VMware CIO Tony Scott pushes IT-as-a-service model at virtualisation giant
Scott claims sceptics are now seeing the benefits of switching from the traditional method of procuring hardware
VMware's CIO, Tony Scott, claims that he is changing the way that the virtualisation giant works, having deployed an "IT-as-a-service model".
"It means that anything new I want to do shows up as a new service. I think it will allow for more of a rapid adoption of new technologies compared to the old traditional hardware siloed model," he says.
The firm uses its own vRealize Suite as well as IT service management software from ServiceNow, among other tools, in order to make this model work, and is about seven months into its new strategy.
Scott, who had previously been CIO of Microsoft and prior to that CIO of Disney, claims that when his team first said they wanted to do "hardware as-a-service" and build its own internal cloud, it changed the way its procurement organisation bought hardware.
"We used to buy hardware on a case-by-case basis, looking at the return on investment of the project, and our procurement team would put two vendors against one another and compare the best price, and this could take weeks or months from the time you had thought of an idea. Where you order the hardware, get it set up, and configure it," Scott says.
He reveals that there was a lot of scepticism about IT-as-a-service because each division had been set up using the old model.
"You can imagine what happens when you say ‘alright, we're going to flip this model and pre-buy a bunch of hardware, not knowing exactly what we're going to use it for, we're going to rack it, stack it and make it available - and it becomes a ‘build it and they will come model'," he explains.
Software-defined ... everything
ITaaS is just one step on the path to a software-defined enterprise, a journey that will require a big change in culture at the firm.
"It's the same with anything new: the hardest thing is to get your teams to learn the new technology and to look at what they're doing in a completely different way," he says.
"There are also only a few organisations where you have the opportunity to just say ‘I'm going to stop doing this thing I was doing yesterday and start doing this new thing completely'. You just don't get those opportunities."
Scott believes this is the right approach but admits that there are no "perfect examples" of a software-defined strategy as yet.
"There are cases where companies have good pieces of [a software-defined approach]," he says.
Making its own technology work in-house
Scott suggests that his role as VMware's CIO is no different to that of IT leaders in user organisations, in that he has overall control of all the business applications that run the company.
That said, there is obviously more pressure on him to use VMware technology than there is on other CIOs.
"You want to be able to say to your customers that we've been running our business on this for some time before we ship it to the end user," he says, adding that his team is heavily involved in product development and beta trials.
"We work on things like whether the documentation is good, how easy the software is to set up and install and how easy it is to integrate with other applications.
"Those are the kind of things that a real working IT organisation will look at in a way that wouldn't happen in just an ordinary test environment."
Scott says he is often approached by VMware customers to give his views on products he has deployed.
"We have a lot of peer-to-peer conversations with our customers and it's not a sales or marketing call, they're already customers," he claims.
So what is VMware experimenting with now? The company is working on network virtualisation, which Scott believes can deliver greater speed and flexibility than compute virtualisation.
"I wouldn't say no one else is working on this, but it is early days," he says.
"We're excited about the notion of micro-segmentation of the network, which allows me to respond to a security incident by isolating part of the network really quickly.
"With micro-segmentation, you can firewall a smaller piece of the network, and that's got implications for the performance of your security and for access controls."
Partners and customers
Last year, Computing analysed whether VMware's strategies had irked some of its partners.
The vendor had launched its vCloud Hybrid Service, and VMware's senior vice president and general manager of its Hybrid Cloud Services Business Unit, Bill Fathers, admitted that many of the company's partners were not happy with the launch as it could take away some of their business.
But Scott claims that its partners have taken the announcements well.
"I think everyone understands that there is a variety of ways that a company like VMware needs to take to be relevant in the marketplace," he says.
Scott explains that one of the drivers for the virtualisation giant's strategy to build data centres in France, Germany and the UK, was to allay any customer data security fears after the Edward Snowden leaks.
"Disaster recovery was another reason as people want something close to them but not too close to their primary data centres. As long as they are customers, we don't care at some level what their reason is, and I expect there to be a lot of motivations," Scott says.
VMware recently opened a vCloud Hybrid Service data centre near London, its second in the UK, and Scott says more are on the way, although he would not reveal where.
"I know but I couldn't tell you. We're going to go where our customers are; it's a customer driven thing at this point. We'll make announcements as soon as we're ready," he explains.
Being honest
Scott blames it on a whole generation of tech staff who are readying themselves for retirement.
"These are folks who were there in the early days with deep technical skills, but as technology has moved along, some of those skills have been glossed over by business management tools, and through layers of software," he says.
"But that core set of skills is retiring and leaving the workforce and is not being replaced at the same rate, which is giving the industry a problem."
So what should firms do about employees who don't want to learn anything new?
"That's where I think we owe our staff a conversation telling them ‘this is where we think things are going, and here are the skillsets that are going to be required, and here's what we are willing to do' but we need to be honest with people and say, ‘we need you to do something as well'," Scott suggests.
"Just covering our eyes and pretending it's not going to change is not going to help. So I think it's that conversation which is really important."