On Thursday, September 6, 2012, I was in Atlanta, Georgia, at the first ‘public’ unveiling of a datacenter built utilizing HP’s Converged Infrastructure.

Diversified Agency Services, commonly known by the abbreviation DAS, is a unit of Omnicom Group with over 100 agencies under its umbrella.

That very fact, a platform aggregation project for 165 distinct business/operational units is nothing short of remarkable.

Remarkable in its vision, scope, design, and implementation.

What makes this entire project even more remarkable is the ease with which DAS is informing all of us about this project without reservation.

DAS has a series of blogs, videos, and other information about their journey to converged nirvana here.

The Genesis
As envisioned by DAS Global Chief Information Officer, Jason Cohen, this project, dubbed DAS Journey, was to flatten the entire networks of the DAS business/operational units – just about all of them independent companies – and use the resulting computing infrastructure to speed innovations to those same companies.

I heard you think it: this is perfect for HP Converged Infrastructure.

It is.

It was.

According to HP,

HP Converged Infrastructure is the only enterprise-class solution to quickly and securely build, manage and provision IT services regardless of delivery model

That leadership position has given HP several design wins, a few of them very high profile, such as DreamWorks Animation’s 100% move to HP Converged Infrastructure, also known as HPCI.

I have been following HP’s Converged Infrastructure for the past three years, and I like the way it is coming around.

The Executive Buy-in
As you would imagine, the project entailed working with an almost equal number (of individual company) CIOs and getting their buy in.

According to Jason, one of the most important things he did during the gestational period of the DAS Journey, was make sure he involved all stakeholders in it.

This assured them that they had a place at the ‘high table’, so to speak, and that their specific concerns would be addressed.

He also hired a communications spokesperson who was charged with making sure that everyone was kept abreast of all developments.

These two initiatives must have greatly help assuaged the fears of many an BU and/or OU executive with regards to their IT needs.

As an aside, I applaud Jason and his team for this. One of these days, I must ask him what pills he slipped into their restoratives for ego-containment!

Harnessing The Brightest Minds
According to Jason, what he did was look at the companies under his umbrella, and select what he felt were the best minds available, and offer them the opportunity to join his team.

One of the reasons a lot of these transformative projects fail is when ‘expert consultants’ that haven’t a clue about the business or businesses in question are brought in to either create, direct, or manage change.

Such decisions leave the minions unhappy, and is virtually guaranteed to scuttle the project.

By including the people with intimate knowledge of the companies into the mix, that #fail was avoided.

Selecting an engaged partner
One of the hardest, and most important things to do in such a project is selecting an engaged partner.

While partners are plentiful, selecting one whose decisions would be aligned with your business needs is a moonshot!

Luckily for DAS, they had an ongoing relationship with HP.

As a result, HP consulting services worked closely with DAS in order to provide DAS with the best solution for their (DAS’s) needs, not just to get an invoice.

The engaged cooperation and “HP White Glove” customer service has DAS well pleased with HP.

HP Converged Infrastructure
As I mentioned earlier, HP Converged Infrastructure is a client satisfaction-based initiative.

As HP sees it, while they have, and can produce solutions based on an homogeneous HP hardware, software and middleware stack, they realize that it might not be in the interest of the customer to do so.

Resultantly, DAS Journey Atlanta is a heterogeneous solution, with some routing by Cisco left there for legacy and management reasons based on recommendations by HP Networking and HPCI consultants.

That folks, is what “looking out for the client” really is!

As I see it
The benefits of using HP Converged Infrastructure in this DAS Journey project cannot be underscored. More importantly, the level of engagement DAS received from HP – even when HP didn’t even know if they would be selected for the project – is, and should be the topic of a whitepaper on successful prospective engagement.

This is another showcase for HP from a satisfied customer, and one where HP helped deliver a solution, albeit a heterogeneous solution.

I was able to get DAS’s Jason Cohen, Jerry Kelly, and B.G. Naran to participate in some interviews. I will be posting these AbsolutelyWindows FreeStyle videos in addition to a Q&A video shot after the datacenter tour.

----- ** -----

Thanks to HP (Teri & Samantha) and DAS for opening up the kimono and letting us into their new datacenter, and making executives available for interviews.

Many thanks to Ivy Worldwide – Terri & Tom – for making this happen.

Follow @johnobeto

© 2012, John Obeto II for Blackground Media Unlimited