CDI — Accelerated, award-winning digital transformation with VMware Technologies

Digitally transforming a business is never a “one size fits all” strategy. Every company has its unique challenges and must solve problems in ways that make sense for their business. CDI, a VMware partner and VMware Cross-Cloud Managed Services Provider, understands the difficulties facing businesses trying to digitally transform.

“Organizations often want a digital transformation. What they sometimes don’t realize is they need an operational transformation. At CDI, we’re experts at enabling digital and operational transformations,” says Chris Black, CDI’s Managed Services CTO.

Instead of recommending the same services to each client, CDI creates individualized suites of technology and managed services to solve each business’s particular need. It’s this dedication to their clients that earned CDI this year’s Cloud Innovation & SaaS Transformation Award for the Americas in the 2023 VMware Partner Achievement Awards.

“CDI is thrilled to be part of the distinguished group of VMware partners that have been recognized for an award this year,” Black says. “VMware is deeply embedded in our client offerings, and they’ve been a tremendous partner.”

Enabling agility through VMware Cross-Cloud managed services

Over the past few years, IT has shifted from being largely reactive to proactive, and is now starting to become more predictive. Organizations continue to evolve and understand more about the different technologies available to them—hyperscalers, on-premises, edge, hybrid or multi-cloud, and others. This is paving the way for new and innovative solutions to come to market, such as VMware Cross-Cloud managed services.

“CDI is optimistic about VMware Cross-Cloud managed services because organizations are continuing to evolve. We’re now able to put applications on casters, so to speak, and move them to the right ecosystem at the right time for the right business outcome,” says Black. VMware Cross-Cloud managed services enable CDI and its clients to be more agile, propelling them to the cutting edge of digital transformation. Black continues, “The ability to use the managed services gives organizations the luxury to have an application that’s born in the cloud when agility is the most important attribute needed for that application.”

As cloud-born applications become more integrated into businesses, the flexibility to move them where they need to be means that organizations can more reliably prioritize and manage performance and cost as their transformations progress. This frees them from the shackles of legacy IT operational models and allows CDI clients to make the most out of the IT resources available to them, creating more impact and generating more business value.

Modernizing IT operations to help clients achieve more

One of CDI’s clients, a large staffing firm based in Philadelphia, initially reached out to CDI to modernize their IT operations. The firm had a handful of people who were the only ones with knowledge about key technologies that were being used by the business.

CDI was brought on board to eliminate those risks and prevent information from being lost if any key people ever left the organization. The VMware partner then helped the firm gather the shared knowledge and turn it into repeatable, documented processes that could be used by the entire organization, providing 24/7/365 availability to this important information.

After working with CDI for a few months, the staffing firm transitioned their day-to-day IT operations to CDI, including responsibility for making sure that the infrastructure, applications, and security controls were in place to drive business requirements. This freed the firm’s staff to focus on more valuable projects to enable their lines of business. For instance, with the existing IT resources in the organization, they implemented upgrades to their optical character recognition (OCR) application, which helped them achieve higher efficiency. As a result, the firm’s staff placements went up 20-23% year-over-year.

“At CDI, we like to think of ourselves as ‘built different’ and ‘built better,’” says Black. “Everyone has a vision of what they think IT will look like in the future. But at the end of the day, it’s people who make the difference, and making them successful has made CDI successful as a whole.”