The joint venture Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition between VMware, Cisco, and EMC is showing some traction.

Yesterday,  Cisco announced today that NBN Co, the company set up by the federal government to design, build and operate Australia’s wholesale-only, high speed broadband network, has selected Cisco to lead the implementation of its data centre infrastructure.  The solution will be deployed by Cisco and will be built upon Vblock^TM technology.

Ironically, SiliconANGLE was at the VCE SAP Center of Excellence lab in Santa Clara for a in-depth customer and technology briefing.  I was impressed with how fast this VCE trend is moving.

Most joint ventures in technology are mainly marketing vehicles for the big guys to flex their muscle that they are innovative.  However, VCE and SAP are really delivering real proof points.  We have a few videos and pictures of the event and they show that customers are designing in VCE now, and quickly putting deployment test use cases in motion.

We have covered extensively the new world of virtualization at EMC World, SAP Sapphire, VMworld, Oracle Openworld, Hadoop World, and over 100 interviews with industry experts. Many videos on SiliconANGLE.tv with content from SiliconANGLE.com community, and deep research from Wikibon.org.

VMware is the product of choice for enterprise virtualization in the enterprise and there is a pressing need for an integrated stack or solution for the converged infrastructure. This is the premise of VCE.

Like any new technology products and platforms VCE is taking a classic trajectory in it’s phases of rollout.

Phase 1: Design in – companies design in the solutions to their infrastructures.

Phase 2: Deployment and value extraction – in market rollouts that provide “specific value” to the enterprise.

Phase 3: validation and proof points – mainstream adoption.

VCE is growing fast but not talked about in the mainstream press because it’s in the design in phase for “at scale” enterprises.

Videos from SAP Center of Excellence Lab in Santa Clara

SAP VP of Infrastructure Richard Probst talks about the challenges that customers face.

Customer Reactions to VCE – Callaway Golf

I sat down with Callaway Golf senior manager of their global ERP systems, Chinh Van to talk about the opportunity of the cloud and changes in IT.

With the VCE customer win, it highlights the value of VCE.  With VCE ,the selected Vblock infrastructure package is the industry’s first completely integrated information technology offering that combines best-in-class virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security and management technologies with the unrivaled industry expertise of Cisco, EMC and VMware.  As a result of this simpler, pre-integrated and pre-tested IT infrastructure, NBN Co-staff can focus on innovation, virtualizing applications and delivering services instead of configuring and tuning separate components.

What All This Means

The industry is taking two different angles on bringing solutions to table. One approach is open with integrated stacks and the other approach is a proprietary stack by one vendor.

Integrated stacks can be defined in many ways, and the benefits derived will be a function of the definition. The range of integration can between two extremes:

Integration of IT components by (say) a systems integrator, and delivering the system to be maintained as business as usual.

Delivery of a standard integrated stack of hardware, OS, application and management that has been pre-tested for performance and availability, and is delivered and maintained as a single bill of material (BOM). This BOM can be maintained by a single group within the organization.

A very important benefit of the integrated stack is the work that can be done to pre-test and qualify the stack for different environments, reducing the risk that projects are over-configured, or that under-configured projects that should have needed more hardware were approved in error. This risk reduction is not included in this analysis but is very significant.

Integrated stacks can provide a significant reduction in IT costs over the life of a project. The maximum benefit comes from stacks like the VCE VDI solution, where all the component parts are included and maintained as a single BOM. IT executives will need to ensure that the organization can provide a single department within IT or the line of business that will be responsible for the total IT support for these savings to be realized.

According to Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman, “EMC and Cisco put a stake in the ground when they created the fully integrated Vblock solution. HP and IBM have been reloading their own stacks with acquisitions in storage (3PAR, Storwize) and networking (3COM, BNT). Last week, NetApp launched their latest response to the stack wars by partnered with Cisco and VMware to deliver FlexPods. The growing modularization of the datacenter calls for converged infrastructure which will simplify environments and hasten adoption of virtual environments.