Ever since we launched VMware Cloud Foundation back at VMworld 2016, we have seen customers show an amazing level of interest in this new product. Now, I think we all knew we had something special in our hands, but I don’t think we anticipated the early success we were about to experience.
It seems like customers had been waiting for a solution like this one. A solution that could help them address their IT pain points on both the private cloud and the public cloud fronts. On the one hand, very often I would hear customers says things like “I love vSphere”, or “performance on vSAN is fantastic”, or “NSX is revolutionary”, but also very often I would hear them say “I am struggling to get to this SDDC vision of yours with all of these components”. Customers like these are now adopting Cloud Foundation as the way to leapfrog themselves to the VMware SDDC.
On the other hand, we have so many customers trying to figure out how to adopt the public cloud in a manner that makes any sort of sense to the VMware infrastructure they are already running on premises. These customers are now looking into Cloud Foundation as a Service, for example from IBM Cloud or from the upcoming VMware Cloud on AWS, as the enabler to extend their IT footprint to the public cloud without having to re-architect their applications or having to start all over again in the IT operations learning curve.
Cloud Foundation is surely surpassing any expectations we had for customer adoption, and we have been hard at work trying to learn as much as we can about our new customers. Now, it’s still early for us to share success stories with real customer names, but we still want to start telling you the background stories, the IT drivers and the use cases leading to Cloud Foundation deployments. Let me start with the following one.
A large Telco company outside the US is growing rapidly through acquisitions of other telco companies, leading to an increase in OpEx due to disparate skillsets, systems and the sprawl of “shadow IT”. Reducing OpEx in the Telco industry is critical to success, so the company is determined to eliminate $1B by end of 2018. To that effect, the company is looking to consolidate many data centers that resulted from the acquisitions using a simpler, standardized architecture, at the same time that it tries to bring the use of public cloud back under the umbrella of IT. This is where Cloud Foundation will shine as an integrated stack to build a hybrid cloud. Cloud Foundation will be used as the way to move all of IT onto a common SDDC platform. In parallel, the company is currently testing Cloud Foundation as a Service on VMware vCloud Air as a beta customer. As you can see, this is particularly exciting story, as it shows how this customer has bought into the complete value proposition of Cloud Foundation as a unified SDDC platform to build a true hybrid cloud.
We will continue to share more of these customer stories, so please come back to learn more about how your peers are planning to take advantage of the capabilities of VMware Cloud Foundation.
For more information:
- Check out the product page for Cloud Foundation
- Follow us on Twitter: @vmwCF
- Stay in touch by following our Cloud Foundation Blog
