When a fire destroyed one of Revlon's factories in Venezuela in June 2011, operations at that location were quickly brought back up and running in New Jersey within 15 minutes. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the fire, and the company was able to quickly restore functioning, thanks in large part to the company's internal cloud, which now supports a range of mission-critical apps and associated data – including ERP, manufacturing, warehousing, business intelligence.
David Giambruno, senior vice president and CIO of Revlon, described the company's aggressive cloud strategy in a panel discussion led by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Heinz Roggenkemper, executive vice president of development at SAP Labs, also joined the event. (Dana's panel, organized by VMware, is available as a podcast.)
Disaster recovery and business continuity are just one aspect of the benefits companies are leveraging from private cloud computing – in which key systems and resources are supported within an accessible virtualized service layer across the enterprise. Managing private cloud sites may have its complexities, but Giambruno says the bottom line is simplicity.
“I always go back to this iPad view of the world, where the business just wants to know what's available and we will do the rest underneath,” he says.
Currently, Revlon has 531 applications running on its internal cloud, which supports roughly 15,000 automated application moves a month, and 14,000 transactions a second, Giambruno says. “Over 90 percent of our corporate workload sits on our internal cloud, and it runs most of our footprint globally.”
One of the major transformations at Revlon is the way cloud has changed the CIO's role. "My job is to say, 'yes.'" Giambruno relates. "I'm just here to help. I'm a service. Services are supposed to deliver. What this cloud ecosystem has delivered for us is our ability to say yes and get more done faster, better, cheaper."
What instigated Revlon's cloud move? The company was going through a server refresh, and chose to only replace 20% of its hardware resources. The remaining budget would go into private cloud technologies, such as VMWare. First order of business was a storage area network in which data was pooled across enterprise hardware. "As we did that, we started sharing with the business," says Giambruno. "We showed them what we're doing and that it still worked. Then, we started the walk phase of putting applications on it. We actually ran north of six nines.” The approach was incremental -- a "crawl, walk, run" strategy for gradually introducing cloud to the enterprise, he explains.
Plus, additional budget was not required for the effort, he added. “At Revlon, we didn’t spend any more to put this in. We changed how we spent our money.” Revlon was also able to take charge of its own disaster recovery -- and that saved money, Giambruno says. “We internalized all our DR. We kept taking external money that we were spending and were able to give it back to the business and essentially invest in ourselves. For Revlon, the more money R&D has to develop new products to get to our consumers and for marketing to tell that product story and get it out to our channels and use the media to talk about our glamorous products, that really drives growth in Revlon.”
Another change for Revlon is that it has become a cloud provider itself – pushing its cloud out to suppliers and contractors. “One of the things we realized is that we could start extending our cloud. "At the end of the day, it's about collaboration with our community of vendors and suppliers, and enabling them to interact with us easily," says Giambruno.
