This document discusses how intelligent operations with VMware vSphere and vSphere with Operations Management can enable proactive data center management and help IT transform into a strategic partner for businesses. It outlines three strategic imperatives for IT: 1) quickly and flexibly serve business needs, 2) ensure high performance and availability, and 3) act as a strategic partner rather than cost center. vSphere with Operations Management provides intelligent operations, consistent management, automation and control, and tangible results that help IT achieve these imperatives and transformation.
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Business innovation depends on excellence in IT
These days, you’d be hard pressed to name a business strategy or
goal that doesn’t rely on IT to a large degree.
• Hospitals intent on improving quality of care install virtual desktops
so doctors and nurses can call up charts and ensure continuity of
service as they move from room to room and patient to patient
• Retailers with aggressive sales goals send employees onto the
retail floor with mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) devices to ring up
purchases, and send the info immediately to the cloud, where it
updates a just-in-time inventory management system residing on
a virtual server in a distant data center
• Manufacturers committed financially and socially to greener
operations globally virtualize all their servers worldwide to
reduce power and cooling usage—saving millions annually as well
as helping save the planet
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Business value creation has a new equation
that upends traditional thinking
Today, the vast majority of CEOs believe that investments in technology create
value for their business.1
But truly savvy CEOs realize value is not created by reducing the cost of IT for
each dollar of revenue. Instead, they concentrate on increasing revenue for
each dollar of IT cost.
This reversal of traditional thinking is critical if organizations want to thrive in
the digital age, according to CSC, which performs an annual survey of c-suite
attitudes toward business and IT innovation.2
1. PwC 18th Annual Global CEO Survey, 2015
2. CSC Global CIO Survey 2014-2015, CSC, 2015
4. 4
Transcending the “keeping the lights
on” mentality in IT
Although conventional wisdom is that “keeping the lights on”
accounts for a full 70 percent of an organization’s IT budget,
the reality is probably worse4
—especially with so many IT funds
being siphoned off by lines of business.
Case in point: Gartner has predicted that by 2017, chief
marketing officers (CMOs) will spend more on IT than CIOs.5
CIOs themselves, when asked what stood in the way of
IT helping to drive business innovation, named the difficulty
in managing infrastructure as a roadblock second only to
budgetary constraints.
Budget constraints
Resources are primarily focused
on managing existing IT workloads/
keeping the lights on
Difficulty finding staff
qualified to execute the technology
to drive innovation
Difficulty deploying
technology to facilitate innovation
Too much time and too many
resources are used to handle urgent
incidents and problems
Lack of strategic vision at the corporate
level to drive innovation
Source: CSC CIO Global Survey 2014-2015
52%
39%
38%
33%
31%
29%
4. CSC Global CIO Survey 2014-215, CSC, 2015
5, By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT Than the CIO, Laura McLennan, Gartner, webinar, January 2012
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Data center metrics: The good, the bad, and the ugly
CIOs often live and die by the data center’s performance and availability numbers.
Nine out of 10 respondents to a 2014 survey of data center professionals showed
that service availability is highly critical to their performance.6
But at the same time, 41 percent of organizations missed their service availability
goals for mission-critical systems in 2013. Not surprisingly, organizations with higher
service availability goals were significantly less successful in meeting their goal.7
But here’s a new way of thinking about improving data center metrics: IT
departments should no longer be concerned with improving system performance
and reducing downtime for its own sake. Rather, consider these as metrics for
enabling IT to deliver more of what the business needs, when it needs it.
In other words, it’s time to transform infrastructure and application measurements
from tactical to strategic metrics.
6. 2014 Service Availability Benchmark Survey, Continuity Software 2014
7. 2014 Service Availability Benchmark Survey, Continuity Software 2014
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Time to regain lost ground
This transformation, from being a tactical cost center to a strategic partner can’t happen too soon, as numbers point to some backsliding in this
area in recent years.
39% 40%
2014 2013
IT is considered a cost center
33%
20%
2014 2013
A formal client/service provider relationship
28%
41%
2014 2013
A collaborative partnership
Source: CSC CIO Global Survey 2014-2015
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The virtual data center is key to transforming
IT into a strategic partner
There’s one proven way to improve data center performance
and availability metrics as related to business goals: virtualize
the data center. A significant proportion (41 percent) of
respondents in a recent survey said that the reason they were
virtualizing was specifically because they needed to increase data
center availability.8
Virtualization passed a significant milestone back in 2012, when
51 percent of x86 corporate workloads were virtualized, according
to the 451 Group.9
Two years later, that number had surpassed
70 percent, according to Gartner.10
Virtualization is now
a key component of IT infrastructure and, more recently, of IT
transformation.
Virtualization of X86 Workloads:
51%
2012 2014
70%
8. The Age of the On-Demand Data Center, Brocade, December 2013.
9. Survey: 51 percent of X86 Servers Now Virtualized, by Pedro Hernandez, IT Business Edge, January 17, 2013.
10. Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, Gartner, July 2, 2014
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Why vSphere 6 is the right virtualization platform
On the one hand, corporations have choices when it comes to
choosing a virtualization platform. On the other hand, if they
want to be successful at transforming IT into a driver of business
innovation, they really don’t have many alternatives. VMware
vSphere is the only logical choice.
In a 2014 poll by Gartner, more than 90 percent of organizations
said that VMware was their primary server virtualization hypervisor.11
And that was before the introduction of vSphere 6, about which
reviewers have said:
the leading
virtualization
platform doesn’t
disappoint
Virtualization Review
InfoWorld
The Register
will transform
your environment
struggled
to find
a flaw
11. VMware, Microsoft Rule X86 Server Virtualization, by Timothy Prickett Morgan, EnterpriseTech, July 8, 2014.
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A three-pronged CIO strategy is required
IT departments need to consider:
Strategic imperative No. 1: Consistently provide solutions at the speed that business operates, quickly delivering reliable
services and applications and being more flexible to business requests
Strategic imperative No. 2: Be more proactive in ensuring high performance and availability of infrastructure and applications
Strategic imperative No. 3: Act as a strategic partner to the business rather than a cost center, delivering not just operational
efficiency, but improving business innovation as well as operations
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Strategic imperative No. 1: Quickly and flexibly serve the business
First, the IT infrastructure needs to be designed to ensure secure delivery of cloud, mobile, analytics, and big data applications.
This means virtualization. There’s simply no other way for businesses to stay secure and ahead of the competition.
CIO’s 2015 investment priorities
Then, IT needs to find a way to consistently automate and manage the virtual data center. This is necessary to free up
resources that can then be used for more strategic initiatives.
Rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
2014
41%
31%
27%
26%
24%
17%
13%
12%
11%
9%
7%
6%
2015
50%
37%
32%
34%
36%
11%
11%
12%
8%
10%
7%
2%
Investment Priority
BI/ analytics
Infrastructure and data center
Cloud
ERP
Moblie
Digitalization/ digital marketing
Security
Networking, voice and data comms
Customer relationship/ experience
Industry-specific applications
Legacy modernization
Enterprise applications
Source: Gartner CIO Agenda Report, Gartner, 2015
n = 2,793
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Strategic imperative No. 2:
Ensure high performance and availability of IT resources
This imperative requires IT to be exceedingly proactive. No
more waiting for reports from users that a system is unavailable
or performance has slowed.
This proactivity is simply not possible without a dashboard that
monitors and analyzes how all IT infrastructure and application
resources are performing, and presents insights to IT staffers
from one place.
This insight into the entire stack must include visibility into
dependencies of application and infrastructure components.
This enables IT to avoid extended troubleshooting because of
unintended side effects of changes.
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Strategic imperative No. 3:
Act as a strategic partner to the business
To regain lost ground and again begin to be treated as a full
collaborative partner, IT needs to be able to safely automate a broad
range of manual tasks.
Additionally, IT needs customizable and adaptable tools to automate
more dynamic environments using policies and control. IT also requires
the capability to optimize the placement and balancing of workloads.
Finally, to improve business operations, IT standards and security
guidelines must be enforced across the virtual infrastructure.
• IT leaders who currently report directly to the CEO: 44 percent
• IT leaders consulted by their CEOs frequently about strategy: 64 percent
Source: State of the CIO 2015, CIO Magazine, 2015
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vSphere with Operations Management:
Strategic suite aids IT transformation
Designed for businesses of all sizes to run application at high service levels, vSphere with Operations Management can maximize
hardware savings through achieving higher capacity.
vSphere with Operations Management can help you achieve your unique business needs by delivering virtualization with consistent
management, purpose-built to help you get the best performance, availability, and efficiency from your infrastructure and applications.
vSphere
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Virtualization with consistent management
vSphere with Operations Management is designed for
your business.
Your business is unique—and your virtualization and
management platform should be designed to fit your needs.
VMware introduced intelligent operations management that
adapts to your environment and gives you richer insights in
time to take proactive action.
64%
2015 2013
46%
Source: CSC Global CIO Survey 2014-215, CSC, 2015
IT Spending Outlook Improves
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Intelligent Operations from Apps to Storage
vSphere with Operations Management is designed for better insights.
What’s so smart? The tools leverage both structured and unstructured IT
data across a variety of disciplines as well as an extensive list of third-party
extensions to identify and remediate issues proactively before they cause
outages that impact users or revenue.
vSphere
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Automation with Control
vSphere with Operations Management is designed for better IT.
Safely automate management of your infrastructure with guided remediation, fine-grained controls, policies, and customizable
actions. Do the same to place and balance workloads. Finally, perform capacity optimization, planning and modeling to improve
resource utilization and get more done in less time.
All this leaves your teams to work where they add most value—and have the power to say “yes” to your business more often.
Top ways CIOs spend their time
Aligning IT initiatives with business goals: No. 1
Improving IT operations and systems performance: No. 2
Source: State of the CIO 2015, CIO Magazine, 2015
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Tangible results you can count on
In a 2014 VMware vSphere with Operations Management Customer Benchmark Study by Management Insights, comparing
the added benefits of vSOM vs. the standard vSphere, customers saw a:
53 percent reduction in the cost of
managing IT infrastructure
54 percent decrease in downtime of
Tier 1 applications
2.4x ROI within 12 months
30 percent or higher improvement in visibility
across layers, apps availability, capacity
utilization, VM’s per admin, user satisfaction
with IT, and other metrics
