If a small team like ours can embrace VCF and do big things — uniting silos, empowering devs, building our private cloud — so can you.
Jeremy Wright, director of IT infrastructure, Grinnell Mutual
Exactly one year ago at VMware Explore 2024, Jeremy Wright, director of IT infrastructure at Grinnell Mutual, was sitting in the audience harboring some doubts, as speakers touted the benefits of running a business on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
“I was skeptical, attentive, and wondering if VMware Cloud Foundation was truly for a small outfit like ours,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘This sounds powerful, but probably more for large enterprises.’”
Grinnell Mutual is a 116-year-old insurance company based in the small town of Grinnell, Iowa. Wright’s IT team is relatively small, and the business they support is not a big operation.
“We’re just 17 dedicated people supporting 750 employees across the organization,” Wright said. “Small, but mighty.”
Serving customers, agents, and mutual insurers in 19 states, Wright’s team runs mission-critical workloads that are the lifeblood of the company’s highly distributed employee base.
His doubts about VCF lingered until he approached a presenter after a session on vSAN financials. He posed a question: “How do you convince someone like me – who understands discrete storage and is really comfortable with how we run on that storage – to go to vSAN?”
“I came away from that session with a new perspective. I did some back-of-the-napkin math right then and there. By going with VSAN over a discrete storage appliance, we could save a million dollars upfront, not even factoring in today’s prices.”
That was the beginning of a deeper dive into blogs, subreddits, and new VCF features like global deduplication and site maintenance mode for stretched clusters. Suddenly, VCF wasn’t too big. It was the perfect fit for a lean team looking to maximize efficiency.
Making the Business Case
The next step was to convince the C-suite. Hardware wasn’t due for renewal until March 2026, and there were SQL licensing overlaps to navigate. Wright leaned on experience managing tight budgets. He built a five-year financial plan showing how VCF would cut leasing costs, optimize Microsoft renewals, and make the most of payment timing.
“Once the dollars lined up,” he said, “they were on board. It wasn’t hard; it was about making the business case crystal clear.”
For Wright, VCF’s impact goes well beyond the financial savings.
“It’s not just software; it’s a unifier,” he explained. For the first time, his network, systems, DevOps, DBA, and desktop automation teams are working together on the same platform. “We’re in the same meetings, engineering solutions side by side, so everyone knows the ‘why’ behind our setups.”
Wright and his team recognized that a public cloud option such as AWS would have required additional headcount.
“On a platform like AWS, we’d need to hire more people to manage the silos and complexity,” he said. “With VCF, our small team will extract maximum value from a cohesive set of tools.”
Empowering Developers
One of Grinnell Mutual’s biggest pain points was the gap between IT infrastructure and development teams. Developers working in IntelliJ IDE on Horizon VDI struggled with performance. So the IT team launched “Operation Monday,” containerizing the IDE and managing it with VCF Automation and VMware Kubernetes Service.
“We don’t have to teach them VDI intricacies; they don’t have to school us on developer tools,” Wright said. The team is also planning to use Data Services Manager to provide self-service Postgres databases, another big boost in developer empowerment.
Wright dismisses the notion that public cloud reduces the cost of virtual desktop environments.
“Absolutely not. You’d need the same headcount with specialized, siloed skills,” he said. In fact, when Grinnell compared Azure Virtual Desktop to their VMware-powered VDI, Azure “couldn’t touch it on price or performance.”
Wright has a simple message for other small teams: “VCF builds you a private cloud with all the features — self-service, scalability, data sovereignty — without the public cloud headaches. Stop thinking of it as servers and infrastructure. It’s private cloud, period.”
Security and Savings
For any small IT group, securing and protecting the business is a big challenge. But Wright said VCF is important to Grinnell’s security strategy.
“We may be small, but we take security very seriously,” he said. “VCF is one of our force multipliers. A long ago promise I made to my boss to bring real micro-segmentation to our environment will soon be a reality with vDefend, Distributed Firewall and NSX. And the UI is more unified than ever, making it easier for my different teams to get up to speed and train each other.”
Meanwhile, the financial upside continues to grow. That initial $1 million savings from vSAN was just the start. Wright expects VCF to continue shaping renewal and budgeting decisions for years to come.
Having used VMware since the 2.x days, Wright sees VCF as delivering on two long-standing VMware promises.
“I feel like VMware has made me two promises: ‘First, we’ll virtualize your workloads and let you extract as much value as you possibly can from the hardware you own.’ This promise has been fulfilled for a long time.
“The second promise is, ‘We’re going to enable customers of any size to run a full-stack private cloud. For the first time, I believe VMware is delivering on this promise.”
Wright urges other small IT teams to consider VCF, whether at Explore or with your VMware reps.
“Your ‘aha’ moment is waiting,” he said. “If a small team like ours can embrace VCF and do big things — uniting silos, empowering devs, building our private cloud — so can you.”