Expertise and counsel are vital to helping customers align their technology investments to their business goals. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Technical Adoption Managers (TAM) and VCF Professional Services are masters at understanding customer challenges and leveraging their VMware technology expertise to help customers achieve desired outcomes. Their skill at understanding their customers and developing trusted relationships enables them to architect, implement, and operationalize VCF solutions.
A good example of these collaborative partnerships is a customer we helped save over $37M by quickly exiting an expensive contract with a cloud hosting provider and moving to an on-premises VCF private cloud.
The customer is in a unique industry that doesn’t allow rapid change and is highly risk-averse. They wanted to deploy a new VCF private cloud so they could move from a managed service provider to an on-premises solution.
The TAM and Professional Services consultant built a 10-year capabilities roadmap with constant communication and collaboration to help the customer realize long-term growth. They have also taken the time to understand the customer’s industry so they can speak their language and understand how best to advance their priorities.
Approach
The customer initially started with a half-day TAM. He embedded himself into the account, observing and identifying their technology challenges and road-mapping solutions. The TAM meets regularly with the customer’s lead architect to identify initiatives and options. For example, the TAM developed the roadmap to transition from VMware vSphere to a fully integrated VCF private cloud. The first phase was to build the customer’s new VCF infrastructure and migrate applications and workloads from their legacy platforms. So impressed with the TAM’s work, the customer has increased his time on the account to 2.5 days per week to help with their operations strategy and uncover more business problems that can be solved with VCF.
Professional Services was at the center of helping the customer ramp up and manage the VCF implementation. The CIO relied on Professional Services for the enterprise architecture and deployment, filling in skills gaps on his team, and training the IT team to manage the environment. The VCF skills the customer acquired helped them exit an expensive cloud hosting contract and save $37M. Delivering this kind of ROI gave the IT team bragging rights to their executive leadership.
Result
The TAM and Professional Services are now working with the customer to build their VCF capabilities with advanced automation and containers, and are exploring opportunities for artificial intelligence.
Our team has collaborated so effectively with the customer that they are like an extension of their staff. As a result of the partnership and value they have provided, the customer has achieved much in a short period, including:
- Completely transforming their IT landscape from a managed service provider on aging hardware and software to a modern VCF private cloud
- Gaining the skills, knowledge, and best practices needed to manage VCF independently and save over 37M USD
- Preparing to move to the next significant initiatives and beyond
Learn how to leverage VCF experts to accelerate your cloud journey with VCF Services and Lifecycle Support.
