VMware case studies: 10 real-life enterprise success stories

 In a dramatically short space of time, the world of enterprise has undergone a transformation. In fact, it's kind of like a friend you haven't seen in years. It's got a new haircut and a new attitude. 

Legacy apps are rapidly taking a back seat as software and data are moved en masse to the cloud. 

No matter what industry you work in, the cloud is where it's at – and VMware has been leading the way with its powerful suite of virtualisation and cloud computing software. 

From banking to education, from healthcare to networking – more and more enterprises are taking the plunge. In this article, we look at ten case studies that owe their success not only to their forward-thinking team leaders but also to VMware. 

We begin with a household name: Lloyd's Banking Group. 

Lloyd's Banking Group 

Given the ubiquity of cloud solutions, you might be surprised to learn that the banking sector is trailing behind – comparatively speaking, at least. 

At the time of writing, just a quarter of banks run more than 30% of their software on the cloud. 

However, there are powerful arguments to be made for cloud banking, from its capacity to reduce infrastructure costs to its consolidation of data silos. 

Lloyd's Banking Group has heard the good news and acted accordingly. It's the UK's biggest retail bank – and the bank of choice for many household high-street names.

Speakingin 2022, Sarah Lucas, Head of Migration Services, told an interviewer all about the cloud transformation journey that Lloyd's has been on. 

To begin with, small teams were spun up to test the waters. But private and public teams were using different solutions – and this didn't always make for clear communication. 

Over time, these teams were unified, "making", as Lucas says, "a clearer path to the cloud". 

Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment 

How do you know what a school's strengths are? In Massachusetts, MCIEA realised there were a couple of obstacles in the way – and it turned to VMware to help remove them. 

First, data from schools isn't always of a high quality. Second, it's often delivered long after the fact. Both of these things can make it difficult for parents to decide whether a school is right for their kids. 

MCIEA tackled this problem by building a web portal in partnership with VMware Tanzu. This interface gives parents useful data about the areas of strength and areas of improvement in Massachusetts schools. 

In MCIEA's own words, VMware has helped them to be a "lighthouse" and show what can be accomplished in the world of education assessment. 

Sentara Brock Cancer Center 

Sentara is a North American healthcare system with 14 hospitals across Virginia and North Carolina. It's used VMware on Azure to move its operations to the cloud. 

IT, saysMatt Douglas, Chief Enterprise Architect at Sentara, is a critical part of healthcare with the capacity to save lives. Sentara's clinical research, which contributed to the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, depends on mammoth data sets. This data can be analysed with greater speed and precision when run on the cloud. 

There's another problem that the cloud helps solve. Healthcare records are vulnerable to hacking and identity theft. Sentara wanted to ensure its patient data was as safe as its clinical data. 

It leveraged VMware on Azure to move its mission-critical software to the cloud, weeding out legacy apps that were reaching the end of their lifecycles or were compromised by compliance issues. It also used VMware HCX to automate and schedule the migration of workloads. 

In its own words, Sentara, in partnership with VMware, is part of a "healthcare revolution". 

Lumen 

Lumen is a networking firm that operates around 400,000 route miles of fibre and 160,000 on-net fibre locations. 

It worked with VMware to converge compute, storage, network and security functions and enable customers to build firewalls, VPNs and more in minutes rather than days. 

It's also partnered with VMware to create joint solutions: Lumen Private Cloud on VMware Cloud Foundation, Lumen Edge Private Cloud with VMware Tanzu, Lumen SD-Wan with VMware and Lumen Managed VMware Cloud on AWS. 

American Tire Distributors (ATD) 

ATD is a success story in more ways than one. It's an independent supplier of tyres with more than 100 distribution centres and 80,000 customers in the USA. 

In recent years, ATD has undergone a dramatic digital transformation in partnership with VMware, making the most of both VMware's products and its services. 

In the wordsof Chris Green, Enterprise Infrastructure Management at ATD, VMware helps the company to "analyse where we want to get to in a software-defined data centre and what our gaps are now". 

And the winner is… 

In August 2023, VMware's "Explore" convention was held in Las Vegas – and it handed out gongs for customer achievement to business leaders from a range of sectors. 

These companies were singled out both for their "transformational journeys" and for making the move from on-prem to cloud with innovation in mind. 

The winners were: 
 

• Putnam Investments, Weathering the Change Hero
• ADT (not to be confused with ATD!), Customer Experiences Hero
• OSDE, Modern Apps Innovator
• City of Edmonton, Cloud Infrastructure Innovator
• The Boeing Company, Hybrid Workforce Innovator

 
This should give you a sense of the breadth of VMware's versatility. From smart homes to investment management, from aeroplanes to an entire city – name an enterprise that can't benefit from cloud migration and we'll show you a flying pig. 

Are you looking for cloud consultancy services to help you on your digital transformation journey? At Ascend Cloud Solutions, we know the VMware software suite like few others – and we're old hands at cloud migration. Get in touchto book a no-obligation consultation.