VMware Explore4 min read

6 Business Heroes and Industry Innovators

VMware proudly announces the 2023 VMware Customer Achievement Award winners for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region at VMware Explore 2023 in Barcelona.

VMware customers accelerate innovation and transform business in a multi-cloud world. At VMware Explore 2023, we celebrate the transformational journeys of six heroes and innovators from the EMEA region.

Heroes

VMware heroes — like Orange France, ARIA S.p.A and East London NHS Foundation Trust — strive to improve our evolving, complex world. Heroes seek to continually improve the customer experience by championing new technologies.

Orange, Weathering the Change Hero

Orange France, part of the Orange Group, is a leading international telecom company not only on a digital transformation but also a sustainable transformation. Among the company’s top priorities: accelerate time to market for new services and improve its environmental footprint.

Orange planned to consolidate 17 legacy data centers to three newly built, highly energy-efficient data centers by 2030. With VMware, Orange simplified its IT environment, defined a migration strategy and began to move workloads to the new data centers.

In a shift to infrastructure-as-a-service, developers, marketers and other lines of business immediately access resources they need to innovate and bring new products to market. And the new, energy-efficient data centers and VMware solutions have a tangible impact on the environmental footprint of the company’s IT operations.

  • The average workload in the Orange France private cloud consumes significantly less energy than it did in the virtualized legacy infrastructure.
  • With a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) estimated at 1.3, the data centers rank among the most efficient in France.
  • By optimizing IT resources, Orange France will considerably aid The Orange Group with its goal of producing net zero carbon emissions by 2040.

[Related: Orange France Advances Towards Ambitious Energy-Saving Goals]

ARIA S.p.A, Customer Experiences Hero

ARIA is the in-house company of Lombardy region in Northern Italy. Its job is to help digitally evolve government services, including for over 40 public healthcare companies in the region.

Recently, ARIA quickly and consistently migrated critical workloads to the cloud from over 44 local data centers of regional hospitals. Its approach, using VMware Cloud on AWS, avoided expensive re-platforming and guaranteed service continuity and maximum ROI.

In the cloud, hospitals now have:

  • Greater sustainability
  • More efficient digital services
  • Stronger security

East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT), Hero for Good

The COVID-19 pandemic put a squeeze on ELFT’s mental health and community health services. To cope with this and future stressors, the Trust swiftly migrated to the cloud, virtualized its networks and implemented a robust disaster recovery solution.

With VMware, ELFT built a robust platform where IT innovates, scales and maintains access to digital care services. Already:

  • Clinical staff are less encumbered by technology and able to engage more with patients.
  • More people have access to ELFT’s digital care services through digital pods.
  • Patients more easily access and manage their own records.

And the Trust has a solid foundation to deliver more strategic, innovative solutions for years to come.

[Related: East London NHS Foundation Trust Closes the Gap Between Technology and the Point of Care]

Innovators

VMware innovators including Bank Julius Bär, Lloyds Banking Group and La Poste — are visionary. They revolutionize their businesses and industries and bring extraordinary value to their customers and employees.

Bank Julius Bär, Apps Transformation Innovator

Over 130 years, Bank Julius Bär grew from a family business in Switzerland to a progressive private bank in over 25 countries. The Swiss bank continues to help people grow and manage their wealth — now with trusted, best-in-class digital experiences.

It’s not easy delivering new software features fast while maintaining the highest security standards. So Bank Julius Bär transformed its 400-strong engineering organization into a culture of software development excellence.

Working with VMware Tanzu Labs, the bank:

  • Established a TechX team to focus on accelerating engineer productivity and software development.
  • Introduced more consistent, customer-centric and outcome-based engineering practices.
  • Increased developers’ productivity from day one with standards, best practices and a unified pipeline.
  • Avoided duplicate, wasteful work by streamlining decision-making and adopting transparent, accessible tools.
  • Improved communication and knowledge-sharing among engineers through a Community of Practice.

Lloyds Banking Group, Cloud Infrastructure Innovator

Lloyds Banking Group invests heavily in its people and technology to be the UK’s biggest digital bank. Lloyds relies on data and analytics to continue its rich history — over 300 years — of helping Britain prosper.

Using cloud and AI technologies, the organization intends to use its wealth of data to create better products and experiences for colleagues and customers. To get better outcomes in a multi-cloud environment, Lloyds:

  • Broke down silos and unified public and private cloud teams on one cloud-based platform.
  • Defined collaborative processes and centralized support related to cost, agility and security.
  • Made the ongoing development of a cloud-smart culture, mindset and skills critical.

[Related: The Journey to Cloud Smart: Learning from Lloyds Banking Group]

La Poste, Hybrid Workforce Innovator

Mobile and connected, La Poste’s 70,000 postal workers carry out most of their daily tasks with a smartphone in their pocket. No fewer than 20 apps are vital to their work. With the addition of corporate users and other frontline workers, the business runs on 200,000-plus smartphones and tablets.

To make work easier, devices and apps must be constantly updated, highly functional, consistently secure and simple to use. With digital employee experience (DEX) technology:

  • Employees get software updates in less time and with minimal effort — so they’re operational right away.
  • IT and service desk teams more efficiently identify, troubleshoot and remediate that impact employee productivity.
  • IT ensures greater security configuring location-based access and developing single sign-on (SSO) apps.
  • La Poste has the flexibility and agility to further enhance their portfolio of apps and digital transformation.

[Related: La Poste Solves the Riddle of Application Updates and Improves Postal Work]

Congratulations to all these heroes and innovators! Explore more customer stories on VMware News & Stories.

The 2023 VMware Customer Achievement Awards program has been conducted in partnership with TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Entries were reviewed and evaluated by a judging committee consisting of VMware executives, ESG analysts and Tech Target Editors.