Industry

I remember riding in the car which a bunch of teenagers a few months ago when the Seether song “Careless Whisper” came on the radio. They loved it - so edgy, such a great sound. Ugh, really?  Had they never heard of Wham?  George Michael? I’d like to forget the 80s sometimes, too, but please. How could those kids think that song was an original? Don’t even get me started about Limp Bizkit covering “Faith” … blasphemy.

It happens in music, and it happens in IT -- and it appears to have happened this week.

The recent VCE announcement from Cisco, EMC and VMware sounds very familiar, a lot like the Business-Ready Configurations for Virtualization (also known as vPOD) Dell’s been doing all year. 

Their “IT flexibility and lowering the cost of computing” message – yeah, doing that since March. If the popular saying “imitation is the best form of flattery” held true, these three companies would have also leveraged Dell’s passion for customer choice. But they didn’t. Instead, they seem to be focused on locking customers into a proprietary stack of technology. Customers don’t like that. That kind of situation could easily turn into a couple of million dollars.

Fortunately, Cadence Design Systems will never have to worry about that. Check out how they used Business-Ready Configurations to save about $2.7 million in physical-hardware cost.  Using Dell’s run books Cadence expects to double the speed at which they deploy VMs to roughly 200 per month. 

As we continue to integrate existing and new partners into the configs (EMC, Brocade, Juniper, Scalent), customers will find it even easier to deploy a customized, virtual environment start to finish.

Where is Milli Vanilli these days, anyway?

I was scrolling through my blog reader and came across a post by Dave Rosenburg that piqued my interest: “KDDI chooses 3 Terra for cloud infrastructure.”  Having lived in Japan many moons ago I’m always interested in getting updates on what's happening in tech over there and since this involved the cloud, I was doubly piqued.

Gaijin Clouds gathering

Turns out that KDDI, the number 2 telecom provider in Japan (which makes them pretty humongous) has not only become a cloud provider as of late but have gone with gaijin technology to do so.  KDDI’s recently launched “KDDI Cloud Server Service” is powered by  3Tera’s Applogic cloud compute platform.  According to the 3Tera press release:

Initial offerings include virtual systems and virtual private data centers run at the KDDI Telehouse domestic data centers. This allows KDDI to offer both Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as a-Service solutions, where customers can run their existing applications on the IT platform or use KDDI’s prepared applications to significantly lower their initial investment and operational costs.

As Dave points out in his blog, its interesting not only to see a Japanese company  embrace the cloud but using outside technology to do so.

KDDI has made a big step forward, it will be interesting to see what the uptake is like.

Fun facts to know and tell: The word for cloud in Japan (kumo) is the same word for spider (kumo).  Now the characters used for both are different and the Japanese use the English word “cloud” when talking about cloud computing but still, I’m looking forward to getting the chance to present on cloud computing in Japan and make some bad pun involving the two.  Corny?  Yes, but that’s how I roll.

Pau for now….

Agility is a good characteristic for companies to have, particularly in today’s uncertain market.  Companies that can move quickly to adapt to changing market conditions have a competitive advantage over those that can’t.

Unfortunately, agility is often perceived as a luxury.  Too often, we think of agility in terms of final-state: complete interoperability of elegant systems and processes – requiring years of work and significant investment. In reality, the optimal level of agility for your company in today’s environment may be closer than you think.

Consider the average person’s approach to physical agility and general fitness.  We all need regular exercise and a healthy diet, but many of us struggle when we think about the lifestyle change required to be in great shape.  We hear that we need 60 minutes of exercise a day, five days a week, with a mix of cardio and strength training.  We hear that we should eat only whole grains, cut out processed food, and we’re told that a “serving” of anything is about a third of the size of what most of us consider a normal portion.  If you are not following these and other guidelines, the changes you’d need to make to be in optimal health can seem overwhelming – and prohibitive.  As a result, many folks end up taking no action at all.

It’s too bad, because there is value in even 10 minutes of exercise a day, or in simply cutting out sugary drinks, or in a variety of other small changes.  Small lifestyle tweaks like these can improve how we feel and how we function day to day.   Similarly, improvement in a company’s agility need not require a massive business and technology transformation.  Many improvements can be achieved without significant cost or disruption.

The most important step is to identify the goals of your agility play.  I am a fan of Michael Hugos’ high-level approach described in this post with his formula for determining business agility -- he speaks of agility in terms of profitability.  If your company can consistently earn profits that are two to four percent higher than market average, the assumption is that your company is adapting quickly to changing customer demands and market factors.

For example, if your company plans to maximize profitability by focusing on high-margin offerings to your customers, you need to build a capability to support an ever-changing portfolio of high-margin products as the market evolves and the margins shift.  So what needs to happen in your environment in support of this capability?  You might charter a cross-functional team to identify and update constraining technology and processes, or you might spin up a project or two to reduce prohibitive complexity in the foundation of your IT environment, or you might offer streamlined collaboration tools.

While there are many options to consider, remember that not all processes will need to be rationalized, and not all technology complexity will need to be removed from your environment before your agility increases – baby steps optimized to support the relatively narrow task at hand will allow you to be agile in the way your company requires to maximize profits as the market shifts.

It’s the corporate equivalent of committing to 10 pushups a day during tank-top season.

Think about where small changes and investments can make a big difference to your corporate agility, and I’ll do the same. Let me know if you've got other suggestions that worked at your company.

Meanwhile, I’m going to lace up my walking shoes and take a few trips around the block.

Since 1995, I’ve had the pleasure to participate in the growth of Dell from a relatively small computer start-up to one of the largest technology providers in the world. What a ride it’s been!

In 2001, I joined Dell's Industry Solutions Group (ISG), typically referred to as the OEM Group within Dell. It’s been ten years since our group began customizing hardware and providing unique services to OEM customers who use standard Dell hardware in their offerings. Last week, my colleague Bruce Eric Anderson, introduced me in a post he wrote on Google's new search appliance. Google is one of our many customers and represent some of the topics that I’ll be writing about here on Inside Enterprise IT.

As a Systems Consultant, I’ve assisted hundreds of product managers, engineers and developers create hardware appliances for their solution. I’ve helped them manage through hardware transitions, and, I’ve informed them about the future of Dell hardware solutions so they could be prepared for all the improvements that come with the advancements of technology.

This past March, Dell released the first of its 11^th generation of PowerEdge servers based on Intel’s XEON 5500 series of CPUs, the PowerEdge R610, R710 and T610. These truly innovative servers, along with the recently released PowerEdge R410 and T410, incorporate many improvements driven specifically by our OEM customers. I have seen several generations of PowerEdge servers marketed as appliances by our customers, and every generation has been consistently more reliable, stable, and feature-appropriate than its predecessor.

We continuously listen to the needs of our customers and use that information to improve the products and services that help them achieve their market goals more effectively and efficiently.

So, I'm happy to be able to share my industry observations with you here and hope that you'll let me know your thoughts and feedback. If you want to reach me directly with questions, you can ping me at franklin_flint at Dell (dot) com.

You can't read an issue of BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal or other major business publications without reading about "green IT." The same goes for IT-oriented outlets like Cnet, InformationWeek and eWeek.

The industry has come to realize that not only is consuming less energy good for the environment but it is also good for your company's bottom line. But how do you select an IT vendor while keeping an eye on these issues?

Dell recently commissioned Forrester Research to produce a study devoted to helping IT organizations improve one of their cornerstone processes — IT procurement. They researched and analyzed the state of green IT procurement, focusing on criteria to evaluate suppliers' overall sustainability policies and practices. While Forrester drew upon their years of extensive research in green IT, they also conducted 30 in-depth interviews with industry consortia, environmental NGOs, and a several internal stakeholders at Dell. Additionally, they conducted in-depth interviews with enterprise-class customers in North America and Europe (note that none of these companies were identified or selected by Dell and are not necessarily Dell customers.). Forrester spoke with IT practitioners at these organizations to understand if and how they are incorporating green criteria into their evaluations and selections of IT systems and IT suppliers.

The study shows that IT procurement will be a significant point of leverage for companies looking to improve the sustainability of their computing infrastructures. Forrester points out in the study that "Buyers struggle with this in part because there are no standard metrics and decision criteria that enable IT organizations to assess the green credentials of IT vendors."

From the report, I've pulled five suggestions on how companies can structure their request-for-proposal (RFP) documents. The report goes into great detail on suggested weighting for each of these areas and how to assess them.

1. Corporate environmental governance. These criteria are designed to illuminate a tech vendor’s overall commitment to sustainability by examining its goals and the broad processes it has in place for measuring and reporting progress toward those goals.
2. Corporate operations. These criteria focus on how aggressively a supplier is tackling the environmental impact of its own internal facilities and operations.
3. Supply chain. This includes a couple of crucial criteria that examine how a vendor is managing the environmental practices of its suppliers.
4. Stakeholder engagement. These criteria look at how proactive and participatory a vendor’s environmental programs are. They ask about a company’s engagement with important stakeholders, including customers, employees, and the rest of the IT industry.
5. Design for environment. This section focuses on how the supplier translates its sustainability practices into the products and services that it delivers to customers.

You can read a summary of the report here or if you'd like to download as a .pdf to send to your procurement teams, click here.