Is your organization embarking on a VMware multi-cloud journey? Would your organization benefit from a having a VMware technology expert embedded within your team? Are you currently realizing the maximum value from your VMware investments? Whether you’re a new or existing VMware customer, a VMware Multi-Cloud Technical Account Manager (TAM) could be a good fit for your organization.
A VMware Multi-Cloud Technical Account Manager partners with your team to help you take full advantage of your VMware cloud technology investments, optimize operations and keep pace with rapid technology changes.
Multi-Cloud TAMs (like all VMware TAMs) are 100% focused on helping you, our customer, be successful. Allow me to share just a few of the ways multi-cloud TAMs partner with you and your teams to help maximize your VMware investments.
1. Keep your VMware environment healthy and stable
Multi-Cloud TAMs are equipped with a wealth of tools and deliverables that maximize the value of your VMware investments. The TAM Health Check, designed to ensure your environment is in a healthy state and remains so, is one of those deliverables. As part of the TAM Health Check, we review architectural decisions, product configurations and VMware best practices as they relate to your specific use of VMware solutions. The TAM Health Check provides actionable recommendations to improve the health, performance and resiliency of your environment.
Often the TAM Health Check uncovers opportunities for process-related efficiencies in your environment. For example, for one of my customers the TAM Health Check showed that all ESXi hosts built after a certain date were missing critical portions of their configurations, deviating from best practices and opening the door to a variety of potential issues. After an investigation, we determined that the consulting partner referenced outdated build process documents. The customer was able to correct both the existing configuration issues as well as update their build documentation to prevent the issue from re-occurring.
We continue to evolve our TAM Health Check to bring more value to our TAM customers. Recently, we announced TAM Health Check Reports are now available in Skyline, streamlining the process for TAMs and our customers.
2. Partner for upgrade success
Multi-Cloud TAMs collaborate with you to plan for and achieve successful upgrades. As a Multi-Cloud TAM, I observed many of my customers struggling with the manual review of the VMware Compatibility Guide and Interoperability matrix. They were unsure how to upgrade one portion of the environment without detrimentally impacting others. I saw my customers’ confusion as an opportunity to streamline processes and teach others. I shared this common problem with our Skyline team to integrate “what if” scenarios into Skyline. These scenarios allow you to automate the configuration compatibility checking and identifies any products that also will need to be upgraded. Eliminating manual reviews not only saves time, but also helps to ensure you cover all your bases.
But what if you don’t have Skyline? While most VMware customers use Skyline, not all are. In these cases, your Multi-Cloud TAM can provide you with upgrade guidance based on their experience and known best practices. My colleague Limberth Huertas’ vSphere 7 Upgrade Guide blog is a great example of how Multi-Cloud TAMs leverage their expertise to provide upgrade guidance.
3. Reclaim unutilized resources
One Multi-Cloud TAM customer had been virtualizing workloads for years, achieving close to 90% virtualization on their VMware vSphere platform. They managed the platform’s capacity through manual calculations and out-of-the-box alerts within vRealize Operations for monitoring and to ensure they retained enough spare capacity.
Their Multi-Cloud TAM helped them upgrade vRealize Operations to the latest version and worked with them to leverage capacity reclamation reports. Those reports pointed to 110 TB of storage that they could reclaim just from powered off VMs and snapshots. Astounded by this actionable information, the Multi-Cloud TAM partnered with the customer to investigate the details of powered off VMs and snapshots that had accumulated for several years. Within the first year, the customer’s Multi-Cloud TAM helped the customer reclaim about 83 TB of storage at an approximate cost savings of $157,000. That was a big win for this customer, but they weren’t done yet! The customer and Multi-Cloud TAM then turned their attention toward idle VMs and right-sizing VMs for additional savings.
4. Showcase power savings with data center sustainability dashboards
My colleague, Varghese Philipose had a customer whose top initiative was to reduce power consumption. They wanted to showcase how much power they were saving by virtualizing workloads. Varghese partnered with the customer to build sustainability dashboards using VMware vRealize® Operations™ for showcasing carbon emission reductions. The dashboards were a huge success! Varghese shared the results with the TAM community and soon there was a crowd of customers who benefited from these dashboards.
Given the momentum of sustainability, TAM customers wanted to see these dashboards built into the vRealize Operations product. After much collaboration, this became a reality with the release of vRealize Operations 8.6 in October 2021. This is another great example how TAMs communicate customer feedback to VMware product teams to influence product roadmaps and bring customer-requested enhancements to life.
5. Participate in exclusive customer roundtables
TAM customers have exclusive access to roundtable events that include other TAM customers, VMware product teams and VMware developers. These events focus on specific topics and are open to only 20 to 30 customer attendees. An example of an event I organized was a roundtable on Git integrations with VMware vRealize Orchestrator based on an upcoming release. Customers loved interacting with the VMware product managers and engineers who wrote the code. The event presented a deep dive into the new capabilities, why they were important and how to successfully leverage those capabilities in environments. Equally valuable was the customer feedback the VMware product team received on planned features and more importantly what would push the value proposition to the next level. Customers felt their participation was meaningful because they got to influence the product roadmap and helped reprioritize features. It was a win-win for everyone!
6. Prepare team skill sets for new technology
Cloud transformation is about more than just technology and process changes. Ensuring your IT staff has the right skill sets for your future technology and operating model is essential. Multi-Cloud TAMs collaborate with VMware Learning to conduct a Knowledge Skills Assessment (KSA) of your IT team to identify gaps in skill sets. From there, the Multi-Cloud TAM will make training recommendations at both a team and an individual level. Since Multi-Cloud TAMs are familiar with your organization, they’ll work with VMware Education to deliver customized educational courses for your organization’s priorities and initiatives. This ensures your team is prepared to adapt and thrive as you embrace new technology.
7. Benefit from a wealth of technical experience
Prior to becoming a Multi-Cloud TAM, I was on the customer side for over 15 years. My experience as a cloud infrastructure architect for a multinational healthcare company and as an infrastructure architect at a mutual insurance company allowed me to develop deep technology expertise while understanding the broad picture of how different technology silos fit together on a global scale. It gave me the level of experience I needed to be a successful Multi-Cloud TAM. But my background isn’t unique. Many of my TAM colleagues have similar backgrounds. Additionally, we are constantly honing our skills through ongoing education and earning VMware and industry certifications. Would your organization benefit from the expertise of a Multi-Cloud TAM? Contact your VMware sales representative to learn how you can get started with Technical Account Management Services today.
