Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how cloud service automation can improve deployment of IT applications and delivery for higher efficiency.

1. Cloud Automation Eases Application Delivery for Global
Service Provider NNIT
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how cloud service automation can improve
deployment of IT applications and delivery for higher efficiency.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact
on people’s lives.
Once again, we’re focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of
IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, and business
results. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013
Conference in Barcelona.
Our next innovation case study interview highlights how NNIT is using HP Cloud Service
Automation (CSA) to improve their deployment of IT applications and data and to provide
higher efficiency. To learn more, we’re joined by Jesper Bagh. He is the IT architect and cloud
expert there at NNIT, based in Copenhagen. Welcome, Jesper.
Jesper Bagh: Thank you very much, Dana.
Gardner: So tell us a little about your company and what you do. Then, we’ll get into some of
the problems and solutions that you've been tasked with resolving?
Bagh: NNIT is a service provider located in Denmark. We have offices around the world, China,
Philippines, Czech Republic, and the United States. We’re 2,200 employees
globally and we're a subsidiary of Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company
making insulin.
Gardner: IT architect, that’s an interesting title. Tell us what you do and what
you were doing before you achieved that rank. What are your job
responsibilities?
Bagh: My responsibility is to ensure the company that business goals can be
delivered by functional requirements and turning the functional requirements into projects that
can be delivered by the organization.
Gardner
Bagh

2. Gardner: I know that the IT architect and cloud architect individuals are in high demand in a lot
of companies. Tell us how you’ve evolved your thinking towards a cloud deployment and
explain a little bit about how you are using CSA to accomplish that?
Full suite
Bagh: We embarked on CSA together with HP back in 2010. Back then CSA, was compiled of
many different software applications. It wasn't really software back then, but mostly PowerPoint.
Now, it’s a full suite of software.
It has its own life and it has helped us to show to our internal group and the customers that we
have that services out in the cloud. For us it has been a tremendous journey to show that you can
deliver services fully automatic and by running them, can gain great efficiency.
Gardner: And has the ability to be more service-oriented in your cloud activities
filtered back into more of IT? Are you extending this thinking about service,
catalog, and delivery into other aspects of IT in addition to cloud?
Bagh: We’re wall-to-wall service provider. So we do both development application management
and infrastructure outsourcing. Cloud is just one aspect that we’re delivering services on. Before
we did the cloud project, we started off by doing service-portfolio management and cataloging
our services, trying to standardize the services that we have on the shelf ready for our customers.
That made us able to put that into a cloud and show the process of standardizing your services,
doing cloud, and focusing on the dedicated customers. We have customers in our facility
management who are not able to leverage cloud services because of compliance or regulatory
demands.
We have roughly over 10,000 services in our data centers. We’re trying now to broaden the
capabilities of cloud delivery to the rest of the infrastructure so that we get a more competitive
edge. We’re able to deliver better quality, and the end users, at the end of the day, get their
services faster.
Gardner: Has this benefited your speed to value when it comes to new applications, and how do
your developer and test and automation individuals react to this?
Bagh: The adaption of automation is an ongoing journey in our company. I imagine other
companies have also had the opportunity of adapting to a new breed of software and a new life in
automation and orchestration. What we see is that the traditional operations divisions now
suddenly gets developers trying to comprehend what they mean and trying to have them work
together to deliver operations automatically.
Back in the good old days, developers were in one silo and operations were in another silo. Now,
we see a mix of resources, both in operations and in development. So the organizational change

3. management derived from automation projects is very key. We started up, when we did service
cataloging and service portfolio management, by doing organizational change to see if this could
fit into our vision.
Gardner: Now, a lot of people these days like to measure things. It’s a very data-driven era.
Have you been able to develop any metrics of how your service automation and cloud-
infrastructure developments have shown results, whether it’s productivity benefits or speeds and
feeds. Have you measured in a time to value or a time to delivery. What have you come up with?
Value add
Bagh: In the cloud project, we did two things. We did infrastructure as a service (IaaS), but we
also did a value add on IaaS. We were able to deliver qualified IaaS to the life science industry
fully compliant. That alone, in the traditional infrastructure, would have taken us weeks or
months to deliver s server because of all the process work involved. When we did the CSA and
the GxP Cloud, we were able to deliver the same server within a matter of hours. So that’s a
measurable efficiency that is highly recognized.
Gardner: For other organizations that are also grappling with these issues and trying to go over
organization and silo boundaries for improvement in collaboration, do you have any words of
advice? Now that you've been doing this for some time and at that key architect level, which I
think is really important, what thoughts do you have that you could share with others, lessons
learned perhaps?
Bagh: The lesson learned is that senior management focus on the entire process is key. Having
the organization recognized is a matter of change management. So communication is key.
Standardization before automation is key.
You need to start out by doing your standardization of your services, doing the real architectural
work, identifying which components you have and which components you don't have, and
matching them up. It’s trying to do all the Lego blocks in order to build the house. That’s key.
The parallel that I always use is there is nothing different for me as an architect than there is for
an architect building a house.
Gardner: Just briefly, looking to the future, are there other aspects of service delivery, perhaps
ways in which you could gather insights into what's happening across your infrastructure and the
results that end users are seeing through the applications? Do you have any thoughts about where
the next steps might be?
Bagh: The next step for us is to be more transparent to our customers. So the vision is now we
can deliver services fully automatically. We can run them semi automatically. We will still do
funny stuff from time to time that you need to keep your eyes on. But in order for us to show the
value, we need to report on it.

4. The next step for us is to be more proactive than reactive in our monitoring and reporting
capabilities, because we want to be more transparent to our customers. We have a policy called
Open and Honest Value-Adding. From that, we want to show our customers that if we can
deliver a service fully automatically and standardized, they know what they get because they see
it in a catalog. Then, we should be able to report on it live for the users.
Gardner: Very good. I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We’ve been learning about how
NNIT is improving their delivery and performance of applications through the use of an
important cloud-service automation technologies.
Gardner: So a big thank you to our guest, Jesper Bagh, the IT architect and cloud expert at
NNIT based in Copenhagen. Thank you so much.
Bagh: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And thank you too to our audience for joining this special new style of IT discussion
coming to you directly from the HP Discover 2013 Conference in Barcelona.
I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP Sponsored Discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how cloud service automation can improve
deployment of IT applications and delivery for higher efficiency. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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