VMware Cloud Foundation Operations And VMware Cloud Foundation
Automation Reduce Wasteful Spend And Improve Organizational Efficiency For Industrial And
Infrastructure Companies
VMware commissioned Forrester Consulting
to interview eight representatives and conduct two Total Economic Impact™ (TEI)
studies to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with
VMware Cloud Foundation Operations and VMware Cloud Foundation Automation.1
This abstract will focus on the use of VMware Cloud Foundation Operations and
VMware Cloud Foundation Automation by industrial and infrastructure companies.
Forrester Consulting conducted additional interviews to better understand how
the combined use of these solutions drove value within organizations. The
additional interviewees for this Spotlight were:
An enterprise architect for a global industrial firm based in
the United States with $35 billion in annual revenue and more than 100,000
employees.
A systems engineer for a multinational infrastructure firm
based in the United States with $5 billion in annual revenue and more than
18,000 employees.
Their organizations had desired to implement a self-service
internal cloud prior to working with VMware. They struggled with slow manual
provisioning processes and overspent due to poor capacity planning and a
reliance on outside contractors. Decision-makers at these two organizations
focused on:
VMware Cloud Foundation, which offers a comprehensive platform
for building and managing private or hybrid cloud environments.
VMware Cloud Foundation Operations, which provides
organizations with visibility into physical, virtual, and cloud
infrastructure from virtual machines (VMs) and containers to applications.
This visibility allows organizations to optimize infrastructure instead of
continually deploying too much or too little, monitoring, and alerting for
issues for rapid remediation.
VMware Cloud Foundation Automation, which is a cloud
infrastructure automation solution that delivers a self-service private
cloud. The solution empowers users with self-service consumption of
Kubernetes and modernized cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
capabilities, allowing organizations to harness the power of a private cloud
ecosystem. VMware Cloud Foundation Automation supports organizations that
are looking to new technologies such as Kubernetes, open-source software,
multiple clouds, and different operating models and practices like DevOps
and platform engineering.
Annual savings with VMware Cloud
Foundation Automation provisioning enforcement
$30,000
Reduced lead time for provisioning VMs
by
97%
INVESTMENT DRIVERS For INDUSTRIAL And Infrastructure
Organizations
The interviewees’ organizations adopted VMware Cloud Foundation
Operations and VMware Cloud Foundation Automation to create self-service
internal clouds. Prior to investing in VMware Cloud Foundation Operations and
VMware Cloud Foundation Automation, one organization had made two prior attempts
to establish this with other service providers, which resulted in poor outcomes.
The other organization was not able to find a vendor that met its strict
compliance needs.
Time-consuming provisioning. The enterprise architect noted that in their prior environment,
provisioning additional infrastructure was a slow, time-consuming process
that required multiple manual touchpoints. They explained: “It was like a
20-something-plus-day process to obtain a virtual machine. So there’s a lot
of interdependencies, a lot of ticketing, and manual ticketing processing
back and forth. That was one of our main drivers, improving that speed of
provisioning.”
Unoptimized hardware and service
spend. The enterprise architect explained that their
organization had relied on managed services to provide virtual
infrastructure. Not only was this process slow, but their providers charged
a per-item cost every time a virtual machine was provisioned. In a dynamic
environment, this meant that the organization incurred significant
unexpected variable overhead. The enterprise architect detailed, “In the
pre-automation state, the service provider and the supplier had an initial
upfront cost for that provisioning and then an ongoing monthly support
cost.”
Lack of visibility.
Interviewees struggled with poor visibility, which made capacity planning,
forecasting, and reporting incredibly difficult and often inaccurate. The
systems engineer explained: “In the past, it would’ve been a very manual
process of going through the center itself looking at every VM, looking at
its performance history, and then conducting analysis. Using [VMware Cloud
Foundation] Operations actually streamlined that process for us, so we don’t
have to look at any of those pieces manually. We just get the report, and we
go from there.”
“Without leasing, we would constantly be purchasing and provisioning new
hardware to manage our growth and have somewhere to put things.”
Enterprise architect, industrial
Key Results For INDUSTRIAL AND INFRaSTRUCTURE
The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations
include:
Enabled self-service provisioning and reduced
wait times. The interviewees explained that by
creating a self-service environment for provisioning VMs, users could save
weeks of lead time. The enterprise architect said: “Now, users can provision
new VMs with [VMware Cloud Foundation Automation] in an hour or so and then
spin out their old ones. We’ve got a lot of project teams that are doing
that. In the past, they would need to do those requests knowing that they’re
going to have probably about a month of lead time before they even get the
machine.”
The infrastructure organization
further accelerated delivery times using Operations to inform decisions on
infrastructure requests. The systems engineer detailed: “Operations sped up
my ability to either approve or disapprove a request that comes in from the
different teams. Say Team A needs an additional 300 vCPU. Team B needs an
additional 400 gigs of memory. Operations has given me that foresight to be
able to look into it and say, ‘I can do this request,’ or ‘I can’t, and I
need you to look back at your team’s utilization because of X, Y, Z’ without
having to do it all manually like before.”
Reduced managed services spend. The enterprise architect explained that their organization used a
managed services provider for provisioning infrastructure prior to building
their self-service environment. The providers would not only charge for the
infrastructure but also for the labor associated with executing requests.
The enterprise architect explained: “In the before state, manual
provisioning would have involved six or more staff members with the ticket
going back and forth. … This is now fully automated, [with] no intervention
from anybody except for the user putting in their request. So for the labor
cost, that’s from six or so personnel to zero.”
Built governance into
provisioning. Interviewees’ organizations built
governance into their self-service process, with preset compute and storage
options. Users could go outside these bounds, but it required an additional
approval process to ensure that these requirements were truly necessary to
the business. The enterprise architect explained: “[With] the provisioning
today, we have set sizes that can be selected for them to provision as far
as the compute and storage. For anything else, we have an approval gate
where the staff that runs virtualization can review. Having that in a
guardrail state, it’s much easier to know what is being
provisioned.”
The systems engineer added: “It’s
mostly just the segmentation, being able to keep one team out of another
team’s programming. We can demonstrate that nobody has been able to touch
things outside their teams, which in this case would be [VMware Cloud
Foundation Automation] restricting the access to the different
VMs.”
Avoided infrastructure spend. One organization used VMware Cloud Foundation Automation to create
leases and eliminate unnecessary spend. The enterprise architect stated:
“There are machines out there that get forgotten about and get left. So if
their lease comes up and if they are not renewed, those go into a brownout
state, and they are decommissioned and removed. We’ve got cost avoidance
from not needing to expand the infrastructure quite as often because those
things are coming in and coming out.”
The other
organization leveraged Operations to create capacity reports, show teams
that they were underutilizing assets, and reallocate resources. This allowed
it to save thousands in spend by using resources it was already paying for.
The systems engineer explained: “Within the last year, we’ve been able to
work with individual teams and say, ‘Hey, I know you said you need this for
your project, but we’re seeing you are way over capacity for these VMs. We
need you to scroll it back, or else we’re going to scroll it back for you.’
When we send out oversized reports, [users] have been able to downsize their
VMs with no impact, and we reallocate those resources to other
teams.”
This study is commissioned by VMware and delivered by Forrester Consulting.
It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.
Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other
organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their
own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the
appropriateness of an investment in VMware Cloud Foundation Operations and
VMware Cloud Foundation Automation.
VMware reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains
editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to
the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the
study.
VMware provided the customer names for the interviews but did not
participate in the interviews.
1 Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by
Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes
and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and
services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and
realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key
business stakeholders.
ABOUT FORRESTER CONSULTING
Forrester provides independent and objective
research-based consulting to help leaders deliver key transformation outcomes.
Fueled by our customer-obsessed research, Forrester’s seasoned consultants partner with
leaders to execute on their priorities using a unique engagement model that
tailors to diverse needs and ensures lasting impact. For more information, visit
forrester.com/consulting.
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