VMware highlights how to transform business by transforming IT

The traditional approach to IT is changing. At the South African leg of VMware Forum 2012, the companyhighlights what customers needto drive their business into the cloud and beyond.

VMware is helping businesses better manage the changes in technology and economic pressures by providing organisations with a roadmap to assist with the transformation of IT departments.

With the advent and realisation of virtualisation and cloud computing, businesses are struggling to manage their older legacy systems, revealing that the traditional approach to IT is at an end. As a result, innovation through technology can be stifled; virtualisation to many seems a pipedream and the disconnect between business and IT is deepening.

“We are in the middle of the next wave of IT and if we aren’t prepared to grab it and drive our business towards it, we will be unable to take advantage of the economic, productivity and business benefits associated withit,” states Chris Norton,regional director southern Africa at VMware. “The traditional approach to IT is broken across the board, from infrastructure, applications and workplace enablement. The bottom line is that we need to act fast before we lose control of it entirely.”

Because of the explosion in new types of devices and more importantly the easy access to tools and applications in the cloud, IT risks losing control. Norton states that if business continues on its current approach to IT, it won’t keep up with demand, resulting in loss of mind and market share amongst users, customers and suppliers.

“For the most part the end user is driving the enterprise demand. They are not asking what devices they can use, or which applications they access your data with, they are simply using them,” adds Norton. “It is therole ofbusinesses to embrace this and not fight against it, but rather start providing access to information in the cloud, in the way users want, in-keeping with business best practice.”

But cloud computing is not a fad technology or an ethereal application we can buy off the shelf and implement, Norton warns. Cloud computing is rather an infrastructure-based technology roadmap that marks the next generation of technology infrastructure.

VMwareidentifies that cloud is undoubtedly a disruptive environment, attacking what many perceive IT to be and how it should behave. But it is an environment that users are embracing andisalready in use outside of their workplace, driven by pervasive mobile devices, shared applications in the cloud and even social media and networking channels.

“IT must naturally take a considered approach to the Post-PC era, but they must approach it. There are three areas where it must be addressed, and these are the transformation of the end-user computing layer, the application layer and the infrastructure layer,” states Norton. “It is here that we believe VMware can play a significant part in your future approach to technology. Through the combination of virtualisation technologies to build a cloud-based infrastructure and end user access to enterprise applications in the cloud, business can harness this new wave of technology and IT can regain control of its organisation.”

“Where the old wave of computing was based on automation through scripting, we believe that the new Post-PC era is being driven by automation through policies. If you can provide the technologies for users to access data within the cloud, you can own the experience and managethe behaviour as they are directed through a policy-based framework prescribed by you,” adds Norton.

VMware Cloud solutions:

• Cloud Foundry from VMware is the first and only truly open platform-as-a-service, providing the user with choice in terms of developer frameworks, application services and clouds for deployment.

• VMware vSphereis the industry-leading virtualisation platform for building cloud infrastructures. It accelerates the shift to cloud computing for existing datacenters, while also underpinning compatible public cloud offerings, paving the way for the only hybrid cloud model.

• VMware vCenter Operations Management Suiteprovides automated operations management to enable companies to get better visibilityand to ensure service levels, optimum resource usage and configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.

• VMware Horizon Application Manager simplifies IT by centralising application management in the Post-PC era. IT can now unify management of any SaaS, Web and Windows applications and securely deliver them to end-users on the device of their choice, increasing their flexibility and productivity while reducing the cost of complexity.

“The above are merely a taste of what VMware has in its technology arsenal, all of which provide the forward thinking business a true roadmap for the future, as well as ensuring they are able to fully embrace the power of the Post-PC era. In Africa we are not far behind our global counterparts, as in many environments we have the benefit of greenfields sites that need transformation and are eager to embrace the cloud. That said, we are working with our partners and local service providers to embrace the unique bandwidth, pricing and regulatory challenges facing our local customers to ensure that they are not left wanting in this Post-PC era,” ends Norton.