VMware CSP Archives - Transform Your Technology

10 ways to win the IT talent game

David Ashworth — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 13:43:21 +0000

10 ways to win
the IT talent game

Harnessing the capabilities of VMware Cloud Service Providers and their skill aggregation model, your organisation can seamlessly integrate VMware solutions into your operations.

This approach not only accelerates the realisation of business outcomes, but also ensures the alignment of IT initiatives with broader strategic goals.

1. The evolving IT landscape

Discuss how the rapid pace of technological advancement has intensified the demand for skilled IT professionals across various domains.

2. Navigating skill scarcity

Address the challenges posed by the scarcity of specialised IT talent, and how this affects the CTO in driving innovation.

3. Impact on digital transformation

Highlight how the availability of IT talent influences the pace and success of digital transformation initiatives within the organisation.

4. Strategic talent acquisition

Explore the need for the CTO to adopt a strategic approach to talent acquisition, focusing on the specific skills required to achieve technological goals.

5. Internal skill development

Discuss the importance of nurturing internal talent, upskilling existing employees to fill skill gaps and enhance workforce agility.

Discover the best VMware path for your business!

6. Skill ecosystem amplification

Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) curate a diverse pool of skilled IT professionals across various domains, from VMware experts to cloud architects. By partnering with CSPs, organisations gain access to a comprehensive skill ecosystem that can swiftly address complex IT needs.

7. Tailored solutions through aggregation

CSPs aggregate skills from different experts to craft tailor-made solutions that align with each organisation’s specific IT requirements. This comprehensive approach ensures that the chosen VMware options, whether VMWaaS, IaaS, Hyperscaler, or vSphere+, are optimised for maximum business agility.

8. Accelerated time to value

CSPs bring pre-vetted skillsets and experience, enabling organizations to rapidly deploy and adopt advanced VMware solutions. This accelerates the implementation timeline, ensuring that IT initiatives quickly translate into tangible business value.

9. Expertise-on-demand

With CSPs, organisations tap into a readily available pool of experts to manage intricate tasks like migration, optimization, and ongoing management of cloud-based IT infrastructure. This on-demand expertise reduces the learning curve and enhances overall operational efficiency.

10. Cost-effective access to talent

Collaborating with CSPs offers organisations cost-effective access to top-tier IT talent without the need for exhaustive hiring processes. This financial efficiency, coupled with the ability to swiftly assemble skilled teams, enhances the ROI of VMware investments.

Discover the best VMware path for your business!

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10 ways VMware CSP and vSphere+ can support the future of your organisation!

David Ashworth — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 10:38:59 +0000

10 ways VMware CSP and vSphere+ can support the future of your organisation!

Whether you opt for VMWaaS, IaaS, Hyperscaler, or vSphere+ solutions these four pathways offer a comprehensive approach to optimise your organisation for maximum business agility.

1. Enhance remote work

Learn how our options support remote and flexible work, ensuring your organisation’s agility and resilience in a rapidly changing work environment. Cloud based vCenter in vSphere+ is offers the support to work anywhere.

2. Future-Proof IT investments

Dive into how our solutions adapt to emerging trends and technologies for sustained competitiveness.

3. Multi-cloud management

Discover how our offerings help to effectively manage multiple cloud providers and platforms, simplifying complex environments and driving operational agility.

4. Optimal financing models

Explore how our various financing models align IT expenses with usage, freeing capital for strategic initiatives and ensuring financial flexibility.

5. Business-critical decisions

Understand how our offerings empower you to make business-critical decisions swiftly, leveraging real-time data and analytics to strategic advantage.

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6. Efficient resource allocation

Learn how our solutions optimise resource allocation, allowing you to focus on innovation and growth rather than routine infrastructure management.

7. Maximise IT skills

Discover how partnering with us enhances IT skills, bridges skill gaps, and ensures your team is equipped for agile technology adoption.

8. Vendor lock-in mitigation

Understand how our solutions mitigate vendor lock-in risks, promoting flexibility and agility by enabling you to pivot when necessary.

9. Predictable refresh cycles

Learn how our solutions establish predictable refresh cycles, ensuring technology is always up-to-date and aligned with your business goals.

10. Drive digital innovation

Explore how our offerings drive digital innovation, providing the tools and support to foster a culture of creativity and continuous improvement.

Discover the best VMware path for your business!

The 10 VMware pathways to unlock business agility and drive IT

Ownership mentality is changing. Allocating expenses to usage has more focus these days, right down to per user, per CPU, and/or per TB. There are many factors driving organisations to explore alternative financing models for their IT needs, including:

Adapt to market dynamics. Explore how our offerings empower your business to swiftly adapt to changing market conditions. In particular, VMwaaS consumption models offer the flex up and flex down for this, ensuring you remain competitive and future-ready.

Invest wisely in IT. Gain insight into how our solutions help to optimise IT investments, driving innovation and efficiency while ensuring cost-effectiveness, with particular emphasis alleviating the traditional problems of shelfware and changing project plans. Moving to subscription or consumption-based means you no longer pay for licensing that’s no longer needed.

Seamlessly transform IT. Discover how our various options provide a seamless pathway to transform IT infrastructure, enabling a smooth transition and minimising disruption.
Our options offer a wide range of choice depending on how much change is needed, even when looking to move from on-prem, these options minimise the risk in change, while offering new opportunities to increase value.

Agility through financing. Learn how our financing models enhance agility, enabling you to efficiently allocate expenses to usage, and access technology without straining capital budgets.

Strategic IT budgeting. Understand how our options align IT expenditures with strategic objectives, allowing flexible and effective budgeting that supports long-term growth.

Optimise IT operations. Delve into how our solutions optimise IT operations, ensuring streamlined processes and efficient resource utilisation to enhance overall productivity.

Innovate with Cloud Services. Explore the innovative potential of our cloud-based services, offering scalability, rapid deployment, and pay-as-you-go models to drive agility.

Mitigate risks. Learn how our offerings help to mitigate risk through effective governance, ensuring compliance, security, and data protection in a dynamic environment.

Sustainable transformation. Discover how our solutions contribute to sustainability, leveraging technology to reduce carbon footprint and align with responsible business practices.

Skill augmentation. Understand how partnering with us addresses the challenge of skill gaps by granting access to specialised expertise, enhancing agility in IT projects.

Discover the best VMware path for your business!

The post 10 ways VMware CSP and vSphere+ can support the future of your organisation! appeared first on Transform Your Technology.

VMware vSphere+ Sparks Lexmark’s Multi‑Cloud Transformation

Joel Haney — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 10:04:52 +0000

VMware vSphere+ Sparks Lexmark’s Multi‑Cloud Transformation

Over the last 30 years, Lexmark has grown from a photocopier manufacturer to a pioneer in networked imaging and IoT solutions ─ managing more than 7 million printing devices in over 170 countries.

Lexmark created a global print and services platform, aligning the evolution of digital imaging tech with document management needs to supply services from a central hub. As the company perfected its own IoT and edge network, Lexmark recognized an opportunity to harness its IoT expertise; creating the Lexmark Optra IoT Platform to enable other makers of connected devices to deploy, manage and maintain IoT and edge products, using the Lexmark digital ecosystem.

“If you think about imaging, a printer is really an IoT device,” said Vishal Gupta, global CIO and CTO, Lexmark International. “We wanted to provide the human touch for our customers, to ship supplies when needed, to whom they’re needed, and with supply chain challenges, to extend the life of these devices.”

Each Lexmark printer has up to 125 sensors to collect various data. Connecting this sprawling digital ecosystem enables Lexmark to deliver remote services from predictive maintenance to supply replenishment and document management, making it one of the world’s largest IoT and edge networks.

“We have manufactured about 30 million printers. We know how to secure them, how to manage them, how to remotely enable the outcomes our customers need,” said Gupta. “Our vision is to help our customers leave a lasting impression in their world and, as an innovation platform, that’s what our IoT and edge offerings enable them to do.”

Modernising for a hybrid, multi-cloud world with VMware vSphere+

Operating a vast digital infrastructure of this scope and scale poses formidable challenges. Lexmark uses a dozen on-premises data centres across a global network, all running on the VMware vSphere cloud compute platform. As digital technologies mature and customer demands become more complex, Lexmark needed to modernise digital infrastructure to support traditional and cloud native applications in on-premises and public cloud workloads—all with a unified system to manage the estate as a single entity.

Lexmark chose VMware vSphere+

The vSphere+ workload platform brings cloud benefits to on-premises by deploying high-value cloud services to quickly build, run, manage and secure traditional and next-gen applications. The platform offers a cloud-connected subscription that provides centralised management for an entire distributed environment through a cloud console. vSphere+ enabled Lexmark to manage all distributed data centres as one.

“We’re moving to a hybrid, multi-cloud world,” said Gupta. “We’re going from 12 somewhat homogenous data centres to maybe half that number, with three different clouds, Azure, AWS and Oracle.”

Adopting a multi-cloud strategy gives Lexmark many advantages. The ability to use any cloud allows developers the freedom and flexibility to build applications using the best features of each. Integrating on-premises data centres with any number of public clouds is a plus. And of course, vendor lock-in is no longer an issue.

Using an assortment of platforms can increase infrastructure complexity and pose security and management challenges, but vSphere+ allows Lexmark developers to run cloud deployments in a similar way as on-premises assets, creating a seamless experience.

“When you’re in the middle of infrastructure transformation, you have to ensure that you’re getting the agility without the complexity,” said Gupta. “We use vSphere+ to help reduce complexity—now I don’t have to stand up separate teams for each environment. I can have a holistic team that manages all these infrastructures as one.”

Simplifying infrastructure and accelerating innovation with DevOps services

For Lexmark, this modernised infrastructure delivers the flexibility and necessary capabilities to launch new subscription offerings. Developers enjoy a suite of services to streamline networking, storage and management for Kubernetes workloads. By giving developers access to an enterprise-ready DevOps environment, Lexmark seamlessly builds and runs containerised applications.

And using vSphere+ allows the Lexmark data science team to more efficiently manage GPU resources and leverage GPU-based acceleration, to create a variety of AI and ML initiatives.

“When you have infrastructure that’s elastic, predictable, easy to secure and operate, it gives the freedom to the developers to essentially innovate at scale and innovate at speed,” said Gupta.

Integrating on-premises and multi-cloud models via subscription

As a subscription offering, vSphere+ offers Lexmark a more flexible business strategy. Moving from a CapEx to an OpEx model enabled the company to extend subscription-based pricing to its data centre and a flexible framework to better scale resource consumption according to need, aligning it with subscription offerings delivered to customers.

“VMware vSphere+ aligns well with our philosophy and it’s the same model we use for our own managed services,” said Gupta. “The world is moving toward subscriptions. You can see it not just in the cloud, but in how we consume entertainment. I think it’s a win-win. It enables predictability for the end consumer and the supplier.”

Learn more

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7 ways to optimise business IT infrastructure with VMware vSphere+

Joel Haney — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 13:29:17 +0000

7 ways to optimise business IT infrastructure with VMware vSphere+

Find out how the vSphere+ multi-cloud workload platform delivers cloud benefits to on-premises workloads.

The rapid shift to multi-cloud and subscription-based environments, along with the adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) operating and consumption models, helps organisations to realise new operational efficiencies, performance optimisation and cost benefits.

VMware vSphere+ Subscription brings the functionality of VMware Cloud to on-premises infrastructure deployments. vSphere+ reduces infrastructure maintenance costs, optimises operations and speeds up security responses.

1. Server Consolidation

As the VM environment becomes more complex, maintaining visibility or planning capacity can be challenging without insight into how to maximise future performance.

Businesses can consolidate multiple physical servers into a single virtualised server with vSphere+. This enables companies to run more apps on fewer machines, which also reduces spend and offers easier to run management, with added gains and efficiency. In addition, server consolidation makes it easier to avert or recover from disasters.

2. Resource Optimisation

Business growth brings challenges. The advantage of vSphere+ is how easy it is to meet evolving IT and application needs. Workloads running on-premises can access benefits including locality, low latency, performance and predictable costs, but can miss out on useful cloud innovations.

vSphere+ combines industry-leading virtualisation technology, with an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment and high-value cloud services. This supports businesses to transform existing on-premises deployments into SaaS-enabled infrastructure, helping organisations to centralise management, supercharge productivity and accelerate innovation.

3. Enhanced Disaster Recovery

VMware vSphere+ offers robust disaster recovery capabilities, including vSphere Replication, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR).

VCDR protects on-premises mission-critical VMs by replicating them to the cloud and protecting them from disasters and ransomware. vSphere+ centralises management through the VMware Cloud Console to enhance operational efficiency and integrates a wide range of add-on hybrid cloud services to expedite disaster recovery and ransomware protection.

4. Improved Security and Compliance

As you might expect, VMware vSphere+ provides advanced security features, including vSphere Security Hardening, Secure Boot and vSphere AppDefense.

A security health check service evaluates the security posture of your entire vSphere infrastructure, providing peace of mind by identifying potential weaknesses or exposures. In addition, the VMware Support Team are only granted specific vCenter Server monitoring, without access to customer workloads. Meanwhile, customers have visibility into which actions are planned, which are currently being executed and previously executed plans.

For on-premises managed vSphere components, the VMware vSphere+ subscription creates a shared responsibility security model, which minimises friction, enabling users to easily set up, monitor and revoke permissions.

5. Simplified Management and Automation

vSphere+ offers centralised management through vCenter Server, which provides a unified interface to manage virtualised environments. The vCenter Server appliance contains all the Platform Services Controller services from earlier releases, preserving previous functionality, authentication, certificate management and licensing.

vSphere+ is VMware’s virtualisation platform, transforming data centres into aggregated computing infrastructures, which include CPU, storage and networking resources. These infrastructures are managed as a unified operating environment, providing you with the tools to administer the data centres which participate within that environment.

6. Scalability and Flexibility

Operations management sits at the top of the vSphere environment, offering invaluable foresight into intelligent growth. The dashboard provides top level, streamlined control, managing the entire virtual machine environment, so you know how to allocate resources and maximise performance.

The next step in virtualisation, vSphere+ provides analytic reports into current and future capacity, providing the ability to grow and scale to accommodate workloads.

Simplify the lifecycle management of your vCenter instances by making updates with a single click and reduce the maintenance window so it’s easier to schedule updates sooner. Users also gain rapid access to new features and are able to address security vulnerabilities quickly. If a problem arises, simply roll back the update.

Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and vSphere High Availability (HA), can help businesses to dynamically allocate and balance computing resources based on workload demands. VMware vRealize Operations add-on service, provides both capacity planning and optimisation for infrastructure for current and future workload requirements.

7. Cloud Integration

VMware vSphere+ seamlessly integrates with cloud platforms such as VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP) partners.

Businesses can consolidate management of all vSphere deployments through a centralised cloud console: VMware Cloud Console. DevOps teams can access IaaS services (ex. provisioning VMs, networking, setting up Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters), easily from the Cloud Consumption Interface, simplifying infrastructure setup across the vSphere estate through intuitive UIs and developer-friendly APIs, freeing time to focus on development efforts.

Businesses can simplify TKG cluster lifecycle and package management with API-driven Cluster Classes and Carvel to build on Kubernetes with confidence, improve the resilience of containerised workloads through availability zones and gain useful self-service access to IaaS services across vSphere cloud infrastructure from an intuitive cloud console.

Building upon advanced technology with vSphere+ provides access to a wide selection of cloud services and centralises management through the VMware Cloud Console. Workloads remain on-premises, running on ESXi hosts orchestrated by vCenter instances, just like traditional vSphere. But now, vCenter can connect to the Cloud Console through a VMware cloud gateway, allowing metadata to be collected and used to centrally manage the entire distributed vSphere+ estate. Admin services can then simplify global operations. Developer services can manage the Kubernetes environment and optional add-on hybrid cloud services can be purchased to extend the capabilities of vSphere+ even further.

Learn more

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Financing for the future of business

Jackson Lynch — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 13:17:04 +0000

Financing for the future of business

Take a deep dive into the future of financing

with Wayne Peters, TD SYNNEX VP, Global Financial Solutions

Financing plays a crucial role in addressing business concerns around capital budgets, particularly when it comes to executing IT projects. These concerns may include the preservation of capital, improving cashflow, budget flexibility, faster project implementation, technology upgrades, scalability, tax benefits, and asset management and disposal.

By leveraging creative leasing and financing solutions, businesses can address capital budget concerns and strengthen their balance sheet. Financing provides the ability to execute IT projects without comprising stability, enabling businesses to leverage technology for growth, efficiency, and innovation.

How priorities have changed toward IT investment and expenditure

Shifts in financial demands and priorities reflect the changing landscape of technology and the evolving needs of organisations. There’s a current emphasis on digital transformation, subscription-as-a-service models, cloud computing, cybersecurity investments, data analytics and business intelligence, sustainability, and IT skills development.

By adapting financial strategies, businesses can align IT investments with emerging trends to drive innovation, efficiency, and competitiveness.

Key factors driving alternative IT financing models

Cost management.
Technology advancements.
Scalability.
Risk mitigation.
Cash flow preservation.
More effective budgeting and planning.
Potential tax and accounting advantages.
Asset management.

These factors contribute to better financial management, agility, and competitive advantage.

Shifting from CapEx to OpEx for IT investment

Cloud-based services offer pay-as-you-go and subscription-based pricing structures to allow companies to treat them as operational expenses.

There are several financing options for cloud-based solutions. The main ones are pay-as-you-go, subscription-based plans, consumption models, and leasing. We have seen a significant increase in MSP’s wanting to utilise financial solutions as an effective way to acquire assets needed to deliver services and/or solutions. This also allows for assets to be stored on-prem, off-prem, or in co-lo facilities.

Payment solutions and TaaS options from TD SYNNEX Capital

Our solutions benefit customers and channel partners through increased credit capacity, asset management, and establishing a predictable refresh cycle. Benefits specific to customers, include:

Improved cash flow management.
Increased credit capacity.
Ability to entertain an effective asset management strategy.
Predictable refresh cycles.
Flexible financing options to allow financing terms to align with the expected life and value of the assets they are financing.

The benefits specific to channel partners can include developing better sales opportunities, creating long-term relationships with customers, streamlined sales processes, accelerated revenue and profitability growth, improved working capital, and developing upselling/cross- selling opportunities.

The future of IT financing

The market has been moving where financing has been for years. How customers want to utilise IT equipment and recognise the expense of that use, can be solved with an effective financial solutions strategy that considers subscription-based models, and more personalised (or custom) financing models that adapt to the solution being financed through a more integrated approach.

From a technology standpoint, I see financing companies engaging with more efficient tools, such as Blockchain and AI, to make decisions and deliver financing solutions. I also see financial solutions becoming more integrated through API’s in procurement systems.

As an example, TDSC utilises electronic documents to speed up the signature process, and we own our own platform to automate and integrate small ticket financing into ecommerce and vendor websites. Regardless, the goal will always be to find a way to seamlessly integrate financial solutions into the selling processes, to provide ease of use and an improved customer experience.

Discover the best VMware path for your business

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