Today European organizations are demanding solutions that offer secure, resilient, and sovereign cloud alternatives. At our company, ITQ, a leading specialist in hybrid cloud, cloud native, digital workspace solutions, and private AI, and a Pinnacle Solution Provider Partner for Broadcom, headquartered in the Netherlands, we work with customers to meet the latest compliance and security challenges while accelerating their business growth.
In this article, I’ll share how we at ITQ helped a leading German software provider migrate to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) to maximize the value of their technology investments while reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 33 percent.
The Challenge: Compliance Requirements and Rising Costs
The customer, a software provider with more than 50% market share in the German-speaking insurance sector, faced rising strict compliance requirements to handle sensitive health data. With approximately 1,300 employees globally and €170 million in sales revenue in 2023, their operations relied on over 80 legacy systems that were costly to maintain and inefficient to scale. The customer’s objectives were clear:
- Improve IT infrastructure utilization – Consolidate legacy systems to maximize performance and efficiency.
- Gain control of TCO – Optimize resources and create transparency around IT and cloud spending through Financial Operations (FinOps).
- Streamline operations – Improve workflow and enable better cost allocation across internal tenants.
- Enhance security and data control – Ensure compliance with European data regulations and improve services for end customers.
The Solution: VMware Cloud Foundation
ITQ, a Broadcom partner with more than 15 years of VMware software expertise, helped address these challenges directly. Our team’s approach went beyond technology implementation, focusing on enterprise architecture and change management to ensure long-term success.
It’s critical to align IT strategy with business values. We began with strategy workshops to identify the customers’ needs, IT priorities and business objectives to design a tailored solution. Through this process, we determined that VCF would deliver the greatest long-term value for the customer.
The result was a migration from legacy on-premises systems to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). VCF provided a complete stack—including network, storage, compute, automation, monitoring, and disaster recovery—out of the box. This eliminated the need for extensive engineering and manual processes, delivering a private cloud solution that was both cost-effective and flexible.
Key Outcomes: Efficiency, Cost Savings, and Security
The project achieved remarkable results:
- Infrastructure consolidation: The customer’s 80 legacy systems were consolidated into just 18 high-performance servers, achieving 95% virtualization. This reduced hardware, maintenance, and operational costs while improving efficiency.
- 33% reduction in TCO: Achieved through the combination of ITQ's Flex Cloud offering and professional services.
- Elimination of costly disaster recovery (DR): By replacing their self-managed DR data center with VMware Cloud Foundation, the customer reduced costs and simplified operations. The addition of VMware Live Recovery, VMware Live Cyber Recovery, and VMware vDefend strengthened ransomware resilience, enabled unified detection, containment, and recovery across sites.
- Resource optimization: FinOps implementation created transparency around IT and cloud spending, enabling ongoing cost control and optimization.
- Automation benefits: Automation capabilities streamlined operations, reducing manual overhead and enabling better cost allocation across internal tenants.
- Enhanced security: To meet the customer’s stringent security requirements based on a Zero Trust approach, East-West traffic was encrypted using NSX Distributed Firewall (DFW) combined with appropriate policy definitions. For secure data storage, vSAN encryption was implemented, with workloads running on NFS leverage VM encryption.
Benjamin Hünemeyer, Managing Director at ITQ, highlighted both the financial and compliance benefits of VCF: “Building your own private cloud from a financial perspective has proven more cost-effective than running your workloads in a public environment. In addition, the customer understood that VCF gave them full control of anything when it comes to encryption, data address, and data in transit. It was highly important for them that their data only be stored in Europe and managed exclusively by European employees. It was a key driver for them.”
The Broadcom Advantage: A Comprehensive Approach
Our holistic approach was at the heart of our success, engaging stakeholders across multiple departments—including finance, IT administration, and controlling—to manage cultural and process changes. This ensured the solution was both technically sound and aligned with the customer’s business goals.
VCF’s integrated design further simplified operations. In the past, lifecycle management—upgrading your data centers—was not easy to do. Now with the fully integrated stack, it’s the same way as if you are updating your iPhone. You don’t even notice that it happens. Everything continues to work. You don’t need an experienced engineer to do it. It’s a huge benefit of VCF. The success of this project has paved the way for future phases with the customer, including expansion to additional data centers and the incorporation of AI capabilities for FinOps.
By combining technical expertise, our strategic partnership with Broadcom, and innovative solutions like ITQ Flex Cloud with VCF, ITQ demonstrates how partners can drive substantial value for customers who want to modernize their IT infrastructure while maintaining security, compliance and cost efficiency. To learn more about ITQ’s work with Broadcom, please visit https://expert.broadcom.com/provider/itq.