Customer Solution Case Study Transform the Datacenter Capgemini Uses Integrated Cloud Solution to Help Enterprise Customers Transform With the Microsoft Cloud Platform System, we have the ability to put the right workload in the right location at the right time for customers. Lance Friend, Senior Vice President of Dynamic Services, Infrastructure Services, Capgemini Many Capgemini customers are eager to embrace cloud computing but are challenged by legal regulations and data security concerns. Capgemini is using the Microsoft Cloud Platform System powered by Dell to give customers a way to quickly deploy private clouds and gain an easy path to the Microsoft Azure public cloud. Customers can get into the cloud in weeks instead of months while meeting regulatory requirements, which dramatically speeds up their pace of innovation and transformation.
CPS fills an important role in the cloud computing spectrum in that it enables us to deliver hybrid cloud solutions in combination with public cloud and traditional hosting services. Paul Verkerk, Account Executive, Infrastructure Services, Capgemini Frank Fogarty, the CEO of a large multinational bank, sits at his desk sweating bullets. His firm is being outsmarted and out-maneuvered at every turn by Internet startup banks. They offer clever mobile banking apps. No-fee checking accounts. We-pay-you checking accounts. Three-click business loan applications. How in the world can his stodgy 100-year-old firm match the level and speed of innovation dished out by these upstarts? It takes his team months to agree on a new service and months more to order the computers to test it. Fogarty calls his guy at Capgemini. Fail Fast Capgemini specializes in helping large firms as well as midsize firms and startups transform their businesses. All these firms want to break free of traditional business models and make profound changes to their organizations to remain competitive in business environments where all the rules have changed. Present in more than 40 countries with almost 140,000 employees, Capgemini provides an array of consultative services that combine cutting-edge technology with deep industry expertise. Our job is to make sure that our customers stay ahead in their markets and that their IT is an enabler, says Lance Friend, Senior Vice President of Dynamic Services in the Infrastructure Services group at Capgemini. They re all dealing with disruption in their markets, and they need to speed up their pace of innovation and fail fast try new ideas, abandon what doesn t work, and move onto the next thing as quickly as possible without losing a lot of money. However, traditional ways of provisioning IT do not enable a fail-fast model. As in Fogarty s bank s case, the ability of IT to respond to the needs of the business is often like turning the rudder on an ocean liner the gap between intent and movement is excruciatingly wide. Capgemini knows what its customers need to speed things up: cloud computing delivering IT as a service using virtualized and pooled IT resources that are provisioned in minutes, released when no longer needed, and charged for only when used. Cloud computing significantly ups agility and reduces costs. Overview Customer: Capgemini Customer Website: www.capgemini.com Country or Region: France Industry: Healthcare Hospitals Partner: Dell Partner Website: www.dell.com Customer Profile Paris-based Capgemini is one of the world s leading business and IT consulting firms, with almost 140,000 professionals serving primarily enterprise customers in more than 40 countries. Business Situation Capgemini wants to help enterprise customers transform their businesses in weeks, not months or years, and needs a secure way to help those companies take advantage of cloud computing. Solution Capgemini is an early evaluator of the Microsoft Cloud Platform System powered by Dell, an integrated hardware-software solution that helps customers rapidly deploy private cloud capabilities with a connection to the public cloud. Benefits Move customers to the cloud in weeks versus months Dramatically accelerate customer innovation and transformation Give customers a way to span private and public clouds Help Capgemini reduce operational costs and boost service value
But many Capgemini customers are ocean liner organizations with established datacenters and ways of doing things. Many are deeply regulated and can t move to public cloud environments because of data residency requirements and security concerns. Our customers know that they need to move to the cloud to transform their business, but they don t know how to get there, Friend says. They need a way to keep sensitive data and applications on-premises while moving development, test, and low-risk applications to public cloud and have both environments talk to one another. Flexible Private Cloud in a Box Capgemini solved part of the problem by creating private clouds for customers cloud environments that sit in a customer s datacenter or a Capgemini datacenter and are used exclusively by that customer. Yet building a custom private cloud is a lot of work. Engineers have to gather customer requirements, specify the hardware and software, order the hardware and software, integrate all the pieces, test all the pieces, and troubleshoot problems at least six months can elapse before a system is customer-ready. Our customers always want faster and less expensive, and we need to be able to deliver to their needs every single time, says Keith Kelly, Enterprise and Cloud Architect in the Infrastructure Services group at Capgemini. As a close, longtime partner of Microsoft, Capgemini chose to collaborate on the Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS) powered by Dell, a turnkey hardwaresoftware private cloud solution. By using a converged system, CPS reduces the risk and complexity of implementing cloud infrastructure, and it provides a path to hybrid clouds cloud environments that span private and public clouds. CPS consists of Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft System Center 2012 R2, and Windows Azure Pack running on Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell Storage, and Dell Networking infrastructure. It contains services and functionality that are similar to those provided in Microsoft Azure public cloud datacenters and connects seamlessly to those datacenters. Like Azure, CPS includes a self-service portal that lets Capgemini offer self-service, pay-as-you-go capabilities to customers and lets Capgemini customers offer the same services to their employees. We love the idea of a converged system, because we have one vendor to call for compute, networking, storage, and software support, all hidden behind a single license, says Kelly. We also like the fact that CPS is not specialized for certain workloads but is a generic platform that can stretch in different directions to perform database analysis one minute and handle email traffic the next. Adds Paul Verkerk, Account Executive in the Infrastructure Services group at Capgemini, CPS fills an important role in the cloud computing spectrum in that it enables us to deliver hybrid cloud solutions in combination with public cloud and traditional hosting services. With hybrid solutions, we can
We can deploy a working private cloud in a couple of weeks rather than six or more months. This kind of speedup is essential for customers that want rapid transformation in today s fast-paced IT era. Keith Kelly, Enterprise and Cloud Architect, Infrastructure Services, Capgemini provide customers with a migration path from traditional environments to the cloud in an environment that is secure, managed, and compliant. Capgemini s plan is to use Azure as a rapid application development environment supporting fail-fast innovation and run production workloads in CPS where there is more control. The hybrid approach gives heavily regulated industries such as financial services the ability to take advantage of the spectrum of cloud environments, Friend says. Add Service Orchestration To complement CPS and Azure, Capgemini has created a cloud orchestration service called SkySight that customers use to quickly and easily access cloud-based applications. SkySight gives Capgemini customers a friendly portal, or menu, where employees can select needed applications and provision them with a few mouse clicks. Customers can turn cloud services and applications on and off as needed on a pay-as-you-go basis. On the back end, the applications can run in the customer s own datacenter on CPS, in a Capgemini datacenter on CPS, or in Azure. Customers don t really care where their applications run or the data is stored, says Friend. Compliance and security requirements will drive that. Customers will have one interface and one application store. With the Microsoft Cloud Platform System, we have the ability to put the right workload in the right location at the right time for customers. Move Customers to Cloud in Weeks Versus Months By using CPS, Capgemini can make the ocean liner turn on a dime. We can deploy a working private cloud in a couple of weeks rather than six or more months, Kelly says. This kind of speedup is essential for customers that want rapid transformation in today s fast-paced IT era. Customers that are embarking on two-to-five-year business transformation projects want to see results quickly. If it takes months or years to get your IT infrastructure in place, your overall digital transformation timeline takes a big hit. IT groups also have to move fast to mitigate the risk of business owners skirting around them. If IT can t meet the needs of the business quickly, then the business will take matters into its own hands and get cloud resources elsewhere without IT s involvement, Friend says. This is a massive risk, because IT no longer has control over the business applications, costs, or data security. CPS gives our customers the agility they crave while giving IT the control it needs. Add More Value, Reduce Costs The less time Capgemini spends building the platform, the more time it has to spend on application development and innovation its secret sauce. Capgemini professionals who previously designed and built infrastructure can now focus on helping customers take full advantage of their clouds, automate additional processes,
and implement new self-service capabilities. These are the kinds of services that separate Capgemini from its competitors. The highly available, redundant design of CPS also has a positive impact on the company s bottom line. A big expense for any operations organization is time to resolve incident tickets, Kelly says. We ll see a reduction in incident tickets with CPS because it uses redundant components, so issues such as a failed hard drive that would normally require urgent intervention are no longer urgent and are thus less expensive to fix. Plus, its many self-healing capabilities reduce downtime and support work and will significantly improve our bottom line. When something does go wrong, we have one number to call Microsoft. For Frank Fogarty and other business leaders like him, Capgemini can allay the anxiety and provide a quick and painless path to the cloud which is the path to rapid business transformation. Other Information Hardware Dell PowerEdge C6220ii servers Dell Storage MD3060e dense enclosures Dell PowerEdge R620 server Dell Networking S4810 switches Dell Networking S55 switch Product Solution Taxonomies Microsoft Server Product Portfolio Windows Server 2012 R2 Microsoft Cloud Platform System Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Technologies Hyper-V Windows Azure Pack Partners Dell