IT Leadership

The Future-Ready Journey: Returning to Growth and Innovation in the Wake of COVID-19 

By Sumit Dhawan, Chief Customer Experience Officer, VMware.

We have begun to face a different reality, and none more acutely than where and how we work. With everyone at home, we have all become remote workers – with a home office as our base and a need to get a variety of different tasks done entirely virtually.  

One big perk from being home is getting time back for what is most important. I am finding greater balance between family and work. While my focus on the home front means learning to grill for my wife and son – for VMware it means getting more time with customers having rich discussions. Over the course of a week, I had the opportunity to speak with >50 CXO customers about how they are responding to the pandemic – and not just keep the lights on, but continue to grow and innovate amidst the new normal 

The New Normal Has Its Benefits

We are in the midst of a “remote work revolution. Economists estimate that over a third of all U.S. jobs are capable of being successfully done from home, and most industries have adjusted rapidly. In a compilation of data studies on the subject by Forbesthose of us who have embraced a remote work strategy have seen clear benefits: 

4 Stages of VMware Future Ready Solutions

Customer engagements have now all gone completely digitalAll of us are building new technologies to offer our services to our customers and supply chain completely digitally. Those with agile teams embracing technology for virtual engagement with customers are benefiting from being able to offer new services – at a significant advantage to those who cannot 

We know that skeptics would question these metrics and count things that are being missed by face to face engagement; however, we need to embrace thnew normal will be different and better than what we had beforeIt will deliver a better customer experience and a better employee experience leveraging modern technologies. To that end, we can credit COVID-19 with forcing a “rip-the-band-aid-off” approach to a shift that many of us have been working through at our own pace.  

Where Do We Go From Here?

We are all in different stages as we respond to the situation before usOver half of the Executives I met with are having to adjust first to impacts from significant budget reductions while starting to think about how they allocate enough for innovation. At the same time, a third of the customers I have spoken with are facing increased demand for products and services. It is time we simplify things, and provide prescription for how to Respond, Adapt, and Accelerate a Future-Ready Journey together:

Respond, Adapt, and Accelerate a Future-Ready Journey  

Most of us have come out of the Respond phase of our post-pandemic plan (except certain industries like travel and hospitality). In the Respond phasewe are in reactive mode – securing vital data, information, and systems, while quickly shifting to enable our workforce to work remotely and sustain our customer base. Once we move into the Adapt phasewe have tailored our investments to new customer experience and serviceswhile enabling our workforce with new tools and capabilities. A majority are also in very early Accelerate phase initiatives (5-15% started) – using digital technologies to drive growth of their businesses and acquiring new customers, made all the more possible by innovating for new employee experiences. They are able to invest for the long-term benefits tied to these efforts, despite the unavoidable disruptions they are facing fiscally and operationally. 

The Future-Ready Journey (with an Amazing Customer Experience)

We are working hard to ensure we take this opportunity to innovate and enhance our Customer ExperienceOur goal in the Respond phase was to provide uninterrupted service and support to our customers based on the spike in usage of our products and having to grow the size of the implementations quicklyI am proud of how the VMware team acted with a customer always focus as they adjusted to working 100% remote. 

We are now in both Adapt and Accelerate phases of our journey. As part of the Adapt phase, we are innovating on how we engage with customers, continually seeking feedbackdoing major product launches and creative processes virtually, as well as bringing tools and workflows to our teams to better support our customers. In addition, we have shifted our investments more aggressively to going faster on building a modern digital experience as we enter the Accelerate phase. With these new innovationsour customers can get a unified way to get proactive notifications, search for informationand manage open tickets while they work from home. At VMworld 2020, I will share how this is all designed to manage our customers journey to multi-cloud, digital workspace, or security – critical in today’s world.  

Our journey is not significantly different than many customers I speak with (except certain industries that may have a different time horizon for movement across those phases). Every conversation that I have had leads to three major priorities for customers that are equally aligned to ours: 

  1. Modernize applications for faster delivery of digital capabilities to customers 
  2. Distribute capacity and scale security for new work styles 
  3. Formalize a “remote-first work-from-home program for all employees 

Technology platforms are going to play a bigger role than before. At VMware we have our five key technology solutions that when integrated together help our customers achieve these objectives – building a Digital Workspace, App Modernization through Tanzu, a Multi-Cloud with a unified technology stack for current and modern apps, our intrinsic security for workspace and workload with Carbon Black and virtualized network designed for cloud with NSX. 

VMware 5 Key Technology Solutions

We Are In This Together

Inevitably, we are on this journey together. Each of these phases requires different experience and expertise. The Customer and Employee Experience of the Future-Ready Journey will require a combination of data, machines, and people to be ready to respond in moments of crisis, continue to innovate, and leverage modern technology in new ways. We care about helping you get through this and are deeply committed to your success, focusing on the outcomes you need to achieve in whatever phase of the journey you are on. 

Future Ready Webcast Series

In today’s remote-first world, teams can continue to work effectively no matter their location. This webcast series will teach you how to facilitate access to any app, on any device, anywhere.