How content in context within apps and process strengthens marketing muscle

The next BriefingsDirect discussion explores the changing role and impact of content marketing, using the IT industry as a prime example. Just as companies now communicate with their consumers and prospects in much different ways -- with higher emphasis on social interactions, user feedback, big data analysis, and even more content to drive conversations -- so too the IT industry has abruptly changed.

There's more movement to cloud models, to mobile applications, to leveraging data at every chance -- and they are also facing lower-margin subscription business models. The margin for error is shrinking in the IT industry. If any industry is the poster child for how to deal with rapid change on all fronts, including marketing, it's surely the global information technology market.

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To examine how the IT industry is adjusting to the dynamic nature of marketing, we're joined by Lora Kratchounova, the Founder and Principal at Scratch Marketing and Media in Cambridge, Mass. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Lora, you and I have been talking about marketing for years now. We're in an interesting field, and it’s been such a dynamic time. I have some interesting ideas about where technology is going and where marketing is intercepting, and how they are both changing.

So, let’s start at a high level. Content marketing has proven to be very successful, and you and I have had a hand in this. Creating compelling stories, narratives about what’s going on, and how people can learn from peers as they go through problems and solve them, has become a mainstay in marketing. From your perspective, why is content marketing so important? Why has it been so successful?

Kratchounova: There are couple of reasons for that. The pace of change is tremendous now. People are trying to get their bearings on what’s going on in their markets, and a lot of times, they need to get educated. What has changed with social media now, information is a lot more immediate and transparent, and you can get it from many more sources than the just online presence of a company, for example.

Kratchounova

The top-down modeling in the marketing is changing. We used to rely on companies to tell us how to think about the world, and now we can form our own opinions. As we realize that the customer is in the driver’s seat, they educate themselves, and they make the right decisions about how to go about change, companies are realizing that they need to feed into that flow and be part of that discussion. So content marketing has been so successful, because you become an educator, not just selling to people, and especially in IT.

Gardner: And I think people have become much more accustomed to conversations, rather than just a one-direction information flow. "We're the seller and we're going to tell you what it is." Now, people want to relate. They want to hear what others have to think. It’s much more of an actual conversation.

Ongoing conversation

Kratchounova: Exactly. Look at any IT domain. It’s interesting when we look at who is influencing and who the main voices in it are, who the voices that people consider experts are. You pretty much consistently see reporters, journalists, and the analysts folks like you, but then we see that there are a lot of C-level executives from IT companies who are becoming that kind of a voice as well.

That just points to the need for that ongoing conversation, the need for sharing at all levels of the buyer funnel. Once people have bought into a selection, they need to make sure of adoption, and they are maximizing the investment.

So the conversation is very important, and the immediacy of having access to folks and having the ability to exchange a few thoughts on Twitter or LinkedIn has changed the dynamic completely. So it’s absolutely about conversations and storytelling, but it's still mapped to the buyer’s funnel.

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People are still educating and still looking at options for a change or for replacement, one or the other, until they select the people they want to work with. And it’s usually people in brands. It's not just that they want to work with this company, but the people behind it. We're moving more to a people economy.
Gardner: As you point out, you can get to the real source of the knowledge nowadays. Publishing is available to anybody whether they're tweeting, blogging, posting on Facebook, or putting something up on their company website. Anybody who has something to say can say it. It can get indexed and it can be made available to anybody who wants to hear about that particular topic.

The ability to publish is great, and it democratizes the means of how we communicate with each other and educate each other, but yet you still have to earn it.

Most people now don’t just sit back and wait for information to reach them. They're proactive. They go out, they start to search, they do hashtag searches on Twitter, and they can do Google or Bing on web.

It’s much more of, "I know something; I'm putting it out there." And there's another case of someone saying, "I need to know something; I am seeking it." They come together on their own. The content makes that possible. The better the content, the better the likelihood that those in a need to know and those in a need to tell come together.

Kratchounova: Exactly, but I think you hit on something very important. Everybody can publish, and a lot of people are publishing. Yet, we're interested in a love for your people, falling in love for your people, and what they have to say.

The ability to publish is great, and it democratizes the means of how we communicate with each other and educate each other, but yet you still have to earn it. This is very important. People who really are influential are usually domain experts and they're there to help other people. That’s the other aspect of it that both companies and their marketing teams and their executives need to think about. You have to actively participate and show your expertise, it doesn’t come for granted.

Important of curation

Gardner: And there's another aspect to greasing the skids between the knowledge and the acquirer of the knowledge, and that is content curation. There are people who point at things, give it credence, and say that it's a good thing, you should read it; or that’s a bad thing, don’t waste your time -- and that helps refine this.

Kratchounova: It’s pretty exciting.

Gardner: There are machines doing the same thing. There are algorithms, there's indexing, there's both human and machine aspects of winnowing down the good stuff and providing it to people in a need to know, and that’s when we are going to get more powerful.

Kratchounova: Great. I'm sure you know about Narrative Science. I've had a professional crush on this company for few years now. They take data, turn it into storytelling, and they think this is phenomenal. Obviously, that’s not going to replace some of the human storytelling that needs to happen, but some of the data storytelling will come from technology. This is one particular application where marketing and technology come together to bring something completely new into life.

Gardner: So we can get knowledge through expertise or we can get knowledge through experience, someone who has gone through it already and is willing to share that with you. If you're acquiring IT, it’s super important to avail yourself of everything, because it changes so rapidly and the costs are high.

IT depends on the IT buyer, because we can’t necessarily lump them together and ask how the IT buyer goes about it. There are people with different needs, and it depends on their role.

If you make a big mistake in how you're designing a data center, you're out millions of dollars, your products don’t work, and your front office are going to come screaming down on you. You have to make the big decisions and you have to make them correctly in IT. It’s not just a service to the business; it is the business.

So, let’s think about the IT industry in particular, and then think about how content marketing as we’ve discussed is powerful. How do IT people acquire content marketing? Do they get it through websites, emails, or tweets? Is it delivered to them at a webinar that they opt into? How does content marketing reach somebody who's an IT buyer?

Kratchounova: IT depends on the IT buyer, because we can’t necessarily lump them together and ask how the IT buyer goes about it. There are people with different needs, and it depends on their role. If you're CIO or CTO, there is a different mix of channels and sources you use. If you're on the dev or on the ops side and looking for specific solutions, you're going into completely different channels.

For example, if you're a DevOps professional, you're maybe on Stack Overflow and you might be seeking advice from other folks. You might be on GitHub and sharing open-source code and getting feedback on that.

If you're a CIO or CTO, what we have found working with number of different companies, be that global companies or maybe companies that are growing, is that they do seek their peers to validate what the peers are going through. One of the best things that companies can do, when they try to talk to the C-level, is expose some of those connections that they already have from their customers. Make sure that the customers are part of the discussion, and they can chime in.

Another important source of information for the C level in IT would be folks like you, analysts, and strategic system integrators like Accenture and Deloitte, because these folks are exposed to the kinds of challenges that a CIO or CTO would go through. So they have a lot to bring to the table in terms of risk mitigation, optimal deployment, and maximization of the investment in IT. Making those connections and sharing those experiences we have seen work really, really well.

Let me just throw this in as well. The other thing we have seen is that the C level is still going on Google. They're still doing the searches. We have compelling data, across the board, that in any B2B complex enterprise environment folks are self-educating as well. So it’s not a question of either/or; it’s what’s the right mix for each company depending on channels, depending on where people sit.

Spectrum of content

Gardner: So there is a spectrum of content, some highly technical and defined, on places like GitHub that are germane to a technologist. Then, there is that spectrum up from there to a higher level toward peer review of products and peer review of solutions. Then, there are more business topics about what is strategic, what’s the forward direction, how do I understand at an architectural-level decision processes, and where can I go for more information to find out what’s coming down the pike and then put it in place.

Kratchounova: Think about Spiceworks. They're probably at five million IT professionals at this point, and the community is there for a reason. So again, with each particular, there isn’t one size fits all. One thing that we always recommend to folks is that if you’re looking to develop an influential strategy and approach IT, it really depends on what domains you span.

You find that even if you're doing mobile application development, the folks who were really influential and set the standards of that stage are somewhat different from the folks who are concerned with security in mobile app development. So there isn’t necessarily one pool of influencers that you need to go then to develop a relationship and understand what’s in their mind. It really depends on your domain.

Gardner: So if you're a marketer and you recognize that quality content is super important, you need to have a spectrum of content. It needs to be some content that would be germane to a technologist that’s highly detailed, a how-to type. You need to have peer review and stories, case studies, testimonial type content where the customer is telling what they’ve done, why it benefited them, and what you can learn from that.

You also need to have higher-level discussions with experts to help people chart the next course, the strategic level. So content needs to come across a spectrum, and we recognize that the way in which people get that content might be through search. It might be through web, e-mail, webinars, webcasts, reading certain online sites, listening to certain Twitter feeds or groups, or having a select group of people that you follow. All of that happens.

But what’s interesting to me, Lora, is that all has to do with the web. But what we're seeing in IT is a rapid movement toward mobile apps, rather than just the web. And in many cases, they're starting to overtake the web as to where people spend their time. I'm sure you're using a smartphone and you have mobile apps. You're not going on the web to find a cab; you’re going to the Uber app to find a cab.

If you're looking for a restaurant review, you’re not necessarily going on the web and doing a search. You’re going into a specific app on Yelp, OpenTable, or somewhere else to find out where your restaurants are and you’re going into Google Maps to find out how to get there.

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So more-and-more, we're seeing, on the consumer side, people using mobile apps for more of their processes, for their inquiry, for their actual productivity. Then, on the enterprise side, the business-to-employee (B2E) side, we're seeing people using cloud services.

We're moving more toward mobile applications, cloud services, an API-driven world that leverages big data and analytics in order to put context into process. It's all about user experiences, and mobile delivers the best. How then does content continue to reach people? Do we lose the ability to deliver content when they are in apps?

Different perspective

Kratchounova: I have a different perspective on what you're describing. I don’t know that we are moving to a mobile app experience necessarily. When we think about the apps and the examples you gave -- Yelp or Uber -- yes, they're best-of-breed applications that we use because these are the most frequently used applications.

But what you're seeing is actually a digital transformation. Digital no longer means the web, as we know it, going online through your computer. You're actually navigating on a mobile device. So it’s this digital transformation that’s happening, and the trend that we're seeing is aggregation.

It’s not about one individual app, but it’s more about what is the Flipboard within the enterprise. You're seeing that sort of aggregation bubbling up to the top because information overload is a huge problem. People can’t prioritize anymore. They can’t toggle among those different applications and companies.

For example, one of our clients, not to necessarily add a plug for them, actually is very germane to the discussion. Harmon.ie does exactly that.

Once you understand, then you understand what a partner is trying to do. Why are they are here, what’s the context, what’s the most logical next step or the optimal next step?

In those kinds of environments, what we're finding and where I totally agree with you, is the ability to read and understand context, so that you can support the user, be that an employee with internal work experience, or external customers, to support them to get the job done.


The role of content is actually merging with big data, because big data is helping us to understand context and say, "What do we serve this person here?" On the marketing side, and the lingo side it’s more about ongoing customer journeys. Think about the same thing on the employee side, ongoing employee journeys or partner journeys.

Once you understand, then you understand what a partner is trying to do. Why are they are here, what’s the context, what’s the most logical next step or the optimal next step? Now, content becomes both an ability for people to find something, but also for marketers or product development folks. I think those functions are emerging as well to deliver the right content in the right format so that the user can get the job done. That’s my perspective on that.

Gardner: There's no disagreement from me on this issue of context to process, context to location, context to need for knowledge all being much more granular and powerful going forward. What I am concerned about is that, when I talk to developers, the vast majority of them are much more interested in a mobile-first, cloud-first world.

They're not much interested in building what we used to think of as big honking applications in the enterprise. They're much more interested in how to bring services -- and microservices -- together in context to provide a better productive outcome and how to leverage low-cost services in APIs and from any cloud.

Discovering inference

So, to me, it becomes, on one hand, all the more important to have the ability to deliver content contextually into these processes, but at the same time these processes are becoming fragmented. They're going across hybrid-cloud environments, they include both what we call cloud and SaaS, and I'm not sure where the marketer now can get enough inference to support the injection of content appropriately.

The ways that it’s been done now is usually through the web where we have links, and we have code, and we can do cookies. It’s sort of like, it’s Web 1.0 mechanisms by which marketers are injecting content, but we are moving not only pass Web 2.0, we're into Web 3.0  cloud platform. To me this is a big question mark.

Kratchounova: It is a question mark. I don’t know that there is going to be one mode of delivering what we're talking about or one approach or one framework. I'll give you one example. Look at how web content management has changed. It used to be about managing pages and updating content. Now, web content management is becoming the Marketing Command Center, if you look at a web content management system like Sitefinity, for example.

Now, marketers can deal with the customer through his own mobile and on the web, so they can inject the content that needs to happen there. The reason they can do this now is because there is this ability, the analytics that come from all of these customer interactions of you, actually creating cohorts of people as they're going through your web experience or online experience. You know why they're there and what’s the optimal path for them to get where they need to be.

You're seeing this ability to distribute content to post content to people, but in a much more contextual way. So, there is going to be a pull and push, but the push is getting a lot smarter and very contextual.

So, you're seeing this ability to distribute content to post content to people, but in a much more contextual way. So, there is going to be a pull and push, but the push is getting a lot smarter and very contextual.

Gardner: So it’s incumbent upon us who are examining this marketing evolution in the context of the IT industry to create that spectrum of content to make it valuable, to make it appropriate and not too commercial or crass, but useful. And at the same time now, think about how to get this in front of right people at the right time.

It seems to me that if I'm an IT company, and more and more of my services, whether it’s a B2B, B2C, B2E, or all of the above, I need to be thinking about ways that I'm going to communicate with my existing universe or market and move them toward new products and services as they need them in context of their process.

Think about this in a B2C environment in retail, where I am walking through Wal-Mart. I have my smartphone and, as I turn the corner, they know that now I am interested in home goods, and they are going to start to incentivize me to buy something. That’s kind of an understood mechanism by which my location and the fact that I turned a corner and made a decision provides an inference that then they can react to with content or information.

But take that now to the B2B environment where I'm in a business setting. I'm in procurement, I'm in product development, or I'm looking for a supply chain efficiency. I want to move into a new geographic location and I need to find the means to do that. All of those things are also like turning a corner in a Wal-Mart, except you're in a business application using cloud services, using a mobile device and apps.

If I'm an IT vendor, I'm going to want to have content or information that I can bring to that situation, perhaps even through an example of what other people have done when they face that same process crossroads. So the content can be more important and more germane. These are multi-million-dollar decisions in some cases.

Don’t you think that big companies should be starting to make content with the idea that it’s going to become part of their application services, part of their cloud delivery services, and that they need to use big data and analytics to know when to inject it?

Understanding context

Kratchounova: I absolutely agree. I think that difference between the example you just gave for Wal-Mart and a B2B environment is that, in Wal-Mart, you don’t need to understand so much about who the person is, what their role is, whether they work at an accounting firm or whether they are a physician, for example.

In a B2B environment you do need to understand context, and context is the location or the point where they are in their journey, whatever that journey maybe, and their role as well, because different people do have different decisions to make.

It’s a little bit more complex to bring context in a B2B environment, but it’s absolutely essential. You used the word inference. We always get enamored by the concept of the big data and guess what, once the machines are there, they're going to analyze everything and it's going to be this perfect world of marketing where everyone is aligned. 

Just look at the history of marketing. We don’t know ourselves as people. We individually don’t know ourselves as well, let alone someone else getting to know us that well. Inference is very important, but it’s going to be a balance between inferring what the person needs and allowing the person to customize this experience as well. So it’s going to come both ways.

Some people still believe that it’s a relationship-based world and, therefore, there's no need for a digital experience for their customers or for their potential buyers, which is actually never the case.

Some people going to one extreme or the other. Some people still believe that it’s a relationship-based world and, therefore, there's no need for a digital experience for their customers or for their potential buyers, which is actually never the case. Other people believe that it’s all digital; therefore they don’t need to touch them in any other way, which is rarely the case, especially in IT. 

Gardner: I also suggest to you that the data is more readily available, because I, as an employer, as a corporation, control what’s going on. I know what that employee is doing. I know what apps they're using. I know what data they're seeking. 

They're going to provide a feed of data back to you about what’s going on, on those apps from your very own employees.

What I'm suggesting then, as we begin to think about closing out this fascinating conversation, is that you need to have content, stories, and customers lined up, so that you can uncover their path to truth, their path to value, and have that content context-ready. Not only you are going to be using it in webinars, webcasts, podcasts, blogs, but pretty soon, if my hypothesis is correct, you're going to be using that content in the context of process and inside of applications in cloud services and on mobile devices.

Way of the future

Kratchounova: Maybe this is an opportunity, because it is the way of the future, and some people are more mature and others are less mature, but maybe we can bring other people into the discussion and see what other folks in the field think about where the content is going, how to contextualize and how to deliver it. One of the biggest question is how do we scale this. You can still do a meaningful experience or create a meaningful experience one-on-one, but it’s hard to recreate that even if your customers are 200, 500, or even 5,000 within the IT space. 

Gardner: You also have to remember that people's connections to apps, cloud services and context-aware processes are only going to increase. The Internet of Things and new classes of devices like the Apple Watch are expanding the end points and ways to connect to them. One of the things that’s important with the Apple Watch functionally is that it’s very good at alerts and notifications. It can also detect a lot of context of what you're doing physically and your location, and it can relate, because it integrates to your phone, with what you're doing with applications and cloud services.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if you're wearing an Apple Watch or equivalent, you're in a business setting, and you come up against a problem that you might not even know yet, but all of these services working together are going to say, "That person is going to be facing a problem; they are going to need to make a decision. Let’s put some information, content, and use cases together for them that will help them as they face that situation to make a better decision." That’s the kind of role I think we're heading toward. 

Before we sign off, Lora, tell me more about Scratch Marketing and Media, what you do and why that’s related to this discussion we have had today.

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Kratchounova: Scratch Marketing and Media is an integrated marketing agency. We help B2B technology companies with market growth. Sometimes that means helping the sales folks within IT companies and sometimes it means working with the marketing folks on things like content marketing programs, PR, and all its relations, and influence their relations in social media.

Gardner: And how could they find out more information about Scratch Marketing Media?

Kratchounova: You can go online at www.scratchmm.com.

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How HTC centralizes storage management to gain visibility and IT disaster avoidance

The next BriefingsDirect storage management innovation case study discussion highlights how communications cooperative HTC centralizes storage management to gain powerful visibility, reduce costs, and implement IT disaster avoidance capabilities.

We’ll learn more about how HTC lowers total storage utilization cost while bringing in a common management view to improve problem resolution, automate resources allocation, and more fully gain compliance -- as well as set the stage for broader virtualization and business continuity benefits.

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To explore how HTC attains total storage management, we sat down with Philip Sellers, Senior System Administrator at HTC in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Tell us about HTC.

Sellers

Sellers: HTC is the largest telephone cooperative in the nation. We serve the Myrtle Beach and surrounding South Carolina area. We started out as a telephone company, but at this point, we're a full-line telecommunications company, doing cable TV, internet security, home automation, and through our partnership with AT and T, we also do wireless service. 

Gardner: Now, you are not HTC, the handset maker from Asia; you are an entirely different company.

Sellers: A completely different company, although we do sell a few of those handsets with our wireless division.

Gardner: You told me when we talked earlier that you are a reluctant storage administrator. You started out as a VMware in virtualization admin. How did you get from one to the other, and why is it important for your organization?

Common story

Sellers: It’s probably a common story in a lot of shops. As VMware became more prolific in our environment, the line started to blur between networking and VMware, and storage and VMware. So I was pulled more into those directions as the primary VMware admin for our company. That gave me the opportunity to dig in and start to learn an area of IT that was new to me.

Gardner: Philip, tell us a little bit about the scale: how many virtual machines (VMs), how many employees, what sort of a size organization are you?

Sellers: We have 700 or so employees at this point, and almost that number of VMs that we're managing. We have a couple of different storage platforms today with the HP EVA and HP 3PAR StoreServ in-house.

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We also use lots of other things. We have HP StoreOnce for backup and HP StoreVirtual for some of our smaller needs, such as remote offices. 

Gardner: What kind of storage workloads are we dealing with here? Is this all of the apps across the company? What set of IT workloads are you addressing? 

One of the great benefits we've realized with VMware is the ability to have a good test and development platform to mirror what we have in production.

Sellers: The group that I'm a part of is actually the internal IT group. So we're running line-of-business applications, not the things that our customers are delivered service across, but the things that run our business to take orders, support financial operations, and those sorts of things.

And we're running a mixture of test and dev and production. One of the great benefits we've realized with VMware is the ability to have a good test and development platform to mirror what we have in production. So it runs the gamut for internal IT.

Gardner: When you start to think about progressing to a better utilization and the rationalization of storage, rather than have overlapping or disjointed storage capabilities, what sort of philosophy do you have about storage? How do you think that you can make the whole greater than sum of the parts and get those utilization benefits over time?

Deeper insight

Sellers: It’s something that I learned back in my virtualization days. For me, it’s huge to have visibility into what’s going to in your storage. One of the benefits of our transition to HP 3PAR storage is that we've been able to realize much deeper levels of insight into what’s going on inside of the arrays.

You know, as we were making that switch, we evaluated other third parties, ultimately deciding on the mid-range 7000 3PAR series for our environment and for our needs. That visibility has been key for us.

But it’s also come with a set of challenges, because we now have multiple storage consoles that we need to manage from. We have different places that we need to check. One of the keys for us is having somewhere where we can see it all, or get a better idea of the entire environment from an end-to-end perspective.

One of the other huge benefits that we've realized is some level of disaster avoidance.

That’s one of the things we learned from our VMware days. We were flying blind early on, and that caused us problems and potential problems, because we didn’t know something was going on. One of our main goals is establishing good visibility into our storage environment.

Gardner: So, it’s not just enough to modernize your storage and improve your storage capabilities, but at the same time you really need to address the management issues and consolidate management. In doing so, what have been some of the payoffs that you can recall? How has this helped your organization better provide IT services internally?

Sellers: From a performance standpoint, our former primary storage platform was not great at telling us how close we were to the edge of our performance capabilities. We never knew exactly what was going to cause a problem or the unpredictability of virtual workloads in particular. We never knew where we were going to have issues.

Being able to see into that has allowed us to prevent help desk cost for slow services, for problems that maybe we didn’t even know were going on initially. One of the other huge benefits that we've realized is new levels of disaster avoidance.

Gardner: And what do you mean by that, rather than disaster recovery (DR), which is taking care of business after we have had some terrible thing happen? How do you head that off?

Disaster avoidance

Sellers: I know that’s not an industry term, but that’s what I like to call it, because in our environment, we have two data centers that are fairly close together. What we've implemented is the HP 3PAR StoreServ metro storage clustering feature, which they call peer persistence, but it's VMware’s metro storage clustering. We've also done that with Windows clustering as well.

We have two sets of 3PARs in different data centers, and they act as one. So, they replicate synchronously between the two locations and they fail-over "automagically." I don’t know how else to say it. It just seamlessly fails-over between the two sites.

For our environment, we were at a particularly vulnerable state if we lost a data array, because so many things were pointing at it. Now if we lose a single data array it’s not a big deal. It fails-over and it continues running.

Gardner: And when you say vulnerable, I think you're talking about hurricanes?

Sellers: A lot of times we plan for those large natural disasters, but sometimes it’s the small ones that get us like UPS maintenance or something as simple as a power outage. Maybe your generator doesn’t kick in in time. Sometimes, that can be a disaster of almost the same scale as a hurricane to your business operations -- just from something simple.

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Gardner: So the storage management capability has provided "automagically," as you say, this disaster avoidance. That’s a pretty important metric. Do you have any idea of the value of that to your business, and maybe start to put that in dollar terms? It seems a pretty profound difference.

Sellers: I can’t necessarily put it into dollar terms. That’s not the world that I work in, but I know that anytime there is downtime to our customer relationship advisers, and the people in the field, that’s bad for business.

So we're avoiding those kinds of situations as best we can. We could lose an entire data center site and, with technology built into the VMware layer and into the HP 3PAR layer, it will come back up. It may be reboot of a server, but we try to do everything we can to avoid disaster situations today, rather than just plan for needing to fail a data center over to "site B," and go through all of that testing.

Gardner: Let’s get down to some more brass tacks on actual storage utilization benefits. Any thoughts or recollections about what this means in terms of utilization, so  no more worries about running out of storage base or capacity?

Seeing benefits

Sellers: Yeah, the HP 3PAR platform has been really great inside of our environment because we realize the marketing term of the "two-to-one thin provisioning." We're seeing that benefit.

When I looked at the console before I came here, we were seeing around a 2.3 to 1 compaction, and that’s without deduplication and some of the other newer technologies that are capable in the 3PAR platform. We may be able to realize better than that in the future.

Gardner: We've talked about disaster avoidance. We've recognized some significant savings in the provisioning and utilization. Let’s go back to management. What sort of benefits are you getting now with a more holistic approach and how does that help, perhaps on a data lifecycle basis?

Sellers: One of the ways that we're approaching that set of problems is with storage resource management software. We've traditionally used a piece of software called Storage Essentials, which HP makes. It’s heterogeneous storage-management software, so it can look at all of our different arrays and looks at our backup arrays and our primary storage arrays, as well as our back-up environment, and pulls all that information together.

We've been able to leverage that from a reporting standpoint to be able to view and pinpoint growth to see how see things are running from a dashboard view.

We've been able to leverage that from a reporting standpoint to be able to view and pinpoint growth to see how see things are running from a dashboard view. Over the last six months or so, I've been working in an early-release program for a product called HP Storage Operations Management.

This software is the next iteration of Storage Essentials. It’s got a much more approachable and modern user interface, which brings up and aggregates our total environment so that we can get a full picture of what’s going on there. Then, we can drill down and see at specific levels how things are performing, what our utilization trend is, or how much time we have until a device or a storage pool is full.

Those are things that keep us out of the really dangerous situations in getting down to a time where you're in a mission critical season, maybe the holidays or something where it’s heavy sales, and you run out of disk space and you can’t get your procurement cycle to get storage quickly enough.

Those things are just as dangerous as the hurricane that we were talking about earlier from a business operations perspective. Tools like this help us to manage and see what’s going on in the environment and help us plan and act proactively.

Gardner: I could really see why your philosophy is visibility and management oversight. It comes back again and again as a huge force multiplier benefit. 

Room to grow

Sellers: Absolutely. There's a saying that ignorance is bliss. When you're flying blind, that’s true, until it catches up with you, and it eventually overtakes you. We have lots and lots of room to grow and capabilities where we're at today. This new version of management storage resource management product has lots of great potential, too.

It’s an initial release. So, it’s got somewhat limited support for different storage families and that kind of thing, but they're working to bring in additional support and make it all that the previous product was, and much more -- and that’s visible from the initial release.

So we're excited about seeing where that can help us, particularly because one of the switches in this new product is that it’s not just a collect, an analytics reporting system. It’s a dashboard system where it takes that analytics and brings it back to a dashboard to let you drill down in to it and see it real clearly in near-real-time. I won’t say in real-time, but within whatever amount of time you configure.

Gardner: How about your future business activities? How well you can support them? I know that media is a fast-changing business. Do you feel confident now that when your superiors in your organization come to you and say, "We need this," that you're in a better position to hop-to quickly? Is there a sense of confidence that you can take on market change better?

We feel confident that we have room to grow and that we can do so in shorter terms.

Sellers: I certainly believe so. We've been able to adapt and change more quickly because of changes that we've made with VMware, with HP 3PAR. We feel confident that we have room to grow and that we can do so in shorter terms. We've been able to try and look at new things like VDI deployments to help us with compliance-type issues, where we're under regulations and have to patch and have to ensure that our systems are secure.

And so we are looking at things like that now that we were afraid to put on to primary storage in the past. It's something where we think we have a good mix today for the future.

Gardner: What advice might you might provide others who would be approaching a disparate storage environment? And maybe share your philosophy about visibility and anticipation being better than reaction. Maybe they are also seeking disaster avoidance, rather than disaster recovery. For those folks that are not quite as far along in this journey as you are, what might you suggest for them to be thinking about -- or that you wish you knew about earlier?

Sellers: There is definitely some low hanging fruit, and that’s what visibility will bring to you -- the ability to handle some of that low-hanging fruit. If you have a situation where your storage team is siloed away from your server team, bringing something in that can see both of those sides and map together that whole environment is a real easy way to identify inefficiency.

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Those are LUNs that maybe are provisioned -- but not in use. There is no I/O on them. That’s a dollar amount immediately reclaimed. Finding VMs and things with visibility. These tools can look in to the VMware environment where you can see that you have lots and lots of VMs that are shut down.

There are easy things that you can do to start that process, no matter what your storage platform is. I think that’s a universal thing. If you have something that can gain you visibility in to the environment there are some easy things and easy wins that you can bring back.

Further improvements

Gardner: And those of course provide grist for the mill of further improvements and further budget to accomplish even more.

Sellers: Absolutely. If you want to make a storage platform switch or if you want to do other improvements and gain more efficiency, this gives you a little bit of extra room, some wiggle room, to make those things reality. We spent an awful lot of our budget just in keeping the lights on, keeping things up and running. Anytime you can gain some wiggle room from that budget, it certainly allows you the ability to look at innovation.

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

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Big data, risk, and predictive analysis drive use of cloud-based ITSM, says panel

This BriefingsDirect IT operations innovation panel discussion focuses on the changing role of IT service management (ITSM) in a hybrid computing world.

As IT systems, resources, assets, and information are more scattered across more enterprise locations and devices -- as well as across various cloud service environments -- how can IT leaders hope to know where their "stuff" is, who’s using it, how to secure it, and then accurately pay for it?

Better than ever, it turns out. Advanced software asset management (SAM) methods can efficiently enforce compliance, reduce audit risk, cut costs, and enhance end-user productivity -- even as the complexity of IT itself increases.

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

We'll hear from four IT leaders about how they have improved ITSM despite such challenges, and we'll learn how the increased use of big data and analytics when applied to ITSM improves IT assets inventory control and management. We'll also hear how a service brokering role can also be used to great competitive advantage, thanks to ITSM-generated information.

To learn more about how ITSM solves multiple problems for IT, we're joined by Charl Joubert, a change and configuration management expert based in Pretoria, South Africa; Julien Kuijper, an expert in asset and license management based in Paris; Patrick Bailly, IT Quality and Process Director at Steria, also based in Paris, and Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric, based in Harrogate, UK. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Let’s talk about modern SAM, software asset management. There seems to be a lot going on with getting more information about software and how it’s distributed and used. Julien, tell us how you're seeing organizations deal with this issue.

Kuijper: SAM has to square quite a complicated circle. One is compliance in a company, compliance with regard to software installation and usage, and also ensuring that while doing this, we must ensure that the software that is entering a company isn't dangerous. It's things like not letting a virus come in, opening threats or complications. Those are three very technical and very factual environments.

Kuijper

But, you also want to please your end-user. If you don’t please your end-user and you don’t give them the ability to work, they're going to be frustrated. They're going to complain about IT. It’s already a complicated enough.

You have to square that circle by implementing the correct processes first, while giving the correct information around how to behave in the end-to-end software lifecycle.

Gardner: And asset management when it comes to software is not small, there are some very big numbers -- and costs -- involved.

Kuijper: It’s actually a very inconvenient truth. An audit from a publisher or a vendor can easily reach 7 or 8 digits, and a typical company has between 10 and 50 publishers. So, at 7 digits per publisher, you can easily do the math. That’s typically the financial risk.

You also have a big reputation risk. If you don’t pay for software and you are caught, you end up being in the press. You don’t want your company, your branding, to be at that level of exposure.

You have to bring this risk to the attention of IT leaders at the CIO level, but they don’t really want to hear that, because it costs a lot. When they hear this risk, they can't avoid investment, and the investment can be quite large as well.

Typically, if this investment is reaching five percent of your overall yearly software spending, you're on the right level. It’s a big number, but still it’s worth investing.

But you have to compare this investment with regard to your overall software spending. Typically, if this investment is reaching five percent of your overall yearly software spending, you're on the right level. It’s a big number, but still it’s worth investing.

Coming with this message to IT management and getting the ear of a person who is interested in the topic and then getting the investment authorization, you've gone through half the journey. Implementation afterward will be defining your processes, finding the right tool, implementing it, and running it.

Gardner: When it comes to value to the end-user, by having an understood, clearly-defined process in place allows them to get to the software they want, make sure they can use it, and look for it on a sanctioned list, for example. While some end-users might see this as a hurdle, I think it enables them eventually to get the tools they need when they need them.

Smart communication

Kuijper: Right. At the beginning, every end-user will see all those SAM processes as a burden or a complication. So you have to invest a lot in communication, smart communication, with your company and make people understand that it’s everyone’s responsibility to be [software license] compliant and also that it can help in recovering money.

If you do this in a smart way, and the process has a delivery time not longer than three days, then you're good. You have to ensure, of course, that you have a software catalog that is up-to-date, with an easy access to your main titles. All those points from the end-to-end software lifecycle are implemented -- from software tool, then software delivery, then software re-usage, software, and also disposal. When all this is lean, then you’ve made your journey. Then, the software lifecycle process will not be seen any more as a pain, but it will be seen as a business-enabler.

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Gardner: Now, asset management doesn’t just cover the realm of software. It includes hardware, and in a network environment, that can be very large numbers of equipment and devices, endpoints as well as network equipment.
Edward at Redcentric, tell us about how you see the management of assets through the lens of a network.

Jackson: We have more than 10,000 devices in management from a multitude of vendors and we use asset management in terms of portfolio management, managing the models, the versions, and the software.

Jackson

We also have a configuration management tool that takes the configurations of these devices and runs them against compliance. We can run them against a gold or a silver build. We can also run them against security flaws. It gives us an end-to-end management.

All of this feeds into our ITSM product and then also it feeds into things like the configuration management data base (CMDB). So we have a complete end-to-end knowledge of the software, the hardware, and the services that we're giving the customer.

Gardner: Knowing yourself and your organization allows for that lifecycle benefit that Julien referred to. Eventually, that gives you the freedom to manage and extend those benefits into things like helpdesk support, even IT operations, where the performance can be maintained better.

Jackson: Yes, that's 360-degree management from hardware being delivered on-site, to being discovered, being automatically populated into the multitude of support and operational systems that we use, and then into the ITSM side.

If you don’t get it right from the start and you don’t have the correct models defined for example a Cisco device or the correct OS version on that device, one perhaps where it has security flaws, then you run the risk of deploying a vulnerable service to the customer.

Thinking about scale

Gardner: Looking at the different types of tools and approaches, this goes beyond thinking about assets alone. We're thinking also about scale. Tell us about your organization, and why the scale and ability to manage so many devices and information is important?

Jackson: Being a managed service provider (MSP), we have about 1,000 external customers, and each one of those has a tailored service, ranging from voice, storage, to data, and cloud. So we need to be able to manage these services that are contained within the 10,000 plus devices that we have.

We need to understand the service end-to-end. So there’s quite bit of service level management in there. It all ties down to having the correct kind of vendor, the correct kind of service mapping, and information needs to be accurate in the configuration items (CIs), so support can utilize this information.

If we have an incident that is automatically generated on the management platforms, it goes into the ITSM platform. We can create an effective customer list within, say, five minutes of the network outage and then email or SMS the customer pretty much directly.

We need to understand the service end-to-end. So there’s quite bit of service level management in there.

There’s more ways of doing it, but it’s all due to having a tight control on the assets that are out there in the field, having an asset management tool that can actually control that, and being able to understand the topology of the network and where everything lies. This gives us the ability to create relationships between these devices and have hierarchical logical and physical entities.

Gardner: You have confidence that you work with tools and platforms that can handle that scale?

Jackson: All the tools that we have are pretty much carrier-grade. So we can scale a lot more than the 10,000 devices that we currently have. If you set it up and plan it right, it doesn’t really matter how many devices you have in management. You have to have the right processes and structure to be able to manage them.

Gardner: We've talked about software, hardware, and networks. Nowadays, cloud services, microservices, and APIs are also a big part of the mix. IT consumes them, they make value from them, and they extend that value into the organization.

Let’s go to Patrick at Steria. How are you seeing in your organization an evolution of ITSM into a service brokering role? And does the current generation of ITSM tools and platforms give you a road to that service brokering capacity?

Extending services

Bailly: What’s needed for becoming a service broker that is we need to offer the ability to extend the current service that we have to the services that are available today in the cloud.

Bailly

To do that, we need to extend the capability of our framework. Today, our framework has been designed in order to run the operation on behalf of our customers, to run the operation on the customer side, or the operation on our data center, but more or less, traditionally IT. The current ITSM framework is able to do that.

What we're facing is that we have customers who want to add short-term [cloud capacity]. We need to offer that capability. What's very important is to offer one interface toward the customers, and to integrate across several service providers at the same time.

Gardner: Tell us a bit about Steria. You're a large organization, 20,000 employees, and in multiple countries.

Bailly: We're an IT service provider, and we manage different kinds of services from infrastructure management, application management, business process outsourcing, system integration, etc., all over Europe. Today, we're leveraging the capabilities that we have today in India and in Poland.

Gardner: Now, we've looked at what ITSM does. We haven’t dug into too much about where it’s going next in terms of what analysis of this data can bring to the table.

Charl, tell us, please, about how you see the use of analytics improving what you've been doing in your setting. How do baseline results from ITSM, the tools we have been talking about, improve when you start to analyze that data, index it, cleanse it, and get at the real underlying information that can then be turned into business benefits?

Joubert: Looking at inadequacies of your processes is really the start of all of this. The moment you start scratching at the vast amount of information you have, you start seeing the errors of your ways, and ways and opportunities to correct them.

Joubert

It's really an exciting time in ITSM. We now have the ability to start mining this magnitude of information that’s being locked inside attachments in all of these ITSM solutions. We can now start indexing all that unstructured data and using it. It’s a fantastic time to be in IT.

Gardner: Give me an example of where you've seen this at work -- maybe a helpdesk environment. How can you immediately get benefits from starting to analyze systems and IT information?

Million interactions

Joubert: In the service desk I'm involved in, we have about a total of a million interactions over the past few years. What we've done with big data is index the categorization of all these interactions.

With tools from HP, Smart Analytics and Smart Ticketing, we're able to predict the categorization of these interactions to a accuracy of about 84 percent at the moment. This assists the service desk agents to more accurately get the correct information to the correct service teams the first time, with fewer errors in escalation, which in turn leads to greater customer satisfaction.

Gardner: Julien, where does the analysis of what you're doing with software asset management, for example, play a role? Where do you see it going?

Kuijper: SAM is already quite complex on-premise and we all know today that the IT world is moving to the cloud, and this is the next challenge of SAM, because the whole point of the cloud is that you don’t know where your systems are.

However, the licensing models, as they are today, refer to CPU, to on-premise, to physical assets. Understanding how you can adapt your licensing model to this new concept -- not that new anymore now -- this new concept of cloud is something to which even the software publishers and vendors have not really adapted their model.

This is the next challenge of SAM, because the whole point of the cloud is that you don’t know where your systems are.

You also have to face some vendors or publishers who are not willing to adapt their model, especially to be able to audit specific customers and get more revenue. So, on one hand, you have to implement the right processes and the right tools, which are now going to navigate in a very complex environment, very difficult to scan, very difficult to analyze. At the same time, you have to update all your contracts, and sometime, this will not be possible.

Some vendors will have a very easy licensing model if you are implementing their software in their own cloud environment, but in another cloud environment, in a competitor, they might make this journey quite complicated for you.

So this will be complex and will be resolved by correct data to analyze and also some legal workforce and purchasing workforce to try to adapt the contracts.

Gardner: In many ways right now, we never really own software. We only lease it or borrow it and we're charged in a variety of ways. But soon we'll to be going more to that pay-as-you-use, pay-as-you-consume model. What about the underlying information associated with those services? Would logs go along with your cloud services? Should you be able to access that so that you can analyze it in the context of your other IT infrastructure?

Edward, any thoughts as a managed services environment and a management of networks provider. Do you see that as you provide more services that you are providing insight or ITSM metadata along with the services?

IaaS to SaaS

Jackson: Over the past five or six years, the services that we offered pretty much started as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), but it’s now very much a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, managed OS, and everything up the technology stack into managed applications.

It's gotten to a point now that we are taking on the managing of bespoke applications that customers wanted to hand over to Redcentric. So not only do we have to understand the technology and the operating systems that go on these platforms in the cloud, but we also have to understand the bespoke software that’s sitting on them and all the necessary dependencies for that.

The more that we invest into cloud technologies, the more complex the service that we offer our customers becomes. We have a multitude of management systems that can monitor all the different elements of this and then piece them together in a service-level model (SLM) perspective. So you get SLM and you get service assurance on top of that.

Gardner: We've recently  heard about HP's IDOL OnDemand and Vertica OnDemand, as part of the Haven OnDemand. They're bringing these analytics capabilities to cloud services, APIs as well. As I understand it, they're going to be applying them to more IT operations issues. So it’s quite possible that we'll start to see a mash up, if you will, between a cloud service, but also the underlying IT information associated with that service.

Let’s go back to Patrick at Steria. Any thoughts about where this combination of ITSM within a cloud environment develops? How do you see it going?

Bailly: The system today exists for traditional IT, and we also have to have the tooling for designing and consuming cloud services. We are running HP Service Manager for traditional IT, legacy IT, and we are running HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) for managing and operating in the cloud.

We’d like to have a unique way for reconciling the catalog of services that are in Service Manager with the catalog of services that are in CSA, and we would need to have a single, unique portal for doing that.

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What we're expecting with HP Propel is to offer the capabilities to aggregate services that are coming from various sources and to extend that by also offering them. When we're serving this live, we need to offer some additional features like collaboration, incident management, access to the knowledge base, collaboration between service desk and end user, collaboration between end users, etc.

There's also another important point and that is service integration. As a service provider, we will have to deliver and control the services that are delivered by some partners and by some cloud service providers.

In order to do that, we need to have strong integration, not only partnership, but also strong integration. And that integration should be multiple point, meaning that, as soon as we're able to integrate a service provider with this, that integration will be de facto available for our other customers. We're expecting that from HP Propel.

And it’s not only an integration for provisioning service, but it’s also an integration for running the other processes, collaboration, incident management, etc.

Gardner: Patrick mentioned HP Propel, do any of you also have some experience with that or are looking at it to solve other problems?

Single view

Joubert: We're definitely looking at it to give a single view for all our end users. There are various supportive partners in the area where I work. The end user really wants one place to ask for fixing a broken light, to fixing a broken PC, to installing software. It's ease of use that they're looking for. So yes, we are definitely looking at Propel.

Gardner: Let’s take another look to the future. We've heard quite a bit about the Internet of Things (IoT) -- more devices, more inputs, and more data. Do you think that’s something that’s going to be an issue for ITSM, or is that something separate? Do you view that the infrastructure that’s being created for ITSM lends itself to something like managing the IoT and more devices on a network?

Kuijper: For me, as asset management experts and software asset management experts, we have to draw a line somewhere and say, "There is this IoT, and there is some data that we have to say we don’t want to analyze." There are things that are here on the Internet. That’s fine, but too much engineering around that might be over-killing the processes.

We also have to be very careful about false good ideas. I personally think that bring your own device (BYOD) is a false good idea. It brings tremendous issues with regards to who takes care of an asset that is personally owned by a person in a corporate environment, who deals with IT.

Today, it’s perfect. I bring the computer that I'm used to in the office. Tomorrow, it’s broken. Who is going to fix it? When I buy software for this machine, who is going to pay for it and who's going to be responsible for non-compliance?

We also have to be very careful about false good ideas. I personally think that bring your own device is a false good idea.

A CIO might think it’s very intelligent and very advanced to allow people to use what they're used to, but the legal issues behind it are quite complicated. I would say this is a false good idea.

Gardner: Edward, you mentioned that at Redcentric, scale doesn’t concern you. You're pretty confident that the systems that you can access can handle almost any scale. How about that IoT? Even if it shouldn’t be in the purview legally or in terms of the role of IT, it does seem like the systems that have been developed for ITSM are applicable to this issue. Any thoughts about more and more devices on a network?

Jackson: In terms of the scale of things, if the elements are in your control and you have some structure and management around them. You don’t need to be overly concerned. We certainly don’t keep anything in our systems their shouldn’t be in there or doesn’t need to be.

Going forward, things like big data and smart analytics layered on top would give us a massive benefit in how we could deliver our service, and more importantly, how we can manage the service.

Once you have your processes is in place, and can understand the necessity of those processes, you have the structure, and you have the kind of management platform that your sure is going to handle the data, then you can basically leverage things like big data, smart analytics, and data mining to enable you to offer a sophisticated level of support that perhaps your competitors can’t.

Esoteric activity

Gardner: It's occurred to me that the data and the management of that ITSM data is central to any of these major challenges, whether it’s big data, cloud service brokering, management of assets for legal or jurisdiction compliance. ITSM has become much more prominent, and is in the position to solve many more problems.

I'd like to end our conversation with your thoughts along those lines. Charl, ITSM, is it more important than ever? How has it become central?

Joubert: Absolutely. With the advent of big data, we suddenly have the tools to start mining this information and using it to our benefit to give better service to our end-users.

With the advent of big data, we suddenly have the tools to start mining this information and using it to our benefit to give better service to our end users.

Kuijper: ITSM is definitely core to any IT environment, because ITSM is the way to put the correct price tag behind a service. We have service charging and service costing. If you don’t do that correctly, then you basically don’t tell the truth to your customer or to your end user.

If you mix this with the IoT and the possibility to have anything with an IP address available on the network, then you enter into more philosophical thoughts. In a corporate environment, let’s assume you have a tag on your car keys that helps you to find them, and that is linked on the Internet. Those gizmos are happening today.

This brings some personal life information into your corporate environment. What does the corporate environment do about this? The brand of your car is on your car tag. They will know that you bought a brand new car. They will know all this information which is personal. So we have to think about ethics as well.

So drawing a line of what the corporate environment will take care and what is private will be essential in this IOT. When you have your mobile phone, is it personal, it is business? Drawing a line will be very important.

Gardner: But at least we will have the means to draw that line and then enforce the drawing of that line.

Kuijper: Right. Totally correct.

Gardner: Edward, the role of ITSM, bigger than ever or not so much?

Bigger than ever

Jackson: I think it’s bigger than ever. It’s the front end of your business, and the back-end of your business its what the customers see. It’s how you deliver your service, and if you haven’t got it right, then you are not going to be able to deliver the service that a customer expects.

You might have the best products in the world, but if your ITSM systems and your ITSM team aren’t doing what they're supposed to be doing then you know it’s not going to be any good, and the customers are going to say that.

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Gardner: And lastly to Steria, and Patrick, the role of ITSM, bigger than ever? How do you view it?

Bailly: For me, the role of IT Service Management (ITSM) won't change. We did ITSM in the past and we still continue to have that in the future. In order to deliver any service,  we need to have the detailed configuration of the service. We will have to run processes and not have the service change. What will change in the future is the diversity of service providers that we use.

As a service provider, we'll have to walk with a lot of other service providers. So the SLA will be more complex to manage for service management. It will be critical. For the customer, you will have to not only manage — but to govern — that service even if it is provided by lot of service providers.

Gardner: So the complexity goes up, and therefore the need to manage that complexity also needs to go up.

Bailly: What is also very important in license management in the cloud is that very often the return on investment (ROI) of the cloud adoption has ignored or minimized the impact of software cost. When you tell your customers, internal or external, that this xyz cloud offer will cost them that amount of money, you will most likely have to add up 20-30 percent because of the impact of the software cost afterward.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP Enterprise.

You may also be interested in:

• Rolta AdvizeX experts on hastening big data analytics in healthcare and retail
• The future of business intelligence as a service with GoodData and HP Vertica 
• Enterprises opting for converged infrastructure as stepping stone to hybrid cloud 
• Redcentric orchestrates networks-intensive merger using advanced configuration management database
• HP pursues big data opportunity with updated products, services, developer program
• How eCommerce sites harvest big data across multiple clouds 
• How Localytics uses big data to improve mobile app development and marketing 
• HP hyper-converged appliance delivers speedy VDI and apps deployment and a direct onramp to hybrid cloud
• Full 360 takes big data analysis cloud services to new business heights
• HP hyper-converged appliance delivers speedy VDI and apps deployment and a direct onramp to hybrid cloud 
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