VMware has come on board as diamond sponsor of ITWeb’s Cloud, Data Centre & DevOps Summit 2020, to be held on 11 February at The Forum in Bryanston.

Dave Funnell, Manager: Cloud Provider at VMware, says events such as this inform local decision-makers of cloud developments and how enterprises across the world are taking advantage of cloud solutions as the sector matures.

“VMware’s software has become the glue that makes hybrid multi-cloud operationally feasible," he says. “To date, all of the six predominant hyperscalers, from Gartner’s magic quadrant, have partnered with VMware to provide native VMware platforms within their availability zones. In Sub-Saharan Africa, we have over 60 Cloud Provider partners providing customers with VMware-based clouds for a localised cloud offering tailored to their requirements.”

He says it is for this reason that it’s imperative that VMware is present at the ITWeb Cloud, Data Centre & DevOps Summit, "not only to provide a view of our cloud offerings and business strategy, but also to give customers a better understanding of how we can work with them to accelerate their journey to the cloud".

“Our objective at the event will be to give customers an understanding of why VMware is viewed as the ‘Switzerland’ of the cloud and should be considered in any future cloud strategy,” adds Funnell.

According to Funnell, all businesses are under similar pressures: they need to become more agile and have to reduce time to market for new applications, along with managing costs. These three drivers are the main reasons for the rapid adoption of cloud strategies for a business. 

“The problem begins when IT organisations have to start implementing cloud at scale. The common questions that arise include:  Where do they start? How will they be successful? Why does it take so long to migrate existing application services to the cloud? How do they manage cloud costs? How do they implement security and network policies?

“We don’t just want to talk about cloud trends at the event; that has been done and customers know they need to consider the cloud,” he says. 

“Instead, we will give delegates more tangible strategies they can enlist when navigating the cloud, as well as a view of the cloud services they can successfully deploy within their companies to achieve digital transformation. All this, within the remit of improving the quality of services being delivered by IT to business, as well as a view of how they can avoid the pitfalls that have befallen other companies which have, in part, failed along their cloud journey.”

Importantly, he says, the event will play host to all the major cloud vendors, many of whom are VMware’s partners, and in turn give delegates an overall view of what, as an industry, each has to offer in this space. 

“Delegates will then be able to decide for themselves which solutions and aspects of the cloud are best suited to their requirements, both for their existing legacy applications and the next-generation cloud-native applications they will develop into the future.

“Sub-Saharan African companies are not that different from the rest of the world: our businesses react to the same market pressures as companies globally. And we also have to get a grasp of how we can successfully adopt cloud services,” adds Funnell.

Events like this provide a platform for information-sharing among peers, vendors and the IT industry at large. It is a fantastic opportunity to get examples from organisations around what works, what doesn’t and what can be done to fix it, he says.

“For us at VMware, we use these events to make ourselves, as a business, more accessible to end-users. Our success is measured by the success of our clients, and we want to assist clients in making their journey to the cloud successful. And because of our neutrality in the provision of cloud services and partnerships with other vendors, we are uniquely positioned to become a central component of that journey.”