“Today’s mobile-cloud era has resulted in new business challenges and an unprecedented pace of change. Businesses have to be able to adapt to this new agile and dynamic business model in order to thrive and navigate in the new digital world. Companies need to innovate and drive a competitive advantage that creates an amazing customer experience,” said Emmanuel Portugal, country manager, Philippines, VMware.
Emmanuel Portugal, country manager, Philippines, VMware
This is why, at VMware, “we continuously innovate our solutions to better enable our customers on their digital transformation journey.”
The company first introduced the vCloud initiative in 2008 to allow enterprises with internal clouds to access external cloud capacity on demand without the need to customize or change their applications. Alongside changing demands for cloud adoption over the years, “we have expanded our services and offering to include infrastructure (unifying on-premises and off-premises resources with hybrid cloud computing), develop (extending infrastructure and apps to the cloud), manage (delivering and managing infrastructure services) and desktop (deploying virtual desktops as a service so people can be truly mobile).”
Last year, VMware announced the industry’s first “one cloud, any application, any device” solutions, a unified platform that unites on-premise and public clouds with open management and enables rapid development, automatic deployment and secure consumption of any application, anywhere. This “one cloud” model is based on VMware’s software-defined data center technologies that extend the power of virtualization to networking and storage. No matter the type, choice or cloud consumption model, this unified platform gives businesses the flexibility and choice to create new or update existing applications, with greater ease of manageability and security across the organization.
“From a recent VMware Philippines Business survey, we found that 94% of respondents are confident that cloud is an enabler of innovation with more than half (52%) looking at adopting the hybrid cloud model. On the back of digital transformation and hybrid cloud adoption in the Philippines, we most recently announced further advancements to our cloud management platform, providing customers with the ability to provision and manage at scale across compute, storage, network and applications services across hybrid cloud platforms,” Portugal said.
VMware infrastructure is now the foundation for some of the largest and most successful private, public, and hybrid cloud environments in the world. Today, the company serves more than 500,000 customers, including 100% of the Fortune 100, and they range from industries such as finance, healthcare, retail and telecommunications.
“What is happening in the market is the adoption of a hybrid environment where IT services are undertaken in a private, on-premise cloud alongside a public or off-premise cloud facility. This hybrid environment is evolving today as customers place their workloads and applications in multiple clouds. Aside from agility, customers want to see cost transparency, flexibility and security in this hybrid environment.
What VMware provides is a platform that enables customers to run and manage their workload across multiple cloud environments,” Portugal said.
The same VMware survey also found that the top must-have IT capabilities found to be scalability, security, flexibility and simplicity in management, and “we are really excited to be helping customers through this time of transition by putting software and data at the core of the business to enable a new model of IT, with solutions that harness these attributes.”
Various studies noted that one of the biggest challenges in cloud adoption is the continuing confusion of many about cloud and its benefits. For Portugal, “it’s really a journey that begins with an understanding of a customer’s business requirements and direction. An important element is to enable the customer to take advantage of cloud technology without impacting business operations. VMware technology enables our customers to run their new and existing (or older) applications in the same cloud environment. Doing this provides the customer to leverage their existing investments while gaining the agility and cost effectiveness of a public cloud.”
Portugal said that in today’s digital workspace, businesses must also look at catering platforms and applications for flexible work styles. “Whether they are remote office task worker, executive or a contractor, as consumers themselves, employees want consumer grade self-service access to their applications that fit with their work styles and profiles. Alongside different working styles and areas of responsibilities, businesses also have to consider the applications required, sensitivity and security of data they access, and the type of devices they carry,” Portugal said.
To better enable organizations, VMware recently launched Workspace ONE, the simple and secure enterprise platform that delivers and manages any app on any device by integrating identity, application, and enterprise mobility management. “Ultimately, it’s all about making mobility and making cloud systems easier for enterprises to manage. Workspace ONE includes consumer-style email, calendar, contacts, content and chat applications that feature invisible security measures,” Portugal said.
Traditionally, industries like healthcare, financial services and utility service providers who own and manage large amounts of Big Data, often take the lead in adopting cloud technologies. “We have seen great successes with our customers in this space, with technology adoption enabling massive cost savings and improvements in efficiency,” Portugal said.
One example would be the deployment of VMware’s solutions with the nation’s largest water concessionaire, Maynilad. With services spanning across 17 cities and municipalities across the West Zone of the Greater Manila area, ensuring customer service with efficiency is no easy feat for Maynilad. With applications from water leak management systems, field signals monitoring to customer relationship management systems, Maynilad faced the challenge of managing multiple applications and vast amount of data. In addition, Maynilad’s one server per application model meant high operating costs and under-utilized resources. The capital and labor intensive IT model was ill equipped to support the organization’s responsiveness to increasing demand and application use. As part of the company’s efforts to transform its IT infrastructure and move to the cloud, Maynilad saw improvements of its customer service delivery by at least 50%, better resource management and reduction in wastage from the increased IT efficiency and productivity, scalable to the company’s growth with VMware.
“Today, Philippines is home to over 51 million unique subscribers with strong momentum in IT spending. Alongside continued mobile and cloud adoption, the ‘growth of data-centric and disruptive business models like Uber and Airbnb are examples of companies and industries redefining landscapes and customer expectations. Noting that the cloud is a key driver of today’s asymmetrical business world, one of the five imperatives outlined for businesses to stay ahead today highlighted the need to move to a more connected and compatible ‘Professional Era of Cloud’ in which businesses launch applications to the ‘span’ instead of a silo. This unified hybrid cloud represents the future of IT, providing the foundation for years to come,” Portugal said. “Regardless of industries, businesses now must innovate like a start-up and deliver like an enterprise.”
VMware has partnered with Globe Telecom and PLDT to enable the adoption of cloud and business mobility amongst Philippines businesses.
To help businesses in Philippines move to the cloud, VMware collaborated with Globe Telecom to provide virtual private cloud services. Giving businesses the option of cloud capabilities without the high costs of purchasing dedicated servers, customers are also able to scale their requirements by increasing or decreasing variables such as storage and more.
In addition, the company’s partnership with PLDT-VMware Horizon DaaS Powered Cloud enables Philippines businesses to stay agile and competitive by providing a highly scalable, mobile and always-on solution without having to worry about existing infrastructure and know-how. “As our workspaces becomes increasingly digitized, the solution expands the workplace, allowing users to access it online and work on their desktop set up from any smart device via the internet or a private network. Through this partnership, businesses in the Philippines have the option to cloud solutions with great end-user experience via a single client interface that allows access to cloud-hosted virtual desktops and hosted apps from any device, anywhere without compromising enterprise security,” Portugal said.
Portugal added that with one in two looking to adopt the hybrid cloud approach, “we also provide businesses in Philippines with VMware vCloud Suite, an enterprise-ready, cloud management platform that delivers the industry’s most complete solution for managing a heterogeneous, hybrid cloud. VMware vCloud Suite supports companies addressing cloud management requirements across day-one and day-two operations for compute, storage, network and application level resources. This integrated offering brings together VMware’s industry-leading vSphere hypervisor and VMware vRealize Suite multi-vendor hybrid cloud management platform. VMware’s new portable licensing units allow vCloud Suite to build and manage both vSphere-based private clouds as well as multi-vendor hybrid clouds.”
In the end, “whether private, public or a hybrid cloud approach, VMware remains committed to provide innovative cloud solutions to empower Philippines businesses with the agility, flexibility and scalability to do well,” Portugal ended.
