Friday, September 16, 2016

Strategic DevOps—How advanced testing brings broad benefits to Independent Health

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital business transformation case study highlights how Independent Health in Buffalo, New York has entered into a next phase of "strategic DevOps."

After a two-year drive to improve software development, speed to value, and improved user experience of customer service applications, Independent Health has further extended advanced testing benefits to ongoing apps production and ongoing performance monitoring.

Learn here how the reuse of proven performance scripts and replaying of synthetic transactions that mimic user experience have cut costs and gained early warning and trending insights into app behaviors and system status.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

Here to describe how to attain such new strategic levels of DevOps benefits are Chris Trimper, Manager of Quality Assurance Engineering at Independent Health in Buffalo, New York, and Todd DeCapua, Senior Director of Technology and Product Innovation at CSC Digital Brand Services Division and former Chief Technology Evangelist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What were the major drivers that led you to increase the way in which you use DevOps, particularly when you're looking at user-experience issues in the field and in production?

Trimper: We were really hoping to get a better understanding of our users and their experiences. The way I always describe it to folks is that we wanted to have that opportunity to almost look over their shoulder and understand how the system was performing for them.

Whether your user is internal or external, if they don't have that good user experience, they're going to be very frustrated and they're going to have a poor experience. Internally, time is money. So, if it takes longer for things to happen, and you get frustrated potential turnover, it's an unfortunate barrier.

Gardner: What kind of applications are we talking about? Is this across the spectrum of different type of apps, or did you focus on one particular type of app to start out?

End users important

Trimper: Well, when we started, we knew that the end user, our members, were the most important thing to us, and we started off with the applications that our servicing center used, specifically our customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

Trimper
If the member information doesn’t pop fast when a member calls, it can lead to poor call quality, queuing up calls, and it just slows down the whole business. We pride ourselves on our commitment to our members. That goes even as far as, when you call up, making sure that the person on the other end of the phone can service you well. Unfortunately, they can only service you as well as the data that’s provided to them to understand the member and their benefits.

Gardner: It’s one thing to look at user experience through performance, but it's a whole new dimension or additional dimension when you're looking at user experience in terms of how they utilize that application, how well it suits their particular work progress, or the processes for their business, their line of business. Are you able to take that additional step, or are you at the point where the feedback is about how users behave and react in a business setting in addition to just how the application performs?

Trimper: We're starting to get to that point. Before, we only had as much information as we were provided about how an application was used or what they were doing. Obviously, you can't stand there and watch what they're doing 24x7.

Lately, we've been consuming an immense amount of log data from our systems and understanding what they're doing, so that we can understand their problems and their woes, or make sure that what we're testing, whether it's in production monitoring or pre-production testing, is an accurate representation of our user. Again, whether it’s internal or external, they're both just as valuable to us.

Gardner: Before we go any further, Chris, tell us a little bit about Independent Health. What kind of organization is it, how big is it, and what sort of services do you provide in your communities?
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Trimper: We're a healthcare company for the Western New York area. We're a smaller organization. We define the red-shirt treatment that stands for the best quality care that we can provide our members. We try to be very proactive in everything that we do for our members as well. We drive members to the provider to do preventative things, that healthier lifestyle that everybody is trying to go for.

Gardner: Todd, we're hearing this interesting progression toward a feedback loop of moving beyond performance monitoring into behaviors and use patterns and improving that user experience. How common is that, or is Independent Health on the bleeding edge?

Ahead of the curve

DeCapua: Independent Health is definitely moving with, or maybe a little bit ahead of, the curve in the way that they're leveraging some of these capabilities.

DeCapua
If we were to step back and look at where we've been from an industry perspective across many different markets, Agile was hot, and now, as you start to use Agile and break all the right internal systems for all the right reasons, you have to start adopting some of these DevOps practices.

Independent Health is moving a little bit ahead on some of those pieces, and they're probably focusing on a lot of the right things, when you look across other customers I work with. It's things like speed of time to value. That goes across technology teams, business teams, and they're really focused on their end customer, because they're talking about getting these new feature functions to benefit their end customers for all the right reasons.

You heard Chris talking about that improved end-user experience about around their customer service applications. This is when people are calling in, and you're using tools to see what’s going on and what your end users are doing.

There's another organization that actually recorded what their customers were doing when they were having issues. That was a production-monitoring type thing, but now you're recording a video of this. If you called within 10 minutes of having that online issue, as you are calling in and speaking with that customer service representative, they're able to watch the video and see exactly what you did to get that error online to cause that phone call. So having these different types of users’ exceptions, being able to do the type of production monitoring that Independent Health is doing is fantastic.
I do think that Independent Health is hitting the bleeding edge on that piece. That’s what I've observed.

Another area that Chris was telling me about is some of the social media aspects and being able to monitor that is another way of getting feedback. Now, I do think that Independent Health is hitting the bleeding edge on that piece. That’s what I've observed.

Gardner: Let’s hear some more about that social media aspect, getting additional input, additional data through all the available channels that you can.

Trimper: It would be foolish not to pay attention to all aspects of our members, and we're very careful to make sure that they're getting that quality that we try to aim for. Whether it happens to be Facebook, Twitter, or some other mechanism that they give us feedback on, we take all that feedback very seriously.

I remember an instance or two where there might have been some negative feedback. That went right to the product-management team to try to figure out how to make that person’s experience better. It’s interesting, from a healthcare perspective, thinking about that. Normally, you think about a member’s copay or their experience in the hospital. Now, it's their experience with this application or this web app, but those are all just as important to us.

Broadened out?

Gardner: You started this with those customer-care applications. Has this broadened out into other application development? How do you plan to take the benefits that you've enjoyed early and extend them into more and more aspects of your overall IT organization?

Trimper: We started off with the customer service applications and we've grown it into observing our provider portals as well. A provider can come in and look at the benefits of a member, the member portal that the members actually log in to. So, we're actually doing production monitoring of pretty much all of our key areas.

We also do pre-production monitoring of it. So, as we are doing a release, we don’t have to wait until it gets to production to understand how it went. We're going a little bit beyond normal performance testing. We're running the same exact types of continuous monitoring in both our pre-production region and our production regions to ensure that quality that we love to provide.

Gardner: And how are the operations people taking this? Has this been building bridges? Has this been something that struck them as a foreign entity in their domain? How has that gone?

Trimper: At first, it was a little interesting. It felt like to them it was just another thing that they had to check out and had to look at, but I took a unique approach with it. I sat down and talked to them personally and said, "You hear about all these problems that people have, and it’s impossible for you to be an expert on all these applications and understand how it works. Luckily, coming from the quality organization, we test them all the time and we know the business processes."
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The way I sold it to them is, when you see an alert, when you look at the statistics, it’s for these key business processes that you hear about, but you may not necessarily want to know all the details about them or have the time to do that. So, we really gave them insight into the applications.

As far as the alerting, there was a little bit of an adoption practice for that, but overall we've noticed a decrease in the number of support tickets for applications, because we're allowing them to be more proactive, whether it’s proactive of an unfortunately blown service-level agreement (SLA), or it’s a degradation in quality of the performance. We can observe both of those, and then they can react appropriately.

Gardner: Todd, he actually sat down and talked to the production people. Is this something novel? Are we seeing more of that these days?

DeCapua: We're definitely seeing more of it, and I know it’s not unique for Chris. I know there was some push back at the beginning from the operations teams.

There was another thing that was interesting. I was waiting for Chris to hit on it, and maybe he can go into it a little bit more. It was the way that he rolled this out. When you're bringing a monitoring solution in, it’s often the ops team that’s bringing in this solution.

Making it visible

What’s changing now is that you have these application-development testing teams that are saying, "We also want to be able to get access to these types of monitoring, so that our teams can see it and we can improve what we are doing and improve the quality of what we deliver to you, the ops teams. We are going to do instrumenting and everything else that we want to get this type of detail to make it visible."

Chris was sharing with me how he made this available first to the directors, and not just one group of directors, but all the directors, making this very plain-sight visible, and helping to drive some of the support for the change that needed to happen across the entire organization.

As we think about that as a proven practice, maybe Chris is one of the people blazing the trail there. It was a big way of improving and helping to illuminate for all parties, this is what’s happening, and again, we want to work to deliver better quality.

Gardner: Anything to add to that, Chris?

Trimper: There were several folks in the development area that weren’t necessarily the happiest when they learned that the perception of what they originally thought was there and what was really there in terms of performance wasn’t that great.
It was a big way of improving and helping to illuminate for all parties, this is what’s happening.

One of the directors shared an experience with me. He would go into our utilities and look at the dashboards before he was heading to a meeting in our customer service center. He would understand what kind of looks he was going to be given when he walked in, because he was directly responsible for the functionality and performance of all this stuff.

He was pleased that, as they went through different releases and were able to continually make things better, he started seeing everything is green, everything is great today. So, when I walk in, it’s going to be sunshine and happiness, and it was sunshine and happiness, as opposed to potentially a little bit doomy and gloomy. It's been a really great experience for everyone to have. There's a little bit of pain going through it, but eventually, it has been seen as a very positive thing.

Gardner: What about the tools that you have in place? What allows you to provide these organizational and cultural benefits? It seems to me that you need to have data in your hands. You need to have some ability to execute once you have got that data. What’s the technology side of this; we've heard quite a bit about the people and the process?

Trimper: This whole thing came about because our CIO came to me and said. "We need to know more about our production systems. I know that your team is doing all the performance testing in pre-production. Some of the folks at HPE told me about this new tool called Performance Anywhere. Here it is, check it out, and get back to me. "

We were doing all the pre-production testing and we learned that all the scripts that we did, which had already been tried and true and been running and continuously get updates as we get new releases, could just be turned into these production monitors. Then, we found through using the tool, through our trial, and now all of our two plus years that we have been working with it that it was a fairly easy process.

Difficult point

The most difficult point was understanding how to get production data that we could work with, but you could literally take a test on your VUGen script and turn it into a production monitor in 5-10 minutes, and that was pretty invaluable to us.

That means that every time we get a release, we don’t have to modify two sets of scripts and we don’t have two different teams working on everything. We have one team that is involved in the full life cycle of these releases and that can very knowledgeably make the change to those production monitors.

Gardner: HPE Performance Anywhere. Todd, are lot of people using it in the same fashion where they're getting this dual benefit from pre-production and also in deployment and operations?

DeCapua: Yes, it’s definitely something that’s becoming more-and-more aware. It’s a capability that's been around for a little while. You'll also hear about things like IT4IT, but I don’t want to open up that whole can of worms unless we want to dive into it. But as that starts to happen, people like Chris, people like his CIO, want to be able to get better visibility into all systems that are in production, and is there an easy way to do that? Being able to provide that easy way for all of your stakeholders and all of your customers are capabilities that we're definitely seeing people adopt. It was a big way of improving and helping to illuminate for all parties, this is what’s happening
That means that every time we get a release, we don’t have to modify two sets of scripts and we don’t have two different teams working on everything.

Gardner: Can you provide a bit more detail in terms of the actual products and services that made this possible for you, Chris?

Trimper: We started with our HPE LoadRunner scripts, specifically the VUGen scripts, that we were able to turn into the production monitors. Using the AppPulse Active tool from the AppPulse suite of tools, we were able to build our scripts using their SaaS infrastructure and have these monitors built for us and available to test our systems.

Gardner: So what do you see in our call center? Are you able to analyze in any way and say, "We can point to these improvements, these benefits, from the ability for us to tie the loop back on production and quality assurance across the production spectrum?"

Trimper: We can do a lot of trend analysis. To be perfectly honest, we didn’t think that the report would run, but we did a year-to-date trend analysis and it actually was able to compile all of our statistics. We saw really two neat things.

When you had open enrollment, we saw this little spike that shot up there, which we would expect to see, but hopefully we can be more prepared for it as time goes. But we saw a gradual decrease, and I think, due to the ability to monitor, due to the ability to react and plan better for a better performing system, through the course of the year, for this one key piece of pulling member data, we went from an average of about 12-14 seconds down to 4 seconds, and that trend actually is continuing to go down.

I don’t know if it’s now 3 or less today, but if you think about that 12 or 14 down to about 4, that was a really big improvement, and it spoke volumes to our capabilities of really understanding that whole picture and being able to see all of that in one place was really helpful to us.

Where next?

Gardner: Looking to the future, now that you've made feedback loops demonstrate important business benefits and even move into a performance benefit for the business at large, where can you go next? Perhaps you're looking at security and privacy issues, given that you're dealing with compliance and regulatory requirements like most other healthcare organizations. Can you start to employ these methods and these tools to improve other aspects of your SLAs?

Trimper: Definitely, in terms of the SLAs and making sure that we're keeping everything alive and well. As for some of the security aspects, those are still things where we haven’t necessarily gone down the channels yet. But we've started to realize that there are an awful lot of places where we can either tie back or really start closing the gaps in our understanding of just all that is our systems.

Gardner: Todd, last word, what should people be thinking about when they look at their tooling for quality assurance and extending those benefits into full production and maybe doing some cultural bonding at the same time?
The culture is a huge piece. No matter what we talk about nowadays, it starts with that.

DeCapua: The culture is a huge piece. No matter what we talk about nowadays, it starts with that. When I look at somebody like Independent Health, the focus of that culture and the organization is on their end user, on their customer.

When you look at what Chris and his team has been able to do, at a minimum, it’s reducing the number of production incidents. And while you're reducing production incidents, you're doing a number of things. There are actually hard costs there that you're saving. There are opportunity costs now that you can have these resources working on other things to benefit that end customer.

We've talked a lot about DevOps, we've talked a lot about monitoring, we've mentioned now culture, but where is that focus for your organization? How is it that you can start small and incrementally show that value? Because now, what you're going to do is be able to illustrate that in maybe two or three slides, two or three pages.
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But some of the things that Chris has been doing, and other organizations are also doing, is showing, "We did this, we made this investment, this is the return we got, and here's the value." For Independent Health, their customers have a choice, and if you're able to move their experience from 12-14 seconds to 4 seconds, that’s going to help. That’s going to be something that Independent Health wants to be able to share with their potential new customers.

As far as acquiring new customers and retaining their existing customers, this is the real value. That's probably my ending point. It's a culture, there are tools that are involved, but what is the value to the organization around that culture and how is it that you can then take that and use that to gain further support as you move forward?

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Thursday, September 8, 2016

How always-available data forms the digital lifeblood for a university medical center

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital business transformation case study examines how the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha consolidated and unified its data-protection capacities.

We'll explore how adopting storage innovation protects the state's largest hospital from data disruption and adds operational simplicity to complex data lifecycle management.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To describe how more than 150 terabytes of data remain safe and sound, we're joined by Jeff Bergholz, Manager of Technical Systems at The Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Tell us about the major drivers that led you to seek a new backup strategy as a way to keep your data sound and available no matter what.

Bergholz: At Nebraska Medicine, we consist of three hospitals with multiple data centers. We try to keep an active-active data center going. Epic is our electronic medical record (EMR) system, and with that, we have a challenge of making sure that we protect patient data as well as keeping it highly available and redundant.

We were on HPE storage for that, and with it, were really only able to do a clone-type process between data centers and keep retention of that data, but it was a very traditional approach.

Bergholz
A couple of years ago, we did a beta program with HPE on the P6200 platform, a tertiary replica of our patient data. With that, this past year, we augmented our data protection suite. We went from license-based to capacity-based and we introduced some new D2D dedupe devices into that, and StoreOnce as well. What that affords us is to easily replicate that data over to another StoreOnce appliance with minimal disruption.

Part of our goal is to keep backup available for potential recovery solutions. With all the cyber threats that are going on in today's world, we've recently increased our retention cycle from 7 weeks to 52 weeks. We saw and heard from the analysts that the average vulnerability sits in your system for 205 to 210 days. So, we had to come up with a plan for what would it take to provide recovery in case something were to happen.

We came up with a long-term solution and we're enacting it now. Combining HPE 3PAR storage with the StoreOnce, we're able to more easily move data throughout our system. What's important there is that our backup windows have greatly been improved. What used to take us 24 hours now takes us 12 hours, and we're able to guarantee that we have multiple copies of the EMR in multiple locations.

We demonstrate it, because we're tested at least quarterly by Epic as to whether we can restore back to where we were before. Not only are we backing it up, we're also testing and ensuring that we're able to reproduce that data.

More intelligent approach

Gardner: So it sounds like a much more intelligent approach to backup and recovery with the dedupe, a lower cost in storage, and the ability to do more with that data now that it’s parsed in such a way that it’s available for the right reason at the right time.

Bergholz: Resource wise, we always have to do more with less. With our main EMR, we're looking at potentially 150 terabytes of data in a dedupe that shrinks down greatly, and our overall storage footprint for all other systems were approaching 4 petabytes of storage within that.

We've seen some 30:1 decompression ratios within that, which really has allowed my staff and other engineers to be more efficient and frees up some of their time to do other things, as opposed to having to manage the normal backup and retention of that.
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We're always challenged to do more and more. We grow 20-30 percent annually, and by having appropriate resources, we're not going to get 20 to 30 percent more resources every year. So, we have to work smarter with less and leverage the technologies that we have.

Gardner: Many organizations these days are using hybrid media across their storage requirements. The old adage was that for backup and recovery, use the cheaper, slower media. Do you have a different approach to that and have you gone in a different direction?

Bergholz: We do, and backup is as important to us as our data that exists out there. Time and time again, we’ve had to demonstrate the ability to restore in different scenarios, the accepted time of being able to restore and provide service back. They're not going to wait for that. When clinicians or caregivers are taking care of patients, they want that data as quickly as possible. While it may not be the EMR, it maybe some ancillary documents that they need to be able to get in order to provide better care.
We're able, upon request, to enact and restore in 5-10 minutes. In many cases, once we receive a ticket or a notification, we have full data restoration within 15 minutes.

We're able, upon request, to enact and restore in 5 to 10 minutes. In many cases, once we receive a ticket or a notification, we have full data restoration within 15 minutes.

Gardner: Is that to say that you're all flash, all SSD, or some combination? How did you accomplish that very impressive recovery rate?

Bergholz: We're pretty much all dedupe-type devices. It’s not necessarily SSD, but it's good spinning disk, and we have the technology in place to replicate that data and have it highly available on spinning disk, versus having to go to tape to do the restoration. We deal with bunches of restorations on a daily basis. It’s something we're accustomed to and our customers require quick restoration.

In a consolidated strategic approach, we put the technology behind it. We didn’t do the cheapest, but we did the best sort of thing to do, and having an active-active data center and backing up across both data centers enables us to do it. So, we did spend money on the backup portion because it's important to our organization.

Gardner: You mentioned capacity-based pricing. For those of our listeners and readers who might not be familiar with that, what is that and why was that a benefit to you?

Bit of a struggle

Bergholz: It was a little bit of a struggle for us. We were always traditionally client-based or application-based in the backup. If we needed Microsoft Exchange email boxes we had to have an Exchange plug-in. If we had Oracle, we had to have an Oracle plug-in, a SQL plug-in.

While that was great, it enabled us to do a lot, it we were always having to get another plug-in thing to do it. When we saw that with our dedupe compression ratios we were getting, going to a capacity-based license allowed us to strategically and tactically plan for any increase that we were doing within our environment. So now, we can buy in chunklets and keep ahead of the game, making sure that we’re effective there.

We're in throes of enacting archive-type solution through a product called QStar, which I believe HPE is OEM-ing, and we're looking at that as a long-term archive-type process. That's going to a linear tape file system, utilizing the management tools that that product brings us to afford the long-term archive of patient information.

Our biggest challenge is that we never delete anything. It’s always hard with any application. Because of the age of the patient, many cases are required to be kept for 21 years; some, 7 years; some, 9 years. And we're a teaching hospital and research is done on some of that data. So we delete almost nothing.
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In the case of our radiology system, we're approaching 250 terabytes right now. Trying to backup and restore, that amount of data with traditional tools is very ineffective, but we need to keep it forever.

By going to a tertiary-type copy, which this technology brings us, we have our source array, our replicated array, plus now, a tertiary array to take that, too, which is our LTFS solution.

Gardner: And with your backup and recovery infrastructure in place and a sense of confidence that comes with that, has that translated back into how you do the larger data lifecycle management equation? That is to say, are there some benefits of knowledge of quality assurance in backup that then allows people to do things they may not have done or not worried about, and therefore have a better business transformation outcome for your patients and your clinicians?
Being able to demonstrate solutions time and time again buys confidence through leadership throughout the organization and it makes those people sleep safer at night.

Bergholz: From a leadership perspective, there's nothing real sexy about backup. It doesn’t get oohs and ahs out of people, but when you need data to be restored, you get the oohs and ahs and the thank-yous and the praise for doing that. Being able to demonstrate solutions time and time again buys confidence through leadership throughout the organization and it makes those people sleep safer at night.

Recently, we passed HIMSS Level 7. One of the remarks from that group was that a) we hadn’t had any production sort of outage, and b) when they asked a physician on the floor, what do you do when things go down, and what do you do when you lose something? He said the awesome part here is that we haven’t gone down and, when we lose something, we're able to restore that in a very timely manner. That was noted on our award.

Gardner: Of course, many healthcare organizations have been using thin clients and keeping everything at the server level for a lot of reasons, a edge to core integration benefit. Would you feel more enabled to go into mobile and virtualization knowing that everything that's kept on the data-center side is secure and backed up, not worrying about the fact that you don't have any data on the incline? Is that factored into any of your architectural decisions about how to do client decision-making?

Desktop virtualization

Bergholz: We have been in the throes of desktop virtualization. We do a lot of Citrix XenApp presentations of applications that keeps the data in a data center and a lot of our desktop devices connect to that environment.

The next natural progression for us is desktop virtualization (VDI), ensuring that we're keeping that data safe in the data center, ensuring that we're backing it up, protecting the patient information on that, and it's an interesting thought and philosophy. We try to sell it as an ROI-type initiative to start with. By the time you start putting all pieces to the puzzle, the ROI really doesn't pan out. At least we've seen in two different iterations.

Although it can be somewhat cheaper, it's not significant enough to make a huge launch in that route. But the main play there, and the main support we have organizationally, is from a data-security perspective. Also, it's the the ease of managing the virtual desktop environment. It frees up our desktop engineers from being feet on the ground, so to speak, to being application engineers and being able to layer in the applications to be provisioned through the virtual desktop environment.
The next natural progression for us is desktop virtualization (VDI), ensuring that we're keeping that data safe in the data center, ensuring that we're backing it up, protecting the patient information on that.

And one important thing in the healthcare industry is that when you have a workstation that has an issue and requires replacement or re-imaging, that’s an invasive step. If it’s in a patient room or in a clinical-care area, you actually have to go in, disrupt that flow, put a different system in, re-image, make sure you get everything you need. It can be anywhere from an hour to a three-hour process.

We do have a smattering of thin devices out there. When there are issues, it’s merely just replaying or redoing a gold image to it. The great part about thin devices versus thick devices is that in lot of cases, they're operating in a sterile environment. With traditional desktops, the fans are sucking air through infection control and all that; there's noise; perhaps they're blowing dust within a room, if it's not entirely clean. SSD devices are a perfect-play there. It’s really a drop-off, unplug, and re-plug sort of technology.

We're excited about that for what it will bring to the overall experience. Our guiding principle is that you have the same experience no matter where you're working. Getting there from Step A to Step Z is a journey. So, you do that a little bit a time and you learn as you go along, but we're going to get there and we'll see the benefit of that.
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Gardner: And ensuring the recovery and voracity of that data is a huge part of being able to make those other improvements.

Bergholz: Absolutely. What we've seen from time to time is that users, while they're fairly knowledgeable, save their documents where they save them to. Policy is to make sure you put them within the data center. That may or may not always be adhered to. By going to a desktop virtualization, they won’t have any other choice.

A thin client takes that a step further and ensures that nothing gets saved back to a device, where that device could potentially disappear and cause a situation.

We do encrypt all of our stuff. Any device that's out there is covered by encryption, but still there's information on there. It’s well-protected, but this just takes away that potential.

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Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Loyalty management innovator Aimia's transformation journey to modernized IT

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital business transformation case study examines how loyalty management innovator Aimia is modernizing, consolidating, and standardizing its global IT infrastructure.

As a result of rapid growth and myriad acquisitions, Montreal-based Aimia is in a leapfrog mode -- modernizing applications, consolidating data centers, and adopting industry standard platforms. We'll now learn how improving end-user experiences and leveraging big data analytics helps IT organizations head off digital disruption and improve core operations and processes.
 
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To describe how Aimia is entering a new era of strategic IT innovation, we're joined by André Hébert, Senior Vice President of Technology at Aimia in Montreal. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What are some of the major drivers that have made you seek a common IT strategy?

Hébert: If you go back in time, Aimia grew through a bunch of acquisitions. We started as Aeroplan, Air Canada's frequent flyer program and decided to go in the loyalty space. That was the corporate strategy all along. We acquired two major companies, one in the UK and one that was US-based, which gave us a global footprint. As a result of these acquisitions, we ended up with quite a large IT footprint worldwide and wanted to look at ways of globalizing and also consolidating our IT footprint.

Hébert
Gardner: For many people, when they think of a loyalty program, it's frequent flyer miles, perhaps points at a specific retail outlet, but this varies quite a bit market to market around the globe. How do you take something that's rather fractured as a business and make it a global enterprise?

Hébert: We've split the business into two different business units. The first one is around coalition loyalty. This is where Aimia actually runs the program. Good examples are Aeroplan in Canada or Nectar in the UK, where we own the currency, we operate the program, and basically manage all of the coalition partners. That's one side.

The other side is what we call our global loyalty solutions. This is where we run loyalty programs for other companies. Through our standard technology, we set up a technology footprint within the customer site or preferably in one of our data centers and we run the technology, but the program is often white-labeled, so Aimia's name doesn't appear anywhere. We run it for banks, retailers and many industry verticals.

Almost like money

Gardner: You mentioned the word currency, and as I think about it, loyalty points are almost like money -- it is currency -- it can be traded, and it can be put into other programs. Tell us about this idea. Are you operating almost like a bank or a virtual currency trader of some sort?

Hébert: You could say that the currency is like money. It is accumulated. If you look at our systems, they're very similar to bank-account systems. So our systems are like banks'. If you look at debit and credit transactions, they mimic the accumulation and redemption transactions that our members do.
Gardner: What's been your challenge from an IT perspective to allow your company to thrive in this digital economy?

Hébert: Our biggest challenge was how large the technology footprint was. We still operate many dozens of data centers across the globe. The project with HPE is to consolidate all of our technology footprint into four Tier 3 data centers that are scattered across the globe to better serve our customers. Those will benefit from the best security standards and extremely robust data-center infrastructure. 

On the infrastructure side, it's all about simplifying, consolidating, virtualizing, using the cloud, leveraging the cloud, but in a virtual private way, so that we also keep our data very secured. That's on the infra side.

On the application side, we probably have more applications than we have customers. One of the big drivers there is that we have a global product strategy. Several loyalty products have now been developed. We're slowly migrating all of our customers over to our new loyalty systems that we've created to simplify our application portfolios. We have a large number of applications today, and the plan is to try to consolidate all these applications into key products that we've been developing over the last few years.
We've shopped around for a partner that can help us in that space and we thought that HPE had the best credentials, the best offer for us to go forward.

Gardner: That’s quite a challenge. You're modernizing and consolidating applications. At the same time, you're consolidating and modernizing your infrastructure. It reminds me of what HPE did just a few years ago when it decided to split and to consolidate many data centers. Was that something that attracted you to HPE, that they have themselves gone through a similar activity?

Hébert: Yes, that is one of the reasons. We've shopped around for a partner that can help us in that space and we thought that HPE had the best credentials, the best offer for us to go forward. 

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), a solution that they have offered, is both innovative, yet it is virtual and private. So, we feel that our customer’s data will be significantly more secure than just going to any public cloud.

Gardner: How is consolidating applications and modernizing infrastructure at the same time helping you to manage these compliance and data-protection issues?

Raising the bar

Hébert: The modernization and infrastructure consolidation is, in fact, helping greatly in continuing to secure data and meet ever more difficult security standards, such as PCI and DSS 3.0. Through this process, we're going to raise the bar significantly over data privacy.

Gardner: André, a lot of organizations don't necessarily know how to start. There's so much to do when it comes to apps, data, infrastructure modernization and, in your case, moving to VPC. Do you have any thoughts about how to chunk that out, how to prioritize, or are you making this sort of a big bang approach, where you are going to do it all at once and try to do it as rapidly as possible? Do you have a philosophy about how to go about something so complex?

Hébert: We've actually scheduled the whole project. It’s a three-year journey into the new HPE world. We decided to attack it by region, starting with Canada and the US, North America. Then, we moved on to zooming into Asia-Pacific, and the last phase of the project is to do Europe. We decided to go geographically. 
The program is run centrally from Canada, but we have boots on the ground in all of those regions. HPE has taken the lead into the actual technical work. Aimia does the support work, providing documentation, helping with all of the intricacies of our systems and the infrastructure, but it's a co-led project, with HPE doing the heavy lifting.

Gardner: Something about costs comes to mind when you go standard. Sometimes, there are some upfront cost, you have to leapfrog that hurdle, but your long-term operating costs can be significantly lower. What is it about the cost structure? Is it the standardized infrastructure platforms, are you using cheaper hardware, is it open source software, all the above? How do you factor this as a return on investment (ROI) type of an equation?

Hébert: It’s all of the above. Because we're right in the middle of this project, it will allow us to standardize, to evergreen, a lot of our technology that was getting older. A lot of our servers were getting old. So, we're giving the infrastructure a shot in the arm as far as modernization. 

From a VPC point of view, we're going to leverage this internal cloud much more significantly. From a CPU point of view, and from an infrastructure point of view, we're going to have significantly fewer physical servers than what we have today. It's all operated and run by HPE. So, all of the management, all of the ITO work is done by HPE, which means that we can focus on apps, because our secret sauce is in apps, not in infrastructure. Infrastructure is a necessary evil.

Gardner: That brings up another topic, DevOps. When you're developing, modernizing, or having a continuous-development process for your applications, if you have that cloud and infrastructure in place and it’s modern, that can allow you to do more with the development phase. Is that something you've been able to measure at all in terms of the ability to generate or update apps more rapidly?

Hébert: We're just dipping our toe into advanced DevOps, but definitely there are some benefits around that. We're currently focused on trying to get more value from that.

Gardner: When you think about ROI, there are, of course, those direct costs on infrastructure, but there are ancillary benefits in terms of agility, business innovation, and being able to come to market faster with new products and services. Is that something that is a big motivator for you and do you have anything to demonstrate yet in terms of how that could factor?

Relationship 2.0

Hébert: We're very much focused right now on what I would say is Relationship 1.0, but HPE was selected as a partner for their ability to innovate. They also are in a transition phase, as we all know, so while we're focused on getting the heavy lifting done, we're focusing on innovation and focusing on new projects with HPE. We actually call that Relationship 2.0.

Gardner: For others who are looking at similar issues -- consolidation, modernization, reducing costs over time, leveraging cloud models -- any words of advice now that you are into this journey as to how to best go about it or maybe things to avoid?
Hébert: When we first looked at this, we thought that we could do a lot of that consolidation work ourselves. Consolidating 42 data centers into 4 is a big job, and where HPE helps in that regard is that they bring the experience, they bring the teams, and they bring the focus to this. 

We probably could have done it ourselves. It probably would have cost more and it probably would have taken longer. One of the benefits that I also see is that HPE manages thousands and thousands of servers. With their ability to automate all of the server management, they've taken it to a level. As a small company, we couldn’t afford to do all of the automation that they can afford doing on these thousands of servers.
We probably could have done it ourselves. It probably would have cost more and it probably would have taken longer.

Gardner: Before we close out, André, looking to the future -- two, three, four years out -- when you've gone through this process, when you've gotten those modern apps and they are running on virtual private clouds and you can take advantage of cloud models, where do you see this going next? 

Do you have some ideas about mobile applications, about different types of transactional capabilities, maybe getting more into the retail sector? How does this enable you to have even greater growth strategically as a company in a few years?

Hébert: If you start with the cloud, the world is about to see a very different cloud model. If you fast forward five years, there will be mega clouds, and everybody will be leveraging these clouds. Companies that actually purchase servers will be a thing of the past. 

When it comes to mobile, clearly Aimia’s strategy around mobile is very focused. The world is going mobile. Most apps will require mobile support. If you look at analytics, we have a whole other business that focuses on analytics. Clearly, loyalty is all about making all this data make sense, and there's a ton of data out there. We have got a business unit that specializes in big data, in advanced analytics, as it pertains to the consumers, and clearly for us it is a very strategic area that we're investing in significantly.

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