Dealing with change is a perpetual process in the IT community, particularly given the rapid rate of technical innovation. But just because change is a constant for IT doesn’t make it any easier to weather its impact—especially when it comes to the foundation of enterprise computing: the data center. Research by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group found that the future of the data center will be very different going forward, noting that 50% of organizations intend to improve data center connectivity to public cloud infrastructure and 49% plan to reduce their use of on-premises infrastructure in favor of public cloud migration when feasible.1
VMware understands the challenge organizations face in weathering such change in their IT strategy, particularly as it relates to computing infrastructure. With that in mind, VMware has cited Putnam Investments, NEC, and Orange France as the Weathering the Change category winners for the Americas, Asia/Pacific/Japan (APJ) and Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) regions in the 2023 VMware Customer Achievement Awards program.
Americas Region: Putnam Investments
Putnam epitomized the challenge—and opportunity—of IT modernization in moving from an on-premises-only infrastructure model to a more nimble, flexible and scalable hybrid cloud architecture. As a leading financial services and investment management firm, Putnam’s IT modernization mandate was driven by its need to improve responsiveness to business stakeholders. IT requirements such as improved access to data-sensitive workloads, VDI hosting, flexible hosting of tier 1 applications and disaster recovery all needed a new architectural model that balanced workloads between both the public cloud and on-premises data centers.
Putnam turned to solutions such as VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Aria when it closed its data center earlier than expected and moved to a cloud operating model. In so doing, the firm was able to meet its CIO’s cloud objective ahead of schedule, achieving a holistic, robust platform for hosting mission-critical applications. Not only did the move enable Putnam to accelerate its application modernization timeline, but it resulted in a stronger, more responsive disaster recovery strategy, improved scalability, enhanced agility and an essential shift from a Capex economic model to a more appropriate Opex one.
Most important, Putnam was able to anticipate and overcome the potential impact of IT change to become more tightly aligned with business stakeholders’ needs.
APJ Region: NEC Corp.
As one of the world’s largest commercial organizations, NEC has made digital transformation (DX) a strategic initiative in its goals to better serve its customers, its employees, and society at large. To facilitate its effort to make its employees more productive and to deliver a more satisfying work environment, NEC sought transformation in three ways: an enhanced digital experience for its workforce, a centralized data platform across all internal data, and a comprehensive modernization program to improve the efficiency and sophistication of all systems.
To achieve these goals, NEC partnered with VMware in order to make cloud migration and a cloud-native environment cornerstones of a modernized IT effort. Specifically, NEC used VMware Cloud on AWS in order to minimize complexity and risk, while lessening the impact of cloud migration on end users’ productivity and workplace satisfaction.
In fact, the collaboration with VMware allowed NEC to migrate 301 systems and 424 virtual machines to VMware Cloud on AWS in just 70 days. As a result, NEC estimates that it reduced migration costs by 91%, and believes it will reduce operational costs by 19% over a traditional on-premises approach when the full cloud migration implementation is complete.
EMEA Region: Orange France
Orange France, part of Orange Group, is a leading telecommunications provider that faced a familiar set of challenges: accelerating time to market for new services, while continuing to reduce its environmental impact. To do so, its leadership team knew its technology partners would be instrumental in helping it serve its growing customer base in an environmentally responsible manner, while also achieving its many business and financial goals.
Orange France worked closely with VMware Professional Services to move toward a more automated approach to IT service delivery. It centered on VMware Cloud Foundation to orchestrate a software-defined data center solution at multiple levels, including the infrastructure and physical layer and the software development stage.
The result was a widely transformed IT service delivery model based on private cloud architecture that reduced complexity, promoted efficiency, and increased energy efficiency, thanks for the combination of VMware’s many technology solutions and its professional services. Working closely with VMware allowed Orange France to move huge volumes of applications and data to a modernized platform, while reducing its carbon footprint by downsizing the number of servers tenfold.
The 2023 VMware Customer Achievement Awards program is conducted in partnership with TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group. Entries were reviewed, evaluated and ranked by a panel of judges comprising ESG analysts, TechTarget editors, independent industry experts and VMware executives.
1 “The Data Center Lives On, but Its Future Will Be Very Different,” Tech Target’s Enterprise Strategy Group, 2023
