Virtualization Journey

In my previous post I talked about what are the key elements that drive the adoption of VMware virtualization technology in our customer base.

After looking at dozens of customer journeys directly and  indirectly through various customer proxies (Sales Account Managers, VMware Consultants and Technical Account Managers (TAM), etc) we find that customers are in one of three stages that we are going to call:

• IT Production
• Business Production
• ITaaS (IT as as Service)

There is also a stage zero where companies just experiment with the technology. I am not going to address this phase here. I am concerned with projects that take virtualization into production like with all the customers we interviewed in the journey project.

The chart show all key elements for adoption: Sponsorship/ownership, Confidence and Value. These evolve pretty significantly over time with two major inflection points along the way.

Each of these three stage is worth its own post. In this article I will address how the journey evolves at the high level.

IT Production

This is the Cost-Efficiency phase, building the core technology and skills base by virtualizing IT-owned applications, and benefiting from the value of server consolidation.

Sponsorship/Ownership
In the IT Production phase, IT organization virtualize what they own. In fact at this stage it is not really a matter of sponsorship, it is more matter of ownership. They are comfortable with the technology from previous experimentation or deployments and they are now ready to virtualize the applications where they don’t need to ask permission to the business.

Confidence
At this stage, confidence can be characterized as reactive. The team reacts to a business trigger such as hardware refresh or data center consolidation by using virtualization technology. They typically deploy the VMware hypervisor and the core management platform and they start virtualizing the low hanging fruits: File,Print, Web servers, domain controllers, Test and Development servers. At this stage they are building up their virtualization skills. They don’t tackle applications that are perceived to be riskier or that require them to fight tricky political and cultural battles. Just not yet.

Value
The predominant value proposition in this phase is consolidation of IT infrastructure to save on hardware, space and cooling. Customers also end up with some nice by-product and capability such as faster provisioning, a better storage infrastructure (required to deploy VMotion and other useful virtualization features). This creates the technical and knowledge platform to target more interesting applications and for future growth.

Business Production

The Quality of Service phase, tackling business applications (such as Microsoft Exchange, SAP, Oracle Apps, Databases etc) while adopting more of the VMware product stack (such as DRS, SRM or View) with a rapid switch of the value proposition towards better SLAs, business continuity and overall quality of service.

This is a major chasm that customers have to cross on their way to high level of virtualization penetration. I will probably spend multiple articles on this phase in the future, addressing triggers, obstacles, best practices and examples. This is just a quick summary.

Sponsorship
In the Business Production phase, the IT organization which is driving the virtualization agenda needs to find new level of sponsorship for the journey to progress. They have virtualized all the low hanging fruits, everything that they owned. Next step: business applications.

To do so, they now need to get the “Application Owner” on board. Application owners bring about new concerns besides saving money by consolidating servers. They care about performance, lowering risk, quality of service, time to market for new versions of the application, business continuity, planned and unplanned downtime. This is why every single customer we talked to who is in this phase learned how to address these concerns by painting a different value proposition than just server consolidation. They use VMware product features such as SRM, High Availability (HA) and Fault Tolerance (FT) to provide better quality of service (and performance) for their business applications running in a virtual environment.

Confidence
Confidence can be characterized as selective at this stage. The team carefully selects the first applications to virtualize based on a path of least resistance for their organization. “Do I have a good relationship with that application owner?, “Do I have skills to virtualize the application in question?”, “What are the risks associated with virtualizing it?”, “What are the risks associated with NOT virtualizing it?”, “Does the ISV support the application in a virtual environment?”, “Is there a compelling reason to virtualize this particular app (lack of HA, deploying a new version, non-satisfactory uptime…)?”…

Often the seed for virtualizing a business application is planted when a new version is being developed and tested. This process may already be happening in a virtual environment and when the app is going into production, deploying it on a physical server introduces a risky architectural discontinuity. It often makes sense to just leave it running in a virtual environment and take it into production.

After the first couple of business applications are successfully virtualized things get easier, the confidence grows fast and soon the team is ready to take on most business applications. Evangelizing the success and the business value achieved is a critical success factor in this stage. We found that customers do very creative things to make this happen. I will share some of these stories in the upcoming posts.

Value
In this phase the predominant value proposition is quality of service along pillars such as business continuity, lower downtime risks, faster provisioning, time to market and so on. It is actually pretty interesting how dramatic is the change in the type of value people associate with virtualization as they make the transition from IT Production to Business Production. More on this below.

Virtualization First Policy

“Virtualization First” policy refers to an IT mandate by which the VMware-based virtualized environment become the default deployment model. Physical servers are only provisioned on an exception basis and only when there is a strong technical or business justification.

Many of the customers we interviewed have such a policy in place but there are differences in when they put it in place and how well they enforce it.

Timing
Some customers put this policy in place very early but they don’t enforce it very well and it is pretty easy to make the case for getting a physical server.

Other customers, put this policy in place for the type of applications that they have experience virtualizing at any of the three stages. In fact, the ability to enforce this policy is highly correlated to IT confidence and maturity around VMware technology.

Enforcement
Some other customers put the policy in place after successfully virtualizing few business applications. At that point virtualization tend to get on the radar of higher level of management in the organization and in the same way as increased confidence influences their ability to enforce the policy, increased level of sponsorship provides even better teeth.  When the sponsorship is at the highest level (such as in the ITaaS Phase), that is the ultimate enforcement and empowering function.

ITaaS

In the IT as as Service phase, virtualization is just part of what IT does. Everything new is deployed on virtual, and the value is all around time to market, process automation, and ultimately business agility.

Sponsorship
In this stage, the sponsor for the virtualization journey is all the way tot the top of the organization (typically the CIO). Tracking the value delivered over time raised the visibility of the virtualization journey and it is now a top initiative for the CIO, sometimes with MBOs associated to virtualization penetration and speed of adoptions for the CIO’s reports.

Confidence
Confidence is very high. Most of the product stack has been adopted, including SRM, DRS, Lab Manager, HA, FT and so on. The virtualization team is often folded back into the core server team as virtualization is just part of what IT does.

Value
At this stage organization are looking to scale their virtualization effort so that they can in turn scale the associated benefits that come from process automation, better resiliency, and increased quality of services.

Some customers refer to this state as their “internal cloud” when resources can be allocated on demand where and when needed. IT is nimble. Their credibility has improved throughout the journey and (in their own word) their quality of life is better. They don’t obsess about hardware failures because they know they can move the impacted VMs around. They use DRS to automatically increase resource allocation on the fly. They have a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy or even a complete solution in place. They are looking at or implementing their desktop virtualization roadmap.

Conclusions

These are the three main stages that characterize most customer virtualization journeys we have seen: IT production, Business Production and ITaaS.

The adoption is driven by IT confidence, level of sponsorship and tracking the business value delivered by each project.

There is a major chasm/inflection point around the time customers move from virtualizing IT infrastructure services and tes/dev servers to their first business applications. When they do cross this chasm, the value proposition that they track, perceive and sell internally radically shifts from server consolidation and CAPEX savings, to better quality of service, OPEX savings and better business continuity.

What’s Next

In the next few posts I am going to

• Talk more about the value path for virtualization and what is the relationship between business triggers, product functional areas, capabilities and value
• drill down on each phase and use specific examples to talk about obstacles, best practice, evangelization techniques and so on

Ciao

Vittorio

In previous posts, I covered the 3 main stages of virtualization adoption and the key elements driving the virtualization journey. Just a reminder that most of the material in these posts comes directly from our customers through a primary research project that we carried out last summer.

Let’s now double-click on the IT Production phase.

In this phase the IT department is the main driver for virtualization in a bottom up type of approach. They virtualize the assets that they own such as file and print servers, domain controllers, web servers, Citrix servers, and so on. Test and Dev servers are also a primary candidate for virtualization at this stage.

Key Drivers

Here is the typical status of the key virtualization drivers in IT production:

Confidence

The confidence is reactive, meaning that the team has enough knowledge and experience to react to certain triggers (see blow for the list of typical triggers) but virtualization is not the predominant computing platform yet. The team knows how to install and operate ESX/ESXi but they are typically not familiar with more advanced features like SRM, DRS, HA and FT. There is a big inflection point in term of confidence when the team learns how to use vMotion as it allows them to perform system maintenance without downtime. It is not unusual to see customers organize internal demos around vMotion to show its power to other divisions and/or to the business.

Sponsorship

The sponsorship at this stage is typically at the IT manager or IT director level, especially in bigger companies. In smaller companies the CIO has more visibility into most projects going on in his or her org. In many cases, we cannot even talk about sponsorship as much as ownership as IT tends to virtualize what they own first.  There are cases where the sponsorship is at the senior level but in many cases the virtualization first policy is not enforced aggressively yet.

Value

The predominant value that drives virtualization in this stage is cost saving from servers consolidation. These saves are so significant that they overshadow some of the additional benefits the come from virtualization such as faster provisioning, better manageability, less downtime etc. More on business value further down in this post.

Obstacles

Our customers told us that at the beginning of their journeys, these where the three biggest obstacles  in the way of virtualization projects:

Team Communication

Or lack of thereof. Virtualization technology cuts across multiple teams and disciplines: servers, storage, network, and security. Virtualization is typically introduced into IT by the server team without necessarily involving the other teams that will be impacted by the transformation.

In many customers this has been the main obstacle to more efficient adoption and in turn value realization.

It is very important to:

• Train all teams involved on virtualization technology
• Keep communicating across teams as the transformation takes place over time.

We found customers who even re-organized their IT around virtualization to facilitate adoption and optimize their processes.

Virtualization FUD

This is somewhat related to the previous point. As much as virtualization has become mainstream in thousands of IT shops and it is running mission critical applications in some of the largest data centers the world over, there are still IT professionals that don’t fully understand how it works and what are its advantages. This is natural with any technology transformation but this FUD does get in the way of wider adoption of virtualization.

We learned some very interesting tactics that customers use to overcome this obstacle. Some examples:

vMotion Demo
This is a big hit amongst our customers. They use vMotion to show in a very effective way some of the things that virtualization can do for the business such as  disruption-less maintenance, lower risk from hardware failure, and so on. Later in the journey, the vMotion demo is replaced by demos of even more sophisticated features such as High Availability and Fault Tolerance.

Show and Tell
Virtualization champions within our customers often take the show on the road and they go around the company educating people about the technical and business advantages of virtualization. Sometimes they use a successful internal project that they did, some other times they just hold a virtualization workshop using material from our web site or other blogs.

Virtualize Under the Radar
At the beginning of the journey a lot of virtualization happens below the radar as IT virtualizes the assets that they own directly. Later in the journey FUD from application owners and the business side becomes more of a factor and slows down adoption. This is where we found that some of our most confident customers just go ahead and virtualize applications without really telling their business counterparts. I know, this is controversial but true. The attitude of  these customers is along these lines: “I don’t let the business tell me how to run my infrastructure. If I decide that virtualization is the right computing platform for a given application, I just do it”. If you think about it, the business does not really care what brand hard drive IT uses right? Overtime the same will be true for whether an application or a database runs physical or virtual. It is indeed true for some customers today where virtualization is the default computing platform. It is a factor of their confidence, credibility and experience.

Storage Architecture

Storage architecture is the third major obstacle we found in IT production. Many of our customers told us that if they could do it all over again they would spend more time figuring out the right storage architecture from the get-go that

• works well with virtualization (and vMotion and all the advanced virtualization features)
• supports future growth

I am not the right person to go deep on this issue. I will look for an expert at VMware and interview him or her about storage best practices in one of the future posts.

Triggers and Capabilities

As covered in this post, we developed a framework to model the relationship between business triggers, VMware product deployed, resulting capabilities and business value realized.

In the IT Production stage, these are the typical business triggers that ignite a virtualization project:

• Major hardware refresh
• Data center migration/ consolidation
• Merger / acquisition
• Standardization/Organizational Change
• Outages (application, system)
• Increased capability/ confidence
• Cost cutting initiatives
• Capacity constraints (power, cooling, CPU, space)

Customers respond to these triggers by deploying the basic virtualization platform around ESXi with related management tools (vCenter).

The capability that are achieved by deploying these products include:

• Massive consolidation
• Space, cooling, hardware, energy savings
• Have a lot more floor space
• Faster Provisioning
• Do more with Less
• Excess capacity for future growth

Faster provisioning in particular is a capability that fosters more adoption of virtualization and positively impacts the IT team credibility. It is not unusual for customers to cut down their provisioning cycle form weeks to days, sometimes hours.

These capabilities map pretty directly into the following business value categories

• Capital Avoidance Saves
• IT Operations Efficiency
• Green Saves

Where the predominant value is Capital saves from consolidations as mentioned above.

Development-Related Triggers

There is also another set of triggers that prompts customer to deploy VMware’s development life-cycle management area such as Lab Manager. These triggers include:

• Major application upgrade/Changes
• Need to improve application life-cycle efficiency/ quality
• Major OS refresh

From deploying this area of the VMware product line customers typically get these set of capabilities in return:

• Reduce the cost of application development life-cycle
• Faster set up of development seats
• Reproduce bug/incident events for resolution
• Replay events to identify incident root cause

This is probably the first area in most customers journeys where the value proposition from virtualization is not predominantly around cost saving from consolidation. There will be many more examples in the following stages (Business production and ITaaS, see this post of an overview).

In fact, when deploying products such as vCenter Lab Manager, customers typically realize lower cost for their testing infrastructure, increased application development efficiency and faster time to market for new applications.

What’s Next

In the next post, I will cover some of the IT Production best practices that we learned from our customers.

Vittorio

In the “Key Adoption Drivers” post, I covered what the main drivers for virtualization adoption are and in the “Virtualization Journey Stages” post we saw how the virtualization journey evolves along three main stages that are characterized by:

• Different type of applications being virtualized (IT infrastructure, test and dev, business applications, databases…)
• Level of organizational and process maturity
• Different business value delivered

The three stage framework represents the first axis of the virtualization journey adoption:

Business Value Evolution

One of the most interesting findings from our customers interviews was how the value proposition that virtualization delivers evolves across the journey. Mind you, I am talking about what customers told us, not what VMware marketing says.

At the beginning of the journey (IT Production), it is all about cost efficiency around server consolidation, space, power and cooling savings.

When customers enter into the Business Production phase and they start virtualizing business applications and production databases, the value proposition is all around better quality of service and business continuity. This shift is sudden and dramatic. It is like cost savings from consolidation is taken for granted at this stage and customers switch their focus on faster provisioning, better capacity management, reliability and process automation for their business applications.  This is where features such as High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT) and SRM become important.

At the right side of the journey, it is all about business agility. Customers are on a path to virtualize as much as they can of the IT environment so that they can scale up the benefits derived from virtualization and achieve more process automation, faster time to market, and dynamic allocation of resources to cope with varying demand. This is the stage that gets them closest to running a private cloud. More on this in later posts.

The Second Axis of Adoption: the VMware Product Stack

The journey also evolves along a second axis: the VMware Product Adoption that is which functional areas of the VMware product portfolio a customer deploys overtime.

There are five main functional domains in the VMware product portfolio (pre-SpringSource acquisition):

• Infrastructure Consolidation (ESXi and core vCenter)
• Application Development Quality and Efficiency (Lab Manager)
• Cost Effective Availability and Disaster Recovery (SRM, HA and FT)
• Desktop Security, Mobility and Support Efficiency (View, Workstation)
• Virtualization Efficiency and IT process Automation (DRS, Lifecycle Manager)

The core platform  with ESXi and the basic management capabilities of vCenter provide the foundation for hardware abstraction, consolidation and CAPEX savings along the whole journey. To unlock the higher level business value of virtualization, customers need to adopt and deploy the upper layers of VMware product stack.

SpringSource add some very nice application management and monitoring capabilities with Hyperic, a lightweight development framework (Spring + Tools) and a lightweight run-time container (tc Server).

Although adoption stages and product adoption are somewhat related (e.g. customer who virtualize mission critical applications tend to aggressively deploy features such as HA and FT),  each customer will follow their very own path in deploying the different functional areas of VMware’s product stack. The path mainly depends on what their business triggers are (e.g. running out of data center space, hardware refresh, security compliance on the desktop) and their business priorities.

Business Triggers to Business Value Framework

As part of our customer journey project, we built a taxonomy to map triggers to functional areas, to capabilities to business value. This is how we help customers define the custom journey that best maximize business value returns based on their set of triggers and concerns.
To do so, we first enumerated all the business triggers that are relevant to virtualization; then we mapped which product area addresses each business trigger. From there, we listed all the capabilities and the business values that each product area delivers.

This is the high level view of triggers-to-business-area mapping by stage:

And this is the drill down for the set of triggers the typically spark the deployment of Lab Manager.

And the related capability and value mapping

In the next posts, I am going to show how we use this framework to build a customer adoption journey and then how we calculate the ROI across the different business value categories: Cost Efficiency, Quality of Service and Business Agility