news One of Australia’s largest corporate consultancies, the local branch of international firm Deloitte, has revealed it will join the widespread migration towards internal private cloud solutions, standardising heavily on the vCloud Suite developed by virtualisation leader VMware.
According to a statement released by the two companies on the sidelines of VMware’s vCloud forum in Sydney this week, Deloitte wants to transform its internal organisation by becoming a broker of technology services to its own staff.
VMware has been enlisted to help it achieve this goal, with the vendor’s “commitment to research and development along with the company’s focus on the software defined datacenter” space being the key reasons Deloitte decided to standardise the VMware vCloud suite.
“Deloitte is using the VMware vCloud Suite to accelerate the vision of IT as a Service,” said Tim Fleming, chief information officer, Deloitte Australia.“We have invested in VMware to expand our storage capacity and backup functions, and critically offer a secure environment that provides the reliability and agility that a high performing business demands. VMware vCloud will also deliver the efficiencies, capacity and data controls that our internal business units require,” Fleming added.
This arrangement will see Deloitte embark on its private cloud journey as part of a three year IT strategy, which aligns closely with VMware’s software-defined datacentre vision, with VMware aiding in the firm’s implementation of vCloud Suite Enterprise.
“It’s all about agility. We want our own internal customers to be able to auto-provision IT services that may not be running on our own infrastructure with little to no support from our IT organization,” said Fleming. This will both contribute to savings in support costs and provide revenue benefits to Deloitte, according to Fleming.
VMware is working in conjunction with Deloitte Consulting on the implementation of vCloud Suite. “We’re excited that Deloitte Australia is leading the way across it member network in adopting vCloud Suite,” said Duncan Bennet, vice president and managing director, VMware Australia and New Zealand. “Working with Deloitte provides VMware with a chance to demonstrate the power of our vision of bringing IT as a service into the hands of CIOs across the region.”
Deloitte is one of the biggest professional services firms in Australia with more than $1 billion in annual revenue, and is growing across all its business units. The firm ates high on readiness for a service based delivery environment, according to VMware, due to a high level of existing virtualisation in its operations of roughly 93 percent.
Deloitte is a longstanding client of VMware and has been a steady adopter of virtualisation for the last five years, according to the pair’s media release. Deloitte has been transitioning a vast majority of its workloads to its virtual environment that now runs 1000 virtual machines across 100 hosts. As a result, it has achieved significant cost reduction and hardware lifecycle savings.
opinion/analysis
What we see here is another example of this kind of migration, within a broader trend. As major organisations get closer to 100 percent virtualisation, they tend to start to push towards more advanced datacentre strategies — building internal private clouds of the type described by Deloitte and VMware here, with the automated provisioning, internal billing and management solutions they focus on, as well as shifting their disaster recovery capability into the cloud and even looking at virtual desktop solutions and so on.
It’s good to see Deloitte go down this path, although I hope their devotion to VMware also includes the flexibility to look at other options. It would probably make sense, for example, to shift some non-sensitive workloads eventually into a public cloud environment such as the datacentres operated in Australia by companies such as Rackspace and Amazon Web Services, for example. Even major Australian banks are doing that much, so it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for a firm like Deloitte, which prides itself on innovation. And to my knowledge, VMware doesn’t currently operate public cloud infrastructure in Australia — at least not yet.
Wasn’t this all possible years ago with Vblock?
I know at least one of the big four is uses one of these systems internally.
TK
Hi Thomas – private cloud capability has been around for years but the level of maturity and sophistication hasn’t, we have now reached a point where automation and orchestration is simpler to implement, and has less moving parts and custom scripts. We will continue to see more activity in this space over the next 12 months, as we all try to automate our remedial processes and free up our people to focus on more important functions. I’m sure other enterprises use private cloud capability in some form or another, but it’s the level of maturity in the private cloud offering that would be measured as the differentiator. .
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