Tuesday, June 15, 2010

HP's Anton Knolmar on seeking innovations to enterprise IT challenges at Software Universe conference

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington D.C. We're here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

We're now joined by Anton Knolmar, Vice President of Marketing for HP Software & Solutions. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:
Knolmar: There are a lot of things going on at the moment around virtualization, cloud, outsourcing, on-premise, off-premise. I think that over the next five or six years, there will be an even greater disruptions in how organizations adopt and use technology.

If you look around, there are a couple of facts which are really critical. There will be a 100 percent increase in the number of virtual machines from 2009 to 2012 and a 43 percent growth in virtualized applications. Mobile devices will grow even more.

A lot of things are happening at the moment around those different areas, around mobile devices, cloud, and virtualization, as well as around the information explosion for the foreseeable future.

Ahead of the game

Definitely, from an HP and from an HP Software & Solutions perspective, we want to be ahead of this game and provide the appropriate level for our customers, so that they can be future ready with whatever we provide them.

They can deploy there services. They can deploy them better. They can deploy it all more simply. They can integrate more simply. And, they can use this stuff to give them, our customers, a competitive advantage against their competitors.

Technologies like virtualization and cloud represent the biggest disruption in the technology environment since client-server. But, unlike client-server, the entire enterprise is not just going on one service delivery method or another. We believe that enterprises will have hybrid technologies, as well as a hybrid application environment.

This hybrid environment will be created from enterprise sourcing services from a variety of service delivery models. It will require a set of tools that can manage the service irrespective of where it comes from, either from in-house, physical, virtual, outsource, or via the cloud.

These new delivery models will be directly related to how they can manage and how they can automate them, irrespective of where they are sourced or where they are running.



The ability to benefit from these advances is where our customers are struggling. These new delivery models will be directly related to how they can manage and how they can automate them, irrespective of where they are sourced or where they are running.

That’s one key piece of our announcement. What we can get across from this event in Washington is to explain our customers how we can help them to speed up time-to-innovation by reducing the risk. On the other hand, they can get ready by building a management environment that is ready for the next big thing.

Also, we can explain to our customers how we can simplify, integrate, and automate to gain, as I mentioned before, a competitive advantage from the new technologies. What’s clear to everyone is that one size fits no one. So, enterprises will need to have multiple sourcing options for their applications.

HP Software Universe has quite a history. It’s not the first time that we're running this. A big thing for this year, especially for Americans, is that we're moving out of Las Vegas, where we were for the last couple of years, to Washington.

First, we wanted to get a different staging and we wanted to attract our public-sector customers. That’s an important thing for us, because we do a lot of business here. That’s one of the reasons we've moved to Washington.

What we're also doing for the first time is web streaming our content to different parts of the world, so that we really can reach out much more broadly. We're also building up a kind of HP Software & Solutions community. We have other ways of doing this and are using the social media capabilities as well. [Search for conference goings-on at Twitter on #HPSWU.]

We're connecting our customer community in a better way to bring those pieces together, even the different persona levels. Basically, we're drilling down from a CIO level, via the VP or IT manager, down to the other areas, where we have more of a practitioner level.

For this show specifically, people can even follow us on Twitter and on Facebook. It’s really a big thing for us to be investing in these kinds of new areas and reaching out as broadly as we can do here to the different target audiences and using all these new capabilities which are out there.

More than 200 track sessions

We're really excited, as we have a fully packed agenda from Tuesday until Friday with mainstage sessions and 200 track sessions. We have a dedicated Executive Track and we have a combined solution showcase, where we have our HP product experts, our service professionals, and our key partners together.

We have awards of excellence and partner summits. So, we're really trying to get the entire ecosystem that has already deployed our solutions, from a customer and a partner perspective here, but also prospects in Washington. I'm happy to tell you that all the hotel rooms are booked. So, we're fully packed in the middle of Washington to try to bring across the best of what we have from our Software and Solutions portfolio.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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at 4:01 PM 0 comments

New HP products take aim at managing complexity in 'hybrid data center' era

WASHINGTON - The HP Software Universe 2010 conference is in full swing here this week, highlighted by a slew of HP products and services focused on giving IT leaders the means to view and control their rapidly escalating complexity.

Among the most significant announcements Tuesday is the next iteration of the HP Business Service Management (BSM) software suite. HP BSM 9.0 works on automating comprehensive management across applications lifecycles, with new means to bring a common approach to hybrid-sourced app delivery models. Whether apps are supported from virtualized infrastructures, on-premises stacks, private clouds, public clouds, software as a service (SaaS) sources, or outsourced IT -- they need to managed with commonality. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

"Our customers are dealing with some of the most significant combination of changes in IT technologies and paradigm that I have ever seen," said Robin Purohit, Vice President and General Manager of HP Software Products. "So whether it's a whole new way of developing applications like Agile, the real acceleration of virtualization, test environments moving into production workloads, and all of the evaluations of where the cloud and SaaS fits -- and then how they support all the enterprise applications."

[See an interview with Purohit on BSM 9.0, or listen to it as a podcast.]

HP’s core message around the BSM 9.0 is clear: To help companies automate apps and services management amid complexity so they can reinvest in innovation. The economics of innovation -- of being able to do more in terms of results without the luxury of spending a lot more -- has to be factored into the management matrix.

“We did a study last October that showed our clients believe innovation is going to help them even through uncertain economic times—and they see technology as central to their ability to succeed in a changing environment,” said Paul Muller, vice president of Strategic Marketing, Software Products, HP Software & Solutions. “There is some skepticism within the business community that IT is ready to make those changes.”

HP’s view of the hybrid world

HP wants to help IT combat that skepticism by equipping them with HP BSM 9.0. The solutions not only address hybrid delivery models, but also what Muller calls the “consumerization of IT,” referring to people who use non-company-owned devices on a company network. As Muller sees it, employees expect to have the same dependable experience while working from home as they do at work.

“We believe organizations will struggle to deliver the quality outcomes expected of them unless they are able to deal with the increase rate of change that occurs when you deploy virtualization or cloud technologies,” Muller said. “It’s a change that allows for innovation, but it’s also a change that creates opportunity for something to go wrong.”

Indeed, Bill Veghte, HP Executive Vice President for HP Software and Solutions, said that three major trends -- all game changers on their own -- are converging around IT: virtualization, cloud, and mobile.

"We need to continuously simplify" management to head off rapid complexity acceleration aroud this confluence of trends. He pointed to the need for gaining a comprehensive view into hybrid IT operations, automation for management and remediation, and "simply expressing" the views on what is going on it IT, regardless of the location or types of services.

"Users want a unified view in a visually compelling way, and they want to be able to take action on it," said Veghte.

At the center of Wednesday’s announcement is what HP proposes as the solution to this challenge: HP BSM 9.0. The software offers several features that should cause companies that work with hybrid IT environments to take a closer look. One of those features is automated operations that work to reduce troubleshooting costs and hasten repair time. BSM 9.0 also offers cloud-ready and virtualized operations that aim to reduce security risks with strategic management services.

"The active interest of our clients in cloud computing has just exploded," said Purohit. "I think last year was a curiosity for many senior IT executives something on the horizon, but this year it's really an active evaluation. I think most customers are looking initially at something a little safer, meaning a private cloud approach, where there is either new stack of infrastructure and applications are run for them by somebody else on their site, or at some off-site operation. So that seems to be the predominant new paradigm."

Purohit described BSM 9 as "a breakthrough" for coming to grips with the "hybrid data center."

It’s the great trap because if you don’t know what infrastructure your application is depending on from one minute to the next, you can’t troubleshoot it when something goes wrong.


Indeed, integration is a running theme with HP BSM 9.0. The solution offers a single, integrated view for IT to manage enterprise services in hybrid environments, while new collaborative operations promise to boost efficiency with an integrated view for service operations management. Every IT operations user receives contextual and role-based information through mobile devices and other access points for faster resolution.

"BSM 9 is our solution for end-to-end monitoring of services in the data center. It's been a great business for us, and we now have a break-through release that we reveled to our customers today, that’s anchored around what we call the Runtime Service Model," said Purohit.

"So a service model is basically a real-time map of everything from the business transactions of the businesses running, to all of the software that makes up that composite applications for the service, and all of the infrastructure whether it be physical or virtual or on-premise or off-premise that supports all of that application," said Purohit.

"So all of that together -- knowing how it's connected, what the health of it is, what's changing in it so, you can actually make sure it's all running exactly the way the business expects -- is really critical," he said.

The run-time service model works to save time by improving organizational service impact analysis and troubleshooting processing times, said HP. The HP Business Availability Center (BAC) 9.0 offers an integrated user experience as well as applications monitoring and diagnostics with HP’s twist on the run-time service model.

“The rate of change in the way infrastructure elements relate to each other -- or even where they are from one minute to the next -- means we’ve moved from an environment where you could scan your infrastructure weekly and still be quite accurate to workloads shifting minute by minute,” Muller said. “It’s the great trap because if you don’t know what infrastructure your application is depending on from one minute to the next, you can’t troubleshoot it when something goes wrong.”

Other elements of BPM 9.0 include the BAC Anywhere service that lets organizations monitor external web apps from anywhere, even outside the firewall, from a single integrated console. HP Operations Manager i 9.0 promises to improve IT service performance by way of “smart plug-ins” that automatically discover application changes and updates them in the run-time service model. Finally, HP Network Management Center 9.0 gives aims to give companies better network visibility by connecting virtual services, physical networks and public cloud services together.

HP’s expanded universe

In other HP news, the company announced software that aims to accelerate application testing while reducing the risks associated with new delivery models. Dubbed HP Test Data Management, HP also promises the new solution lowers costs associated with application testing and ensures sensitive data doesn’t violate compliance regulations.

The improvement helps simplify and accelerate testing data preparation, an important factor in making tests and quality more integral to applications development and deployment, again, across a variety of infrastructure models.

Along with HP Test Data Management, HP launched new integrations between HP Quality Center and the Collabnet TeamForge with the goal of improving communication and collaboration among business analysts, project managers, developers and quality assurance teams.

The integration with CollabNet, built largely on Apache Subversion, will help further bind the "devops" process, said Purohit. "The result is better apps," he said.

And as part of its work to help clients maximize software investments, HP also rolled HP Solution Management Services. This offering is a converged portfolio of software support and consulting services that offers a single point of accountability to manage enterprise software investments.
BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.
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at 1:01 PM 0 comments

HP Data Protector, a case study on scale and completeness for total enterprise data backup and recovery

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington, DC. We're here the week of June 14, 2010 to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP's ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

Our topic for this live conversation focuses on the challenges and progress in conducting massive and comprehensive backups of enterprise live data, applications, and systems. We'll take a look at how HP Data Protector is managing and safeguarding petabytes of storage per week across HP's next-generation data centers.

The case-study on HP's ongoing experiences sheds light on how enterprises can consolidate their storage and backup efforts to improve response and recovery times, while also reducing total costs.

To learn more about high-performance enterprise scale storage and reliable backup, please welcome Lowell Dale, a technical architect in HP's IT organization. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:
Dale: One of the things that everyone is dealing with these days is the growth of data. Although we have a lot of technologies out there that are evolving -- virtualization and the globalization-effect -- what we're dealing with on the backup and recovery side is an aggregate amount of data that's just growing year after year.

Some of the things that we're running into are the effects of consolidation. For example, we end up trying to backup databases that are getting larger and larger. Some of the applications and servers that consolidate will end up being more of a challenge for some of the services such as backup and recovery. It's pretty common across the industry.

In our environment at HP, we're running about 93,000-95,000 backups per week with an aggregate data volume of about 4 petabytes of backup data and 53,000 run-time hours. That's about 17,000 servers worth of backup across 14 petabytes of storage.

It's pretty much every application that HP's business is run upon. It doesn’t matter if it's enterprise warehousing or data warehousing or if it's internal things like payroll or web-facing front-ends like hp.com. It's the whole slew of applications that we have to manage.

The storage technologies are managed across two different teams. We have a storage-focused team that manages the storage technologies. They're currently using HP Surestore XP Disk Array and EVA as well. We have our Fibre Channel networks in front of those. In the team that I work on, we're responsible for the backup and recovery of the data on that storage infrastructure.

We're using the Virtual Library Systems that HP manufactures as well as the Enterprise System Libraries (ESL). Those are two predominant storage technologies for getting data to the data protection pool.

One of the first things we had to do was simplify, so that we could scale to the size and scope that we have to manage. You have to find and simplify configuration and architecture as much as possible, so that you can continue to grow out scale.

We had to take a step-wise approach on how we adopted virtual tape library and what we used it for. Virtual tape libraries were one of the things that we had to figure out. What was the use-case scenario for virtual tape? It's not easy to switch from old technology to something new and go 100 percent at it.

We first started with a minimal amount of use-cases and little by little, we started learning what that was really good for. We’ve evolved the use case even more, so that in our next generation design that will move forward. That’s just one example.

We're still using physical tape for certain scenarios where we need the data mobility to move applications or enable the migration of applications and/or data between disparate geographies.



HP Data Protector 6.11 is the current release that we are running and deploying in our next generation. Some of the features with that release that are very helpful to us have to do with checkpoint recoveries.

For example, if the backup or resource should fail, we have the ability with automation to go out and have it pick up where it left off. This has helped us in multi-fold ways. If you have a bunch of data that you need to get backed up, you don’t want to start over, because it’s going to impact the next minute or the next hour of demand.

Not only that, but it’s also helped us be able to keep our backup success rates up and our tickets down. Instead of bringing a ticket to light for somebody to go look at it, it will attempt a few times for a checkpoint recovery. After so many attempts, then we’ll bring light to the issue so that someone would have to look at.

Data Protector also has a very powerful feature called object copy. That allowed us to maintain our retention of data across two different products or technologies. So, object copy was another one that was very powerful.

There are also a couple of things around the ability to do the integration backups. In the past, we were using some technology that was very expensive in terms of using of disk space on our XPs, and using split-mirror backups. Now, we're using the online integrations for Oracle or SQL and we're also getting ready to add SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange.

Now, we're able to do online backups of these databases. Some of them are upwards of 23 terabytes. We're able to do that without any additional disk space and we're able to back that up without taking down the environment or having any downtime. That’s another thing that’s been very helpful with Data Protector.

Scheduling overhead

With VMs increasing and the use case for virtualization increasing, one of the challenges is trying to work with scheduling overhead tasks. It could be anywhere from a backup to indexing to virus scanning and whatnot, and trying to find out what the limitations and the bottlenecks are across the entire ecosystem to find out when to run certain overhead and not impact production.

That’s one of the things that’s evolving. We are not there yet, but obviously we have to figure out how to get the data to the data protection pool. With virtualization, it just makes it a little bit more interesting.

Nowadays, we can bring up a fairly large-scale environment, like an entire data center, within a matter of months -- if not weeks. This is how long it would take us. The process from there moves toward how we facilitate setting up backup policies and schedules, and even that’s evolving.

Right now, we're looking at ideas and ways to automate that, so that' when a server plugs in, basically it’ll configure itself. We're not there yet, but we are looking at that. Some of the things that we’ve improved upon are how we build out quickly and then turn around and set up the configurations, as that business demand is then turned around and converted into backup demand, storage demand, and network demand. We’ve improved quite a bit on that front.

Being able to bring that backup success rate up is key. Some of the things that we’ve done with architecture and the product -- just the different ways for doing process -- has helped with that backup success rate.

The other thing that it's helped us do is that we’ve got a team now, which we didn’t have before, that’s just focused on analytics, looking at events before they become incidents.

With some of the evolving technologies and some of the things around cloud computing, at the end of the day, we'll still need to mitigate downtime, data loss, logical corruption, or anything that would jeopardize that business asset.

With cloud computing, if we're using the current technology today with peak base backup, we have to get the data copied over to a data protection pool. There still would be the same approach of trying to get that data. If there is anything to keep up with these emerging technologies, for example, maybe we approach data protection a little bit differently and spread the load out, so that it’s somewhat transparent.

Some of the things we need to see and we may start seeing in the industry are load management and how loads from different types of technologies talk to each other. I mentioned virtualization earlier. Some of the tools with content-awareness and indexing has overhead associated with it.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript. Sponsor: HP.

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Delta Air Lines improves customer self-service apps quickly using automated quality assurance tools strategically

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington, D.C. We're here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

Our next customer case study focuses on Delta Air Lines and the use of quality assurance tools for requirements management as well as mapping the test cases and moving into full production quickly.

We're joined by David Moses, Manager of Quality Assurance for Delta.com and its self-service apps efforts, and John Bell, a Senior Test Engineer at Delta. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:
Moses: Generally, the airline industry, along with the lot of other industries I'm sure, is highly competitive. We have a very, very quick, fast-to-market type environment, where we've got to get products out to our customers. We have a lot of innovation that's being worked on in the industry and a lot of competing channels outside the airline industry that would also like to get at the same customer set. So, it's very important to be able to deliver the best products you can as quickly as possible. "Speed Wins" is our motto.

It goes back to speed to market with new functionality and making the customer's experience better. In all of our self-service products, it's very important that we test from the customers’ point of view.

We deliver those products that make it easier for them to use our services. That's one of the things that always sticks in my mind, when I'm at an airport, and I'm watching people use the kiosk. That's one of the things we do. We bring our people out to the airports and we watch our customers use our products, so we get that inside view of what's going on with them.

A lot on the line

I'll see people hesitantly reaching out to hit a button. Their hand may be shaking. It could be an elderly person. It could be a person with a lot on the line. Say it’s somebody taking their family on vacation. It's the only vacation they can afford to go on, and they’ve got a lot of investment into that flight to get there and also to get back home. Really there's a lot on the line for them.

A lot of people don’t know a lot about the airline industry and they don’t realize that it's okay if they hit the wrong button. It's really easy to start over. But, sometimes they would be literally shaking, when they reach out to hit the button. We want to make sure that they have a good comfort level. We want to make sure they have the best experience they could possibly have. And, the faster we can deliver products to them, that make that experience real for them, the better.

By offering these types of products to the customers, you give them the best of both worlds. You give them a fast pass to check in. You give them a fast pass book. But, you can also give the less-experienced customer an easy-to-understand path to do what they need as well.

Bell: One thing that we've found to be very beneficial with HP Quality Center is that it shows the development organization that this just isn't a QA tool that a QA team uses. What we've been able to do by bringing the requirements piece into it and by bringing the defects and other parts of it together, is bring the whole team on board to using a common tool.

In the past, a lot of people have always thought of Quality Centers as a tool that the QA people use in the corner and nobody else needs to be aware of. Now, we have our business analysts, project managers, and developers, as well as the QA team and even managers on it, because each person can get a different view of different information.

From Dashboard, your managers can look at your trends and what type of overall development lifecycle is coming through. Your project managers can be very involved in pulling the number of defects and see which ones are still outstanding and what the criticality of that is. The developers can be involved via entering information in on defects when those issues have been resolved?

We've found that Quality Center is actually a tool that has drawn together all of the teams. They're all using a common interface, and they all start to recognize the importance of tying all of this together, so that everyone can get a view as to what's going on throughout the whole lifecycle.

Moses: We've realized the importance of automating, and we've realized the importance of having multiple groups using the same tool.

It's not just a tool. There are people there too. There are processes. There are concepts you're going to have to get in your head to get this to work, but you have to be willing to buy-in by having the people resources dedicated to building the test scripts. Then, you're not done. You've got to maintain them. That's where most people fall short and that's where we fell short for quite some time.

Once we were able to finally dedicate the people to the maintenance of these scripts to keep them active and running, that's where we got a win. If you look at a web site these days, it's following one of two models. You either have a release schedule, that’s a more static site, or you have a highly dynamic site that's always changing and always throwing out improvements.

We fit into that "Speed Wins," when we get the product out for the customers’ trading, and improve the experience as often as possible. So, we’re a highly dynamic site. We'll break up to 20 percent of all of our test scripts, all of our automated test scripts, every week. That's a lot of maintenance, even though we're using a lot of reusable code. You have to have those resources dedicated to keep that going.

Bell: One thing that we've been able to do with HP Quality Center is connect it with Quick Test Pro, and we do have Quality Center 10, as well as Quick Test Pro 10. We've been able to build our automation and store those in the Test Plan tab of Quality Center.

It's very nice that Quality Center has it all tied into one unit. So, as we go through our processes, we're able to go from tab to tab and we know that all of that information is interconnected. We can ultimately trace a defect back to a specific cycle or a specific test case, all the way back to our requirement. So, the tool is very helpful in keeping all of the information in one area, while still maintaining the consistent process.

This has really been beneficial for us, when we go into our test labs and build our test set. We're able to take all of these automated pieces and combine them into test set. What this has allowed us to do is run all of our automation as one test set. We've been able to run those on a remote box. It's taken our regression test time from one person for five days, down to zero people and approximately an hour and 45 minutes.

So, that's a unique way that we've used Quality Center to help manage that and to reduce our testing times by over 50 percent.

I look back to metrics we pulled for 2008. We were doing fewer than 70 projects. By 2009, after we had fully integrated Quality Center, we did over 129 projects. That also included a lot of extra work, which you may have heard about us doing related to a merger.

Moses: The one thing I really like about the HP Quality Center suite especially is that your entire software development cycle can live within that tool. Whenever you're using different tools to do different things, it becomes a little bit more difficult to get the data from one point to another. It becomes a little bit more difficult to pull reports and figure out where you can improve.

Data in one place

What you really want to do is get all your data in one place and Quality Center allows you to do that. We put our requirements in in the beginning. By having those in the system, we can then map to those with our test cases, after we build those in the testing phase.

Not only do we have the QA engineers working on it in Quality Center, we also have the business analysts working on it, whenever they're doing the requirements. That also helps the two groups work together a bit more closely.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript. Sponsor: HP.

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McKesson shows bringing testing tools on the road improves speed to market and customer satisfaction

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington, D.C. We're here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

This customer case-study focuses on McKesson Corp., a provider of certified healthcare information technology, including electronic health records, medical billing, and claims management software. McKesson is a user of HP’s project-based performance testing products used to make sure that applications perform in the field as intended throughout their lifecycle.

To learn more about McKesson’s innovative use of quality assurance software, we interview Todd Eaton, Director of Application Lifecycle Management Tools in the CTO’s office at McKesson. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:
Eaton: It's one thing that we can test within McKesson. It's another thing when you test out at the customer site, and that's a main driver of this new innovation that we’re partnering up with HP.

When we build an application and sell that to our customers, they can take that application, bring it into their own ecosystem, into their own data center and install it onto their own hardware.

Controlled testing

The testing that we do in our labs is a little more controlled. We have access to HP and other vendors with their state-of-the-art equipment. We come up with our own set of standards, but when they go out to the site and get put in to those hospitals, we want to ensure that our applications act at the same speed and same performance at their site that we experience in our controlled environment.

We want to make sure that our solutions get out there as fast as possible, so that we can help those providers and those healthcare entities in giving the best patient care that they can. So, being able to test on their equipment is very important for us.

Just knowing how many different healthcare providers there are out there, you could imagine all the different hardware platforms, different infrastructures, and the needs or infrastructure items that they may have in their data centers.

After further investigation, it became apparent to us that we weren’t able to replicate all those different environments in our data center. It’s just too big of a task.

The next logical thing to do was to take the testing capabilities that we had and bring it all out on the road. We have these different services teams that go out to install software. We could go along with them and bring the powerful tools that we use with HP into those data centers and do the exact same testing that we did, and make sure that our applications were running as expected on their environments.

Another very important thing is using their data. The hospitals themselves will have copies of their production data sets that they keep control of. There are strict regulations. That kind of data cannot leave their premises. Being able to test using the large amount of data or the large volume of data that they will have onsite is very crucial to testing our applications.

The tool that we use primarily within McKesson is Performance Center, and Performance Center is an enterprise-based application. It’s usually kept where we have multiple controllers, and we have multiple groups using those, but it resides within our network.

On the road

So, the biggest hurdle was how to take that powerful tool and bring it out to these sites? So, we went back to HP, and said, "Here’s our challenge. This is what we’ve got. We don’t really see anything where you have an offering in that space. What can you do for us?"

Currently, we have two engagements going on simultaneously with two different hospitals, testing two different groups of applications. I have one site that’s using it for 26 different applications and other that’s using it for five. We’ve got two teams going out there, one from my group and one from one of the internal R&D groups that are assisting the customer and testing the applications on their equipment.

We have been able to reduce the performance defects dramatically. We’re talking something like 40-50 percent right off the bat. Some of the timing that we had experienced internally seemed to be fine, well within SLAs. But as soon as I got out to a site and onto different hardware configurations, it took some application tuning to get it down. We were finding 90 percent increases with our help of continual testing and performance tweaks.

Items like that are just so powerful, when you are bringing that out to the various customer, and can say, "If you engage us, and we can do this testing for you, we can make sure that those applications will run in the way that you want them to."
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript. Sponsor: HP.

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