Virtualization and Cloud will Take IT Ahead

1.  Why should an organization choose virtualization - to cut costs, to improve manageability or to make its enterprise architecture more flexible?
All three I would say, and a little more. In my operation it gives some efficiency, at multiple levels of utilization of server architecture and storage, which in turn imparts cost benefits, affords flexibility in infrastructure management, and can also be moved within a data center.

2. Where have you seen the greatest benefits from virtualization?
There are financial benefits that arise from greater efficiency, more so for reasonably large operations. Enterprises are no longer planning for peak loads; their goal is now utilization of existing infrastructure, customer satisfaction, time to market....managing a multiple billion dollar business, it gives the flexibility need to grow as planned.

3. How important is assessing one's virtual environment readiness, especially with reference to internal skill sets?
It's something that has to be done in parallel, so the basic needs, managing servers etc, the fundamentals that don't go away, can be met. What changes is, dealing with the fact that you cannot physically identify servers. The significant difference is that you are abstracting application workloads from the hardware, and hopefully smart IT operations are even abstracting how they are conversing with their users from the smart tactical questions of where their servers are. Two years ago, my business technology group, the IT team that interface with business customers, would talk about where the servers were, and how many are being bought. But now, typically those conversations do not happen, we talk about business needs, where the transactions are going to be, when it's going to happen. Those conversations are now being converted to actual use - we try to build that on a virtual environment. In the last 18 months any server we bought has been virtualized. We have a program in place we affectionately call sweeping off the floor, meaning we virtualized everything. It's a goal that we have set, at the end of this calendar year we will have virtualized all ours servers, internally.

4. What are the biggest challenges that companies face after implementing a virtualization initiative, and how can they be avoided?
I would say that on a journey of virtualization, the first 20-30 percent is low hanging fruit. You get across the app stacks, and then, as with anything else, it gets tougher and tougher but you have to get smart and continue to get benefits out of that. If you manage to virtualize one application which has a certain database, middleware, its database, a certain operating system, there is a learning you get from that stack that you can use for similar applications. What also happens is that when new applications come in, you start considering them what we call internally, as a private cloud. So how do I give this cloud level scale. I am not talking about chatty applications; I am talking about cloud level delivery applications and changing programming approaches that allow us to do it in different ways. It's changing, evolving skill sets. In the application development side, it is about scale, more than anything else. It's not so much about technology, it's the scale benefits that you get, from a global company point of view, where it makes a lot of sense.

5. How would you respond to the idea that virtualization is losing its luster in concurrence with its increased awareness.
When we hit a hundred percent, we can have this conversation, till then...I think there is enough steam. The benefits are there to be had. The economies and efficiencies are there to be had. Sure, as we go deeper and deeper there will be situations that will need resolutions, but within EMC It specifically, we are sharing our journey with our customers. So whatever we learn as we go down this path, we pass the learnings on. We want our customers to benefit from it.

6. Where do you see virtualization heading? Particularly with reference to business applications
There is a stake that we've been driving into. Within EMC IT we've set the  journey, we are taking our existing  as well as new data center environments to the private cloud, and the underpinning of them is a fully virtual data center. But that's just server virtualization. The next step is to get a 100% virtualized storage environment and the desktop too is getting there. So we've put our entire architecture on one page, security, infrastructure, applications anything we do, and have been doing for the last 12 to 18 months. This, should be leading us towards a private cloud. The goal back them was100% virtualized infrastructure, the last layer of applications, and what we affectionately call the cloud experience, which is fully scalable, unified user interfaces. So I think of it as a state that we want to be in, not a skew that we want to go by.

7. What do you think are the key metrics for measuring the success of the cloud computing platform?
I think of the journey as getting the benefits of a virtualized data center as pervasively as possible across the application stacks, across how you do security, because it allows you to drive to single class of security, a single pane of management, a single application design management over time. I think of the cloud in 3 parts, a private cloud, which is where I am taking my data center as you and I know it from yester year, close, trusted, safe, reliable, built for peak loads, built for app stacks. So you get benefits of that environment but inside my firewall. That's the internal cloud. At some point it can be hosted by a service provider, so somebody could moderate my environment, that's my private cloud nevertheless. I could also have a public cloud, anything as a service. It could be anything - computing, platform, storage, payroll, anything served up in a SaaS based environment, whatever I choose. Over time we will have more models of sharing data, today its classic integration, that will, or some subset thereof would be a roadmap that CIOs would set themselves on the journey to the cloud. But most of us first focus on getting our own internal cloud than federating... or in parallel looking at something like best of breed.

How do you deal with dynamic economic environments and their impact on your business?

8.  How do you deal with dynamic economic environments and their impact on your business?
We build for better utilization, common management tools, common security tools, expansion through best of breed clouds, that is how we deal with it.

9. How do you assess the kind of support that business goals require so that you might better prioritize your response?
It's making sure that we have a very strong, very well defined impact and prioritization process within the organization. But I don't think we'll ever solve all problems or have the budget for everything. I still think that a little tension is good, because with it you make the right calls for everything.

10. How would you describe the degree of business - IT alignment in your enterprise and what do you do to ensure this is on track?
I am in the unique position of being the CIO of an IT infrastructure company so my conversations with the business are all about one of two things...how I can be a better customer of theirs, giving them feedbacks and loops etc on all the products that they build, as an internal customer.

In an internal program  we call "EMC IT Proven", we test everything we take to the market. I want to be 100 percent aligned in my company with the market, so I always make sure that the technology and solutions we take to our customers have great user cases and that has been proven internally. So if are talking about helping a customer build a virtual datacenter, I'd better know about what it takes, and support the business models around it. So if I do a good job in being our first customer, we'd be best aligned with business. I also help in production but for me it is important to be aligned with the business and be our own best customer.

For CIOs who are not a part of the management,(most of my peers report to the CEO or the CFO), cannot survive without being aligned to the business. You have to be part of the strategy process...you have to bring solutions to the table before there is a problem. For instance, a lot of work we do today is about how we manage demand in IT. How do you then prioritize what's being done... we have worked very closely with a methodology that says, lets pick 4 or 5 areas as a company and think of them as enterprise platform place. As you grow, you will find there are more and more parts of your company that will need to use more and more of your core services, you will have to start prioritizing those and building them to scale. You may have great point solutions but they may not work when you want them to, besides you have to allocate and prioritize the budget on a common platform. Those are the ways in which you can have a more structured conversation about what it brings to the business and what you can work on more proactively. It's the way they think, they would understand that this is the way to get to it...these conversations are increasingly becoming the best way to get to the core issues. That also gives you the agility to take strategic decisions.

11. How confident are you that you have got your enterprise priorities and IT budget adjustments right? How difficult has this exercise been and how much more cost saving do you expect to be able to do?
There is always more demand than there is supply, for IT, so it's really about finding the sweet spot, it's about making scientific choices, based on facts, not noise or a whim. I believe if I get the right folks on the table to agree on priorities, whether they are enterprise wide priorities or business unit specific priorities, the budget will shake itself out to get those needs, because you will get the right allocation against it. The other element is that the on you cut flab on the IT team. You also get some muscle, so you are investing into core infrastructure that allows you to grow. Things get better, and as they do, you'd better be there to take full advantage, IT is going to play catch up, and that's not a good position to be in, but those are harder decisions to make. At this point, I think cloud is a better topic at because you get benefits across the board and you invest across too. It makes sense, it is at two levels of demand, it allows IT to do better and also makes a good foundation for business to run.

It is a tough process and it tough times when every penny is being watched, you have to be very prudent.

At EMC we set ourselves a goal 18 months ago - basically we would not spend one cent unless it was driving operational efficiency, business transformation, or productivity elements, giving ourselves force or giving our employees better tools to work with. So unless it was driving productivity or driving efficiency, it won't even make the cut. I had senior level agreements, that was the gate-in process, and it was hard numbers.

Efficiency is not a bad thing at any point. The only fear I have is if we don't re-invest, IT will have to play catch up. This is core infrastructure, applications, so unless you are making pointed investments in those directions, you will make some wrong calls. Virtualization and private cloud are areas where it gives you business efficiency, a clear matrix of measurement and flexibility of growth. Defining your charter into the private cloud is a good way for CIOs to have that conversation with their CEOs, it gives you the efficiency matrix, the muscle, while looking a bit into the crystal ball.

12.  What do you believe to be the three key issues that major enterprises must consider when determining their IT investment strategy.
It's about continued building efficiency into the business, not just about IT being efficient but IT building efficiency into the business,  business  transformation, which is huge, and then productivity.

13. What is the process your enterprise uses for ensuring that CEOs and CIOs, or IT managers, thoroughly discuss and evaluate IT spending for the best value?
We have a governance model. There is IT spending that IT initiates and there is IT spending that business initiates. I have a role that has been put in place a few months ago, that is of the Business units CIO. So the CIOs are not only reporting to me but also reporting to the business heads. Their job is to straddle the fence between the IT approach requirements and the IT requirements of the business needs. It is a very sophisticated demand management program that allowed us to bubble up as a company in business unit specific and demand management projects that we have to prioritize. There was more demand than supply. Obviously, we made some tradeoffs between things that could be consolidated on platforms, there could be some that could wait, and there were some that were important for business. We think what the CIOs did was good demand management process, and clear things that shook out as company priorities,

We have a governance model where I report in to a senior executive team on what's going on, almost every month. Then a broader group once every six months and then project specific teams.

14.  What are the IT budget areas that you find you are most struggling with? Where are you making your toughest decisions and what impact do you expect this to have on your operations in the medium to longer term?
Its areas where you get incremental benefit which is important to somebody in the organization. When we deal with finite budgets and capital expenditures, we need to identify the area which will be most impacted, cover that, to get the right priority there. What's left is the stuff that is harder to trade off, there is no easy way of doing it, but it's the business that's making the call. From the IT side all we can do is ensure we get the right infrastructure, getting cheaper, smarter, more efficient, we do our own housekeeping and get better every year with IT.