Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the VMworld 2012 Conference on how cosmetics giant Revlon has benefited from innovative data delivery.

1. VMware-Powered Cloud Adoption Delivers Bevy of Data
and Performance Benefits for Revlon, Says CIO David
Giambruno
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the VMworld 2012 Conference on how cosmetics
giant Revlon has benefited from innovative data delivery.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: VMware
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you
from the 2012 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.
We're here the week of August 27 to explore the latest in cloud computing and
software-defined datacenter infrastructure developments. I'm Dana Gardner,
Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I'll be your host throughout this
series of VMware sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.
It's been a year since the last VMworld Conference in 2011 when we first spoke
to Revlon. We heard then about their world-class private cloud as an early adopter of innovative
cloud delivery and we decided to go back and see how things have progressed at Revlon.
[Disclsure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
We'll learn now, a year on, how Revlon’s global and comprehensive cloud has matured, how the
benefits from aggressively embracing the cloud have evolved, and perhaps learn about some
unintended positive consequences of their architecture.
To fill us in, we're joined by David Giambruno. He's the Senior Vice President and CIO of
Revlon. Welcome back, David.
David Giambruno: Morning, Dana.
Gardner: Now that you've been doing private cloud as an early adopter and at an advanced
state, what it has been doing for you? How has it progressed now that there has been a bit of
maturity?
Giambruno: We have a couple of fronts. The biggest, which you alluded to, was the unintended
consequence, and we've had a couple of them. When you think of Revlon, we're
global and we have a huge application portfolio. As we put everything on our
cloud and are using our cloud, we realized that all of our data sits in one place
now.
So when you think of big-data management, we've been able to solve the
problem by classifying all the unstructured data in Revlon and we did that
efficiently. We still joke that it's like chewing glass. You've got to go through this huge process.
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2. But, we have the ability to look at all of our data, a couple of petabytes, in the same place.
Because the cloud let us look at it all, we can bring up all of Revlon in our disaster recovery
(DR) test environments and have our developers work with it at no cost. We have disconnected
that cost and effort.
Once we realized we had this opportunity to start working on our big data, the other unintended
consequences was our master data model. On top of our big data, we were able to able to
efficiently and effectively build a global master data model.
Chief directive
At Revlon, one of our chief directives from the executive team is to globalize. So we're
collapsing 21 enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems into one.
The synergies of having this big-data structure and having this
master data models is changing the model on how to deploy a global
ERP. Loading that data is now just a few clicks of a button. It's
highly automated. We're not ETLing data and facing all the old
challenges. We're not copying environments. Everything is available to us and it’s constantly
updating.
At Revlon, we replicate all of our cloud activity every 15 minutes. You've seen on VMware,
where we had disasters and we were able to recover a country quickly and effectively. That
replication process and constantly updating allows us to update all these instances at no cost and
with little effort.
You have to build the structure and you have to go through that process, but once it's done, it's
now automated and you march that out. It's the ability to quickly and effectively manage all your
big data coming in. For us, it's point of sale -- roughly 600 million-plus attributes.
For us to provide information to the business teams, to build good products, to sell good
products, is a key differentiator in helping them.
Gardner: Well, it seems that a key aspect of the modern enterprise, the integrated enterprise, is
having that data and analysis, having a lifecycle approach from the point of sale, to inventory, to
planning, and to supply chain. You say that’s an unintended consequence. Why did you do the
data the way you did that’s now led to this best cloud architecture for you?
Giambruno: We started the cloud architecture, and I always joke it's like having a Ferrari that
you can take out for a spin. When we were building it, we didn't realize all the things we can do.
So it's really that je ne sais quoi, the little thing that, as you see it, you realize all these things you
can do. You are always planning to do those things for the business, because that’s what we do,
but it's how you do them.
I've always said the cloud is what the local area network (LAN) was 15 or 20 years ago. The
LAN changed the way people dealt with information and applications, and the cloud is doing the
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3. same thing. Actually, it's on a bigger geometry, because it really eliminates geography and
provides the ability to move data and information around.
We live in the information age, and to me, the most important thing is delivering information to
the business teams. That's what we see as one of the big next evolutions in our cloud -- making
information out of all this data and delivering that on whatever device they want to be on,
wherever they are, securely and effectively, in a context that they can understand. Not in a way
that we can understand, but in a way that they can consume.
Gardner: Understanding a bit about how you did this chronologically, for those that are still in
the process of getting there with private cloud, did you focus on the data issues first and then
application and workloads? Did you do them simultaneously? Is there some lesson to learn about
how you did it in an orderly sense that others could benefit from?
First things first
Giambruno: I live in this simple world of crawl, walk, run. Whenever I say that my team
starts cringing, because they think, "Oh, there he goes again." But it was literally fix the
infrastructure first and then, from an application and data perspective, the low-hanging fruit, the
file servers.
It's this progressive capability of learning how to do things -- low risk to high risk. What you end
up doing is figuring out how to effectively do those things, because not only do you manage the
technology, but you have to manage the people and the process changes, and all those things that
have to happen.
But all ships have to rise at the same time. So it's the ability to run these concurrent streams.
From a management perspective, it's how not to get overwhelmed and how to take advantage of
the technology, the automation, and the capabilities that come along with that to free up work
that you used to do and put it towards making the change.
I'm a big believer in not doing big bang. So it's not like, tomorrow we're going to have a private
cloud. Throw the switch. It's the small incremental changes that help organizations adapt. It's a
little bit every day. You look back, and at the end of six months or a year, you realize how much
we've done.
It's been the same in Revlon. I constantly take my team and sit them down and say, "Look what
we've done. You're in the forest. You're in the trees. It's time to look at the forest. Step back and
look what you guys have done." Because it's a little bit every day, and you don't realize the
magnitude or the mass, when you have a team of people doing something every day and going
forward.
Gardner: For those of our listeners who may not be that familiar with Revlon, at least your IT
operations, give us a sense of the scale -- the number of applications, size of data, just so we
better appreciate the task that you've accomplished.
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4. Giambruno: I usually quantify it by our cloud, because those are the simple metrics and we
seem to be pretty steady, so the metrics are holding. Our cloud makes about 14,000 transactions a
second. Our applications move around Revlon 15,000 times a month with no human
intervention. Our change rate of data is between 17 and 30 terabytes a week.
We have roughly, depending on the ups and downs, between 97 and 98 of our total compute on
our internal cloud, we have some AS/400s and I think one UNIX box left. But that's really the
scale of what we do.
All of our geographies are around the world. We sit in all the continents except for Antarctica.
We have a global manufacturing facility in Oxford, North Carolina, that produces 72 percent of
everything we sell in the world. We have some other factors around the world. And we are
delivering north of six nines uptime.
Gardner: An unintended consequence was a benefit for how data can be accessed and
consumed, but a lot of people are hoping for consequences around cost. Is there something going
on now a year later vis-à-vis your total cost, or maybe even the cost of data? Maybe you have
been able to reduce the footprint of data, even while you have accessed more and more quickly.
What's the cost equation?
Cost avoidance and savings
Giambruno: There is a history there, as we talked about. We have given back north of $70
million in cost avoidance and cost savings, and we're continuously figuring out how to use
everything. My team is highly technical, so I call it turning screws. We are always turning screws
on how to more effectively manage everything.
We're always looking at how to not spend money. It's simple. The more money we don't spend,
the more that R&D, marketing, and advertising have to grow our company. That's the key to us.
We leverage capability, so one of the big things this year also was our mobile business
intelligence (BI) capability. We've disconnected most of the costs for things in Revlon around IT.
We only manage at a top line.
But if someone wants to try a new application, generally by the time the business team gets in a
meeting with us, it's no cost. We have servers set up. We have the environment. We have the
access control set up for the vendor to come in and set everything up. So that's still ongoing.
We have got this huge mobile BI initiative, which is delivering information to business teams
and contacts. That's the new thing where we have disconnected the cost. We're not laying out
money for it, and we're just now executing around that.
For me, the cost equation is more and more around cost avoidance and keeping on extending the
capability of that cloud.
Gardner: And it seems as if those costs are more of an operational ongoing nature, predictable,
recurring, easy to budget, rather than those big-bang types of cost?
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5. Giambruno: Very, very predictable. For the past three years, we have had the same line items.
While data keep growing, we're still figuring out how to manage things better and better in the
background, because the cloud generates lot of data, which we want it to do. Data, information,
and how we use that is the competitive weapon.
This cost avoidance, or cost containment, while extending capability, is the little magical thing
that happens, that we do for the business. We're very level in our spend, but we keep delivering
more and more and more.
Gardner: Because we are here at VMworld in San Francisco, tell me a little bit about the
VMware impact for the cloud. How do you view the VMware suite and portfolio vis-à-vis the
impact it has had on your maturation and benefits?
Very advanced
Giambruno: We kind of joke with the VMware team that we have what's called Revnomolies.
Revnomolies is what one of the guys on the helpdesk called it, because when we're calling, we're
very advanced. I want to use technology as a competitive weapon. My team masters it. We own
it intellectually.
For us, it's where VMware is going. We're always pushing VMware. "What have you got next?
What have you got next?" It's up to us to take capability and extend it. I don't mean to be flip or
narcissistic or anything like that, but we've got that piece under control. It's about how do you do
it better.
Every time there's an upgrade, what features and functionalities can we then take advantage and
translate that into a business use? When I say business use, we tell the business teams, "Here's a
new capability. You can do this and keep changing the structure of operating."
The new version of 5.1 came out, and we're in the process of exposing our internal cloud to our
vendors and suppliers. We're eliminating all these virtual private networks (VPNs). It's about
how we change and how IT operates, changing the model. For me, that's a competitive
advantage, and it's the opportunity to reduce structural cost and take people away from managing
firewalls.
We did that. We got that. Now we're going to do this a different way. We're going to expose to
our vendors securely the information that they need, that they can interact with as easily and
effectively.
There's even the idea of taking a portion of our apps and presenting those to our suppliers on
their iPads and their iPhones so they can update our data and our systems much more cleanly and
effectively. We can get the synergies and effectiveness and have our partners like to work with us
and make it easy on them as well. It's always a quid pro quo, "It's Revlon. They're good to deal
with. Let’s help them."
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6. It's how you create those partnerships and effectiveness to get business done better. It makes it
easier on the business teams, contracts go better, and it's cascading. I call it the spiral up effect,
changing the way you operate to spiral up and take advantage of capabilities.
Gardner: Is that something we could classify as another unintended consequence -- a benefit
that you have been able to enjoy these efficiencies around cloud internally for your enterprise,
but now you are taking it to an extended enterprise benefit?
Giambruno: Absolutely. Look at the security complexity around VPNs and managing that and
the audits. That's so much fun. Changing the model is really the opportunity, making it easier for
the auditors to audit and making it easier for your supply chain, for all of those people to interact
with you in a much more effective manner.
It's about enabling procurement to process their information and work with the vendors, because
everything is about change. It's about speed of change. If we get a demand signal that changes
and we need to buy more raw materials or whatever for our factories, we have the ability for not
only our procurement teams, but our vendors to interact with us easily to make those changes. It
ensures that we can deliver the right products, to the right stores, to the right peoples, so at the
end the consumers are happy. It's about how do you change the model of delivering that.
Technology enabler
VMware has done that for us, and we keep taking advantage of all the stuff. I joke that I'm like
a technology enabler: "What have you got for me? What have you got for me?" So I can give it
out to the business and my teams, because it keeps people interested. We can say, "We saw you
guys, and it was hard for you. Now, you can do this." And it's done.
"What do you mean it's done?" "It's done. Just use it. It's okay. Let us know what you think, if
you want us to change something." But it's always being on the front of the bow, saying, "Here's
what we can do. Here's how we can help."
That’s the culture of IT in Revlon. I'm merciless about how we're just here to help. We run the
technology and own the technology intellectually, so we can help. That’s my only concern.
Gardner: Given that we started our conversation about data and the benefits that the cloud
architecture has brought to you, is there anything about the VMware approach? They've been
focused on virtualization in their history, moving towards fabric approaches to development and
deployment in the cloud model. How about data?
Is there something that you'd like to see now that you're going down that path in the nature of the
relationship between a cloud and data services, anything that you would like to see change or
shift?
Giambruno: My team thinks that there needs to be a cellular approach to applications. What I
mean by that is we have had what we call dribs out there. In the press lately, everybody has been
talking about POD data centers. In 2009, we were written up in one of the magazines for our
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7. Mini Me data centers, essentially our little PODs, and that’s our cloud capacity that we manage
around the world.
But when you think about an application architecture, let's take an ERP instance. We want to take
a vertical slice of our warehouse management and push that out from a central location into our
warehouses. Right now, that’s really hard. You end up with multiple instances or a single global
instance, and then you have to deal with network latency and all those fun things.
Internal cloud
But in the future, in my internal cloud, I should be able to take a vertical instance of
functionality and push that. To me, that's next. If the vendors can figure out how to do that and
have my internal cloud manage those transactions back, but push the pieces of functionality
wherever it needs to be, so it sits in those Mini Me data centers and let it be close to people, so I
don’t have to deal with latency and then manage those transactions back, that's the next big
evolution.
The one other one is mobile computing. What I mean by mobile computing is viewing
applications, so data never leaves my data center.
I know a device. I know the person. When they hit the edge of my network, essentially hit my
data center, we know their device. We know who they are, and they only get access to
information they are supposed to have and they only view it.
I could encrypt my entire data center, and at a hypervisor level, encrypt everything, because if
you encrypt the VBK file, the job is done. The compliance and security impact is huge. No more
data leakage, audits become easier, all of those things.
Again, it's a completely different way to operate and think about things, but we need to slice
applications up, move them out, and then view the applications. That’s a whole new geometry of
operating IT in a much more efficient manner.
Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been talking about Revlon’s global and
comprehensive cloud and how it has matured, and about the benefits, both intended and
unintended, from aggressively embracing the cloud model.
I'd like to thank our guest. We've been here with David Giambruno. He is the Senior Vice
President and CIO at Revlon. Thanks so much, David.
Giambruno: Have a nice day.
Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the
2012 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of
podcast discussions. Thank again for listening and come back next time.
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8. Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: VMware
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the VMworld 2012 Conference on how cosmetics
giant Revlon has benefited from innovative data delivery. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2012. All rights reserved.
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