TigoUne Leverages the VMware Cloud Provider Platform to Grow Market Share & Differentiate Services

This post originally appeared on Nebulae Magazine by Fernando Escobar.

“VMware’s vCloud Director is a secure and stable platform that supports the growth of our Cloud business by monetizing every single resource in the environment – networking, storage and compute.” – Jhon Gomez, Director Cloud & Data Center, TigoUne

Key Challenges

Provide a cloud service to support customer’s business-critical applications
Implement new use cases that were previously difficult to integrate
Scale as needed to meet evolving needs
Speed customer on-boarding and provisioning
Enable secure multi-tenancy

VMware Solution

VMware® vCloud Director™ (VCD)
VMware® vCloud Availability for vCloud Director™ (vCAV)
VMware® NSX®
VMware® vRealize Operations™ (vROPS)
VMware® vRealize Log Insight™ (vRLI)
VMware® Identity Manager™ (vIDM)
VMware® vRealize Business for Cloud™ (vRBC)
VMware® vRealize Orchestrator™
VMware® vCloud API™
VMware® vSphere vCenter™
VMware® vSphere ESXi™

Business Benefits

Reduces CapEx by eliminating development of custom portal
Decreases OpEx by reducing administrative overhead
Improves SLAs
Faster time to market for new service offerings
Meets customer self-service and security needs
Speeds customer on-boarding and business growth
Ensures workload security and automated resource control

TigoUne Takes Advantage of Opportunities for New Business Growth and Improved Operations with vCloud Director

TigoUne is a Service Provider with a go-to-market strategy of integrating Telecommunications, Internet, Mobility, IoT, Cloud, Datacenter, Security, Voice and Collaboration services . Founded in 2006, TigoUne is one of the largest telecommunications companies in Colombia, and its parent company has a local presence in multiple countries in Latin America , North America , Spain and African markets.

TIGO’s presence and leadership in Central America, Colombia, Bolivia and Paraguay, and network integration in CLOUD TIGO, allow the company to offer differentiated service by incorporating multi-country solutions supported by its data centers in regions around the world. All TIGO data centers are able to deliver VMware services in support of thousands of petabytes of secure and reliable data.

“As a long time VMware partner, we always expect a high level of reliability and serviceability from the platform,” explains Jhon Gomez, Director Cloud & Data Center. “vCloud Director integration with other VMware solutions brings a layer of monetization that is key to our business.”

The Challenge

TigoUne’s customers are primarily looking for cloud services that can support legacy applications in a hybrid environment, as well as the ability to protect workloads by leveraging Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service. As new customer use cases and needs emerge, TigoUne wanted to offer services valued by its enterprise, government and SMB customers, however integration of new services was difficult. As a result, TigoUne would not be able to take advantage of new revenue-driving opportunities. In addition, TigoUne wanted to make sure that its ability to differentiate by providing cloud services for all the regions it serves while providing the highest levels of agility and security while supporting multi-tenancy. Customers were demanding isolation and compliance for their hosted cloud environments.

“Deploying new services to improve our current offerings and go-to-market capabilities is critical,” explains Gomez. “We need to improve our agility and security while also ensuring speed of implementation.”

The Solution

TigoUne selected vCloud Director as its Cloud Management Platform, enabling the deployment of isolated and secure environments for tenants. The solution allows TigoUne to provision mission critical workloads that are relevant to a customer’s core business, as well as virtual machines that are part of the customer’s environment.

“vCloud Director allows us to create the right products and efficiently service our customer,” says Gomez. “The evolution of VMware service provider solutions enables us to quickly and easily implementing new use cases, and that gives us the ability to add value for our customers while creating new revenue opportunities.”

Based upon the vCloud Director platform, TigoUne has been able to design new service offerings to meet customer needs with the capabilities to integrate existing Cloud services to other layers, including applications, networking, storage, backup and recovery, virtual desktops, cyber security, IoT, big data and Analytics. All of these services are being offered under the same cloud environment in private, hybrid and public operational models. This enables TigoUne to meet the demanding integration, management and operation needs of corporate customers.

Security was a critical factor when deciding for the new CMP solution. While the cloud is specifically targeted to enterprise customers, small businesses that can benefit from the advanced services. In the past, they relied on vCloud Network and Security components, and this security capability is being migrated onto VMware NSX. Tenants gain visibility as well as the ability to handle Day 2 operations in the security field on their own by utilizing the self-service portal on top of vCloud Director 8.20 and NSX. TigoUne has been able to implement Role Based Access Control (RBAC) at a very granular level per tenant by applying permissions to each resource pool in the IaaS offering.

“We selected VMware because its offering is so robust, agile, flexible and mature, and because VMware is the platform of choice for our enterprise customers, we are confident about this solution will meet the service levels corporate customers need,” explains Gomez. “VMware is instrumental to our Cloud strategy. In addition to the centralized proactive monitoring, capacity planning, orchestration and automation tools available for the vCloud Director framework, it also facilitates administration of our Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) platform.”

Business Results and Benefits

TigoUne has realized benefits in several areas, including a reduction in CapEx and OpEx, improved SLAs, and faster time to market for new offerings.

The vCloud Director portal eliminated the need to invest in developing a custom portal, saving money as well as the time and resources that would have been dedicated to development efforts. That allowed TigoUne to focus resources on where it has the largest impact – solving customer’s challenges.

vCloud Director has also provided operational advantages for TigoUne by reducing administration overhead while allowing the ability to scale up as needed without sacrificing a secure multi-tenant, elastic environment. At the same time, the vCloud Director platform is so stable that requires a smaller operations team and results in fewer service interruptions, which improves operations while contributing to customer satisfaction.

The delivery and innovation of new services has been significantly improved since deploying vCloud Director. Before vCloud Director, TigoUne provided dedicated hosting whenever individual, per-tenant resource pools and administration consoles (vCenters) were required. In addition to the administration demands, this also added costs. With vCloud Director, cloud has become the primary offering.

“Time-to-market has been dramatically affected in a positive way by standardizing our offerings under vCD,” says Gomez. “We have seen better SLA experience by using vCloud Director, and we also have identified initiatives to improve our internal and external SLAs even more by deploying Orchestration, Automation and DevOps initiatives in the future, knowing VCD is capable of supporting these accelerators.”

Today TigoUne also uses the built-in charge back and metering tools in vCloud Director to measure, analyze, and report on utilization and costs associated with its VMware-based cloud infrastructure. The cost transparency enabled by vCenter Chargeback Manager (being migrated to vRealize Business for Cloud vRBC) allows TigoUne to confirm and adjust financial models based on resource consumption.

Looking Ahead

“The big difference between vCloud Director and other alternatives is the networking and security framework,” says Gomez. “It enables us to administer the platform in an agile, efficient and practical way without having to use and interact with perimeter equipment to deliver a complete and secure solution for our customers.”

TigoUne is planning to adopt vCloud Director 9.0 in the near future and to introduce the multi-site and Federation of vCloud Directors functionality by deploying vCloud Director 9.0 and vCloud Availability 2.0 locally and in all TIGO Datacenters in the region. This integration will create a single, unique cloud offering for both IaaS and DRaaS. Additionally, TigoUne is planning to use the upcoming hybrid cloud extensions provided by vCloud Director 9.0 to ease interaction with the existing on-premises VMware-powered customer data centers, which will extend TigoUne offerings to the hybrid cloud.

The Orchestration, Automation and DevOps capabilities of vCloud Director 9.0 create new opportunities for TigoUne, and it will be deploying these tools along with its vCloud Director 9.0 upgrade.

“vCloud Director is one of the fundamental pillars enabling new business and possibilities for TigoUne,” concludes Gomez. ““It’s a secure and stable platform that supports the growth of our Cloud business by monetizing every single resource in the environment – networking, storage and compute.”