According to a recent VMware blog post on the topic of our SMB focus this year, Julie Eades, VMware VP of SMB Marketing, reveals why a growing number of small and midsize businesses are finding IT solace with VMware.  “Whether a large organization or a growing startup, companies of all sizes are looking to lower costs, increase IT flexibility and grow without complexity while ensuring that their IT environments and businesses run without any downtime, even when disaster strikes. ” 

In 2012, VMware’s increased investment and focus on serving SMB customers is a result of much work with our customers and partners to further define the IT needs and characteristics of SMBs and to create, package and deliver the right solutions for their business.

“Our ultimate vision is to make IT more easily consumable so that SMBs can concentrate on growing their businesses instead of worrying about how IT works!” Eades says.

Learning from our customers: Real World IT challenges

Another benefit of listening to our customers and building solutions tailored to their needs, is that their challenges, their stories, begin to manifest themselves within VMware—beyond just product engineering. Based on these stories, we’re introducing VMware’s Real World Advantage—an SMB IT professional’s source for information and resources on the VMware SMB portfolio of virtualization, disaster recovery, management and desktop solutions.

This site highlights several “Real World” IT scenarios that small and mid-size businesses face, whether it’s limited budgets, demanding users, manual upgrade processes or system downtime—and how VMware can help.

What’s Your Story?

Whether you’re a long-time customer or just beginning to research virtualization, we’re interested in hearing your story.

Tell us in 100 words or less some of the challenges you face as an SMB IT professional trying to keep your users happy. Share in two steps:

• Just visit our SMB Facebook page  and “Like us” (if you haven’t already)
• Post your (most humorous, aggravating or career propelling/limiting) experience. Bonus points if you can prove how you solved that challenge with VMware!