Since 2006, Murchan and his company have led those transformation journeys in partnership with VMware. “For me, without any shadow of a doubt, VMware is the finest hypervisor on the planet,” he says. “The beauty of VMware is that it works on prem, in a hybrid cloud, in any of the hyperscalers, or any private cloud.”

As a cloud enablement company, Creative ITC values the flexibility VMware brings to work in any cloud that best meets the needs of its clients. Creative ITC current operates ten data centers around the world, built on an Equinix cloud platform. All of them are virtualized with VMware. The company also has a new offering, the Creative Modern Application Platform, which is based on VMware Tanzu cloud-native application platform based on Kubernetes.

“Kubernetes and containers provide a much more efficient infrastructure for running applications,” Murchan notes, “This approach uses less CPU, less RAM, less storage, and in the long run will save clients money.”

Murchan points out that many of Creative ITC’s clients find themselves with large number of legacy applications running on aging infrastructure, and the cost of operating that environment is growing out of control. They need to modernize their applications on a more cost-effective and flexible platform, which is where the Creative ITC and VMware partnership comes into play.

“Leveraging the VMware Tanzu Kubernetes environment with our Creative Modern Application Platform, we’re able to help clients build a more efficient application environment,” Murchan says. “We might move some apps into a hyperscaler cloud, refactor others, or adopt SaaS where it makes sense. The outcome for the client is they could reduce the number of apps by 40 percent because they are modernized, running on a more efficient infrastructure, which lowers their total cost of ownership."

Enabling Secure Collaboration for Global Clients

As a VMware partner, Creative ITC can help its clients with a wide range of cloud-enabled solutions to improve their application experience. For example, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), leveraging VMware Horizon, offers global clients a power way to improve collaboration and infrastructure efficiency, especially when running and sharing large, compute-intensive applications.

For example, Creative ITC’s clients in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries rely extensively on computer-aided design (CAD) and building information modeling (BIM) software, which create very large files. Traditionally, companies would provide high-end workstations to run these applications, but that quickly becomes cost-prohibitive, and it makes sharing files or collaborating on projects difficult when teams are in different parts of the world.

Murchan explains, “The challenge many of our clients face when using BIM is the actual data needs to be near the desktop where they’re doing the modeling. If you have a design house running the BIM app in Asia but the data is in the UK, the latency would be so great, the designers wouldn’t be able to open the BIM file. Collaboration would be nearly impossible. However, using VDI the files and data can both be in the UK and anyone, anywhere in the world can work collaboratively on the models virtually. Keystrokes and mouse clicks are at wire speed, eliminating the latency problem.”

As a prime example, Murchan points to one of Creative ITC’s clients, SNC-Lavalin, a fully integrated professional services and project management company with offices around the world. SNC-Lavalin has more than 34 000 people in 50 countries around the world collaborating on projects using tools such as CAD and BIM software. In addition, SNC-Lavalin designers also collaborate with third-party companies on certain projects. The professional services and project management firm works on some of the most iconic projects in the world—airports, football stadiums, motorways, tunnels, etc.—and must meet strict security and data sovereignty requirements.

Creative ITC helped this client through its digital transformation, virtualizing the customer’s data centers and networks, using VMware NSX to enable secure segmentation of application traffic and VMware Horizon to build a virtual desktop infrastructure. As a result, Murchan says, “With VDI, SNC-Lavalin can provision virtual desktops for third parties and limit their access to only the data required for that specific project.”

Another major goal of the VDI solution was enabling mobility for SNC-Lavalin’s workforce. Now, designers and engineers can work with large CAD or BIM files from anywhere in the world—virtually, without the need to move files and data across the network. “VDI helped our client by eliminating the need to have servers dotted around all over the world. Instead, infrastructure, applications, and data are all consolidated and secured in one central location.”

In fact, SNC-Lavalin was able to consolidate the number of data centers from 16 to just three, reducing storage requirements by 69 percent and power consumption by 50 percent.

SNC-Lavalin is just one of many examples where Creative ITC and VMware bring together world-class expertise and technologies to deliver customer value. Murchan concludes, “We go to market with VMware because they are the leader in virtualization and multi-cloud solutions. VMware will work wherever our customers need their applications and infrastructure. That’s a big part of what has made VMware so successful, and we want to be part of that success as well.”