As of this year, this is our new slogan. We will continue to use our traditional slogans, for they remain relevant (Passion for technology and We are ITQ), but we want to emphasize our identity and vision. During the last few months I’ve received a lot of questions regarding this new slogan. Great news to me! Maybe we triggered people. In most cases this question pops up: “Francisco, how can you put together ‘independent’ and ‘VMware’ in one slogan?”
Therefore, I would like to illustrate the new ITQ slogan. Most marketing experts will probably consider this a sin, but I don’t mind acting out of the box a little; it fits me.
Dutch: well, the “Dutch” part isn’t that complicated. We’re based in the Netherlands and our team consists mostly of Dutch people all salaried by ITQ. However, we do work across the Dutch borders: not only in the Benelux, but also frequently in the Nordics and other EU countries. These assignments confront our consultants with problems and challenges not, or to a lesser extent, found in the Netherlands.
“Dutch” is meaningful on its own: we tend to underestimate our country, but the Netherlands are host to the second largest VMware community event accommodating close to a 1000 attendees. This Dutch VMware User Group (NLVMUG) conference is co organised by two of our consultants in close collaboration with VMware. Also, the Netherlands are a gateway for American start-ups, because Dutch organisations are leading when it comes to adopting innovations. Which is something to be proud of, in my humble opinion.
Independent: because we actually are completely independent. First and foremost, we don’t sell software or hardware, so we’re open-minded towards all new technologies enriching the infrastructural landscape. Because software needs hardware, they will both always be an important part of this infrastructure. We have knowledge of the complete ecosystem and are able to provide our customers with the best advice. Certain “point solutions” exist in today’s market, providing specific added value to our customers in some use cases. Partly due to the fact that we don’t sell software or hardware, we find a lot of IT related companies as our customers.
VMware: completely VMware. We believe in the vision of VMware and share their view on the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), transition to the Cloud and focus on end users (“one cloud, any application, any device”). We’re hired by VMware on a daily basis to assist in implementations, support and proof of concepts (PoC) for their clients. It’s also possible to hire us with existing VMware credits.
Still, we’re not financially influenced by VMware: we don’t sell licenses. We kindly leave this to others in the ecosystem; our core business is our knowledge and experience.
Knowledge: complete expertise. We possess the knowledge and experience of the complete VMware landscape: everything needed to bring the IT infrastructure into the future and to sustain it. Rapid technological developments create new solutions for legacy applications. Therefore, shaping the infrastructure is a future-oriented architectural process.
ITQ heavily invests in the knowledge of its consultants and project managers. Besides allocating a budget for education and visits to global events, we encourage the self-education and study of our consultants and to this end grant them several hundreds of hours per year. This includes, for example, contributions to the community, the vExpert program, communication and organisation of certain events like VMUG, or teaching/training. We also invest in our own intellectual property, like standardised self service portals for service providers or Orchestrator templates to fully automate Software Defined Data Centers.
Partner: full teammate. IT is technology driven, but it doesn’t end there. In a world of disruptive technology, the bottleneck often is the adoption of new technologies and procedures. It’s essential to us to recommend solutions which seamlessly blend in with existing IT infrastructures and to guide this process in a professional way (not everybody needs a Ferrari and who owns one, will have to learn how to drive it).
Independent and VMware?
We create clarity and transparency for our clients by sharing the vision of VMware. This, together with our knowledge of the complete ecosystem, is precisely what enables us to be independent.
If you want to know more about this, me or one of my colleagues are more than willing to visit you and to tell you more about our methods and our knowledge of the complete ecosystem like AMAZON, AZURE and Openstack 🙂
