CASE STUDY VMware Aria Cost Helps Logicworks Leverage Azure for Core Practice Area

Logicworks has been helping customers meet infrastructure compliance, governance and availability requirements for more than 23 years. As a seasoned Microsoft partner of 20 years, they can accelerate cloud adoption exponentially.

“Customer demand brought us to Azure,” said Steven Zeller, vice president of product marketing for Logicworks. “Microsoft has compelling proprietary features for moving to the cloud, and Azure can be used as a global resource to stretch usability and deploy seamless migrations. Often when a customer does all the framework involved before migration, they don’t realize the amount of effort and skill required. It’s our challenge to provide value. The good news is, we can. By automating processes, developing our own IP, and partnering with ISVs, in a matter of months, we can achieve utilization well before they could even think about migration.”

Logicworks leverages Azure in three practice areas that are applied to their vertical focus in finance and healthcare.

Cloud Adoption Consulting

For customers who seek professional services to aid their cloud adoption, Logicworks crafts a strategy to plan and migrate solutions, and build out cloud solutions. It’s a complete breadth of services: infrastructure migrations, DevOps implementations, and secure network design. The process begins with discovery and an in-depth assessment of current structures. Logicworks then creates a reference architecture design, builds it, and helps the customer migrate.

Cloud Management

The core managed services product of Logicworks has three levels of service. The first service tier is long-term managed services focused on cost management, powered by VMware Aria Cost powered by VMware Aria Cost.

Basically, Logicworks conducts a review of a customer’s existing Azure account, helps them rightsize it, and seeks out savings. This is called a shared saving model. Logicworks is paid based on the savings they help the customer enact.

Second-tier services focus on monitoring, tier-one services, and 24x7 support. Logicworks uses both internal operations automation systems and third-party solutions. If a customer already has an existing integrated monitoring system, Logicworks can integrate it with their monitoring hub to see the full picture. Alerts generated by third parties are operationalized through Logicworks’ system to ensure continuity. Flexibility is key to creating a custom system that a client loves to use and, sometimes, that means integrating a tool that already works for them.

Logicworks’ managed service offerings are supported by VMware Aria Cost to offer best practice reporting, ROI recommendations, and rightsizing recommendations. The customer dashboard relies on Logicworks’ OSS and an open source DevOps monitoring tool, VictorOps, to provide customers with timely information.
Customers need a deep level of reporting for utilization and costs, and VMware Aria Cost has custom report options to provide these insights.

These reports help to choose the right virtual machine (VM) size to perfectly fit customer workloads. Microsoft Azure provides a variety of compute options based on the latest Intel processor technologies.

Leveraging service catalog, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and their own DevOps, Logicworks creates a best practice cloud solution for their customer. Then they become the customer’s long-term operations partner, managing and monitoring the solution. 

Best practice security and compliance enforcement is included in tier three, as well. Bots automatically scan all of Logicworks’ accounts to look for behavior that is not in compliance. “One bot detected noncompliant customer behavior—a new VM was set up in a new region,” said Zeller. “The bot identified that this was atypical behavior for the customer. We confirmed this was a hack and shut the VM down. It could have cost the company several hundred thousand dollars a month.”

Partner Criteria

“We look for three criteria with partners,” said Zeller. “First is customer demand. We seek to offer the tools that our customers want. Second is commonality. Partners’ solutions need to enable enough flexibility while providing stable, well-accepted tools. Finally, our internal criteria are threefold. How does it operate within our own frameworks? What is the business relationship? And, what is the potential for mutual growth?”

“We are an engineering-heavy company. ISV selection lives and dies by engineer approval. Our research and development group actively evaluates tools, and a lot of engineering vetting goes into the process,” said Sachin Bansal, director of alliances for Logicworks.

Partners seeking guidance on how to build VMware Aria Cost powered by VMware Aria Cost into your service offerings, please contact your channel account manager or email cht-partners@groups.vmware.com.