Mark Hance, IBM Lynn Coke, IBM Technical Solution Architect

Transcription

1 Host: Speaker: Mark Hance, IBM Lynn Coke, IBM Technical Solution Architect Welcome to this IBM podcast series focused on how to create and manage a more efficient data center. I am Mark Hance from IBM. Through this series we will cover topics that can help improve your data center efficiency along with tips and advice on using technology and services to help you and your company succeed. In this segment we are here to discuss how you can get more out of your data center infrastructure using Managed Services with Lynn Coke, IBM Technical Solution Architect. Lynn thanks for joining this podcast. Thank you. Lynn, we have been hearing a lot of managed service these days and understand that IT managers and CIOs are struggling with increasing demands on IT, cost pressures due to growth and complexity and the needs to be responsive to change. The IT world is full of terminology, some helpful for our listeners if we could start with a definition of managed services. Sure, I would be happy to. Managed Service is typically referred to as information technology services that manage or assume responsibility for providing a predefined set of services, in other words there are managed services providers often called MSP's that come in and provide the services in a predefined way that cover hardware, software, tools and skills needed to provide information technology services. Components associated with this are usually server and storage, network and security, backup and recovery services, monitoring for everything and sometimes they add desktop, helpdesk, middleware services and even facilities if it is required. That one of the things you might look for is transformational activities because you're taking a set of services and rather than having a managed service provider do what you are already doing you can ask them to do data center consolidation, server virtualization or optimization so that

2 you can get the full advantage of their service and lower your cost and make your environment more efficient. Okay, that is the groundwork that's really helpful to get that common understanding. You covered a couple of the benefits, maybe you can help us understand a little bit more, if I'm an IT manager or CIO how can this help? Why should I care about management services and how can it really help me do my job better? You mentioned that we now IT managers are being asked to handle greater demand and now they have increased complexity, they see Cloud out there, all of a sudden they are faced with limited resources, and their expertise may not be staying up to par and then of course they are being faced with flat or shrinking budgets but they still have to provide improved business value and all businesses want increased focus on innovation. By coming to IBM for your managed services you have a trusted provider. We can help you reduce cost, we can manage that complexity and because we are right there on the leading edge of the development and we can provide the skills that we have to maintain your innovation and actually to help you plan and control adoption of this technology not just see Cloud but be able for example to take advantage of Cloud, take advantage of some of the new things that come out that you're interested in within managed services. We can put the latest hardware, we can do the latest software, so it's not just providing the service as it is, it is actually working with you as a partner to work towards your strategies and your goals to give the best experience and most efficient use of your IT infrastructure. Okay Lynn, that is very helpful. You touched on a couple of capabilities that IBM has. We know there are other vendors in this space; can you expand on what IBM has, what's different about IBM's capabilities in the managed services space? Yes, absolutely! One of the things that's unique that I feel is actually a real value is that we have gone through this process ourselves. We have optimized our experience and now we've taken our IT infrastructure, optimized it, done all the things that our clients are looking for, so we have that wealth of experience, we have the skills to provide the full range of managed services and we have the ability to provide delivery skills local, regional and globally. So were not just talking for example in the US or in Europe, we have skills in Asia, we have skills across the globe that are available to provide these managed services to our clients. We can do additionally basic services

3 and I think that you will see that there are managed service providers that provide the basic services. We can add the next level. For example in the managed service contract you might have network connectivity so that you can do remote monitoring of your servers. We can also provide advanced network monitoring in a full managed service contract, so not only are we managing your servers and storage we are all fully managing your network. So by being able to take a modular approach where we are looking at services that are provided and going up one level or many levels, for example very heightened security requirements for example, because we have not already in our portfolio and we've already done it for ourselves and we've done it for other clients we can do it for the next client coming. That sounds like a very important capability that we have, the ability to go deeper. You can start at a certain level but then increase the services capabilities that you're looking for and IBM has got that depth and breadth available. Can you help us with maybe a couple client examples of how IBM has helped clients use managed services and to gain some of these benefits? Sure, I'd be happy to. For example we are supporting a bank in Taiwan with the Managed Helpdesk services and we provide enhanced security, they realized a reduced data loss from their branch office personal computers and we also saw something you might not usually think of as a managed service benefit but they had 73% reduction in energy consumption per desktop. So we made them a stronger environment, they had 24 x 7 support and they were able to reduce their energy bill. We have another one and obviously we have a lot of choices but there is one in a Danish company that was a large managed security service and as I mentioned we can provide all levels of security. We were able in the first year and to reduce their costs by 55% and actually we virtually eliminated the need for manual audits. So by having this implemented they are able to use their people more effectively and they've reduced their costs. I would also like to add one more and that is that we provided managed services to a US insurance company. They are Asia subsidiary. It is a fully managed IT infrastructure service. We actually reduced their operation expenditures by 30%. We improved their service levels and they now have around-the-clock monitoring and management and doing this has actually provided increased availability. So they realized quite a few benefits besides reduce cost in their services. This is not a one-time action, we do see as I mentioned before reduced costs for the client, we see the fact that we can take over the complexities so the client doesn't have to worry about it, we

4 have the skills provided for them so they can focus on their core services and we provide the IT technology for them. That is some really strong quantitative benefits and I like the CapX reduction, the benefit of CapX reduction with this approach. If I'm interested in a managed services engagement with IBM can you help me understand what the typical steps with the managed services engagement are? How would I typically the client is I know many implementations will be different but if we are to look at a typical engagement what would be the steps to deploy a managed services solution within my company? Obviously we need a discovery phase where we understand what are the services that you want to cover, what's in scope for the solution. We need understand the location, the number of servers, virtual machines, the storage, essentially a picture of what is provided today and what would be in scope for the managed service. We also want to understand the long and short term strategy of where a client wants to go, what services they might be interested in, the types of things that they've been wanting to do but maybe haven't had the time or skill to do. So we want to look at everything and then put it in a plan so that although not everything may happen in the first year, certainly we understand together what the IT roadmap should be for the client. This phase of looking as the services can take few weeks and it can take many months. It really is how much is available, what the client needs us to assume, perhaps they don't want to involve the IT staff at the beginning, so it is understanding the pieces, how much we can provide based on assumptions from our experience and what they are able to tell us of the environment. Once we have that and once we've agreed on what the services are, what scope of the next movement is then it is typically between four and six months to have the managed service up and running in the way that the client is most comfortable. If you have asked for some type of transformational service, data center consolidation, those could happen at the same time. So while we are installing and focusing on the monitoring and management of the servers and storage we can also be doing data center consolidation or other activities. So it's not that we would have to do one thing, wait for the next thing and wait, these things can happen at the same time. So we're able to put the management and support of the environment in quickly and then do the additional services that you might be interested in. That's very helpful. So if our listeners Lynn are interested in finding out more where can they go?

5 where you would find this information, of course you can go to your IBM representative, that is the fastest and easiest but you can also look on the Internet at IBM.com/services/managed and that will take you to our managed services page and you can look at all the different services that are available and discussed this hopefully with your IBM rep to understand what would be the best fit for you. Lynn Coke, IBM Technical Solution Architect, thank you very much for your insights around managed services and benefits they can provide to IT managers and CIOs. Really some great advice on how to get started. Thanks again for your time Lynn. This concludes our podcast. Thank you very much.