1. CASE STUDY
Gravitant Powers First Cloud Services Brokerage
Portal for State of Texas
AT A GLANCE
THE CHALLENGE
Texas State Agencies wanted a better
way to plan for cloud IT services,
govern procurement and contracts,
control provisioning, and manage costs
in the cloud. They faced issues such as
vendor lock-in, VM sprawl and cost
uncertainty.
THE SOLUTION
Gravitant’s cloudMatrix technology
offered Texas the ability to stand up a
Overview powerful and dynamic web-based
cloud brokerage portal for government
agencies to design, order, provision,
Cloud computing has already established itself as an alternative to and control IT services across multiple
providers.
traditional IT with shorter procurement times, lower cost and greater
agility for both private enterprise and government IT needs. However, THE RESULT
users find that it is difficult to onboard and manage this new evolving Texas State Agencies were able to
simulate cross provider provisioning
and rapidly changing technology.
and estimate cost prior to
deployment. The portal also
Texas State Agencies wanted to use cloud services but needed an
allowed Agencies to establish
effective way to plan for cloud IT services, control provisioning, and complete command and control into
manage costs in the cloud. Texas State Agencies required a solution their cloud IT. Gravitant’s cloud
that aggregates services from multiple providers, integrates into brokerage solution therefore
maximized the opportunity for
existing technologies, enforced audit and approvals, managed costs,
Agencies to leverage cloud
and could be customized for each instance – in other words, they computing to improve government
needed a cloud services brokerage solution efficiency.
www.gravitant.com (512) 535 - 7399 info@gravitant.com

2. THE CHALLENGE
A common lament from CIOs is that IT is often “…characterized by low asset utilization, fragmented demand for
resources, difficult to manage environments, long procurement cycles, and a decreasing IT budget.” Similar challenges arise
with cloud services and make it difficult for customers to realize the full capabilities and advantages of cloud technology.
With thousands of different cloud service providers with different offerings and pricing models, customers have a
difficult time selecting the cloud service provider and an offering that best meets their needs. The contractual solution, and
often times the optimal solution, may require mixing and matching of services from multiple cloud providers, but the
resulting billing situation with multiple bills from different providers is a nightmare.
“Every Cloud Provider is different, and we don’t know who to pick or
how much it would cost ahead of time”
- IT Director, Texas State Government
The Texas State Agencies wanted to spin up resources on demand and spin them back down when needed. But different
terminology, standards and technology across providers creates inefficiency. Network and security settings needed to be
identified and configured per provider. Furthermore, the lack of automation with many cloud providers adds extra and
often unknown manual processes to provision resources.
Also, the cloud providers did not offer any solution for Agencies to track how much resources have been utilized by each
application and apportion the bill accordingly. This level of transparency is needed for chargeback as well as SLA
compliance, cost and resources control and to ensure that ever-changing IT demands are being met.
All of this made it a challenge for the CIO’s office to maintain visibility and control over IT spend. What the CIO’s office
needed was a solution that aggregated services from multiple IT providers, could easily integrate into the existing
technologies, and could be customized for each instance. In other words, Texas Agencies were in need of a cloud brokerage.
THE SOLUTION
Through the Pilot Texas Cloud Offering initiative, sponsored and created by the Texas Department of Information Resources,
Gravitant instantiated a powerful and dynamic web-based cloud brokerage portal called the Texas Cloud Services Portal
(TCSP). This portal runs on Gravitant’s innovative cloudMatrix CSB Platform and enables Agencies to design, order, provision
& control IT services (public, private, and hybrid) across providers.
Portal Capabilities
 Wizard based tools for screening applications ripe for the cloud, identifying target cloud infrastructures, estimating
capacity required on the cloud, comparing provider prices side-by-side, creating a migration roadmap, and finally
evaluating the ROI of cloud migration.
 Single view for designing application architectures in the cloud, assigning portions of the architecture to different cloud
providers, automatically provisioning the entire architecture simultaneously, and cost estimation.
 Dashboards for consolidated billing, utilization monitoring, and security monitoring.
 Command and control screens for; provisioning authorization control, workflow orchestration, and provider compliance
evaluation.
www.gravitant.com (512) 535 - 7399 info@gravitant.com

3. State of Texas Implementation
At the center lies the cloud services broker
platform – cloudMatrix - which integrates cloud
services from public, private, and hybrid clouds
as well as managed services and migration
services. Above cloudMatrix lies the cloud
management services fabric that allows for auto
provisioning, consolidated billing, chargeback,
command and control, and governance. These
management services were critical for
successful adoption of this portal in the
government sector. All of this is exposed to the
consumers through the Texas Cloud Services
Portal which is accessible through the web in
the form of SaaS.
The participating agencies included: Texas Secretary of State, Texas Water Development Board, Texas Department of
Transportation, and Texas Department of Information Resources.
THE RESULT
The TCSP portal allowed the agencies to get hands on experience with cloud architecture design, sourcing, provisioning, monitoring,
and billing. Agencies were also able to get their legal and financial groups involved in the procurement process through the portal’s
user administration and access control capabilities. There are currently 18 Virtual Data Centers provisioned through the portal across
Amazon, Savvis, Terremark, and Vintage IT Services.
The success of the TCSP solution was expressed in public at the 2012 Texas Association of State Systems for Computing and
Communications (TASSCC) conference. A panel of speakers representing the different participating Texas agencies as well as Gravitant
was organized to describe the cloud experience and provide future recommendations for federal government as well as other state
agencies.
The pilot program has been extended through 2013 in an effort to accommodate more agencies. The Texas Department of Information
Resources has published a lessons learned document as a result of the combined shared experiences of these Agencies as well.
“We have seen the agility of the cloud first hand. Using the cloud brokerage portal from
Gravitant, we instantiated the Texas Voters Registration application and launched it in just 2
DAYS. That was a great proof point for us.”
- Information Security Officer, Texas State Government
A B O U T G R AV I TA N T
Founded by innovative executives with over five decades of combined experience in Enterprise
IT management, operations research, advanced analytics, and service -oriented architectures (SOA), Gravitant
offers next-generation on-demand cloud broker and management applications for enterprise IT organizations.
For more information visit us at WWW.GRAVITANT.COM
www.gravitant.com (512) 535 - 7399 info@gravitant.com