using VMware solutions to deliver new capabilities or cost savings; that are deeply invested in growing VMware expertise; and have helped increased market penetration of VMware solutions, particularly for customers in underserved markets.

Tightly Aligned with VMware on All Fronts

Azi Handley, the global alliance leader for Kyndryl, has a team dedicated to growing the company’s joint business with VMware. Handley says, “The goal of our partnership is to take Kyndryl's unique and extensive migration, architectural, and strategy services across all VMware solutions, offerings, and capabilities.”

Handley sees the VMware partnership and Kyndryl’s business growing around some of the joint innovation, development, and engineering that the two companies are doing as a natural outcome of the strong alignment of both companies’ future plans. According to Handley, “Our top strategies for 2022 match VMware’s, and include app modernization, multi-cloud, and anywhere workplace. If we look at our practices within Kyndryl, VMware has an offering that fits within each of them.”

Meeting the Customer Demand for Options

Handley says, “One of the key trends we see within our clients is the desire to have choice.” As a standalone company, Kyndryl can now offer more options around all its practice areas.

With app modernization, Handley explains that the partnership helps developers more easily obtain the resources they need to develop modern apps from within the familiar VMware environment. She says, “Clients that already have a VMware footprint want to migrate onto VMware Tanzu because it lets them work using the tools they already know.”

Clients also want choice when it comes to moving to the cloud. Handley says, “There is the desire to go to other clouds such as AWS and Google Cloud and mix and match different environments and different applications where it makes sense.” As an independent company, Kyndryl has been able to develop strong partnerships with major hyperscalers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

“We can look at a customer’s existing footprint of on-prem environments and come up with a strategy to figure out which apps we're going to move onto which hyperscaler.” Handley continues, “But as part of that, we're looking at modernization as well—so what are we moving onto public cloud, and what are we going to modernize onto Tanzu?”

From a digital workspace perspective, Kyndryl offers customers desktop as a service with VMware Workspace ONE and VMware Horizon. That’s giving its customers options for how their employees work—from home, on the go, or in a hybrid work environment.

Moving to the Cloud to Reduce Costs and Accelerate Provisioning

Kyndryl recently helped a prominent Spanish telecommunications company with a digital transformation that involved a move to a hybrid cloud. The company plans, manages, and controls information telecommunications services for government departments and local agencies in a region of Spain. In this role, it leads the government’s information and communication technologies (ICT) and serves as a strategic instrument for deploying the government’s plans.

The government had a large and diverse software environment and tasked the telecommunications company with consolidating that environment onto a cloud-based infrastructure to lower IT operating costs. The government also wanted the company to provide a unified and efficient IT environment. This would accelerate digital transformation of the different public services the government managed and offered citizens.

Kyndryl helped the telecommunications company consolidate the infrastructure into a hybrid cloud environment based on the VMware Software-Defined Data Center that’s hosted both in the IBM Cloud and on-premises data centers. The results were impressive: the company consolidated 10 government departments and eight regional agencies into a single operating and consumption model. This has accelerated the government in refactoring up to 500 applications to private cloud workloads hosted in just two data centers, achieving an 80 percent consolidation of infrastructure and operations and reducing Infrastructure cost by 20 percent.

And the benefits continue: Provisioning new workloads into production now takes less than two hours, with approximately 1,000 workloads deployed and 850 workloads already migrated. The telecommunications company forecasts deploying an estimated 2,000 workloads in 2022.

Building VMware Expertise to Offer Customers Choice

Kyndryl values its investment in growing its VMware expertise. In just the last two years, 350 of its practitioners have earned VMware certification badges. The company has also earned

VMware Master Services Competencies, including:

• Data Center Virtualization
• Network Virtualization
• VMware Cloud Foundation

All this expertise sets up Kyndryl to be able to offer customers the choice they need when it comes to their technology infrastructure. Handley says, “Our focus in 2022 and beyond is to offer options to our customers. Now our customers can choose any partner, any hyperscaler, and any strategy from their cloud journey to app modernization and digital workplace.”

Stay tuned for more spotlights on our 2022 VMware Partner Achievement Award winners just like this one. Interested in becoming a VMware Partner? Learn about the VMware Partner Connect program. Looking for a VMware Partner like Kyndryl? Find one using our Partner Locator. Then learn how VMware Principal Partners can help drive your business success.