The Journey to Your Cloud

Cloud computing is the antidote to inflexible, overly complex IT infrastructures. It’s not an end state you can jump to instantaneously, but a transition achieved in stages. To guide and assist you on your path, VMware provides The VMware Journey, a proven and practical implementation roadmap designed to deliver benefits as you go.

During each phase, IT becomes more agile, responsive, and efficient; ROI increases while IT costs go down. The journey culminates in a cloud that is uniquely yours—a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment perfectly aligned with your individual business needs and goals.

Why Make the Journey? What’s In It for Our Company?

Agile and responsive IT is critical for business success in our global, highly networked economy. But traditional IT platforms aren’t equal to the challenge. In fact, with their inherent rigidity and multiple layers of complexity, they could fairly be described as the antithesis of agility.

The Cloud: Tailored for Today’s and Tomorrow’s Needs

The evolution to this new model begins with virtualization, the fundamental enabling technology of cloud computing. VMware research reveals that enterprises typically approach the Journey in one of these two ways:

• Path 1. Step-Wise Virtualization to Maximize Efficiency. IT steadily virtualizes more and more of its workloads and environments, dramatically improving datacenter efficiency, increasing reliability and quality of service, and simplifying operations.
• Path 2. Progression Toward Cloud-Scale Operations and Agility. Once 20-25% virtualization has been achieved, IT begins to deploy cloud computing capabilities as well. This approach amplifies the benefits of virtualization, driving business agility, reducing IT spend, and preserving IT governance. Significantly, customers that take this approach—earlier adoption of cloud architecture—report lowering their costs and boosting agility six times faster than enterprises that wait.

This second path is more ambitious in scope and entails greater organizational change, modifications to business processes and workflows, and training cycles for IT and line-of-business staff. While this approach can yield greater value in a shorter timeframe, its suitability depends on the size of your enterprise and the depth of your training resources.

Whichever path you opt for, the VMware Journey supports your initiative with a three-phase framework of best practices:

• Phase 1. IT Production
• Phase 2: Business Production
• Phase 3: IT as a Service

Why Choose VMware?

Built-In Compatibility with Your Existing Environment

Virtualization is the foundation for the cloud, and VMware is the acknowledged virtualization leader. Many of your workloads may already be VMware-virtualized, or you may just be starting out. Either way, by building your cloud on VMware, you extend the performance and capabilities of a platform you already have, with cloud technology engineered to fit seamlessly. Instead of having to rip and replace, you preserve and enhance the value of your current IT investment—free from compatibility worries or extensive customization costs.

Proven Real-World Methodology

Only VMware smoothes and streamlines your cloud transformation with The VMware Journey, a detailed yet flexible three-stage process based on best practices, KPIs, metrics, and proven strategies, and complemented by a year-over-year quantitative customer benchmark study of cloud benefits achieved.

Accelerate and Amplify Value at Every Phase.

The Journey is a self-reinforcing process in which IT capabilities and business value are incrementally realized and continuously build on one another. Each newly virtualized workload brings new reductions in cost and complexity together with corresponding gains in efficiency and quality of service. Likewise, an early investment in cloud computing amplifies these benefits by generating even greater cost savings and unprecedented business agility.

A Cloud that Adapts to You

Unlike other cloud offerings, VMware’s approach is not one-cloud-fits-all: our solutions are flexibly tailored to increase your agility in alignment with your specific business needs and IT objectives. At any point along the Journey, you can easily move workloads to your private datacenter cloud or to one of the many vCloud-enabled public clouds in our partner ecosystem. With VMware, you gain the freedom to determine which environment is best for each workload, and the ability to deploy it there without compromising security, reliability, or governance.