subject: Q&A with BDNA Europe [print this page] Q&A with BDNA Europe Q&A with BDNA Europe
Q&A with Abdel Kander, General Manager BDNA Europe
IT companies come and inevitably go and ones with prosaic, acronym-based names come and go more than most. So hearing all about why another four-letter new kid is not just the latest but the greatest can be a common, not to say dreary, occupational hazard. But a couple of months back when iQ first heard about recent UK arrival BDNA, we were intrigued with its seemingly whole new approach. iQ&A spoke with the company's General Manager for Europe, Abdel Kander to find out what the self-styled "IT Genome Company" is really all about.
iQ: "BDNA: The IT Genome Company". Sounds rather grand and ambitious
Abdel Kander: I wouldn't say that. We believe every enterprise has an IT Genome the complex of hardware, software, processes, and policies that define an IT infrastructure and the value it delivers.
Having accurate data about these assets, with content and context, is essential for making informed business decisions. The ability to maximise the value of key IT initiatives like virtualisation, software licence compliance, datacentre consolidation, Green IT, and others depends on your ability to accurately see the state of your IT infrastructure.
This has never been truer than today, when the demand for IT service quality and agility has never been greater, but when IT budgets are under considerable downward pressure. Given that IT budgets are lower by 10 to 25%, organisations are questioning how to start instituting reductions without diluting their service levels.
BDNA delivers solutions that enable customers to map their IT Genomes and bring clarity, confidence, and speed to IT decision-making to sequence' their IT Genomes and thereby make fact-based strategic decisions to enhance competitive advantage.
We even have an IT Genome Center, which includes elements like the Technopedia (the world's first IT Genome encyclopaedia; a complete collection of critical information about every major software and hardware product in the industry), BDNA Discover, BDNA Normalize, BDNA Enrich, and BDNA Publish.
In order to fulfil expectations the traditional trick of many software vendors has been to sell algorithmics and modest catalogues of content that are then augmented by the customer, or for the customer in lucrative service engagements.
BDNA's exhaustive out-of-the-box catalogue enables our products and services to have immediate business impact without the services overhead of other, legacy, point tools.
iQ: So who are BDNA? What's the company's provenance, background, history?
AK: We've spent the last decade or so building our global presence; expanding across the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. And of course we're now officially in the UK. We're HQ'ed in Mountain View, California with around 350 global enterprise customers in all kinds of sectors including Pfizer, the State of California, the US Army and WorldBank.
We also have three R&D centres and several US patents with others pending.
As for provenance it goes back to the IT Genome philosophy. It's all about enabling customers to achieve deep visibility into what their computing hardware, software, networking infrastructures, and technology usage patterns are made of.
iQ: OK So what is "The IT Genome" exactly? Forgive the cynicism, but it sounds a bit PR.
AK: The IT Genome provides both the content and process framework required to understand the total composition of your IT infrastructure. End of.
iQ: Your website quotes "a global technology vendor" as saying "BDNA found almost 3,000 servers (it) didn't know about. That's $8m!" Those are pretty chunky figures. How and where did all that come about exactly?
AK: Unfortunately we can't name names. However, that particular firm was undergoing a broad M&A driven growth strategy at the time. The divisional IT team was asked to consolidate and rationalise both the business operations and development resources of the acquired companies to gain economies of scale. The client had inherited a panoply of technologies, datacentres and operational systems.
At the same time, their major datacentres had run out of both power and space. In the main datacentre they couldn't take any additional power from the grid. After an exhaustive evaluation process, the client opted for BDNA Insight.
Within three months of deployment, it saw dramatic ROI in server consolidation and rationalisation. With asset re-use and recovery as the primary driver, the customer expected to find maybe 200 to 500 unmanaged servers in its existing datacentres. By retiring or re-using these (and their power and space), they would save over $3,000 per server based on internal calculations.
However, using BDNA Insight, they actually discovered over 32,000 of these servers, including 2,900 outside their control system. This resulted in an ROI eight times higher than initially expected equating to $7.7 million in capital expense savings.
iQ: Is that typically, widely representative? How do such large companies find themselves in such a compromising position?
AK: Yes it's quite a common problem. Modern IT is increasingly complex to manage and as businesses grow, IT becomes more complicated, chaotic, and costly still. Inefficiency spreads with every new user, new device, new server, and new application.
As businesses spend more and more money on their IT infrastructures, their environments become increasingly complex and multi-faceted too. Also, as firms work on a broader and more global scale, IT assets are often purchased, operated and maintained by different departments in different locations.
This, combined with the fact that infrastructures are constantly changing and evolving, makes it difficult to keep track of IT assets and their status. As a result companies often find themselves suffering performance problems, lack of enterprise integration, poor asset utilisation, and inflated costs. The lack of transparency, visibility, and accountability leads to systematic IT costs. Instead of contributing to the corporate bottom line, IT becomes inefficient.
iQ: But how does that kind of waste go unaddressed? Unnoticed even?
AK: Most IT professionals think of their primary mission as "keep the lights on". Some take that quite literally and end up keeping unnecessary and wasteful "lights" on. In a time of cost reduction and environmental concerns every "light" should be examined more carefully.
As I say, modern IT is becoming complex to manage. Without an effective, efficient way of managing assets and of finding out what is and isn't needed, there will undoubtedly be IT waste that goes unnoticed.
iQ: Your collateral refers to all this as a "sickness called IT waste". But how, notionally, do you know if your business is infected? Are there specific telltale signs and symptoms?
AK: Certainly. There's inefficient IT of course. But then there are also things like duplicate and unused technologies.
With the first, as organisations grow, decisions about what software and hardware to invest in are often made by individual business units and departments to serve their own interests and needs rather than those of the larger organisation. This leads to the duplication of technologies.
It is a similar story with unused technologies. During boom times little attention was paid to the number of applications and devices being deployed across networks, with few questions asked about their true business purpose and value.
In many cases, the original business driver to implement those technologies no longer exists. Under- and over-licensing is another key indicator. Failing
to keep track of software assets may mean an enterprise is paying again and again for software it has already bought or that has become obsolete. More than 41% of UK businesses are wasting thousands of pounds every year through software over-licensing.
Truth is, it's a sneaky disease! If you're a CIO, the day could come when you're benchmarked against your peers only to find your unit costs are among the highest ($ per email account, $ per Gb of storage). If you're an incumbent outsourcer, you may find that the contract renewals are more painful because legacy-free competition can render the same services at a much lower price.
iQ: So where should businesses start? Is self diagnosis and treatment possible?
AK: Of course self-diagnosis and treatment is possible, but for 100% accuracy it's best to go to an expert; someone who knows what they're talking about.
I'd liken it to someone diagnosing an illness and treating themselves based on advice from the Internet. No matter how good you think that advice is, it's never going to be as accurate as if you'd visited a doctor for proper
diagnosis and treatment.
I'd recommend seeking proper advice and, of course, I'd recommend that advice comes from BDNA!
iQ: BDNA's is a new take, but on a very old problem. Why should your model work where so many others have tried (and even succeeded for a while) but ultimately fallen away?
AK: I agree that it's always been a problem, but I think more recently it's suddenly moved up the corporate agenda and become an area of focus for
all organisations.
BDNA's approach starts at the root cause visibility. And in the Technopedia we've compiled the industry's most comprehensive catalogue of IT information, containing 9.5 million data points on hundreds of thousands of products.
iQ: "Technopedia" sounds suspiciously like common sense. Can you tell us more about that?
AK: It is updated constantly, enabling extremely accurate information on all IT assets regardless of platform in a fraction of the time other systems require.
Most importantly, we implement and automate the entire content lifecycle discovery, validation, normalisation, and aggregation so that organisations can truly understand what they have, where they have it, who's using it, and what its value is to the organisation.
iQ: How do you go about pulling together something of that scope and size though and how can you be sure it's comprehensive?
AK: We've spent nearly a decade mapping the DNA of modern IT and the Technopedia is the result. We can be sure it's comprehensive because its modification is a continuous operation delivering fresh, complete, relevant content.
Additionally, we actively encourage 3rd party participation in its ongoing development, and as new technology is brought to market we're there to make sure it gets listed.
Much as Wikipedia relies on its community to ensure accuracy, we do the same to ensure Technopedia stays up to date.
iQ: So how would you describe BDNA's er, DNA?
AK: You mean the meta-DNA! BDNA comes from a pragmatic view of the IT world. As overwhelming as it might seem, BDNA believes only by meticulously probing, organising and enriching the vision of IT, will it be possible to land the IT profession safely from a "spend like there's no tomorrow" to a more sustainable way of life.
