Mike Campbell runs the Shared Services team for ACI Worldwide's Hosting Business (ACIW), a $1 billion payments processor that handles $13 trillion worth of transactions each year for thousands of banks, retailers, and other businesses. As VP of Shared Services, he provides cloud-based software services to ACI's customers, and buys IT equipment and services to keep ACI's data centers humming. With an IT spend of more than $10 million a year, he's right at the intersection of corporate IT and cloud. He foresees a major shrinkage in enterprise IT spending, as cloud and the greater use of software intelligence drive wider use of generic hardware. "Virtualization has already reduced the need for servers and forced Dell, IBM, and other enterprise vendors to change," Campbell says. "With the cloud, we are not going to need as much infrastructure. So the industry's whole business model will change."
Campbell's own infrastructure is in the early stages of just such a transition. Today, from ACI's main hosting facility outside Atlanta, his team manages 16 data centers worldwide. His goal is to get that down to a total of just four data centers over the next few years. At the same time, he is opening a data center in Ireland, to help ACI comply with European requirements that European corporate data be stored within the European Union. With ACI building a new greenfield data center he took the opportunity to explore new approaches to the internal data center network. He looked at VMware's (VMW) NSX networking solution, which is a software-based system for managing a data center network. He also checked in with Cisco (CSCO), the standard provider of data center switches and a longstanding supplier to ACI. Cisco has reacted vigorously to the wave of software-defined networking solutions, which include, besides the VMware product, others based on generic "white-box" switches that are far cheaper than Cisco gear. Cisco's response includes two new lines of switches, the Nexus 7000 and Nexus 9000, which offer more software-based features while also reducing price. Since the VMware NSX is a software product that still requires Cisco hardware, and is not inexpensive, Campbell says he's likely to go with the new Cisco Nexus 9000s. "The Cisco software-defined data center solution is a hell of a lot cheaper, about half the price," Campbell says, referring to earlier Cisco switches that he's used in other data centers. "It's very attractive on both the capex and opex sides."
It's a similar story in storage, which is typically an even larger share of the budget than networking in a modern data center. Large standalone storage systems are being replaced by a combination of off-premise, cloud-based storage and on-premise, by storage systems that are closer to the compute function, to support virtualization. The rapid growth of hyper-converged systems, which combine compute and storage in a single unit, is an example of the latter trend. Says Campbell: "I agree with (VMware CEO Pat] Gelsinger, when he said that we are putting enterprise-class storage within the VMware ecosystem and that will have a huge impact. Today storage is a $6 billion business and in a few years it will be a $1 billion business. We won't need those big boxes any more."
Although a supporter of hyper-converged infrastructure, Campbell thinks many of the companies offering such products are overcharging for their offerings. "We've done a lot of work on this," he explains. "When you peel back the onion, they are all offering the same hardware, with their own software on top. And they charge you more than double for the pleasure of using their software." Enterprise customers often buy the proprietary products because they are convinced by the vendor that they need the requirements the vendor is selling, when in reality if they mapped and specified their needs more carefully, they could meet them with a less expensive system. He attributes much of the overinvestment to vendors' selling skills, which generate excitement and enthusiasm over whatever is the hot, talked-about technology. "People buy a Ferrari when what they really need is a Toyota," he says.
For ACI's storage needs, Campbell has tested and deployed systems from numerous vendors. But his favorite is Hitachi (HTHIY). "I'm a big Hitachi fan. They are very engineering-focused, the quality and stability of the product is really good, they are easy to deal with and they are good on price. Their marketing is awful so a lot of people don't know about them, but people in the storage business know Hitachi."
Like most large financial institutions, ACI doesn't use the public cloud today. Security and compliance are top priorities for ACI and the public cloud introduces too many uncontrollable factors for Campbell to be comfortable with it. He invests a large and growing amount of money and IT manpower in finding and deploying a growing array of security solutions—and he's unwilling to provide details of which solutions he favors for the obvious reasons. "As a rule, we run out of a facility we own and control because it's much easier to maintain our security and compliance standards that way – our customers expect it," he says. Exceptions are in some markets in Asia, where the data is required to be held in-country and it's not economic for ACI to run its own data centers. However, he's watching developments in cloud technology closely. He's interested in the progress in application mobility, such as vMotion, a VMware technology to allow workloads to easily move from one data center to another or private to public clouds.
"We're very much focused on the ability to move applications from a primary data center to a backup data center without missing a transaction and without the customer noticing." This technology, much talked about by vendors but still not yet ready for prime time at a large enterprise like ACI, is important for reliability and disaster recovery. Campbell sees VMware as in pole position in this area. "Application mobility is a fairly heavy-duty piece of gymnastics. Adding these capabilities to the hypervisor will enable VMware to maintain its dominance."
In line with his concerns about backup and disaster recovery, he's looking into virtualization-based backup technologies from innovative startups including Veeam and Zerto. He admires the speed and innovation in the startup community, but is reluctant to rely on them for important pieces of ACI infrastructure. "I have great respect for startups, but I'm loathe to associate myself with a company that isn't proven and could leave me hanging," he says. "I need to know that a company will be around next week, next month, next year." One startup he uses and praises is VMTurbo, whose software generates an immediate payback through its ability to economize on the usage of virtual compute and memory resources. (See our profile here.)
Campbell nevertheless sees the public cloud gaining increasing acceptance in the years ahead even with highly demanding clients in the financial services business. ACI recently decided to move its large Oracle (ORCL) implementation from an on-premise data center to Oracle's new cloud facility. It's a complex project, but should pay off by allowing ACI to reduce the cost of professional expertise required to manage the Oracle platform, shifting much of the management to Oracle's own team. In time, he can see the public cloud taking on some of the transaction processing activities ACI does today.
"The cloud is getting better and better. I see a future where people get comfortable with moving more and more stuff off-premise."
