“Has never been done before” usually invokes feelings of “concern” and “risk” and “doubt” – however such challenges present opportunities for our clients to liberate themselves of legacy thinking, convoluted business processes and obsolete technology. “New” is not a substitute for the fundamentals – planning, management and execution. Believe it or not, projects usually fail in the absence of the basics.
Next Generation Business Models
Reimagining the State Data Center
A Top 3 State
Opportunity
Our client was one of the first states in the country to reap the benefits of IT Infrastructure Consolidation. Based on the expiration of a set of contracts associated with the State’s core IT services pertaining to private cloud computing, mainframe, print/mail and public cloud computing services, our client had a unique opportunity as one of the country’s largest states to “reimagine” a 21st century set of data center services to enable state agencies to drive digital innovation statewide as well as to optimize the overall Data Center Services to drive a step-change in capability for all State Agency and Higher Ed. customers.
Our Role
Stonyhurst was engaged to conduct extensive market research to develop a ten-year prospective view of what the model of data center services will evolve to, and develop a sourcing strategy to obtain these services to align with a multi-sourcing service integrator (MSI) model. As part of the engagement, we collaborated with State IT experts to identify improvements to:
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agency support functions – putting customer innovation and legacy replacement as center points of the next generation service;
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transformation of the State’s print/mail service to one of digital citizen engagement;
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driving overall service simplification and standardization to drive efficiencies and speed of operations;
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rethink the State’s cost, payment, KPI/SLA model to drive a win/win with the next set of potential vendors;
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removal of networking limitations while dramatically increasing the overall security of the service when combined with State managed security services; and
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evolve the service over the next contract from one of “cloud first” to “cloud only” that is positioned to exploit infrastructure, platform and software as a service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) as a natural extension of the State’s data center that is safe, secure and relevant.
Results
Our collaboration with the State has created a blueprint for the next procurement and includes the required materials to brief Agency customers, prospects, interested stakeholders and the vendor community on the opportunity for the State to lead the nation in Data Center services and customer enablement via the cloud – private and public – as a seamless way of doing business. More than sixty implementation options were identified to drive service simplification/standardization, evolve and optimize the service as well as (longer-term) to transform the State data centers and position for an “assetless” future. Adoption of an ever-changing cloud-oriented “software defined everything” is a key design tenet – including reducing the wide range of different operating systems, hardware types and configurations to streamline support, maintenance and operations.
Finally, the strategy includes strong emphasis of all participants in the “customer lifecycle” including engagement, adoption, optimization and transformation, the “incentive model” for the service component providers. Overall service design and operating metrics going forward will focus on driving innovation, creativity and agility of the service and to encourage customer engagement, transparency, solutioning and cost alignment with 21st century computing models to drive a step-change in “value” through the migration of the service to its next step.
HYPER-AGILE, CLOUD DEVELOPMENT INFRASTRUCTURE
PAYPAL
Leading Online
Payments Engine
Opportunity
PayPal, formerly an eBay company, had outgrown its Silicon Valley based data center both technically and financially. The company sought to dramatically increase its development capabilities to drive software engineer productivity in response to explosive growth in mobile payments and to position itself for future growth.
With more than 2,100 developers worldwide across almost every time zone, PayPal engaged Stonyhurst practitioners to perform a comprehensive review of the development infrastructure and processes associated with product conception, prototyping, multi-team Agile development and deployment to its production environments globally. As part of the project, the entire technical environment (hardware, storage, networking) was due to both come off lease and be refreshed with contemporary technology.
More than 300 applications, 3,000 physical computing assets and 30,000 environments needed to be rationalized, relocated and certified between quarterly release cycles - all without impacting more than 300 live projects in various stages of implementation.
Our Role
Stonyhurst practitioners lead an inventory and dependency analysis to fill in the gaps between “as designed, as built and as operated” as part of a critical dependency analysis. Once this foundation was established, a modern design in the new data center more than 500 miles away was implemented based on modern rack and virtualization standards, removal of obsolete data, applications and systems. Stonyhurst practitioners led the project management and procurement functions for this mission critical data center move, which occurred on schedule with very little (if any) turmoil associated with a wholesale data center move, virtualization and migration of more than 4PB of storage.
Results
This project was delivered on-time, on-budget, and on-quality without impacting any projects in flight. All code, data, configurations, environments and developers were "wire-migrated" to the new data center including more than $20M of new equipment and systems with zero downtime or drama while saving more than $7M annually in data center leases and $5M more in capital equipment leases.
INVESTING IN WHAT MATTERS
A Top 10 State
Data Center Consolidation
/ Co-Managed Service
Opportunity
In 2010, the State faced an extraordinary challenge: the State’s Information Technology (IT) capability statewide was fragmented and inefficient. Among other signs of discontinuity, the State had more than 32 data centers spread across 26 Cabinet agencies, over 9,000 physical servers, and 19 different e-mail systems. This was a byproduct of the State devoting more than 80 percent of its IT spending to maintaining aging infrastructure, rather than investing in citizen-facing systems and services. The end result capability that was not only disjointed but also poorly positioned to produce innovations that would benefit citizens and businesses in the State. Simply put, the State was spending too much money on things that didn't matter - gold plated data centers and networks.
Our Role
Stonyhurst practitioners collaborated with the client to develop a unique approach to consolidating the State's infrastructure: upgrade a central data center of more than 320,000 sq/ft to a Tier III capable computing center; implementation of modern virtualization, storage management, network, and security platforms; and migration of more than 20 cabinet agencies to a State private cloud located at the State Computing Center.
Stonyhurst practitioners lead the strategy effort, highly complex sourcing of an industry-first "co-managed service" that utilizes State and contractor talent and negotiated a highly complex design/build/run contract under a $267M+ multi-year, co-managed service arrangement.
Results
Following a power and cooling upgrade to the data center facility, a Private Cloud was established in 2013. The client has moved from a poorly architected and underutilized data center condominium to a high performance cloud resulting in an almost 9 times improvement on infrastructure dollar investments. Server, storage and network architecture has been consolidated under a modern ITIL v3 process architecture that is supported by leading tools and monitoring consoles that drive high levels of availability, consistency, resiliency and computing uptime as well as provide better protection and security from cyber threats. As part of this initiative, the client collapsed State servers from nearly 9,000 physical servers spread across more than 32 data centers to just over 6,500 virtual machines concentrated at the State’s primary data center that serves as the life blood of State applications and services.
The State data center, on a square footage basis, is one of the top 10 data centers in the country. Our client is leveraging its wealth of space to support not only the State’s consolidation, but the consolidation needs of their Higher Education and Local Government communities.
Shortly after the data center remediation effort started, the State collaborated with Tthe largest university in the State to locate computing functions on the third floor of the facility. This effort resulted in significant operating savings to the university as well as cost avoidance of more than $40M in designing and constructing a new data center elsewhere on campus. Many Universities and Counties that are leveraging the State data center for Disaster Recovery services and the relocation of their production environments as well as the Supreme Court, the Auditor of State.
Discussions are underway with more than 60 institutions that comprise the higher education community to leverage the State data center for primary computing or disaster recovery purposes.
SECURE COMPUTING: GONE GREEN
Raytheon Space
and Airborne Systems
Classified Data
Center Relocation
Opportunity
A leading global defense contractor had outgrown their on-premise data center that was supporting a mixture of classified and non-classified computing workloads. In addition to facilities capabilities, Raytheon wanted access to “better practices” infrastructure design and operations expertise, virtualization of mixed Unix/Linux workloads, ITIL® processes and Green Computing to support a global corporate initiative.
Our Role
Stonyhurst practitioners led a sourcing effort to develop a comprehensive Statement of Work, end-to-end Service Level Agreements and an innovative Governance model between Raytheon and their Infrastructure provider. During the negotiation, Stonyhurst was able to reduce the provider’s proposed costs by more than 45% in a $40M transaction without any diminishment of Raytheon’s requirements, quality levels or security considerations and replace an incumbent vendor who was not adequately addressing the needs of the client.
Results
Raytheon obtained computing facilities in one of the world’s greenest data centers without offshoring sensitive ITAR data or systems, nor exposing the nature of any classified computing workloads to any exposure risk. As a result of the data center migration, Raytheon enjoys a highly elastic, scalable and secure computing environment at a fraction of the cost of "in-house" or "via legacy provider" options.
ENABLING NEXT GENERATION COMMUNICATIONS
TerreStar Networks
Next Generation
Satellite/ Terrestrial
Mobile Network
Opportunity
TerreStar was developing a ubiquitous Satellite / Terrestrial network that provided 100% coverage for voice and data mobile applications designed for national security/classified applications, law enforcement and first responders. In parallel with the launch of the worlds largest communications satellite, TerreStar needed to design, deploy and operate a unique combination of terrestrial (GSM) networks and customer management and revenue systems to meet critical business go-live requirements.
Our Role
Stonyhurst practitioners led the enterprise sourcing effort for major operational elements including core revenue/customer systems, ERP, core/radio access network and ancillary software items (in excess of $1.3B+ of contract value) including:
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Terrestrial Tower Network Build-out ($1B+)
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Billing and Customer Care Systems ($350M+)
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ERP and Back-Office Systems ($3M+) - including a 45 day deployment of SAP
Results
Transactions were structured as "build/operate/run" as a Service to minimize capital investments and maximize deployment timelines. Successful delivery of Information Technology elements including the Operation Support Systems (OSS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Support Systems (BSS) and Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) for a 4G all-IP Satellite/Terrestrial network including an innovative 3GPP/IMS core network implementation.
UNIFYING END-USER, DESKTOP INFRASTRUCTURE and MAINFRAME SUPPORT PROCESSES
A Top 10 State
Cloud-Based Enterprise IT Service Management, ITIL v3 Platform
Opportunity
The State Infrastructure Services Division (ISD) is charged with the design, deployment, operation and maintenance of critical enterprise services that include the State’s Private Cloud (designed to manage more than 7,000 distributed servers), Enterprise Storage (more than 4 Petabytes), Mainframes (4 currently in operation), Telecommunications and Networking, End-Point (more than 90,000 devices) Security Services and other IT services that are utilized by more than 120 Agencies, Boards and Commissions and 52,000+ State workers in support of these Agencies missions.
Our Role
Stonyhurst collaborated with the State to identify an Enterprise-wide IT Service Management (ITSM) platform to consolidate and retire more than 26 disparate “ticketing systems” in use across the State on either an Agency basis, or for a specific IT Tower. Based on this design, the State selected ServiceNOW as its service consolidation platform and ITIL v3 as it’s operating process standard. Stonyhurst developed a unique RFP to obtain ServiceNOW implementation and platform operations managed services across the following domains and processes:
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Incident, Problem and Change (I/P/C) Management
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Configuration and Asset Management
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Service Catalog Management
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Knowledge Management
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Support Portal
Results
The State has migrated infrastructure, telecom, mainframe, ERP, end-user/desktop and telecommunications ordering processes to ServiceNOW within it’s first 18 months of operation and has standardized on ITIL processes for the vast majority of Cabinet Agencies. More than 6,500 servers, 40,000 VoIP clients, 9,000 circuits and 10,000 desktops are actively managed via ServiceNOW and legacy/standalone Agency applications have been retired.
REGULATING MEDICAL MARIJUANA WITH SaaS
Top 10 State Medical Marijuana Program
Department of Commerce, Medical Board, Pharmacy Board
Medical Marijuana Control Program – Technology & Processes
Opportunity
The Legislature of the State passed a Bill pertaining to the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes. The State needed to identify and implement a comprehensive set of IT solutions to oversee and regulate this new industry across the State that not only complied with State law and rules pertinent to regulatory compliance, but also to ensure that stringent Federal laws and rules are strictly adhered to within the parameters of the Department of Justice “Cole Memorandum” and FinCEN banking regulations.
Our Role
Stonyhurst supported State Agencies (the Medical and Pharmacy Boards as well as the Department of Commerce) to develop a comprehensive RFP designed to support the State’s regulation, monitoring, licensing and ongoing operation and oversight of the Medical Marijuana industry as allowed by this legislation.
This RFP, the best of it’s kind nationally, was designed to select and implement a “Seed to Sale” system designed to track the end-to-end Medical Marijuana Supply Chain from plant origins: (e.g., seeds, clones, biological matter, and variants); cultivation and harvest of Medical Marijuana including the destruction of unusable by-products; Transport of usable materials from one medical marijuana entity to another (i.e., Cultivators, Processors, Laboratory and Dispensaries); sale, error or recall of each consumer ready product by a Dispensary licensed by the State board of Pharmacy; and identification of anomalous, apparent fraud, diversion, violations of law and compliance with State auditing, compliance, inspection and reporting requirements for the State Agencies charged with the administration and oversight of the Program.
Additionally, Stonyhurst accepted the State’s challenge of developing an innovative souring approach and RFP to secure Marijuana industry licensing systems (cultivators, laboratories, dispensaries, doctors) that will leverage the State’s eLicense platform based on a set of reusuable enterprise templates designed to accelerate the launch of the Medical Marijuana Program.
Results
Stonyhurst led a comprehensive industry analysis effort which included review of all prior competitive sourcing activities nationally, identification of apparent “flaws” and “blind spots” in system implementations in other States (both medical and recreational) as well as conducted an innovative “competitive dialog” process with leading Seed-to-Sale, Track-and-Trace and cash intensive business solutions providers to mutually inform: State experts charged with the implementation of this Program, inclusive of Policy, Compliance, Legal, Taxation and IT staff; Industry participants in preparation for receiving the competitive solicitation (RFP); and Process Design Expert firms that were interested in helping the State launch the Medical Marijuana Program in a safe, legal and time-sensitive manner. The State’s RFP garnered interest and responses from all leading Seed to Sale solution providers (6 proposals), many qualified process design and implementation firms as well as a variety of eLicense integrators that together will help the State launch this highly visible and important program.
