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VMware Explore4 min read

2022 Customer Achievement Awards: 7 Heroes and Innovators

VMware Staff

We’re proud to present seven companies with our 2022 Customer Achievement Awards at VMware Explore. This year, our awards committee looked at nominees in two categories: heroes and innovators.

Heroes take the lead on new technologies and act for the greater good, even in the face of challenging circumstances. They include:

  1. Garmin, Customer Experiences Hero
  2. Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education, Hero for Good
  3. Albertsons, Weathering the Change Hero

Innovators use the VMware ecosystem and technology to give customers and employees greater value and benefits. They include:

  • Peel Regional Police, Anywhere Workspace Innovator
  • LIQ, Security Transformation Innovator
  • S&P Global, Cloud Transformation Innovator
  • CVS Health, Modern Application Innovator
2022 VMware Customer Achievement Awards Winners

Read their stories below.

Garmin, Customer Experiences Hero

Garmin is well known for GPS navigation and wearable technology. Like the customers they serve, Garmin believes “every day is an opportunity to innovate and a chance to beat yesterday.” To deliver the best customer experiences, this hero adopted the VMware Tanzu Application Platform.

With this transformative solution, toilsome tasks are automated away, and developers focus more on creating business value. Most importantly, software is released into production daily (often multiple times per day) instead of monthly.

We wanted to be able to move at the speed the business was asking for. And we needed to move from a 60-day deployment cycle in some cases to a 16-minute deployment cycle. That was our big business driver; we wanted that agility.

Jonathan Regher, Senior Software Engineer, Garmin

Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education, Hero for Good

Academic achievements often depend on the results of standardized tests, which can be biased and narrow-minded. Schools that receive low scores may face reduced funding or even closure. To change this, Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA) developed a framework for a more comprehensive, accurate and equitable view of student and school performance.

With VMware Tanzu Labs, this hero built a user-friendly dashboard that visualizes the data and makes it actionable for partners. This easily accessible information better positions schools to receive the resources necessary to set up students for academic success.

It’s really been amazing to see the roles technology, software and data play in public education. Across public education in general, software is trying to solve problems that are major and very new in some cases regarding how students are learning material.

Peter Piazza, Project Director, MCIEA

Albertsons, Weathering the Change Hero

Albertsons weathered changing shopping habits during and after a pandemic by scaling their e-commerce offerings. The U.S. grocer bet early on VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS) to modernize and quickly pivot.

The company scaled workloads, accelerated the software path to production and transformed the overall developer experience. The result: more engaged customers and stellar revenue growth. 

It’s all about how we look into all these technology stacks and how we can migrate and modernize these legacy systems and leverage the benefits out of the cloud or cloud technologies … how we can modernize our stack and then also improve the customer experience, our store associates’ experience, and just help our customers at the end of the day.

Gaurav Jain, Senior Manager of Container Platform, Albertsons

Peel Regional Police, Anywhere Workspace Innovator

As policing changes, modern police services must be more transparent, accountable and grounded in the communities they serve. So the Peel Regional Police (PRP) in Ontario, Canada decided to equip officers with iPhones and body-worn cameras.

With VMware Workspace ONE, PRP rolled out 2,000 iPhones to officers in less than eight weeks. In addition to in-car computers and police radios, officers now have secure smartphones in their hands when they are on bike or on foot. The body camera system, managed through Workspace ONE, improves accountability and aids in the gathering of digital evidence. Officers of this innovative police force are more present and engaged with the community, continuing to shift public perceptions.

The smartphone is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the applications that can revolutionize policing. We can use the phones as a platform and officers can then find the applications they need, quickly and conveniently. If you can improve the day-in-the-life of a working officer, you can deliver a faster time to value.

Tony Ventura, Director of IT Services, Peel Regional Police

LIQ, Security Transformation Innovator

As a customer experience company, LIQ is more than familiar with the value of data and the importance of privacy. The Brazilian company must meet strict security and compliance requirements at every step of the customer journey — while fending off increasing ransomware attacks.

Using VMware Carbon Black, LIQ continually monitors, identifies and neutralizes emerging threats and suspicious behavior. In just one month, Carbon Black issued thousands of alerts, blocked more than 28,000 known instances of malware and identified 420 critical endpoint vulnerabilities. LIQ continues to innovate its approach to simple, scalable and flexible networking and security with VMware solutions.

We have already achieved surprising results, such as a 94% drop in the volume of incidents of applications hosted in the cloud, total infrastructure cost 60% lower than two years ago and a 92% reduction in the amount spent with historical data storage.

Nicolas Ramirez, Director of Technology and Innovation, LIQ

S&P Global, Cloud Transformation Innovator

Governments and businesses rely on S&P Global’s business intelligence to make important, well-informed decisions. Fast and efficient access to accurate, reliable data is critical to the business.

This innovator transformed their data processing and storage with a multi-cloud solution from VMware. With the flexibility of the cloud, S&P Global saves millions on data center capital and operating expenditures and improves governance over its environment.

Our IT team was asked to complete a planned five-year cloud migration in just 14 months. With our move to VMware Cloud on AWS, we estimate savings in the range of $20 million dollars. Using HCX, we seamlessly re-platformed 150 business critical apps to VMware Cloud on AWS with no business disruption in just eight months.

Robert Roday; Associate Director of Infrastructure, EU, and Cloud; S&P Global

CVS Health, Cloud Native Innovator

CVS Health wants to help make healthcare accessible and affordable. Apps are one way they help people conveniently navigate the U.S. healthcare system — and their personal healthcare.

To give their developers an edge, the U.S. healthcare leader shifted to a cloud-first model and adopted a cloud-native application platform. Time to deploy apps shortened from weeks to hours. Developers new to Kubernetes have a minimal learning curve. And teams work closely together, and with other lines of business, to create solutions to their collective business goals.

The dev experience is our north star. The developer is number one.

Roshan Navagamuwa, Chief Information Officer, CVS Corporate

We thank all these heroes and innovators for their bold industry leadership and innovation! For more breaking technology news, visit the VMware Explore 2022 Media Kit now and follow #VMwareExplore on social media.