V center operations competitive marketing presentation

© 2010 VMware Inc. All rights reserved
Confidential
vCenter Operations Positioning & Competition
Differentiating VMware’s Real-Time Performance Management Approach

2 VMware confidential – internal use only
Competition
 Competition is split into two camps:
• “Big 4” ITOM
• Performance Analytics Vendors (direct competitors to vCenter Operations -
discussed on next page)
 Big 4 ITOM vendors
• General
• Lots of marketing/positioning – little actual product
• IBM
• Tivoli Performance Analyzer – offline trending and reporting
• IBM ITM – simple dynamic baselining, metric-based alerting
• HP
• HP Problem isolation – simple baselining/rules/workflow, requires detailed topology
• CA
• CA NetQos – discussed on next page
• BMC
• Proactivenet – discussed on next page

Competitive Landscape – Performance Analytics (Faux Quadrant!)
Challengers Leaders
Abilitytoexecute
Completeness of vision
Niche Players Visionaries
Cirba
Akorri
BMC
(ProactiveNet) VMware
(vCenter Operations)
Netuitive
BMC’s size provides
Proactivenet with an
advantage in terms of
execution. Behind in
analytics (left off Gartner
Cool Vendor)
Focus on use case
around storage and
virtualization I/O with
queuing theory-based
algorithms geared
towards this purpose Rules/utilization driven
analytics with focus on
virtualization capacity
planning. Moving into
Operations
Model-driven analytics
limited to certain
technology silos and
metrics. Currently
focused on
virtualization
Data agnostic self-learning
analytics engine capable of
modeling any data type is
vCenter Operations’s
competitive advantage
CA (NetQos)
Simple base-lining/reporting.
No correlation. Relies on
network data it collects

vCenter Operations Technology Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
 Industry’s best fundamental dynamic
thresholding and anomaly detection
 Completely data agnostic
 Completely learning-based analytics
 No static models
 Adapts to change better than any
performance analytics solution
 Adapts in real time – no models or
rules to change
 Excellent cross-silo correlation and
analysis
 Customizable user interface
applicable across all Operations roles
 Highest scalability of any performance
analytics solution
Weaknesses
 Limited adapter set
 No CA, BMC
 Adapting to large existing monitoring
infrastructures can be time-
consuming
 Adapter configuration
 Takes time for accurate learning
 Netuitive has faster accurate
results due to models
 Customizable interface – double-
edged sword
 Services (or training) intensive to
accommodate all roles
 Steep operationalization curve
 Proactive posture is often a
departure from standard Ops
processes

Where We Win / Where They Win
Where we win
 Application or service centric
opportunities, where cross-silo
correlation and analysis is required
 Monitoring Infrastructure is multi-
vendor with multiple silo’d tools
 Prospect implemented a Big 4
“Manager of Managers” or other 2nd
Generation solution that failed
 Other constituents require visibility
besides Operations (eg, Executives,
Application Owners, internal/external
Customers, etc)
Where they win
 Only interested in eliminating hard
threshold setting for alerting
 Single silo opportunities (eg, “Server
Team”)
 Buy into “Best Practices” model-
based approach
 We are late to opportunity (Competitor
has set vision)
 Customer has very limited monitoring
in place
 “1st / 2nd Generation Tool” message
is viewed as adequate

Overcoming Challenges
Weaknesses
 To Counter “too few” adapters
 VC should be in every oppt, insist it be a part
of any POC
 vCenter Operations’s “General SQL Loader”
can be used to pull from any monitoring tool
that has a RDBMS backend, only need a tool
SME
 To Counter Takes time for accurate learning
 Stress the importance of increasing accuracy
of vCenter Operations (under ever-changing
environments and as cyclical behavior is
learned), vs. analytic “plateau” reached soon
after alternative products are implemented
 To Counter double-edged sword customizable
Dashboards
 Leverage OTB Dashboard Templates and
vCenter Operations Best-practices
 To Counter Steep operationalization curve
 Avoid deployment plans that “boil the ocean”.
Target a handful of critical applications;
usually the customers “best and brightest”
know the most about these apps
Where they win
 To Counter need to “eliminate hard threshold
reliance”
 Stress vCenter Operations’s industry leading
DT competitive algorithms, and
 limits of metric-centric alarming
 To Counter Single silo opportunities
 Stress vCenter Operations’s universal
approach which simultaneously supports
application-centric and well as component-
centric analysis/alerting
 To Counter “Best Practices” model-based
approach
 Stress limits to the applicability of model-
based tools – dynamic environment, custom
applications, etc.
 If you are late to opportunity, you will have to work
higher up the organization
 Other vendors are likely to be silo-ed due to
their product limitations
 Customer has very limited monitoring in place
 Introduce VMware complimentary products:
Hyperic, AppSpeed, Virtual Center;
 Stress how customers benefit from analyzing
existing tools’ data regardless of perceived
incompleteness

Target Customer Summary
Customer Profiles
 Ideal
 Large Apps/Services mission critical for revenue
 Large Enterprise
 Large Online presence
 Financial services
 Healthcare
 Good
 Medium to large enterprise with a strong dependency on applications/services
 Government
 Manufacturing
 Retail
 Watch out for
 “Single Vendor Solution” companies
 Avoid
 Small enterprises with little or no monitoring

Alive Enterprise Value Proposition – By Role
Role Potential Pains Reason
CIO
• Increasing labor costs to manage performance
• End user customers frustrated with system
performance
• Blindsided by performance issues with mission
critical applications
• Increasing complexity and lack of
automation
• Existing tools cannot provide proactive
alerting to building problems
VP of
Operations
• Servers and network 99.999% available, yet
performance problems persist
• Root cause determination costly and time-
consuming
• No real-time understanding of performance
• Existing monitoring tools do not help
with performance problems
• Time-consuming manual effort
required in problem solving
VP of
Infrastructure
• VM environment blamed whenever a virtualized
app misbehaves
• No way to prove “It’s not me”
• Team spends too much time troubleshooting
performance application issues
• Inability to isolate performance problems
to silo of technology where it originated
• Existing monitoring tools do not help with
performance problems
• Time-consuming manual effort required
in problem solving
Application
Owner
• Unable to get to the root cause of performance
problems
• No common language for communicating about
performance across technology silos
• No real-time view of application performance
• Time-consuming manual effort required
in problem solving
• Silo’d monitoring solutions not integrated
and data not holistically analyzed
VM/System
Administrator
• Too many alerts
• Too much time spent managing hard thresholds
• Cannot adapt to change in real-time
• Hard threshold-based alerting is
impossible to use and manage in today’s
IT environment

9 Confidential
Identifying Opportunities
 Company should have a number of large, (25+ server)
heterogeneous, multi-tier, custom-developed, mission critical
applications.
– Best candidates have larger (100+ server) applications that are
customer facing, are high visibility to executives and/or have
penalties associated with downtime/slowdowns. Financials and
other companies with large online presence are prime candidates.
 These applications have re-occurring slowdowns and outages
that come without warning from their existing monitoring solutions
- end users are the first to notice and call in to complain.
 These applications have identified technical and business
"owners" responsible for the performance, availability and
revenue generation of the applications.

10 Confidential
Identifying Opportunities (cont.)
 Monitoring is comprehensive, covering many technology silos
– (e.g., network, server, application, middleware, user experience and
business performance data are readily available.
– Even better is the company keeps 30-90 days of historical
monitoring data for each technology silo (makes POCs easy and
highly successful).
 Company is forward thinking on the technology front and we can
identify a champion who is willing to sponsor this technology to
make a name for himself as a cost cutter or as an individual who
revolutionized how the company manages mission critical
applications and services.
 Company has an existing, funded initiative for a "next generation
data center" or "proactive/predictive monitoring".
 A company with all of these qualifications would be the perfect
candidate. Of course, we sell to companies with just a few of
these characteristics.

11 Confidential
Questions to Consider
• How many physical/virtual servers are in your organization?
• What tools do you currently use for monitoring your infrastructure and
applications?
• Do you have a view of real-time performance for your applications, and
infrastructure?
 Even though you have monitoring tools in place, do you still experience
application slowdowns and outages without warning?
 Do your monitoring tools isolate the probable root causes of
performance problems? If not, can you always identify the root cause of
performance problems with manual effort?
 Do you learn of performance problems from end users first?
 Have you had re-occurring performance brownouts?
 Does solving performance problems require “all hands on deck” bridge
calls?

12 Confidential
VMware vCenter Operations Competition - Netuitive
Vendor: Netuitive
Products: SI, SI For VMware, Service Analyzer (SA)
Description: SI is Netuitive’s analytics product for systems. It provides basic dynamic thresholding
and anomaly detection for devices. SI for VMware does the same for virtual environments. Service
Analyzer provides analytics for services.
Weaknesses: Netuitive products are limited to pre-defined IT environments because their analysis
is template-based. Their analysis is also limited to a small number of pre-defined metrics and is
based on pre-defined KPIs. Their GUI is static and targeted at a limited set of users. The SA product
only has rules to correlate inter-system anomalies. We have not seen it in the field and our latest info
about it says it simply doesn’t work
VMware Alternative: VMware vC Ops’ analysis is completely data agnostic and is not limited to
pre-defined templates or KPIs. vC Ops can scale to analysis of millions of metrics in real time. The vC
Ops GUI can be customized for any constituent, from business users, to IT Operations silo owners, to
the CIO.

13 Confidential
VMware vCenter Operations Competition – IBM/Tivoli
Vendor: IBM
Products: Tivoli Performance Analyzer
Description: TPA is IBM’s ONLY product that does performance analysis. It is focused solely on
system/OS. Other Tivoli products and modules (in the Application, Storage and Network space) have
no performance analytics, but have reporting, threshold-based alerting, etc.
Weaknesses: Since TPA is limited to systems, the other silos do not have any analysis. The nature
of analytics in TPA is rudimentary baselines (on single metrics) and rules that correlate them. TPA is
also limited to the scalability of ITM, which is an order of magnitude LESS that vCenter Operations
VMware Alternative: VMware vCenter Operations’s analysis is completely data agnostic and is
not limited to pre-defined templates or KPIs. vCenter Operations can scale to analysis of millions of
metrics in real time. The vCenter Operations GUI can be customized for any constituent, from
business users, to IT Operations silo owners, to the CIO.

14 Confidential
VMware vCenter Operations Competition - CA
Vendor: CA
Products: CA eHealth, CA Spectrum, CA Unicenter, CA Wily
Description: CA’s products above focus on network, server and applications. Their monitoring
coverage is very broad. They have robust analytics in Spectrum and good rule-based framework in
Unicenter. eHealth has rudimentary baselining capabilities, which allow it to alert on single metric
violations. However, CA doesn’t have any performance analytics capability beyond that, and
Unicenter’s rules framework is used to correlate failures.
Weaknesses: eHealth is the primary competitor to vCenter Operations, but it is more b/c of CA’s
excellent marketing. eHealth is truly a network-only reporting product with very basic baselining.
When it comes to managing application performance holistically, CA has no answer

15 Confidential
VMware/vCenter Operations Competition - HP
Vendor: HP
Products: HP Problem Isolation (PI)
Description: HP has a broad monitoring coverage, but only one analysis engine, HP PI. This
module is only applicable to HP BAC. The engine has basic baselining and some rules on top of it. It
also allows a user to troubleshoot a performance problem in a step-by-step workflow. The conclusions
are all made by the user!
Weaknesses: The level of analytics is very low and requires skilled operators to interpret what
they see when following the process. The process is actually hiding under the cover the fact that HP
PI relies on accurate and timely topology info (ideally, coming from uCMDB), which make deployment
and relevancy much more difficult. Good marketing is covering this up effectively!

16 Confidential
VMware/vCenter Operations Competition -
BMC
Vendor: BMC
Products: BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management
Description: The product is based on the acquisition of ProactiveNet. It uses BMC’s system and
application monitoring to perform single- and multi-metric analysis, with some predictive
capabilities. It does requite the deployment of BMC’s agents, and its overall strength of analysis is
similar to Netuitive’s at best.
Weaknesses: Highly reliant on BMC’s own monitoring. Clever marketing hides the fact that the
alerts generated by the tool have to be fed to BMC’s BSM components, which in turn requires some
rules to process them.

17 Confidential
Further Reading
What questions should customers ask 1st & 2nd generation
platform vendors?

18 Confidential
What questions should the customer ask other vendors?
“One of our most important applications is a custom-designed service with many
hundreds of individual servers grouped into many arbitrary sub-groupings, with an
accompanying series of Batch Jobs. For these types of applications that don’t follow
classic n-tiered architectures, how would the alternative product’s analytics predict a
problem for such an application?
Complex customized applications without well mapped topologies are outside
the realm of the big framework vendors – unless it is accompanied with
heavy PS work.
Watch out for these answers: “We will be working with you to best
understand…” or “Our ‘best practices’ allow us to jump start… “ or “With
a CMDB you will be able to…”

19 Confidential
Module 1.8 – Competitive Review
“We have these datasets available for real-time exploitation: (describe various home-
grown and 3rd party monitoring tools in use). Does your product suite analyze and
correlate each of these data types as a “system”, as opposed to a silo-ed perspective?
Does this include Business data? How about Batch data? Specifically, which of your
products do that?”
Could they leverage all forms of data holistically – OS, application, network,
business data, batch data, etc?
Watch out for these answers : “We have multiple products that do this…” (i.e.,
it may not be a holistic analysis even if visualized on a single pane)

20 Confidential
“Given your products’ analytical capabilities – what techniques do they use to generate
preemptive Alerts? Do they for instance use Templates or Best Practices to determine
which alarms are important to look at?”
Second generation monitoring tools employ alarm correlation techniques
and/or simple metric hard-threshold or dynamic baselining – which, by their
very nature, attempt to use best practices about the type of application, and
simplistic assumptions about the data behavior in order to best determine
alarm filtering rules. vCenter Operations on the other hand is a self-learning,
probabilistic solution that offers system-level Smart Alerting that does not
assume any pre-conceived notions about the type of application or data

21 Confidential
"Root-Cause Analysis" (or Determination or Isolation) is a term used practically by
everyone in the IT management space. Can you describe, step-by-step, how this is
accomplished with your product and whether this is completely and permanently
WITHOUT any user input of any sort (rules, thresholds, CMDB population, etc.)?
Often alternative products claim to perform RCA. However, they are typically
relying on a greater or lesser amount of manual work (PS writing rules) that
needs to be customized for every situation. What’s more, RCA is typically NOT
performed across silos. vCenter Operations's approach is (a) FULLY
automatic, (b) Cross-silo, as a significant benefit from being data-agnostic,
and (c) "resistant" to changes in the IT or Business environment, as the
learning and RCA algorithms automatically adjust to these changes.

22 Confidential
“Can your products do dynamic “Baselining” of data? If so, what products do this? What
types of data can be baselined in this way? Can Batch data also be baselined? How
about Business Data?”
Many vendors suggest they do Dynamic Baselining (may be called Dynamic
Thresholding, etc) but it is not entirely clear if this is limited to specific
product/silos (e.g., Network-only data, or OS-level data etc.). Also, it is
typically not clear what data behavior patterns can be baselined with their
algorithms – linear, binary, discrete, cyclical, seasonal, sparse, etc.

23 Confidential
“When it comes to scalability, what are the sizing and capacity upper bounds of your
analysis solution in the following dimensions: (a) Number of metrics they can process with
a given monitoring interval from a single analysis server, (b) Size and number of machines
required to do that, (c) Amount of PS work required to deploy, and (d) Amount of PS work
required to maintain?”
vCenter Operations can analyze millions of metrics, collected every 5 minutes,
from a single mid-range server. These millions of metrics could be about
many different applications or even for a single large application. The
deployment requires a few days of PS and the ongoing cost of maintenance is
ZERO.

24 Confidential
“There is so much change happening in our environment, how does your product
compensate for this high degree of change? Will I get flooded with Alerts when change
occurs?”
You are likely to hear that the alternative product relies on a full CMDB
deployment, or the re-work of “templates” or “rules”. What this means is that
the alternative product is not a true learning system, and still requires a
detailed understanding of both topology and change management processes
so as not to be flooded with alerts, or heavy PS (re-)work. This can be both a
product and a process project! Speaks to Total Cost of Ownership and time
to value. Furthermore, the accuracy of CMDBs is suspect, at best; inaccurate
CMDBs result in inaccurate analysis or complex, manual rules to overcome
that.

25 Confidential
“How do users, managers and executives collaborate in consuming the analysis resulting
from your product? Is there a single pane of glass that all can consume WITHOUT any
coding for customization of various, different User Interfaces?”
vCenter Operations leverages the latest in Web 2.0 techniques to provide a
rich, flexible, and collaborative visual experience. This is available under
standard role-based access and control (RBAC), and all with GUI-based
personalization.

26 Confidential
Dealing with Customer Objections

27 Confidential
Consider these aspects when responding to objections:
 What assessment can you make about the customer’s Performance
Management Maturity Level?
 This will be important to understand as much as possible because you’ll want
to tailor your replies accordingly… e.g., don’t spend any time describing
vCenter Operations’s advanced Metric and Alarm Correlation if the customer
is at Level 1 or 2.
 What tools are in use currently, or if this is a competitive opportunity,
what tools are being considered? Are the current or considered tools
1st Generation or 2nd Gen tools?
 This is critically important to understand so you know how to contrast
vCenter Operations.
• If compared/competing against 1st Gen tools: vCenter Operations’s
automated, sophisticated Dynamic Thresholds and Health Scores will be a
huge differentiator, as will the unified Dashboard views.
• If compared/competing against 2nd Gen tools: It is important to stress the
variety of DT algorithms and the vendor and data neutrality of vCenter
Operations’s approach… this makes vCenter Operations universally
applicable regardless of a customers size, heterogeneity, or complexity.

28 Confidential
“I already have monitoring, why do I need more?”
 Of course, you want to stress that vCenter Operations is not a monitoring tool. But
having said that, understanding what existing monitoring tools are will give you the ability
to understand what vCenter Operations does differently from those tools, to ask what
those tools lack, and to question the prospect on those shortcomings. It is also important
to appreciate that some “laser” tools are actually doing things that vCenter Operations
doesn’t do (e.g.: Wily does a deep dive into the J2EE space at the bean and method
level). This is a perfect time to let the prospect know that vCenter Operations is not a
replacement for those laser tools but an indicator that a laser tool should be used when
we find that there’s a problem in that given area.
 Prospect: “I don’t need your tool because I have Wily (or NetQoS) to tell me when I have
application problems.”
 Response: “Having Wily is great when there’s actually a problem in the application space
however; Wily will only show you the traffic coming into the application, the details about
the application and the exit points to the backend databases. If there’s a problem
anywhere else in the service delivery path, you’ll be blind to those problems. With
vCenter Operations, we can manage everything from the firewall back including the
underlying network infrastructure and all the components that make up the service. Also,
by understanding what is normal by time of the day and day of the week, you’ll have
advanced and objective insight as to when problems are starting to occur.”
 Most people when probed will also tell you that they have a plethora of monitoring tools
yet they still have a hard time solving issues. Remember, it only takes a small amount of
time to fix problems, it is finding the problem that takes a long time, and finding it while
customers are complaining is painful!

29 Confidential
“My problems only occur in the X area, and we already have a tool for
that.”
 (X can be replaced by web servers, application servers, database servers,
network, etc.)
 Again, this is a prime opportunity to point out that we are not a monitoring tool
but an analytical correlation engine that provides insight into the entire service
delivery path and provides not just a bunch of metrics but the ability to
understand how things are performing from the end-users perspective as well as
understanding normal performance for the entire service delivery path. This is
brought together within one single pane of glass and not spread out across
different consoles from the disparate tools that typical IT infrastructures use -
validating that this is what they have in their environment solidifies your position
at this point as well. Again, asking questions to qualify what the real problem is
will probably uncover the fact that they already have a bunch of tools and they
are afraid of taking on the management of another tool.

30 Confidential
“I think your tool is great but I don’t have any budget for another monitoring
tool.”
 Remember vCenter Operations is NOT a monitoring tool - asking questions is
the most powerful thing for you to do when confronted with an objection. Here
ask, “What you are wondering is, 'Is it worth it to change my budget?' That's the
real question, isn't it?” Also, remind the prospect that vCenter Operations is so
much more then ‘another monitoring tool’ - vCenter Operations is an Analytics
solution. vCenter Operations takes raw monitoring data and turns it into
actionable information by letting you understand the health of your enterprise
through the understanding of what normal performance is of each and every
metric, server/device, silo, application, business service, data center, etc.
 Also sell the fact that vCenter Operations can actually boost the value of their
sunk-in investments in monitoring, finally achieving in the area of ‘performance
management’ what these tools have been able to achieve for ‘availability
management’. Once vCenter Operations is deployed and providing its value in a
few short weeks, it will become very clear to the customer that in fact, their
monitoring landscape, and its ability to collect raw performance data, is very
much a commodity and with a solution like vCenter Operations an organization
can revisit during the next budgetary cycle their continued maintenance and
support costs for these commodity tools, renegotiating or even swapping them
out for less expensive alternatives.

31 Confidential
“How easy is it to provision and maintain vCenter Operations –
Recurring costs?”
 This is typically not an objection but rather a question, or if another vendor has
filled their heads with FUD, they could be looking to validate that vCenter
Operations is easy to implement, easy to maintain and there isn’t going to be a
significant amount of recurring cost associated to it. Every situation is unique
when it comes to deployment and integration especially when there’s existing
technologies that we haven’t integrated with in the past. But, the obvious point
you want to make is that, yes, the solution is easy to deploy, easy to maintain
and the ongoing costs will be minimal compared to large complex solutions.
Chief among the reasons for this ‘ease-of-use’ is that unlike other tools vCenter
Operations does not have ‘agents’, nor does it require the user to write a bunch
of complex Rules or Templates that require continuous administration & rewriting
when there are changes in the environment. vCenter Operations does not
require the user to continually change thresholds because of false positives from
setting them too low or missing valuable indicators because they are set to high.
Keep in mind that most organizations will set their thresholds to the highest
tolerable level. The biggest problem with doing this is with typical tools, you have
zero visibility as to what is happening below that absolute threshold. With
Dynamic Thresholds, you have complete visibility and early warning when DT
thresholds are breached in either direction. The value in this alone can make
someone a champion of the technology.
 vCenter Operations is a Learning-based solution that leverages universally
application algorithms and techniques to be valuable ‘out-of-the-box’ and with
little to no on-going maintenance. We usually estimate 0.15-0.25 FTE (full-time
employee) to maintain vCenter Operations.

32 Confidential
Resources
 Product Management/Marketing (VMware):
• Jessy Schoss: Product Management VMware vCenter Operations
(jschoss@vmware.com)
• Steve Henning: Product Marketing VMware vCenter Operations
(shenning@vmware.com)

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