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Today, we got the chance to sit down with Aprimo, an on-demand marketing automation company that has built their software business around scaling their own cloud infrastructure with VMware vCenter . Aprimo has optimized its offerings to scale with customer growth and leverage best-in-class hardware to match innovation in the software layers it develops. In this discussion, we found less need for discussing private vs. public cloud. Instead, we found more focus on performance and speed-to-market as key drivers for moving a virtualization strategy into personal cloud infrastructure reality. Sponsor The story of Aprimo starts with virtualization - and has led to the company defining the boundaries of its cloud offering and product architecture around the benefits of scaling resources on demand. Aprimo uses a Microsoft .Net three-tier architecture with MSSQL in the back-end. All of the three tiers (front-end, business logic, database) run in virtual containers that are monitored with vCenter. Performance is the question that Aprimo studied when bringing vendors on board. The company has relationships with 3Com, Cisco, and HP for the three key parts of the technology stack. vCenter joins these offerings together and offers the company quick response to new customer requests. Like many business, marketing can come in waves and this architecture is designed to scale around the unknown and to be agile enough to support the marketing calendar. Here is a diagram showing the core services VMware vCenter is focused on: We had the chance to explore the customer experience of build-your-own-cloud with John Gilmartin, Director of Product Marketing at VMware. We asked him if VMware sells clouds, or if instead its tool build clouds. What we found is that it is a bit of both. Like a data center itself, or a complex application, building your own cloud can be a multi-faceted event. Customers are using vCenter as a building block to manage the resources and enabling automation around business processes. By thinking of automation as the line in the sand between virtualization and cloud, we can easily see how connecting business processes focuses on the best place in harnessing on-demand resources for business benefit. Some of the areas of focus we the Aprimo team took on as the company to optimize its virtual resources into its cloud. Design and optimization of resource pools Database tier optimization and support new dynamic customer scaling Designing for performance with vendor evaluations Leveraging best practices from VMware on tuning and finding bottlenecks Processes for spinning up new users automatically across all resources Out of these focus areas, we found database scaling the most interesting to consider. It seems clear that as build-your-own-clouds grow, database performance, concurrency, and process integration are ripe for further optimization. What we learned from Aprimo and VMware vCenter is that launching a cloud infrastructure is a combination of virtualizing computing resources and designing the automation of the right business and technical processes. Reaching the stage of an effective cloud depends on how the team thinks about connecting software, sales, and infrastructure together as a process. Making a commitment to your own cloud can bring a company together - from sales manager to developer. This join can position an organization to win customers and grow the business due to an increase in the end to end agility of the organization. Is your business ready to cook up a cloud recipe of your own? Discuss
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One Approach to Growth: Build Your Own Cloud with vCenter in the Middle
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McKesson is a global health care leader that has 26 operating companies. The centrial IT group had the vision to automate "the last mile" of IT planning, the budget approval process. We think of it as the budget approval dance, and when containing costs, it's a ritual that can leave scars. This company has evolved to the point of improving the cost of budgeting, and making it faster and smarter by understanding the assets, services, and service delivery of IT. Budgeting can be painful because it can be in slow-motion. Contrast this with the real-time controls of such as VMware V-Motion and Amazon's web service console and we see a great linkup for driving process change through budgeting. And driving budgeting by cloud and virtualization. We took a look at McKesson's journey and the service catalog functions of NewScale , an IT services catalog company. Sponsor McKesson: Let's Start with Less Meetings and Less 5mb Spreadsheets NewScale has customers like McKesson and Charles Schwab and competitors like HP, IBM, Tivoli. The company has been growing its customer base and helping stable-state enterprises to leverage Service Management. And that leads directly into cloud procurement. We tracked the use case at McKesson, where the company landed at the service desk in the cloud as a means to the end in their journey to build a low-impact budget process . We see a lot of benefit in this approach, where if successful, it would mean that the advantages to go with commodity pre-approved services dramatically improves the timing and effort of procurement. This is a lever that gives Finance a significant hand in the IT spend. Since cloud and virtualization offerings can be spun-up with service call, the cloud is well positioned to be there as budgeting and approval processes are automated. In phase one, the company reported significant progress in moving processes towards the service catalog. One click vs. Fill Out the Form In the end, the move towards enterprise standards may be won over simplicity. Is it less clicks to provision. This means connecting the dots between processes, systems, software, teams, and policy. To EC2, or to EC2 through Official Channels: That is the Question IT services management comes into the picture and could make a difference in how the business and technical contributors of organizations are rewarded for moving to a standard platform. Information Technology Infrastructure Library is tool set that has been given to IT managers to try to wrap standard language around IT service management. It gives the enterprise a common way to manage processes for IT and track the changes involved in building and operating systems. Services platforms like Amazon and Salesforce can be considered IT disinter-mediation. We all know a IT leader out there somewhere who is funding their project by credit card out in the cloud. IT, of course, knows this also (especially since they are likely watching your network traffic). One part of the service management offering is making it even easier than Amazon. Carrot, vs. stick. Service catalog management has the promise when it wraps things like Amazon's EC2, or VMwares offerings, gives the enterprise a way to get the same service from the web. And, with budget approval and IT approval baked in, the carrot is there. All of IT moves towards transparency and IT processes as being measured as processes. In the ITIL community, there is discussion of the next layer of the library moving towards service delivery in the move towards ITIL Version 3. It's easy to see that "provision server" becomes fully automated. Soon, all the IT functions below it become invisible. We see this as a future cloud inflection point, where instead of there "cloud services", we are all in one. Zen Mashup What has been your experience in mashing ITIL, ITIL Service Delivery in your environment? Do your IT services flow like water? Discuss
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Got Budget? Virtualization as Poster Child for Less Meetings
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budget,
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enterprise,
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