For our first ever virtual .NEXT Global conference we are excited to recognize some of the most innovative companies, IT leaders, and technology teams in the industry. These companies have shown that making advancements in IT and technology innovation are more important than ever before.
Here’s a sneak peek at the finalists for our awards that represent this year’s outstanding cloud trailblazers, cloud transformers, DevOps rockstars, and .heart givers. We were impressed by all the submissions this year!
Cloud Trailblazer Award Finalists
This award recognizes a senior executive who has demonstrated excellence in technology leadership through innovation in the datacenter. This senior executive is an innovator who inspires IT teams to challenge the status quo and embrace innovation to fuel the business, drive down costs, and reduce complexity—all while improving overall productivity.
- Exvillage Software Systems Pvt Ltd - Dipesh Khadye, IT Head
As head of IT, Dipesh Khadye had to rethink how to optimize the cost of Exvillage’s monthly cloud spend while still providing resources on demand to the business. He chose Nutanix Beam to optimize the OPEX spend on AWS and prioritize cloud security in real time. Beam offered complete visibility of all the costs and helped his organization reduce its costs significantly. - JM Finn - Jon Cosson, Head of IT & CISO
Jon Cosson had a firm strategy to replace JM Finn’s previous solution with Nutanix and has already planned to implement AHV across the board. He has consistently shown a passion to make HCI the core of the business and reduce hypervisor costs. By moving to AHV, they are looking to embrace the full strategy with Nutanix Flow advanced networking and security services. - RBL Bank - Sankarson Banerjee, CIO
HCI enables Sankarson to free up precious datacenter space, provide faster user log in, and easier daily management that allows the business to meet their vision of becoming the fastest growing credit card issuers in India.
Cloud Transformers Award Finalists
The Cloud Transformers Award honors a team that has helped elevate and evolve their organization through innovation in the datacenter, with demonstrable resulting benefits in customer experience, operational savings, or increased availability and efficiency.
- Rakuten Europe Bank
Rakuten Europe Bank relocated its infrastructure from VMware to Nutanix to solve performance issues related to the configuration between its hardware and software. The architecture and infrastructure teams collaborated to improve its software, hypervisor and hardware solutions by optimizing its SQL servers, business applications, and migrating their hypervisor to AHV which gave business users more time to manage other important tasks. - University of California, San Diego
UC San Diego partnered with Reserved Instance brokerage firm to integrate Nutanix Beam to create a new IT business model. The result? Over 25% cost savings and about 50% improvement in operational efficiency as well as significant improvements in security compliance. - Creighton University
Creighton University utilized Nutanix DaaS offering—Frame—to extend learning at home and ensure all students can access university tools and online resources. The university leverages Frame, public cloud, and Nutanix Core HCI to satisfy teaching and learning requirements for both professors and students. Frame is currently being used with MS Azure, Amazon AWS, and Nutanix Core HCI to create a true hybrid multicloud. - RBL Bank
The IT team at RBL Bank decided to move its critical Citrix VDI workload to Nutanix HCI, resulting in significant benefits in datacenter space reduction, faster user login and ease of daily management, providing confidence to the business in meeting its vision of becoming the fastest growing Credit card issuers in India. Another key initiative they performed was to build a DBaaS platform on Nutanix to simplify the database operations which were overly complex and manual. Using Nutanix platform and Nutanix Era, the IT team cloned an instance of its database to handle the new load. This was accomplished in a record four hours which would have otherwise taken over four days on traditional infrastructure.
DevOps Rockstar Award Finalists
Breaking down silos between Infrastructure, Ops, and Development teams requires collaboration, insight, agility, and supporting technology. This award honors teams who are working together to accelerate the development and roll out of applications. These innovators have found efficient and effective ways to remove friction between teams and collaborate in the spirit of driving digital transformation.
- Kaneka Malaysia SDN BHD
The IT team at Kaneka Malaysia brought in DevOps and citizen developers teams to break down barriers through small group initiatives and collaborate on new automation tools and platforms. This resulted in a cost savings of over $500,000 on labor productivity alone. The new citizens developer program that launched through this initiative improved quality of life for the IT team, saving over 67,000 hours of labor per year. Employee morale also increased, allowing them to focus on more value-added jobs. - Excellus BlueCross BlueShield
The Excellus BlueCross BlueShield engineering team worked with numerous teams to develop an automation workflow that integrated into their current development, test, and production environments. They were able to automate Windows and Linux VMs on the Nutanix platform, thus removing human error and the need for manual processes during the server build and provisioning process. This new process allows teams to invest new time savings into more areas of need. - Kerry EAS Logistics Network Limited
Kerry EAS Logistics consolidated and migrated four facilities based in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Alibaba to a new datacenter in the cloud running on Nutanix HCI. This allowed the company to on-board customers faster than its competitors, improving its competitive edge. Automation has also been achieved for its day-to-day database management operations, providing a substantial CAPEX reduction.
.heart Giving Back Award Finalists
As businesses embrace enterprise cloud in transforming their datacenters we want to honor those companies that are simultaneously making a positive impact on their communities and the world. At Nutanix, we believe strongly in the power of diversity to contribute to innovation and satisfaction in the workplace. This award recognizes a socially responsible organization that has dedicated time, resources, and energy toward programs and diversity initiatives that fosters a passion for technology and education in everyone.
- United Network For Organ Sharing (UNOS)
UNOS recently launched the Donor Image Sharing project which is the first national platform for organ procurement organizations (OPOs) and transplant teams to share high-quality medical images of donated organs to help facilitate more transplants. The project makes large file-size medical images, radiographs, videos of echocardiograms, catheterizations, pulmonary bronchoscopies, and other images available to OPOs, transplant, and donor hospitals. Currently, there are many different ways of showing these images, so having a standard would decrease errors and provide surgeons with more information that could help them decide to transplant organs they may not have considered otherwise. - S&D Coffee & Tea
S&D partnered with the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) to develop the Leadership Equity and Diversity (LEAD)
Scholarship. Five passionate coffee professionals are selected to receive the new LEAD scholarship. LEAD is aimed at increasing diversity of leadership within the global coffee community by enabling access to professional development resources to people from underrepresented or marginalized communities. - Organic Valley
Organic Valley was founded in 1988 by a handful of family farmers in the Midwest whose vision was to stray from the industrial outlook on American agriculture which was centralized around corporate and chemical farming. Organic Valley wanted to make its company philosophy one that emphasized sustainable farming in a way that protects the land, animals, economy, and people’s health. They pooled their exemptions into an organic-focused granting fund called Farmers Advocating for Organic (FAFO) as a way to promote and advance organic farming . The fund provides a way for Organic Valley farmers to address the long-term needs of the organic marketplace and the future of organic agriculture. The CoOp also partnered with other companies to form the Grassroots Aid Partnership (GAP). This organization serves as a conduit to gather resources from partnering companies and direct them to the grassroots response organizations that are assisting community members that have been affected by natural disasters.
Special thanks to our esteemed judges: Karl Miatke, our customer and Solutions Architect at COUNTRY Financial and Wendy M. Pfeiffer, CIO of Nutanix.
Please join us for our first ever virtual Global .NEXT conference to honor these innovators! We’ll announce the winners during the first day of .NEXT on Tuesday, September 8th from 2:10-2:20pm PST. For more details of the event and the full conference agenda, please visit the .NEXT Conference website.
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