For a shipping company like FedEx Corp., which deals with delivering packages across the globe every day of the year, it’s crucial that its technology be on-point. Packages that go astray due to problems on the information technology side can mean a loss of business and substantial amounts of money.

FedEx Services, the IT and marketing arm for FedEx, is an operating area that “absolutely, positively” has to have its technology ducks in a row, according to Vijay Banga (pictured, right), technical fellow at FedEx Services. And after much trial and error, FedEx Services found that VMware Inc.’s vSAN hyper-converged infrastructure software answered its specific needs.

“We wanted to … get off our fabric that we had with our storage,” Banga said. “We wanted to try and use an environment with the converged infrastructure.”

Banga, along with  David Boone (pictured, left), staff solutions architect at VMware Inc., spoke with Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The discussed how vSAN is working for FedEx Services, as well as why collaboration is so important for both FedEx and VMware. (* Disclosure below.)

Collaboration remains key to mutual success

Boone’s role at VMware is to help large enterprise and strategic customers as they go through the proof of concept process, particularly with vSAN.

“I’ve worked with Vijay through the entire process of evaluating vSAN at FedEx and working through any issues that we encountered, making sure that it’s going to meet their demands when we go into production,” Boone explained.

It’s important to be collaborative and discuss all issues and where things may not fit with the FedEx process, what can be done to overcome or work around issues, and feed that back into product management, according to Boone. That way, VMware can make sure that it is continuing to evolve its products to meet the needs of enterprise customers.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference.  (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored coverage of VMworld, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE