Making Wishes Come True

In October 2015, 60 Minutes aired a story about Kaden Erickson who was granted his wish of visiting Australia. Only a few weeks later, Kaden succumbed to ETP-ALL, a rare form of leukemia.Those watching the story were so moved that they flocked to the websites of their local Make-A-Wish Foundation chapters causing all of the websites to simultaneously go down. People who wanted to donate money, volunteer or start a Make-A-Wish operation in their home town couldn't do it.

Since then, Make-A-Wish has adopted a centralized enterprise model, moving from on-premises infrastructure to a hybrid cloud. The colocation site relies on a 100 percent virtualized environment running VMware vSphere®, using VMware vCloud Director® to manage and automate processes and VMware NSX® to secure the virtual network.

Having a fully virtualized data center allows Make-A-Wish to scale up or down as needed, seamlessly spinning up new virtual servers as demand increases. In doing so, VMware is helping direct gernerous donations toward wishes and not costly upgrades to physical hardware or recoverying from network failures.

Digital Transformation For Social Good

"Kenyans were having major challenges in accessing public services," says Jacqueline Otwori, director of business process re-engineering for Huduma Kenya. "Public service delivery points were full of long queues, manual process, sometimes corruption incidences. And we thought this cannot continue, so we needed to transform the way services were being offered to Kenyans."

The solution was made possible by VMware. Huduma Kenya selected VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Workspace ONE with Horizon to virtualize and centrally share desktop applications in the 52 local Huduma centers. With this digital foundation in place, Huduma instantly and quickly deploys new services and updates. And since no application data touches the remote desktops, the integrity of the transactions can be guaranteed and secure.

Rescuing America's Food

Hunger in the U.S. is a perplexing problem, given that Americans trash billions of pounds of food per year. Most of this discarded food comes from farms, manufacturers, and grocery stores. The obvious solution to solve the hunger problem is to reroute this food to families in need and away from the landfill - but this isn't easy.

With perishable food like fruit, milk, and meat often nearing their expiration date, distributing this food with speed and efficiency to local food banks is essential.

Working through a VMware Managed Cloud Services Provider, Feeding America now supports a digitally connected network where trucks already on the road can be rerouted to a new location and food banks can swap surplus food to balance inventory.

"It's a powerful thing when you realize that produce would go to waste if it hadn't made it through the supply chain, which happens all the time," says Lisa Jericho VP of IT. "We're looking at new ways to use technology to rescue more food, to help more people and to distribute more nutritious food."