUTHOR: Craig Stanley (@benchmarkguru)

 The commonly stated mantra of benchmarking is that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”.  While that is certainly a truism, a corollary I’d like add is that “you can’t measure what you can’t quantify”.  Figuring out what KPIs you need to track is usually not too difficult, but determining how to quantify some KPIs can seemingly involve black magic, smoke and mirrors.  It can be mystifying to say the least.  This article discusses the benchmarking measures and quantification behind VMware’s Infrastructure Move-The-Needle Vision Benchmark and will hopefully; shed a little light on the process.

The VMware Vision Benchmarking Team provides a customer service benchmark analysis called a Move-The-Needle.  We determine a few basic KPIs, quantify where a customer’s performance is on these KPIs, measure the gap between where the customer is and where the best performing peers are and calculate the potential benefit of closing that gap, or moving-the-needle.  It is important to note that some industries are more heavily invested in virtualization than others. In some cases, even the best performers may be woefully behind the technology curve in terms of leveraging virtualization into significant operational savings.  Analytical insight into the technological maturity of the industry in addition to the best performing peers is invaluable in putting the information into an actionable perspective.

In the Infrastructure Move-The-Needle Benchmark, we look at five Key Performance Indicators:

1. Percentage of x86 Physical Servers Virtualized
2. Percentage of Desktops Virtualized
3. Percentage of Virtual Machines that are DR Protected
4. Virtual Machine to VM Administrator Ratio
5. Number of Days Needed to Provision a Virtual Machine

These KPIs were initially selected based on feedback from large IT organizations as the basic metrics they needed to track and compare in order to measure virtualization maturity.  These have the added benefit of being easy to collect and track consistently over time and between competing organizations.  In the chart below, we illustrate the needle position and the impact of moving it to the best performing peer levels.

1. x86 Percentage Virtualized – What is the percentage of the total number of x86 servers that are virtualized? This metric is used to gauge the overall integration of server virtualization in the organization and is important, as the road to a private cloud requires a high level of server virtualization.  Additionally, significant CapEx and OpEx savings can be realized as virtualization drives up the utilization density while reducing the number of physically managed, energy consuming devices.  Based on VMware ROI figures, we estimate that an organization can save approximately $3,400 for every physical server they can virtualize. About 84% of the potential savings is CapEx with 16% recurring annually.  An added benefit is that physical servers may be able to be redeployed to offset growth or may be powered-off until needed to save on operating costs.
2. Desktop Percent Virtualized – What is the percentage of the total number of desktops that are virtualized?  This metric measures the depth of the implementation of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) initiatives, which also play heavily in the future cloud ubiquitous computing model.  The goal of desktop virtualization is threefold: 1.) Remove as much of the end user, physical support as possible, 2.)Consolidate into significantly fewer managed and maintained user images, 3.)Create an environment where the user experience is not tied to any one physical I/O device or location.
   
   Initially, an investment in VDI is not likely to save or replace much hardware or software expense.  End users still need an output device, be it a thin client on a PC or other device, and investment must be made in servers to support desktop virtualization.  However, image and application support requirement such as patching, config management, etc., may be significantly reduced.  We estimate that each desktop virtualized may carry a potential savings of about $500 per PC migrated.
   
   There are hurdles to VDI as evident in the data we see suggesting a relatively small adoption rate, but VDI may prove to be one of those areas of potential strategic advantage for organizations seeking to deliver applications on demand and support multiple device form factors. 
3. Percentage of VMs under DR Protection – How many of your VMs are under a DR protection plan?  This metric yields important information about the type of workloads supported on VMs.  We expect a low percentage score may suggest that the VM workloads are not Tier 1 since they are not part of a DR implementation, while a higher percentage here suggests the VMs may be identified as Tier 1.  This particular metric tends to provide better insight than just a metric of number of Tier 1 applications on VMs.  The action to put them under DR protection is better proof that these applications are considered critical based on function not just name or business unit ownership.
   
   Based on the VMware ROI data, we’ve estimated a potential savings of about $550 per hour of avoided downtime.  Obviously, your results may vary depending on how much impact a particular Tier 1 application outage would have, but this can give you some idea of the potential savings or conversely, the potential exposure.
4. VM to Admin Support Ratio – How many VMs do you support per VM Administration FTE?  This is a commonly used and asked-for metric as it illustrates a support-FTE utilization ratio.  The basic tenant of virtualization is that you are able to support more VMs than physical machines with the same number of FTEs.  We would expect to see this number in the hundreds of VMs per Admin FTE based on the virtualization maturity of the organization and the number of VMs.  It is important to note that the denominator is an FTE (Full Time Equivalent), which could be made up of fractions of multiple admin’s time and does not necessarily map one-to-one to physical headcount.
   
   Moving the needle on this metric is measured in fewer FTEs needed to deliver the same quantity of support.  While reducing the number of FTEs is one interpretation of this result, most organizations seek to leverage the freed-up resources to handle other projects or growth.
   Something else to keep in mind is that a high ratio here, even higher than your peer group, may not be a good thing.  This is where the analysis of multiple metrics comes into play.  In many cases, an analysis cannot be based on a single metric or piece of information, and this metric is a good example of that.  Let’s say I support 1,000 VMs per Admin and my peers only support 500 VMs per Admin.  Certainly, my VM:Admin ratio (productivity) is better, but since this metric does involve a limited resource, ie labor, what does my labor performance look like?  Does it take me several days to provision a VM?  If so, then maybe I’m stretched too thin at a 1,000 to 1 ratio.
   Server utilization is another good example of these dependent KPIs.  If all my servers are always running at 100%, is that necessarily the best way to be operating?  If I can’t deliver the workloads to the required SLA, then no, it isn’t.
5. Days to Provision a VM – How many days does it take to provision a VM including requests, approvals and implementation?  The understanding of this metric covers a couple of performance issues.  The first is the level of automation and repeatable processes in place to be able to quickly provision a VM and deploy it into production.  The second factor is the degree of standardization, policies and governance that enables a VM request to be quickly approved, procured and provisioned.  We find that organizations farther along in their cloud journey have the processes and governance in place to be able to procure and provision a VM into production in only a few days, much faster than organizations without them.
   
   This metric is also useful as the counterpart to the VM:Admin ratio as noted earlier and it balances speed to deliver against the resource level needed to deliver that speed.  For example, if you can procure and provision a VM in a day while still maintaining a higher than average VM:Admin ratio, then you are likely to be more effective and efficient than peers.  But if your provisioning time is lengthy with a high VM:Admin ratio, it may be indicative of a staffing shortage or lack of automation.
   
   The value to the organization by reducing this number is that VMs and consequently, additional applications, can be deployed faster helping IT support a more agile, robust enterprise.  We arrive at a savings figure based on $1,000 per day in opportunity savings resulting from being able to provision your virtualizable physical servers faster.  While this is a typical soft or indirect saving, and the actual saving per day might vary, it does give us a way to assign a dollar saving to this improvement.
   
   These are but a few of the many metrics that can be used to measure performance, utilization, efficiency and effectiveness.  In this Infrastructure Move-The-Needle, we identify and quantify 5 KPIs that can drive savings and value back to the IT organization and the enterprise.  By knowing where we are, and knowing where the best performers are, we can close that gap and reap the savings.  You can get there from here by moving the needle.

Craig Stanley is the Benchmarking Practice Lead for the VMware Vision Team. You can follow him on Twitter @benchmarkguru.

AUTHOR: Craig Stanley (@benchmarkguru)

This article is the first in a series that will explain VMware’s context for benchmarking virtualization and cloud implementation, and discuss the Key Performance Indexes (KPIs) that are used to quantify, measure, and analyze the organizations journey toward ITaaS.

The first step in the benchmarking process is to determine what needs to be measured and how it will be quantified.

Quantification is all about determining:

1. What are the KPIs (Key Performance Metrics) that matter and can I determine what data elements they are based on?
2. Can I get the information I need consistently to calculate my KPI?
3. Can my KPIs be compared against my competition or industry?

First, what are the KPIs that matter most to your operation? Typically, it may be the ratio of a consumable resource to a quantity of production such as a cost per application developed or a cost per server.  Other consumption-based metrics may be expressed as ratios like cost per FTE, FTEs per system, or VMs per Host.  There are dozens if not hundreds of metrics that may be interesting, but the ones you track need to:

1. Measure your current state – the KPIs should not be based on data elements that are out-of-date by the time you collect them.
2. Provide meaningful information that supports your strategy – the KPIs should matter.
3. Be easy to understand and explain – the relationship of the underlying data should not be so esoteric that the resulting relationship is dubious.

Next, is the KPI based on information you can get consistently over time?  In order for benchmarking to be useful, the KPIs need to be based on apples-to-apples comparative data elements.  Having consistent data and KPIs also enables you to evaluate year-over-year performance with relevant metrics. This ability is an invaluable oasis of information to validate, justify and monitor continuous improvement.

Lastly, are the KPIs specific to just your organization? Are they common across your competition or industry and can you get access to the KPI data elements from your competition?  The primary benefit of benchmarking is to help identify KPIs and determine where you are and what progress you’ve made.  Another major benefit is that it provides you the basis you need to see how you are performing against your competition. 

KPIs may be industry-focused such as IT spend per new policy or IT spend per claim for an insurance company for example.  Comparing KPIs like this across industry competitors can provide significant insight into the IT / business landscape and valuable feedback on strategy.

In my next blog, I’ll talk about the KPIs used for the VMware Infrastructure Move The Needle and explain how they can help quantify the value of moving from your present virtualization state to the level of the best performing peers.

Craig Stanley is the Benchmarking Practice Lead for the VMware Vision Team. You can follow him on Twitter @benchmarkguru.

AUTHOR: Craig Stanley

Imagine you’re in a high-speed, endurance auto race with a heated field of competitors and the only dashboard instrument you have is your fuel gauge.  You can tell how fast you’re burning up your resources, but you have no other instrumentation to tell where you are or how fast you’re going.  Furthermore, all of the windows are blacked out so you can’t see anything outside your vehicle. You may have a folding map that you bought from some roadmap vendor, but without being able to locate where you are on the map, it’s not very useful.  You can hear the sounds of competition around you but can you really discern if the competition is close or is it just a lot of noise from farther away?

This doesn’t sound like a very effective way to compete in a race does it?  But in reality, this is how a lot of businesses operate every day.  And in this article, we’ll take a look at benchmarking from an IT perspective.

Benchmarking provides the tools to help you measure and understand where you are at present and how you compare to your competition. Having this information enables the IT organization to measure internal progress, get insight into what peers are doing and where they are, compare speed of technology progress with peers and develop a baseline for comparing costs of technology and operation.  Benchmarking methodologies define the KPIs (Key Performance Metrics) that matter most and give the organization the ability to compare these KPIs to their competition.

In the metaphor of an auto race, let’s look at the competitive advantage and benefits derived from benchmarking.  In navigating the competitive field, you’re going to need some tools.

Effective tools for navigation:

1. Plan (Roadmap) – You need a roadmap of where you’re trying to go, what you want to accomplish and how soon you want it accomplished. Benchmarking helps you measure your progress in attaining your destination as laid out in your roadmap.  It provides a “You Are Here” point along the path.
2. Speed (Speedometer) – How fast are we going and are we going fast enough to reach our targeted goals?  Continuing the race analogy, if you go too slow, you will be passed up by your faster and more aggressive competition. But if you go too fast, you run the risk of losing control and ending up somewhere entirely unexpected.  Benchmarking helps you understand how fast the field is moving and gives you insight into your position as a leader or laggard in technology.
3. Perspective (Front and rear windows) – You need to be able to see where you’re headed and where you’ve been.  The organization has made investments in technology improvement and it is essential in these times of limited capital to be able to look back, see what benefits have been realized and perhaps more importantly, what expected benefits were not realized and why.  Benchmarking helps establish that stick in the ground to know where you are so that progress may be quantitatively measured.
4. Position (Side Windows) – In order to make good tactical and strategic decisions about your plan, you need to be able to see who is around you, how fast are they moving and if they heading in the same direction that you are.  If they are moving faster than you, you are either playing a losing game of catch-up or your advantage is diminishing.  Maybe a competitor is heading in a different direction than the pack. Are they lost or are they changing the game? Benchmarking provides an empirical basis for comparing you to your competition, but it also reveals insight into the technology maturity and progress of the peer group itself.  Often organizations find themselves scoring at the top of the peer group for a particular KPI, but when the peer group is analyzed, it may be that the group itself is not mature or underperforming.  These can indicate opportunities to seize a lead.
5. Performance Improvement and Agility (Acceleration) – When good drivers see an opening, they move fast and with purpose. After KPIs are measured and compared, the next steps are to identify the low hanging fruit that usually drives the greatest benefit in the least amount of time.  Progress can be accomplished quickly and validates the benchmarking process.
6. Direction (Steering) – The best drivers look for the inside turns to maintain position and overtake the competition.  Benchmarking identifies areas where the organization is performing well against competitors, but also identifies opportunities for improvement.
7. Holistic Analysis (Driver) – Drivers take all of the information available to them and use it to make tactical decisions leading to their strategy of winning the race. In the same manner, benchmarking helps IT make decisions with a holistic view of all KPIs analyzed together and in conjunction with competitive results.  The simultaneous analysis of KPIs often leads to insight not visible in standalone metrics.

In the race for competitive position, the IT organization must take advantage of every opportunity to meet the corporate directives of doing even more, faster, with less.  The more information IT has about the usage, innovation and maturity of technology, the better enabled it will be to move from simply providing technology on demand to becoming seen as a true business enabler.

Craig Stanley is the Benchmarking Practice Lead for the VMware Vision Team.

AUTHOR: Craig Stanley 

“They’re coming to get you, Barbra….” Night of the Living Dead (1968)

In the classic line from Night of the Living Dead, Johnny teases his sister by telling her “they’re coming to get you.” While initially in jest, it turns out they really were out to get her.  In celebration of the season, lets take a look at what scares us in business or what should be scaring us, and who is coming to get us.

First, keeping your eyes fixed on your strategic goals shows focus, clarity and determination, but it’s not always a bad idea to take a quick look over your shoulder to see what’s closing in on you.  Paranoia may not be such a bad thing, as long as it’s of a constructive form.

Some of the most successful companies have always had a healthy paranoia about their competition catching up and passing them.  It helps keep them worried about continuous innovation, risk taking and all the actions that tend to set the leaders apart from the followers.

When you’re the leader, it’s always temping to coast and take it easy for a while, milk the cash cow, and enjoy that well deserved rest.  But, almost without exception, there is someone, somewhere trying to figure how to do what you do faster, cheaper, and perhaps, better.  And they are coming to get you.

Yesterday’s innovation is today’s competitive battleground and tomorrow’s commodity.  All innovation tends toward commodity; it is the continuous infusion of innovation and differentiation that keeps the enterprise one step ahead of commoditization. 

While being a commodity provider is not a bad thing, is being forced by the market to compete primarily on price part of your strategic business plan?  If you have no competitive paranoia, perhaps you should. 

So how does a business take that look over the shoulder?  First, you need a method or process to measure where you are in the competitive landscape that can be leveraged to gauge how others are performing.  This methodology is commonly called a benchmark and defines the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics that matter most to the accomplishment of strategic goals.  These KPIs generally correlate costs & revenue to a quantitative value of resources created, consumed or modified.

Second, you need a source where you can find the same information and metrics for your competitors and others in your industry.  There are several organizations that collect competitive data, and in the cloud space, VMware’s Vision Benchmarking provides KPIs and peer analysis on the most significant cloud and virtualization metrics.

Lastly, you need a comprehensive analysis to highlight areas of strengths and weaknesses, identify potential opportunities and target the threats or those competitors who are out to get you.  Knowing the lay of the land and where they are on it gives organizations the information they need to main a lead, develop business strategies to move ahead, or keep an eye on that inevitable challenge to your market position.

You’re not paranoid; there is someone out there who’s out to get you.  Knowing it and embracing it can help keep the competition behind you.

Craig Stanley

Benchmark Practice Lead

VMware Vision Program

AUTHOR: JJ Digeronimo

Who? . . .The IT consumer that is, that can now shop around.  For years, IT consumers (a.k.a LOB, Developers) believed there were limited sources (THE IT department) for what they needed to get their job, project or release complete.  IT Department alternatives are creeping more and more into their landscape.  What many of these consumers used to call servers is now more commonly being termed, compute.

So what really is cloud?

If you peel back the hype, could cloud be access to timely, relevant, effective compute?

• Timely – I can get it when I needed it
• Relevant – the horsepower seems to be what I need to facilitate a task
• Effective – It works the way I expect it will

And could we throw in a 4^th descriptive . . .cost effective?

• Cost Effective – I am comfortable paying the price of this compute based on the variable above for a particular duration

The compute landscape today is much different than even two years ago.  Internal IT departments are experiencing more applicable competition than many want to admit.  These outside IT compute sources seem to be offering their customer (a.k.a. LOBs, Developers) a service that meets many of the criteria once only supplied internally.  IT teams often argue that these outside sources are not as secure.  This is an important point, notice that security is not on the list above on often not on the consumer of IT’s list either.  So although a critical criteria and priority for IT, it is often over looked when demands are high and compute is a 6-12 week in-waiting reality.

Acknowledging this as a reality now is a must.  If your consumers of your IT offering are not yet going outside your datacenter for compute, I promise they will.  If fact, if you cannot detect this easily just think about the SAAS applications (formerly ASP offerings) quickly creeping into the mix.  They are often more cost effective and have many of the attributes listed above.  This is happening and likely faster than most IT departments can complete a server refresh. 

So what do I suggest IT department to do? Make the investment now to build a on-demand compute pilot so that you can easily showcase IT’s ability to be timely, relevant, effective and secure.  Yes, there will be some investment needed but what group does not have to invest in their people and offerings especially when competition is on the brink of creeping in.  Make the invest in your people and processes now, showcase your staff, skills and ability to offer what seems now to be required thanks to app stores, mobile devices and dev clouds.

The good news is that there are easily definable business agilities metrics when IT departments automation mundane activities and work with their business departments to identify, implement and measure efficiencies in the operations.  We know this because VMware is working hand-and-hand with hundreds of companies across all industries to develop and implement their cloud *YOUR CLOUD* offering with measurable business agility metrics. What are you waiting for?

White Paper – Business Agility and True Economics of Cloud Computing

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/cloud/VMware_Business_Agility_and_the_True_Economics_of_Cloud_Computing_White_Paper.pdf

AUTHOR: Eric Ledyard

Much of our industry is focused on what is being called the "post-pc era" of desktop/mobile computing. Many vendors have approached this concept with technologies and solutions around desktop virtualization. While this is a very valid approach to a limited number of users at most organizations, in order to truly address the needs of users in the new world, we believe that the focus needs to be moved up to the application layer in order to address all use-cases. The first thought process that needs to be modified is that if we are going to be living in a post-PC era, we need to stop looking at technologies which only move the PC from a physical device to a virtual device and start looking at what a user truly needs to perform their function and build solutions that provide the best experience for them to do that.

In the new world order of end user computing, users will be accessing a combination of applications that are hosted internally, hosted externally, and will be relying on SaaS applications managed by third-party providers. They will also be accessing them from not just one device that is locked in their office but from multiple devices and multiple locations, thus driving the need for security policies and management tools that have the ability to understand where the user is and limits their access to their sensitive data based on their location and risk profile. They will also request that they have the ability to browse corporate applications and provision them automatically to themselves through a self-service portal. 

These requirements are typically the reason that desktop virtualization projects fail. As companies move to try to envision what their users will need in the future, they then try to provide these services while still using a PC mentality and approach. What they find is that they cannot prove enough value to their organization to justify the monumental changes that would be required to virtualize their desktops. We are finding it more common that if you assess an organization and try to determine which use-cases will benefit from a strictly virtualized desktop solution, you will find that there are very few users at a corporation that would be able to use this solution.

VMware has taken a much different approach to these challenges and has found that in order to provide a true post-PC era solution, you have to break away from the desktop completely. In the following diagram, you can see the vision for what we are doing:

As you can see above, the concept is to provide universal, secure access to all the user-centric services of the organization whether those are full virtual desktop resources, social resources, app services (internal, external, SaaS), and data services from any device, anywhere. The real challenge of providing these services effectively is ensuring that the users are secure and that you have complete control over your data resources.

What VMware has done to address this challenge is created a solution for this in the form of many products that you may already be familiar with (VMware View, ThinApp, etc) and then providing secure portal-based access through the creation of VMware Horizon Application Manager. I am extremely excited about the release of vHAM (and I love the name… we are looking for an acronym that would spell vBACON) and many folks do not fully understand why I love the concept so much. As is often the case, many people like to summarize new technologies and then make assumptions on how they work and what their value statement is based on something they know about another product in the marketplace. vHAM is far more than just a “single sign-on portal” as many folks describe it. In fact, it is a user-based self-service portal that will provide ubiquitous, secure access to all end-user services at an organization from any device. An example of what this looks like is below:

As you can see, a user logs in using only their active directory login information and they are then presented a portal with all services that they have access to. If you look closely, some of these services are internal applications, some are hosted applications, some are virtual desktop services, and others are SaaS application services. The very interesting thing that many people do not realize (because it is so seamless and simple to use) is that each of these services is protected and abstracted by a layer of enhanced security that allows the IT organization to protect and manage their resources effectively across all of the services they provide.

The really cool thing about vHAM is that the only credential that I know, as the user, is my active directory or LDAP account. From that point, I have no idea what credentials are being used to authenticate me into the other applications. If I were to leave or if someone were to hack my active directory account information, they would still not have access to any of my end-user services. I also would not be able to get into any of the systems or SaaS applications remotely since I would never know what my login credentials were. This is a huge advantage for any security team and provides ton of value in the new world of end-user services.

vHAM is still in its infancy at the time of writing this blog entry. Many of the advanced functionality that is planned is still guarded by NDA, but hopefully from the diagrams above you can see that the vision that VMware is working towards is extremely well thought-out and is very comprehensive. It is not merely a desktop virtualization strategy but is truly a platform for providing end-user services in the post-PC era.