Metanext was recently named the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) regional winner of the VMware Cloud Innovation and Transformation Award. This award shines a spotlight on partners that have accelerated customers’ digital transformations to multi-cloud environments based on VMware technology to deliver offerings with novel applications or next-gen technology.

Metanext won the award for guiding a major European manufacturer through its journey to the public cloud using Azure VMware Solution. The manufacturer is already experiencing major benefits, including significant cost-savings on hardware and infrastructure, an environment that supports a DevOps approach to developing modern apps, and more.

Helping Customers Make the Best Choice for Cloud

As Director Alliance VMware at Metanext, Leonardo Coscia oversees the partnership between Metanext and VMware and guides 20 consultants who offer customers expertise in VMware solutions. He says, “The biggest challenge customers face is migrating to the cloud.” Many customers want to move to the public cloud, but struggle to determine the optimal path.

He continues, “At Metanext, we examine our customers’ use cases to determine the best cloud provider—or if the use case is better addressed with on-premises infrastructure. If the public cloud is the right fit, we help customers migrate their workloads to the best public cloud provider.”

Supporting Customer Innovation in the Cloud

Metanext recently helped a manufacturing company move to the public cloud. The manufacturer needed to address three key issues: legacy hardware and infrastructure, high costs of on-premises infrastructure, and a desire to shift to a DevOps model for developing modern apps.

Coscia recalls, “The main issue of the customer is they had legacy infrastructure and a legacy data center. We needed to allow the customer to modernize the data center. The best way to do that was to use a public cloud solution provider.”

Rather than refreshing the VMware infrastructure and underlying hardware that was nearing end of life, Metanext proposed that the customer move its workloads to Azure VMware Solution. This shift would reduce the customer’s existing footprint and associated on-premises hardware costs. It would also provide access to cloud-native services so that the manufacturer could quickly embrace the DevOps model for application development. In addition, the manufacturer could maintain access to its business-critical applications, which could continue running on top of the customer’s VMware-based infrastructure without being refactored.

The implementation involved deploying several Azure VMware Solution clusters across Europe and Asia, securely connecting the clusters using the high-performance VMware SD-WAN (formerly VMware VeloCloud). The customer can monitor network and application consumption using VMware vRealize Operation Cloud and vRealize Network Insight Cloud and can use native Azure services for other necessary cloud services.

Results That Speak for Themselves

Workloads were moved to the cloud in less than five months with no refactoring. “The customer migrated legacy workloads to the new VMware infrastructure without any downtime.” Coscia says, “We also helped the customer to use native services and deployed a CI/CD pipeline to do continuous integration and continuous deployment.”

The manufacturer is already experiencing solid results. Developers can quickly get the infrastructure they need to build new modern applications. The manufacturer no longer needs to upgrade or maintain hardware and can scale its infrastructure as needed. Legacy hardware and infrastructure has been reduced by almost one third and workloads in Azure VMware Solution are performing 25% to 30% faster. Monitoring the network and application consumption makes managing costs by business line much easier. Coscia says that the manufacturer can “be focused on the business and not in the infrastructure.”

Continuously Building VMware Expertise

Metanext and VMware have forged a strong partnership, with VMware providing “a lot of help by proposing several training plans and certification paths.” This guidance from VMware, along with the partner’s hard work and dedication to building expertise, has enabled Metanext to earn six VMware Master Services Competencies (MSCs) in under two years. These competencies, which demonstrate that the partner has developed technical expertise and proven success delivering VMware solutions to customers, include:

• Cloud Management and Automation
• Cloud Native Apps
• Data Center Virtualization
• Network Virtualization
• VMware Cloud on AWS
• VMware Cloud Foundation

Offering Technical Proficiency and More

Coscia says that Metanext is “able to evaluate not only technical aspects, but also economic aspects and functionality aspects” of digital transformation and multi-cloud journeys. He believes that customers choose to work with the company due to its expertise in VMware solutions and these other areas. With these skills and experience and a company credo of “think, build, and run the cloud,” customers have a trusted advisor to help them navigate their path to the cloud.

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. Looking for a VMware Partner like Metanext? Find one using our Partner Locator. Then learn how VMware Principal Partners can help drive your business success.