Carahsoft and Its Partner Ecosystem Empower a Vital Federal Agency to Serve the Public More Flexibly and Efficiently
As the Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider® and Master Government Aggregator®, Carahsoft has built its entire business around partnership. To support its public sector customers—organizations that span federal, state and local government agencies, as well as education and healthcare—Carahsoft has built long-standing relationships with technology vendors, resellers, systems integrators, and consultants. And VMware has been among them since shortly after Carahsoft’s founding in 2004.
Will Jones, the senior vice president of sales at Carahsoft, says, “We’ve created relationships within VMware to help them build the partner ecosystem that supports our government customers today. This continues to be something that we greatly appreciate. Being a long-time partner and growing with VMware has been a great experience for us.”
In fact, Carahsoft is one of the most successful, fastest growing technology solution providers in the nation. The company’s unique capabilities in aggregating multiple players, products, services, and procurement contracts are central to that success. It allows Carahsoft to assess each customer’s unique mission requirements and map them to the best team of partners for delivering on those requirements. Jones points out that the breadth of solutions available from VMware is an important factor in making that effort successful.
“With the solutions that VMware offers today, we’re able to meet a broad range of requirements, from end-user computing to multi-cloud, depending on the specific needs of each customer,” Jones notes.
Creating unique customer value by nurturing relationships
Carahsoft has established partnerships with hundreds of public sector organizations, bringing together the right mix of people, technology and services to solve today’s most daunting challenges in areas such as cybersecurity, AI and machine learning, DevSecOps, Internet of Things, customer experience, and mobility. In some cases, the solutions Carahsoft delivers with its ecosystem partners include government services aimed at improving the health and welfare of millions of citizens.
The company’s success engaging one of these important, human-centric public sector agencies was a major factor in Carahsoft being selected as the 2022 VMware Partner Social Impact Award winner for North America.
Jones explains, “We worked with a large federal agency who has been a long-time VMware customer. They wanted to move to a consumption-based model, and we were able to put together a package with a very good reseller partner who supports that customer and offers them unique value.”.
The partner, V3Gate, is a well-respected IT solutions provider with extensive experience working with US federal departments and agencies. A Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business and Minority-Owned Business Enterprise, V3Gate specializes in emerging technologies that help clients simplify their infrastructures, reduce costs, and create more agile IT environments. In this specific case, V3Gate was contracted with a very large federal agency responsible for assisting more than 9,000,000 constituents with healthcare, education, home loans, life insurance, and more.
The federal agency had to account for 20,000+ VMware assets across eight unique geographical regions. However, both V3Gate and the agency struggled to summarize all products owned and determine which solutions had been fully deployed. The environment had simply become too complex, costly and inefficient to manage, pointing to the need for a more flexible and cost-effective consumption model.
Jones points out, “A consumption model was perfect for this federal agency. I can't overstate the value that our partner ecosystem brought for this particular customer.”
Delivering flexibility and cost-efficiency with a consumption-based model
Carahsoft worked closely with V3Gate’s end customer to catalog and understand every asset purchased and deployed. To streamline this effort, Carahsoft developed a customized API into VMware to obtain real-time access to purchase information, as well as to leverage proprietary solution renewal retention best practices to “nurture” every VMware customer within the agency across three unique databases.
Through this process, Carahsoft was able to highlight solutions owned by the customer, as well as build strategic relationships with stakeholders across the federal agency in support of V3Gate. Working collaboratively, Carahsoft, V3Gate, and VMware then used product information gleaned from more than ten years of data capture to develop a proposal for a consumption-based solution.
“Our close partnership with VMware allows Carahsoft to provide specially tailored services in collaboration with other technology partners like V3Gate,” Jones says. “I think that brings unique value to both our customers and VMware because we’re positioned to make those alignments possible.”
The end solution leverages the VMware Cloud Provider Program, enabling the federal agency to consume VMware solutions as a service. By migrating their critical applications to VMware Cloud on AWS, users across the agency can still enjoy all the familiar VMware features and capabilities they have always had with greater flexibility and the economics of only paying for what they consume.
Building a foundation of value that will grow for decades
The new consumption-based VMware environment delivered by Carahsoft and V3Gate is impacting all 9,000,000-plus constituents relying on services from this vital federal agency. The customer is so satisfied with the solution, it has since made a large investment in professional services from Carahsoft to ensure its IT staff is trained on all current VMware solutions and is able to quickly map out new projects.
By shifting to the VMware consumption model, the customer can also now quickly adapt to changing needs and deploy additional VMware solutions while realizing significant cost savings. Already, through the alliance between Carahsoft, V3Gate and VMware, the customer has invested in additional solutions, including AirWatch, Carbon Black, and vSphere Operations Management.
Jones comments, “The VMware Cloud Provider Program is a great way for customers to retain all the value of their VMware solutions while gaining the ability to consume them as they want. We’re confident that the joint team in place between Carahsoft, V3Gate and VMware will be an important asset to this federal agency and the American public for decades.”
Stay tuned for more spotlights on our 2022 VMware Partner Achievement Award winners just like this one. Interested in becoming a VMware Partner? Learn about the VMware Partner Connect program. Want to find out more about how Carahsoft and our other VMware Principal Partners can help drive your business success? Visit our Partner Locator.
