Archive for the ‘Digital Fuel’ Category

Eleven years ago, on a rare snowy weekend in the ancient-modern city of Jerusalem, four dreamers– my three partners and myself — decided to start a business. Little did we know what it would take to transfer random ideas and mounds of passion into a flourishing organism called a company. Our vision was to create software products and services that would help organizations manage the business of IT. To create state-of-the-art software solutions that would transform the way people manage IT. We had the industrialist’s fervor for innovation, creation and success. We shared a belief that a business is much more than just making money: it is about the beating economic heart that drives human life. And thus Digital Fuel was born.

The business gradually acquired a life of its own, with hundreds of customers and thousands of people using our solutions, benefiting from our software and services. In time, we developed three market-leading product lines. Above all, we provided hundreds of families and individuals worldwide with economic prosperity and security, a place to experience, evolve and enjoy! Many of our employees joined us as fresh graduates and pursued their careers within Digital Fuel; many are now serving as executives and managers at other companies. Digital Fuel alumni have gone on to establish several new companies of their own, and a number of couples and families found their start at Digital Fuel as well! We shared ups and downs, excitement and disappointments, success and failure, birth and death, and lots and lots of fun. For all of this, we are very proud and thankful.

As this market became high priority and the consequent demand grew exponentially, it became clear that the best way to continue providing our customers with the best products and services would be to team up with a larger company.

I have chosen VMware to be the best home for Digital Fuel, on account of VMware’s unparalleled leadership position in providing cutting-edge IT Management solutions for the evolving cloud-based dynamic IT. Their current success, excellent products, widespread market reach, relevance to new IT, and primarily the quality of their team and plans for the future, all gave me strong confidence that this is the best place for myself, my team and our customers.

Digital Fuel is a strategic acquisition for VMware, as it extends from a vision of IT as a Service. VMware will continue to develop and evolve our solutions as a key element of its capabilities for managing the business of IT in the cloud era. Nothing can make me happier than the thought of 250,000 VMware customers using and receiving value from our solutions.

My team will continue to work under VMware, and I will personally stay on with VMware to ensure we continue doing what we do best, providing real value!

The synergies are great, and the opportunities are boundless.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all of the current and past Digital Fuel employees. I am humbled by the opportunity I’ve been awarded to lead such an amazing group of individuals – smart, innovative, passionate, dedicated, hardworking and most importantly, good people.

Yakov and Gilad, the best co-founders, who vowed to do whatever it took to make this business happen, have stuck to their word right up until this very moment when they are probably somewhere in the world meeting a customer. Regardless of title or compensation, they were there, working hard, smart and dedicated.

On this day I also want to remember our dear friend and partner, Benny Lehmann, without whom none of this would have been possible.

The future is here, and it looks better than ever!

There are these moments in life when you just sit back and smile with joy!

I had one last week.

We re-launched our Customer Advisory Board.

My team worked hard to prepare the online event. The agenda was to include a review of the up and coming amazing…phenomenal…great…. awesome….gorgeous… brilliant! version of our product.

(Credit for the superlatives goes to a guy named Steve Jobs):

And most importantly, we were there to listen, learn and get advice and direction from our customers.

It was amazing to have ACS, BASF, Cummins, Cisco, Deutsche Bank, Estee Lauder, First Horizon, Koch, Nationwide, Neiman Marcus, Starwood, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Volkswagen, and Walgreens stand up and introduce themselves and what they do with our product one after the other, with endless compliments and great feedback and ideas.

This is the essence of being an industrialist: creating products and services that people need, use and value!

Pure Joy! Try it.

The world of IT finance is changing. As we’re entering a new era of dynamic allocation, brought on by the rise of virtualization and cloud computing, Digital Fuel enables companies to allocate usage of cloud computing resources, and to track which application installed on top of an instance of a VMware virtual machine is active at any given time.

IT organizations can readily use the Digital Fuel models and templates to create an out-of-the-box experience that allows them to get started using Digital Fuel not only faster, but in a more meaningful way than other solutions.

Read more here: IT Business Edge

We are seeing a growing trend of companies post-virtualization looking to understand TCO and unit cost of IT services as well as show back and chargeback for these services – tasks that are tough in shared virtualized environments.

In this regard, I enjoyed reading Building a VMware Cost Model, posted by Martin Thompson on The ITAM Review.

It is one thing when we brief writers and get articles written about us. It is something else entirely when someone we don’t know and did not brief decides to write about what we do.

Long live the Web and Web Marketing!

Yesterday we launched a new solution atop our V6.3 platform of applications. This solution is focused on helping our customers manage their IT costs in the fast growing cloud world.

The basic concept is to bring out-of-the-box reports, dashboards, templates and data connectors, specifically targeted at a CIO that needs to manage multiple IT services based on multiple technical capabilities which she can receive from multiple alternatives, in-house or external, public or private.

Making the cost-and-value-effective choices, as well as ongoing tracking of TCO and Unit cost of these services, is what we are bringing to the table.

This is already gaining great traction. It seems like the concept that software is not only functionality, but also content that reflects best practices and know-how, is the right way to go. We have seen the same very positive response to our out-of-the-box content in our 6.3 version and it takes a big part of our future releases roadmap.

Some good coverage from the press:

Managing the Costs and Complexities of a Cloud-Based Infrastructure (Read Write Web).

I like the analogy to Nimsoft

Putting a Cost on Cloud Computing (IT Business Edge).

Digital Fuel Debuts IT Cloud Cost Management Software (TechCrunchIT)

Your feedback is welcome!

Follow us all the way up to the CIO Executive Summit NYC:

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 7:30am – 6:00pm
New York Marriott Marquis
1535 Broadway
New York, NY 10036

Register here.

And to Forrester’s IT Forum 2010, Las Vegas:

THE BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION: MAKING IT REAL
MAY 26-28, 2010 • THE PALAZZO • LAS VEGAS, NEV.
The Palazzo Resort Hotel Casino
3325 Las Vegas Blvd. South
Las Vegas, NV 89109

Register here.

It is working! Once again, we have overachieved our monthly new ARR (Annual Recurring Revenues) and our new SaaS customers goals. We’ve added customers such as Cisco, Hospira, First Horizon, Telus, SeaPass and many others to the mix.

There’s nothing that I like more than new customers using new solutions. The growth is in both of our traditional markets – the first is the core enterprises who are looking to manage cost and performance of internal IT as well as cost and performance of outsourcing and cloud providers.

The second market is MSP’s and Cloud Service Providers looking to manage the cost and performance of services they deliver to the enterprise. Am I an arms dealer, selling to both sides? I’m selling to both sides but not arms!

Service providers manage multiple customers while enterprises manage multiple vendors and Bu’s. The solutions we provide for IBM, Cisco Services, Siemens, TELUS, O2, Telefonica, Capgemini, PWC, Unisys, Xerox, Steria, Computacenter, Swiss Post, SciSys and other service providers are very different than the solutions we run for Cisco IT, Deutsche Bank, Capital One, Hospira, Koch Industries, ThermoFisher, P&G, Nationwide, BASF and VW – even if they receive services from one of the service providers who use our solution.

So yes, we provide unique value to each side. That is one of the secrets of our business!

I’m on my way to Frankfurt for some prospect meetings. There’s nothing I love more than that, except for my wife and daughters, obviously.

I got a gift from my travel agent – a guide of museums in cities across the world. Well, I was never big on art, but in the last few years I started getting into it so I will go visit the STADELSCHES KUNSTINSTITUT UND STADTISCHE GALERIE after the meetings in Frankfurt.

I often hear from customers, when talking about IT Cost budgeting and planning or IT demand management, that it is more art than science. Since I don’t think I will find any IT budgets displayed in STADELSCHES KUNSTINSTITUT UND STADTISCHE GALERIE, it is probably a good idea to share with you how IT Budgeting and Planning or IT Demand Management can become a science. It is very simple, if you know:

1. What IT services or “capabilities” you provide.
2. What are the detailed cost models of the services you provide.
3. Key historical metrics: Volume of a specific IT capability per revenue, per HC, per customer, per transactions etc. all by organization, by region, and so on.
4. Historical unit cost per IT capability and how it trends based on value.
5. Business Units, business objectives for the coming year, growth in HC, revenues, transactions etc.

Take all of this, mix it up, throw it on a canvas and you have a great budget…oops ART.
Just joking.

With all of the above you can truly accurately prepare a good, detailed IT budget.

I have seen it happen at many companies, Nationwide, Koch Industries, Volkswagen, Cummins engines, UBS, P&G and many others. Sounds like a lot of work? Well, some create amazing spreadsheets and some use a system – it’s your choice.

Had a great conversation the other day with Milind Govekar at Gartner. Conversations with him are always a pleasure – he knows the industry and is exposed to tons of customers, which obviously brings lost of value to me. OK, enough with this – I am losing credibility promoting Gartner.

Millinad nicely put it that at the heart of what my company does, IT Cost and IT Financial management, is usage-based IT Cost allocation.

At the core of it is the fact that as IT becomes more centralized and based on shared and virtualized resources, one must easily allocate costs based on actual usage. Why? Simply because if you can’t do that, then you can’t accurately and predictably know your operating costs and therefore your P&L reporting is going to be all wrong, inconsistent, unjustifiable and unpredictable and that is simply unacceptable.

I love those moments when you have a great revelation in understanding something. I had one of those today.

For some time now we’ve been trying to figure out why Business Unit Visibility into IT Cost, or IT cost show back, is one of the main drivers for our business.

We are of course aware of the opportunity to optimize IT costs by gaining visibility. We also know that visibility to business units creates responsibility and ownership over IT spend – we have seen it happen many times with our customers who are using our IT Cost Management solutions.

But there was something else we were unaware of. The type of functionality our customers were looking for – what-if analysis, IT forecasting, re-forecasting – these all drove us to feel there was something additional, a need of our customers that we were missing.

Well we found it.

Profitability Predictability!

IT is highly unpredictable when not managed correctly. IT spend is a small but a growing part of operating costs, and it is the most unpredictable part. The result: IT is an area of risk and surprises for business units who must be able to predict their profitability.

This core need of a Business Unit for predictability is driving the need for easy-to-use IT cost transparency solutions and analysis, such as those offered by Digital Fuel.

I love it when it all becomes clear!