Interview with John Churchhouse and Christian Rudolph
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.
John: What was the big driver behind moving to the cloud?
Christian: For the business of the TUI InfoTec it is important that we can react fast and flexible to the business needs of our customers. With this knowledge in mind in the background it is very important to build services which can be expanded very flexible.
We started with IaaS to speed up the deployment and extending of the current infrastructure. The next steps are to design and build SaaS solutions for customers.
John: How has VMware helped you on that journey?
Christian: Some days ago I found a presentation which I held in 2003 on a COMPAQ User Group and I’ve presented how easy a virtualized server could be managed and maintained. Since then VMware enabled us with different products and features like P2V for physical server migrations, DRS to have an automated load balancing of the VMs, Storage vMotion enables us to have zero-downtime during our Storage Migration Project, Storage DRS to nearly full automate the administration tasks.
One great product which is not often in the focus had brings us a great push forward in our journey and this is vCenter Orchestrator. Through the Orchestrator we have automated our server deployment and other administrative Tasks.
These things enabled us to go our journey forward to do more with less.
Another helpful person for us is the Technical Account Manager we are using to get help and feedback to our own customized journey to the cloud.
John: If you were going to give cloud sceptics one reason why they should be embracing cloud computing, what would it be?
Chrisitan: For me the number one reason is scalability. I think everybody had the problem that a service had performance issues and nothing is easier than to deploy for a short time period one more instance in the cloud and pay only for the necessary resources.
John: Finally, you presented a session at VMworld Europe last year – are you coming to VMworld Barcelona this year?
Christian: Yes, of course. For me it is the possibility to meet some guys if normal didn’t see for a year. It is the chance to get the latest updates from VMware and the VMworld is the biggest convention for virtualization and cloud computing trends. The only thing I’m currently not sure about is if I will be there this year only as visitor or one more time as presenter.
Read more about TUI InfoTec here.
