UPDATED 15:00 EDT / MAY 20 2019

CLOUD

Q&A: Harel Insurance moves to multicloud for infrastructure-free environment

Multicloud adopters are seeing the value of undergoing a profound transformation in their digital model. They are leveraging multicloud solutions that help them accelerate and enhance their business impact.

Harel Insurance Investments & Financial Services Ltd. is one recent multicloud adopter that is seeing the benefits. The company is leveraging the VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail for lifecycle management capabilities.

“The multicloud approach that VMware Cloud Foundation gives us [is an] infrastructure-free [roadmap] to just focus on the services,” said Niv Raz (pictured, right), chief technology officer at Harel Insurance. “And once you take in the VxRail as a hardware platform for that and the VMware Cloud Foundation, the software, you’re getting a complete lifecycle that assists you to just focus on being a service broker.”

Raz and Gil Shneorson (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of VxRail at Dell EMC, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed Harel’s digital transformation and how VxRail is shaping their journey (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: Can you give us at a macro level what are some of the changes and stresses on the company and how’s that impacting your job?

Raz: In 2015, our CEO declared an innovative program named Recalculating Routes. The purpose of the program … was to take the role from traditional insurance company to more digital transform. The post-service part is very hard in insurance, and we are investing a lot to make the post-service customer experience very advantaged.

Miniman: [Gil], help us connect the dots — the transformations that your customers are going where VxRail and the new solutions built with VxRail help enable [them].

Shneorson: Many [of our customers] look at ATI and VxRail as the next simple tech refresh. They see the agility; they see the economical benefit. But there’s a growing majority of customers who look to this as transformational. And so that’s where you see ATI and VxRail specifically in our case starting to grow beyond being an infrastructure for workloads to being an infrastructure for their hybrid cloud and multicloud environment.

By putting this building block in many of our customers’ data centers, they’ve made the choice that will enable them to now embark on a more transformational strategy.

Miniman: Niv, what’s the reality in your world [as a customer] and the impact on your work?

Raz: In this journey, when you’re looking about the digital transformation, you must have an infrastructure that supports the scalability, the elasticity, the availability that our customer demands. So to be scalable, our multicloud strategy in Harel is to have an infrastructure-free environment, to focus on the service applications and not to focus on the infrastructure management part.

The big concerns of our IT teams were how to care only about support, matrix’s compatibility, and maintenance. When you go into the private cloud environment … that’s VxRail on the bottom and VMware Cloud Foundation on the top, it allows Harel to start the journey to a phase that said, “OK, we’re going to our infrastructure-free roadmap.”

Miniman: The business overall joint product development between Dell EMC and the VMware teams is something that we think was transformational. What are some the big drivers; what’s changed in the business?

Shneorson: When we discovered that working together pays off through our joint leadership through examples like VxRail and others, we started looking at every part of the business and how collaboration could enable us to add even more value.

Now, with VCF on VxRail, you can have full lifecycle management of the entire VMware stack, and the entire hardware stack drivers, framework, everything lifecycle together. It’s a very, very impressive outcome, and it’s ready now. I’m really thinking that shift is going to be more than just ATI; people are going to start embracing the full stack because they can.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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