An Office of the CTO Guest Blog
By Colleen McMillan

The following is the third in a three-part blog series about the VMware Journey to your cloud in the public sector. The previous installment, published February 27, 2012 outlined Phase 2-Business Production.  This third installment describes the final segment of the journey: Phase 3 - IT as a Service.

We’ve already seen the benefits of the second phase of the VMware Journey, Business Production, where organizations virtualize their business-critical applications and the IT staff is freed to support end users with updated tools and services. In the public sector, that includes everyone from students and teachers to policeman and citizen constituents.

By this stage of the game, the organization is humming along smoothly. The virtual infrastructure is pretty much maintaining itself. And different areas of the organization are on-board with their virtualized applications.

What comes next? Innovation to make things even better.

For too long, IT has been a drain on an organization’s budget - a necessary evil to keep the machines humming but not much help when it came to making things better. But in the phase of the Journey, IT finally has its chance to shine by offering business value at the lowest possible cost. Imagine your IT organization given a chance to brainstorm ways for the organization to save more money or offer additional services. Better yet, imagine your IT team with the time and resources to make those new features a reality.

During this final phase of the journey, the organization approaches the desired end-state of an enterprise hybrid cloud, in which IT provides the highest business value at the lowest possible cost: IT as a service (ITaaS)..

A good example is the State of Michigan’s MiCloud Automated Hosting Services (AHS)  solution, which recently won the  NASCIO (National Association of State CIO) Fast Track Award. Everyone talks about "The Cloud,". but Michigan has captured the numerous benefits of cloud computing, rapidly transforming the way we deliver IT services to government," said Bob McDonough, Lead Cloud Architect, Office of Enterprise Architecture, State of Michigan, Department of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB). When our clients demanded ’more for less’ , we delivered MiCloud - a fully automated self-service cloud platform on a fast track in early 2011. Cloud Computing is not something you buy.  It is something you do."

In planning MiCloud, the State of Michigan IT team did not request additional expenditures.  Automated Hosting (AH) in the new ITaaS solution breaks barriers to consolidation, standardization, virtualization, and optimization through innovation.  Thus, the AHS solution was able to provide immediate budget relief with an enterprise service that supports legacy application modernization, consolidation and infrastructure optimization.  Overall, the MiCloud solution delivered VMs that run 99 percent faster and cost 75 percent less to operate with a projected ROI of 248 percent.

http://www.nascio.org/awards/2011awards/FastTrack.cfm

The state of Michigan not only realized early cost savings, but through the benefits of a private cloud managed to improve quality of services to its customers and ultimately provide additional business agility. "All state agencies are beneficiaries," said Bob McDonough, DTMB spokesperson for the MiCloud Fast Track NASCIO nomination. "State of Michigan decision makers gain the freedom to take risks and try new strategies, to succeed or fail quickly, then move on.  Citizens and businesses enjoy service innovations sooner and appreciate the value for money delivered as a taxpayer."

Empowering Departments and End Users

Ideally at this stage, every IT service is fully defined in terms of its components, resources, and delivery guarantees. Different units or departments within an agency or school can select and obtain resources through a standardized and automated self-service catalog or on-demand. This reduces provisioning time to a fraction of what it once was. These groups are expensed for IT services via transparent chargeback and detailed reporting.

With a highly automated, low-maintenance cloud infrastructure in place, IT can focus on delivering innovations that enable new services, drive down costs and enhance the student or citizen experience. Consider what the cloud has done for Oxford University, one of the premier research universities in the world.

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/cto/public/blog/2011/11/07/at-oxford-cloud-and-virtual-technology-brings-research-into-twenty-first-century-and-beyond

After saving money and consolidating resources through virtualization, the Oxford IT team created a cloud database that allows researchers to move their data from isolated servers to an online searchable database that others can access to enhance their own research.

This virtual database as a service solution has helped Oxford reduce costs while liberating their data. Researchers can now share data more widely and across traditional organizational boundaries - perhaps in read-only format for other departments within the university, other universities or even the general public.

At Oxford, virtualization set the stage for fast and expanded access to research data, but that represents just one of a myriad of examples. A police department, for example, might place greater focus on developing applications to support mobile communications or identify suspects. School administrators, on the other hand, might channel more resources to tools for responding to emergencies and communicating in real time with security officers, faculty, students and their parents.

Sometimes bold new action is required - leveraging IT to cut costs is not new, but emphasizing agile technology as a key enabler can represent a true paradigm shift for the public sector. This final phase on the journey to the cloud is really just the beginning of an evolutionary process.

IT as a service for the public sector is an evolution from brittle cost-burdened, server-centric IT operations to flexible IT operations where any workload can be provisioned, monitored and managed from anywhere in the cloud—and at the lowest possible, utility-based pricing, with cost transparency. When a cloud architecture is in place, IT in the public sector gains the opportunity to innovate and bring new value to an organization --not only providing budget relief but also tackling the innovative and critical new projects that deliver a whole new level of value to students and citizens.

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An Office of the CTO Guest Blog
By Colleen McMillan

The following is the second in a three-part blog series about the VMware Journey to your cloud in the public sector. The first installment, published February 13, 2012, introduced the VMware Journey and its multiple phases and outlined Phase 1 - IT Production: Lower Costs and First Steps through Virtualization.  This second installment describes Phase 2—Business Production.

Virtualization is an important technology in its own right, but in the context of cloud computing it’s best viewed as a foundational technology that gets the journey started. Virtualization helps lower costs and streamline IT services, but it’s in Phase 2—what we call  Business Production—where the services being offered are enhanced and the benefits begin to accelerate.

We refer to this phase as Business Production because it focuses on business-critical applications that can benefit dramatically from the uptime, increased availability and easier maintenance afforded by virtualization.  With IT operating more smoothly, the organization can shift its focus toward improving the tools that enhance the business — instead of constantly struggling to keep up with outages, updates and user demands.

Improving the business-critical application experience in public sector organizations starts with bringing key applications (e.g., a class registration application for students or an online driver’s license renewal tool for citizens) into the cycle. With automated IT tools reducing overhead and eliminating cumbersome maintenance tasks, the IT team can shift its focus to building or improving tools that deliver new services and capabilities to the ultimate end-users.

In education, the end user community includes the students, faculty and administration. In government agencies, it includes citizens, business owners, voters and drivers, among other stakeholders. Research shows that once word spreads about a more cost-effective, high availability solution for mission-critical applications, departments and divisions within an organization start sharing wish lists about the tools and features that will make their lives - and the lives of their constituents - much easier.

Consider what the cloud has done for Indiana University, part of the Big Ten Conference, but also recognized as a leading university for academia and research with over 110,000 students and 8 geographically dispersed campuses.  Through VMware virtualization, they consolidated over 90 percent of their servers, including Tier 1 applications such as Oracle databases, ERP financial and HR systems, and even their online course management system, the university’s most publicly visible application.  This university drastically cut costs, lowered energy usage, and provided a more efficient IT infrastructure for its students and faculty.  The overall project was clearly a success- in terms of saving money, but also by building operational efficiencies and improving business agility.

It’s during this Business Production phase that developers can expand their vision for applications, bringing enhanced functionality to users and new services to key constituents, whether they are faculty, students, employees or the citizens they serve. A police department, for example, might  place greater focus on developing applications to support mobile communications or identify suspects. School administrators, on the other hand, might channel more resources to tools for responding to emergencies and communicating in real time with security officers, faculty, students and their parents.

Consider the example of a national food inspection agency that was facing new regulatory challenges.

A cloud solution allowed the agency, among other things, to better monitor livestock; produce and processed food items in near real-time as they moved from source to supermarket. Beyond that, the agency started to look at how to enhance that information even further. To keep track of sources of food contaminants, for example, those data files can be integrated with information from other government agencies, as well as agencies from other countries.

At this point in the process, the benefits and the cost savings are obvious. But what’s the next step? Can organizations find other ways to leverage cloud technology to bring an even greater return-on-investment? In the third and final phase of the journey, as organizations deploy IT as a service, the possibilities become almost unlimited.

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An Office of the CTO Guest Blog
By Colleen McMillan

What's your plan?  Hurricane season may now be over, but experience shows that the technology plan you put in place today can make all the difference next summer when the storms start heading our way again.

As a native Floridian, I still let out a sigh of relief around this time every year. November 30 marks the official end of the U.S. hurricane season, which in past years was my signal to put thoughts of Mother Nature's potential wrath out of mind for awhile and start gearing up for the holiday season and New Year.

These days, however, after hearing about the best practices of government agencies around the country, I realize that I've been taking the wrong approach all these years.

I now know that the winter months -- typically absent of tornadoes and hurricanes -- are probably among the best times to start planning for next year's storms. From a budgetary standpoint, the end of the year may not seem ideal for planning - after all, most public sector budgets are already well into their cycles by this point. Nonetheless, I've come to see that that the end of the year is a good time to start gathering the information that's needed to put together a plan of attack against disasters. Before you need money, you need a plan.

Planning for a Faster, More Reliable Response

In Greenville County, South Carolina, for example, smart planning by the county's Emergency Medical Services team has put in place the capability to respond to disasters in seconds. The county worked with Data Network Solutions, Inc. a VMware Premier Partner, to shift its dispatch center to a virtual environment, which allows it to stay up and running in the event that its primary data center goes down. That's brought peace-of-mind to anxious officials who were concerned about shifting away from an expensive legacy system. And it's given the county, an inland region that's not always in the direct path of hurricanes but definitely feels the effects, a new vision for its disaster recovery plan.

More importantly, though, the new environment brings GPS technology to the dispatch center, which automatically identifies the closest ambulance to an incident and dispatches it without delay. Likewise, it empowers dispatchers with instant medical information so that they can provide callers with life-saving information while emergency officials are in route.

"Lives are on the line," said Brenden Brewer, a systems administrator for Greenville County. "We're concerned about losing calls. We're concerned about dropping calls. We're concerned about the integrity of the data."

Technology for Saving Both Lives and Money

It's not just hurricanes that make it so important to have a disaster recovery plan in place. In the earthquake-prone area of northern California, the city of Fairfield is preparing for "the big one" by rolling out a VMware virtual environment for the city's most critical services, including computer-aided dispatch and records management systems for the police and fire departments. Because they're virtual, the systems are no longer chained to a physical building. If that building becomes inaccessible because of damage from an earthquake, the system can easily be accessed from another location, without compromise. As an added bonus, the city has actually seen a significant reduction in equipment costs, software licensing fees and power consumption.

Planning Starts with the Right Questions

The idea of putting together a blueprint for disaster preparedness can seem overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be. Start by asking yourself the following questions:

• What will be the critical needs in the hours that follow the disaster? What will be the top priorities?
• Will emergency responders be able to communicate with one another?
• How will school officials ensure the safety of students and communicate the situation with parents?
• What is the weakest link in the system? Is it an understaffed department, aging equipment, untrained staff?
• Finally, can an investment in new technology minimize the chaos in the seconds, minutes, hours and days following a disaster?

Every institution and government agency will have its own answers to these questions.  A school, for example, will have a different set of needs and demands than a police department or county-operated hospital. And the resources available to different organizations will vary, as well. But as we see in places like Fairfield, and as I pointed out in a previous post about disaster recovery, some cities, counties and campuses are discovering that an investment in technology can not only save lives during a future emergency, but can also save money almost immediately.

A hurricane or earthquake can be a devastating thing.  But with the right amount of planning ahead of time -- instead of during the time when weather forecasters are warning of an approaching hurricane -- cities, schools and other public agencies can "ride the storm" with peace of mind.  Once the disaster passes, even if things appear to be in shambles, these localities can depend on systems that are safe from harm, secure and ready to work.

Visit the VMware Public Sector industry solutions web pages to learn more about disaster recovery solutions.

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An Office of the CTO Guest Blog
By Colleen McMillan

It was really quite fitting, in the days following the death of Steve Jobs that so many of the tributes that flooded the Internet didn't just talk about products like the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad. Instead, as VMware CEO Paul Maritz put it, "Steve was one of those people who set such a high standard, with a refusal to compromise, that he ended up changing the world."

There's no denying that the devices to come out of Apple, with Jobs at the helm, represent breakthroughs in technology and design.  More importantly, however, the inventions and insights of the Apple co-founder have changed people's expectations about technology and revolutionized entire industries.

Take iTunes and the iPod, for example. These innovations  were about more than just portable music. Those white ear buds were definitely an early status symbol and the iTunes program rocked the recording industry in a way that Van Halen never could. Steve Jobs made a multi-billion dollar industry rewrite its entire business model and shape it to conform to a whole new vision of delivering value to customers.

The same could be said about the way that Apple, through Jobs' demand for simplicity and perfection, raised the bar on smartphones and introduced the world to tablet computers like the iPad. In the process, he caused entire industries — including those in the public sector — to rethink what they do and how they do it.

And that's exactly what's happening now in classrooms and government agencies everywhere.

Granted, there have been other forces for change at work in the public sector, including cloud computing, datacenter virtualization, smartphone apps and mobile broadband. But tablet computers — which are on track to reach 100 million shipments by 2013 — are driving the biggest change. Among other things, they're reshaping the way teachers teach and students learn, and they're impacting the way government serves and informs its citizens.

Tablets in schools, for example, have opened the doors to new tools for learning through applications — an animated lesson on how to solve an algebraic equation, for one example,  or an interactive video of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. For students who mostly grew up around cell phones, home computers and video games, out-of-the-box learning through a multimedia touchscreen app not only can be easier for them but also can create a learning environment that's engaging, entertaining and more effective.

These trends show how our perspective on technology has evolved over the years. We have come to expect instant access to everything — and not just music, photos and YouTube videos. Citizens expect to use the Internet to renew their car registrations, apply for a business license or file their tax returns. Likewise, students expect their homework assignments to be posted online. Their parents, meanwhile, know that a quick review of current grades can be found with the click of a mouse.

But expanded access to static information is just part of the revolution now underway. Across the public sector, there's a new understanding that public service in the post-PC era is about more than access to a PDF of a voter registration form on a Web page. Instead, the new technology developed by Steve Jobs and others is allowing public workers — food inspectors, zoning officials, social workers and many others — to spend more time in the field and less time behind a desk. The tablet unleashes all these professionals  from their office PCs, allowing them to process "paperwork" digitally from the field. At the same time, it allows citizens to interact more with government, to have a stronger voice, and to gain access to real-time information.

And we're just now at the beginning of even greater changes.  Schools and public agencies are in the earliest stages of changing the way they use technology. Eventually, things like interactive tablet apps will be business-as-usual for them.

That's why leading technology providers like VMware recognize that public sector agencies, among other industries, are interested in the benefits of cloud solutions that incorporate tablets like the iPad. Products like VMware's free View Client for the iPad, for example,  is built to offer control over data and network access without compromising the flexibility to work seamlessly and securely with both tablets and smartphones.

The tributes to Steve Jobs will likely continue for some time, especially as the impact of tablets and smartphones- which appears to be just in the earliest stages - continues to evolve and grow beyond the early adopter stage. Certainly, with Steve's guidance, Apple has established a long-term strategy for tablet computing. And because Jobs was known for working on projects years in advance, his impact on products and the evolution of technology will likely be felt for years to come.

Imagine, if Steve Jobs had lived beyond his short 56 years, the sort of vision he would share with us for the next generation of computing. We can only speculate on the sort of impact he might have made on other businesses or technologies.

Just as much as we build on his enduring legacy, we will miss his long-term vision.

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An Office of the CTO Guest Blog
By Colleen McMillan

It's never a bad thing when you're best recognized for helping your customers save money - especially when those customers are cash-strapped school systems. But as the Lone Star College System in Houston, Texas has come to prove, the savings that came from a shift to the Cloud are only the tip of the iceberg.

If you've been through the bureaucratic nightmare that is college registration, you know how competitive it can be to get into the right classes at the right times. Certainly, that situation hasn't changed. But students and staff at all kinds of schools are today facing an added challenge: computer systems that can't handle the flood of registrations and, therefore, crash at the worst possible moments.  Just when students are about to confirm their enrollment in that critical class that will make or break the semester schedule, the computer system goes down.

The challenge became even tougher at Lone Star College, where both the number of campuses and the student population were expanding at a rapid rate.  As you might have predicted, the old system couldn't handle the crush of 85,000 students all trying to register at the same time.

The result, of course, was a system crash. It left the IT folks scrambling, leaving little choice but to take everyone else - Finance, HR and others - offline. It also meant keeping an around-the-clock eye on the system to make sure it didn't fail again. Adding more resources to meet these peak loads wasn't an option - it would have required more hardware, at a cost of several million dollars.

Simply put, the system was no longer working for the students, faculty and staff on the 15 Lone Star college campuses.

But now, through a new partnership with VMware and EMC, the college is not only seeing savings of more than $600,000 in capital expenditures, but is also working with a system that's elastic enough to add extra resources when the demand is high and scale it back down when things slow down.  Moreover, they've been able to accomplish all this without having to invest in extra hardware that would have just sat idle once the registration crush was over.

The transformation came in the form of a cloud computing solution that delivers IT-as-a-Service to more than 90,000 users across all LSCS campuses.

In a Q&A interview with Campus Technology magazine, Link Alander, vice chancellor of technology services at LSCS, explained how the Cloud has shifted the registration process from a nightmare into a dream come true. Alander says:

We have gone through two registrations on the new design and have not had a system outage. During peak registration, I am able to dynamically add capacity to meet the heavy load. We no longer have to shut down other areas like finance during registration. After registration, the elastic capacity is released to the system for other uses.

And if that weren't a great enough testament, Alander notes that the time to implement new services - something that would have taken months in its pre-cloud era - was reduced to a matter of days.

It's one thing to hear our sales and marketing teams talk up the value of IT-as-a-Service. After all, they're supposed to talk it up. But it means so much more when a customer not only talks up the technology but singles out our company's approach to solving problems. Alander continues:

We looked at many things before we decided on a solution. Key factors were: Are they an industry leader and are they innovating? We know EMC and VMware are leaders in their space and are constantly innovating. The critical factor that set them apart, though, is that they are focused on a partnership and don't just want to be vendors to LSCS. They want to add value, and they understand that their success is our success.

Here at VMware, we couldn't have said it better ourselves.

Come listen to Lone Star's story first hand at VMworld, #CIM2520 - IT as a Service: Leveraging Private, Public and Hybrid Clouds in Higher Education!  Monday 8/29 11am.

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