VMware Tanzu Labs: New Name, Even More Transformative Expertise

As we celebrate the one-year anniversary of VMware Tanzu, we are thrilled to announce that VMware Pivotal Labs, the software consulting branch of VMware Tanzu, will now be called VMware Tanzu Labs.

Our consulting services have always been a foundational piece of the VMware Tanzu portfolio. With over 30 years of modern software development experience as Pivotal Labs, combined with a team of leading Kubernetes architects, many formerly of Heptio and Red Hat, Tanzu Labs offers an unmatched level of consulting expertise in both applications and next-generation infrastructure. The name Tanzu Labs better reflects the full scope of how we partner with leading organizations around the world: to build and modernize apps, develop Kubernetes-based app platforms, and enable the adoption of modern practices and culture changes that are necessary for meaningful transformation and sustained success.

During the past 12 months, Tanzu Labs’ team of 800 practitioners across 10 countries delivered 892 projects for clients such as BT, Duke Energy, Tesco Bank, Dish, Fiserv, Carina, and USMEDIC. Of these projects, 84,457 hours were dedicated to software development related to COVID-19.

Here are some highlights from the past year.

Stories of agility, resilience, and transformation at SpringOne

At our annual SpringOne user conference, many Tanzu Labs customers shared how they are tackling tough modernization initiatives, adopting modern practices such as DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering, and taking on large-scale agile transformations. Organizations that had invested in app modernization and in- house software development capabilities were better prepared to respond quickly to unprecedented challenges.

Nonprofit Carina’s founding executive director, Nidhi Mirani, shared how the COVID pandemic spurred the need for a new app connecting essential workers with licensed childcare providers. Mirani said that working alongside our team was “transformative” and highlighted the rapid delivery of usable releases, agile methods, and user-centered design that enabled her organization to release a fully functional app in just four weeks.

We heard from Albertsons Senior DevOps Manager Bhuvan Padakanti about Albertsons’ rapid shift from in-store purchasing to record-breaking online ordering and 10 times normal e-commerce traffic in the early months of the pandemic.

Padakanti recounted how Albertsons was prepared in part for this rapid shift to digital having previously partnered with Tanzu Labs to learn how to build cloud native apps, which enabled Albertsons to move from a legacy on-premise system to an entirely microservices-based e-commerce platform.

Customers including AirFrance KLM, State Farm, and BT shared impressive stories related to app modernization. And a panel of agile leaders from Comcast, Tesco Bank, and Bell Tracy discussed the critical role of management in successful transformation at scale.

These are just some of the many inspiring customer stories shared during SpringOne 2020!

Impactful solutions for the nonprofit sector

We’ve had the honor of continuing to work with nonprofit customers such as A21 and Carina through VMware Tanzu Act (formerly called Pivotal Act).

Tanzu Act is a program that partners with nonprofit organizations at a discounted rate to drive social impact through designing and building technology. Tanzu Act contributes to VMware’s 2030 Agenda, a 10year commitment to address critical challenges facing our global community with a focus on creating Trust, Equity, and Sustainability through 30 measurable goals to be achieved by 2030. The 2030 Agenda builds on VMware’s long-standing commitment to innovate for a better future, and we are proud to play an active role through Tanzu Act’s hands- on work partnering with the humanitarian sector to solve complex problems.

Building awesome software while working remotely

As the world went into lockdown due to the global pandemic, enterprises had to rapidly respond to dramatic changes impacting customer needs, employee experience, and available budget. While Tanzu Labs has many years of working with remote and distributed teams, the sudden move to “all remote” was a monumental shift for most of our customers and many of our own practitioners who were accustomed to co-located teams. Many practices, in fact, relied on the advantages of in-person communication and co-located teams. However, Tanzu Labs has a pedigree of thought leadership in software methodology going back several decades. Its practices are derived from certain core principles that form the basis of how to serve a fast-paced, software-centric business. So in response to the move to all-remote work, the team revisited those principles and reimagined practices that are sustainable when the team is remote but stay true to the underlying insights that have made Tanzu Labs so effective. It was by drawing on its depth of understanding on software that Tanzu Labs continued to serve customers successfully despite the challenging conditions. These are the core principles that form the foundation of Tanzu Labs and our practices:

Additionally, we published dozens of resources for remote software development teams, including remote work guides, a collection of Miro templates, and tips

on remote pair programming. Explore all of our resources for remote teams here.

Now part of the AWS Partner Network for Consulting Partners

In December, we announced that Tanzu Labs is now an AWS Partner Network Consulting Partner for app modernization and software development. Through this expansion of VMware Tanzu’s existing partnership, any AWS customer (including VMware Cloud on AWS customers) can engage seasoned Tanzu Labs experts in cloud native software development to assist with the analysis, disposition, migration, and modernization of their entire application portfolio.

Learn more about the partnership here.

Looking ahead

During the next year, we will continue to scale to meet the ever-growing demand for application modernization and Kubernetes expertise across industries. Tanzu Labs remains dedicated to our relentless pursuit of helping organizations deliver outcomes, working collaboratively with our clients in order to impart the practices and skills that enable long-term transformation. We will extend our community of partners who learn and adopt our methods, in order to work side-by-side with us and provide greater scale for large projects, which will allow us to work with even more customers. In addition to direct service engagements and extended partnerships, Tanzu Labs plans to publish our vast collection of best practices, proven patterns, app modernization recipes, and playbooks. This treasure trove of resources is based on decades of hands-on experience working with organizations of every size, across every industry to solve difficult, high-stakes problems. So whether you're ready to build a developer-centric platform with Kubernetes, accelerate your move to cloud, tackle a gnarly back-end system, or reimagine a digital customer experience, Tanzu Labs has what it takes to help your teams deliver better software to production, faster.