VCE Is Moving Into The Heart Of London’s Tech City

EMC’s converged infrastructure subsidiary VCE doubling down on a dose of hip by moving into new offices in the heart of London’s Tech City, TechWeekEurope has learned.

VCE will be migrating across London into the old offices of EMC/VMware spinoff Pivotal Software “within the next few weeks”, as Pivotal moves into a larger office across the road due to its growth in the UK.

‘Startup’

A VCE employee told TechWeekEurope that the move comes as the company increasingly tries to act like a startup, and hopes being in the heart of London’s trendy tech scene will inject its employees with a burst of startup enthusiasm.

The source told TechWeekEurope that VCE prides itself on the diversity of its staff in the UK, and that the move from its current offices in Finsbury Circus to Old Street will drop VCE into the centre of London’s disruptive fintech scene.

VCE moved into its City of London Finsbury Circus offices in February 2012. But another employee, who works at EMC, told TechWeekEurope: “Pivotal is moving to a bigger office and VCE is moving into Pivotal’s office. We announced Pivotal moving into that [Old Street] office three years ago, and said ‘right, this is going to be a $100 million investment, the whole 9 yards’, but they [Pivotal Software] have outgrown it.

“I think the VCE guys are going to have a brilliant new office right in the heart of Shoreditch. Tech City is such a hub of interesting stuff going on.”

VCE, founded in 2009, announced earlier this week that its converged infrastructure offerings will be part of Dell’s complete Hyper-V package. Upcoming owner Dell now boldly claims it has the industry’s broadest range of kit, adding VCE’s VxRail Appliance Family, VCE VxRack Node and VCE VxRack System 1000 FLEX to its wares.

Cloud pains

The Hyper-V announcement comes as VCE releases results today from a survey titled ‘Endangered IT’ which the company conducted with more than 2,500 business and IT pros in businesses with between 50 and 1,000 or more employees.

VCE found that 69 percent of CIOs are worried that future business growth will reveal cracks in the way traditional IT operations and infrastructure is run, especially with the shift to cloud and the need for data-intensive services.

Almost half of all CIOs thought that one of the top IT challenges for the next three years is extracting value from even greater volumes of data, found VCE’s survey.

The study was conducted to uncover key challenges companies face and their primary concerns of IT infrastructure at a time when market pressures are always evolving.

To accommodate the demands of growth, many companies are turning to cloud computing for support, said VCE, with a majority of business leaders wanting to outsource most of their IT systems and data to the cloud.

However, the business CIO’s disagree with this, feeling more circumspect towards moving all to the cloud. VCE said most CIOs want to opt for a hybrid solution, move less essential IT systems and data to the cloud – keeping core data and systems in-house.

VCE thinks its converged offerings can offer businesses a way to calm these worries.

“The research casts new light on current attitudes towards IT within businesses of all sizes. To reclaim full control, CIOs and their IT teams need to stop spending so much time building and managing different infrastructure components. Instead they need to transform IT into an efficient business-focused engine that can scale rapidly in response to changing business needs,” said VCE EMEA CTO Nigel Moulton.

Worries also come from the lack of cloud-trained employees in businesses, and the surplus of workers that is left after employees, traditionally from various areas such as storage and networking, re-train for the cloud and reduce the workforce needed.

“CIOs and their teams need to break down silos and embrace new converged and software-defined skills technologies alongside or instead of traditional infrastructure, and rebuild their trust in IT ro reclaim its relevance across the business,” said VCE.

Enter VCE’s converged infrastructure.

“A powerful infrastructure will deliver the high performance, scalability and agility the business needs, said Barry Cashman, vice president of EMEA at VCE.

“Too much effort is still spent simply keeping the operational lights on, when the business needs to focus on developing and releasing new, value-added products and services. IT needs to be free to focus on meeting business goals. A converged infrastructure will enable it to do so,” he said.

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