Introducing VMware Cloud Ready Framework Customer Journey

The Tech industry regularly undergoes major transformations that define trends for the next several years. While these trends vary over time, they tend to follow a familiar pattern regarding their approach to solving the underlying business problems. We can summarize this approach into a 3-step recurring cycle that aligns with significant changes to overall business strategies within an organization.

1. Review and define current business goals.
2. Identify technical solutions that address the business goals, design/build the final solution, and adjust operations to manage the implementation.
3. Evolve the solution as needed per minor changes to business goals.

We do an excellent job of addressing the second step of the cycle; in other words, we tend to document the topics of business value, technical design/implementation, and overall management of our solutions. There are countless examples of this, from standard technical documentation to blog posts on the business value of a product or how to implement some specific feature of a given solution. Where we typically fall short in narrating the complete end-to-end journey of adapting modern technology to fit continuously evolving business strategies.

To address the ongoing challenges associated with mapping technical solutions to modern business strategies, we are pleased to announce a new addition to the VMware Cloud Ready Framework (VMCRF) initiative that better defines the customer cloud journey. This methodology is built around three objectives:

1. Business strategy: The entry point to technology must always be through well-defined business cases. A curated list of common business cases paired with the most appropriate technical solutions and their associated design patterns.
2. Solutions over products – Technical discussions should focus on comprehensive solutions rather than individual products. This approach helps to further reinforce objective #1.
3. Evolution rather than revolution – The focus should be on the continuous evolution of technology solutions rather than on major technical revolutions. Both technology and business strategy are ever-evolving, with a goal to ensure that organizations are provided with the most current methodologies for evolving today’s technology to meet the demands of tomorrow.

Over the next few weeks, we will begin introducing changes to our VMware Cloud Tech Zone site, including additional structured content built upon the three constructs mentioned above. We have already started the process with content targeting the Disaster Recovery use case. Other use cases will be available from the “Use Cases” drop-down menu at the top navigation bar of Tech Zone.

As VMware Cloud continues to evolve, we will continue to provide updated guidelines to cloud architects and application owners that reflect the most common practices observed within our largest and most complex customer installations. If you are interested in providing feedback or participating as a design partner, please reach out by emailing vmwcloudready@vmware.com.