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Monthly Archives: June 2012

New VMware Bootcamp: The VMware View Mobile Secure Desktop

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Learn how to successfully roll out and deploy virtual desktops, applications and infrastructure through this Bootcamp series to securely support mobile users.

The VMware View Mobile Secure Desktop is a fully validated architectural design that provides end users with quick and easy access to applications and data across devices, locations and networks. This solution streamlines and automates desktop management and provides IT with the ability to apply location-aware, policy driven access to corporate resources to ensure higher levels of security and compliance.

The Mobile Secure Desktop leverages VMware View, vShield security services and vCenter Operations Manager monitoring components. It has additionally been validated with technology and solutions from VMware partners to provide organizations with an end to end solution designed to securely support device diversity, mobile workers and bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives.

This Bootcamp features 12 on-demand technical deep dive sessions and covers everything from design best practices and security best practices to location aware printing. The first sessions begins Monday, July 16th with one new session being pushed out daily.

You can also register on the site to receive a FREE e-book (collection of all of the material that will be presented in the Bootcamp series).

Get this FREE On-Demand Training!

Be sure to also check for related blog postings along the way!

TUI InfoTec Delivers SMB Cloud Services – Q & A

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Interview with John Churchhouse and Christian Rudolph

TUIQ&A
 
In any sales situation, being able to show prospects examples of the work that’s already been done is absolutely critical, and it’s no different for us. When customers agree to being case studies, it’s a great endorsement of what we’re doing – that they’re happy to go on record and be quoted as saying we’ve helped their business is fantastic, and it shows other prospects why we are potentially the technology partner for them.

TUI Infotec is one such business, and its infrastructure architect, Christian Rudolph, is a great advocate of the work we do to help drive TUI’s business. It’s been a little while since we caught up with Christian, and so John Churchhouse, EMEA Director of SMB at VMware, had a chat with him about TUI’s work with us and its plans for the future.

John Churchhouse: What’s been the biggest change in the way you go about business at TUI, now that you’re using a hybrid cloud model?

Christian Rudolph: The biggest challenge for us is to convert our services to be cloud ready and bring this big mind change to our software development teams and also to our infrastructure operations team.  To get the better understanding for all people we started currently an approach to extend the internal vSphere Infrastructure with our TUI InfoTec Service Provider Cloud, where also services from non-TUI customers are hosted. This brings us into a position to move the service later on to every other cloud. 


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When responding to mobile workforce IT challenges are your solutions just temporary fixes?

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Lisa Wolfe - HP
Posted by Lisa Wolfe
HP, WW SMB Marketing
& Strategy Leader


There are so many challenges to address with a growing mobile workforce and small and midsize businesses with few IT staff are faced with addressing these challenges as “incoming” – one offs – one at a time requests. It’s like trying to plug the hole in the dyke to prevent a flood just as the water shifts to the next available outlet – another challenge, another leak, another temporary solution.

As a first step clarify your mobile IT strategy

Have you taken the time to think through your end-to-end mobile strategy and how to shore up your existing IT (servers, storage and networking) to support a growing mobile workforce? The sheer explosion of “human information” (audio, video, text generated by your employees) coming into the business as “unstructured data” and the wireless bandwidth support requirements for rich media and streaming video with wired speeds are issues that need to be addressed. OK … These are the easy issues to manage and HP has solutions for you here – by increasing the storage capacity of our X5000 storage solution and offering an 802.11n module for our MSR router series we have the means to help you address both the explosion of unstructured data and the wireless bandwidth requirements.

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Reflection: How BancVue Brought Their IT Manifesto to Life with VMware

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Earlier this month, I attended the midTech Summit in Las Vegas where I met with more than 40 CIOs and IT decision makers from Mid-Size and Small organizations across multiple industries.   It was an amazing opportunity to listen to these senior IT leaders and the challenges they face every day.  In sum, and no surprise, common themes included: 

  • Growing revenue and acquiring new customers
  • Containing costs and improving productivity
  • Being able to react quickly to changing market conditions
  • Improving the quality of products and processes

6a00d8341c328153ef01630450a4c5970d-120wiWith that in mind, I was fortunate to have had the privilege to share a VMware update which largely focused on a live conversation with Sunny Nair, BancVue’s Vice President of IT and Systems Operations, where together we discussed how BancVue brought their IT manifesto to life by partnering with us on their journey towards infrastructure pooling, elasticity, automation and self service.   

A Real World Advantage
BancVue started by discussing how they had previously experiened challenges with other open source and commercial solutions prior to moving to VMware vSphere.  My sense was that the audience appreciated the opportunity for a real world conversation with a peer IT leader about many of the pros and cons around virtualization, cloud computing and core questions about implementation, security, which apps to virtualize.  We also spent a bunch of time around BancVue’s ROI and other benefits including their cost savings from server consolidation, hosting and reduced energy costs as well as improved availability and their ability to redeploy IT resources to focus on strategic business initiatives – all the while  improving customer service through their enhanced flexible infrastructure.

You can hear more about BancVue’s journey when Sunny and I present together on our live Spiceworks webinar next week titled, "Introduction to Virtualization – Real World Success Story"

Tuesday, June 19, 2012 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM CDT
Register here 

I look forward to continuing to share these stories and demonstrating how VMware can help our customers simplify their infrastructure and deliver real world results.  We've helped hundreds of thousands of customers start their journey to the cloud with very tactical steps.  I welcome your stories or comments and look forward to your thoughts.    

Until next time, 

Brandon

 

It’s Your Cloud: A Thoughtful Roadmap to Transform Your IT

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6a00d8341c328153ef01630450a4c5970d-120wiIn light of all the interest in the Cloud and Cloud Computing, it seems that the more news that comes out, the more questions arise.  And one can feel like a herd is stampeding towards you telling you to do all or nothing.  The concern I hear time and again from Mid-Market and Small size business CIOs and IT Directors is that they want to jump on board, but they are concerned about a myriad of issues including cost, value and ROI, compliance, uptime, data security, and most importantly, where to begin?    And, depending upon their industry, some of these questions may resonate even more deeply.                                                                                                                                          


It's Not Their Cloud…It's Your Cloud
I’d like to share another real-world example of how to breakhrough the noise and start on a path that can help you pragmatically move your IT Department down a path towards 'Your Cloud' by providing better infrastructure pooling, elasticity, automation and service levels while freeing up IT capacity to drive increased top and bottom-line impact at your company.  Today, we'll discuss Acorda Therapeutics, a mid-market size biotechnology service provider that recently teamed with us and our partner, ICI, and took the first concrete step forward.

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Socialcast Private Social Network Now Free for 50-Users or Below

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Since VMware acquired Socialcast in 2011, we’ve had many exciting conversations with our customers about helping them implement private social networks within their organizations. Many of our customers are new to Enterprise Social Networks while others have had varying degrees of [non]success with restricted, free trials or feature-constrained free offerings in the market – having 300,000 customers makes it easy to get lots of feedback quickly. We’ve heard from enough customers to recognize that the market need a great, free, Enterprise Social Network offering so companies can get started on the right foot with their social journey. We believe VMware is in the best position to deliver this experience.

Last week we announced that all the capabilities of the Socialcast enterprise version are free for all Socialcast communities of up to 50 users. We want all VMware customers to create a free Socialcast community and we want to hear about your journey. With complete access to all the features that make social in the enterprise revolutionary, small businesses and departments of larger companies can get started with an enterprise social network with the confidence that they are starting with a company that they want to end up with for the long term. Also, time and time again we’ve heard from our closest friends – systems administrators, application owners, IT and Security Managers – that have to pull the plug on a less-than-reliable social network because the they need access to essential administration and security functionality. Nobody wins when this happens. There’s a way to blend the necessities of protecting company IP with a great user experience, but that doesn’t start by circumventing the IT policies that keep company data and employees safe.

Enterprise social networks are on their way to becoming an essential part of the workplace experience – unless you think the 850M users of Facebook is a fad. According to Forrester 49% of companies will have investments in social networking solutions in 2012. For small businesses enterprise social networks are particularly interesting. As opposed to large companies looking to “shrink” the size of the organization, small companies often have fewer tools in place to address the issues around collaboration and integrating their workforce and systems. We’ve seen immediate changes in the way Socialcast’s small business customers collaborate as well as a long-term shift in how they use other tools like email and file sharing. Additionally, small companies are often part of an ecosystem of vendors, customers and an extended workforce – Socialcast allows small businesses to connect this ecosystem in a private, secure way that makes everyone’s work more efficient.

Starting with a free Socialcast community provides access to the rich set of features that will unite the people, applications and information in your company. If you’ve heard about enterprise social but haven’t started your journey, or you want to bring an incredible new collaboration tool into you organization, now is the time to get started. Any organization can sign up for a free Socialcast community at http://www.socialcast.com/

~Matt Stodolnic, Sr. Director, VMware Applications Marketing 

VMworld Early Bird Rate and Session Public Voting Deadline June 8

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We are in the final days of two very important deadlines: early bird registration rates and the opportunity to vote on sessions submitted to call for papers – both end on June 8.  

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Expand your knowledge, bring value to your company and meet with your peers at VMworld 2012 US. Register by this Friday to save $600 on the Full Conference pass. VMworld 2012 Europe registration will open within 2 weeks. At VMworld plan to take the next step in your journey to ITaaS.

We are inviting everyone to participate in the Call for Papers voting session by June 8. During this time, all complete session proposals will be voted on and allows us to poll the general public on which sessions they want to see presented at the event. Vote Today!

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ChannelPro-SMB Readers’ Choice Awards – VMware Named The Best Virtualization Vendor

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Virt_vendor_wVMware has been named a winner in the 2012 ChannelPro-SMB Readers’ Choice Awards in the category of Best Virtualization Vendor, as well as a runner-up in the categories of Vendor Partner Program: Best Sales Support, Vendor Partner Program: Best Technical Support, and Vendor Partner Program: Best Training Programs.

Readers of ChannelPro-SMB were invited to participate in the channel's first SMB-focused Readers' Choice Awards by casting their votes for the most SMB- and partner-friendly products, technologies, services, programs, and professional organizations in the channel today, via the publication's website. For each category, readers were asked to select the option that best satisfies the unique business requirements, work styles, and budgets of their small and midsize business clients, as well asthose that best serve their own partner organizations.

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