By Kathy Gibson in Barcelona – There has been a lot of talk about the software-defined data centre (SDDC) – but in 2014, VMware and its partners will move on delivering its benefits to end-user companies.
“We have spoken about the concepts of SDDC, end-user computing and hybrid cloud,” says VMware SA’s Ian Jansen van Rensburg. “2014 is when we will deliver on these promises and start seeing some action.
“It’s all very well to talk about it, but now we have to deliver.”
Jansen van Rensburg adds that companies in South Africa and Africa as a whole could be just about anywhere on their journey to the SDDC, and one of the differentiators that VMware brings to the market is its ability to help customer understand where they are and how to reach their goals.
“VMware is big enough to matter, but small enough to care,” he says.
“We are passionate about the technology we deliver and the solutions that come from that. But we also have the ability to talk to the people developing the products. When there are suggestions made by our customers, the organisation actually listens to them and could build them into the product.”
The organisation’s ability to understand how IT impacts the business is another differentiator, says VMware SA’s Wayne Biehn.
“What we are trying to achieve, and what our customers want, is a transformation platform that accelerates the time to IT – bringing IT at the speed of business. In the past, the biggest issue has been that IT has lagged the business.
“VMware has been significantly single-minded in its focus to accelerate IT to where it meets business needs. Customers need that if they want to differentiate themselves and compete more effectively. It speaks to more than IT, and rather to value to the business. It’s about leveraging IT to generate value back into the business.”
Jansen van Rensburg adds that SDDC will help customers multiply the savings they achieved by virtualising their servers to the entire data centre.
“When we launched virtualisation it was innovative and ground-breaking. At VMware we are getting very excited again because I think we are close to bringing the wow factor to market again.
“So far we have had awesome feedback to the SDDC concept; everyone we have spoken to loves it.”