Procurify - What is Cloud-Based Spend-Management Software?

Last night I had the pleasure of being invited to attend the Procurify event hosted at KPMG Canada's offices in downtown Vancouver. The event offered some exceptional networking opportunities but also gave some insight into the Procurify solution of a "cloud-based, online and mobile spend-management software."

As the solution is targeted at the finance folks there was an interesting mix of people and I must say that KPMG & Procurify were excellent hosts. The mix in the audience was an exceptional bonus to the event and provided the opportunities for many to have conversations that ranged beyond the traditional IT/cloud services discussions and talk about diverse business challenges and opportunities.

"Procurify...takes finance and accounting processes that take hours or days and reduces it to minutes..."

The presentation itself included a panel discussion of the service offering, including some quick case studies and a walk-through of signing up & using key functions.

The panel consisted of (L to R):

• Praven Gupta, QuickMobile CFO/COO
• Herman Chandi, Procurify VP of Business Development
• Norbert Huber, KPMG Partner, Management Consulting & Technology Enablement

The elevator pitch for Procurify is that this subscription service which scales to any size business takes finance and accounting processes that take hours or days and reduces it to minutes by making the interface simple to use, and accessible where-ever the people who need it are.

The business workflows targeted by this solution seem to be procurement and travel or other expenses. The workflow was remarkably simple, and watching it in action made me a little jealous of those who have adopted it. I've had to work with the manual processes that this solution targets in the past and have felt the pain. 

As paperwork and chasing people down isn't my strong-suite, the built-in receipt scanning/upload and automated expense submission/approval workflows integrated into the Procurify solution had me drooling a bit. You simply use the mobile app on your smartphone, take a photo of your receipt from the app, and upload it with a minimum of other information needed.  I can see how this could be a game changer for increasing efficiencies and transparency for corporate spending. 

"...biggest challenge with start-ups in Vancouver is getting support in your home town."

Praven Gupta provided some interesting insights on his real-life use of the service, but in the open Q&A afterwards, provided one of the most insightful quotes of the night. When the panel was asked what the biggest challenge as a start-up in Vancouver was, Praveen responded that the "biggest challenge with start-ups in Vancouver is getting support in your home town." 

The observation was that while Vancouver is becoming a hotbed for innovative start-ups and increasingly provides great resources to bring the best & brightest entrepreneurs here, local-based business seem reticent to adopt their products and services - all the big and early sales go over-seas or outside of Vancouver. Praveen challenged Vancouver based business to better understand the service offerings being developed locally and engage with them.

"...biggest challenge with cloud offerings is integration..."

Earlier in the presentations, when giving an over-view of what a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solution offering is, Norbert from KPMG made the observation that one of the biggest challenges with "cloud (offerings) is integration" implying that having multiple SaaS services can increase the likelihood of data integration and integrity risks. This is a valid point that I'd love to explore deeper with other cloud & SaaS experts - feel free to share your opinions on that matter please!

So in the end, a great and informative event, and I'm very thankful to Procurify and KPMG Canada for inviting me to attend, observe, and share what I've learned with you.

For more information on Procurify or KPMG Canada please check the links in this blog, or follow them on Twitter:

• #GoProcurify
• @Procurify
• @KPMG_Canada

As always, I appreciate your comments and feedback on this article and any others via Twitter or email.

@itManageCast

itManageCast@gmail.com

Current Networking Trends that Affect Network Management

Trends in Network Management are understandably driven by the trends in network architecture. Network architecture tends to be viewed as monolithic and unchanging; this is far from the truth. Networks tend to go through cyclical evolutions approximately every five years when the ever-increasing plethora of other network dependent technologies build up a critical mass and force change on the network. Like every other technology the IT manager must face, these changes must be adapted to and managed effectively because of the pressure they place on the networks that keep Information Technology’s life-blood flowing.


Convergence
Voice over IP (VoIP) has been in the workplace for some time now and most networks have already adopted, or planned for, this technology. Those which have not will need to in short order – if your shop won’t ever use VoIP as it exists today, other convergence requirements will be around the corner. Even if your shop is not using a VoIP technology today, it is foreseeable that the other business areas or the telco providers will provide sufficient momentum or incentive for this change to take place.

Support of VoIP solutions can include the requirement for Power Over Ethernet (POE), Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs), and traffic prioritization. These technologies have in the recent past outstripped the ability of legacy NMS’ to properly monitor and manage them.

Network-based video conferencing and streaming audio for training and other business (and often non-business) related requirements may not require POE but demand traffic prioritization and VLAN capability on the network. Finding a corporate network solution in place today that does not support either VLAN or traffic prioritization is rare, but what about the NMS that monitors and reports upon these technologies?

The other factor to consider with respect to convergence and it’s impact on NMS choices is that convergence based technologies entering the workplace tend to be very high-profile in as far as the public image and business operation of the workplace are concerned. When the telephones don’t work, or the customer WebEx sessions fail to operate smoothly, customer perception of the organization is negatively impacted.

A NMS choice needs to be designed to support convergence technologies, or be a supported integration with a point solution from the convergence technology vendor (i.e.; have a proven “plug-in” capability with your Cisco IP telephony management toolset).


Mobility
An increasing demand is placed on today’s networks to support mobile computing solutions from laptops and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to wireless VoIP devices. This is by no means an inclusive list, but clearly the expanded use of these types of end-user computing technologies is driving the increase in deployment of wireless networking technologies.

As more wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are deployed, a trend is occurring where many shops are looking seriously at the continued value in having multiple physical Ethernet drops for every person’s work area.

The increased dependence on WLANs for business critical functions is a change in networks that is driven in from the network edge, as opposed to outwards from the network core. Having the end-users bring more of these technologies into the workplace with the expectation that they will have access to the same business functionality that they have had from their hard-wired desktop systems is driving this requirement at a nearly exponential growth rate.

Deployment of wireless network technologies to keep pace with the demand can be a risky business, and your selection of NMS needs to be able to keep pace with these demands. If your organization is seeing the growth in wireless technologies ensure that you select an NMS that will have the scalability to add monitoring for the quantity of Wireless Access Points (WAPs) that will be deployed. This can be a significant additional number of “managed nodes.” You will also need to make some strategic decisions as to whether you will be monitoring the wireless devices attaching to the WAPs.

A further consideration when selecting a NMS for a wireless environment is the support for the control and management infrastructure used between the WAPs and the wired network. Often large wireless deployments will have centralized controllers that manage groups of WAPs. These architectures will also likely need enhanced ability to monitor security related aspects.


Security
A trend in networking is the ability to apply security controls at the network edge. This useful concept requires underpinning technology that needs to tie back into your NMS for control and audit purposes. Access to network ports is managed by intelligent edge switches that leverage RADIUS technology and tie it back into the directory systems; thus controlling who is authorized to connect physically or wirelessly to the network.
However you implement this, your NMS of choice needs to be aware of “bad connections” and forward those alarms to your network and/or security people. Perhaps there’s even automated controls you want to leverage for this, but regardless, you’ll need an NMS that is ready to work alongside these identity-driven networks.

When senior management (or worse, external auditors) come knocking asking for reports of network use how will you provide that information? Find out what kinds of audit/reporting requirements your organization may require of the network for privacy or other mandated legal compliance reasons, and use those as further criteria in your NMS selection.

The basic underpinning network management technology in use today is the Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP. SNMP versions 1 and 2c (the most frequently used versions) are infamously insecure. These protocols should never be used outside of the secure perimeter of your network, and even regarded dubiously for use inside. Most network gear you buy today support the use of SNMPv3, the secure encrypted version of SNMP. The challenge comes when evaluating the NMS, as many still do not support SNMPv3 out of the box. This is certainly something to check for.

If a part of your network is outsourced, and you still want or need to manage it, you will need to have an NMS that is capable of understanding proxy-based SNMP management, likely as well as SNMPv3. Many network outsourcing companies will not provide this proxied monitoring so you should be checking with your service provider before making this a NMS criterion.


Configuration
How is your organization dealing with issues of network device inventory, version control, and change management? Should your NMS be part of the solution or part of the problem?
Your NMS choice does not necessarily have to be part of a framework solution with a full Configuration Management Database (CMDB), but it should at least have significantly advanced polling and collection abilities to keep current on what is out in your network. As well, this data should at the very least be readily exportable to your CMDB choice of today or tomorrow. The polling intervals should be readily configurable, so that you can have different polling intervals for network nodes of different importance.

When considering polling, you should also learn about the polling technology that the NMS uses. Is it basic ICMP (ping) status for up-down? Or is it slightly more complex SNMP-based? As discussed in the security section, consider the versions of SNMP to be used. Additionally, try to understand what kind of polling engine the NMS uses and how it differentiates and adds/removes risk from the management of your network. This is the kind of area where an expert consultant in NMS comes in very handy.

Is it important to you to centrally manage the firmware and configuration of your network topology? There are many point-solution tools from the hardware vendors that provide this, as well as third-party application specifically designed for this functionality. You should determine whether your need are better suited by integrating this functionality into your NMS, or obtaining a NMS that provides this ability. Wanting your NMS to handle your complete configuration management needs will dramatically shorten the list of available products, so it is advised to focus more on the compatibility aspect and leverage the point solution for firmware and configuration management, while letting the NMS manage discovery & status.


Business Driven Requirements
Every decision made in IT is governed by or directly affected by business drivers and requirements. Various requirements for your NMS selection are going to be driven from what is currently happening with other business areas of your organization, or strategic initiatives.

We spoke early in the security discussion about regulatory compliance issues around having data collected and reported for audit, but other areas of consideration should be around mergers or acquisitions, planned growth, or outsourcing. All of these factors require a NMS that is scalable and quick to update its understanding of your changing network topology. It may also require that you have the ability to provide secured, limited access to the NMS for third-parties who have shared interests in the support and maintenance of the network.

Does the organization have any plans around Data Centre consolidation? This kind of activity will mean reduced core network nodes, but increased edge nodes, and an increased backhaul of network traffic. This again leads to scalability of the solution, speed and accuracy of the discovery and polling mechanisms, and the ability to extract the network inventory information readily.

Green IT initiatives may have some impact on your NMS selection as well. While power reduction strategies likely point towards data centre consolidation, they can have other unexpected outcomes for the network, like increased virtualization, possibly outsourcing of certain services, and often less printing means more electronic data movement and the ability to get large files quickly back and forth from the core to the edge on mobile devices.

Ensure that your NMS selection takes these kinds of items into consideration by its ability to provide management to the network edge (or beyond) with speed and accuracy, and a fast and accurate causal engine to help reduce the time spent diagnosing problems that affect the delivery of data to the other business users. They may not always be network problems, but can you back that up objectively and quickly when the VP is standing in your door?

Another area to consider is managing the network as a delivered service to your customers and the data collection, analysis, and reporting requirements for that. Service Delivery Management in the NMS is also rare but tends to be a feature available more commonly when you are using framework solutions. You can get to this point without a framework if you carefully consider how you will make the measurements of the Service Level Agreements and Service Level Objectives available to the customers of your network, both internal and external to the organization.

Lastly, the biggest impact that business driven requirements have on NMS selection is that of diminishing budgets and the requirement of doing more, or the same, with less. This can lead you to consider how to budget for your NMS & its ongoing support and maintenance, but also gives you the opportunity to consider making it an operational cost by leveraging some form of “Software as a Service.” Many vendors provide this solution, where for monthly or annual fees they will manage your NMS and provide the output you require from it by either hosting the NMS remotely (debatable due to security considerations) or implementing and maintaining the NMS on your site.

HPSU 2009 - Part 3

BTO Mainstage - Robin Purohit

Discussion of Trends and Roadmap of Products

Robin took the BTO Mainstage to lead a discussion of trends and provide a roadmap products. First Robin discussed some of what he referred to as "Breakthrough Communities" which included

• User communities - Vivit
• Web 2.0 Collaboration
• Customer Advisory Boards

The next topics were around hot tech trends and how those affect HP Software.

Virtualisation

~ 15 M virtual machines shipped last year - expected to double over the next 3 years. Robin noted that there are improvements in data protection & virtualisation from the HP perspective. I'll be getting more information fro the show floor tonight & tomorrow.

SaaS

18% of biz apps are expected to be deployed via SaaS (Software as a Service). HP in the last 6 months has made the latest Service Manager & Asset Centre available via SaaS for customers who don't want to run the applications in-house.

Web 2.0

Robin noted that there is a hot trend seeing the transition of rich internet technology from the consumer world to the enterprise. These Web 2.0 apps power rich visuals, but have a huge impact to QA, Security, and support/performance

aspects of managing your datacentre.

Robin also noted that there is what he called a "regulatory tsunami" coming - indicating that if we think there's been a lot of work around SOX etc., just wait to see what the current US & International administrations will be annoncing in the next year. HP is preparing to assist customers in this area by way of their Tower software acquisition, and a focus on PCI compliance with that branch of HP Software. This also segued to the topic of "cloud governance" and how to know that when you are buying IT services on the wire & paying for use you are protected. This is where the HP services groups "Cloud Assure" steps in making sure that what you buy will work.

As always the lecture to the audience came around to the topic of quantifying the business value of IT. HP is making efforts to move beyond cost and show revenue related to IT services that IT delivers. Not a new message, but HP has tooled up more applications in this area. The release of the HP IT Financial Management Portfolio includes Financial Planning & Analysis which shows cost trends over time by different lines of biz, and provides a breakdown of labour vs. capital. This product integrates with 3rd party ERP & financial systems for single point of glass analysis. Robin also mentioned the upcoming release of PPM 8.0. The new suite also includes enhanced Asset Management with a focus on software licence management; Robin stressed the well versed point that licence compliance is the key use & ROI area for this tool.

The discussion moved on to the Application Security Centre with the free 21 day trail of App Sec Centre on SaaS. Robin informed us of HP's opinion that 35% of flash apps violate Adobe best practices, which is where the SWFScan tool comes into play. Apparently the tool is aware of nearly 4000 flash applications, and has had 13000 downloads so far, driven by the fact that 35% of all webstes run flash of some variety.

Data Protector was the next topic, and HP claims to reduce TCO of backups by 50%. This tool currently has 30000 installs and HP claims market leading growth for a product that is the leading solition for virtual servers & storage. Marketing figures, nothing of substantial intrest to me there.

The presentation came around at last to Application Lifecycle Management, and Robin showed the HP vision that outlines somewhat like this:

Vision - Roadmap - Release - Cycle - Daily

CMS - PPM - Requirements - QC - Compliance

HP flogs the use of their "Agile Accelerator", with it's inclusion of "best practices" to speed adoption, and the app lifecycle is being completed by a focus on app retirement. Pretty interesting that last part, but vague still. The numbers quote for ROI purposes were $200-300k hardware & other savings to be seen when you consolidate but I suspect those are average numbers from fortune 500s.

Robin then discussed HP Operations Orchestrator, and HP Configuration Management. Apparently this week they will be publishing a set of best practices for configuration management - I will read & review those once they're available.

Next Robin brought up some brief guests:

Jonathon M Gregory, Partner Strategic Effetiveness (SITE) @ Accenture - claims 5-30% savings by implementing Accenture's IT financial mgt solution. Jonathon spoke very briefly and basically made a commercial for how Accenture is the key player in finding the single version of the truth for IT. If you want to know more find your local Accenture rep! :-)

Robin mentioned RIM and HP Operations Manager on the BES solution was briefly plugged - I will get more info from the show floor and share it.

The last speaker before we were subjected to a 45 minute commercial for how wonderful HP software is was virtualisation - how do we do it right in the data centre. Brian Byun, VP of Global Alliances for VMware spoke quickly about VMware Vsphere 4. In short, it creates a private cloud architecture and supports cost transparency models by leveraging vCentre to implement shared infrastructure capacity planning, and allows customers to federate the infrastructure & include resources from external suppliers.

Lastly, before Brian left, he & Robin made an announcement: VMware will be launching integrated BSM for physical and virtual systems, HP DDM will be integrated in future releases of the vCentre suite, and there will be integrated virtual and physical client desktop management.