Planview Information Technology Group Virtually Reinvents Itself and the Business - Page 3
MAPPING VIRTUAL MACHINES TO STRATEGIC PLANS WITH PLANVIEW ENTERPRISE
Once Planview IT was strategically aligned with the business, the possibilities exploded. In looking at the roadmap for the upcoming year, the biggest challenge is managing rapid growth and virtual machine sprawl. Sanchez's team initially built the environment to support 75 virtual machines; they are currently running 400.
When Sanchez approached the CFO to request new blades to handle the recent quarterly increase of 100 virtual machines, he realized it was challenging to justify virtual machines. There was a disconnect between what the CFO needed to hear to approve purchases and the explanations that IT could provide as to what those virtual machines did. Sanchez's team realized that there was a big opportunity to use one of Planview's own products to map the strategic business goals for each virtual machine.
What Sanchez chose was Planview Enterprise Service Portfolio Management, an integrated component of the Planview Enterprise portfolio management solution. It was designed to accurately links IT services with related assets, labor, and applications to reveal the true cost of delivering services to the business. This information enables IT to determine the value of services, identify and eliminate ineffciencies, accurately invoice business units, gain control of IT spending, and uncover hidden value in the IT department by reducing maintenance costs and delivering business services more effciently.
Sanchez uses Planview Enterprise Service Portfolio Management to align each virtual machine with a project, which is itself mapped to a strategic goal. Today he can tell his CFO exactly which virtual machines are driving exactly which pieces of the business – Engineering, Corporate, and Production – and thus explain why they are needed and useful. And, critically, the application automatically grabs virtual machine server information from a cluster. This eliminates the need to manually enter each new virtual machine, both saving time and reducing the chances of human error.
Dashboard views in Portfolio Management provide quick visual indicators of the performance of services and assets.
THE PAYOFF
Transforming IT, virtualizing the infrastructure, and leveraging Planview Enterprise Service Portfolio Management has paid off in four key areas:
1. Revenue and competitive advantage – Improved sales and the customer buying process with a stable, cost-effective, enterprise-ready SaaS environment that can be provisioned within 24 hours
2. Corporate productivity – Guaranteed that the development and quality assurance groups never have to wait on hardware
3. Cultural and financial benefit – Changed IT into a true strategic business partner as it turned IT from a cost center into a profit center that can demonstrate the strategic goal and benefit of each and every virtual machine
4. Easy IT management – Provided stable and rapid deployment of internal services and increased the job satisfaction of IT staff
Planview IT has evolved from being a financial drain in the eyes of management to being a strategic leader, business partner, and profit center. One of the key benefits for Planview is to meet customer demand for SaaS portfolio management solutions – primarily because IT has found a way to make hosting cost-effcient. It is easy to add new hosted customers because there are no purchase requests for additional hardware to slow things down. Instead, IT simply sets up a new environment for the customer as a virtual machine on existing hardware.
Similarly, IT can create virtual machines and test environments for internal use, such as development requirements, in days instead of months, and move on to more strategic work. And when new virtual machines are added, Planview Enterprise Service Portfolio Management automatically tracks them so that Sanchez has and can report on the complete view of what is happening on his virtualized network, when, and what the strategic import is.
