VMware IT Business Management

VMware offers a comprehensive, prescriptive approach–based on more than ten years of customer interactions–to transform IT into a business with complete visibility into its costs, services, service levels and areas for improvement. Using a defined methodology, VMware enables IT to optimize its cost, value, and perceived value to run IT as a business through five value drivers:

• Gain 360° visibility for fact-based decisions
• Optimize costs and services
• Communicate IT value in business language
• Manage business expectations
• Bring IT all together

Gain 360° Visibility for Fact-based Decisions

Gain unprecedented visibility and transparency into all of IT – across physical, virtual and cloud environments. By automatically tracking and processing IT cost and service data across your organization, ITBM dashboards provide a 360 degree view of what your IT services cost to deliver along with the service levels you are providing. This visibility enables IT to run like a business making fact-based decisions with:

• Complete visibility into all IT costs, spending and service levels using cost models to map IT spending to delivered IT services
• Automated process replacing spreadsheets, tribal knowledge and manual calculations with complete unit cost visibility and bills of IT usage
• Role-based dashboards for simpler, business priority based decision making

Optimize Costs and Services

Visibility into your costs and service levels means you can improve IT health by cutting costs in non-strategic or bloated areas while investing in innovation or growth areas in a fact-based, systematic way. Broad and deep benchmarking information across 20 industries and over 3500 metrics coupled with “what-if” analysis and forecasting capabilities make it easy to identify optimization opportunities. With VMware ITBM you’ll have access to:

• Benchmark-driven, cost-effective IT decisions
• Leading benchmark information across 20 industries and 3500 metrics
• A portfolio view of IT services, costs, trends, and TCO to speed decision making
• What-if analysis and forecasting capabilities to model IT decisions
• A digitized process and audit trail to end manual ad hoc spreadsheets and calculations

Communicate IT Value in Business Language

Some IT organizations talk about IT value as uptime, capacity, turnaround time or response time. Some communicate IT value in the language of the business (e.g., investment, ROI, service levels, NPV), backed by facts. VMware ITBM helps IT communicate in business language with deliverables including the Bill of IT, Bill of Operations and Service Performance reports. These reports change the nature of conversations as they:

• Show IT usage, costs, overages, and agreements
• Show SLA agreements in relation to performance reports
• Show IT value in business language for smarter IT decisions

Manage Business Expectations

Better IT drives a better business. Regardless of how strategic IT is to your business, managing business expectations is easier when a standard set of SLAs is jointly agreed upon by the business and IT. Automated workflows help manage these services across their lifecycle, while proactively engaging personnel resolve issues before they impact agreed upon service levels. And, these SLAs can be extended to your vendors (e.g., cloud service providers and outsourcers). Combining a common language with common metrics gives you the ability to:

• Show actual usage of services by business unit, P&L center, and geography
• Use SLAs, costs, and trends to manage services
• Proactive identify opportunities for new lower or higher cost services that would better meet the needs of the business
• Manage service costs and value over time to support innovation and growth

Bring IT All Together

Following the money is a great way to understand the IT supply chain and how IT delivers value to empower your business. By incorporating data from third party systems and VMware offerings including Chargeback Manager, VMware IT Business Management brings financial awareness and service quality excellence to your IT supply chain. Rather than have separate planning, reporting and execution functions, manage your IT supply chain as a unified process. Our comprehensive approach enables you to "follow the money" in the emerging world of cloud computing to:

• Link IT strategy to execution in a systematic way
• Make IT more agile with complete budget accountability
• Forecast KPI performance, credits, and earnbacks
• Ensure comprehensive IT-business alignment across the lifecycle of all IT activities
• Showcase your opportunity or superiority against your peers through benchmarks