In their ongoing coverage of VMworld 2013, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman speak with Chris Greer, Chief Engineer of Architecture for FedEx. The three discuss the IT savvy and innovation it takes to make the effortlessness of international, same-day and guaranteed deliveries feel so effortless for corporations and SMBs.

Speaking of one of their major clients, Greer quips, “Regardless of what Amazon says, there’s no such thing as ‘free shipping’.” There are indeed several costs and trade-offs involved in working with various online retailers, trucking companies and personnel to provide customers “one seamless experience” explains Greer.

In a business in which, cost, agility and speed seem so equally important, Vellante asks, “Can you be the best at all three of those?” Greer says the one quality FedEx cannot compromise is reliability. Moreover, the company aims to “deliver that same experience in IT that we do to our customers.”

Miniman inquires about Greer’s take on cloud and software defined data centers. Greer says that virtualization has really changed the data center overall as it “lets IT get out of the way of the business.”

FedEX has a large private cloud internally and is considering a hybrid cloud. Citing specifics, Greer shares, “As far as the organization, we’ve just grossed around 22,000 virtual machines. So, we’ve got about 7,000 to 8,000 people in IT. It’s a global problem and a challenge to co-ordinate that all together. We keep pushing the envelope to see what we can virtualize.”

FedEx is trying to virtualize as much as they can and it has made a substantive impact on how the company runs its data center. Greer says FedEx “bought more storage due to virtualization,” which “puts more pressure on a network to move faster.”

Vellante asks about the skill-sets necessary for software based storage in the virtualized office. Greer thinks light workloads are best in those settings. He notes, “The VSA are virtualized. They had a couple physical services, still mostly file print services.”

On another note, Greer shares that an important concern for FedEx is efficiency. He says, “Power consumption is something we look at very heavily. We’ve seen a large reduction in power usage.”

Watch the interview in its entirety below: