Software and automation specialists VMware and Accenture have announced the signing of an extended partnership that will see the pair launch a dedicated business group that will help organisations adopt a ‘cloud first’ strategy.

The new business unit will help enterprises and businesses accelerate their digital transformation efforts by streamlining their migration to the cloud, building modern apps more rapidly, and using the cloud as a fulcrum for innovation and new business models.

The new business group will form part of Accenture Cloud First, which Accenture launched in 2020 with a $3 billion investment to help businesses move and operate their businesses in the cloud.

Cloud is the single most powerful tool for mastering change,” said Julie Sweet, chief executive officer, Accenture.

“As organisations accelerate their move to the cloud and edge over the next few years, the Accenture VMware Business Group will help deliver the speed, scale and security they need to fundamentally reinvent their businesses and create more value.”

The Accenture VMware Business Group represents a new multi-year, multi-million-dollar investment from the two companies, and builds on over 20 years of collaboration between the two firms. The new business unit will be supported by approximately 2,000 Accenture cloud professionals trained in VMware products and services.

The two firms will develop a range of pre-engineered vertical industry solutions, including a platform to help telcos accelerate the rollout of 5G and edge computing services.

“To meet the demands of today’s unprecedented business environment, organisations must employ a multi-cloud strategy – more rapidly than ever before,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware.

“Increasingly, customers are running their applications on one or more clouds, datacenters and the edge and the Accenture VMware Business Group will bring together the world-class teams and expertise required, with the speed, agility, and resilience that organisations demand, today and tomorrow.”

The new business group will also launch a specialised VMware Cloud Migration Factory, which will allow customers to migrate their computing workloads to the cloud rapidly, more securely and confidently, using highly automated processes.

The VMware Cloud Migration Factory will give clients access to a controlled environment and dedicated resources to plan, test, migrate and modernise applications at scale to their preferred public, private and/or hybrid cloud.

“The pandemic brought about a new ‘next normal’ for organisations, one where they need to accelerate their use of cloud to modernise the business and serve as a foundation for innovation,” said Rick Villars, group vice president of worldwide research, IDC. “They recognise that public, private and hybrid cloud all play a critical role in this transition and they require technology cloud partners and service providers who are able to execute the strategies and provide the skills needed to drive this transformation faster than ever before.”

VMware and Accenture have announced the launch of a business group aimed at guiding companies through their adoption of a cloud-first strategy, as part of a newly expanded partnership between the two organisations.

The Accenture VMware Business Group’s primary mission will be to encourage and accelerate migration to the cloud, build modern apps and use the cloud as a foundation for new business models. It is supported by around 2,000 Accenture cloud professionals trained in VMware services.

The move represents a multi-million dollar investment from both companies, which have a relationship spanning more than two decades.

“Cloud is the single most powerful tool for mastering change,” says Accenture CEO Julie Sweet.

“As organisations accelerate their move to the cloud and edge over the next few years, the Accenture VMware Business Group will help deliver the speed, scale and security they need to fundamentally reinvent their businesses and create more value.”

The new business group will make several new investments: training more Accenture employees in VMware tech, developing new service offerings based on VMware solutions, and go-to-market and sales operations. The two companies will also develop pre-engineered vertical industry solutions, including a platform to help telecommunications companies accelerate the rollout of 5G and edge computing services.

“To meet the demands of today’s unprecedented business environment, organisations must employ a multi-cloud strategy – more rapidly than ever before,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

“Increasingly, customers are running their applications on one or more clouds, data centres and the edge and the Accenture VMware Business Group will bring together the world-class teams and expertise required, with the speed, agility, and resilience that organisations demand, today and tomorrow.”

Another development stemming from the Accenture VMware Business Group is the launch of a specialised VMware Cloud Migration Factory to migrate computing workloads to the cloud. The VMware Cloud Migration Factory will give clients access to resources to plan, test, migrate and modernise applications at scale to their preferred cloud.

“The pandemic brought about a new ‘next normal’ for organisations, one where they need to accelerate their use of cloud to modernise the business and serve as a foundation for innovation,” said Rick Villars, group vice president of worldwide research, IDC.

“They recognise that public, private and hybrid cloud all play a critical role in this transition and they require technology cloud partners and service providers who are able to execute the strategies and provide the skills needed to drive this transformation faster than ever before.”

Microsoft on Thursday announced the general availability of its Azure Hybrid Benefit solution for Linux customers in India.

Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that helps organisations to cut the costs of running workloads in the cloud, Microsoft said.

It helps customers “seamlessly” migrate to on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) virtual machines (VMs) to Microsoft Azure.

The solution enables significant reduction in cost of running workloads on-the-cloud by converting existing PAYG (pay-as-you-go) virtual machines (VMs) to bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) billing, Microsoft said.

The solution gains significance in view of the fact that businesses face challenges in migrating workload to public cloud due to regulatory and data sovereignty related issues.

This is common in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and government.

Also, some workloads, especially those related to edge, require low latency.

Additionally, many organisations have significant on-premises investments that they want to maximise so they choose to modernise on-location datacenters and traditional apps.

This includes in on-premises licenses and subscriptions, and the inability to migrate them to cloud often affects the return on investment and total cost of ownership.

Azure solves this by acknowledging this investment and not charging for subscriptions or licenses again when customers move to the cloud, Microsoft said.

Globally, over 1,500 Linux virtual machines were migrated during the preview period to Azure using the new Azure Hybrid Benefit capabilities, enabling significant cost reduction for enterprise running Linux workloads in Azure, the company added.

Since 1861, Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) has been helping New Zealanders achieve their goals and turn dreams into reality. To provide innovative products and services to its customers, BNZ wanted to modernise its aging infrastructure. It chose Microsoft Azure as its cloud platform, migrating and modernising its business-critical .NET applications. Today BNZ can provide superior customer experiences and is benefiting from improved agility, scalability, risk management, and cost-efficiency.

BNZ aims to empower New Zealanders to achieve big by doing great things with money. To help customers with the services they require and respond to them quickly, BNZ branch staff and back-office staff were using several staff-assisted applications. However, these applications were running on the aging platform. To modernise its technological capabilities, BNZ wanted to move these staff-assisted .NET applications running on end-of-life Windows 2008 software—from an on-premise platform to the Azure cloud. It was looking to take advantage of cloud architecture, respond to opportunities with speed at the same time improve its security, reliability, disaster recovery, and reduce infrastructure costs.

BNZ challenged itself to go beyond lift and shift, and with Microsoft helping them along the way, the team decided the right approach – modernise. “We had a collaborative, hands-on 3-day workshop with Microsoft Engineers to understand the different approaches and techniques that we could use,” says BMK Lakshminarayan, Solutions Architect at BNZ. “Microsoft help in this journey is excellent as they helped us in setting up the Fast Track assistance – a dedicated Microsoft Azure engineer to speed up our adoption and guide us through the options and overcome challenges – which is a big help. Microsoft Fasttrack team help to us is like starting your 100 metre race from 75th metre. We would catch up with them every fortnight, and that helped us move forward in our cloud journey in a better way. We settled for a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) approach.”

Modernising Internal Staff-Assisted Applications
BNZ started its modernisation journey by moving two of its staff assisted applications—Cash Management Online and Loyalty Loader (Flybuys) to Azure. These applications are now leveraging Azure cloud-native services & features including – Application identity & access management with Azure Active Directory, AI-enabled analytics with applications insights and improved monitoring. BNZ Developers & Operations teams now have rich analytics and monitoring data to optimise the application for its performance and better customer experience. Above all, BNZ is experiencing a significant improvement in the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of the applications with a fully automated failover.

Previously, when BNZ had these staff-assisted applications on its on-prem infrastructure primary and secondary data centers, and if there was an infrastructure-related outage, a manual intervention would be required to resolve these issues. The tasks include updating our DNS, switching to secondary application servers/database, this would take a minimum of 30 minutes. With Azure – “Now we have a fully automated failover process, and our applications are available for our staff members to help our customers without any interruption. So, from requiring at least 30 minutes for recovery, down to zero— it’s excellent,” remarks BMK. “We can serve our customers quickly without wasting their time.”

BNZ also automated the deployment of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for the databases. “In the past, the manual deployment for database took up to two hours, and today by using Azure Pipelines under DevOps, we’re able to straight away cut it down to five minutes—a massive difference,” states BMK. “It’s not just that our CI/CD pipeline became faster, our security scanning and data classification also became faster. It means we’re also becoming more secure.” For any bank, security is of utmost importance. The in-built, intelligent security services of Azure are helping in early detection of threats, allowing BNZ to respond quickly.

Saving time and effort: re-use, re-apply, re-engineer
In order to document its applications, infrastructure, data and integration, BNZ has been using seven different platforms. These include SharePoint for technical documentation, Confluence for wiki documentation, Team Foundation Server for storing code, and yet another server & tools for housing database scripts. When it moved to Azure, it was able to consolidate these different tools and platforms under one roof. “We brought everything under Azure DevOps in the Git repository, which is very convenient and useful,” says BMK. He further explains how this has simplified the onboarding process of new developers. “New developers can easily see the source code, the data, the scripts, and any other support documentation, including those in the CI/CD pipeline. As we have opted for CI/CD pipeline as code, anyone can reuse and reapply the codes for different applications – this saves much time.”

Nic Olivier, Head of Enterprise Cloud Service, states, “There are cloud security systems that we follow and the idea behind this is, once we put it in one place, then all applications can leverage the work that has been done previously, allowing for a better use or, rather, re-use of architectural and security cases. Now the development teams don’t have to re-engineer everything from scratch as the building blocks already exist. This is helping us to get much faster output in terms of delivering better customer experience.” Yogesh Shetty, who is the Azure Team Lead at BNZ seconds Olivier’s statement, “By leveraging existing work, we were able to set up the infrastructure for another project pretty seamlessly. Setting up infrastructure & configuring them would typically take us two to four weeks for a full Software Development Life Cycle.

BNZ plans to leverage the learnings and skills built through the modernisation of its two applications to streamline upgrades of its remaining applications. The intent is to speed up modernisation to 2-3 applications per sprint. Moreover, BNZ now has the ability to dynamically scale resources as it continues to modernise its application portfolio.

From today, organisations can run the Google Cloud VMware Engine from Google’s Sydney cloud region.

The Engine is an integrated first-party offering and fully owned and operated service that enables enterprises to migrate or extend their VMware-based applications to Google Cloud without any major changes to application policies, tools or processes.

This allows customers to keep what they like about their on-prem application environment and tap into next-generation hardware and application services with minimal effort.

“VMware technologies form the cornerstone of many customers’ enterprise IT environments and we’re focused on giving customers a simple way to be able to run what they want, where they want and how they want. As part of our ongoing commitment to enterprise customers, this is a significant step forward, building on the support we have already added for the likes of SAP, Oracle and Windows over the last year,” says Google Cloud Australia and New Zealand vice president Mark Innes.

Google Cloud VMware Engine provides a hyper-converged architecture so organisations can run and scale their infrastructure to power enterprise workloads that they would traditionally have needed to manage on-premise.

Enterprises can also modernise existing IT investments and leverage on-demand self-service provisioning of VMware private clouds with integrated connectivity to Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud Operations, Cloud Storage, Kubernetes, and Cloud AI.

Businesses in the A/NZ region can deploy Google Cloud VMware Engine closer to their operations and unlock new growth opportunities.

The Engine’s worldwide presence allows multinational customers to benefit from the service’s networking capabilities, such as a global routing service to allow VMware workloads to securely communicate across regions.

Partner ecosystem

This availability builds on VMware Cloud Foundation joining Google Cloud in July 2019 and the acquisition of CloudSimple in November 2019.

Google Cloud VMware Engine is also VMware Cloud Verified, the highest level of validation for VMware-based cloud services.

“VMware’s partnership with Google Cloud is about accelerating our customers’ digital transformation journey, so we’re pleased Google Cloud VMware Engine is now available in the Sydney region. Local customers can now maintain the familiarity of their VMware tools and training and protect their investments as they execute on their cloud strategies. We look forward to helping our mutual customers bring new services to market rapidly and operate them seamlessly and more securely across hybrid- and multi-cloud environments,” says VMware vice president and Australia and New Zealand managing director Brad Anderson.