Deloitte Bolsters Portfolio With VMware-Based Private Cloud Solution

Deloitte rolled out a private cloud solution aimed at streamlining enterprise customers' moves to the private cloud, something it said will set it apart from solution provider competitors.

Deloitte's Cloud ServiceFabric solution is preconfigured, ready to use, and can be deployed in as little as six weeks using the VMware vCloud Suite, Rick Clark, a director in Deloitte's technology practice, said. As part of the customizable package, Deloitte offers Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service, operational capabilities, automation, pre-integration and more. The "cloud in a box" solution also integrates four service management processes: request, change, event and capacity.

The solution will be weaved through all of Deloitte's consulting offerings and act as a foundation for the rest of the New York-based company's cloud and Software-as-a-Service offerings, Clark said. The goal of the solution is to help clients integrate their existing environments with a new private cloud system and services.

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"You’ve got a solution base you can build out all these capacities on. We're looking at this as a base-enabler for all of our future services," Clark said. "We're trying to integrate it into everything we do."

Clark called the solution a "bubble world," because it reduces implementation time and operational impacts on enterprise customers who are looking to "jump-start" their move from what he called "old world" legacy systems to the "new world" of the cloud. Customers only have to provide software licenses and the hardware to establish a footprint.

"We don't believe that you can deliver just a technology and the client will be happy with it. The client's ... going to stick [the technology] in their existing enterprise. The problem with that is existing IT is fragile; it has a lot of moving parts. If you try to stick a private cloud into existing infrastructure, you're going to damage stuff," Clark said.

ServiceFabric uses the VMware VCloud Suite and operates on vSphere-based private clouds.

"As organizations continue to realize the benefits of a software-defined data center architecture, we are pleased to work closely with Deloitte to empower a diverse set of customers to rapidly deploy and scale a dynamic private cloud solution," Dan Smoot, senior vice president of Global Customer Operations at Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware, said in a statement. "Cloud ServiceFabric with VMware vCloud Suite will offer a powerful and robust private cloud solution to enable organizations to realize greater agility, cost savings and flexibility."

Deloitte already has approximately a dozen clients as early adopters, with two or three dozen in talks to also adopt the solution. Clark said that the solution appeals to what he called "fast followers" of the cloud, not the early adopters but those following closely behind as more solutions develop. In particular, Clark said Deloitte is seeing demand in health care, life sciences, financial services and the public sector.

In particular, ServiceFabric will help Deloitte push forward its Software-as-a-Service and enterprise cloud apps package solution CloudMix by providing a private cloud foundation, in what Clark called a "layered approach." Having that package will allow Deloitte to differentiate itself from its competitors in the cloud market, he said.

"Those are the things that start to differentiate our system. When I look at the competition out there, most of them offer a base system, a lot of them are providing cloud but it's 'cloud washing.' It's really, 'I've got virtualization up and running, I might have managed virtualization up and running, but do I have the automation, self-service, self-healing, the tenets of the [National Institute of Standards and Technology]? We hit all of those. I think that's a sure measure of private cloud that most of [our clients] want but don't understand."

PUBLISHED MAY 6, 2014