IBM development team avoids $4.5 million in capital expenditures with a cloud

OVERVIEW TABLE

IBM Tivoli Development Services
Austin, Texas
www.ibm.com

Industry
Computer Services

Products
IBM® Systems Director Active Energy Manager
IBM Tivoli® Access Manager for Operating Systems
IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT
IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager
IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database
IBM Tivoli Common Reporting
IBM Tivoli Directory Server
IBM Tivoli Identity Manager
IBM Tivoli Monitoring
IBM Tivoli Netcool®/OMNIbus
IBM Tivoli Performance Analyzer
IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager
IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager
IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager
IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager

Services
IBM Cloud Services
IBM Systems &Technology Group Services

For more information, visit:
ibm.com/cloud

“Through the deployment of a secure private cloud and use of IBM Integrated Service Management solutions, we’ve avoided more than $4.5 million in capital expenditures and saved more than $3 million in operational expenses.”
—Jim Pollard, Program Director, Tivoli Worldwide IT, IBM


IBM Tivoli Development Services provides organizations within IBM Software Group and Research with IT services to support the software development cycle.

Challenge
With 24 development labs worldwide, IBM® Tivoli® Development Services faced high capital, management and administration costs, and less than optimal efficiency. Lack of a virtualized IT environment limited the organization’s ability to reuse and share IT resources and best practices. Predominantly manual request workflows, and capacity management and administration processes drove up management costs and resulted in average delivery times for new resource requests of weeks to months. Additionally, the organization’s physical resources were largely underutilized, with average utilization of 5-6 percent.

Solution
IBM Tivoli Development Services consulted with IBM cloud computing and systems technology experts to create a geographically dispersed secure cloud that can be monitored and managed through a central site. This approach is helping to reduce IT expenses, capital requirements, security administration, and setup and deployment time for resources. Through this initiative, the organization moved its existing servers into virtualization pools and deployed new virtual machines, consolidating the total number of worldwide labs from 24 to 19. It then leveraged IBM Integrated Service Management solutions based on Tivoli software to automate end-user services, provide users with a catalog of available services to choose from, and efficiently monitor, manage and secure the environment.

This private cloud provides developers and testers with predictable, rapid access to securely reserve, provision and deploy development and test environments. It also gives them the ability to manage images that can be certified, stored, centralized and published. The central monitoring and management component maintains effective and efficient service delivery across the entire cloud. It monitors all of the resources, service requests, operating systems and energy usage. And it centralizes IT asset information so staff can define and implement detailed lifecycle workflows to track and manage assets from cradle to grave.

Information is collected and presented through customized dashboards. These dashboards allow administrators to track performance, availability, utilization and capacity of resources, and to proactively forecast and plan for future needs. For example, administrators can easily track the usage of resources based on the services requested and provide that information to development and test managers so they can adjust resource reservations to support their projects. With all asset information in a single application, staff can quickly search, identify and deploy inactive assets from a base of more than 30,000 virtual systems to meet a development need worldwide. When needed, capacity can be increased simply by “plugging in” a virtualized infrastructure anywhere in the world. Users are authenticated against IBM’s employee directory to quickly provide secure access to this private cloud.

Benefits
In just 10 months, the team deployed a secure private cloud that enables the organization to get more use out of existing resources and avoid significant capital expense. So far, Tivoli Development Services has avoided more than $4.5 million in capital expenditures and saved more than $3 million in operational expenses with its move to cloud computing. Average server utilization has risen from 5 percent to as much as 60 percent. Additionally, the organization can provide increasingly better service to its users—delivering services more rapidly, consistently and with fewer errors. Average delivery times for new resources have been reduced from months and weeks to days and hours. This improved service enables developers and testers to complete higher quality work and deliver products to market faster. This results in increased competitiveness and higher revenue for the company. The organization anticipates management and administration costs will continue to decline as service delivery processes are increasingly automated and staff is redirected to work on high-value activities and innovation projects.