A New Platform is needed:
Our Goal is Efficiency, Agility and Control.

1. Cutting costs for the organization.
2. Becoming flexible within the infrastructure.
3. Maintaining control so that we can make things run efficiently as possible.

The New Platform is moving away from Traditional IT to an ITaaS Model. This new model helps to reach the three goals. Moving away from the slow response to business needs decreasing the time it takes to deploy new environments and servers.

In order to facilitate this new model you still need to maintain change management  and the three goals while also putting automation into place. Enter the Software Defined Datacenter. 

Building out new VMs use to take hours now you can deploy them in minutes with templates.  The same is true with networking and storage with storage and network based management. 

Where does automation come into play? Service Catalogs and Service Blueprints. 

Monitoring comes in with tools like the vRealize Suite.

• Intelligent Health Monitoring
  
• Proactive Capacity Optimization
  
• Configuration and Compliance Management 

We need to move away from knowing and managing every aspect to being the broker to all the services that offer the flexibility we need letting Amazon maintain Amazon and so on.

Users do not care where the data resides just as long as they can access it and access it on what they want to access it on.

Understanding the customer needs and embracing and partnering with the competition.

Take a Self assessment:

• Where do I spend my time today!
  
• What repetitions are there?
  
• Where is the business hurting the most?
  
• Are users going behind my back?
  
• Do I know my customers?
  

Act on assessment and make some changes. This will help us move into IT As A Service.

Updated the group on what was presented to everyone at VMWorld 2014.

• VVOLS - No more LUNS.
• vSphere 6 - Content Library added.
• NSX - Cloning a network.
• Storage - Virtual Volumes, Storage Policy Based Management and VSAN.
• vCloud Air - What use to be Hybrid Cloud.
• vRealize - Now general availability.