Today at VMworld 2021, we’re excited to announce the honorees for the first-ever VMware Customer Excellence Awards.
In their role as independent auditor, IDC was also commissioned by VMware to act as the preliminary judge and recommendation organization to the 2021 VMware Customer Excellence Award Program.
The awards committee looked at the toughest challenges organizations faced over the past year. From suddenly remote workforces to changing customer demands and the global health crisis, these eight organizations made the impossible “possible” in these categories:
- Innovation of the Year: FedEx
- Digital Business Transformation of the Year: Pirelli
- Social Impact of the Year: IHC New Zealand
- Improved Customer Experience: IndusInd Bank
- Improved Employee Experience: Twitter
- Digital Transformation: Commonwealth Bank of Australia
- Business Resiliency: Airtel
- Changed What’s Possible: Netherlands Cancer Institute
Innovation of the Year: FedEx
Featured by VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram in the VMworld 2021 General Session, FedEx is accelerating its digital transformation across every region globally. And, among so many other demands on their business, the company’s cloud, apps, data intelligence and IoT innovations were critical for helping distribute lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines to communities across the world.
At FedEx, we stand at the nexus of the digital and physical world. So, we started this journey with a lot of focus on making our technology cloud ready, cloud native and flexible. If we had not built that technology to be flexible, we never could have adapted to the world and all the changes that the pandemic brought.”
Rob Carter, EVP and CIO, FedEx
Digital Business Transformation of the Year: Pirelli
Pirelli manufactures tires for premium and prestige vehicle brands. The company collaborates with these car manufacturers to design tires for specific models and versions. Working collaboratively enables Pirelli to gain deeper insight into near- and long-term customer needs, delivering greater manufacturing agility and faster time to market. Thanks to this business model, more than 80% of customers fitting Pirelli tires as original equipment choose Pirelli tires in the replacement market.
Highly digitized processes in Pirelli’s manufacturing plants require intensive data management. To modernize its IT infrastructure, Pirelli needed a multi-cloud strategy to integrate its private cloud with a public cloud solution. Since VMware helped virtualize nearly 100% of the company’s on-premises private cloud, the migration to a public cloud solution using VMware Cloud on Amazon AWS was a logical digital foundation to provide Pirelli with full platform independence. Using VMware technology to move virtual machines from the private to public cloud created an efficient, multi-cloud vendor strategy compatible with all public cloud providers.
The company’s integrated approach enables Pirelli to transform the way it works with customers in order to minimize costs and improve time to market, agility and team collaboration. The solution is expected to increase the company’s bandwidth at lower total cost of ownership globally.
We are very proud of the recognition we have received. To have received an award in the ‘Business Digital Transformation of the Year’ category confirms that we are on the right path and that this is the direction to pursue also in the future: our cloud strategy will allow us to progressively digitize core business processes, with a consequent positive impact on costs, production efficiency and effectiveness, and time to market.
Pier Paolo Tamma, SVP and Chief Digital Officer, Pirelli
Social Impact of the Year: IHC New Zealand
Founded in 1949, IHC New Zealand advocates for the rights, inclusion and welfare of all people with Intellectual disabilities. IHC is the second-largest social housing provider in the country and provides full residential services so that the people we support can live in their communities. IHC also offers vocational training to assist with employment opportunities.
For years, IHC operated a paper record-keeping system. This process created fragmented sets of resident data, effecting the amount of time staff could devote to residents. Ultimately, IHC’s team decided they needed digital solutions to modernize their operations. The first step: enabling 3,500 remote staff with mobile devices and cloud-based apps.
Working with VMware engineers, IHC will soon manage all 2,500 mobile devices with VMware Workspace ONE. Its small-but-mighty team of 25 IT experts deploy apps to users’ chosen devices in a controlled, consistent way. And with managed services provider CCL, the team helps drive usage and feature enhancements.
Looking forward, IHC is exploring IoT and cloud solutions to advance its mission of enabling people with intellectual disabilities to lead fuller, barrier-free lives.
Our staff model using digital services in everyday life, so that the people we support just see that as normal, as well. And that becomes part of their transition to living and breathing in a digital environment and becoming engaged in that. We’re honored to receive the Social Impact award from VMware in recognition of what we’ve achieved so far.
Mike Hughes, CIO, IHC Group
Improved Customer Experience: IndusInd Bank Ltd
Headquartered in Mumbai, IndusInd Bank has more than 1,500 branches across India, with offices in London, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Established in 1994, the bank opened with traditional banking services. But as competition intensified, the company pioneered customer-centric financial service innovations that helped customers transition to online banking and other digital experiences.
But to create a robust platform for its evolving digital capabilities, IndusInd needed a pathway to the cloud. IndusInd Bank partnered with VMware to accelerate innovation and deliver new customer experiences. Now, the bank can build and run apps on any cloud.
IndusInd’s flexible, multi-cloud infrastructure delivers a constellation of customer-centric apps and services. One of those is IndusAssist on Amazon Alexa. This innovative service lets customers check account balances, transfer funds and pay credit card bills simply by talking to Alexa. Another example is Video Branch. Using mobile devices, customers can connect with bank representatives and complete a full range of tasks from home—or anywhere in the world.
Finally, IndusInd’s digital foundation gives its team the tools and resources they need to rapidly respond to business disruptions and adapt to rapidly changing markets.
For example, “Compared to before the pandemic and now, 70-80% of our acquisitions are via digital channel. That’s a big jump; a very high portion of customers are using digital channels. Payment has become contactless during the time that the pandemic came into our lives,” said Biwasbrata Chakravorty, head of information technology, IndusInd Bank.
Our engagement with VMware has been on the data center, the cloud and on the endpoint side. What is really important is that the partnership has grown. We’ve worked with transparency through crucial moments, new technologies. We’ve been on the money with launches and rollouts. We have recently gone live with Tanzu, one of the implementations on the container, in the Kubernetes space. We expect VMware to be a partner on the roadmap for a significant period of time, as these are not tech fads but part of our strategy.
Biwasbrata Chakravorty, Head of Information Technology, IndusInd Bank
Digital Transformation: Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA)
CBA’s goal is to move 95% of its IT workload to the public cloud by 2025, as a way to simplify CBA’s technology estate and ensure applications remain highly resilient and highly available. The bank’s migration to public cloud ensures greater digital resilience throughout its IT infrastructure by consolidating disparate systems and processes and adopting automation for an improved service. In working closely with AWS, VMware helped to ensure success in implementing capabilities for CBA’s renewed operating infrastructure.
Now with a more standardized, resilient architecture, the bank is able to use a scalable and agile platform, where technology teams can deliver the best digital experiences to customers. It will return benefits to CBA in operational efficiencies, enabling business agility, growth and market differentiation.
This ultimately translates into benefits CBA’s customers, who will be able to access their money 24/7 and pay for critical services. Additionally, with the improvements in CBA’s technology infrastructure, it can now provide a key payment platform that forms a large part of Australia’s liquidity for customers receiving income support, disability payments, veterans’ pensions and salaries for government employees.
Having the leading digital experience for our customers is something we take pride in delivering, and we see this as a real differentiator for us. This award from VMware is a testament to how passionate our technology teams are to harness public cloud as an enabler for innovation and the best digital experiences for our customers.
Mark Vudrag, Executive General Manager, Global Technology Services, Commonwealth Bank