VMware Tanzu (Dell Technologies) > Case Studies > Modernizing Mission Critical Apps with VMware Tanzu: A VMware IT Case Study

Modernizing Mission Critical Apps with VMware Tanzu: A VMware IT Case Study

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Glass
Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Maintenance
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Tamper Detection
Traffic Monitoring

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

The Customer

VMware, Inc.

About The Customer

VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology, accelerating digital transformation for evolving IT environments. The company's software spans compute, cloud, networking and security, and digital workspace. One of the apps modernized was VMware Customer Connect, a self-service portal that millions of users access each month to evaluate products, download software binaries, manage software licenses, request support, and conduct account management. The portal is crucial for VMware's customer service and experience, and its performance directly impacts the company's reputation and customer satisfaction.

The Challenge

VMware was undergoing a significant digital transformation to support its business model transition from perpetual-license software to subscription and software-as-a-service (SaaS). The VMware IT team was tasked with delivering new capabilities in an accelerated timeframe while improving performance, resiliency, and user experience. One of the apps modernized was VMware Customer Connect, a self-service portal accessed by millions of users each month. Since its launch a decade ago, the portal experienced exponential growth in traffic, leading to scalability and performance issues, outages, and latency. Its legacy codebase and monolithic architecture made it difficult to build and deliver new features. To enhance the platform’s performance and security in the short term, VMware added third-party software tools. However, a lack of integration and other inconsistencies added to the platform's complexity.

The Solution

VMware IT’s architecture team evaluated VMware Tanzu, a suite of products and solutions for building and running modern apps. It enables developers to deploy modern apps faster into a stable, scalable runtime environment and helps operations teams handle change requests related to design, log aggregation, and configuration monitoring more efficiently. VMware IT rearchitected VMware Customer Connect with lightweight microservices, built and delivered using the Spring Boot open source Java framework and VMware Tanzu Application Service. A single-page application framework using open source, Clarity-based UI design was used to improve navigation for end users of the portal, while leveraging microservices hosted on VMware datacenters to achieve higher resiliency. By adopting an event-driven architecture and decoupling services to operate independently, the VMware Customer Connect team was able to accelerate the delivery of new features, strengthen resiliency, and improve performance and response times.

Operational Impact

The modernization of VMware Customer Connect led to significant improvements in its performance, availability, and usability. Customers quickly noticed these improvements, with some large telecommunications customers applauding the innovation and comprehensive approach to rectify issues and drive long-term value, increased responsiveness, and easy-to-use interface. The new platform streamlined developer workflows, increasing productivity by about 25 percent. The team also spent less time on general platform maintenance, saving about 1,000 person-hours per year. The overall customer experience became smoother, with a clean, modern design to the portal. Customers also noticed that the portal was faster as they browsed from one page to another, viewed documents, and downloaded software. The modernized capabilities put VMware on the front foot when it comes to the future, with the growing use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in cloud native environments.

Quantitative Benefit