VMware Digital Workspace Customer Quotes
Genghis Capital Ltd., a leading investment bank in Kenya, has managed to maintain full business continuity throughout the recent health pandemic as a result of its decision to become a cloud- and digital-first business. "When this pandemic began, we feared for the worst. When we moved to our VMware cloud in 2017 with Node Africa, we decided to turn our business digital and be hosted 100% on a VMware-powered cloud. Today, we are glad we made this decision. Our team was able to seamlessly transition into a work from home model with no disruption to our business,” said Jeremiah Chunge Munyasa, head of Alternative Channels & Technology at Genghis Capital. “Our clients can digitally onboard, move funds, trade, chat for assistance/support - all from their mobile app device without having to come to the office or call our office line.”
Pittsburgh Technical College is a private, non-profit academic institution serving more than 1,600 students from its Oakdale, Pennsylvania campus. “When we made the decision to transition all on-campus activities to a virtual environment as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, our biggest challenge was navigating how to keep the family atmosphere of our tight, single-campus location alive and well online. VMware’s digital workspace solutions played a key role in helping us do that,” said William Showers, CIO, Pittsburgh Technical College. “We’ve been using VMware Horizon for several years to allow employees and students to access virtual desktops and apps on the device of their choice. Today, teachers and students can access collaboration tools and high-computing programs, such as immersive 3D-graphics datasets, from their virtual desktop to teach and learn remotely. The process for accessing these tools is the same as before – the only thing that has changed is the user’s location. I’m certain that if we hadn’t made the investment in VMware Horizon, this transition would not have been as seamless, and we would have found ourselves playing catch-up when the pandemic hit.”
Schoolcraft College is a Michigan-based institution who has been leveraging technology to solve the challenges that have emerged from the crisis. “Schoolcraft College delivers more online and distance learning classes than any other community college in Michigan but there’s still a tremendous amount of in-person classes offered. Administrations and colleges are realizing that they have to be able to deliver better collaboration tools between students and technology to differentiate themselves during this crisis,” said Patrick Turner, vice president and CIO at Schoolcraft College. “Remote access to virtual computing will revolutionize the course delivery methodology in higher ed and we just have to get people to embrace it and understand the nuances necessary in order to maintain the pedagogical connection for student engagement. Thanks to VMware, we’re able to deploy a safer learning environment for our students that they can access from anywhere in the world.”
The University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) is one of the youngest and largest universities in Germany and is located in the heart of the Ruhr metropolitan region. “The scope and the scale of the response to COVID-19 was completely unprecedented, in terms of how much of the world went digital inside a month. Fortunately, our investment in VMware and a VDI environment has proved its value and we were well prepared to provide online education platforms,” said André Kreft, CIO and managing director, Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Biology. “Our employees and students were able to make the switch to working from home. This virtual platform was also instrumental in the implementation of our new Open Source video conferencing system BigBlueButton, facilitating real-time seminars with staff and students. To improve educational equity, students can also borrow devices from us and access the university network via the VDI environment. Thanks to VMware, our students can continue their studies under safe conditions at home, without compromising their health or their education.”
West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District in central New Jersey serves approximately 9,900 students. “By using VMware vSphere to virtualize our data center and VMware Horizon virtual desktops for remote learning, we can give students, faculty, and staff the same experience at home as they would have on site. In response to COVID-19, it was crucial to support 1:1 computing with Chromebooks for every student in grades 5-12,” said Harry Doctor, technology manager, West-Windsor Plainsboro Regional School District. “With Horizon, we’re able to keep students engaged with a robust array of teaching and learning tools that would be difficult to access using Chromebooks alone.”
World Wide Technology (WWT) is a technology solution provider with more than 6,000 global employees. “We went from having about 25 percent of employees working remotely to jumping overnight to well over 90 percent. Having a digital workspace platform, VMware Workspace ONE, and robust VDI environment, VMware Horizon, already in place meant that, fortunately, we didn’t have to burn the midnight oil to support a nearly fully-remote workforce,” said Joey Toms, manager of IT end-user services, World Wide Technology. “We’ve also utilized Horizon to reimage IT support for two critical use cases – new hire onboarding and break/fix scenarios. If a new hire is located in an area impacted by supply chain disruption, we can allow them to use whatever device they have at home while we work on getting them their company-issued device. Since they are accessing our data center and company network from a more secure VDI instance, we can get new hires up and running quickly on a personal device without being concerned from a security standpoint. We use this same approach if an employee breaks their device. They can continue to access critical apps from a personal device via VMware’s digital workspace while an IT team member fixes their broken device and ships it back to them.”
WSB University is the largest, state-recognized private university in Poland’s Lower Silesia region, specialized in finance and banking education. “Amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, we needed to conduct courses online using a variety of e-learning platforms for both lectures and exercises with hundreds of virtualized computer workstations with Windows and Linux systems. With over 20 years of experience in training professionals for business and annually educating over 14 thousand students, our students and lecturers needed to have remote access,” said Joanna Nogieć, Ph. D., Vice-Chancellor Faculty of Finance and Management, WSB University in Wrocław. “However, organizing laboratories that required access to specialized systems and applications was a big challenge. Luckily, we had been using VDI technology based on the VMware Horizon solution for some time it was made it possible for both students and lecturers to have access to the academic resources and systems they needed from anywhere in the world.”