Gravitant helped the State of Texas create a cloud services brokerage portal to help state agencies plan, procure, and manage cloud services from multiple providers. The portal allows agencies to design cloud architectures, estimate costs, provision resources across providers, and gain visibility and control over spending. It addresses challenges like vendor lock-in and cost uncertainty. The portal has been successful, with 18 virtual data centers provisioned across several providers. The solution maximizes the benefits of cloud computing for improved government efficiency.

1. CASE STUDY
Gravitant Powers First Cloud Services Brokerage
Portal for State of Texas
AT A GLANCE
THE CHALLENGE
Texas State agencies wanted a way to
plan for cloud IT services, govern
procurement and contracts, control
provisioning, and manage costs in the
cloud. They knew they faced issues
such as vendor lock-in, VM sprawl, cost
uncertainty, and procurement
challenges.
Overview THE SOLUTION
Gravitant’s cloudMatrix technology
offered Texas the ability to stand up a
Cloud computing is an established alternative to traditional IT powerful and dynamic web-based
cloud brokerage portal for government
service delivery with shorter procurement times, lower cost
agencies to design, order, provision,
and greater agility for both private and public sector IT needs.
and control IT services across multiple
However it is still a challenging environment to onboard and providers.
manage this new, evolving, and rapidly changing technology. THE RESULT
Texas State agencies were able to
simulate cross-provider provisioning
Texas State agencies wanted to use cloud services but needed
and estimate cost prior to
an effective way to compare cloud offerings, architect cloud
deployment. The portal also allowed
solutions, contract and manage cloud services. Texas State Agencies to establish complete
agencies required a solution that aggregates services from command and control into their cloud
multiple providers, integrates into existing technologies, IT. Gravitant’s cloud brokerage
solution maximized the opportunity to
enforces audit and approval requirements, manages costs, and
leverage cloud computing to improve
is customizable for each participant, in other words, they government efficiency.
needed a cloud services brokerage solution.
www.gravitant.com (512) 535 - 7399 info@gravitant.com

2. THE CHALLENGE
A common lament from IT Leaders, well crystallized by Vivek Kundra when he was the Federal CIO, is
that IT is often “…characterized by low asset utilization, fragmented demand for resources, difficult to
manage environments, long procurement cycles, and a decreasing IT budget.” Similar challenges arise
with cloud services and make it difficult for customers to realize the full capabilities and advantages
of cloud technology.
With thousands of different cloud service providers with different offerings and pricing models,
customers have a difficult time selecting the cloud service provider and an offering that best meets
their needs. The contractual solution, and often times the optimal solution, may require mixing and
matching of services from multiple cloud providers, but the resulting billing situation with multiple
bills from different providers is a nightmare.
“The diversity in cloud financial and service level models creates complexity in
performing a normalized analysis that results in appropriate and consistent
purchase commitments”
- IT Director, Texas State Government
Several Texas State agencies wanted to provision resources on demand and de-provision resources
outside peak usage periods. But different terminology, standards and technology across providers
challenge procurement strategies and practices. Network and security settings needed to be
identified and configured per provider. Furthermore, the lack of automation with many cloud
providers added extra and often manual processes to provision resources.
Also, the cloud providers did not offer any solution for agencies to track resources utilization by
application and apportion the bill accordingly. This level of transparency was needed for SLA
compliance, cost and resources control and to ensure that dynamic IT demands are being met.
All of this made it a challenge for IT Managers to maintain visibility and control over IT spend and
resource utilization. Agencies needed a solution that aggregated services from multiple cloud
providers, easily integrated into legacy technologies, and was customizable for each agency. In other
words, Texas agencies needed the services that are delivered by a cloud broker.
www.gravitant.com (512) 535 - 7399 info@gravitant.com

3. THE SOLUTION
Through the Pilot Texas Cloud Offering initiative, sponsored and created by the Texas Department of
Information Resources, Gravitant created a powerful and dynamic web-based cloud brokerage portal called the
Texas Cloud Services Portal (TCSP). The portal runs on Gravitant’s innovative cloudMatrix CSB Platform and
enables agencies to design, order, provision and control cloud services (public, private, and hybrid) across
providers.
Portal Capabilities
• Wizard-based tools for screening applications for cloud deployment, identifying target cloud
infrastructures, estimating capacity required on the cloud, comparing provider prices side-by-side,
creating a migration roadmap, and finally evaluating the ROI of cloud migration.
• Single view for designing application architectures in the cloud, assigning portions of the architecture to
different cloud providers, automatically provisioning the entire architecture simultaneously, and cost
estimation.
• Dashboards for consolidated billing, utilization monitoring, and security monitoring.
• Command and control screens for provisioning authorization , workflow orchestration, and provider
compliance evaluation.
State of Texas Implementation
At the center lies the cloud services broker
platform – cloudMatrix - which integrates cloud
services from public, private, and hybrid clouds
as well as managed services and migration
services. Above cloudMatrix lies the cloud
management services fabric that allows for auto
provisioning, consolidated billing, chargeback,
command and control, and governance. These
management services were critical for
successful adoption of this portal in the public
sector for delivery to the citizens of Texas
through the Texas Cloud Services Portal.
www.gravitant.com (512) 535 - 7399 info@gravitant.com

4. THE RESULT
The TCSP portal allowed the agencies to get hands on experience with cloud architecture design, sourcing,
provisioning, monitoring, and billing. Agencies were also able to involve their legal and financial groups in the
procurement process through the portal’s user administration and access control capabilities. There are
currently 18 Virtual Data Centers provisioned through the portal across Amazon, Savvis, Terremark, and Vintage
IT Services.
The success of the TCSP solution was first presented at the 2012 Texas Association of State Systems for
Computing and Communications (TASSCC) conference. A panel of speakers representing the project
participants was organized to describe the cloud experience and share the collective experience with other
public sector organizations. The program has been extended through 2013 in an effort to accommodate more
agencies. The Texas Department of Information Resources has published a lessons learned document as a
result of the combined experiences of these Agencies as well.
“There are so many complexities in making the cloud work for us. Gravitant’s cloud
brokerage platform, along with their expertise helped us get on to the cloud successfully.”
- Information Security Officer, Texas State Government
ABOUT GRAVITANT
Founded by innovative executives with over five decades of combined experience in Enterprise
IT management, operations research, advanced analytics, and service-oriented architectures (SOA),
Gravitant offers next-generation on-demand cloud broker and management applications for
enterprise IT organizations.
For more information visit us at WWW.GRAVITANT.COM
www.gravitant.com (512) 535 - 7399 info@gravitant.com