Delivering at the Nexus of the Digital & Physical Worlds: VMware & FedEx

As a tech analyst and university educator, I am often asked to partner with leading tech companies to review leading technologies and to share my insights. This post is sponsored by VMware, though the insights shared are my own.

"At FedEx, we stand at the nexus of the digital and physical worlds," said FedEx CIO Rob Carter as he shared FedEx's success story of using VMware services to quickly and efficiently scale to meet the intense demands of delivering the massive rollout of the life-saving Coronavirus vaccines as well as the surge in e-commerce deliveries due to stay-at-home requirements.

Carter detailed FedEx's story of successfully scaling to meet new and urgent needs of a world challenged by a pandemic, noting that a long-standing partnership with VMware had helped the company begin its journey of digital transformation with "a focus on making our technology cloud-ready, cloud-native and flexible." He explained that helping the company to "manage across the edge, across our data centers, and into the cloud" is something that "VMware does really well for us." He noted that it laid the digital foundation for future success.

With the Covid19 vaccine rollout, lives depended upon FedEx scaling up quickly and efficiently.

"VMware Tanzu is critical to our day-to-day"

FedEx Senior Enterprise Architect, Matt Lum, called VMware Tanzu "critical" to the company's "day-to-day", especially with FedEx's demanding testing practices. VMware Tanzu, a portfolio of products and services that helps enterprises build, run and manage applications on Kubernetes ("an open-source container orchestration platform") is a service FedEx lauds as helping the company not only in its day-to-day operations, but also in giving it a greater ability to be agile, innovative, and efficient in meeting new demands with new applications.

Lum, credited VMware Tanzu with helping FedEx scale up to meet the demands of delivering the Covid vaccine roll-out as FedEx introduced new applications to more closely track deliveries by providing a trusted infrastructure.

Carter also stressed the role of technological flexibility in enabling the company to pivot to the changing needs of a world engulfed in a pandemic. "If we had not built that technology to be flexible, we never could have adapted to the world and all the changes that the pandemic brought."

The Internet of Things, Technology at the Very Edge

"The Internet of Things, technology at the very edge, is really important" to FedEx, Carter noted. He explained that FedEx's new package tracking technology, "SenseAware", generates "billions of transactions" across the company's network, tracking data such as package location, temperature, and humidity. He commended VMware's technologies for empowering FedEx to "manage those transactions effectively and provide the visibility that the future is going to demand."

Looking to a future certain to be filled with new and unknown challenges, Carter concluded: "Our future is really rich with VMware technology."

For FedEx, the key to successfully pivoting and scaling started with a digital foundation that was "cloud-ready, cloud-native and flexible."

Takeaways

• FedEx started on its journey of digital transformation with a customer-centric focus and an eye on making its business "cloud-ready, cloud-native and flexible", tapping into a partnership with VMware technologies and services.
• Having a trusted multicloud and enterprise applications partner enabled FedEx to pivot and quickly scale to the historic demands of responding to a global pandemic.
• With billions of data points to monitor, automation and visibility gave FedEx the confidence to introduce new applications when they were needed most, swiftly, securely, and seamlessly, specifically mentioning VMware Tanzu as the enabler.
• The risks of standing still are far worse than the challenges of moving into the future.

The FedEx-VMware success story of tapping technology to quickly and effectively scale to meet the demands of a world challenged by a pandemic is best told by people who deliver FedEx's journey of excellence every day:

You can see more compelling case studies showcasing the benefits of VMware's multicloud and enterprise applications services by visiting the best of VMworld 2021 – On Demand!