“What is your perception of living in the cloud?”

In the engagement I was on last week, one of the most thought-provoking questions we presented to the Sr. IT management team was: “What is your perception of living in the cloud and where do you think your challenges/improvements will be?” The feedback that we got from them made me think that they were not unique in their viewpoints and that most customers that are on the ‘roadmap to the cloud’ are going to face very similar challenges. I wanted to capture their comments and share them because they are a fairly progressive organization and the information we gathered was very insightful into what was ‘front of mind’ for them.

In order to protect their identity, I can only provide a very high level of what the organization looked like, but effectively, they were a centralized IT organization that provides services to multiple subsidiary business groups. One of their primary goals for their future development is that they must be able to provide better services to their customers than Google/Amazon/Microsoft can provide. I am working on a blog post on that entire subject alone because in this space I am working in, this is the primary theme we are getting from every company we engage with. They were fully aware that they were already being measured by their subsidiaries on their ability to deliver services vs what is available in the market. One of their quotes was: “..we believe every one of our customers will say that we provide a very high quality of service, however, they will follow that by saying they wish we would deliver them faster.” Again, that statement alone could drive an entire blog post regarding IT transformation and what it really means to an organization, but it was a strong driver in their response to the question at hand. Each person in the group participated in the feedback and their answers are broken out below.

VP of Open Systems Infrastructure

“I think the biggest challenge that I perceive is changing our customer’s mindset about their infrastructure. Today, we get requests for a specific server with specific processors and memory in them and specific storage they think is the best to support their environment. The challenge is to get them to change their perception of how they receive IT services. They should not care what the infrastructure is behind their services because they should be abstracted into a service catalog. If the SLA's are met, the infrastructure should not matter to them. The other challenge is that some of the subsidiaries will have no issues with Multi-tenancy but others will not accept this without putting up a significant fight. The biggest benefits in my perception are better resource utilization, lower time to market, and being able to get to a service-catalog based environment with pre-defined tiers of service. Also, today our service request process is painful and slow and we need to get to a point where service request and delivery is on par with public cloud providers. Another big component is that none of the subsidiaries pay for their services from us today, so they do not understand the dynamics of what a request entails. We are looking forward to cloud in order to improve transparency through the use of a service catalog. Change and capacity management are other pieces that we need to improve and are hoping to get once we improve our service delivery model.”

VP of Application Development

“Standardization is still the biggest challenge for us currently and I fear it will be as we move forward into cloud. Also, we are challenged with how we will interoperate with other cloud service providers such as MS Azure. Getting all the subsidiaries to the same development platform seems like an impossible task. Also, we have to be fairly flexible in the ability to accommodate and integrate our COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) applications.”

Chief Security Officer

“Our challenges today exist because there is no set security standard for the entire organizational structure. Many subsidiaries that need higher security do not have it and many that think they need it do not. Post transformation, it would be much better for us because we could enforce the right levels of security for each subsidiary. Another strong benefit of cloud is that we will centralize and consolidate our security audit functions. This is a process today that takes an enormous amount of time and is highly inefficient. We have an education challenge for the subs in that we need to get them over the fear of multi-tenancy. Today, many of them will throw compliance interpretation in our face to resist being multi-tenant. I know that we have the ability to amend most of our compliance SLA’s and I feel we could significantly reduce our exposure to risk if we centralize our security model. One challenge we will face is that we will have to adapt our application certification process and procedures to fit our cloud methodology. Today, we have a very manual process and not much standardization. In the cloud model, we would be able to enforce application development standards that would allow us to certify applications much more efficiently.  

Chief Technology Officer

“We want to establish that we are the premiere service provider for our subsidiaries. We feel we can provide better services than any public cloud provider if we can change our core strategy for IT service delivery. It is important for us to map our IT services to the business. We need to educate our customers on what we offer and how we can help them and then tie a business justification for our services. If one of our customers feels they need to develop their applications to Azure, then they need to provide a strong business justification for why they are going to do that and how they are going to own their security and maintenance of those services. Another part of cloud is that we need to shut down datacenters that are not needed. Compute should be done centrally with a D.R. service offering that we can provide if a customer requests that level of service. A huge benefit of a service catalog and a cloud strategy is that we will be able to modify behavior by changing the way we provision services and charging those services back to the customer. We believe there won’t be many customers who will choose to implement a standalone dedicated physical infrastructure when they see that the time to market is 5-10X longer than our cloud-based offerings and when they see the costs associated with them. Capacity on demand is another benefit of cloud. Our ability to ramp services up and down and only charge business units for what they consume would be a substantial improvement over where we are today. Our goal is to take the quality of service we provide today and accelerate the time to market while reducing our operating costs and increasing our overall IT efficiency through the adoption of a cloud strategy.

My Conclusion

One of the biggest challenges in IT today is being able to quantify what people think “The Cloud” really is. I thought this IT organization had a very concise perspective on the key tenants of the cloud philosophy. Granted, this may just be because their understanding matches very closely what my own understanding of the industry is, but I still think they are on to something. Ultimately, they are very aware of the challenges ahead of them that exist in changing the people and process mechanics of their environment but they are working towards unifying their IT teams to work towards the common goals listed above. Much of their role in the near future is to educate their customers on the importance of pursuing this IT transformation motion and selling them on the value that will be gained through the effort. I definitely feel they have a large amount of strategic opportunities available to them and I think there are still some areas they have not even realized are there. For example, the application development team still hasn’t looked at next-generation application development frameworks and done any assessment of what the impact could be for them if they adopted them. They are, however, much farther down the path than many companies and have a strong sense of purpose as they move their projects forward.

My First ‘Vision’ Engagement.

Last week I got to experience my first ‘Vision’ workshop from start to finish. I have to say, I am completely blown away to see this group in action. I rode along for mentoring and thoroughly enjoyed seeing how many ‘big brains’ we had engaged from VMware’s perspective and how much interaction and participation we were able to get from the company we were helping. The magic of the way we engage seems to be the ability to get CIO’s and CTO’s and IT VP’s all in the room at the same time discussing strategic initiatives that the company needs to achieve in the next 3-5 years. I have personally been on over a thousand customer meetings in the last 5-6 years and I have never been in a meeting that had as many strategic IT management people as these meetings had last week.

Another key aspect of what I was impressed by was the efficiency of the engagement. I asked my mentor: “How long do we typically take to get a full strategy together… 3 months? 6 months?” He laughed and said: “Our goal is to get every engagement we do completely executed in under 30 days.” I did a double-spit-take on that one. How could we possibly understand the organizations’ goals, talk to all groups within IT that are involved, assess where they are today and do a gap analysis, get with the SME’s and discuss possible solutions, put together a roadmap, tie the roadmap to specific work packages, discuss with PSO organization to align resources and project scopes, put together a full product list with pricing, generate a proposal, and get it all presented back to the customer in less than 30 days?!?! Once again, I was greeted with a smile and given the look of: “Watch this, rook… we are about to blow your mind.” Indeed they did.

Day 1: We all arrived at a hotel near the customer the day before the first meeting. I watched as people starting rolling into the conference room and introduced myself. I was shocked as more and more people came into the room. At the end of the flow, we had anyone and everyone from VMware that would be involved with the account. The TAM, the account manager, the SE, the SSM, SME’s from each discipline (VEUC, Cloud, Etc), and then the vision team members. (The BSS and BSA team.) I have to say, I was extremely impressed. I have never really been in a position where getting all these people in the same room at the same time would be possible. Then, the magic happened. Reid Engstrom was my BSS on this account. (Yes, I am the BSA on this account, with my mentor John Steiner helping whip me into fighting form.) Reid is to me as Gandalf was to Frodo. He is absolutely a candidate for ‘the most interesting man alive’ and has been in amazing roles in this industry. His previous experience was as CTO of one of my favorite companies… Harley-Davidson. He immediately took the reins and kicked things off. With a wisdom born of experience he laid-out the agenda for the following two days, explained the process we would go through, cleared-up any questions and then instructed each member of the team what their role was and made sure they were enabled to deliver their piece of the puzzle. We went through together, as a team, each persons’ presentation and polished them up. Each person gave feedback and was engaged. It was the most collaboration I have witnessed. Amazingly… it was done in about 4 hours.

Day 2: We arrive onsite at the customer at 8:00AM and start to sit down. All the VMware team came in and then it was clear that there were just as many people from the companies’ IT department. As we started introductions, that is when I was bewildered again. CIO, CTO, VP of App Dev, VP of Infrastructure, VP of Mainframe, CSO. They were all there! At the same time! Then, we listened as the CIO level-set us on their top goals, challenges, etc and we went through our prepared presenters… gathering absolutely amazing amounts of information from the IT executive team. At one point, I actually threw a question out expecting that everyone would vehemently disagree. I asked: “Based on what you have told me, do you think you are at risk of having ‘Shadow IT’ in your environment?” After I clarified what Shadow IT is, they all answered: “Oh yeah… I am SURE we do! But, today, we have no way of knowing… they don’t need approval for anything under $100K..” I sat there stunned. They were being completely transparent. Completely divulging information to us. And then it dawned on me….

“WE were doing THEM a favor. And they were grateful for it.”

No one had ever engaged them in this manner before. No one had come to them to bring the forces to bear to affect real transformative change in their environment. They were getting extreme pressure from the industry competitors (Amazon, Google, Teremark[Verizon]) and needed help. So much so, they spent 4 hours with us to give us as much data as we needed. 4 HOURS! ;-p

Day 2 – Part 2: After our meeting with the team, Reid gathered us all up back at the hotel conference room and we began our debriefing. We went through what we heard. Did a rough swipe of a SWOT analysis. Identified risks to them and us. We gathered everyones’ notes. (Reid actually has pre-built notes pages designed in order to ensure people capture relevant data in the workshop… awesome.) After gathering this, we then shifted gears to identify next steps and give people ownership of follow-ups.

All in all, after only two days of meetings it was amazing to see the amount of work that we completed in a fully collaborative fashion. It truly felt like 1+1 = 3 when we left. We are still in the middle of this, but I am extremely certain this engagement will be completed within 30 days. Amazing.

What is the ‘Vision Program’?

It is my 4^th full week of getting indoctrinated into the Vision Program within VMware and I wanted to do a write-up to explain what it is we do, how it is we do it, and why we do it. Effectively, we are a new venture for VMware that is focused heavily on changing the way the VMware field sales team works with strategic accounts through the use of ‘value engineering’. Our mission statement is as follows:

To collaboratively develop an actionable Cloud strategy, business case, and execution plan through clear alignment to the customers’ goals and objectives.

The key differentiator for our group is that we are strategic in nature and not transactional. Our execution is focused on the top strategic VMware customers and the team we have is full of senior-level people who have been in strategic leadership roles before within corporate IT. Within the group, we have two distinct roles: Business Solutions Strategists (BSS) and Business Solutions Architects (BSA). The BSS group are folks that used to be CIO’s and CTO’s of companies themselves and understand people, process, and politics of corporate IT organizations and how to engage with senior management teams to define the strategic direction of their own companies. The BSA’s are the senior architects that define the strategic technology roadmap for the organization and ties together the products and services that are needed to transform the IT organization. The BSA aligns products and services to a roadmap that breaks out strategic IT initiatives and then outlines the work stream and the work packages for each.

There are multiple key strategies that we execute on today. Some examples of these are: Optimizing your virtual datacenter, Enterprise management, Application modernization, Virtual End User Computing, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to name a few. Each of these has a distinct work stream associated with it and within each work stream we define a work package to complete each step of the stream.

The work streams break out all the logical steps for how an organization needs to address each strategic initiative and assigns work that needs to be done for each. We take these and shift each tab out into a timeline that meets the project goals of the teams we interview during our engagement. The work package is a visual way for us (the BSA’s) to assign products and services (VMware or other) to each work stream component. This acts as a high-level roadmap for how the organization will transition their environment from where they are to where they want to be.

Using these tools, the Vision Program provides strategic guidance to large customers to get them to realize the goal of VMware to become an IT transformation company in the future. One of the best quotes that I have heard was: “You are the leading edge of the ‘Cloud Company’.” Our goal is to tie together the field sales teams, the SME’s, the PSO team, and the customer’s entire IT management team and provide an actionable approach to moving to a cloud IT organization. We truly believe this is the future of VMware as a company and how we will grow to being seen as what we truly are, rather than just a virtualization company.