VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that Siemens IT Solutions and Services, which works with mid-tier to Fortune 100 companies, has deployed VMware’s industry-leading management and virtualization suite, VMware Infrastructure 3, to provide a secure, reliable and flexible platform for its customers’ production and pre-production application environments.
Among the many services offered by Siemens, customers are increasingly interested in hosted solutions that can support variable traffic loads. To address this market demand, Siemens has joined with the VMware vCloud Initiative by developing a virtualized private cloud environment with VMware Infrastructure to provide capacity on demand for mission-critical applications. Siemens used the VMware platform to build out its cloud environment, improve server utilization from 20 percent to over 60 percent, and reduce hardware expenditures by approximately 70 percent compared to the cost of building a cloud environment without virtualization.
Siemens IT Solutions and Services, an operating company of Siemens Corporation, offers consulting services, systems integration, software development, and IT infrastructure management. The business unit has annual revenue of $7 billion. Siemens is using VMware Infrastructure to help both internal and external customers address significant business challenges, including the need for green IT, cost reduction, business innovation, more effective customer service, and faster time to market. The VMware platform also gives Siemens cost-effective and reliable disaster recovery and a resilient application environment that enables delivery of service availability up to 99.99 percent.
“For our customers, reliability and speed are essential for ensuring competitiveness,” said John Hill, chief technology officer, at Siemens IT Solutions and Services. “With the VMware platform, we help our customers increase availability and reduce deployment time for applications and servers. We can now deploy in one day what used to take many weeks. Of course, VMware is much more than just a shortcut for us. Our customers turn to us for answers to the difficult questions facing their businesses, from financial to strategic to technical. VMware’s flexibility, security and manageability allow our people to spend more time addressing ‘upstream’ issues and less time on the rudimentary aspects of technology implementation.”
Hill also cited the business flexibility that the VMware solution provides as a key factor in Siemens’ decision to deploy the VMware platform. He noted that Siemens could now move the entire contents of a server anywhere in the world simply by transmitting a file. The process used to involve backing up the data locally, shipping a tape file to another location, and reloading the data onto a new server. It was a tedious and time-consuming process. Today, the process can be done automatically and electronically in minutes, giving Siemens and its customers tremendous agility and making data accessible wherever and whenever it can be of most value.
“The VMware platform allows us to look at computing resources as a large pool of interchangeable assets rather than a string of unique and separate components,” said Hill. “Only VMware technology offers us and our users the range of tools and technologies combined with broad industry support required to host and serve business critical applications. And by building our business on the VMware platform, we will be able to leverage the vCloud technology offerings to deliver new services in the cloud, without losing reliability.”