SHI Creates Holistic, Award-Winning Enterprise Solutions with VMware that Free Enterprise Resources and Enable Innovation
Digital transformation has changed the face of business and how enterprises operate. However, the rush to consume cloud technologies has left some with unnecessarily complex, hard-to-manage environments.
VMware partner, SHI, a technology solutions provider and the largest minority-owned business in the United States, helps enterprises regain control of their IT infrastructure. Their approach is solution-agnostic, piecing an environment together that helps customers throughout their digital transformation journey.
"Solving business challenges requires open conversations that ask the tough questions and understand the whole enterprise. We want to know what's troubling clients today, as well as the next business challenge they want to address," says Jon Palmer, director of solutions engineering for SHI's data center organization.
From current IT operations to ideal future states, SHI aims to find efficiencies in every client engagement. By delving into every part of the enterprise, SHI helps clients realize cost savings that free up resources to drive business growth.
Success with Award-Winning Solutions
SHI's comprehensive approach and end-to-end solutions, which have achieved outstanding results for their clients, earned them the Partner Value Award for the Americas in the 2023 VMware Partner Achievement Awards. "VMware is one of our most strategic partners, and we're thrilled to have been recognized for our dedication to client success," says Palmer. With VMware, SHI has provided customers with valuable solutions and support to achieve business outcomes.
The benefits of the VMware partnership have extended past SHI's client interactions. Within the company, SHI has adopted many of the VMware build methodologies and practices when designing and implementing internal solutions. This helps SHI better understand VMware capabilities and enables them to support VMware deployments more effectively in customer environments.
Recovering Resources for Innovation
Often, when SHI creates a solution for clients, they find outdated or forgotten cloud services from the initial rush of cloud adoption. "Over the past decade, there’s been a lot of enthusiasm to move to the cloud. But it hasn't always been done correctly. We've found workloads running rampant in client environments, creating unnecessary costs," says Palmer.
Since cost optimization is regularly a top concern, many of SHI's conversations revolve around understanding their clients' myriad challenges and finding practical solutions. To discover potential efficiencies, SHI investigates each client's environment and cleans up unnecessary workloads to optimize their infrastructure.
Beyond simply removing workloads, SHI goes one step further and determines the best combinations of VMware and additional technologies to solve each client’s needs. Complex, traditionally on-premises workloads might be migrated to either a private or public cloud, depending on where they would be both cost-effective and optimized. Regardless of the final solution, finding cost savings and better managing client resources is increasingly important as enterprises seek to consume new technologies, such as AI.
While many of SHI's clients are in the proof-of-concept phase with AI, the VMware partner is excited about the opportunity to help guide them into production. From designing a solution to digging into the data and training the AI data models — and doing it all responsibly — SHI can help clients better adopt and utilize this cutting-edge technology.
Finding the Best Solution for Each Customer
Recovering unused cloud resources isn't the only type of challenge SHI solves for clients. One example is with a mutual customer in the energy industry. Their data center lease was expiring, and the client needed to migrate workloads away from their existing environments into a more scalable, long-term solution.
VMware Cloud was the answer. Since the client was already using VMware technology, the migration was seamless. "We didn't have to refactor applications to move their workloads to VMware Cloud. It was a very straightforward process," says Palmer.
After the initial launch, SHI was then able to build on their success and implement management tools with vRealize Network Insight. Then, to ensure the most uptime possible, they layered VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) on top. With this new infrastructure, the clients' IT resources were free to achieve stronger business outcomes and empower the rest of the enterprise.
"Our partnership with VMware enables us to provide immense value to our clients and is critical to their success. We're excited to continue our partnership and help our clients achieve their digital transformation goals," says Palmer.
