Cloud Management Superstar Anexinet On 'Cloud Hype' Versus Saving Customers Money With VMware NSX

Digital transformation specialist Anexinet is winning more deals and saving customers money on cloud expenses by leveraging VMware NSX.

Anexinet, a Blue Bell, Pa.-based solution provider who is an Amazon Web Services Advanced Consulting Partner and also a top VMware partner, designs, builds and manages digital platforms around enterprise modernization. The company, ranked No. 209 on CRN's Solution Provider 500 list, has digitally transformed multinational manufacturer W.L. Gore & Associates by implementing VMware NSX technology.

"They wanted to implement a cloud-first strategy," said Dan Smith, vice president of sales at Anexinet, in an interview with CRN at Dell Technologies World 2018. "They had a lot of Oracle databases and traditional applications that didn't move well. The network was not secure as far as any software-defined anything. It was your traditional legacy applications, switching, firewalls as well as some intrusion detection appliances."

[Related: Five Things You Need To Know About VMware's New NSX-Based Virtual Cloud Network]

With NSX, Anexinet enabled portability to modernize all of the customer's applications while providing workload management around where each application should be placed to make it the most efficient and cost-effective. Anexinet created a new hybrid environment for W.L. Gore & Associates that leverages both on-premises software-defined technology from Dell Technologies and public cloud.

"Cloud is obviously the hype -- the executives are all talking about it -- but does it actually make sense to put applications, or all applications, into the cloud?" Smith said.

Anexinet started with an assessment of the customer's environment, followed by an evaluation of all the applications. "Then we evaluate, 'Should it be a hyper-converged play? Should it be some type of hybrid solution? Or should it be going into the cloud?'" said Smith. "Those are the solutions we're working with technology providers like VMware to bring to our customers on a daily basis."

Anexinet also provides tools, insights and real-time analytics around monitoring and managing customer cloud infrastructure budgets.