Customer stories are key to understanding how our products are used. I would like to share with you a few customer stories from our recent brand-new engagements. While each customer’s situation is unique, I believe there are benefits in exploring different business objectives and requirements, discovering the key drivers for selection decisions, and understanding the value that Cloud Management brings on different stages of the cloud journey. Since these are all very recent deployments, and many of these customers are not public references yet, I cannot call them by their names. They are all very real, though, and many of them might agree to speak privately “peer-to-peer”. Please contact your VMware account manager if you are interested.
Q4 2016 was huge for VMware in general, and for Cloud Management in particular. We have so many projects where customers selected vRealize Cloud Management solutions, across multiple industries, use cases, and geographies. Obviously, we can’t cover everything in one article, so I selected these 5 customer stories that I think provide a good mix.
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A Global Airline Flies High with vRealize
This major global airline with several thousand flights daily serves hundreds of domestic and international destinations in tens of countries. Though a long-standing VMware customer, the airline was slow to adopt new infrastructure solutions beyond vSphere. Part of the issue was that the customer went through some business hardship and was forced to budget every project on a year-to-year basis, and budget by specific projects. After their financial recovery, however, this policy had stayed in place preventing strong momentum and agility. They were then plagued by several outages including critical business application as well as network issues, causing them lost revenue and increased operational expenses, as well as customer satisfaction damage.
In 2016 the airline had approached VMware and a deep architectural and operations review was set up of both their infrastructure and their personnel. The decision was made to fund a number of new data centers. VMware was a large part of this newly approved budget. Our specialist team, together with the customer’s teams, was able to build a new cloud strategy based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with vRealize Suite, using vRealize Operations and Blue Medora Management Packs to get better insight into their environment as they start to modernize their infrastructure. Customer has charted a very aggressive schedule of getting the first new DC up and running within several months, to run hundreds of mission critical applications.
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A Tier-1 Financial Services Firm Sees 1 + 1 = 3!
This deal, originated out of the US but is global by nature, demonstrates the top-level team work between Dell EMC and VMware, where vRealize was one of the key drivers. This how it all came about:
This global financial services firm was looking for a hybrid cloud solution and issued an RFP to over a dozen of different vendors. VMware partnered with Dell-EMC and Pivotal. After a successful proof of concept project (POC) spanning multiple months, the customer chose Dell-EMC/VMware infrastructure combination, with Pivotal providing the application platform, for a few reasons:
- vRealize Automation proved to be the best service catalog/cloud management platform
- The integration value of all the products in our vRealize Suite of vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Business for Cloud
- The high level of confidence in NSX, and also excited with the cross-cloud architecture that NSX could support
With vRealize management installed on top of the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud from Dell-EMC, they are expecting to get a more agile and efficient platform to then build new applications, and ultimately remove a significant amount of operational costs through automation and intelligent operations. We competed against and beat out a number of very strong competitors in the process! Dell-EMC and VMWare is like 1+1=3!
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A Government Agency in Asia Pacific Region Gets Their IT Back
The Taxation Office is the principal revenue collection agency of the government in one of the larger countries in the Asia Pacific region. They had three system integrators and hosters providing significant amounts of IT service to them, but still didn’t have clear visibility, management, or control when, why and how these services were being provisioned. They also had very limited visibility into service costs. It became critical for the agency to regain control and track IT expenditures to daily outcomes. Creating a management and visibility framework was also critical as the IT organization increased their adoption of the public cloud.
The solution was a hybrid cloud platform managed by vRealize Automation, with NSX as the security mechanism. The agency’s production workloads have now been moved from a traditional environment to a fully implemented hybrid cloud. They now support both AWS and vSphere running live workloads, and have identified several critical apps to deploy to the public cloud, this will not only streamline workflows and provide greater agility but also give full transparency into their IT operations costs. This customer now has a choice of provisioning their DevOps workloads in private or public clouds, with a full visibility into all platforms.
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A Tier 1 Telco Calls Out to VMware for Cloud
This customer is the top fixed/mobile carrier service provider in a major European country serving 100M+ subscribers. This engagement continues a pattern of vRealize delivering value to a growing number of the world’s top telcos. The complete solution includes NSX, vCloud Suite, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and a professional services across the board.
Like other telcos, this customer was challenged with eroding margins and growing operational costs. To address this, they introduced the new strategy to manage big data, edge up their market differentiation and be able to increase the dividends to the shareholders. They were willing to invest wherever needed to deliver the highest quality of services while keeping costs under control.
The VMware specialists team instigated several short proof of concept (POC) projects that positioned VMware solution as the best-in-class software-defined infrastructure, demonstrating the efficient and reliable foundation for both IT and virtualized carrier-grade network functions.
Through successful POCs and demos we have shown that automated provisioning and governance provided by vRealize Automation and vCloud Director, coupled with NSX, will streamline the IT and network provisioning, while vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight will provide the single pane of glass end-to-end monitoring / analytics capability to enable proactive incident management and carrier-grade infrastructure operations.
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Oil and Gas Flow Easier with vRealize Cloud Management
With some of the largest proven crude oil and natural gas reserves and the largest daily oil production, this customer is one of the world’s most valuable companies. As they evolve to a more modern IT infrastructure they have faced many common issues, including decentralized app requests, lack of proper capacity management, and no easy way to troubleshoot issues. With several different kinds of environments, each with their own network, connectivity, storage and app requirements, everything had to be deployed manually by an admin.
VMware’s solution will provide an automation tool that will integrate with the existing IT policies and tools. With a broad operation management strategy, they rolled out VxRack and Cloud Foundation with vRealize Suite deployment to provide performance and capacity management for the environment, implement persona-based reporting, and create charge back/show back models for different cloud services.
The Bottom Line: Value Across the Board
As you could see with these customer stories, across different industries and geographies, customers rely on vRealize Suite to meet their cloud according to their tactical or strategic objectives. The value is across the board – from increased agility and improved performance, to reduced costs and higher business efficiency. Stay tuned for more – looking forward to sharing more real-life projects and customer stories with you!
