VMware and Your Cloud Maximize IT Agility
to Drive Business Agility

Shifting Focus to Create Opportunity

In today's technology-driven marketplace, a business can only be as agile as its IT environment. Enterprises must improve IT agility to increase overall business agility. Cloud computing promises a more agile and efficient IT environment. It replaces traditional, costly and inefficient computing silos with elastic, self-managed, dynamic IT infrastructure. It enables IT to intelligently anticipate and respond to business needs.

As the fundamental technology for cloud computing, virtualization provides the critical first step in IT transformation. Whether you have virtualized all of your workloads or are just starting out, VMware can help you build on it.

Business Agility and the Economics of Cloud Computing
With the financial benefits of cloud computing well established, IT leaders are now beginning to realize its business value beyond cost reduction. In a newly released business-agility survey, corporate decision makers linked cloud computing directly to business agility.

What does it mean for a business to be agile?
According to McKinsey & Company, there are eight business indicators of agile organizations. Companies that hesitate to embrace cloud computing may actually be hindering faster revenue growth, greater and more lasting cost reduction, and more effective management of risks and reputational threats.

One of the study’s primary conclusions is that cloud computing creates a tighter connection between IT transformation and business transformation, driving competitive advantage. In organizations evolving to cloud computing, IT takes on a strategic role contributing to ongoing competitiveness and growth.

Are You Ready for Cloud Computing?

• Analyze your portfolio: Analyze your portfolio and prioritize the applications that will benefit most from a cloud approach.
• Virtualize all of the workloads: Virtualize all of the workloads you are targeting for the cloud.
• Define the standard services: Define the standard services you want to offer, with associated service levels, and optimize your architecture, infrastructure and organizational policies to support a service consumption model.
• Outline security protocols: Outline security protocols and compliance requirements.
• Consider how you will manage: Consider how you will manage resources, perform chargeback and handle change management as you move to a cloud model.

Hybrid Clouds Maximize Business Benefits

As IT leaders consider cloud computing, foremost in their minds are their current IT environments and business requirements. They want to be sure the approach they choose does not require them to start from scratch, ripping and replacing working infrastructure.

They want an approach that is flexible and scalable enough to meet their requirements now and into the future, and to be secure. They want to avoid being locked into a particular vendor’s solution. Most important, they want a cloud tailored to their business.

Depending on business needs, each cloud model—public, private and hybrid—has characteristics and benefits that attract organizations.

• Public Clouds: Public Clouds deliver fast access to new compute resources at low cost and are often used to deploy applications with unpredictable or seasonal demand.
• Private Clouds: Private Clouds enable corporate IT to provide enterprise-class performance, security, quality of service and tighter integration datacenter with business operations.
• Hybrid Clouds: Hybrid Clouds reduce expenditures and increase agility, combining the benefits of both public and private clouds, and offering portability between them according to business requirements.

The hybrid cloud is the most strategic cloud model. It allows you to combine the benefits of both public and private clouds and offers portability between them according to your business requirements. It enables you to deploy applications with the cost structure and service levels you need, and adjust them when business requirements change.

For most enterprises, the hybrid cloud is also the most economical model.

VMware Solutions Enable the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud
As you transition to your cloud, you need a global technology leader with qualified solution and service providers that will work with you every step of the way and move forward at your pace. Only VMware enables the enterprise hybrid cloud, so that you can create and manage the applications and services that you need to run your business most effectively.

An enterprise hybrid cloud features high performance, comprehensive security, high availability to deliver exceptional quality of service, interoperability and the ability to scale with business operations. The key to enabling hybrid cloud deployment is the standardization of frameworks and infrastructure, including a common platform, common management and common security.

Only VMware provides you with the flexibility and portability to move your applications between clouds without rewriting them—from private clouds to VMware vCloud® enabled public clouds and back. Whichever cloud option suits your business best, VMware offers solutions based on open standards to build and manage your cloud. VMware also supports a broad community of public vCloud providers to ensure that everything in your cloud works seamlessly and securely.

Today, all five of the cloud service providers that Gartner, Inc. placed in the leaders quadrant of its current Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting* are partially or wholly based on VMware.
* Gartner. Inc. "Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting." Lydia Leong and Ted Chamberlin, December 2010.

Cloud Infrastructure and Management Solutions
Customer-proven VMware cloud infrastructure and management solutions provide standardization for delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to increase IT agility.
PDF Link
VMware solutions deliver intelligent virtual infrastructure, the foundation for your cloud. Intelligent Intelligent virtual infrastructure is highly adaptive and can sense and respond to changing business needs. This built-in intelligence, along with an analytical approach to monitoring and managing resources, enables IT organizations to automate most manual tasks in dynamic, virtualized and cloud environments.
VMware cloud infrastructure and management solutions include common frameworks and infrastructure that deliver application and data portability, accessibility and security. Through virtualization and a single framework, VMware solutions provide comprehensive security for the enterprise hybrid cloud. VMware solutions are based on open standards, including the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), which has been adopted as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard. These solutions extend to an ecosystem of more than 3,500 service providers to ensure manageability and interoperability across clouds.
VMware Solution Benefits

• Eliminate downtime and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) of business-critical applications.
• Deliver high-quality service and reduce operational expense with built-in intelligence and automation.
• Increase agility by providing a flexible architecture to build an enterprise hybrid cloud.

CONSONA Case Study
LAMCO Case Study

Cloud Application Platform
The VMware vFabricTM Cloud Application Platform is the best way to build, run and scale modern applications whether you deploy them onsite or offsite. It delivers the highest application performance, quality of service and resource utilization by intelligently leveraging the underlying infrastructure.

The vFabric platform also enables enterprises to extend existing investments and expertise to incorporate new consumer application paradigms, including social networking, mobile access and collaboration.
When developers leverage the popular vFabric frameworks and tools, including Spring—a core component of the platform used by more than three million developers worldwide—they increase the velocity of application development and deployment, which enables IT innovation.
VMware Solution Benefits

• Build modern, Web-oriented applications in less than half the time of traditional approaches.
• Deliver cloud-ready applications that are optimized to run on virtual infrastructure.
• Enhance application portability between public and private clouds.
• Overcome relational database bottlenecks and enable real-time data.
• Increase the reliability, availability and scalability of applications.

To provide development organizations with even greater choice, VMware offers Cloud Foundry, the industry’s first open platform as a service (PaaS).

End-User Computing Solutions
End users expect and require access to their data and applications from multiple devices, anywhere. Securely meeting these needs in a timely manner with existing resources is precisely what VMware delivers.

VMware Solution Benefits

• Provide enterprise users with secure and flexible access to applications and data anytime, anywhere.
• Reduce the cost and complexity of desktop management.
• Shift users from traditional email to next-generation email and collaboration software.

Case Study - MidMichigan Health
Data Sheet - VMWare View
Read More:
Desktop Virtualization
Find Desktop Solution Reseller Partners
Find VMware View Alliance Partners

Journey to Your Cloud
VMware understands that every organization approaches IT transformation with its own set of challenges and objectives. The VMware Journey starts with virtualization and culminates in IT as a Service, increasing business agility at every stage. The Journey helps your organization achieve a cloud model that is uniquely yours—a private, public or hybrid environment precisely aligned with your individual business goals.

Build Your Cloud with VMware
The experienced VMware team works with a large ecosystem of partners
to help you make the most effective changes to your IT environment, processes and operations. VMware, together with leading systems integrators and public cloud service providers, builds and harvests the intellectual property and services required for the journey to your cloud.

• VMware Consulting Services–In-depth virtualization and cloud computing expertise to deliver an operational cloud environment using proven, repeatable delivery methodologies that speed the business value of cloud computing
• VMware Education Services–Industry-leading technical training and certification programs that build cloud computing knowledge and expertise in your IT organization
• VMware Support Services–Knowledgeable support professionals and extensive self-help resources that facilitate customer and partner success with VMware virtualization and cloud infra- structure solutions.

Read More:
Link to Services
Read Boldly Navigating Towards IT-as-a-Service Whitepaper From VMware and CIO.com
Explore VMware Cloud Technologies and the Advantages

Why VMware?
By delivering secure interoperability between clouds, VMware brings you all of the benefits of an enterprise hybrid cloud approach. With an evolutionary path to cloud computing based on the most widely used virtualization platform, VMware delivers the only cloud that matters— your cloud.

Your Cloud
Deploy the right cloud model for your business needs.

Customer-Proven Solutions
More than 250,000 customers worldwide trust VMware solutions.

Evolutionary Approach
Leverage existing IT resources while moving your business forward.

Interoperability
Move workloads seamlessly between private and public clouds and gain all of the benefits of the enterprise hybrid cloud.

Open Standards
Solutions based on open standards for flexibility and freedom of choice.

Large Ecosystem
More than 25,000 technology partners and 3,500 cloud service providers to meet your business needs.

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