Centralized administration and consistent experience are critical to maintaining efficiency and productivity. Explore the ‘Three Cs of Service Success’: Customer, Consumption, and Cohesion. Learn why the Engagement Model is vital to user consistency. Discover how VMware Cloud Services Engagement Platform helps VMware business units launch what they need, when they need, with no friction.
In 2019, VMware established itself as a leader in hybrid and multi-cloud, offering the unique ability to provide customers with consistent infrastructure and operations across cloud environments. One of the key pillars of consistency is the engagement model and customer experience across our portfolio of cloud services. Read on to learn what is consistent customer engagement and how you can improve the productivity of your organization with this key differentiator from VMware.
The need for consistent engagement and common administration
Since the rapid adoption of public clouds such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, the relevance of the public cloud within an enterprise now extends to a diverse group of people. For example, your infrastructure and your DevOps teams may be interested in services that span from the data center to the cloud, your line of business development teams may be interested in building modern applications and your central IT team may be interested in services that offer compliance and security.
With different users and business units and cost-centers within your company using VMware services, across such diverse needs, central administration and a consistent experience become critical for increasing your efficiency and productivity.
For example, you need all your users to securely authenticate with your corporate credentials and authentication policies, irrespective of service they use. You need cost visibility across all your business units and a simple, consolidated, single bill every month. You need one way of tracking all your support tickets with VMware, irrespective of the service or the user using that service. Your business units need the flexibility to sign up for any service trial when they like, as they need, without the risk of being charged.
In essence, your business units need one way to engage with the service offerings from VMware – from how they sign up to sign in, to how they try and buy and use any of our services. They need an experience that is personalized, delightful and offers solutions to their business problems irrespective of the service they use. And, you need central administration and visibility across their use and one place to manage their identity, costs and compliance needs.
How does it benefit you?
I attribute the success of a service to the three C’s – knowing and understanding our customers, working with our customers on their consumption, and walking them through cohesive experiences that are outcome-driven. The key to achieving all three C’s is understanding your journey with us and engaging with you every step of the way, consistently, end to end.
Consistency for you is one way to engage, whether you try from our website, or are led by our sales organization, or work with your trusted VMware partner to use one of our services. Delightful engagement is reducing your administration needs with a central console to manage your organization, access, payments, and purchases across every service you use from VMware. Connecting end to end is stretching this experience beyond VMware to our third-party marketplace and partner offerings. And this is not just for the services you use currently, but more importantly, it is about providing the same experience as you embark on your journey on our new offerings like Project Tanzu. Finally, this is not just about UIs – you can use our APIs to facilitate this rich engagement as well.
How do we deliver your outcomes at scale with speed?
As VMware, we need to launch our cloud services with compelling experiences, at scale with speed. We must invest in a technology that reduces duplication while allowing for flexibility and agility, so our business units can launch what they need, when they need, with no friction. All this, while ensuring that each service provides the consistent experience and delivers the outcomes that you need. This problem increases exponentially in complexity when we are delivering a portfolio of inter-connected services, each with their own cadence, against their own markets.
This means allowing a business unit within the company to deliver a new service in weeks across multiple different routes to market. The VMware Cloud Services Engagement Platform was born out of this burning need with a simple mission for delivering services: each business unit delivers its core product differentiation, while the engagement platform accelerates innovation, by providing business and monetization capabilities. The business and monetization capabilities are built once centrally and used by every service that launches.
Our journey: Cloud Services Engagement Platform
It starts with you, our customers, and your journey with our portfolio of services and marketplace offerings.
Our first set of foundational components were about getting you started with our cloud services: that meant onboarding, identity, access, and basic commerce through one route to market. We then expanded beyond the initial onboarding to active engagement as you used the services. We simultaneously hardened the platform with compliance, certifications and operational resiliency. The breadth of the engagement platform now includes every step of your journey with us!
This is a journey for us too. Since our early days, our vision was to allow services to launch within weeks. We are closer than ever to that vision and are proud to have over 20 VMware services powered by the engagement platform. We have also integrated our managed service provider program partners’ needs with VMware Cloud Provider Hub and our third-party partner integrations with VMware Cloud Marketplace on this same platform.
Next Steps
It continues with you, our customers, and the continued benefits you get from our portfolio.
Every one of our foundational components is increasing its depth in addition to the breadth of the portfolio. We are exposing more of our APIs from billing to usage to notification events so you can build custom solutions with VMware Cloud. We are harnessing the power of data to provide recommendations and advice based on your usage patterns, so you can benchmark against your peers, forecast your spending better, and deliver end to end solutions to your users.
