Because every customer’s environment is different, the work our VMWare Cloud Foundation Technical Adoption Managers (VCF TAMs) perform is customized to meet their business and IT objectives. In some cases, that means helping organizations modernize infrastructure while maintaining operational control. In others, it may involve identifying opportunities to reduce costs, improving performance, or mitigating risk.
The following examples highlight several ways VCF TAMs have recently helped solve their customers’ operational and technical challenges.
Story One: Helping a customer improve operational control with VCF 9
A U.S. Public Sector customer was struggling with public cloud costs and shadow IT needed the automation capabilities of VCF 9 to regain greater operational control.
Using available hardware, TAM Matt Troillet built a three-node VCF 9 test environment that allowed the customer to evaluate the platform. The team showcased the environment to their leadership and with Matt’s help was able to communicate the value to the business of repatriating workloads to a VCF on-premises solution.
To help address internal skill gaps, Matt created a series of short enablement videos covering topics such as upgrades, NSX edge clusters, VPCs, storage policies, and stretch clusters. The result was a practical path toward more centralized management, lower costs, and greater autonomy for the customer’s internal teams.
As Matt explained, “For me, being a TAM is about more than tech. It’s about finding creative ways to guide my customers toward success.”
Story Two: Working together to avoid more than $1 million in projected storage costs
A healthcare organization operating across seven hospital locations was preparing for a costly storage refresh initiative.
TAM Xerex Bueno developed a highly trusted working relationship with the customer team over several years.
“Over the past four years, I’ve developed such a strong trusted relationship that they [my customer] include me in all their technology planning,” Xerex shared.
When they told Xerex of their plans for a storage refresh, he took the opportunity to help the customer evaluate alternatives. After demonstrating multiple scenarios in his lab environment and testing it out in the customer’s sandbox, Xerex’s customer opted for a more modern approach using VMware vSAN-based architecture as an alternative to expensive storage arrays.
His performance testing demonstrated that a small vSAN cluster could deliver results comparable to the significantly more expensive infrastructure the customer had originally planned to purchase. Check out the 90 second video below to learn about the final result.
Story Three: Helping restore stability for a mission-critical financial application
At a large financial institution running more than 900 applications on VCF, a real-time payment application began experiencing latency issues. Over time, the instability led to transaction failures, regulatory concerns, and growing operational risk.
TAM Chaitra Shastry worked alongside the customer’s internal teams while also engaging VMware engineering and product management to investigate the issue. Together, the teams identified a payment application limitation contributing to the instability. After the product team introduced a feature enhancement to address the limitation, Chaitra worked with the customer to implement additional networking capabilities inside the customer’s VCFenvironment to help restore application stability and improve scalability.
According to the customer, the real-time payment environment has now operated without additional issues for more than 12 months.
“Everyone should have a TAM,” said Chaitra. “We’re fully dedicated to our customers and focused on what drives value for them.”
Supporting long-term operational success
Each day presents fresh opportunities for a TAM to navigate the hurdles facing their organizations. These videos provide just a glimpse into the commitment TAMs shows in assisting customers with meeting objectives, innovating new capabilities, and getting the most out of their existing VCF investments.
The longer TAMs work with their customer, the more they begin to see what else is possible. What starts as one business or technical challenge can quickly turn into larger ideas about performance, operations, scalability, cost management, and new ways to get more from their investments.
To learn more about the VCF Technical Adoption Manager program, visit the VMware Cloud Foundation Professional Services & Lifecycle Support site and explore additional customer stories and resources.
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