Quickstart Portfolio Services leverages Adaptivity’s BluePrinting as a Service^SM (BPaaS) delivery model. BPaas is an unique and repeatable engagement methodology that combines a business-driven approach and Adaptivity’s Blueprint4IT^TM Lifecycle Suite software to deliver comprehensive, fact-based results in a fraction of the time of traditional methods.  Adaptivity’s initial Quickstart Portfolio Services offerings will include the Current State Infrastructure Assessment and Data Center Transformation Services.  Quickstart Services for Current-State Infrastructure is designed to help IT organizations quickly understand how to optimize, rationalize and transform their current-state infrastructure environment.

The Current-State Infrastructure Assessment Quickstart Service provides:

• Comprehensive infrastructure discovery and analysis of 100 hosts and 20 applications that decomposes the complexity of application deployment and interactions into consumable results for detailed analysis.
• 50 detailed, fact-based application architecture blueprints depicting deployment topologies, service interactions and business-context Estate Views representing the total service model for a specific business unit or Line of Business.
• Analysis and reporting engine based on Microsoft Access Database containing all data discovered and analyzed for building the blueprints.

Quickstart Services for Data Center Transformation is designed to help our clients quickly align their target business environment to their IT supply chain; understand the risks and impacts to the business when migrating data centers; or move to a cloud-based delivery model.

The Data Center Transformation Quick Start Service provides:

• Business Value Chain Decomposition facilitates visual business to IT alignment by decomposing the business into functions/activities and aligning the supporting application portfolio to business function/activities
• Comprehensive Infrastructure Discovery and Analysis decomposes the complexity of application deployment and interactions into consumable results for detailed analysis
• 50 Fact-based Architecture Blueprints depicting deployment topologies, service interactions and business-context Estate Views representing the total service model for a specific business unit or Line of Business
• Fit for Purpose Architecture Design gap analysis and recommendations

“The new Quickstart Portfolio Services will allow our clients to quickly and economically address two of the top priorities inside IT organizations; understanding the current state infrastructure environment and optimizing the data center to meet the fluid demands of the business,” said George Mackie, CEO of Adaptivity. “Client feedback has been extremely positive. Our Quickstart engagements are providing IT organizations with the analytics to make intelligent decisions and the IT Blueprints to manage execution. It’s proving to be a very powerful combination.”

Adaptivity’s Quickstart Portfolio Services, while scalable to meet the needs of global IT organizations, are an excellent choice for mid-sized companies seeking to rationalize and optimize their investments in IT infrastructure.

Our training services not only cover our products, but the unifying method that they’re built around.  Adaptivity isn’t just your average IT Management product company, we are built on a vision of the way IT can be.  We’ve captured some of the ways we’ve helped dozens of clients and previous employers optimize their IT in the tools and services we offer; but we’d like to offer you even more.  All of our training offerings give you a peak behind the curtain at the system and the logic that helps make our blueprints so valuable.  Getting your entire team this view can help you whether you’re using our tools to enable your services organization, understand your IT operations, build a cloud strategy, align your IT organization to your business or optimize your datacenter.

Our first training path is for Systems Integrators and Consultancies and the second is for End User Customers leveraging our tools in their environment.  Each has a standard, four day training boot camp, but both the delivery method and the schedule can be customized.

We spend time with your engineers understanding your products and processes, the needs they fill and how they are sized based on workloads and the business needs of your clients.  Once we understand this, we integrate them into our Bayesian logic algorithms in a custom tool.  Your sales force can now ask a few simple questions of the client and produce content that will not only excite and energize clients, but give your solution architects the information they need to start the next phase.

Our tools are used for everything from simple web tools that help customers envision the way products could be utilized to designing and sizing detailed cloud deployments on proprietary infrastructure  to selecting fit-for-purpose hardware solutions for your workloads and we’ve built exciting solutions for Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems and others.  Whatever your technology, contact us and see if we can build something to help mobilize your organization.

We’re pleased to announce that we have released a software as a service (SaaS) version of our Design Studio product.  We figured that we spend enough time advising our clients about the virtues of the cloud; it was time to exploit them ourselves.  The tool includes three of the best features from the desktop version of Design Studio (now being called Design Studio Classic).

1. Integration Services – This feature allows you to load raw discovery data from products like BMC ADDM into the tool.  This allows Adaptivity’s  built-in intelligence access to more information on your data center so we can provide you with more powerful and useful blueprints.
2. Integration Utilities – This feature helps you manage and augment the importation of your discovery data using proprietary algorithms to notice patterns and similarities in your data.
3. Blueprint on Demand – This feature allows you to create a custom set of blueprints from your Design Studio data.  Not only can you limit which blueprints you create, but what portion of the data appears in them.  Imagine being able to show an application owner a detailed blueprint for just his application.

If you’d like a demo of the new SaaS Design Studio or more information, please watch for updates on the blog or let us know.

This brings the number of industry profile templates packaged with IT Planning Studio to seven.

• Capital Markets
• Retail Banking
• Logistics
• Government Social Services
• Government Common Services
• Education
• Manufacturing

How many of you EAs out there have struggled or are struggling with EA implementations?  It’s challenging and we know that far too many Enterprise Architecture implementations stall when it comes to rolling it out beyond a small IT organization.  One of the key elements in structuring an effective EA program is the elusive Business Reference Architecture and getting the business to buy in; the latter being the most difficult to attain unless you have a solid value proposition to offer your business leads.  Adaptivity can help you build that Business Architecture and lay the foundation for the value proposition you can deliver to your business leads.  Our approach is simple and it starts with using our IT Planning Studio to build the “Business Value Chain” and application portfolio alignment.  The BVC exposes your business structure in an easily consumable and visual rendering, while the application portfolio alignment shows you how all your applications and IT assets line up to support the business.  Linking the BVC and the application portfolio alignment together is a matter of building out the associated process workflow and integrating the applications services that support that workflow (you do that part; we can help with the application services integration).  The result of this approach is a visual and traceable alignment between the business and IT that can be easily leveraged in building out and supporting an EA implementation, not to mention visualizing potential business risks and impacts associated with addressing compliance and regulatory requirements, data center transformation initiatives or moving to the cloud.

At a minimum, a typical engagement entails:

1. Creating a business value chain structure and aligning the associated application portfolio to support your business architecture development.  At Adaptivity, we’ve developed a framework for codifying business IT requirements in an easily consumable manner; it’s even baked in to several of our tools.  Leveraging these tools and our expertise, an Adaptivity consultant will guide your IT and business stakeholders through the creation of the business architecture through a small set of workshops and interviews.
2. That insight into the business becomes more valuable when you can see how your applications and infrastructure provide the services to your business to keep it running.  Our Blueprint as a Service (BPaaS) can turn your application portfolio and supporting infrastructure into a visual and sustainable rendering that shows you exactly what IT assets supports each part of your business – visibility and traceability is the key.  Our consultants facilitate this by helping you map your applications to the business architecture.  We can then highlight important key performance indicators (KPIs) and quality of experience attributes for each application.  When you look at this data, together you can see the number of applications each business unit is using and potential overlaps in functionality.
3. For some of our clients, this isn’t a deep enough integration between business and IT.  For them we can go a level deeper and provide a mapping between the application and the workflow of the business process it supports.

Some of our clients have been able to make their way through this business architecture and application inventory/mapping exercise only using interviews.  Others, thanks to mergers and acquisitions or recent personnel changes, don’t have a fully reliable list of applications to start with; we can help with that too.

For many of our clients this business alignment and application rationalization exercise has been the kick-start that they needed to understand their business and their applications and now they’re ready to start making sure their infrastructure architecture is also aligned.

• Complete inventory and dependency mapping for target environment
• Provide a baseline for developing migration move groups, roadmap and timeline
• Assess and validate data center migration impacts to the business and technology teams involved
• Assist solution architects and infrastructure operations in defining and documenting application environments
• Provide observations and recommendations based on discovery and blueprinting activity: impacts, risks, mitigation
• Complete 266 blueprint deliverables in 16 weeks

As is typical with these types of projects, Adaptivity helped the large bank through a three-step process.

1. Objectives Workshop – We started with an objectives workshop. Discovery tools are powerful and can be used to do a great deal of different things, it’s important that we know what you want to learn and that we discuss who will give us the ability to find it.  At this bank we learned about their plans for migration, the type of concerns they had and the risks they were trying to mitigate.
2. Deploy and Discover – We provided the project management and resources necessary to go through the sometimes difficult task of deploying agents and collecting data without risking performance or availability in production.
3. Analyze and Blueprint – Our team leveraged our Design Studio tool and experience to produce useful blueprints in significantly less time than most large consulting firms.

When the project was complete we had met all of the customer’s objectives. In fact, we exceeded them in many ways, including finishing the project on time, allowing the client to begin the planning phase of their migration on schedule (it had been nearly a month behind schedule). We also provided this client with an export of the data discovered so that they could start their own internal CMDB. In the end Adaptivity provided the client with the following outputs:

• 266 Infrastructure Deployment Diagrams depicting the logical and physical deployment architecture for each application. Each diagram breaks down and displays web, application and data tiers.
• 266 Application Interaction Diagrams representing the dependencies for each application. This allowed the client to understand the implications of moving each application.
• 10 Estate View Diagrams representing the interaction of all core and dependent applications related to a specific line of business (LOB).

The success this firm had with our Design Studio and Blueprinting as a Service (BPaaS) doesn’t have to be unique to them. Contact us to meet the people and see the technologies that made this all possible.

This press releases announces the new partnership of Adaptivity and Fujitsu!

Charlotte, NC – April 21, 2011 – Adaptivity, The IT Blueprint Company, which provides IT blueprinting services and software to enable intelligent decisions across the infrastructure design, build and deployment lifecycles, announced today that Fujitsu America has entered into an OEM agreement for the Adaptivity Design Studio to create tailored blueprints for public and private clouds featuring Fujitsu hardware and software products.

By creating an OEM licensed version of Adaptivity’s Design Studio and Cloud Decision Support Wizard, Fujitsu addresses both the design of private enterprise cloud solutions as well as their public cloud offerings codified in an IT blueprint on a global basis.

“Working with Adaptivity to tailor their IT Design Studio tool enables Fujitsu to quickly identify and assess our customers’ application and infrastructure requirements to design optimized cloud solutions. These solutions will deliver the ROI and productivity our customers expect from a global leader in cloud offerings,” said Jody Little, VP Cloud Portfolio Management and Marketing at Fujitsu America.

Adaptivity’s Design Studio provides the IT design precision and automation to create tailored IT blueprints and prescriptive roadmaps that integrate the Fujitsu architecture, engineering and system operations into business optimized IT designs. The IT Design Studio is an extensible platform that enables organizations to leverage their knowledge capital in the form of best practices, enterprise architecture standards and IT rules.

“Adaptivity is proud to be partnering with a world class company like Fujitsu. They are a leader inhelping enterprises navigate the ever increasing complexities and challenges present in the IT market today,” said George Mackie CEO of Adaptivity. “Together our technology will help Fujitsu enhance their customers’ engagement experience and rapidly deliver value through optimized cloud IT blueprint designs.”

About Adaptivity

Adaptivity was founded in 2007 to help companies address the complexities associated with IT design and implementation. Adaptivity’s Blueprint 4IT Lifecycle Suite enables intelligent IT design decisions to be integrated into repeatable actions across the technology build and deployment lifecycle. This is accomplished by providing access to a content rich repository consisting of a blueprint library, knowledge database and data contributions from ecosystem partners.

Blueprint 4IT Lifecycle Suite enables companies to plan and implement with the precision needed to ensure desired system outcomes are achieved. Whether seeking to rationalize an IT portfolio or design a cloud program companies use our tailored blueprints to optimize legacy infrastructure operations and accelerate the delivery of new IT services.

Fujitsu is a trademark or registered trademark of Fujitsu Limited in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks and product names are the property of their respective owners.

At Adaptivity we set out to help our clients model workloads by creating a model of the business that’s as useful as it is simple.  Now, it is one of the most powerful features within IT Planning Studio.  We established two primary goals when we built the business modeling aspect of IT Planning Studio.  The first goal was to make it simple enough that a model could be created in a reasonable amount of time and easily maintained.  Too many business architectures are the result of an army of consultants and become shelf-ware because the IT organization does not have the resources to maintain them.  Second, we sought to maximize the model’s usefulness in making decisions about data, application and infrastructure architectures.  After all, what good is a model of IT’s customer (the business) if it provides no insight or guidance on how IT can address the business’ needs?

Building out the business model is a three-step process using IT Planning Studio.

1. Select an Industry Template to start from.  At the bottom of the IT Planning Studio Home Screen is the section for “Create New Model”.  You will need to name your model and then you can select a Pre-defined Industry.  Adaptivity provides several different templates for industries from banking to logistics.    If you don t find one that you think would be appropriate for your industry, simply select “User Defined” and you ll get a blank form to build from.  Once you click “Create New” you ll be asked to enter a brief description before continuing.
   

   Selecting an Industry Template in IT Planning Studio

2. Define the BVC.  This will take you to the “Define Business Map” screen.  This is where the business model is created.  The first level that you need to consider is the Business Value Chain (BVC).  This means you need to define the business functions and business activities that your company is involved in.  For example, in the Capital Markets industry template there are five business functions; Sales, Trading, Operations, Risk and Reporting.  Each of these business functions has several activities that allow the function to be completed.  For example, the Sales Business Function involves Client Screening, Research and Client Relationship Management.  The template will have these prefilled, but, since  every organization is different, you will need to move functions and activities or create new ones using this easy SaaS tool.
   

   The IT Planning Studio BVC Editor

3. Describe the BVC.  Once you ve created a model of your business, it’s time to describe it in a way that the IT organization can use to facilitate decisions.  Adaptivity has created two ways to do this.  First, at the Business Function Level you can define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  These will help IT balance concerns such as cost reduction and reliability when making decisions about how to operate IT.  At the business activity level, there is a very detailed quality profile to fill in.  The quality profile exposes the business activity’s requirements around availability, communication, complexity, security, user interface, user, workload type, workload volume and data usage.  The business activity quality profile will help you understand information and application requirements for data and those applications that support the business activity.  You can modify KPIs by double-clicking the business function and selecting the “KPI” tab.  You can modify the business activity’s quality profile by double-clicking the business activity and then selecting the “Quality Profile” tab.
   

   Modifying a Business Activity's Quality Profile in IT Planning Studio

   

   Modifying a Business Function's KPIs in IT Planning Studio

Once you’ve built the business model in IT Planning Studio you can output blueprint sheets that depict the business.  You can also map your applications to the business model in order to rationalize the applications that you have or to look at the type of infrastructure or cloud deployment that the application is leveraging.