Customer Profile SummarySize: 650+ employees Location: Palo Alto, CaliforniaIndustry: Delivering Enterprise-Grade Communication and Collaboration Software

In a fast-paced world where brilliant ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time, Jive’s vision is to help organizations connect people, information, insights, opinions, and creativity—to create a collective sense of direction and community. To realize this vision—and increase its margins—Jive needed a low-cost software-as-a-service (SaaS) infrastructure that could keep pace with customer posts, forums, streams, and likes

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Delivering 100 Percent Availability and Deterministic PerformanceJive customers expect 100 percent uptime and deterministic performance. In the call centers of leading telecommunications providers, the JiveX external community platform serves as a foundation for mission-critical customer support. Global media networks depend on seamless collaboration and communication enabled by Jive to deliver timely news in today’s “always on” environment. These examples highlight the strategic nature of enterprise social business where outages or unacceptable latencies can directly impact performance.

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Challenges Deliver 100 percent availability and deterministic performance

le to meet demands of global business growth

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Service profiles have been key to us continuing to expand and having consistency throughout the environment. When you get to an environment of our size, where we have over 800 blades and over 30,000 virtual machines, consistency is key, and having automation around that is the only way we were able to scale.

-- Justin Fitzhugh, Chief Information Officer, Jive

Jive achieves performance and cost goalswith SaaS offering built on Cisco private cloud.

Social Media Software FirmLooks for Low-Cost SaaS

Solution

Scaling GloballyBecause Jive’s customers span the globe, the company needed to scale coverage to multiple data centers, thereby bringing 100 percent availability, reliable performance, and processing power to remote customers.

Security is of paramount importance to Jive and its customers. Jive hosts its customers’ data, including how they operate on a daily basis. In addition, Jive often hosts external-facing communities, displaying its customers’ public face to their customers. Clearly, data breaches would be a detriment.

Building an Integrated Technology Stack Jive’s operations staff needed the flexibility to build an underlying hardware platform in concert with the company’s software development efforts. Marrying software development to infrastructure—by owning and operating the entire technology stack—would allow Jive to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Demonstrating Customer CommitmentThe Jive team also wanted to demonstrate that SaaS was a fundamental business offering. The company believed that its technology stack and ability to conduct operations with a skilled staff would demonstrate its commitment to SaaS customers.

Reducing Total Cost of OwnershipUltimately, Jive needed to reduce overall costs, improve margins, increase profitability. It was also important for the company to leverage economies of scale as it continued to grow its customer base and infrastructure footprint.

Migrating to Private Clouds in Data Centers Worldwide Jive began running in a single data center with a managed service provider. However, the company’s growth demanded more flexibility than the provider could deliver. As a result, Jive decided to operate its own private cloud infrastructure. The company chose Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS®) as the underlying computing and management component. Today, Jive runs private in leased data center space in Phoenix, New Jersey, Amsterdam, and London.

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private cloud built on Cisco, NetApp, and VMware technology

multiple data centers worldwide

Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) Service Profiles and management ease with Cisco UCS Unified Fabric and UCS Manager

Partnering with VMware, NetApp, and Blue Chip TechnologiesThe Jive technology platform builds on Cisco® UCS but involves other partners as well. VMware provides the hardware abstraction layer, and NetApp provides storage. Both allow Jive to deliver a scalable environment that responds to customer demands. This ability is especially important because Jive has thousands of SaaS customers. In addition, value-added reseller Blue Chip Technologies has been—and continues to be—instrumental in facilitating many of the logistical and planning details around deployment and production of the technology stack.

Provisioning Rapidly with Cisco UCS Service ProfilesToday, Jive runs an environment of more than 800 blade servers and 30,000 virtual machines. Cisco UCS Service Profiles have been key to Jive’s ability to expand and to maintain consistency across its environment. These powerful profiles allow the company to deploy and manage its hardware in a unified way, accomplishing scale through automation.

By combining Cisco UCS Service Profiles with VMware vSphere, Jive can manage different customer profiles at the virtual level—enabling maximum flexibility in moving customers across infrastructure to meet varying workload requirements. Flexibility is also accomplished by assigning these servers to a pool of computing resources, rather than hard-wiring specific servers for specific purposes.

Managing Easily with Cisco UCS Unified Fabric and UCS ManagerIn addition, Cisco UCS Unified Fabric allows Jive to deploy solutions once in remote locations and reconfigure, manage, and rearchitect then as needed. Servers are reallocated as needed, and if hardware must be replaced, Jive can easily reassign virtual machines and associated customer profiles. This capability is especially valuable in remote data centers where Jive does not have local personnel.

Though Jive’s production environment include more than 800 blades in multiple data centers worldwide, the company has assigned only one full-time staff member to manage this infrastructure. Jive is able to do this by using Cisco UCS Manager, which provides a consolidat-ed view of alarms and alerts as well as activity types that require monitoring.

Expanding Memory FootprintA key component in enabling Jive to achieve the performance that its customers demand is the expanded memory footprint available in Cisco UCS blades. The Jive application is memory-focused, and this expanded footprint provides the agility needed to move the applica-tion within the environment.

The expanded Cisco UCS memory footprint, coupled with the advanced manageability provided by the Cisco UCS platform, also helps reduce costs. The operations team has the flexibility to run more virtual machines per server, thereby reducing the number of deployed blades. And fewer deployed blades also translate into fewer VMware licenses.

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Creating Optimal User ExperienceUltimately, it is the customer experience that matters. Outages, intolerable latencies, or security breaches not only tarnish Jive’s brand but can also translate directly into lost customers—now and in the future.

A key benefit of Jive’s private cloud infrastructure is added security for customer data. Jive staff members carefully manage access to every aspect of the technology stack. The level of security thus provided is impossible in public, shared environment.

In addition, by running a private cloud solution built on Cisco, VMware, and NetApp, Jive offers a very high standard of performance and availability. By running the entire technology stack on its private cloud and leveraging Cisco UCS ease of management, Jive can deliver deterministic, reliable performance that is simply unavailable in a shared environment.

Enjoying Global SupportBy deploying a private cloud solution built on Cisco, VMware, and NetApp technologies, Jive benefits not only from deploying a thoroughly tested solution but also from the close, worldwide relation-ship of these industry leaders. If issues arise, Jive has a single number to call, which is especially important because its operations are distributed around the globe.

Reducing CostsFrom a TCO perspective, Jive fares much better owning and operat-ing its own cloud infrastructure, rather than renting public space. Since deploying a private cloud solution, Jive has significantly reduced costs and increased margin. As the company brings more customers onboard and provisions additional supporting infrastructure, it experi-ences economies of scale that are not possible with a rented public cloud model.

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Results Provisioned and managed more than 800 UCS blades and 30,000+ virtual machines in four data centers worldwide with support of only o

ed customer experience issues related to outages, poor performance, or security breaches

educed total cost of ownership and increased bottom line through moving to private cloud based on Cisco technology.

We found Cisco to be a great partner around developing overalltechnology stacks and platforms as we look forward, and helpingus develop overall solutions that scale with our business andmeet the cost demands, and cost reductions that we needto have.

-- Justin Fitzhugh, Chief Information Officer, Jive

For More InformationTo find out more about ISVs deploying their software as a service on Cisco-based clouds, go here.

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