Building a capacity planning capability in line with business objectives  

Q Can you provide a little bit of background on Sumerian?

A Sumerian was founded in 2002 in Scotland, with the vision of applying predictive analytics to help its clients improve the performance and efficiency of their operational IT. We work with leading global enterprises across a range of industries to help them de-risk their future IT plans as well as reduce their IT costs by performing forward-thinking predictive capacity planning.
Q What are the key company milestones to date?
A Having been established 13 years ago, Sumerian’s traditional business model was focused on providing predictive analytics as a consultancy and managed service. Over the past few years it’s focused in its attention on developing a capacity planning application which applies advanced predictive analytics. In February of this year, it officially launched Capacity Planning as a Service (CPaaS), which allows Sumerian’s capacity planning application and expertise to be delivered as part of a comprehensive cloud-based service.
Q Who are the key company personnel?
A David Stevens became our CEO back in 2013, bringing with him a wealth of senior management and leadership experience as he spent the previous 8 years serving in various global and regional leadership roles at Investment Technology Group Inc. Michael Allen, our Chief Operating Officer (COO), joined Sumerian in 2003 heads up the team that applies predictive analytics and capacity modelling to gain clear insight into the IT operations and infrastructure at major international organisations.
Q IT capacity planning – what’s the big picture right now – what
are end users doing and how can they improve this?
A A lack of robust capacity planning capabilities is a big risk in the current landscape. If you go back far enough to the days of mainframe computing, capacity planning was a strong discipline because the mainframe resources needed to be shared. With the advent of the PC and server, we moved to distributed systems and it was relatively easy and cheap to just keep adding more servers, so capacity planning as a discipline dwindled away. The end result was server sprawl, with datacentres filling up quickly and consuming vast amounts of energy.
When virtualization came along, it was perceived as a method of ‘fixing the space and power constraint challenges’ without the need to re-invest in developing a strong capacity planning discipline. However, now the use of cloud and virtualization are becoming commonplace, IT operations and cost management are much more complex, resulting in an emerging need to evolve capacity planning disciplines again. However, the new dimensions of complexity in the IT estate requires a new approach to capacity planning – applying techniques and tools that can handle this complexity – such as predictive analytics.

Q What is it that Sumerian offers to help with IT capacity
planning?
A We offer predictive modelling: The ability to accurately assess the ‘what if’s’ and truly understand the impact of changes to a company’s IT estate and ultimately plan properly for those changes. For example, if you’re rolling out a new platform, CPaaS along with Sumerian’s dedicated and specialised data scientists will help you form an accurate model of your current and future capacity needs.
Q How does Sumerian help end users address the problem of
capacity issues?
A Sumerian is currently the only company within this space to offer CPaaS, and with it, its customers can choose the level of support that they require. As complexity of datacentre estates increases, getting data and mining it in a way that generates useful insight across multiple platforms is difficult. CPaaS enables a business to create a highly accurate model across its entire estate – covering both physical and virtual assets and all technology platforms.
Q In terms of modelling – both for growth and for changes/
upgrades – what does Sumerian offer?
A Sumerian’s CPaaS allows users to create an accurate Baseline model of their current environment and then use this as a basis to rapidly model multiple, often complex, change scenarios - whether that be a technology transformation, such as P2V or assessing the options between different hardware platforms, or modelling the impact of growth in business demand.
Q Similarly, how can Sumerian help with data centre
consolidation?
A If a business wants to integrate, for example, an acquired datacentre and/or rationalise its datacentre estate, Sumerian’s CPaaS allows them to accurately model and quantify their planned consolidation and ensure maximised cost savings. Our analytics can identify the optimal consolidation strategy to achieve a business’ cost-saving objectives and ensure ongoing service performance and availability. This service has saved some of our clients millions of pounds.
Q And with the Cloud?
A Cloud computing is very much on the forefront of the minds of many businesses at the moment, and outsourcing datacentres is a very popular method of reducing capital expenditure. The cloud provides organisations with many benefits including increased capacity, agility and flexibility, however their use has also resulted in a highly distributed IT estate, making it that much harder for IT operations managers to maintain good visibility and control.
A solution like CPaaS enables organisations to maintain visibility across their entire estate, whether physical or virtual, whether those resources are on-premise or in the cloud. When using a cloud service provider, a business normally has to trust their recommendations and reporting in terms of determining capacity requirements. CPaaS gets you the independent capacity planning insight you need, potentially leading to significant cost-savings in over-provisioning.
Q And, finally, with disaster recovery planning and testing?
A Reducing the risk to critical business services is a key part of any business’ capacity planning strategy. Sumerian offers businesses the ability to confidently test numerous disaster recovery scenarios and gain an improved understanding of their disaster recovery cost and risk profile.
With Sumerian Capacity Planner’s advanced modelling, a business can conduct an infrastructure walk-through of a disaster recovery event, and simulate a datacentre or hardware failure, and demonstrate its impact. This has already been demonstrated through a major public sector organisation that ensured that its technology refresh plans provided adequately for all likely disaster recovery scenarios. The modelling conducted actually lead the client to adapt its current disaster recovery failover plans too, to only failover critical applications – until the new hardware was deployed.
Q Presumably, the capacity planning is backed up by some kind of professional services/consultancy?
A One of Sumerian’s main selling points is that CPaaS is a highly flexible integrated service, where clients get access to an expert team of data scientists; highly specialised people who have years of working in IT operations. Businesses can choose the level of expert engagement that they require. In fact, all of our clients take some level of managed service as part of their CPaaS engagement, where Sumerian does some or all of the analysis and modelling, and the IT operations team can then focus on taking action and working with the business to deliver successful business outcomes.

Q Is the Sumerian Capacity Planner available in both ‘traditional’ software format and ‘as-a-Service’ as well?
A Yes, however we are not a part of the normal trend if you look at most companies operating in this sector, as they have generally come from an on-premise software background and are now trying to adapt their offerings to provide a SaaS option. Sumerian has evolved from a managed service provider, and our offering has been designed as CPaaS from the outset. A fully integrated cloud-based service, with SaaS at its heart.
Q How does the Sumerian technology integrate with other software packages, such as DCIM?
A DCIM generally looks at facilities infrastructure, rack space cooling, power etc., not the actual servers sitting in the datacentre. Whereas CPaaS looks at server metrics such as memory, CPU, disk etc. Therefore, CPaaS is complimentary to software packages such as DCIM, and indeed DCIM could provide a valuable data source for CPaaS
Q Who are Sumerian’s target customers?
A At the moment, most of our customers come from the banking sector, as well as pharmaceuticals and retail. This is not necessarily important though, as CPaaS can benefit any organisation with a complex IT infrastructure and IT intense business processes.
Q What is the company’s coverage to date – in terms of both the Channel and end user customers?
A One of our major plans for 2015 is to scale up our channel operations. We mainly work with large-scale global companies, for example Tier 1 banks.
Q Can you provide brief details of a customer success story or two?
A We are currently unable to name them for you, however I can give you the example of a global bank that wanted to improve the management of its operational risk and reduce IT operating costs by $3 million over two years.
The bank had already used Sumerian’s predictive analytics to drive reductions in FX trading application latency and to improve batch processing times. Sumerian delivered the service to the client in less than 12 weeks after the initial data was uploaded. By using Sumerian Forward Thinking analytics on a continual basis, the bank was able to decide whether current levels of operating risk were acceptable or not, and determine precisely when and where additional investment was required across its estate.
Within the first 6 months, the client had been able to reduce its exposure to operational risk by preventing a number of service outages that otherwise would have impacted the bank’s ability to process business. The bank reported nine occasions in which service outages were avoided as a result of Sumerian’s service.
Q What are Sumerian’s plans in terms of expanding the company’s product portfolio over the next 12 to 18 months?
A We are experts in what we do, and we plan to maintain our specialised focus in capacity planning. We are proud of our product, and we are always looking at ways to improve it. Soon we will be introducing a new feature enabling us to do a much richer application-level demand modelling.
Q What are the one or two pieces of advice you’d give to an end user looking to invest in capacity planning technology?
A My advice would be; don’t try to find a solitary ‘one solution solves everything’ tool, as this ideal is not only unrealistic, but irresponsible if you truly care about your business. A tool-kit approach makes much more sense in this space. Buying a software tool does not a great capacity planning function make - you need the right combination of people and processes too. . This is one of the major strengths of Sumerian’s CPaaS as it offers the flexibility and expert support, alongside a highly specialised product, that can help you to build up your capacity planning capability in line with your business objectives.