Notes / to-do's
Minimize text
Funny pictures as bio
What are the requirements/needs that brought ACB? Not clear
Outcomes in $$ where possible
Cut down the amount of words
Citrix Online, LLC (GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC, GoToAssist, GoToTraining, GoToWebinar)
From its roots as an entrepreneurial start-up company in 1997, Citrix Online has earned distinction for boldly disrupting business as usual by bringing easy-to-use Web-based services to business professionals everywhere. Today, Citrix Online product families radically simplify remote computing for millions of users worldwide. A division of Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), Citrix Online offers the leading Web-based remote access and collaboration services in the software-as-a-service model, as well as high-definition audio conferencing
Creating better ways to get work done anytime and anywhere is how Citrix Online became the first to introduce computer remote access via the Internet. The company was founded as a collaborative effort by a university professor and two of his enterprising students for managing their communication when the professor was working from his offices and labs throughout the world. Together, they designed Web-based screen-sharing technology that allowed instant access to their computers, regardless of location. The former student entrepreneurs continue to shape and direct the company's technology vision, with Bernd Christiansen as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer and Malte Muenke as Vice President and Chief Architect
Developing purpose-built products from the ground up is fundamental to the company’s culture of meeting customer needs. Every Citrix Online product is designed to deliver exceptional reliability, speed, security and ease of use while being affordable to businesses of all sizes – from individual professionals to large organizations. This winning combination of simplicity and cost-effective pricing enables the company to enjoy widespread adoption of its Web-based offerings.
After proving a 100% increase in capacity of audio and video services to manage end-users, the Capacity Management and IT Financial Management teams were faced with similar challenges:
How do we make cost show-back fair and accurate?
The model was updated once a year with % based on a single point in time of one KPI and expensive to produce
Lack of trust: product owners asking “How do you allocate back to products?”
Lack of accuracy: management asking “Which services are costing more than others?”
How do we deal with a constantly changing environment?
Resources associated with services (products) change rapidly, manual maintenance of lists takes too much time and ultimately error-prone
This degrades the quality of results but more importantly product owners spot small even the smallest and insignificant error(*) and lose trust in cost reports
Who’s consuming resources?How do we focus on priorities?
With so many products and resources, where should Capacity Planners spend their time?
Should each product deserve the same amount of effort?
Impetus
- Manual (several day process to retrieve data used for previous chargeback)
- Infrequent (effort kept chargeback percentage based and we just figured it once a year at best)
- Availability/Visibility (never had place to show everyone the numbers and process for our chargeback)
Technical Challenges
- Configuration Management (caplan domains/subdomains are handled manually)
- Allocation vs. Metered (allocation model did not work for us. Metered does)
- Shared Resources (products share some machines, how to account)
- Virtualization (proper separation of chargeback for cloud and physical machines)
Social Challenges
- Ownership of data (finger pointing from one group to next about numbers used for second level calcs)
- Ownership of process (who determines and publishes numbers)
- True comparison (transparency shines light quickly where it may have not been before)
- Acceptance (why are we using certain metrics to do this when there are others…but must be available via automation)
Increased satisfaction of business units, more educated IT decisions
The accuracy and frequency of updates to the model allows product teams to effectively use these results during product reviews
The priority of Capacity Planning efforts can now be based on cost of the infrastructure, to focus on cost-savings initiatives
Resources are freed up and reallocated to more critical business objectives
Resources are being returned to the pool thereby allowing Citrix Online to quickly move servers where they are needed
Ability to quickly reconfigure models and automatically generate auditable results
Automatic data collection
Automatic hierarchy definition and update
Automatic generation of reports
More and more trust gained from product owners
allow Citrix Online more time to focus on improving the definition of the model and to increase its adoption
Because a cat is needed in any slide deck
Size of each bullet is relative to how many organization go thru the 3 steps
MRU is the one where most organizations have adopted Capacity Optimization: technology limitations prevented this to be efficient in the past, now it is
Tiered and Service Based are appropriate only for service providers or organization that manage very similar types of products/services between the different BU’s
For targets (who pays for what), leverage the TrueSight Capacity Optimization capability to automatically import relationships
As cost-items, start from data you are already collecting
Iterate the definition of <cost items, cost-rate, cost-model> a few times
Create templates and reuse them
Hourly resolution for metered accounting is the easiest and best-for-the-buck option