Whilst all sectors have been transformed by the digital era, some have been more disrupted than others. Industries like media and retail have seen their worlds turned upside down. For an IT specialist operating in those sort of industries, like Arvato Systems, it has meant having to overhaul how they service their customers.
“Due to the changes in our customers’ business models, they are having to rethink their development processes,” explains Sören Hühold, head of IT transformation and cloud services at Arvato. “We developed the SmartShift concepts in response to our customers’ needs; specifically, their want to avoid Big Bang scenarios. They don’t want to change the entire organisation at once, they want to transform their IT step by step, at their own pace.”
Smart Shift allows a smooth transition from customers’ own data centres to Arvato Systems’ as their service provider. “Since IT transformation is always complex, it’s a matter of making the change manageable, dividing it into sensible units, and focusing on the right issues.”
As you will see in this video, this gives customers greater flexibility, allowing them to choose exactly what they want. As such, they get an agile, procedural outsourcing method which meets their needs.
This flexibility is based on VMware’s vRealize suite and vSphere 6.5. The former allows Arvato to proactively manage the status, performance and capacity of IT services in a variety of cloud environments. The latter is also extensively used, thanks to its automation and management capabilities and integrated security features. NSX is another vital component; as Sören Hühold states, it “makes the gentle transition in the network possible.”
Arvato stands out from other private cloud providers through its long history as a full IT outsourcing provider and has long used VMware in its own data centres. This position as both partner and customer means it knows exactly what capabilities the software has, and why Arvato should deploy it with its own customers. “VMware is an important partner for Arvato,” Sören Hühold concludes “and enables us to meet the requirements of our customers: flexibility and reliability.”
