Global CIO Ryan Fay Transforms ACI’s Data Center with VMware
ACI Global CIO Ryan Fay is a frequent media contributor and blogger. See an excerpt below of his latest feature, and read the full article on Network World.
Ryan Fay, executive vice president and global CIO at ACI Specialty Benefits, began using VMware’s virtualization products in the early 2000s when he was at a different company. “It’s been exciting to see what VMware has been able to do,” he says. The company stuck with its core competency but continued to innovate into new areas at the same time, he says.
In 2009, Fay was hired at ACI, a provider of corporate-benefits packages, to lead a digital-transformation initiative. ACI had recently acquired four companies, its data footprint was growing at 300% a year, it had security, compliance and data governance issues, and the data center needed modernization.
The first step was a basic server hardware consolidation effort that led to the creation of 40,000 virtual machines, a move that saved the company an estimated 30 to 40 percent in CAPEX costs per year and helped with HIPAA and PCI compliance efforts.