W H I T E P AP E R

D e l i v e r i n g P r i v a t e C l o u d s T o d a y w i t h M i c r o s o f t S y s t e m C e n t e r 2 0 1 2

Sponsored by: Microsoft

Mary Johnston Turner

April 2012

I D C O P I N I O N

Developing effective private cloud management and implementation plans is a top

priority in 2012 for many enterprise IT decision makers as they seek to make more

efficient use of virtualized IT infrastructure, increase IT staff productivity, integrate and

streamline approval and provisioning workflows, and improve end-to-end application

performance and stability.

Microsoft System Center 2012 has been designed to address these requirements by

providing customers with a highly integrated management environment that can

monitor and optimize complex, heterogeneous private cloud applications and

infrastructure. System Center 2012 provides end users, application owners, and IT

staff with self-service provisioning capabilities and tools to automate many routine

processes and workflows. Interviews with five System Center 2012 Private Cloud

early-adopter customers highlight the benefits of using this newly enhanced System

Center architecture to support private cloud initiatives, including:

Improved business agility due to faster application deployment and infrastructure

provisioning processes that enable application developers and business process

owners to rapidly access resources.

Greater IT staff efficiency and productivity as individual administrators are able to

handle significantly larger numbers of service requests while using automation to

reduce human error.

Better IT credibility with business stakeholders as improved application visibility

and control allows IT teams to detect and remediate service-affecting problems

and incidents before they impact the business.

Reduced business risk due to tighter integrations between self-service

management tools and Active Directory to ensure automated, consistent access

to authorized resources while simultaneously preventing unauthorized use.

Reduced energy and capital costs enabled by dynamic workload deployment and

migration capabilities that can automatically spin up, spin down, and pool

application and infrastructure resources as needed.

The experience of Microsoft's customers is consistent with IDC's research findings.

The implementation of elastic, automated private cloud environments is taking place

in phases as organizations learn how to best exploit virtualization, automation,

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self-service, and policy-driven optimization across complex, heterogeneous

datacenter and application environments. For organizations that are willing to

embrace the use of self-service solutions — supported by standardized and

automated workflows, processes, service-level agreements (SLAs), and templates —

private cloud architectures can significantly improve business agility and operational

productivity.

I N T H I S W H I T E P AP E R

Microsoft recently introduced System Center 2012, a tightly integrated management

solution built from the ground up for automated private cloud application and

infrastructure management. IDC interviewed a range of System Center 2012 early-

adopter customers about their private cloud strategies and the role that System

Center 2012 is playing in support of those programs. This white paper discusses

IDC's industry-wide views on private cloud management trends and priorities,

describes how System Center 2012 is addressing these needs, and highlights

System Center 2012 customer experiences and lessons learned. The goal of this

paper is to equip IT decision makers with a context for designing their own private

cloud management evaluations and pilot projects.

S I T U AT I O N O V E R V I E W

Cloud computing offers IT management teams an opportunity to improve business

agility, streamline IT operations, and extract greater cost savings across complex

application and infrastructure environments. Unlike traditional IT environments that

depend on IT staff to make all moves, adds, and changes, private clouds empower

application owners and streamline service delivery via the use of sophisticated, self-

service provisioning portals and policy-based automation and workflow orchestration

technologies.

Private cloud architectures allow IT organizations to dynamically pool and share

resources across a wide range of application owners, development teams, and end

users, based on business priorities and SLAs. Self-service private cloud management

solutions streamline infrastructure provisioning, speed up application deployment, and

improve configuration and change management compliance.

As Figure 1 shows, a recent IDC survey of 679 U.S. IT decision makers indicates that

approximately one-third (32%) already have some type of private cloud

implementation in production, although most are limited to supporting specific user

groups or applications at this time. An additional 37% are in the early stages of

implementation and/or planning for private cloud.

©2012 IDC #234109 3

F I G U R E 1

S t a t u s o f P r i v a t e C l o u d I m p l e m en t a t i o n s

Source: IDC's U.S. Private IT Cloud Systems Management Survey, July 2011

In most cases, these organizations are beginning their private cloud journey by

standardizing and automating self-service provisioning and deployment of application

and infrastructure resources used by application development, test, and quality

assurance (QA) teams. Others are evolving existing grid computing environments to

take advantage of cloud. Still others are looking to self-service and automation to

streamline virtual desktop provisioning and support.

Regardless of the specific use case, the majority of organizations plan to continue to

expand use of these technologies over time with the goals of improving business

agility, reducing costs, and improving application performance and service levels (see

Figure 2). As a result, IT teams that are implementing early-stage private clouds

today want to be sure they are investing in management solutions that will be able to

scale and accommodate a wide range of heterogeneous applications, infrastructure

resources, and workflows over time.

Established/proven (32.0%)

Early stage (37.0%)

No plans (31.0%)

n = 679

4 #234109 ©2012 IDC

F I G U R E 2

P r i v a t e C l o u d G o a l s

n = 200

Note: Multiple responses were allowed.

Source: IDC's U.S. Private IT Cloud Systems Management Survey, July 2011

Management solutions for large-scale private and hybrid cloud environments will

need to support rapidly increasing numbers of users and complex, multi-tier

applications. Effective private cloud management solutions need to pair automated

self-service provisioning and workload migration capabilities with insight into real-time

application performance, capacity utilization, and root cause analytics to continually

optimize mission-critical application performance. These management solutions need

to provide role-based insight into application and infrastructure dependencies and be

able to execute many routine management tasks automatically. By their very nature,

cloud computing environments are dynamic and complex and need management

tools that can optimize business performance and IT costs in real time.

T o p P r i o r i t i e s a n d S u c c e s s F a c t o r s f o r

P r i v a t e C l o u d M a n a g e m e n t S o l u t i o n s

Despite the increasing scale and complexity of today's highly virtualized, mobile, and

multi-tier application environments, most organizations are holding datacenter and IT

operations head count steady while expecting the existing staff to continue to take on

more and more responsibilities. Organizations that are having the most success with

achieving their private cloud business agility and productivity goals report they have

coupled investment in state-of-the-art management solutions with a commitment to

up-front planning and standardization. By designing repeatable templates, SLAs, and

workflows up front, they are better able to take full advantage of automation,

orchestration, and self-service.

31.5

49.5

78.0

87.0

91.0

0 20 40 60 80 100

Control IT head count

Improve application performance and availability

Control IT operations costs

Control IT capital costs

Improve business agility

(% of respondents)

©2012 IDC #234109 5

This is particularly true for the growing number of organizations that expect to support

multi-tier applications across heterogeneous hypervisor and hardware platforms.

IDC's research (see Figure 3) indicates that VMware currently dominates the

hypervisor market with 57.1% of units shipped; however, use of other hypervisors

such as Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer is growing. IDC

expects that more and more organizations will deploy multiple hypervisors in the

coming years as they strive to optimize the performance and cost of supporting many

different types of applications across their private clouds.

F I G U R E 3

W o r l dw i d e V i r t u a l M a c h i n e S o f t w a r e S h i p m en t S h a r e b y

V e n do r , 2 0 1 0

Source: IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Virtualization Tracker, 2011

Based on ongoing discussions with IT decision makers who are currently selecting

management solutions for the deployment, orchestration, and day-to-day operation of

production private cloud environments, IDC has identified seven key evaluation

criteria that need to be considered:

Easy-to-configure, out-of-the-box self-service provisioning policies and templates

linked to best practice workflows.

Scalability across complex heterogeneous resources and infrastructure, including

multiple hypervisors, operating systems, servers, network, and storage platforms.

Integrated data models, analytics, and workflow engines across the full life cycle

of deployment and day-to-day operations.

Image-based management that abstracts applications from the underlying operating

system and infrastructure dependencies to optimize application performance and

resource utilization in real time based on SLAs and capacity requirements.

Policy-based, elastic workload placement and ongoing optimization that accounts

for information management, compliance, business priorities and resource

utilization, and cost policies and constraints.

VMware (57.1%)Microsoft (24.6%)

Citrix (7.2%)

Other (11.1%)

6 #234109 ©2012 IDC

Extensible workflow automation and orchestration capabilities that enable IT

teams to extend out-of-the-box workflows and templates as needed to support

the specific needs of their organization.

The ability to seamlessly integrate with a wide range of existing systems and

service management solutions, including the ability to monitor public cloud

services using standard APIs, dashboards, and analytics.

In addition to self-service provisioning, automation, orchestration, and performance

optimization, cloud computing architectures typically introduce the concept of fine-

grained resource utilization monitoring to support usage-based chargebacks to specific

users or business groups. In practice, chargeback models have been widely

implemented by cloud service providers that offer access to resources on a pay-as-you-

go basis. However, for enterprise IT and private cloud implementations, many

organizations are beginning to introduce the concept of "showback" to make user

groups more aware of their resource consumption without rendering true internal bills. In

some cases, usage information collected from cloud management systems is integrated

into existing enterprise ERP chargeback and cost allocation accounting systems.

M i c r o s o f t S y s t e m C e n t e r 2 0 1 2 A d d r e s s e s

C r i t i c a l P r i v a t e C l o u d M a n a g e m e n t

R e q u i r e m e n t s

The cloud management capabilities outlined earlier in the document collectively

empower IT organizations to respond more quickly to business requirements while

improving application performance and resource utilization in ways that significantly

reduce IT costs and increase both end-user and IT staff productivity. Fundamentally,

cloud transitions IT from focusing on the stability and performance of individual

component silos to emphasizing the delivery of stable, flexible, and elastic end-to-end

business services.

With the introduction of System Center 2012, Microsoft addresses the full range of

emerging private cloud management requirements from the perspective of application

owners and IT operations teams. Its unified data model, analytics, workflow engines,

and user interfaces allow end users and application owners to focus on the rapid

provisioning of critical infrastructure and application resources while it simultaneously

empowers datacenter administrators to streamline workflows, maintain security and

configuration compliance, monitor performance, and optimize the overall utilization of

physical and virtual resources.

System Center 2012 is designed to discover, pool, share, and optimize applications

deployed across complex private cloud environments. It can also configure, deploy,

and monitor applications and resources in public cloud environments for

organizations that want support for hybrid cloud architectures. For organizations that

expect to rely on a mix of public and private cloud resources over the long run, the

ability to monitor and control them using a single platform and interface will improve

IT productivity and simplify the end-user and application owner experience.

©2012 IDC #234109 7

As a scalable, modular, and integrated product, System Center 2012 delivers all the

functionality needed to support private and hybrid cloud operations but allows

customers to activate only those capabilities needed at the time. For organizations

that are still in the early stages of their private cloud journey, the enhancements

Microsoft has made to System Center 2012 will also improve the efficiency and

scalability of traditional datacenter management solutions while providing a smooth

transition to private cloud management when desired (see Figure 4).

F I G U R E 4

S y s t em C en t e r 2 0 1 2 Un i f i e d P r i v a t e C l o u d M a n a g e m e n t

A r c h i t e c t u r e

Source: Microsoft, 2012

For application owners and datacenter managers who are evaluating solutions for

private cloud management, some of the most important new System Center 2012

features and functions are:

A role-based service catalog and a self-service provisioning portal that support

dynamic, policy-based multi-tier application deployment as well as multi-

hypervisor provisioning and sprawl control. Designed with the needs of

application owners in mind, this self-service capability empowers end users and

developers while shielding them from having to be concerned with the underlying

complexity inside the datacenter.

8 #234109 ©2012 IDC

Significantly enhanced application performance visibility and root cause analytics

that enable IT teams to better prioritize responses to incidents and events. Real-

time application performance monitoring and analytics enable workloads and

applications to be automatically migrated based on pre-defined thresholds to

maintain service levels.

A highly scalable and automated service model and service delivery architecture

enables private cloud application provisioning, monitoring, change management,

and automation across complex heterogeneous environments, including

Windows Server Hyper-V, VMware, and Citrix XenServer hypervisors as well as

Windows, Unix, and Linux operating systems. The ability to quickly define and

standardize service models and consistently and automatically deploy them is a

key new feature.

Use of the same workflow and analytics platform to build, monitor, manage, and

dynamically optimize applications and infrastructure resources across private,

public, and hybrid cloud environments means that IT organizations can extend

the scope of private cloud operations as needed without having to acquire

additional tools and software licenses.

Availability of a broad range of customizable out-of-the-box provisioning

templates and best practice workflows that support a range of third-party

integrations.

Collectively, these new capabilities position Microsoft System Center 2012 to directly

address the needs of today's rapidly developing enterprise private cloud

environments while continuing to support the full range of datacenter management

capabilities that Microsoft customers have come to expect from this product family.

S i m p l i f i e d S y s t e m C e n t e r 2 0 1 2 L i c e n s i n g

E a s e s T r a n s i t i o n

In tandem with the technical improvements made to tightly integrate the individual

functional modules within System Center, Microsoft has also significantly simplified its

licensing model to allow customers to make a single purchase decision and then take

advantage of the product's more sophisticated capabilities at whatever pace they

desire.

Specifically, System Center 2012 unifies the licensing for functionality previously

provided under individual licenses for Configuration Manager, Operations Manager,

Virtual Machine Manager, Service Manager, and Data Protection Manager. Common

orchestration and application monitoring technology has been fully integrated across

the product.

System Center 2012 also introduces the self-service provisioning portal

App Controller (formerly code-named Concero) and Endpoint Protection (formerly

Forefront Endpoint Protection) as core elements of the solution. Infrastructure

technology licenses for SQL that had previously been sold separately are also

included.

©2012 IDC #234109 9

Microsoft has also simplified its approach to licensing in that all pricing is now tied to

the number of managed processors, freeing customers from having to worry about

managing variable charges associated with per workload or per virtual machine (VM)

pricing models. The firm's goal is to provide customers with a highly cost-effective

private cloud management solution.

System Center 2012 will be available in two editions:

System Center 2012 Standard. This edition is designed for non- or lightly

virtualized environments. The license for System Center 2012 Standard covers

up to two physical processors and the management of up to two operating

system environments (OSEs).

System Center 2012 Datacenter. This edition is designed for highly virtualized

environments. Each license for System Center 2012 Datacenter will cover up to

two processors and provide the ability to manage unlimited virtualized OSEs.

S y s t e m C e n t e r 2 0 1 2 C u s t o m e r S u c c e s s S t o r i e s

a n d L e s s o n s L e a r n e d

The initial plans for System Center 2012 were announced at the Microsoft

Management Summit in spring 2011. As is typical for major new releases, Microsoft

provided the opportunity for many existing customers to partner with the company to

help develop requirements, use cases, and deployment methods for this important

new set of capabilities.

IDC had the opportunity to speak with five System Center 2012 early adopters. All of

the companies were experienced users of one or more System Center modules, and

most of them rely on Microsoft platforms such as Windows 7, the .NET Framework,

SQL Server, and Hyper-V, as well as VMware, to support many mission-critical

application environments.

As a group, these customers are very enthusiastic about the new levels of end-to-end

automation, application visibility, and integration provided by System Center 2012.

The following profiles describe the private cloud programs of and lessons learned by

these customers. Although each customer has a different set of priorities, the

consistent feedback is that System Center 2012 is a critical enabler of more scalable,

elastic, cost-effective, and application-aware IT operations.

Worldwide Chauffeur Service Company Optimizes Mission-Critical

Applications

This worldwide provider of chauffeur services operates in more than 650 cities

worldwide with more than 750 directly owned vehicles. It also partners with more than

1,000 third-party vendors and affiliates to provide a range of celebrity, luxury, and

business chauffeur services. In this industry, customers expect personal preferences

and last-minute schedule changes to be accommodated to perfection.

The company relies on System Center 2012 for many aspects of infrastructure and

application management across its private cloud environment. The firm has implemented

the Service Manager component of System Center 2012 as the front end for

10 #234109 ©2012 IDC

trouble ticket management and automated provisioning activities for employees and

partners. The firm has leveraged integrations across the configuration, monitoring, and

automation modules of System Center 2012 to improve service levels and more quickly

respond to changing workload requirements and peak-hour needs.

The ability to provision complete multi-tier application images using the App Controller

component of System Center 2012 has enabled the company to better optimize use

of infrastructure resources while freeing business application owners and developers

from having to be concerned with detailed specification of network, server, and

storage resources. The CIO describes this as the ability to manage "many servers

simplified as one."

Historically, the firm has relied on manual processes to configure and reconfigure

multi-tier application and infrastructure environments, an approach that was time

consuming and error prone. By using System Center 2012 to streamline and speed

up many repeatable configuration, provisioning, and migration activities, the IT team

has been able to significantly improve the availability and stability of mission-critical

scheduling and dispatch applications. Specifically, uptime has improved from

99.999% to 99.99999%. The benefits of this integrated approach to multi-tier

application and infrastructure provisioning and optimization have included:

Improved business agility as the company's end users, developers, and quality

assurance and test teams are able to self-provision resources more quickly.

Users report a more than 100% reduction in provisioning times. Provisioning

backlogs have been cut from two weeks to less than one day using the newly

designed automated processes through System Center.

A 75% reduction in the number of service tickets due to the fact that capacity

adjustments, patches, and provisioning requests are now handled automatically.

A 33% reduction in energy costs due to the ability to automate many application

monitoring and workload migration activities so that unused resources can be

spun down when not needed.

Increasingly, the self-service IT portal is becoming the standard way for all employees

to request IT services as remote desktop and Active Directory self-service

management is being added to the menu. Since many of the employees are mobile

chauffeurs, the firm is implementing a virtual desktop provisioning and management

strategy to maintain consistent, stable remote end-user environments.

The company has been a System Center customer for a number of years and, according

to the CIO, often struggled to integrate products and deploy productive solutions during

past implementations and upgrades. However, it experienced minimal issues with the

enhanced System Center 2012 integrations. He reports that System Center 2012, paired

with a commitment to proactive planning and standardization, has significantly improved

both service delivery economics and SLAs across his environment. The firm is currently

in the process of extending this environment to provide software-as-a-service (SaaS)

ground transportation services management solutions to third parties. The stability and

flexibility provided by System Center 2012 are critical enablers of this important business

expansion opportunity.

©2012 IDC #234109 11

Major British Government Organization Teams with Global Outsourcer

to Automate Application, Desktop, and Datacenter Management

With 27,000 employees and 1,400 branches across the United Kingdom, this major

British government organization and its global outsourcing partner are using Microsoft

System Center 2012 to implement a 3-year private cloud initiative using self-service

automation to improve application, desktop, and infrastructure provisioning and

configuration management.

The first phase of the program is focusing on simplifying and automating desktop and

branch office server provisioning, management, and monitoring. Branches with fewer

than 50 employees rely on remote connections to central datacenters; however,

about 120 sites have enough staff that it is important to keep them productive even if

there is a network outage. These larger branch offices typically rely on a host

(physical server) supporting approximately 3 virtual machines and deployed as an

appliance that is remotely managed using System Center 2012.

The organization has defined standard templates and images that are used to

automatically provision the multi-tier applications and infrastructure software required

for the office appliances. System Center 2012 is also being used to automate both

initial provisioning and self-service request management. In addition, it is providing

ongoing desktop and system configuration management and patching management

automation.

This extensive commitment to automation and standardization has enabled the

organization to significantly improve the speed and accuracy with which new systems

can be deployed more efficiently and existing system configuration and security

compliance can be maintained. Desktop and branch office application and

infrastructure upgrades are managed and automated centrally without the need for a

local technician to be present at remote sites. As a result, the average time spent on

site by a technician to deploy and install a new desktop machine has decreased from

2 hours to 15 minutes per machine.

The next stage of the organization's private cloud journey targets the implementation

of large-scale virtualization across multiple datacenters. Currently, less than 20% of

the 600+ existing physical application servers have been virtualized, and these

physical systems are significantly underutilized. The organization has recently begun

to automate the provisioning of virtual machines using System Center 2012 and plans

to cut the number of physical servers in half as it virtualizes as much as 90% of its

servers. As part of this initiative, the organization is creating templates to support

storage as well as server provisioning and plans to extend automation to network

provisioning in the near future.

Over the longer term, the agency plans to fully automate most aspects of multi-tier

application provisioning and management in the datacenter as well as for branch

offices and desktops. It expects to use System Center 2012 to monitor multiple

hypervisors, including VMware and Hyper-V, as well as a range of operating systems

and application architectures. The organization is also in the early stages of planning

to use System Center 2012 to automate provisioning and application monitoring

activities in the public cloud.

12 #234109 ©2012 IDC

System Center 2012 is playing a critical role in the transformation of the way this

agency provisions and manages a wide cross section of IT resources and

applications. Without having access to these integrated, automated self-service

provisioning, configuration management, and monitoring capabilities, the organization

would find it very difficult to make the kinds of productivity and performance

improvements it has experienced in the first stages of its private cloud initiative.

Credit Verification Company Improves Infrastructure and Application

Elasticity, Agility, and Stability

With 380 employees focused on providing real-time credit verification services for real

estate and government, a major credit verification company values the integration,

automation, self-service, and workflow orchestration capabilities provided by System

Center 2012. It is a highly automated business that handles millions of transactions

daily. Any strategy that can speed business processing, reduce downtime and errors,

and preserve data integrity makes the firm more competitive.

These requirements are the key drivers in the firm's current effort to implement private

cloud self-service provisioning capabilities across its highly virtualized datacenter

environment. With 100% of the firm's production and development datacenters

already virtualized at a typical ratio of 30 VMs per physical rack server, and higher

ratios on blades, the company recognizes that its ability to continue to improve

service levels and reduce costs has to go beyond simple datacenter virtualization.

Over the past several years, the firm worked with Microsoft and System Center to cut

90% of its datacenter energy costs by reducing power consumption from 6.8 million

kilowatt-hours (kWh) to 700 thousand kWh.

As part of the System Center 2012 Private Cloud TAP program, the firm is now focusing

on increasing business agility and flexibility and empowering its users and developers

using the self-service provisioning and orchestration capabilities of System Center 2012

to streamline IT operations and reduce errors in a number of ways, including:

Automating self-service infrastructure and application provisioning for the

company's large application development and QA staff.

Automating VM updating and patching across development and production

environments using golden images and standard automated workflows.

Automating the backup and synchronization of the firm's primary datacenter

environment with its disaster recovery cluster. The firm uses automated virtual

machine image management to automatically maintain a mirror image of the

production environment on standby.

Together, these automation capabilities are enabling the company to create a highly

stable environment in which it can almost double compute capacity in just 15 minutes

— if needed — to respond to rapid changes in business conditions. As an example,

recent fluctuations in interest rates have acted as a catalyst for substantial increases

in the number of credit verifications requested. Using automation, the company is

able to guarantee its customers updates within 4 hours — or it will pay for the

transaction. The company reports it is able to meet this threshold 99.8% of the time,

while competitors struggle to increase capability power in days or weeks.

©2012 IDC #234109 13

Future plans for the expansion of the private cloud environment managed by

System Center 2012 include automation of production application provisioning

activities and continued general improvement in the elasticity and stability of the

company's production and development environments. The firm is also taking

advantage of built-in integration across System Center's performance monitoring,

self-service provisioning, and virtualization management modules.

The company's datacenter management team reports that the level of integration

provided by System Center 2012 has been a game changer for the operations staff

because they are now able to monitor application and infrastructure performance,

dependencies, configurations, and utilization across their environment and are able to

make more efficient and dynamic use of available resources while improving service

levels and providing developers and QA teams with rapid self-service access to

resources and applications as needed.

Private Cloud Program Streamlines European Healthcare Information

Solutions and Online Service Delivery

This major European healthcare information solutions provider designs and delivers a

wide range of pharmaceutical and medical database information solutions to

pharmacies, drugstores, retail chains, and wholesalers. Many of these offerings are

delivered online. As a result, it is a very IT-centric company with approximately

200 tech-savvy employees. The company's private cloud infrastructure includes over

900 mission-critical databases supported by Windows Server 2008 R2, .NET, SQL,

Hyper-V, and System Center.

The organization's private cloud program has focused on the implementation of self-

service infrastructure and database provisioning for the company's development and

test teams. The firm reports it has been a learning experience as the organization has

experimented with finding the best way to design templates, optimize workflows, and

create strategies for convincing its developers to accept shared resources and

self-service options. Several months into the effort, however, the company is seeing

reductions in user account and provisioning errors. Manual sign-offs have been

eliminated for most provisioning requests, and developers are able to get access to

resources much more quickly than before. System Center provides the core runbook

automation technology used for this effort. Links to Active Directory provide very fine-

grained control over access privileges and help enforce compliance and change

control policies.

An example of the benefits experienced from implementing this highly automated

environment can be seen in terms of infrastructure, database, and application

provisioning cycle times. The firm reports that the cycle time from request to

provisioning completion has shrunk from days to minutes as approvals have become

more automated and streamlined. The organization is currently able to support 300

VMs and 900 databases on about 25 servers, a 75% reduction from the 100 physical

servers it used to support. This highly virtualized cloud environment is managed using

just 6 IT operations staff, who are able to deliver a much higher quality of service than

was previously possible. On the hardware side of the budget, the firm credits its

private cloud and virtualization programs with the elimination of $3 million in server

acquisition costs.

14 #234109 ©2012 IDC

Overall, this company believes that the deep integration of automation and

orchestration capabilities available across the System Center 2012 environment has

been critical to the success of its private cloud program. Having the capability to

standardize processes and automate deployments has allowed the organization to

streamline operations and freed senior IT staff from repetitive, error-prone

provisioning activities. This automation helped reduce human errors and sped up

resource provisioning, operations, and resource reclamation life cycles while

significantly reducing VM sprawl.

In a company that makes its money selling information services and database

solutions, the IT department's top priorities are to reduce costs, increase service

levels, and guarantee the reliable availability and performance of the infrastructure

and application environment on which the business runs. The firm's private cloud

strategy allows a single high-performance IT team to support a widely diverse set of

development, test, QA, and production resources, databases, and applications in a

highly efficient and reliable manner.

U.S. Financial Services Organization Relies on System Center 2012 for

Broad-Based Business Process Automation

This financial services organization has long partnered with Microsoft to exploit the

runbook automation and orchestration capabilities in System Center. The 1,500-employee

firm manages home loan payments and transactions across the United States. This is a

highly regulated and time-sensitive industry in which payments need to be processed and

recorded on time so that customers can avoid fines and fees. The firm's systems handle

millions of financial transactions between multiple institutions, and each one has to be

secure, validated, and auditable.

Business process automation is critical to the firm's ability to handle such a large-scale

transaction processing environment while keeping costs low. The organization has

developed custom process automation workflows to support a wide range of processes,

including business process transaction monitoring and alerting, triggering file

transmissions, running SQL queries, and exporting CSV files. With System Center 2012,

the firm is implementing the ability to launch automated workflows remotely via

Web services to further streamline complex business processes.

The firm estimates it has saved more than $250,000 in head count and overtime by

avoiding manual IT staff efforts and enabling staff to focus on adding value to the

business. The impact that the process automation capabilities of System Center have

had on the firm's ability to meet customer service-level commitments and regulatory

filing requirements has been even more important to the overall bottom line.

F U T U R E O U T L O O K

IDC's research indicates that most organizations will take a number of years to fully

implement private cloud strategies that span their infrastructure and application

environments. As Figure 5 shows, most organizations move through two parallel

maturation cycles when implementing effective private cloud management strategies

and service delivery models. In one stream, focused on management technology

enablers, organizations typically move from focusing on bare metal and hypervisor

©2012 IDC #234109 15

provisioning and automation to implement policy-based image management to

provisioning and dynamically optimizing the performance of complex applications and

workloads. In parallel, they move through a service delivery cycle that shifts IT

priorities and SLAs from focusing on individual components to emphasizing the

end-to-end needs of applications and eventually prioritizing the reliable, agile delivery

of complex end-to-end services.

F I G U R E 5

T y p i c a l P r i v a t e C l o u d M an a g e m en t J o u r n e y

Source: IDC, 2012

IDC forecasts that spending on cloud systems management software will top

$2.7 billion by 2015, a CAGR of 46% between 2010 and 2015, reflecting what we

expect will be a rapid ramp-up of cloud management investment across both

enterprise and service provider customers.

Virtualization management

Process automation and orchestration

Self-service

Application performance and SLAs

Dynamic optimization

Infrastructure

Applications

Services

16 #234109 ©2012 IDC

C H AL L E N G E S / O P P O R T U N I T I E S

The challenges facing Microsoft, its customers, and the private cloud management

industry as a whole center around the ability of enterprises to adopt an automated

service delivery approach to internal datacenter operations, application provisioning,

and end-to-end performance optimization. Increasingly, the capabilities of the

management technologies are improving faster than the rate at which customers can

fully consume these capabilities.

Microsoft's decision to fully integrate all System Center 2012 functionality on a

common platform, and to price it using a unified license model, provides the

opportunity for customers to make one buying decision and then activate functionality

incrementally as desired. This strategy provides Microsoft with the opportunity to

gradually expand from its historic strongholds in desktop and server configuration

management into much more complex, application-aware private cloud management

use cases without disrupting current customer activities and initiatives.

E S S E N T I AL G U I D A N C E

Private clouds, enabled by integrated, automated, and application-aware

management solutions, represent the next step for many enterprises in their journey

to create more agile, reliable, and cost-effective IT environments. For IT decision

makers who are currently developing private cloud road maps, it is critical that

management solutions be able to scale and adapt over time as applications become

more complex and infrastructure becomes more heterogeneous.

Microsoft System Center 2012 has been designed to enable IT organizations to architect,

implement, and manage both traditional and private cloud environments on a modular

basis. Microsoft's customers report that System Center 2012 offers significantly improved

levels of integration, end-to-end process automation, and application visibility and control

as well as important new capabilities such as self-service. All of these capabilities are

critical enablers of sophisticated private cloud operations.

System Center 2012 directly addresses today's most important private cloud

management requirements and provides customers an affordable option for getting

started now and for scaling up over time.

C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e

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