If you are following this blog series, by now you may have gathered two things: my colleague Nelson Yan and I are tag-teaming on this effort and we are sharing stories about key use cases that we are seeing emerge within the Cloud Foundation customer base.
We started off with the story of a Large Telco that wants to build a true hybrid cloud by running Cloud Foundation on premises and from VMware vCloud Air as a service. We followed with the story of a Government Research Agency that intends to drive IT automation in their private cloud by pairing Cloud Foundation with the capabilities of VMware vRealize Automation. Today, I want to share the story of a major airline that purchased Cloud Foundation to fundamentally modernize IT infrastructure in their data center.
Every now and then I still read some technology article claiming that IT infrastructure is how companies can drive differentiation. False. It’s the opposite. Companies whose line of business is not the delivery of IT services want to spend as little time and resources as possible running IT infrastructure, so that they can drive differentiation through applications and higher level services for the line of business. To these customers, modernizing IT infrastructure means to make it standardized, so that time spent on the design phase can be minimized. Make it small in footprint, so that more infrastructure can be managed by fewer people. And make it automated, so that the IT team can focus on innovation. This is what Cloud Foundation does by combining VMware’s core virtualization capabilities for compute, storage and networking into a hyper-converged architecture that deploys a standardized SDDC design through the automation of the SDDC Manager.
Now let’s talk about our customer. Despite its accolade and customers’ appreciation, this was a company that had not invested in data center technology for a long time and was still in infancy in its virtualization journey with mostly vSphere usage. This aging IT infrastructure came into spotlight when the company suffered a couple of IT outages that led to flight cancellations, customers stranded and millions in cost. These outages brought new urgency for an initiative to modernize the data center. With limited IT skill set, the company sees Cloud Foundation as a strategic investment to help them roll out infrastructure in an easy, standardized way going forward. They are also excited to leverage the lifecycle automation power of SDDC Manager to accelerate time to market for this investment and to reduce operational complexity. The company will also leverage vRealize Suite as its cloud management platform to automate IT service delivery.
This use case exemplifies the need for companies to invest in simple and fast infrastructure that gets out of the way so that they can focus on what truly matters to them.
Please come back for more of these customer stories, so that you can learn how your peers are taking 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
