VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced the winners of the first-ever Virtual Vanguard Awards. The awards recognize VMware customers who have best employed VMware Infrastructure to create innovative, high-ROI and leading-edge IT strategies. The winners represent achievements in four categories:

• Best Overall ROI and Operational Benefits: IndyMac Bancorp;
• Most Comprehensive VMware Infrastructure: Phoenix Insurance Company;
• Most Critical Application in Production: Tescom; and
• Vanguard Award for Innovation: Stowers Institute for Medical Research.

The winners were honored during a ceremony at VMworld 2006, the leading virtualization event taking place this week in Los Angeles.

“Our customers break the boundaries of traditional computing by leveraging virtualization and VMware products, and we continue to be amazed and impressed by their creativity and innovation,” said Diane Greene, VMware President. “VMware remains committed to delivering software that helps customers solve complex business challenges and realize significant benefits. The Virtual Vanguard Awards are our way of highlighting some of the ways customers have used our products to achieve such benefits.”

Best Overall ROI and Operational Benefits. This award showcases the company that has seen the quickest and largest ROI using VMware technology. The entries were judged on the overall impact of costs avoided, time-to-ROI or operational benefits—not the largest or quickest ROI in terms of absolute numbers. The judges also looked at the effect of virtualization on total IT budget, operational performance and/or corporate bottom line.

IndyMac Bancorp, Inc., the winner in this category, used VMware virtualization software to create an efficient and flexible infrastructure, saving 60 percent on the cost of hardware and 76 percent on network infrastructure, equating to a total savings of nearly $4 million.

“By utilizing VMware technology, we were able to consolidate more servers with minimal performance degradation, in addition to the important operational benefits afforded by virtual infrastructure,” said Steve Kim, manager for IndyMac Bancorp.

IndyMac Bancorp operates as the holding company for IndyMac Bank, F.S.B., a thrift/mortgage bank, which provides mortgage products and services in Los Angeles County.

Most Comprehensive VMware Infrastructure. This award honors the most comprehensive VMware Infrastructure deployment based on a combination of total size and on amount of total infrastructure virtualized. The judges looked for customers utilizing virtualization technology in multiple ways across their IT infrastructure, from desktop to data center and from development to production, and have virtualized at least 50 percent of their development, staging and production environments.

The winning submission came from Phoenix Insurance Company, which has virtualized more than 80 percent of its development, pre-production and production environments. In addition, the company has used VMware software to create a separate disaster recovery setup.

Eran Levi, infrastructure manager for Phoenix, described the company’s high virtualization rate. “We currently have 98 percent of development, 98 percent of pre-production and 85 percent of production environments running on VMware Infrastructure,” said Levi.

With yearly revenue of nearly $3 billion, Phoenix Insurance Company is one of the largest insurance companies in Israel.

Most Critical Application in Production. This award recognizes the most mission-critical application running on VMware Infrastructure. “Mission-critical” was defined by the consequences of application failure: Should this application become unavailable for any noticeable length of time, the impact on the applicant’s company would be serious. Examples of such serious consequences might include loss of revenue, broken service-level agreements, customers unable to pay bills or place orders, violations of regulatory compliance rules and compromised security.

The winner in this category, Tescom, runs many of its mission-critical enterprise applications on VMware Infrastructure, including e-mail servers, customer relationship management applications and accounting and finance applications, all of which are used by employees around the globe.

“Down time is not an option in this kind of environment,” said David Shalit, global IT manager for Tescom. “To avoid potentially disastrous outcomes, all hardware is fully redundant, and Tescom uses VMware Infrastructure 3, including VMware High Availability (HA) and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), to ensure availability at all times.”

Tescom is a global leader in independent software quality assurance and testing, helping companies mitigate the technological risks inherent to the development, implementation and integration of software and information technology applications.

Vanguard Award for Innovation. This award honors customers who have taken virtualization to new levels, leveraging the technology to push the envelope and create unique, innovative solutions to IT challenges. The winner, Stowers Institute for Medical Research, created a virtual desktop grid by using VMware Player to harness the idle CPU time of its Windows desktop computers. When most desktops are idle at night, the virtual grid provides a significant contribution to the institute’s full-time physical compute grid.

“We get all this power with an installation footprint of only a 3 MB ISO image and VMware Player,” said Daniel Thomasset, senior systems administrator for Stowers.”

Stowers Institute for Medical Research conducts basic research on fundamental processes of cellular life to seek more effective means of preventing and curing disease.

The Virtual Vanguard Awards judging panel consisted of Stephen Elliot, research manager for IDC's Enterprise Systems Management Software Service; Eric Kuzmack, IT architect at Gannett; Jonathan Paul, advisory analyst at Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services; and several judges from VMware.