Microservices, containers, Kubernetes, digital transformation — you’ve all heard the buzz about new ways to develop and deliver applications. But how real is it? How many actual examples can you cite of these technologies being used to drive business results?

Organizations today rely on data and software applications to create and deliver value in almost every aspect of their operations. Dell Technologies as a company is no exception. With rapidly changing user requirements and a dynamic market landscape, we need to respond quickly to the needs of our customers, partners and employees. The old way of developing and delivering software was too slow, so we set out to reinvent the way we deliver value through information technology.

It doesn’t get more real than Dell.com. One of the internet’s busiest commercial web sites, Dell.com needs to keep up with the latest trends. The challenge was that implementing capabilities required by the business – such as providing updated search capabilities – took too long to implement, averaging 3-8 months to deliver new application features! In order to speed innovation, Dell Digital (the team responsible for developing and delivering innovation for our website) has modernized its application development infrastructure with VMware Tanzu cloud-native infrastructure.

The results have been impressive. Dell Digital has deployed 7,500 microservices running in production across six data centers providing 24×7 availability. The infrastructure incorporates VMware vSphere, 71,000 VMware Tanzu application containers and 28,000 Kubernetes pods. The environment enables developers to build microservices by provisioning cloud services, containers and virtual machines on their own.

With a few clicks, developers provision resources, select cloud features on demand or move applications across on-premises and public clouds without porting. These automated, orchestrated capabilities have reduced development time from typically six months to a few weeks or less — an 85 percent improvement. The Dell.com team has improved the customer shopping experience by increasing feature launches from 8–10 per year to 55 per year. The Dell B2B website, Dell Premier, has compressed release cycles for upgrades from four weeks or longer to just days. Innovation and meaningful business outcomes have become hallmarks of the VMware Tanzu platform. The Dell Premier team used the platform to develop a smart recommender feature of the B2B website. That feature alone accounts for more than $1million of annual revenue.

Dell Technologies has a complete portfolio of solutions for accelerating application transformation with VMware Tanzu. Please visit our Tanzu portal for more details on this story and ways that we can help you with innovative modern applications infrastructure and VMware Tanzu.