Xtravirt named VMware Worldwide Partner Lifecycle Services Award Winner 2022
Stepping up to the challenges of cloud transformation
Xtravirt is not shy about its ambitions to make multi-cloud a simpler, more successful strategy for organizations. The cloud consulting and managed services business is looking at nothing short of transforming, well, transformation.
Across all industry sectors, companies have ventured into the world of multi-cloud without anticipating the complexity that comes along with that journey. And those companies are feeling pain, struggling to bridge the gap between legacy IT and cloud.
Gavin Jolliffe, Xtravirt’s CEO, observes that many companies have reached a tipping point. “Today, we are seeing organizations embarking on transformation with the intent of adopting cloud more strategically and simplifying operational management.” Yet, as Jolliffe explains, transformation isn’t without its own challenges. “There’s a bit of a truism in our business, which is at the end of a transformation project, partner teams pop the cork on the champagne, they celebrate, and then they leave. But this is the point where the hard work actually starts for the organization.”
In other words, when most consulting firms consider their work finished, the real transformation has just begun. The problem is organizations are often left to fend for themselves.
Xtravirt looks at things differently. “We see ourselves in a lifecycle relationship with the organizations we support,” Jolliffe explains. “Businesses evolve and change, and when they set out on these transformation journeys, sometimes the target operating model isn’t as clear as it may have once appeared to be. So, our approach is to be part of that journey, to give them the time to adjust and stabilize their new operating model as they’ve evolved. These things don’t happen in a start/stop motion, they happen iteratively over time.”
That commitment to delivering value to its customers over the long term is one of the reasons Xtravirt was named worldwide winner of the 2022 VMware Partner Lifecycle Services Award. Among the best of the best in VMware’s cloud-smart ecosystem, Xtravirt demonstrated its leadership capabilities in leveraging VMware Cross-Cloud services and on-premises solutions to deliver measurable business value for its customers. And they did it by remaining engaged beyond the technology implementation to ensure lasting customer success and satisfaction.
For Xtravirt, transformation means strategically harnessing the right technology to meet an organization’s business and operational objectives, while further providing the support they need to successfully navigate change and get comfortable managing modern cloud platforms. “Our approach is a seamless flow between consulting and change and ongoing management,” Jolliffe says. “It’s all about providing the right service in the right way to meet the needs of customers wherever they are at a particular point in time.”
Achieving digital transformation success on a global scale
One of Xtravirt’s recent successes involved a customer that specializes in complex robotic automation software for the manufacturing industry. With 90 locations across 40 countries, this customer was pursuing a global multi-cloud strategy and, working in partnership with Xtravirt, successfully deployed a three-region hybrid cloud hosting model. Each region comprises a VMware private software-defined data center and a VMware Cloud on AWS environment to provide scale and burst capacity.
However, while gaining a highly capable VMware platform on which to run its business, the customer lacked the necessary resources to realize the full business and IT potential of its technology investments. Remaining fully engaged for the long term with this customer, Xtravirt helped identify critical service gaps and capabilities needed to effectively manage the ongoing operation of the customer’s VMware platforms as the business evolved.
Today, Xtravirt is fulfilling the customer’s operational management requirements with a set of managed, consultative and support services focused on achieving lifetime value for the customer. The impact on the organization has been profound. Principally, more robust governance and greater visibility of security and operational risks provides the business with operational certainty as it continues to navigate change.
Importantly, Xtravirt also assures the customer of prompt incident response and resolution. A prime example of Xtravirt’s value in responding to serious incidents rapidly and effectively came in late 2021, when the global Apache Log4j vulnerability was reported. As Jolliffe explains, “Within 10 minutes of hearing from VMware about the Log4j vulnerability, we were putting a response in place to mitigate that risk, and we had the managed environment patched and configured in line with real-time recommendations within 48 hours.”
Constantly adapting to the accelerating pace of change
In a world where transformational journeys are growing more complex, and many companies are finding the operational management of a multi-cloud environment to be more difficult than expected, Xtravirt has developed a unique portfolio of cloud consulting and managed services solutions to ensure organizations succeed.
As Jolliffe summarizes, “One thing we’ve seen is that the pace of change keeps accelerating. At Xtravirt, we aim to enable the firms we work with to move at the fastest pace possible to meet their business needs, and ensure they’re doing it in as safe, compliant, and risk-averse manner as possible. What we’re all about is success for the long term, not just success for the change.”
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