Introduction 

HARMAN designs and engineers connected products and solutions for automakers, consumers and enterprises worldwide. More than 50 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and connected car systems. HARMAN software services power billions of mobile devices and systems that are connected, integrated and secure across all platforms. In March 2017, HARMAN became a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, with approximately 30,000 employees across the globe.

 

Journey to the Cloud

HARMAN’s digital transformation has been a multifaceted journey consisting of networks, data centres, enterprise software, productivity tools, and the cloud. Before their cloud strategy was implemented, engineers didn’t have secure, centralised, policy-driven access to the latest and greatest cloud services, which made it difficult to create and deliver new products quickly. It would take the engineering team weeks or months to provision something within multiple data centres. 

At its inception, HARMAN’s cloud footprint was very scattered across business divisions and project teams. HARMAN leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS)and Microsoft Azure to enable the engineering organisation to build products leveraging automation, AI and machine learning tools. Thomas Blanchet, senior director of digital infrastructure and architecture at HARMAN, and Ashok Madhuranath, senior manager of cloud architecture and operations at HARMAN, began centralising their cloud strategy three years ago, enforcing governance and security to create a strategic Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE).

“There was no central place or central team managing the cloud infrastructure and enforcing policies and governance,” Madhuranath said. Every division within HARMAN now uses the cloud extensively by utilising the HARMAN Cloud Hub portal, which provides seamless and secure access to cloud services, tools and automation. HARMAN’s cloud usage has grown 2,400x since then.

 

Finding the Right Cloud Management Solution

Madhuranath’s team quickly realised they couldn’t operate without a multi-cloud management tool. AWS and Azure’s native tools were unable to provide a centralised view of their multi-cloud environment. The team needed to develop an optimised financial management and governance strategy to answer: Are we using the cloud in an optimised manner or just spending money?

HARMAN was using a competitive solution for about a year before switching to VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth. “The [competitive] tool itself wasn’t providing the reports, visibility or dashboards we were looking for,” Madhuranath said. “The tool had a clumsy UI and was unable to provide the granular cost data the team needed.”

HARMAN needed a reliable solution that provides visibility into their multi-cloud environment. After attending several webinars to familiarise themselves with the platform, Blanchet and Madhuranath recognised the value of VMware Aria Cost and knew it was a better option for their team.

 

Cloud strategy optimisation with VMware Aria Cost

Since the previous tool wasn’t delivering the services HARMAN needed, the team was eager to get up and running quickly with VMware Aria Cost. They needed to be able to justify their USD $1.1 million cloud spend as their multi-cloud presence continued to grow exponentially. The VMware Professional Services team for VMware Aria Cost was able to quickly implement the platform for HARMAN.

 

“Once we signed the contract, because of Professional Services, we were able to get the value from the product in no time.”

— Ashok Madhuranath, Senior Manager of Cloud Architecture and Operations, HARMAN

 

The Professional Services team was able to quickly take HARMAN’s Excel spreadsheets full of data and turn them into VMware Aria Cost reports.

HARMAN also implemented a strategy of self-service optimisation to provide cloud resource owners with an actionable 360-degree view of their cloud footprint (assets, cost and optimisation opportunities). HARMAN pulls recommendations out of VMware Aria Cost to send emails to project owners showing what their cloud footprint looks like and what they can do to optimise. Using self-service provisioning tools to make changes without IT engagement or having to open a service request was a huge benefit. The team built a dashboard that pulls data out of VMware Aria Cost using APIs to look at optimisation opportunities and take quick actions.

VMware Aria Cost has also allowed HARMAN to easily navigate cost optimisation throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

“With COVID, cost became a high priority. We were able to utilise quite a bit of optimisation features that VMware Aria Cost provides.”

— Ashok Madhuranath, Senior Manager of Cloud Architecture & Operations, HARMAN

 

With rightsizing recommendations from VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, in combination with other features, HARMAN saves around USD $135,000 a month, which adds up to more than USD $1 million a year.

HARMAN has quickly moved through the VMware cloud management maturity model, mastering the visibility and optimisation phases. The team only had visibility into 10 per cent of their cloud costs at the start of the cloud journey. Today, they’ve achieved 100 per cent visibility. The team also used VMware Aria Cost to clean up unused resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, which saves them 15–20 hours a week. “Getting decision-making power to who actually pays for the resource has been a big highlight,” Madhuranath shared.

“One of the biggest things I’ve seen with the [VMware] team is their knowledge and expertise, not only with features and customisations within the tool,” Madhuranath said. “The team has pride in the product and features that the product offers and how it can make customers’ lives better. They want customers to use the product and actually benefit from it, as well as helping them along the cloud journey.”

 

Next Steps for HARMAN

Today, HARMAN uses VMware Aria Cost primarily from a governance standpoint and hopes to progress into business integration in the near future. The team intends to integrate VMware Aria Cost data into more internal processes, such as automated chargebacks and security. Within the next six months, Madhuranath will use VMware Aria Cost to get asset data integrated with internal services and tools.