Expedient Finds New Customers with VMware NSX Enterprise

Capturing customers outside of a company’s primary market takes creative thinking, and often new products. For VMware cloud provider partner Expedient, when they wanted to attract first-time customers to a new “push-button” Disaster Recovery (DR) service they chose the only solution capable of delivering – VMware’s NSX Enterprise network virtualization platform.
 

Today, Expedient is helping its more than 1,600 customers support 4,000+ VMs spread across eleven data centers. To better understand Expedient’s success with VMware’s NSX platform, we examine a recent whitepaper detailing the challenge Expedient faced when offering its DR service to new customers, and the eventual solution that launched a 10x growth in average deal size.

DR Recovery at the Push of a Button

Shortly after Expedient launched its disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) offering for existing customers, they made the decision to expand the service beyond customers within Expedient data centers. As Jon Rosenson, Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, explains:

“We were offering disaster recovery services, but it was only inside of our data center. We knew that there are many customers still relying on their own data centers, whether that’s due to security and compliance concerns of location requirements due to latency. We wanted to ensure we could work with those customers and give them the same functionality we were giving customers inside our data centers.”

Of course, delivering a robust DRaaS solution to new customers that meet Ronsenson’s requirements was a unique IT challenge. The replication of enterprise workloads requires a solution capable of meeting specific security, automation, and service needs, while having the ability to quickly scale and grow with the company. It was clear Expedient needed a solution more capable than what they had in-house.

Layer 2 VPN and Egress Optimization Save the Day

IT leaders at Expedient choose the NSX Enterprise virtualization platform because if offered two very specific features: Layer 2 VPN and Egress Optimization. Together, these two features laid the ground work for the construction of a robust multi-cloud distributed disaster recovery solution.

In the whitepaper, Rosenson details the impact of NSX:

“When there is a threat of disaster, or one occurs, organizations need to think about relocating people, protecting physical assets, and even ensuring people’s families are safe. With NSX, our DRaaS can relieve one area of concern with the push of a button, ensuring fail over of sites and giving customers the time and resources they need to focus on other challenges.”

The adoption of NSX propelled Expedient’s DRaaS service to new highs. Today, Expedient’s public/private cloud DR service accounts for 35% of its new sales. Current Expedient customers are able to complete a full recovery process of about 50 VMs in less than 15 minutes compared to the 4 hours once required.

The new NSX Enterprise-enabled DRaaS solution has dramatically grown Expedients existing pipeline of customers and has sparked new conversations with existing customers opening the doors to future opportunities.

For more information about Expedient’s adoption of NSX, read the full whitepaper here.
 
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