vmware cloud on dell
Bringing the cloud operating model to the on-premises datacenter
EFFICIENCY
4x faster
BUSINESS IMPACT
23%
STRATEGY
Scale
Enterprise customers required on-premises hardware for compliance, but traditional procurement was a fragmented, months-long cumbersome process of vendor negotiations and manual deployment.
Partnering with product and engineering, I designed a self-service portal empowering IT admins to order and provision a fully managed physical infrastructure natively through the VMware Cloud console.
24 Sessions • 31 Customers • 56 Participants
Outlining the flow
I started putting together some wireframes to illustrate what the UI could look like based on the blueprint we put together. This helped in ensuring we were aligned with the end-to-end workflow and allowed us to iterate faster.
E-commerce for datacenter
I designed a streamlined step-by-step ordering flow by abstracting the complexity of physical hardware procurement. Admins can select capacity, specify power drops, networking, and ship physical racks without ever leaving the digital console.
Automating the Deployment
Once the hardware is physically plugged in on-site, the software takes over. I designed a transparent provisioning experience that tracks the automated bootstrapping of the SDDC, completely eliminating the need for manual IT deployment.
Day-2 Operations
Managing on-premises hardware is historically an operational burden. I designed a centralized fleet view surfacing real-time rack health and capacity alerts, shifting the lifecycle management entirely onto the service.
Although the first cut of the released service was minimal, I explored ideas to showcase what it would look like to manage several such deployments for a customer across multiple locations. These were showcased at VMware's annual conference in 2019 at the keynote session by VMware's CEO at the time, Pat Gelsinger, and VMware's CTO, Ray O'Farrell.
Scaling the strategy: AWS Outposts
The self-service patterns established for VMC on Dell proved highly scalable. To adapt this architecture for VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, I facilitated a cross-functional virtual workshop, aligning Product and Engineering stakeholders around a unified end-to-end service blueprint. This effort successfully established a single design standard for how VMware handles all physical 'Cloud to Edge' hardware services.
Takeaways
Service Blueprinting over UI: The success of this product hinged on mapping the human and logistical journey much before drawing the digital interface.
Abstracting Complexity: True enterprise design is hiding massive physical network topology behind a simple, familiar cloud-native UI.