CIO Chalk Talks

VCE partnered up with Presidio and Cisco at the Jets House in New York City during Super Bowl week. Jets House is the New York Jets official hospitality venue where season ticket holders, team partners and guests gather to experience all of the week’s excitement. Throughout the five-day experience, current and former Jets players, coaches and cheerleaders participated in meet-and-greet sessions with guests. Each day there were different programming and interactive guest opportunities such as Q&A sessions, cooking demonstrations, and Chalk Talks.

TrophyIn conjunction with the Jets House event, VCE, along with ecosystem partners Cisco and Presidio, hosted two days of executive briefings and client panel discussions that included sessions on IT as a service, mobility and security, and capacity on demand.

IT leaders presented to a group of their industry peers across multiple verticals, which sparked an interactive dialog between the audience and the VCE customers. The most common questions were around how these IT leaders were able to shift their day-to-day tasks from infrastructure concerns to delivering business demands.

The two sessions provided several unique insights:

  • Tangible benefits of getting the first Vblock System
  • Organizational impacts of Vblock Systems
  • Velocity towards multiple Vblock Systems
  • Shifting from IaaS to platform as a service (PaaS) to software as a service (SaaS) to IT as a service (ITaaS)

Tangible benefits of getting the first Vblock System

The CIOs listed VCE’s speedy service delivery as the first benefit to visibly impact their organizations. The word “faster” echoed throughout the discussions. Of course, the speed to value is apparent, but even greater value came from longer-term deployment. With VCE, the CIOs are able to meet the increased expectations and demands from different departments again and again.

By assessing the system as a whole, there is less time wasted on isolated concerns of compute, network, storage and management. Indeed, IT leaders were able to shift from infrastructure centric to more workplace centric views. Over time, the leaders realized that a vibrant and stable service catalog, relying on a true converged infrastructure with lifecycle assurance, is the key to unlocking even faster time to value than ever before. In short, standardization on Vblock Systems empowers teams to focus more on what matters – business needs – and less on IT for the sake of IT.

Organizational impacts of Vblock Systems

Interestingly, the organizational impact of Vblock Systems takes place over different timelines. If an IT department was radically siloed, then the organizational impact will be greater than a system-oriented environment. This sparks the classic debate among the network team, the compute or virtualization team, the storage team, and even the security and compliance teams. Combining these teams yields greater operational awareness, which is only possible with a system view of how services are delivered. Further, it is a system view that provides assurances to security compliance teams not available in the old silo views.

The standardization on Vblock Systems unlocks the capabilities within organizations to expand from only providing management tools to exploring deeper levels of automation and ultimately a complete orchestration alignment to meet business needs. So, while the workshops presented two different journeys of varying silo-oriented history it was apparent that the outcomes aligned to more streamlined operations than the silos ever afforded.

Velocity toward multiple Vblock Systems

As organizations continue to consume services that reside on Vblock Systems, lines of business begin to equate speed and the repeatable outcomes with the “new IT.”  Previously, these lines of business might have attempted to outsource their own IT, and then foist that solution upon internal IT teams to support. Now, in the wake of adopting Vblock Systems, these same application owners seek out the IT teams to understand how they can achieve tenancy goals from development to test to QA to production in a single conversation – all centered around a single IT relationship.

For the first time in many organizations, the IT conversation is internal to the private cloud as a viable option, whereas prior views might mandate looking outside to so-called public clouds more often than not. Additionally, many CIOs found that standardizing their organization’s intellectual property on multiple Vblock Systems within their own data centers was more cost-effective than public clouds.

Shifting from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS to ITaaS

Perhaps the most exciting part of the discussions were centered around shifts to leverage new consumption models and going higher in the value stack for business. This was realized by working closely with Presidio to take advantage of an on-demand capability on Vblock Systems, which allowed customers to quickly expand the infrastructure to meet new business goals.

In fact, this moved discussions along from IaaS to presenting platforms to developers (PaaS) as well as managing full stacks for lines of business (SaaS) and handling quick assimilation of mergers and acquisitions to seasonable IT needs (ITaaS). It was clear that Presidio had tapped into a need and delivered a commensurate solution for the IT leader. Finally, VCE’s on demand financial and technology models allow for use of Vblock Systems on an event or seasonal basis as OPEX (rather than CAPEX), which helps enterprises quickly address new business needs.

About the Author: Jay Cuthrell