Thursday, February 23, 2017

IDOL-powered appliance delivers better decisions via comprehensive business information searches

The next BriefingsDirect digital transformation case study highlights how a Swiss engineering firm created an appliance that quickly deploys to index and deliver comprehensive business information.

By scouring thousands of formats and hundreds of languages, the approach then provides via a simple search interface unprecedented access to trends, leads, and the makings of highly informed business decisions.

We will now explore how SEC 1.01 AG delivers a truly intelligent services solution -- one that returns new information to ongoing queries and combines internal and external information on all sorts of resources to produce a 360-degree view of end users’ areas of intense interest.

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

To learn how to access the best available information in about half the usual time, we're joined by David Meyer, Chief Technology Officer at SEC 1.01 AG in Switzerland. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Meyer
Gardner: What are some of the trends that are driving the need for what you've developed. It's called the i5 appliance?

Meyer: The most important thing is that we can provide instant access to company-relevant information. This is one of today’s biggest challenges that we address with our i5 appliance.

Decisions are only as good as the information bases they are made on. The i5 provides the ability to access more complete information bases to make substantiated decisions. Also, you don’t want to search all the time; you want to be proactively informed. We do that with our agents and our automated programs that are searching for new information that you're interested in.

Gardner: As an organization, you've been around for quite a while and involved with  large applications, packaged applications -- SAP, for example and R/3 -- but over time, more data sources and ability to gather information came on board, and you saw the need in the market for this appliance. Tell us a little bit about what led you to create it?

Accelerating the journey

Meyer: We started to dive into big data about the time that HPE acquired Autonomy, December 2011, and we saw that it’s very hard for companies to start to become a data-driven organization. With the i5 appliance, we would like to help companies accelerate their journey to become such a company.

Gardner: Tell us what you mean by a 360-degree view? What does that really mean in terms of getting the right information to the right people at the right time?

Meyer: In a company's information scope, you don’t just talk about internal information, but you also have external information like news feeds, social media feeds, or even governmental or legal information that you need and don’t have to time to search for every day.

So, you need to have a search appliance that can proactively inform you about things that happen outside. For example, if there's a legal issue with your customer or if you're in a contract discussion and your partner loses his signature authority to sign that contract, how would you get this information if you don't have support from your search engine?
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Gardner: And search has become such a popular paradigm for acquiring information, asking a question, and getting great results. Those results are only as good as the data and content they can access. Tell us a little bit about your company SEC 1.01 AG, your size and your scope or your market. Give us a little bit of background about your company.

Meyer: We've been an HPE partner for 26 years, and we build business-critical platforms based on HPE hardware and also the HPE operating system, HP-UX. Since the merger of Autonomy and HPE in 2011, we started to build solutions based on HPE's big-data software, particularly IDOL and Vertica.

Gardner: What was it about the environment that prevented people from doing this on their own? Why wouldn't you go and just do this yourself in your own IT shop?

Meyer: The HPE IDOL software ecosystem, is really an ecosystem of different software, and these parts need to be packed together to something that can be installed very quickly and that can provide very quick results. That’s what we did with the i5 appliance.

We put all this good software from HPE IDOL together into one simple appliance, which is simple to install. We want to accelerate the time that is needed to start with big data to get results from it and to get started with the analytical part of using your data and gain money out of it.

 Multiple formats

Gardner: As we mentioned earlier, getting the best access to the best data is essential. There are a lot of APIs and a lot of tools that come with the IDOL ecosystem as you described it, but you were able to dive into a thousand or more file formats, support a 150 languages, and 400 data sources. That's very impressive. Tell us how that came about.

Meyer: When you start to work with unstructured data, you need some important functionality. For example, you need to have support for lot of languages. Imagine all these social media feeds in different languages. How do you track that if you don't support sentiment analysis on these messages?

On the other hand, you also need to understand any unstructured format. For example, if you have video broadcasts or radio broadcasts and you want to search for the content inside these broadcasts, you need to have a tool to translate the speech to text. HPE IDOL brings all the functionality that is needed to work with unstructured data, and we packed that together in our i5 appliance.

Gardner: That includes digging into PDFs and using OCR. It's quite impressive how deep and comprehensive you can be in terms of all the types of content within your organization.
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How do you physically do this? If it's an appliance, you're installing it on-premises, you're able to access data sources from outside your organization, if you choose to do that, but how do you actually implement this and then get at those data sources internally? How would an IT person think about deploying this?

Meyer: We've prepared installable packages. Mainly, you need to have connectors to connect to repositories, to data ports. For example, if you have a Microsoft Exchange Server, you have a connector that understands very well how the Exchange server can communicate to that connector. So, you have the ability to connect to that data source and get any content including the metadata.

You talk about metadata for an e-mail, for example, the “From” to “To”, to “Subject,” whatever. You have the ability to put all that content and this metadata into a centralized index, and then you're able to search that information and refine the information. Then, you have a reference to your original document.

When you want to enrich the information that you have in your company with external information, we developed a so-called SECWebConnector that can capture any information from the Internet. For example, you just need to enter an RSS feed or a webpage, and then you can capture the content and the metadata you want it to search for or that is important for your company.

Gardner: So, it’s actually quite easy to tailor this specifically to an industry focus, if you wish, to a geographic focus. It’s quite easy to develop an index that’s specific to your organization, your needs, and your people.

Informational scope

Meyer: Exactly. In our crowded informational system that we have with the Internet and everything, it’s important that companies can choose where they want to have the information that is important for them. Do I need legal information, do I need news information, do I need social media information, and do I need broadcasting information? It’s very important to build your own informational scope that you want to be informed about, news that you want to be able to search for.

Gardner: And because of the way you structured and engineered this appliance, you're not only able to proactively go out and request things, but you can have a programmatic benefit, where you can tell it to deliver to you results when they arise or when they're discovered. Tell us a little bit how that works.

Meyer: We call them agents. You can define which topics you're interested in, and when some new documents are found by that search or by that topic, then you get informed, with an email or with a push notification on the mobile app.

Gardner: Let’s dig into a little bit of this concept of an appliance. You're using IDOL and you're using Vertica, the column-based or high-performance analytics engine, also part of HPE, but soon to be part of Micro Focus. You're also using 3PAR StoreServ and ProLiant DL380 servers. Tell us how that integration happened and why you actually call this an appliance, rather than some other name?
In our crowded informational system that we have with the Internet and everything, it’s important that companies can choose where they want to have the information that is important for them.

Meyer: Appliance means that all the software is patched together. Every component can talk to the others, talks the same language, and can be configured the same way. We preconfigure a lot, we standardize a lot, and that’s the appliance thing.

And it’s not bound on hardware. So, it doesn’t need to be this DL380 or whatever. It also depends on how big your environment will be. It can also be a c7000 Blade Chassis or whatever.

When we install an appliance, we have one or two days until it’s installed, and then it starts the initial indexing program, and this takes a while until you have all the data in the index. So, the initial load is big, but after two or three days, you're able to search for information.

You mentioned the HPE Vertica part. We use Vertica to log every action that goes on, on the appliance. On one hand, this is a security feature. You need to prove if nobody has found the salary list, for example. You need to prove that and so you need to log it.

On the other hand, you can analyze what users are doing. For example, if they don’t find something and it’s always the same thing that people are searching in the company and can't find, perhaps there's some information you need to implement into the appliance.

Gardner: You mentioned security and privileges. How does the IT organization allow the right people to access the right information? Are you going to use some other policy engine? How does that work?

Mapped security

Meyer: It's included. It's called mapped security. The connector takes the security information with the document and indexes that security information within the index. So, you will never be able to find a document that you don't have access to in your environment. It's important that this security is given by default.

Gardner: It sounds to me, David, like were, in a sense, democratizing big data. By gathering and indexing all the unstructured data that you can possibly want to, point at it, and connect to, you're allowing anybody in a company to get access to queries without having to go through a data scientist or a SQL query author. It seems to me that you're really opening up the power of data analysis to many more people on their terms, which are basic search queries. What does that get an organization? Do you have any examples of the ways that people are benefiting by this democratization, this larger pool of people able to use these very powerful tools?

Meyer: Everything is more data-driven. The i5 appliance can give you access to all of that information. The appliance is here to simplify the beginning of becoming a data-driven organization and to find out what power is in the organization's data.
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For example, we enabled a Swiss company called Smartinfo to become a proactive news provider. That means they put lots of public information, newspapers, online newspapers, TV broadcasts, radio broadcasts into that index. The customers can then define the topics they're interested in and they're proactively informed about new articles about their interests.

Gardner: In what other ways do you think this will become popular? I'm guessing that a marketing organization would really benefit from finding relationships within their internal organization, between product and service, go-to market, and research and development. The parts of a large distributed organization don't always know what the other part is doing, the unknown unknowns, if you will. Any other examples of how this is a business benefit?

Meyer: You mentioned the marketing organization. How could a marketing organization listen what customers are saying? For example, on social media they're communicating there, and when you have an engine like i5, you can capture these social media feeds, you can do sentiment analysis on that, and you will see an analyzed view on what's going on about your products, company, or competitors.

You can detect, for example, a shitstorm about your company, a shitstorm about your competitor, or whatever. You need to have an analytic platform to see that, to visualize that, and this is a big benefit.

On the other hand, it's also this proactive information you get from it, where you can see that your competitor has a new campaign and you get that information right now because you have an agent with the customer's name. You can see that there is something happening and you can act on that information.

Gardner: When you think about future capabilities, are there other aspects that you can add on? It seems extensible to me. What would we be talking about a year from now, for example?

Very extensible

Meyer: It's pretty much extensible. I think about all these different verticals. You can expand it for the health sector, for the transportation sector, whatever. It doesn't really matter.

We do network analysis. That means when you prepare yourself to visit a company, you can have a network picture, what relationships this company has, what employees work there, who is a shareholder of that company, which company has contracts with any of other companies?

This is a new way to get a holistic image of a company, a person, or of something that you want to know. It's thinking how to visualize things, how to visualize information, and that's the main part we are focusing on. How can we visualize or bring new visualizations to the customer?

Gardner: In the marketplace, because it's an ecosystem, we're seeing new APIs coming online all the time. Many of them are very low cost and, in many cases, open source or free. We're also seeing the ability to connect more adequately to LinkedIn and Salesforce, if you have your license for that of course. So, this really seems to me a focal point, a single pane of glass to get a single view of a customer, a market, or a competitor, and at the same time, at an affordable price.

Let's focus on that for a moment. When you have an appliance approach, what we're talking about used to be only possible at very high cost, and many people would need to be involved -- labor, resources, customization. Now, we've eliminated a lot of the labor, a lot of the customization, and the component costs have come down.
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We've talked about all the great qualitative benefits, but can we talk about the cost differential between what used to be possible five years ago with data analysis, unstructured data gathering, and indexing, and what you can do now with the i5?

Meyer: You mentioned the price. We have an OEM contract, and that that's something that makes us competitive in the market. Companies can build their own intelligence service. It's affordable also for small and medium businesses. It doesn't need to be a huge company with own engineering and IT staff. It's affordable, it's automated, it's packed together, and simple to install.

Companies can increase the workplace performance and shorten the processes. Anybody has access to all the information they need in their daily work, and they can focus more on their core business. They don't lose time in searching for information and not finding it and stuff like that.

Gardner: For those folks who have been listening or reading, are intrigued by this, and want to learn more, where would you point them? How can they get more information on the i5 appliance and some of the concepts we have been discussing?

Meyer: That's our company website, sec101.ch. There you can find any information you would like to have. And this is available now.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Sumo Logic CEO on how modern apps benefit from 'continuous intelligence' and DevOps insights

The next BriefingsDirect applications health monitoring interview explores how a new breed of continuous intelligence emerges by gaining data from systems infrastructure logs -- either on-premises or in the cloud -- and then cross-referencing that with intrinsic business metrics information.

We’ll now explore how these new levels of insight and intelligence into what really goes on underneath the covers of modern applications help ensure that apps are built, deployed, and operated properly.

Today, more than ever, how a company's applications perform equates with how the company itself performs and is perceived. From airlines to retail, from finding cabs to gaming, how the applications work deeply impacts how the business processes and business outcomes work, too.

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

We’re joined by an executive from Sumo Logic to learn why modern applications are different, what's needed to make them robust and agile, and how the right mix of data, metrics and machine learning provides the means to make and keep apps operating better than ever.

To describe how to build and maintain the best applications, welcome Ramin Sayar, President and CEO of Sumo Logic. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: There’s no doubt that the apps make the company, but what is it about modern applications that makes them so difficult to really know? How is that different from the applications we were using 10 years ago?

Sayar: You hit it on the head a little bit earlier. This notion of always-on, always-available, always-accessible types of applications, either delivered through rich web mobile interfaces or through traditional mechanisms that are served up through laptops or other access points and point-of-sale systems are driving a next wave of technology architecture supporting these apps.

These modern apps are around a modern stack, and so they’re using new platform services that are created by public-cloud providers, they’re using new development processes such as agile or continuous delivery, and they’re expected to constantly be learning and iterating so they can improve not only the user experience -- but the business outcomes.

Gardner: Of course, developers and business leaders are under pressure, more than ever before, to put new apps out more quickly, and to then update and refine them on a continuous basis. So this is a never-ending process.

User experience

Sayar: You’re spot on. The obvious benefits around always on is centered on the rich user interaction and user experience. So, while a lot of the conversation around modern apps tends to focus on the technology and the components, there are actually fundamental challenges in the process of how these new apps are also built and managed on an ongoing basis, and what implications that has for security. A lot of times, those two aspects are left out when people are discussing modern apps.

Sayar
Gardner: That's right. We’re now talking so much about DevOps these days, but in the same breath, we’re taking about SecOps -- security and operations. They’re really joined at the hip.

Sayar: Yes, they’re starting to blend. You’re seeing the technology decisions around public cloud, around Docker and containers, and microservices and APIs, and not only led by developers or DevOps teams. They’re heavily influenced and partnering with the SecOps and security teams and CISOs, because the data is distributed. Now there needs to be better visibility instrumentation, not just for the access logs, but for the business process and holistic view of the service and service-level agreements (SLAs).

Gardner: What’s different from say 10 years ago? Distributed used to mean that I had, under my own data-center roof, an application that would be drawing from a database, using an application server, perhaps a couple of services, but mostly all under my control. Now, it’s much more complex, with many more moving parts.

Sayar: We like to look at the evolution of these modern apps. For example, a lot of our customers have traditional monolithic apps that follow the more traditional waterfall approach for iterating and release. Often, those are run on bare-metal physical servers, or possibly virtual machines (VMs). They are simple, three-tier web apps.
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We see one of two things happening. The first is that there is a need for either replacing the front end of those apps, and we refer to those as brownfield. They start to change from waterfall to agile and they start to have more of an N-tier feel. It's really more around the front end. Maybe your web properties are a good example of that. And they start to componentize pieces of their apps, either on VMs or in private clouds, and that's often good for existing types of workloads.
Now there needs to be better visibility instrumentation, not just for the access logs, but for the business process and holistic view of the service and service-level agreements.

The other big trend is this new way of building apps, what we call greenfield workloads, versus the brownfield workloads, and those take a fundamentally different approach.

Often it's centered on new technology, a stack entirely using microservices, API-first development methodology, and using new modern containers like Docker, Mesosphere, CoreOS, and using public-cloud infrastructure and services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Microsoft Azure. As a result, what you’re seeing is the technology decisions that are made there require different skill sets and teams to come together to be able to deliver on the DevOps and SecOps processes that we just mentioned.

Gardner: Ramin, it’s important to point out that we’re not just talking about public-facing business-to-consumer (B2C) apps, not that those aren't important, but we’re also talking about all those very important business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-employee (B2E) apps. I can't tell you how frustrating it is when you get on the phone with somebody and they say, “Well, I’ll help you, but my app is down,” or the data isn’t available. So this is not just for the public facing apps, it's all apps, right?

It's a data problem

Sayar: Absolutely. Regardless of whether it's enterprise or consumer, if it's mid-market small and medium business (SMB) or enterprise that you are building these apps for, what we see from our customers is that they all have a similar challenge, and they’re really trying to deal with the volume, the velocity, and the variety of the data around these new architectures and how they grapple and get their hands around it. At the end of day, it becomes a data problem, not just a process or technology problem.

Gardner: Let's talk about the challenges then. If we have many moving parts, if we need to do things faster, if we need to consider the development lifecycle and processes as well as ongoing security, if we’re dealing with outside third-party cloud providers, where do we go to find the common thread of insight, even though we have more complexity across more organizational boundaries?

Sayar: From a Sumo Logic perspective, we’re trying to provide full-stack visibility, not only from code and your repositories like GitHub or Jenkins, but all the way through the components of your code, to API calls, to what your deployment tools are used for in terms of provisioning and performance.

We spend a lot of effort to integrate to the various DevOps tool chain vendors, as well as provide the holistic view of what users are doing in terms of access to those applications and services. We know who has checked in which code or which branch and which build created potential issues for the performance, latency, or outage. So we give you that 360-view by providing that full stack set of capabilities.
Unlike others that are out there and available for you, Sumo Logic's architecture is truly cloud native and multitenant, but it's centered on the principle of near real-time data streaming.

Gardner: So, the more information the better, no matter where in the process, no matter where in the lifecycle. But then, that adds its own level of complexity. I wonder is this a fire-hose approach or boiling-the-ocean approach? How do you make that manageable and then actionable?

Sayar: We’ve invested quite a bit of our intellectual property (IP) on not only providing integration with these various sources of data, but also a lot in the machine learning  and algorithms, so that we can take advantage of the architecture of being a true cloud native multitenant fast and simple solution.

So, unlike others that are out there and available for you, Sumo Logic's architecture is truly cloud native and multitenant, but it's centered on the principle of near real-time data streaming.

As the data is coming in, our data-streaming engine is allowing developers, IT ops administrators, sys admins, and security professionals to be able to have their own view, coarse-grained or granular-grained, from our back controls that we have in the system to be able to leverage the same data for different purposes, versus having to wait for someone to create a dashboard, create a view, or be able to get access to a system when something breaks.

Gardner: That’s interesting. Having been in the industry long enough, I remember when logs basically meant batch. You'd get a log dump, and then you would do something with it. That would generate a report, many times with manual steps involved. So what's the big step to going to streaming? Why is that an essential part of making this so actionable?

Sayar: It’s driven based on the architectures and the applications. No longer is it acceptable to look at samples of data that span 5 or 15 minutes. You need the real-time data, sub-second, millisecond latency to be able to understand causality, and be able to understand when you’re having a potential threat, risk, or security concern, versus code-quality issues that are causing potential performance outages and therefore business impact.

The old way was hope and pray, when I deployed code, that I would find something when a user complains is no longer acceptable. You lose business and credibility, and at the end of the day, there’s no real way to hold developers, operations folks, or security folks accountable because of the legacy tools and process approach.

Center of the business

Those expectations have changed, because of the consumerization of IT and the fact that apps are the center of the business, as we’ve talked about. What we really do is provide a simple way for us to analyze the metadata coming in and provide very simple access through APIs or through our user interfaces based on your role to be able to address issues proactively.

Conceptually, there’s this notion of wartime and peacetime as we’re building and delivering our service. We look at the problems that users -- customers of Sumo Logic and internally here at Sumo Logic -- are used to and then we break that down into this lifecycle -- centered on this concept of peacetime and wartime.

Peacetime is when nothing is wrong, but you want to stay ahead of issues and you want to be able to proactively assess the health of your service, your application, your operational level agreements, your SLAs, and be notified when something is trending the wrong way.

Then, there's this notion of wartime, and wartime is all hands on deck. Instead of being alerted 15 minutes or an hour after an outage has happened or security risk and threat implication has been discovered, the real-time data-streaming engine is notifying people instantly, and you're getting PagerDuty alerts, you're getting Slack notifications. It's no longer the traditional helpdesk notification process when people are getting on bridge lines.
No longer do you need to do “swivel-chair” correlation, because we're looking at multiple UIs and tools and products.

Because the teams are often distributed and it’s shared responsibility and ownership for identifying an issue in wartime, we're enabling collaboration and new ways of collaboration by leveraging the integrations to things like Slack, PagerDuty notification systems through the real-time platform we've built.

So, the always-on application expectations that customers and consumers have, have now been transformed to always-on available development and security resources to be able to address problems proactively.

Gardner: It sounds like we're able to not only take the data and information in real time from the applications to understand what’s going on with the applications, but we can take that same information and start applying it to other business metrics, other business environmental impacts that then give us an even greater insight into how to manage the business and the processes. Am I overstating that or is that where we are heading here?

Sayar: That’s exactly right. The essence of what we provide in terms of the service is a platform that leverages the machine logs and time-series data from a single platform or service that eliminates a lot of the complexity that exists in traditional processes and tools. No longer do you need to do “swivel-chair” correlation, because we're looking at multiple UIs and tools and products. No longer do you have to wait for the helpdesk person to notify you. We're trying to provide that instant knowledge and collaboration through the real-time data-streaming platform we've built to bring teams together versus divided.

Gardner: That sounds terrific if I'm the IT guy or gal, but why should this be of interest to somebody higher up in the organization, at a business process, even at a C-table level? What is it about continuous intelligence that cannot only help apps run on time and well, but help my business run on time and well?

Need for agility

Sayar: We talked a little bit about the whole need for agility. From a business point of view, the line-of-business folks who are associated with any of these greenfield projects or apps want to be able to increase the cycle times of the application delivery. They want to have measurable results in terms of application changes or web changes, so that their web properties have either increased or potentially decreased in terms of user satisfaction or, at the end of the day, business revenue.

So, we're able to help the developers, the DevOps teams, and ultimately, line of business deliver on the speed and agility needs for these new modes. We do that through a single comprehensive platform, as I mentioned.

At the same time, what’s interesting here is that no longer is security an afterthought. No longer is security in the back room trying to figure out when a threat or an attack has happened. Security has a seat at the table in a lot of boardrooms, and more importantly, in a lot of strategic initiatives for enterprise companies today.

At the same time we're helping with agility, we're also helping with prevention. And so a lot of our customers often start with the security teams that are looking for a new way to be able to inspect this volume of data that’s coming in -- not at the infrastructure level or only the end-user level -- but at the application and code level. What we're really able to do, as I mentioned earlier, is provide a unifying approach to bring these disparate teams together.
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Gardner: And yet individuals can extract the intelligence view that best suits what their needs are in that moment.

Sayar: Yes. And ultimately what we're able to do is improve customer experience, increase revenue-generating services, increase efficiencies and agility of actually delivering code that’s quality and therefore the applications, and lastly, improve collaboration and communication.

Gardner: I’d really like to hear some real world examples of how this works, but before we go there, I’m still interested in the how. As to this idea of machine learning, we're hearing an awful lot today about bots, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning. Parse this out a bit for me. What is it that you're using machine learning  for when it comes to this volume and variety in understanding apps and making that useable in the context of a business metric of some kind?

Sayar: This is an interesting topic, because of a lot of noise in the market around big data or machine learning and advanced analytics. Since Sumo Logic was started six years ago, we built this platform to ensure that not only we have the best in class security and encryption capabilities, but it was centered on the fundamental purpose around democratizing analytics, making it simpler to be able to allow more than just a subset of folks get access to information for their roles and responsibilities, whether you're security, ops, or development teams.

To answer your question a little bit more succinctly, our platform is predicated on multiple levels of machine learning and analytics capabilities. Starting at the lowest level, something that we refer to as LogReduce is meant to separate the signal-to-noise ratio. Ultimately, it helps a lot of our users and customers reduce mean time to identification by upwards of 90 percent, because they're not searching the irrelevant data. They're searching the relevant and oftentimes occurring data that's not frequent or not really known, versus what’s constantly occurring in their environment.

In doing so, it’s not just about mean time to identification, but it’s also how quickly we're able to respond and repair. We've seen customers using LogReduce reduce the mean time to resolution by upwards of 50 percent.

Predictive capabilities

Our core analytics, at the lowest level, is helping solve operational metrics and value. Then, we start to become less reactive. When you've had an outage or a security threat, you start to leverage some of our other predictive capabilities in our stack.

For example, I mentioned this concept of peacetime and wartime. In the notion of peacetime, you're looking at changes over time when you've deployed code and/or applications to various geographies and locations. A lot of times, developers and ops folks that use Sumo want to use log compare or outlier predictor operators that are in their machine learning capabilities to show and compare differences of branches of code and quality of their code to relevancy around performance and availability of the service and app.

We allow them, with a click of a button, to compare this window for these events and these metrics for the last hour, last day, last week, last month, and compare them to other time slices of data and show how much better or worse it is. This is before deploying to production. When they look at production, we're able to allow them to use predictive analytics to look at anomalies and abnormal behavior to get more proactive.

So, reactive, to proactive, all the way to predictive is the philosophy that we've been trying to build in terms of our analytics stack and capabilities.
Sumo Logic is very relevant for all these customers that are spanning the data-center infrastructure consolidation to new workload projects that they may be building in private-cloud or public-cloud endpoints.

Gardner: How are some actual customers using this and what are they getting back for their investment?

Sayar: We have customers that span retail and e-commerce, high-tech, media, entertainment, travel, and insurance. We're well north of 1,200 unique paying customers, and they span anyone from Airbnb, Anheuser-Busch, Adobe, Metadata, Marriott, Twitter, Telstra, Xora -- modern companies as well as traditional companies.

What do they all have in common? Often, what we see is a digital transformation project or initiative. They either have to build greenfield or brownfield apps and they need a new approach and a new service, and that's where they start leveraging Sumo Logic.

Second, what we see is that's it’s not always a digital transformation; it's often a cost reduction and/or a consolidation project. Consolidation could be tools or infrastructure and data center, or it could be migration to co-los or public-cloud infrastructures.

The nice thing about Sumo Logic is that we can connect anything from your top of rack switch, to your discrete storage arrays, to network devices, to operating system, and middleware, through to your content-delivery network (CDN) providers and your public-cloud infrastructures.

As it’s a migration or consolidation project, we’re able to help them compare performance and availability, SLAs that they have associated with those, as well as differences in terms of delivery of infrastructure services to the developers or users.

So whether it's agility-driven or cost-driven, Sumo Logic is very relevant for all these customers that are spanning the data-center infrastructure consolidation to new workload projects that they may be building in private-cloud or public-cloud endpoints.

Gardner: Ramin, how about a couple of concrete examples of what you were just referring to.

Cloud migration

Sayar: One good example is in the media space or media and entertainment space, for example, Hearst Media. They, like a lot of our other customers, were undergoing a digital-transformation project and a cloud-migration project. They were moving about 36 apps to AWS and they needed a single platform that provided machine-learning analytics to be able to recognize and quickly identify performance issues prior to making the migration and updates to any of the apps rolling over to AWS. They were able to really improve cycle times, as well as efficiency, with respect to identifying and resolving issues fast.

Another example would be JetBlue. We do a lot in the travel space. JetBlue is also another AWS and cloud customer. They provide a lot of in-flight entertainment to their customers. They wanted to be able to look at the service quality for the revenue model for the in-flight entertainment system and be able to ascertain what movies are being watched, what’s the quality of service, whether that’s being degraded or having to charge customers more than once for any type of service outages. That’s how they're using Sumo Logic to better assess and manage customer experience. It's not too dissimilar from Alaska Airlines or others that are also providing in-flight notification and wireless type of services.

The last one is someone that we're all pretty familiar with and that’s Airbnb. We're seeing a fundamental disruption in the travel space and how we reserve hotels or apartments or homes, and Airbnb has led the charge, like Uber in the transportation space. In their case, they're taking a lot of credit-card and payment-processing information. They're using Sumo Logic for payment-card industry (PCI) audit and security, as well as operational visibility in terms of their websites and presence.
They were able to really improve cycle times, as well as efficiency, with respect to identifying and resolving issues fast.

Gardner: It’s interesting. Not only are you giving them benefits along insight lines, but it sounds to me like you're giving them a green light to go ahead and experiment and then learn very quickly whether that experiment worked or not, so that they can find refine. That’s so important in our digital business and agility drive these days.

Sayar: Absolutely. And if I were to think of another interesting example, Anheuser-Busch is another one of our customers. In this case, the CISO wanted to have a new approach to security and not one that was centered on guarding the data and access to the data, but providing a single platform for all constituents within Anheuser-Busch, whether security teams, operations teams, developers, or support teams.

We did a pilot for them, and as they're modernizing a lot of their apps, as they start to look at the next generation of security analytics, the adoption of Sumo started to become instant inside AB InBev. Now, they're looking at not just their existing real estate of infrastructure and apps for all these teams, but they're going to connect it to future projects such as the Connected Path, so they can understand what the yield is from each pour in a particular keg in a location and figure out whether that’s optimized or when they can replace the keg.

So, you're going from a reactive approach for security and processes around deployment and operations to next-gen connected Internet of Things (IoT) and devices to understand business performance and yield. That's a great example of an innovative company doing something unique and different with Sumo Logic.

Gardner: So, what happens as these companies modernize and they start to avail themselves of more public-cloud infrastructure services, ultimately more-and-more of their apps are going to be of, by, and for somebody else’s public cloud? Where do you fit in that scenario?

Data source and location

Sayar: Whether you’re running on-prem, whether you're running co-los, whether you're running through CDN providers like Akamai, whether you're running on AWS or Azure, Heroku, whether you're running SaaS platforms and renting a single platform that can manage and ingest all that data for you. Interestingly enough, about half our customers’ workloads run on-premises and half of them run in the cloud.

We’re agnostic to where the data is or where their applications or workloads reside. The benefit we provide is the single ubiquitous platform for managing the data streams that are coming in from devices, from applications, from infrastructure, from mobile to you, in a simple, real-time way through a multitenant cloud service.

Gardner: This reminds me of what I heard, 10 or 15 years ago about business intelligence (BI), drawing data, analyzing it, making it close to being proactive in its ability to help the organization. How is continuous intelligence different, or even better, and something that would replace what we refer to as BI?
The expectation is that it’s sub-millisecond latency to understand what's going on, from a security, operational, or user-experience point of view.

Sayar: The issue that we faced with the first generation of BI was it was very rear-view and mirror-centric, meaning that it was looking at data and things in the past. Where we're at today with this need for speed and the necessity to be always on, always available, the expectation is that it’s sub-millisecond latency to understand what's going on, from a security, operational, or user-experience point of view.

I'd say that we're on V2 or next generation of what was traditionally called BI, and we refer to that as continuous intelligence, because you're continuously adapting and learning. It's not only based on what humans know and what rules and correlation that they try to presuppose and create alarms and filters and things around that. It’s what machines and machine intelligence needs to supplement that with to provide the best-in-class type of capability, which is what we refer to as continuous intelligence.

Gardner: We’re almost out of time, but I wanted to look to the future a little bit. Obviously, there's a lot of investing going on now around big data and analytics as it pertains to many different elements of many different businesses, depending on their verticals. Then, we're talking about some of the logic benefit and continuous intelligence as it applies to applications and their lifecycle.

Where do we start to see crossover between those? How do I leverage what I’m doing in big data generally in my organization and more specifically, what I can do with continuous intelligence from my systems, from my applications?

Business Insights

Sayar: We touched a little bit on that in terms of the types of data that we integrate and ingest. At the end of the day, when we talk about full-stack visibility, it's from everything with respect to providing business insights to operational insights, to security insights.

We have some customers that are in credit-card payment processing, and they actually use us to understand activations for credit cards, so they're extracting value from the data coming into Sumo Logic to understand and predict business impact and relevant revenue associated with these services that they're managing; in this case, a set of apps that run on a CDN.
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At the same time, the fraud and risk team are using us for threat and prevention. The operations team is using us for understanding identification of issues proactively to be able to address any application or infrastructure issues, and that’s what we refer to as full stack.

Full stack isn’t just the technology; it's providing business visibility insights to line the business users or users that are looking at metrics around user experience and service quality, to operational-level impacts that help you become more proactive, or in some cases, reactive to wartime issues, as we've talked about. And lastly, the security team helps you take a different security posture around reactive and proactive, around threat, detection, and risk.

In a nutshell, where we see these things starting to converge is what we refer to as full stack visibility around our strategy for continuous intelligence, and that is technology to business to users.

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

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Tuesday, January 24, 2017

OCSL sets its sights on the Nirvana of hybrid IT—attaining the right mix of hybrid cloud for its clients

The next BriefingsDirect digital transformation case study explores how UK IT consultancy OCSL has set its sights on the holy grail of hybrid IT -- helping its clients to find and attain the right mix of hybrid cloud.

We'll now explore how each enterprise -- and perhaps even units within each enterprise -- determines the path to a proper mix of public and private cloud. Closer to home, they're looking at the proper fit of converged infrastructure, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), and software-defined data center (SDDC) platforms.

Implementing such a services-attuned architecture may be the most viable means to dynamically apportion applications and data support among and between cloud and on-premises deployments.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

To describe how to rationalize the right mix of hybrid cloud and hybrid IT services along with infrastructure choices on-premises, we are joined by Mark Skelton, Head of Consultancy at OCSL in London. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: People increasingly want to have some IT on premises, and they want public cloud -- with some available continuum between them. But deciding the right mix is difficult and probably something that’s going to change over time. What drivers are you seeing now as organizations make this determination?
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Skelton: It’s a blend of lot of things. We've been working with enterprises for a long time on their hybrid and cloud messaging. Our clients have been struggling just to understand what hybrid really means, but also how we make hybrid a reality, and how to get started, because it really is a minefield. You look at what Microsoft is doing, what AWS is doing, and what HPE is doing in their technologies. There's so much out there. How do they get started?

We've been struggling in the last 18 months to get customers on that journey and get started. But now, because technology is advancing, we're seeing customers starting to embrace it and starting to evolve and transform into those things. And, we've matured our models and frameworks as well to help customer adoption.

Gardner: Do you see the rationale for hybrid IT shaking down to an economic equation? Is it to try to take advantage of technologies that are available? Is it about compliance and security? You're probably temped to say all of the above, but I'm looking for what's driving the top-of-mind decision-making now.

Start with the economics

Skelton: The initial decision-making process begins with the economics. I think everyone has bought into the marketing messages from the public cloud providers saying, "We can reduce your costs, we can reduce your overhead -- and not just from a culture perspective, but from management, from personal perspective, and from a technology solutions perspective."

Skelton

CIOs, and even financial officers, are seeing economics as the tipping point they need to go into a hybrid cloud, or even all into a public cloud. But it’s not always cheap to put everything into a public cloud. When we look at business cases with clients, it’s the long-term investment we look at. Over time, it’s not always cheap to put things into public cloud. That’s where hybrid started to come back into the front of people’s minds.

We can use public cloud for the right workloads and where they want to be flexible and burst and be a bit more agile or even give global reach to long global businesses, but then keep the crown jewels back inside secured data centers where they're known and trusted and closer to some of the key, critical systems.

So, it starts with the finance side of the things, but quickly evolves beyond that, and financial decisions aren't the only reasons why people are going to public or hybrid cloud.

Gardner: In a more perfect world, we'd be able to move things back and forth with ease and simplicity, where we could take the A/B testing-type of approach to a public and private cloud decision. We're not quite there yet, but do you see a day where that choice about public and private will be dynamic -- and perhaps among multiple clouds or multi-cloud hybrid environment?

Skelton: Absolutely. I think multi-cloud is the Nirvana for every organization, just because there isn't one-size-fits-all for every type of work. We've been talking about it for quite a long time. The technology hasn't really been there to underpin multi-cloud and truly make it easy to move on-premises to public or vice versa. But I think now we're getting there with technology.

Are we there yet? No, there are still a few big releases coming, things that we're waiting to be released to market, which will help simplify that multi-cloud and the ability to migrate up and back, but we're just not there yet, in my opinion.
There are still a few big releases coming, things that we're waiting to be released to market, which will help simplify that multi-cloud and the ability to migrate up and back, but we're just not there yet.

Gardner: We might be tempted to break this out between applications and data. Application workloads might be a bit more flexible across a continuum of hybrid cloud, but other considerations are brought to the data. That can be security, regulation, control, compliance, data sovereignty, GDPR, and so forth. Are you seeing your customers looking at this divide between applications and data, and how they are able to rationalize one versus the other?

Skelton: Applications, as you have just mentioned, are the simpler things to move into a cloud model, but the data is really the crown jewels of the business, and people are nervous about putting that into public cloud. So what we're seeing lot of is putting applications into the public cloud for the agility, elasticity, and global reach and trying to keep data on-premises because they're nervous about those breaches in the service providers’ data centers.

That's what we are seeing, but we are seeing an uprising of things like object storage, so we're working with Scality, for example, and they have a unique solution for blending public and on-premises solutions, so we can pin things to certain platforms in a secure data center and then, where the data is not quite critical, move it into a public cloud environment.

Gardner: It sounds like you've been quite busy. Please tell us about OCSL, an overview of your company and where you're focusing most of your efforts in terms of hybrid computing.

Rebrand and refresh

Skelton: OCSL had been around for 26 years as a business. Recently, we've been through a re-brand and a refresh of what we are focusing on, and we're moving more to a services organization, leading with our people and our consultants.

We're focusing on transforming customers and clients into the cloud environment, whether that's applications or, if it's data center, cloud, or hybrid cloud. We're trying to get customers on that journey of transformation and engaging with business-level people and business requirements and working out how we make cloud a reality, rather than just saying there's a product and you go and do whatever you want with it. We're finding out what those businesses want, what are the key requirements, and then finding the right cloud models that to fit that.

Gardner: So many organizations are facing not just a retrofit or a rethinking around IT, but truly a digital transformation for the entire organization. There are many cases of sloughing off business lines, and other cases of acquiring. It's an interesting time in terms of a mass reconfiguration of businesses and how they identify themselves.

Skelton: What's changed for me is, when I go and speak to a customer, I'm no longer just speaking to the IT guys, I'm actually engaging with the finance officers, the marketing officers, the digital officers -- that's he common one that is creeping up now. And it's a very different conversation.
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We're looking at business outcomes now, rather than focusing on, "I need this disk, this product." It's more: "I need to deliver this service back to the business." That's how we're changing as a business. It's doing that business consultancy, engaging with that, and then finding the right solutions to fit requirements and truly transform the business.

Gardner: Of course, HPE has been going through transformations itself for the past several years, and that doesn't seem to be slowing up much. Tell us about the alliance between OCSL and HPE. How do you come together as a whole greater than the sum of the parts?

Skelton: HPE is transforming and becoming a more agile organization, with some of the spinoffs that we've had recently aiding that agility. OCSL has worked in partnership with HPE for many years, and it's all about going to market together and working together to engage with the customers at right level and find the right solutions. We've had great success with that over many years.

Gardner: Now, let’s go to the "show rather than tell" part of our discussion. Are there some examples that you can look to, clients that you work with, that have progressed through a transition to hybrid computing, hybrid cloud, and enjoyed certain benefits or found unintended consequences that we can learn from?

Skelton: We've had a lot of successes in the last 12 months as I'm taking clients on the journey to hybrid cloud. One of the key ones that resonates with me is a legal firm that we've been working with. They were in a bit of a state. They had an infrastructure that was aging, was unstable, and wasn't delivering quality service back to the lawyers that were trying to embrace technology -- so mobile devices, dictation software, those kind of things.

We came in with a first prospectus on how we would actually address some of those problems. We challenged them, and said that we need to go through a stabilization phase. Public cloud is not going to be the immediate answer. They're being courted by the big vendors, as everyone is, about public cloud and they were saying it was the Nirvana for them.

We challenged that and we got them to a stable platform first, built on HPE hardware. We got instant stability for them. So, the business saw immediate returns and delivery of service. It’s all about getting that impactful thing back to the business, first and foremost.

Building cloud model

Now, we're working through each of their service lines, looking at how we can break them up and transform them into a cloud model. That involves breaking down those apps, deconstructing the apps, and thinking about how we can use pockets of public cloud in line with the hybrid on-premise in our data-center infrastructure.

They've now started to see real innovative solutions taking that business forward, but they got instant stability.

Gardner: Were there any situations where organizations were very high-minded and fanciful about what they were going to get from cloud that may have led to some disappointment -- so unintended consequences. Maybe others might benefit from hindsight. What do you look out for, now that you have been doing this for a while in terms of hybrid cloud adoption?

Skelton: One of the things I've seen a lot of with cloud is that people have bought into the messaging from the big public cloud vendors about how they can just turn on services and keep consuming, consuming, consuming. A lot of people have gotten themselves into a state where bills have been rising and rising, and the economics are looking ridiculous. The finance officers are now coming back and saying they need to rein that back in. How do they put some control around that?
People have bought into the messaging from the big public-cloud vendors about how they can just turn on services and keep consuming, consuming, consuming.

That’s where hybrid is helping, because if you start to hook up some workloads back in an isolated data center, you start to move some of those workloads back. But the key for me is that it comes down to putting some thought process into what you're putting into cloud. Just think through to how can you transform and use the services properly. Don't just turn everything on, because it’s there and it’s click of a button away, but actually think about put some design and planning into adopting cloud.

Gardner: It also sounds like the IT people might need to go out and have a pint with the procurement people and learn a few basics about good contract writing, terms and conditions, and putting in clauses that allow you to back out, if needed. Is that something that we should be mindful of -- IT being in the procurement mode as well as specifying technology mode?

Skelton: Procurement definitely needs to be involved in the initial set-up with the cloud  whenever they're committing to a consumption number, but then once that’s done, it’s IT’s responsibility in terms of how they are consuming that. Procurement needs to be involved all the way through in keeping constant track of what’s going on; and that’s not happening.

The IT guys don’t really care about the cost; they care about the widgets and turning things on and playing around that. I don’t think they really realized how much this is going to cost-back. So yeah, there is a bit of disjoint in lots of organizations in terms of procurement in the upfront piece, and then it goes away, and then IT comes in and spends all of the money.

Gardner: In the complex service delivery environment, that procurement function probably should be constant and vigilant.

Big change in procurement

Skelton: Procurement departments are going to change. We're starting to see that in some of the bigger organizations. They're closer to the IT departments. They need to understand that technology and what’s being used, but that’s quite rare at the moment. I think that probably over the next 12 months, that’s going to be a big change in the larger organizations.

Gardner: Before we close, let's take a look to the future. A year or two from now, if we sit down again, I imagine that more micro services will be involved and containerization will have an effect, where the complexity of services and what we even think of as an application could be quite different, more of an API-driven environment perhaps.

So the complexity about managing your cloud and hybrid cloud to find the right mix, and pricing that, and being vigilant about whether you're getting your money’s worth or not, seems to be something where we should start thinking about applying artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, what I like to call BotOps, something that is going to be there for you automatically without human intervention.
Hopefully, in 12 months, we can have those platforms and we can then start to embrace some of this great new technology and really rethink our applications.

Does that sound on track to you, and do you think that we need to start looking to advanced automation and even AI-driven automation to manage this complex divide between organizations and cloud providers?

Skelton: You hit a lot of key points there in terms of where the future is going. I think we are still in this phase if we start trying to build the right platforms to be ready for the future. So we see the recent releases of HPE Synergy for example, being able to support these modern platforms, and that’s really allowing us to then embrace things like micro services. Docker and Mesosphere are two types of platforms that will disrupt organizations and the way we do things, but you need to find the right platform first.

Hopefully, in 12 months, we can have those platforms and we can then start to embrace some of this great new technology and really rethink our applications. And it’s a challenge to the ISPs. They've got to work out how they can take advantage of some of these technologies.
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We're seeing a lot of talk about Cervalis and computing. It's where there is nothing and you need to spin up results as and when you need to. The classic use case for that is Uber; and they have built a whole business on that Cervalis type model. I think that in 12 months time, we're going to see a lot more of that and more of the enterprise type organizations.

I don’t think we have it quite clear in our minds how we're going to embrace that but it’s the ISV community that really needs to start driving that. Beyond that, it's absolutely with AI and bots. We're all going to be talking to computers, and they're going to be responding with very human sorts of reactions. That's the next way.

I am bringing that into enterprise organizations for how we can solve some business challenges. Service test management is one of the use cases where we're seeing, in some of our clients, whether they can get immediate response from bots and things like that to common queries, so they don’t need as many support staff. It’s already starting to happen.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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