Susan Scheer Aoki, VP/GM Skyline Proactive Intelligence SaaS, VMware explains that since the launch of VMWare Skyline two years back, it has gained considerable momentum to become the company’s most influential cloud service.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and Dell CEO Michael Dell first introduced VMware Skyline on stage at VMworld 2017. Since launching Skyline in early 2018, it has become one of VMware’s largest cloud services, achieved significant business milestones, and has seen exceptional growth across its global customer base. During the pandemic, Skyline has enabled thousands of customers and partners with proactive, prescriptive and predictive recommendations to improve environment stability, reliability, security and overall performance.
Notable VMware Skyline milestones achieved include:
- New customers using VMware Skyline grew over 500% in two years
- Over 120% more issues were proactively identified in 2020 vs. 2019
- Issues proactively remedied at the object level grew over 140% YoY
- In 2020, more than 90,000 customer hours saved uploading logs to support
Technology Innovation
Under Pat Gelsinger’s “Innovate Everything” mantra, VMware is developing advanced technologies that prevent problems from happening by leveraging the best in data analytics, AI and ML. If a problem cannot be prevented, customers can self-service troubleshoot or quickly connect and root cause with VMware Support.
At VMworld 2020, VMware announced a new integration with Skyline and VMware vRealize Operations Cloud. This unique integration enables customers with an integrated management and support experience that provides proactive intelligence, contextual troubleshooting, automated remediations and faster support time to resolution. By transitioning teams from a reactive, firefighting mode to a proactive, self-driving model, Skyline frees up customers’ time to focus on more strategic business initiatives and innovation.
Skyline is available to customers with VMware Production Support, Premier Support, Success 360 and vRealize Cloud Universal at no added cost and can be quickly enabled in less than 30 minutes. Skyline proactively supports VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN, VMware NSX, VMware vRealize Operations and VMware Horizon. Learn more about VMware Skyline.
Customer Success
Rackspace Technology, the global, multi-cloud solutions expert, was the first strategic partner to deploy Skyline across their VMware-powered cloud services and internal IT. Rackspace is using Skyline to proactively identify emerging issues they were unaware of and recommend corrective actions, such as upgrades needed to prevent Spectre Meltdown vulnerabilities, storage pathing and misconfigured hypervisors.
According to Richard Harris, virtualization engineer at Rackspace, “We have seen a positive direct impact from using Skyline. We went from reacting to unseen issues that could negatively impact our customers, to being able to get ahead of and address potential problems that could have caused unplanned downtime. The result is that we are able to deliver a better overall customer experience, reduce support calls and our customers can continue business as usual.”
SAP, the market leader in enterprise application software, is using Skyline across multiple SAP organizations to identify numerous potential issues, including security vulnerabilities and configuration issues, and to guide them through remediation. SAP is one of Skyline’s largest deployments, with thousands of hosts connected to Skyline and multiple organizations leveraging the insights around the globe. “Skyline frees time for us to devote to more strategic, higher-value projects that support our business initiatives,” said Thomas Thimm, IT technical principal consultant at SAP.
Sky Group, Europe’s leading direct-to-consumer media and entertainment company, was the first European customer to use Skyline, beginning in 2018. They are using Skyline to alert them to potential risks across their production environment, which is built on vSphere, vSAN and NSX. Sky, along with many Skyline customers, has provided valuable feedback that VMware uses to enhance Skyline and expand its functionality. Skyline has helped Sky deploy end user environments quickly to their customers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We use Skyline to sanity check our deployments before we push them live to our end customers. It helps make sure that the infrastructure is current, secure and configured properly before we put it into production.” said James Cruickshank, solutions architect at Sky Group.
