Read this article about VMware, one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Technology Enabled Process Automation, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

Global Services (GS) organization’s mission is to accelerate VMware customer success and ensure a best-in-class pre and post-sales experiences for customers and partners. VMware’s portfolio of progressive, responsive and pre-emptive services accelerates customer realization of business value beyond their expectations and across the technology portfolio, creating customers for life. VMware’s customer support model has been more of “Reactive Support” model which was triggered by a customer call/email reporting the issue and engaging a Technical Support Engineer (TSE) to connect with the customer and fix the issue. A Reactive Support model addresses issues after the customer experience them and takes time to resolve. Some recent data shows that time to close a case takes on average 13.5 days. Aligning with GS mission to ensure best-in-class support for our customers and partners, VMware had a business opportunity to explore ways to provide a more “Proactive Support” model to its customers where VMware can identify potential problems before they occur and enable TSE’s for more efficient resolution of issues when they occur.

In 2017, through a survey of selected customers (Inner Circle), VMware sensed and received a positive respond to a strategy for a software solution to collect product health information in customer environment to enable early detection of potential issues and their resolutions. This gave birth to VMware SkylineTM software solution. The rationale behind the solution approach was if VMware has a better understanding of the customer environment and usage,

• It can proactively provide guidance to avoid potential problems before they occur,
• It would help uncover an undiscovered bug or other anomaly that needs attention
• It can provide real time analytics that would reduce time to resolution of issues with minimal impact to customer operations
  

The VMware SkylineTM Collector is a virtual appliance (a pre-configured virtual machine) that gathers and aggregates product usage information such as configuration, feature, and performance data while listening for changes and events within the customer's environment. This information is encrypted and then sent to VMware for analysis. The data privacy and security of the data is ensured by VMware. After the analysis is complete, customers can view their proactive findings and recommendations in VMware SkylineTM Advisor. This information is shared with the VMware TSE’s which enables more informed conversations with the customer and improve issue resolution time performance. The TSEs use this data to resolve service requests and generate proactive operational and health assessment reports and recommendations to the customers.

The solution prototype was built and deployed with 4 customers who volunteered to test and improve the solution. The customers were from healthcare, service and technology domain who tested the protype version focused on 4 areas – Operational support service, Health assessment service, design assignment services, software upgrade planning service. Post this prototype validation the product was made available for other VMware customers, as of November 2018, 648 customers chose to adopt VMware SkylineTM with more than 5000 service requests (SRs) were processed through this solution and resulted in case closure within ~10 days.