Pivotal

The Pivotal Approach

We believe there must be a clear balance between technology, people, and process.

To achieve this balance, we help our clients:

  • Evaluate existing technology and its effectiveness in support of business goals.
  • Manage costs more efficiently through better utilization of IT assets.
  • Review current business process, applications and systems. Where applicable, introduce and integrate new components into existing infrastructure.
  • Assess IT personnel.

Our straightforward approach improves IT strategy, operations, investments, governance, and management control systems.

The result: clients are able to innovate, scale, and react with speed.

The Pivotal Technology Operations Life Cycle

The Pivotal Life Cycle

Discovery

Whenever a new product is being considered, there is a discovery phase for the Operations team. The length of discovery varies on the complexity of the new product, the similarity of this product to others that have come before it and the familiarity of the Operations team with the organization and its existing products. This information provides the basis for the operational design needed in the next stage.

Pivotal can:

  • Understand product goals.
  • Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
  • Provide guidance and recommendations.
  • Document Operations process and identify fundamental requirements surrounding scalability, stability, availability and security.

Design

At this stage, best practices are incorporated into a detailed plan of recommendations. This design includes all aspects of the product (application components, networking, systems, storage, and security) and the processes that will support it. The proposed architecture is flexible, scalable, and adaptable to the changes the product will experience over its lifetime. In addition, a monitoring and metrics infrastructure will be developed to support the product.

Pivotal can:

  • Architect a monitoring and metrics infrastructure compatible and consistent with the product design.
  • Allow access to data for calculation of KPIs.
  • Formulate a set of processes that will support the product.
  • Develop Operations-informed database design to ensure peak performance and scalability.
  • Identify hardware requirements for networks, systems, and storage.

Implementation

Ordering hardware, building infrastructure, or installing applications - whatever is needed to fufill design recommendations now are completed. In addition, other environments, including Development and QA infrastructures, are modified to closely resemble the Production infrastructure.

Pivotal can:

  • Order, install, and configure the hardware infrastructure.
  • Install and configure the Operating System.
  • Install and configure the application layer.

Maintenance

Once a product has been launched, day-to-day tasks must be performed to keep the product working optimally. Using the KPIs that were identified in the Discovery stage and the monitoring system that was deployed in the Implementation phase, product availability, capacity, performance and security must be maintained.

Pivotal can:

  • Ensure that the monitoring and metrics infrastructure is in place and functioning as designed.
  • Institute Operational best practices to ensure maximum availability and uptime.
  • Deliver KPIs via Executive Dashboards.

Refinement

Products are rarely static. Product usage may change or enhancement may be needed to keep competitive in the market. Whatever the case, successful applications are constantly upgraded and improved. Operations play an integral role in developing and prioritizing these modifications, as well as in ensuring that these modifications will not adversely affect availability, capacity, performance, or security.

Pivotal can:

  • Participate in product discussions.
  • Determine the baselines by which to measure optimizations.
  • Ensure changes are consistent with operational principles.
  • Update performance scorecards.