By Tim Merrigan, Vice President SLED Sales, VMware
It’s a pleasure to post from EDUCAUSE 2015, where we’re just starting Day Two. Each year, the State, Local and Education (SLED) team at VMware looks forward to this event as the pinnacle in higher education IT, where our education industry colleagues gather to learn, reflect and engage with one other.
We meet and talk with many of our customers at this event each year, and it’s always exciting to hear how they are meeting the challenges of funding cuts and rising costs with innovative new solutions.
They’re leveraging new technology to provide access to curriculum for new students and faculty in online or distributed campus environments on an ever-widening range of personal devices, and all the while safeguarding personal and financial information.
For example, this September at the University of Wisconsin, the faculty introduced a digital lab environment for students that gave all students in the program the same desktop experience, no matter where they were physically located. The new program gave each student access to the same resources, as well as the ability to interact and collaborate with professors and other students throughout the process. And the university, alongside its integrator partner Gantech, accomplished this in just 6 weeks. Wisconsin’s existing VMware Horizon VDI platform made it even faster to roll-out the digital lab environment via Horizon Air, running on vCloud Air.
Then there’s the Rochester Institute of Technology, whose director of IT operations Steve Bertino will be speaking at 10:30 a.m. on strategies in IT operations to benefit both employees and their institutions. In addition, RIT’s Academic Cloud, utilizing a mix of VMware solutions including vCloud Air, vRealize, VMware Virtual SAN, NSX and others, will provide the platform for its Department of Computing Security’s penetration testing competition this November. The program is designed to address the ever increasing need for cybersecurity penetration testing professionals.
Finally, there’s the University of South Carolina, an early supporter of BYOD to create a more dynamic learning environment that supports anytime access to information and greater student and faculty collaboration. The university’s VDI environment, also based on VMware Horizon, allows it to create course specific learning experiences accessible via student’s personal devices. Today, there’s a 50/50 split in logins on campus vs. off campus, and most schools offer the exact same experience in either location.
EDUCAUSE is always a great place to find out how higher education institutions are transforming their organizations and student experience through the latest cloud and mobile technologies and we can’t wait to see what’s new this year—hope to see you at the show!
Stop by our EDUCAUSE exhibitor booth #1910 to learn how your institution can create more dynamic learning environments through innovative VMware End-user Computing solutions: http://www.educause.edu/annual-conference/2015/exhibitor/vmware
