On January 29th, we were able to meet our liaisons at the beautiful VMWare campus.
After introductions, coffee, and gelato we got down to business. Karthik and Vivian, our liaisons, along with a more technical employee named Amit, explained that they had envisioned two main project ideas for our class.
The first idea was a product that would intelligently identify the source of an IT infrastructure failure. Amit explained that there were many components to these large scale IT deployments, and at any given time one or more might fail, causing disruptions of service for users and headaches for IT admins. The software product would essentially be an API-of-APIs that upon request would give predictions as to which component of the infrastructure was failing. All the VMWare employees avidly expressed that this product would be extremely valuable to the company. Unfortunately, this didn't align with our expectations or hopes for our project that we brainstormed the night before at all.
The second idea was essentially a reporting tool for IT Admins and executives such as the CTO or CIO who wanted information regarding their IT infrastructure. Karthik explained that when VMWare's customers asked for this sort of information a long, time-consuming, and expensive process would have to occur. Karthik explained that in this scenario he would have to ask another employee to retrieve and compile the requested data, who might have to ask other employees, who might have to ask other employees. Basically, the pipeline for this sort of request was long, convoluted, and not efficient. In the current ecosystem, customers have to wait as long as 3 months to receive reports regarding their data. This was one of the most remarkable and important facts we learned that day, and helped us choose to pursue this project. The "3 month" figure made it obvious to us that there was a need for a better solution, but this project direction also more closely aligned with our expectations and goal and allowed for much more flexibility in the way of implementation. We immediately expressed interest in this project.
“In the current ecosystem, customers have to wait as long as 3 months to receive reports regarding their data.”
To give them an idea of what direction we wanted to take the project, we let them know a brief synopsis of our thoughts from the night before. Karthik let us know that despite the typically slow-moving and unsexy nature of enterprise software he thought our ideas were both extremely valuable and unique. With that, we ended the meeting optimistic of our future and partnership with VMWare.