Say the words digital transformation and most people immediately think it’s how businesses use technology to gain a competitive advantage, reduce costs, drive new revenue streams and make employees more productive. In fact, a survey by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group found that 54% of organizations cited the need to become more operationally efficient as a key goal of their digital transformation initiatives, while 47% said their efforts are focused on developing new data-centric products and services.1
To do that, organizations now are moving far past their initial forays into cloud computing in order to make cloud a central part of their digital transformation strategies. In fact, more and more often, organizations put “cloud transformation” as the center of their most strategic business initiatives. Three organizations that have made the move to cloud transformation in partnership with VMware are the Canadian city of Edmonton, the U.K.-based financial services giant Lloyds Banking Group, and the major South Korean financial institution, Kasikorn Bank. Each has been named a winner in the Cloud Transformation Innovators category as part of VMware’s Customer Achievement Awards program.
Americas region: City of Edmonton
Edmonton, like most major cities in the Americas, needed to modernize its IT infrastructure but faced funding and deployment resource constraints. To achieve its goals, the city turned to public cloud infrastructure to develop and deliver new public-facing services and position itself as a climate-resilient, progressive-thinking community that helps drive regional prosperity.
As part of its cloud transformation strategy, Edmonton implemented a range of VMware solutions, including VMware Cloud Foundation, Tanzu solutions and VMware Workspace ONE.
With this smart cloud approach, Edmonton can provide its residents, visitors and business partners with a host of new municipal services, while at the same time improving cybersecurity, upgrading the employee experience with a work-from-anywhere framework, and driving greater software developer productivity.
Additionally, the city’s cloud transformation has enabled server and storage consolidation, resulting in economic savings.
APJ region: Kasikorn Bank Technology Group (KBTG)
As a leading financial services organization (and a VMware customer for more than a decade), Kasikorn Bank understands the importance of the cloud as part of its efforts to better serve its customers in the APJ region. To facilitate that effort, Kasikorn spun off its technology arm in 2016 in order to achieve a much higher level of operational excellence in the face of mounting technical complexity.
The single-biggest problem KBTG faced with reducing long lead times associates with Kubernetes infrastructure delivery, which typically involves multiple teams and requires a substantial number of manual steps and approvals. To overcome those challenges, KBTG worked with VMware to reduce Kubernetes delivery from multiple weeks to a few hours, while the adoption of a single process resulted in a more consistently provisioned environment with more automation, fewer errors, and massive reduction in Day 2 ticket requests.
In collaboration with VMware, KBTG also improved efficiency by codifying and automating the entire process from security, network infrastructure and systems infrastructure to a continuous improvement/continuous delivery pipeline. This promoted tighter alignment and interaction among development and operations teams for better business outcomes.
EMEA Region: Lloyds Banking Group
As a leading U.K.-based financial services institution, Lloyds Banking Group serves a wide range of customers with a unique line of financial products. Delivering upon its promise of “Helping Britain Prosper” requires the group to ensure that its portfolio of applications uncover and optimize data critical to the organization’s effort to better serve its customers.
In recent years, Lloyds Banking Group has made major investments in both cloud and artificial intelligence solutions in order to put data front and center in its efforts to build a data-driven culture where employees can serve customers more efficiently and effectively.
A key part of its journey to developing a data-driven culture, it has teamed with the leading technology providers in the world, including VMware. Lloyds Banking Group is using VMware Cloud as a core component in its efforts to make multi-cloud architecture a driving force in breaking down data silos and unifying LBG’s many teams of cloud architects and developers.
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 “2023 Technology Spending Intentions Survey,” TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, 2023
