Welcome to VMware’s IT Transformation site
Along the path to Cloud Computing, we have had some great successes, learned valuable lessons and have emerged with information to share. Our Cloud strategy fuels our evolution, and we consider the adoption of our own solutions to be both critical and unique. The solutions you will find here deliver rich on-demand services and showcase VMware as a trusted partner in creating agile, secure and cost-effective cloud solutions for our customers.
VMware continues to drive the journey to Cloud Computing by acquiring, developing and utilizing technologies that will inspire our customers on their own journeys. As part of our VMware on VMware (VoV) strategy, VMware develops and utilizes both products and solutions across the three key layers of Infrastructure, Application Platform and End-user technology. This three-layer approach enables us to fully leverage the capabilities of the Cloud while creating a comprehensive, cost-effective and streamlined offering for our customers. This site brings you to case studies and analysis from our own journey - real-world examples on how IT can truly transform the business.
Software Technology & Architecture is the foundation layer of VMware’s Cloud Solution. It comprises the tools and technology that shape an organization’s Cloud architecture. As depicted in the scope of case studies below, VMware IT is driving business transformation through IT transformation.
My VMware Data Preparation Assistance (DPA) Custom vFabric Application
My VMware Data Preparation Assistant Engages Customers in Configuring Data for the Cloud
Summary
VMware is moving its 1.4 million worldwide customers to the Cloud. As it prepares for the launch of My VMware later this year, VMware IT has engaged a first wave of some 110,000 customers in using a data configuration tool developed entirely on VMware technologies and designed to ease their transition to VMware’s private cloud.
Business Need:
- Prepare customers for an easy transition to My VMware
- Engage customers in managing the transition of their own data into the new My VMware Entitlement Account data model
Solution:
- Effectively prepare to migrate the entire customer base to My VMware
- Gain customer feedback by using My VMware DPA to enable customers to preview and configure their own data for the new model
- Incorporate user experience into rollout of My VMware DPA for use by installed base
- Validate logic rules based on user experience
- Build the application entirely on Wavemaker and vFabric Technology stack deployed on VMware’s vFRED Private Cloud
Benefits:
- Accelerate time to benefit for all customers for the My VMware launch
- Engage customers in managing their own data configuration
Portals Re-engineering to VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform
Migration to vFabric Cloud Application Platform Drives High Availability, Portals Resiliency and Simplified Applications Management for the Cloud
Summary
As VMware grew rapidly, the number of customer-facing applications became larger, and the IT architecture to manage them became more complex. The customer experience was becoming impacted by the downtimes required for routine maintenance on the company’s ERP systems. By extension, maintenance on these systems disrupted service of as many as 30 customer-facing applications, impacting VMware customers. Further, the company’s journey to Cloud computing was reaching a critical impasse: VMware was ready to take a step towards moving to Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Business Need:
- Customer-facing applications were so hard-wired into back-end ERP that they were disrupted during system maintenance
- Maintenance of larger business-critical apps was taking as long as eight to ten hours, disrupting customer-facing employees and customers
Solution:
- Migrate from a legacy application to vFabric Cloud Application Platform solution for deployment, maintenance and applications management
- Implement a new vFabric technology stack to enable faster and more agile operations
Benefits:
- Application downtime slashed from nine hours to as little as 45 minutes
- Application server footprint reduced by 66 percent
- Downtime support requests reduced by 25 percent
- Software deployment and maintenance costs reduced by up to 40 percent
- Increased agility, reliability and scalability
- Solution highly adaptive to changing customer and business needs
Collaboration through VMware Socialcast Social Media in the Cloud
Socialcast Builds Community and Increases IT Agility
Summary
VMware sought a way to increase dialog across the global enterprise. People at all levels and in all locations were asking for a way to have conversations and share information in an inclusive way that supported VMware’s culture of transparency. As consensus built that some kind of online community was the next right thing, IT had its own conversation about what would be required to manage it. VMware had chosen Socialcast as its social platform of choice and then acquired Socialcast in spring 2011. Socialcast was live at VMware by July.
Business Need:
- Meet demand from all levels of VMware community to easily have communications, collaboration and multi-level engagement
- Easily conduct both public and private conversations across all organizational and geographic boundaries
- Find a social community that can meet all needs without adding to IT overhead
Solution:
- Provide single communication platform
- Leverage SaaS model to avoid IT overhead
- Increase dialog with employees at all levels and across physical boundaries to improve sense of community at VMware
- Meet these demands without increasing the administrative overhead to manage a new platform
- Create community that would work on any employee’s platform of choice - across devices and operating systems
Benefits:
- Instantly facilitated forums for communication
- Ease-of-use solution enabled self-managing system
- Increased employee dialog with management; C-level changes and concerns now easily discussed in a two-way, transparent conversation
- Public and private conversations allow flexibility
- Improved IT agility achieved via instant user polling with high participation/feedback rates
- Improved sense of community furthered VMware’s culture of transparency
SOX Compliance with VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
Monitoring SOX Compliance with vCM
Summary
VMware’s processes for SOX server configuration compliance were time-consuming and subject to human error. Using VMware’s vCenter Configuration Manager to automate the monitoring of its Windows and Linux SOX servers, VMware IT slashed the number of days needed to audit compliance from four to one while achieving many other benefits.
Business Need:
- Streamline mission-critical SOX-compliance processes
- More easily ensure full server configuration compliance
- Deliver on vision of Business Transformation through IT Transformation
Solution:
- Use VMware Configuration Manager (vCM) to monitor SOX servers
- Automate reporting process for compliance
- Involve Professional Services for best practice rules and workflow deployment
Benefits:
- Create default of 100 percent SOX-compliance server configuration
- Eliminate the need to remediate noncompliant configurations
- Streamline audit process from four days to one
- Eliminate human error through automated reporting
- Reduce administrative overhead
Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring with vCenter Operations
vCOps - Virtual Operations Monitoring Drives Holistic View of IT
Summary
Getting at the lowest possible origin of a problem not only optimizes IT performance and the user experience but it also ultimately saves time, money and resources. VMware’s Virtual Network Operations Center (VNOC), the organization that monitors VMware’s virtualized enterprise out of multiple data centers, knew that its various solutions for monitoring availability, capacity and performance had created data silos that sometimes complicated the correct diagnosis of a problem’s root cause. The VNOC lacked a common view into all data gathered by its myriad monitoring tools. Seeking to reduce as many as eight monitoring solutions into one or two, they made the choice to implement VMware’s own Virtual Operations (vCOps) tool.
Business Need:
- VMware’s Virtual Network Operations Center (VNOC) needed to improve insight into IT resources
- Correlated data would improve analysis through a holistic view
- Multiple point solutions lacked integration and overlapped functionality
Solution:
- Conduct Monitoring Summit and interview stakeholders to gather input for best possible solution
- Implement vCOps to enable holistic view into IT metrics through a singular analytics engine
- Garner better decision support and capacity planning
- Secure improved root cause analysis
- Enable ability to accurately forecast and anticipate capacity demands
Benefits:
- Ability to accurately forecast and anticipate capacity demands
- Accurate isolation of root causes
- Holistic, correlated analysis of all data collected
- Centralized metrics enable better diagnostic and decision support
- Ability to use dashboards to tailor the view for specific teams
IT Private Cloud on VMware vCloud Infrastructure
VMware’s Transformative Private Cloud: Slashing Applications Deployment Time, Improving Services and Reducing Costs
Summary
Using VMware cloud infrastructure products helps VMware’s IT organization to do what the company’s customers do; serve end users, meet business conditions that change rapidly and push to new highs levels of security, reliability and economy. With this in mind, implementing a VMware Private Cloud was an exciting, but challenging, IT initiative. As the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions, there was even more on the line: VMware’s cloud infrastructure adoption meant that the IT organization was playing an active role in maturing the company’s cloud infrastructure offerings.
Business Need:
- Accelerate time-to-market for VMware’s cloud offerings
- Improve business agility to accelerate new services and offerings
- Reduce applications deployment time
- Support mobile and social demands
- Implement business-critical applications in the Private Cloud with no additional IT headcount
Solution:
- Build an internal VMware Private Cloud
- Evolve into a cloud-based IT Organization
- Develop mature cross-functional team processes for cloud
Benefits:
- Secure environment permits user self-service and pay-for-use business model
- Applications deployment slashed from 2 to 4 weeks to an average of a few days
- Improved project timelines
- Reduced project costs
- Near instantaneous, on-demand scalability with available capacity
Desktop Virtualization on Horizon View
View Desktop Virtualization Drives Agility, Cost Savings and Improved User Experience
Summary
VMware users wanted to access their desktops anytime and from anywhere — on the road, from home, from their laptop or mobile device. VMware IT deployed its View technology for desktop virtualization and was able to give them what they wanted while reducing the total cost of ownership for each desktop in the growing global enterprise.
Business Need:
- Users demanded access to their desktop applications and data from any location and/or device
- IT needed to drive further cost and operational efficiencies while meeting user demands
- The company needed to bring the benefits of the Cloud to the desktop
Solution:
- Single solution deployed to extend desktops, data and applications to users regardless of location or device
- Enhanced, more mature solution to reduce provisioning to 10 minutes per user
- Reliable, secure desktop resources extended to users beyond the office
- Provide desktop virtualization while reducing the total cost of ownership for each desktop in the growing global enterprise
- Centralized infrastructure afforded by virtualization to drive user and IT benefits
Benefits:
- Centralized virtual machines streamline IT administration, boost security and improve user experience
- Backup times slashed
- User downtime for upgrades and patches virtually eliminated
- Login time reduced by half
- 5.0 upgrade delivers enhanced PCoIP performance, enabling IT to begin addressing provisioning of thin clients in remote offices
Distributed Storage Virtualization for the Cloud using EMC VPLEX
VPLEX Storage Solution Moves VMware Closer to the Virtual Data Center
Summary
With the continued growth of corporate data, VMware sought to achieve new levels of efficiency when it came to storage. The traditional architecture of multiple physical arrays meant purchasing storage to accommodate growth and vulnerability to downtime in the event of an array failure. As the company grew, it knew that taking its storage architecture to the Cloud would boost levels of availability and flexibility. VMware’s evolution to a fully enabled provider of Cloud services called for building domain expertise in deploying and managing virtual storage solutions.
Business Need:
- Transition traditional, physical storage arrays to a virtual environment to increase availability, flexibility and data mobility
- Advance the company’s position as a fully enabled provider of Cloud solutions
- Minimize risk of a single array failure in the production environment
- Gain more effective use of tiered storage architecture and remove storage silos
- Lower TCO in conjunction with thin provisioning
- Accurately conduct trending analysis and capacity planning
Solution:
- Implement EMC’s VPLEX storage virtualization platform for highly available, distributed virtual storage
- Create centralized mechanism for storage provisioning
- Leverage tiered storage in conjunction with thin provisioning capacity
Benefits:
- Distributed storage virtualization
- VPLEX mirror of Tier 1 production data to eliminate single array failure risk
- Highly elastic, on-demand capacity
- Dynamic data mobility: the ability to move applications and data in real-time, with no outage required
- Lower TCO, leveraging tiered storage and thin provisioning
- Centralized SAN storage provisioning
On-demand Sales Tool Access with vSEL Sales Enablement Cloud
vSEL Sales Enablement Cloud Travels with the Sun
Summary
Hard work usually produces good outcomes, but excellent outcomes may require more than work; they may require play. That’s how an experiment in using VMware technologies to offer sales engineers a better way to develop customer demos resulted in vSEL, VMware’s first sales enablement platform.
Business Need:
- Exhibit excellence in global field enablement through best-in-class customer demo ability
- Take VMware’s sales enablement platform to the Cloud for scalability, cost efficiencies, accelerated cycles and agility
- Leverage all applicable VMware technologies
- Free sales engineers (SEs) from the burden of using shared, scheduled resources that hampered development, test and QA cycles
- Deliver training and “lab” platform to field and partner organizations in the Cloud
Solution:
- Eliminate capacity limitations that made it necessary to share and schedule hardware and infrastructure resources for lab time
- Free up development, test and QA cycles
- Enable cost-effective global vSEL deployment through new paradigm
Benefits:
- Platform independence, high availability and scalability at a fraction of the cost
- Overcame capacity limitations and eliminated scheduling backup of shared resources
- vSEL 2.0 built entirely on VMware technologies, underscoring VMware technology and product value
- Cloud-based training for SEs and partners
- Demo cycles are greatly shortened
- Example of first Cloud-enabled sales enablement platform running successfully in production
Cloud Computing on VMware vSphere for Enterprise
Migration to vSphere 5.0 Delivers Enterprise Enhancements
Summary
vSphere, VMware’s flagship product for virtualization, enables customers to build a cloud infrastructure to run mission-critical business applications securely, reliably and with high availability. As VMware readied the latest release of vSphere, the company sought to validate new features and functions prior to general availability. The IT department installed vSphere 5.0 in its production environment, ensuring upgrade steps were clearly defined and modeling best practices with respect to cross-organizational communication.
Business Need:
- Support general release of vSphere 5.0 through IT’s early adoption program
- Document critical installation processes
- Ensure that VMware enterprise is on vSphere 5.0 by general product release
Solution:
- Engage with R&D at Release Candidate (RC) stage to maximize testing with a stable code base
- Validate vSphere 5.0 in high-visibility test environments prior to upgrading production
- Focus efforts on key infrastructure supporting critical applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite
- Document installation and upgrade best practices to ensure timely, accurate rollout throughout the environment
Benefits:
- Demonstrate that vSphere 5.0 is a solid product release by running that version in VMware’s production environment prior to general availability
- Enable improved customer experience through validation testing and feedback to R&D during pre-GA testing
Enterprise Email and Collaboration on VMware Zimbra
VMware’s Move to Zimbra: Rollout Enables Collaboration for the Cloud
Summary
Zimbra, a popular, open-source email and collaboration solution, fit well into VMware’s strategy to offer enterprise-class applications for the Cloud. In addition to exposing internal users to the same business-critical applications VMware provides to its external customer base, management sought to understand the implications of implementing, tuning and optimizing a new solution in a fully virtualized environment.
Business Need:
- VMware needed an enterprise-class email and collaboration platform to expand its VMware vCloud™ strategy to deliver a well-integrated portfolio of compute, application development and core IT service clouds
Solution:
- Reduce dependency on competitor’s products while validating the strength of our own solutions
- Leverage Zimbra, the technology acquired by VMware from Yahoo in January 2010
- Replace VMware’s existing email system with Zimbra Collaboration Server, Network Edition
Benefits:
- Zimbra demonstrated in a virtualized production environment
- Adoption and advocacy fueled by open source architecture
- Mature web-based email solution vetted for production Cloud environments
- Zimbra furthered VMware’s mission of simplifying IT
- Zimbra added to the portfolio of offerings available to our VMware vCloud partner
Global HR Application in the Cloud
Cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) Solution Slashes IT Overhead, Boosts Service Levels
Summary
With VMware experiencing rapid growth, the Human Resources organization was facing the limits of its internally managed legacy human resource information system (HRIS). Using this legacy on-premise HR application required VMware’s IT department to support the system. Further, the old system lacked the scalability and reporting requirements that VMware’s HR organization needed. Workday HCM was selected for its ability to handle audit and compliance reporting. And because it was a SaaS-based solution it could easily scale and offer new services.
Business Need:
- VMware’s internally managed legacy HRIS could not meet HR’s needs for data tracking, scalability and reporting requirements
- IT’s manual management of the old system was resource-intensive
- HR relied on IT to get much of what it needed out of its legacy HRIS
Solution:
- Launch a cross-functional team, including IT, to evaluate HRIS/HCM systems
- Perform a cost/benefit analysis of re-implementing the old system vs. adopting a new one
- Implement Workday HCM, boosting HR’s agility and reducing IT overhead through a SaaS-based solution
- Empower HR to own its HCM
- Use vendor’s best practices for rapid time-to-benefit
Benefits:
- Scalability
- Flexibility
- Increased reporting abilities
- Reduced IT overhead
- Reduced HR overhead through employee self-service
- Go-live in less than four months using best practices
- Maximized agility with cloud-based solution
Enabling Portfolio Enhancements in the Cloud
Trends:
- Create a lab that engages IT to prospect for new acquisitions to advance VMware’s product portfolio.
- Create an environment that engages IT with R&D to identify gaps that might best be filled with an acquisition.
- Evaluate vendor offerings for maturity, fit.
- Work with alpha stage products/projects to offer feedback to R&D.
Global Support and Services Application in the Cloud
SFDC Service Cloud Drives Global Best Practices for a Better Customer Experience
Summary
VMware’s Global Support Services (GSS) organization sought to improve its customer support experience. Its legacy application was cumbersome, limited and not scalable. Further, it lacked integration with sales information and wasn’t consistently implemented across global support operations. When IT’s assessment determined that an upgrade to the legacy system would still not deliver all the desired benefits and would present scalability issues, it was decided that GSS would move to the Cloud.
Business Need:
- VMware’s Global Support Services (GSS) organization needed consistent best practices to drive a positive customer experience from anywhere in the world
- The company needed a cloud-based, global support solution for scalability, price/performance and enterprise visibility
- Integration with sales and partner platforms would drive further benefits through a unified view of increased customer touch points
Solution:
- A solution that improved on VMware’s dated support system and supported the upgrade of integrated email and web tools
- A cloud-based, scalable solution to drive cost and operational efficiencies
- Integration between sales and support environments after sales migrated to a cloud solution
- Consistently applied customer support best practices
Benefits:
- Single, global solution that applies consistent best practices
- Unified view into support and sales history
- Cloud-based solution drives low TCO and reduced IT overhead
- High scalability and improved agility
- Workflow replaces email for reliable and expedited problem resolution
Service Request Viewer and Case Management Custom Applications on VMware vFabric tc Server
Driving High Availability and a Better Customer Experience through Custom Applications for VMware’s Service Cloud
Summary
In order to deliver a world-class service experience, VMware moved its Global Services Support (GSS) organization from an on-premise legacy solution to SalesForce.com’s Service Cloud. Both GSS and IT immediately saw the benefits of a hosted solution: a highly agile, on-demand system that tightly integrated email and other web-based applications with the support application - all with minimal IT overhead for VMware.
Business Need:
- Provide business continuity for Global Support Services (GSS) during SFDC downtimes
- Drive high availability for Service Cloud
- Ensure a 24/7 positive service experience for VMware customers
- Further improve the customer experience through integration with sales and global support organizations
Solution:
- Implement two custom applications, eForms and SR Viewer, in VMware’s private cloud
- Drive an enterprise-class service experience for VMware customers
Benefits:
- eForms provides high availability and business continuity for VMware GSS during planned and unplanned outages of the SalesForce Service Cloud
- Customers receive uninterrupted support via the phone channel
- SR Viewer provides sales organization’s Technical Assistance Managers (TAMs) with easy insight into status of support incidents around the clock
- There is seamless interaction between eForms, SR Viewer and SFDC Service Cloud via a 15-minute delayed data feed from SFDC to a common eForms and SR Viewer database
