Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major university is moving toward achieving the best cloud-computing benefits while empowering users.

1. University of New Mexico Delivers Efficient ‘Common
Good’ IT Services By Centralizing on Secure Cloud
Automation Approach
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major university is moving toward achieving
the best cloud-computing benefits while empowering users.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: VMware
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Our discussion today focuses on one of the toughest balancing acts in seeking the best of cloud
computing benefits. This balance comes from obtaining the proper degree of
centralization or common good for infrastructure efficiency, while preserving a
sufficient culture of decentralization for agility, innovation, and departmental
level control.
The requirement for empowering centralization is no more evident than in a
large university setting, where support and consensus must be preserved among
such constituencies as faculty, staff, students, and researchers across an
Gardner
expansive educational community.
But the IT model does not support localized agility if it takes weeks to spin up a server, if online
services lack automation, or if manual processes hold back efficient ongoing IT operations. Too
much IT infrastructure redundancy means weak security, high costs, lack of agility, and slow
upgrades.
We're joined today by an IT executive from the University of New Mexico (UNM) to learn more
about moving to a streamlined and automated private cloud model to gain a
common good benefit, while maintaining a vibrant and reassured culture of
innovation.
We're also joined by a VMware executive to learn more about the latest ways to manage cloud
architectures and processes to attain the best of cloud efficiencies, while empowering improved
services delivery and process agility.
With that, please join me now in welcoming our guests. We're here with Brian Pietrewicz. He is
the Director of Computing Platforms at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
Welcome, Brian.
Brian Pietrewicz: Thanks, Dana. Glad to be here.

2. Gardner: And we're here with Kurt Milne. He is the Director of Product Marketing in the
Management Business Unit at VMware. Welcome, Kurt.
Kurt Milne: Thank you Dana. Hello, Brian.
Pietrewicz: Hi, Kurt.
Preparing for change
Gardner: Brian, let’s start with you. New technology often creeps ahead of where entrenched
IT processes are, sometimes to the point where decentralization becomes a detriment. There are
too many moving parts, not enough coordination, and redundancy, and yet when we try to put in
new models, like private cloud, that means change.
I'd like to hear a bit more about your IT organization at the university and how you've been able
to do change, but at the same time, not alienate your users, who are, I imagine, used to having
things their way. So tell us a bit about how you started to juggle this balancing act.
Pietrewicz: At the University of New Mexico, as you mentioned, it's a highly decentralized
organization. In most cases, the departments are responsible for their own IT. In most cases, that
means they don't have the resources to effectively run IT, in particular, things
like data centers, servers, storage, disaster recovery (DR), and backups.
What we're doing to improve the process is providing infrastructure as a
service (IaaS) to those groups so that they don’t have to worry about the heavy
lifting of the infrastructure pieces that I mentioned before. They can stay
focused on their core mission, whether that’s physics, or psychology, or who
knows what.
Pietrewicz
So we offer IaaS. We're running a VMware stack and we're also running vCloud Automation
Center (vCAC). We've deployed the Self-Service Portal. We give departments, faculty members,
or departmental IT folks the ability to go into the portal and deploy their own machines at will.
Then, they are administrators of that machine. They also have additional management features
through the vCAC console so that they can effectively do whatever they need to do with the
server, but not have to worry about any of the underlying infrastructure.
Gardner: That sounds like the best of both worlds. In a sense, you're a service provider in the
organization, getting the benefits of centralization and efficiency, but allowing them to still have
a lot of hands-on control, which I assume that they want.
Pietrewicz: Correct. The other part is the agility, the ability for them to be able to react quickly,
to consume infrastructure on demand as they need it, and have the benefit of all the things that

3. virtualization brings with redundant infrastructure, lower cost of ownership, and those sorts of
things.
Gardner: Kurt, is this something that’s common in the market or is this something specific to
education and university vertical industry users, where they like to have that balance between a
service-provider approach for efficiency and agility, but still leave a lot of the hands-on, how to
do what you want to do your way, benefits in place?
New expectations
Milne: No, this is something we see with a lot of our customers increasingly in many different
industries. It’s an interesting time to be in the IT space, because there's this new set of
expectations being imposed on IT by the business to be strategic, to quickly
adopt new technology, and boost innovation.
At the same time, IT still has the full set of responsibilities they've always had --
to stay secure, to avoid legacy debt, to drive operational excellence so they
maintain uptime, security, and quality of service for transactional systems and
business-critical systems. It’s really an interesting paradox. How do you do these
two things that are seemingly mutually exclusive -- go fast, but at the same time,
stay in control?
Milne
Brian’s approach is what I call it "push button IT," where you give folks a button to push and
they get what they need when they want it. But if IT controls the button and they control what
happens when the user pushes the button, IT is able to maintain control. It’s really the best of
both worlds.
Gardner: Brian, tell us a little bit about how long you have been there and what it was like
before you began this journey?
Pietrewicz: I've been at UNM for about two-and-a-half years, and I can tell you the number one
complaint. We suffer from a lot of the same problems that other large IT shops have, with
funding and things like that. But the primary issue that we had when I walked in the door was
customers being upset because we didn't have clearly-defined services, and we had sold these
services to these customers.
We had sold virtual machines (VMs) with database backups, and all kinds of interesting things,
with no service-level agreements (SLAs), no processes, nothing wrapped around it. The delivery
of these services was completely inconsistent.
So I started out down the path. The first thing that we did was to make the services more
consistent. Just to give you an example, deploying a VM for a customer. The way that it was
when I got here was that a ticket came into the service desk. It went to a single technician, and

4. then whichever technician got that ticket figured out their own way of getting that machine
deployed.
As the next step in that process, we went through and, instead of just having it being done a
different way by whoever received the ticket, we identified all the steps associated. In looking at
all the steps associated, we identified over a 100 manual steps that went though six different
completely separate groups inside of our organization.
Those included operating system, storage, virtualization, security, and networking for firewall
changes. In all those various groups that deploy their individual piece of that puzzle, it was
being done differently every time. Our deployment times were taking as long as three weeks.
You can imagine how painful that is when it takes 20 minutes to spin up a VM, but it was taking
three weeks to deploy it to a customer.
We identified all the steps and defined the process very, very clearly, exactly what it takes to
deploy a VM. The interesting thing that came out of that was that it gave us the content necessary
to be able to start developing a true service description and an SLA.
Ticketing system
It also made it so that it was consistent. We did a few things after we did the process
development. We generated workflows within our ticketing system, so that all that happened was
a ticket was put in and then it auto-generated all the necessary tickets to deploy the VM, so it
happened in a very consistent way.
That dropped the deployment time from three weeks down to about three days, because it still
had to go through certain approval process and things like that with security.
For the next step we said, "Okay, how can we do this better?" We looked at all of those steps that
we put in place and found that they were all repetitive, manual steps that could be easily
automated. So enters vCAC.
We took all the steps, after we had them clearly defined, and we automated all the steps that we
could. We couldn’t automate all of them, for example, sending information to our billing system
to bill the customer back. From vCAC we shoot an email over to our ticketing system, that
generates a ticket. Then, the billing information is still entered manually, and we are working on
an upgrade to that.
When I first got here, the services were not defined and the processes were not defined. Since
then, we have clearly defined the processes, narrowed those down into the very specific
processes and tasks that had to be done, and then we automated. We're going through the process
of automating every step in that process.

5. Now, we have a thing we call Lobo Cloud -- our mascot is the Lobo. Customers can now go
online and deploy a machine within 20 minutes. So basically everything has transformed from
extremely inconsistent service and taking as long as three weeks to deploy, to now it being the
equivalent going into McDonald’s and ordering a Big Mac. It’s extremely consistent and down
from three weeks to 20 minutes.
Gardner: I assume Brian that you've adopted some industry-standard methods, perhaps a
framework, that gave you some guidance on this. How does your service delivery policy adhere
to an industry standard like ITIL?
Pietrewicz: That’s what we use. We follow ITIL and we're at varying levels of maturity with it.
ITIL is very challenging to implement, but it's extremely helpful, because it gives you a
framework to work within, to start narrowing down these process, defining services, setting
SLAs. It gives you a good overarching framework to work within.
The absolute hardest part of all of this is implementing the ITIL framework, identifying your
processes, identifying what your service is, and identifying your SLA. Walking through all of
that is exponentially harder than putting the technology in place.
Gardner: It seems to me that not only are you going to get faster servers, response times, and
automation, but there are some other significant benefits to this approach. I'm thinking about
security, DR, the ability to budget better through an OPEX model, and then ultimately reduce
total costs.
Is it too soon or have some of these other benefits that I have heard about typically when people
move to a more automated cloud approach? How is that working for you?
Less expensive
Pietrewicz: We don’t really have good statistics on it. For the folks that had machines sitting
underneath their desks and in closets before, we don’t have a lot of the statistics to know exactly
the cost and the time they were spending on that.
Anybody who works with virtualization quickly learns that once you hit a certain size, it
becomes significantly less expensive. You become far more agile and you get a huge number of
benefits. Some of them are things that you mentioned -- the deployment time, DR, the ability to
automate, the taking advantage of economies of scale.
Instead of deploying one $10,000 server per application, you're now loading up 70 machines on a
$15,000 server. All of those things come into play. But we really don’t have good statistics,
because we didn’t really have any good processes before we started.

6. What’s interesting now is that our next step in the process is to automate our billing process.
Once we do that, we're going to have everything from our virtual infrastructure deployed into our
billing system and either a chargeback or a showback methodology.
So we'll have complete detailed costs of all of our infrastructure associated with every
department and every application that is using our service. We'll be able to really show the total
cost of ownership (TCO).
Milne: Brian, it sounds like you're on a path that a lot of our customers are on. What we see
typically is that there is a change in consumption behavior when your customers know that they
can get IaaS on demand. They stop hoarding resources. The same kind of tools and processes
that can automate the delivery of those services can also automate tearing down those services
when they're done.
Virtualization by itself increases capacity utilization quite a bit, but then going to this kind of
services delivery, service consumption for infrastructure, actually further increases utilization
and drives down over-provisioning.
Adding that cost transparency to that service will further change your consumers' behavior and
the ability to get it when you need it and only pay for what you use drives down the amount of
resources that you have to keep in your data center.
Pietrewicz: Absolutely. It’s amazing what happens when you have to pay for something and it’s
very visible.
Milne: I always feel that if IT is free that really changes the supply and demand equation, if you
study economics. People don’t know what to do with free. They typically take too much.
Economic behavior
Pietrewicz: Right. This really starts driving basic economic and social behavior into the
equation in IT. It’s a difficult thing for organizations to get their head around, and they're sort of
getting it here at the university. It’s not completely in place. The way that we look at it is as a
"We'll build it, and they'll come" kind of thing.
Most folks have figured out that they can really save that money. Instead of going out and buying
a $10,000 server, they can buy a $1,000 VM from us that does the exact same thing. If they don’t
want it any more, they can turn it off and not pay any more. All of those things come into play.
Gardner: This is interesting. This fit-for-purpose concept of using what you need when you
need it and then not using it anymore relates to that discussion we had about centralized and
decentralized. Now that you've been enjoying some benefits through the Lobo Cloud and this
common-good approach to infrastructure, have you gotten feedback from the users? Are they
happy with this or do they wish they had those servers under their desks again?

7. Pietrewicz: You have a little of both. We definitely have people that like to hug their servers. We
had the sort of old school approach with a lot of things. You would assume that universities
would be on the cutting edge. In a lot of cases, we are, but we also have people that just really
like hugging their servers. They like to be able to touch their servers and that sort of thing. So we
have both.
We have people who are very, very appreciative that we put this service out there for them,
because they know it’s the only way for them to do it effectively. But we still have some of the
old-school folks who prefer the physical and are taking a while to adapt. That’s part of the whole
"Build it and they will come" thing. It’s the kind of thing where they have to adjust their
mentality to use it.
Gardner: Consensus is, of course, important.
Pietrewicz: Another piece on that is the university was experimenting with a thing called RCM,
which is a budgeting process that works toward the bottom line of a particular organization. That
means that people have to be transparent and make clear decisions about where they're spending
their money. That's also starting to drive adoption.
Gardner: Just for our audience to understand the scale here, you have done an awful lot in two-and-
a-half years or less. How many individuals are we talking about? What’s the size of your
community, your user base? How many VMs do you have? What are some of the defining
characteristics of your organization?
Pietrewicz: UNM is approximately 45,000 faculty, staff, and students. We have about 100 either
departments or affiliates, and today, we're running about 660 VMs for our organization.
Gardner: And what percentage of the organization is virtualized?
Pietrewicz: For central IT, it’s between 98 percent and 99 percent. For the rest of the
organization, it’s not clear. We don’t have an audit that shows every physical box that anybody
might be using out there.
I'd say that the adoption of virtualization is very low in places where people haven't used IaaS,
because the initial entry cost for virtualization can be higher. Many of the very small
organizations just aren't big enough to warrant the infrastructure necessary to run virtualization
the right way.
Ancillary benefits
Gardner: We talked about some of the ancillary benefits of your approach, but there are some
direct benefits when you go to a cloud model, which gives you more options. You can have your
private cloud. You can look to public cloud and other hosting models, and then you can start to

8. see a path or a vision towards a hybrid cloud environment, where you might actually move
workloads around based on the right infrastructure approach for the right job at the right time.
Any thoughts about where your clouds goals are vis-à-vis the hybrid potential?
Pietrewicz: We have a few things in play that we're actively working. Today, we have people
using various cloud providers. The interesting part about that they're just paying for it with a
credit card out of their department, and the university doesn’t have any clear way of knowing
exactly what’s out there. We don’t really have any good security mechanisms in place for
determining whether there's any sensitive data being stored out there inadvertently.
We're working with a lot of the cloud providers that we are already spending money with and we
are already working with to develop consolidated accounts. One, we can save money through
economies of scale. And two, we can get some visibility into what folks are actually using the
cloud for. And then three, IT would like to act as an advisor to be able to point out for the various
cloud providers that are out there -- this particular provider is good at functionality or this
particular provider is good at security.
The first step is to corral the use of public cloud for UNM and create an escorting process to the
cloud. The second step is going to be a hybrid cloud that we'll set up from our private cloud here
on site. We envision setting up hybrid cloud services with those public cloud providers to be able
to move the workloads back and forth when necessary.
The other major benefit that we very much look forward to is being able to do DR in the cloud
and taking advantage of the ability to replicate data and then spin up systems as you need them,
rather than having a couple of million dollars in equipment sitting, waiting, and hoping you
never use it. Things that you have to refresh every four years so that you have a viable DR plan.
Gardner: Is vCloud Automation Center something that will be useful in moving to this hybrid
model? The one button to push, as it were, on the private cloud, will that become a one button to
push in the hybrid model as well?
Pietrewicz: It will. I mentioned those various cloud service providers. Most of them are
compatible with the vCloud Connector, so that you can simply just connect up that hybrid cloud
service and with a little bit of work, be able to massage your portal.
We can have a menu option of public cloud providers through our portal that they could just
select and say that they want to get a vCHS, Amazon, or Terremark, and then potentially move
workloads back and forth. So vCAC and vCloud Connector are all at the center of it.
The other interesting piece that we're working on and going to try to figure out as part of this is
that we really want to start looking into NSX and/or VIX to be able to provide very clear security
boundaries, basically multi-tenancy, and then potentially be able to move those multi-tenant
environments back and forth in the cloud or extend them from public to private cloud as well.

9. Software-defined networking
Gardner: Brian, you mentioned multi-tenancy earlier, and of course, there is a lot going on
with software-defined data center, networking, and storage. What is it about it that’s interesting
to you and why is this a priority for you, software-defined networking (SDN), for example?
Pietrewicz: SDN is the next sort of step in being able to truly automate your IaaS and your
virtual environment. If you want to be able to dynamically deploy systems and have them be in a
SAN box that is multi-tenant by customer, you really need to have an SDN-type solution, or at
least that’s extremely helpful to do that.
One of the things that we are looking at next is to be able to implement something like NSX, so
that we can deploy the equivalent of what’s a virtual wire, a multi-tenant environment, to
individual customers, so that they can only see their stuff and can’t see their neighbors and vice
versa.
The key is the ability to orchestrate that on demand and not have to deal with the legacy VLAN
and firewall kind of issues that you have with the legacy environment.
Gardner: It’s interesting how a lot of these major trends -- service delivery, cloud, private cloud,
DR, and SDN -- are interrelated. It’s a complex bundle, but the payoffs, when you do this
inclusively, are pretty impressive.
Pietrewicz: Whenever you get to the point of abstracting things to the software level, you
provide the ability to automate. When you have the ability to automate, you get tremendous
flexibility. That sometimes can be an issue in and of itself, just making decisions on how you
want to do something. But along with that flexibility, you get the ability to automate just about
anything that you want or need to be able to do.
The second piece to that is that we're really excited about figuring out, when we build the hybrid
cloud model, how we might be able to extend those tenants into the cloud, either as active
running workloads or in a DR model, so that the multi-tenancy is retained.
Milne: From VMware’s perspective, that kind of network virtualization capability is critical for
our hybrid cloud service. It’s that capability that NSX provides that creates that seamless
experience from your data center out to the hybrid cloud.
As you said, Brian, that kind of network configuration, allocation, and reallocation of IP
addresses, when you are moving things from one data center to another, is not something you
want to do on a manual basis. So NSX is a key component of our hybrid cloud vision. It’s
something that lot of the other cloud providers just don’t have.

10. Pietrewicz: I see it as the next frontier in IT. I think that when SDN starts taking off, it’s going to
be a game changer in ways that we are not even recognizing yet, and that’s one example. Moving
a workload from one network to another network is extremely powerful.
Cloud broker
Gardner: Kurt, this sounds as if not only is Brian transitioning into being a service provider to
his constituencies, but now he's also becoming a cloud broker. Is this typical of what you're
seeing in the market as well?
Milne: It is. Some of our customers will take a step to try to get their arms around shadow IT,
users going around IT, to just offer that provisioning option through the IT portal. So it’s like,
"You're using Amazon? That’s fine. We can help you do that." So putting a button in the service
catalog deploys the kind of work that they've been doing in a public cloud like Amazon, but it
has to come through IT. Then, IT is aware of it.
There's a saying I like. It’s called the "cloud boomerang." A lot of times, the IT customers will
put thing out in the public cloud, but like a boomerang, it seems to always come back. The
customer wants to integrate it with an existing system or they realize that they have to support it
up in the cloud. A lot of times, those rogue deployments make their way back to the IT
organization. So putting an Amazon service in the vCAC portal and not changing anything else is
a nice first step in corralling that.
Pietrewicz: That is exactly what we're seeing. At a university, because there isn’t really
governance, it’s more like build a good service and hope they come. We take the approach of
trying to enable it. We want to make it very transparent and say that they can use Amazon or
vCHS, but there's a better way to do it. If you do it through the portal, you may be able to move
those workloads back and forth.
We are actually seeing exactly what you mentioned, Kurt. Folks are reaching the limitations of
using some of the cloud providers, because they need to get access to data back here at UNM and
are actually doing the boomerang approach. They started out there and now they're migrating
their machines into our IaaS so that they can get access to the data that they need.
Gardner: Kurt, we heard some very interesting things at VMworld recently around the cloud-management
platform. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that and how that fits into what
we've been discussing in terms of this ongoing maturity and evolution that a large organization
like the University of New Mexico is well into?
Milne: We recently announced the vRealizeSuite, which is a cloud management platform. So
we're moving our product management strategy to a common platform.
Over the years, VMware has either built or acquired quite a few different management products.
We've combined those products into a number of suites, like our automation, operations, and our

11. business management suites. Now, we're taking that next step and combining a lot of those
capabilities into a single platform.
There are a couple of guiding ideas there. We see in organizations like Brian’s is that the lines
between the automated provisioning of those workloads automation, provisioning those
workloads, and the ongoing operations and maintenance and support of those workloads, is
really starting to blur.
So you have automation tasks that might happen when you're doing a support call. Maybe you
want to provision some more resources, and there are operations tasks like checking system
health that you might want to do as a step in an automation routine.
Shared services
Our product strategy change is to move towards a shared-services model, similar to a service-oriented
architecture. The different services that are underlying our management products would
be executable through a tool like vCAC, through a command line interface, or through like a
REST API. There's kind of a mix-and-match opportunity to execute those services in different
ways.
To build that platform with the shared service model on top, we need to start re-architecting
some of our products in the backend, so that we have a common orchestration engine, a common
DR backup and a common policy engine. You don’t want one tool to undo the work that another
tool did yesterday. You can’t have conflicting robots going out and doing automated tasks.
The general idea is to try to further consolidate these different management functions into a
single platform. The overall goal is to try to help organizations maintain control, but then also
increase flexibility and speed for their business users.
Gardner: Brian, is that something that you think is going to be on your radar? Is management so
distributed now that you're looking for a more consolidated approach that’s inclusive?
Pietrewicz: That would be wonderful. We're doing things many different ways. If you take the
example of orchestration, we are using Orchestrator, PowerShell, Perl, and starting to experiment
with Puppet.
It would be really good if you could have one standardized way that you approach orchestration,
as an example, and how that might tie into all the other pieces for backend management, rather
than handling it several different ways. As Kurt was mentioning, one part starts to step on
another part. Having that be consolidated and consistent would be a huge value.
Milne: The other part of the strategy is also to make that work across environments. So the same
tools and services would be available if you are provisioning up to Amazon or to your private
cloud or hybrid cloud service, and even different hypervisors.

12. We're fully aware of the heterogeneous nature of the modern data center. So we're shifting to try
to create that kind of powerful common management stack with that unified management
experience across all of the environment. It’s kind of a nirvana. When we talk to people, they say
that’s exactly what they want. So our vision is to kind of march towards delivering on that.
Gardner: Kurt, I am trying to recall from VMworld whether this was offered on-premises, as a
service from a cloud, or some combination?
Service offerings
Milne: That’s the other interesting part of this. We're starting to go down the path of offering a
number of our management products as a service. For example, at VMworld, we announced the
availability of a beta for our vCAC product as a software as a service (SaaS), so you can without
installing any software get a service portal, get that workflow and policy engine, and deploy
infrastructure services across different environments.
We'll be rolling out betas for our other products in subsequent quarters over the next year or so.
Then potentially we could have the SaaS services interact with and combine with the services
that are available through the products that are installed on-premise. Our goal is to get these out
there and then understand what the best use cases are, but that kind of mix and match is part of
the vision.
Gardner: It’s interesting. We might have a reverse boomerang when it comes to the
management of all of this. Does that sound appealing Brian? Is that something you would look to
as a cloud service, comprehensive management?
Pietrewicz: Absolutely, but it’s largely dependent on return on investment (ROI). It’s that
balance of, when you get to a certain level in an IT shop, it’s sometimes cheaper to do things in-house
than it is to outsource it, and sometimes not. You have to do the analysis on the ROI on
what makes more sense to bring it in or to use a SaaS.
As an example, we completely outsourced all of our email, because it’s a lot of work. It's very
simple and easy to do as a SaaS solution, but it’s a lot more work to do in-house. It’s definitely
something that we would look into.
Milne: In a mid-sized organization that might have 300 different applications that the IT
organization supports, maybe 50 of those are IT tools. Already we've seen progress with
companies like ServiceNow that have a SaaS-based service desk. It makes sense to start to turn
more of those management products into a SaaS delivery model.
Gardner: I'm afraid we're getting near our time limit, but I wanted to see, Brian, if you had some
thoughts about others who are starting to move in your direction, perhaps their own Lobo Cloud,
their own portal rationalizing these services, being able to measure them better. What in 20/20

13. hindsight do you have that you could recommend for them as they go about this? Any learned
lessons you could share?
Process orientation
Pietrewicz: The biggest lesson learned, without a doubt, is the focus on the process orientation,
the ITIL model. The technology is really not that hard. It’s determining what your service is,
what are you trying to deliver, and then how do you build that into a consistently delivered
service, complete with SLAs and service descriptions that meet the customer needs. That's the
most difficult part.
The technical folks can definitely sling the technology. That doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal.
The partners and providers do a very good job of putting together products that make it happen,
but the hard part is defining the processes and defining the services and making sure that they are
meeting the customer needs.
Gardner: Kurt, any thoughts in reaction to what Brian said in terms of getting started on the
right path around cloud rationalization of your IT organization?
Milne: One of the things that I've seen is a lot of organizations go through this process that Brian
has described, trying to clearly define their services and figure out which parts of those services
they're going to automate.
A lot of organizations start that service definition effort from an inside-out perspective, get a
bunch of IT guys together, and try to define what you do on a daily basis in a service. That's hard.
The easier approach is just to go talk to your customers and users and ask, "If I were going to
give you a button you could click to get what you need, what would you put behind the button?"
Then, you define your services more from an outside-in perspective. It seems to be where
companies get anyway and you just shortcut a lot of teeth gnashing and internal meetings when
you do it that way.
Gardner: It always comes back to the requirements list, doesn’t it?
Milne: That’s right.
Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on one of the toughest balancing acts, seeking the best of cloud
computing benefits, while also empowering your users.
And we've seen at a large university how this balance comes from attaining a proper degree of
centralization or common good for infrastructure services through a portal, while preserving that
sufficient culture of decentralization and agility. We've also heard how there are going to be new

14. ways to better manage cloud architectures across a variety of different models, and then perhaps
ultimately as a service in and of itself.
So I'd like to thank our guests. We've been here with Brian Pietrewicz, Director of Computing
Platforms at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Thank you so much, Brian.
Pietrewicz: Thanks, Dana. Thanks, Kurt.
Gardner: We've also been here with Kurt Milne. He is the Director of Product Marketing in the
Management Business Unit at VMware. Thank you so much, Kurt.
Milne: Thank you.
Gardner: And thank you also to our audience for joining us for this BriefingsDirect discussion.
This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for listening, and
come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: VMware
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a major university is moving toward achieving
the best cloud-computing benefits while empowering users. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2014. All rights reserved.
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