The Central Role of Customer Feedback for Our Innovation

I was on a customer call on Monday morning, 27 November, with a German customer, along with Runecast Sales Engineer Simon Ahmet and Runecast Customer Success Manager Antun Stare. It was the sort of conversation that leaves all sides feeling great about what just happened… and a perfect way to kick off a Monday morning at work. It helped to solidify in my mind a phrase that we hear frequently within Runecast: “Customer feedback drives us.”

I wasn’t needed on the call but wanted to listen for any potential areas where we might improve our communications.

Our customer had a few technical questions, which were promptly answered by Simon. One of the questions was about our new Agentless OS vulnerability scanning on VMware vSphere and how well it can scale. Then they let us know that they have a more complicated mixed environment with lots of VMs, so agentless is a much simpler approach for them.

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• Capacity Management for vSphere
  Launched in Runecast 6.7.1 on 3 October 2023
  
  Review your cluster capacity utilization, simulate host failure scenarios, or plan future workload deployments. This feature provides VMware admins with an essential, high level usage overview to prevent resource contention and service degradation. Combined with persistent historical utilization snapshots, it serves as an ideal starting point for monitoring growth and shaping the physical expansion strategy for each cluster.
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• Improvements to Capacity Management
  Released in version 6.8 on 7 November 2023
  
  Trend and forecast chart can now be zoomed in to make specific results easier to read. Resource utilization and allocation charts are optimized to display many clusters, improving performance during initial load and workload simulation.

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And finally they thanked us for the new Capacity Management feature, which they had not been expecting (and was thus a very pleasant surprise).

Why We Love Feedback from Customers

Unlike Apple’s Steve Jobs, who famously spoke about not giving customers what they want but rather giving them what they need before they know they will want it (or something to that effect), our customers are uniquely way above an average knowledge level in the realm of technology.

In short, when you think of “IT guys”... our customers are authentic 1337s.

That’s why we love to listen to and learn from them about where they see the industry moving, what they think their needs will be in coming months and years, what they think can benefit them now and in the foreseeable future… and then we do our best to enable that journey for them.

After all, Runecast is built by Admins for Admins.

IT teams from our customers across many different industries report to us regularly how Runecast benefits their Security, Vulnerability, Compliance, DevSecOps, and ITOM teams – as well as CIOs and CISOs – with a proactive and transparent approach that they could not find elsewhere.

This of course results in major time savings, relative cost savings, increases their uptime, and helps them to achieve continuous compliance with vendor best practices, regulatory standards, and other security frameworks.

Customer Success in Numbers

The following are some numerical highlights documented in our case studies:

• 100s of hours saved on security compliance with remediation scripts alone (Kiel Municipal Hospital)
• 78,000 EUR/year minimum annual cost savings (Notino)
• 80% reduction of VMware-related Incidents (Notino)
• 80% reduction in monthly incidents and issues (University of St Andrews)
• 75-85% troubleshooting time savings (University of St Andrews)
• 90% time savings on reactive troubleshooting (Near East Bank)
• 80% time saved troubleshooting and identifying issues (Seijo University)
• 70-80% man-hours time savings (ONI)
• 90% time savings in upgrade planning (FLEXdata)
• 75% time saved on troubleshooting and root cause analysis (de Volksbank)

“We Couldn’t Find Anything Else Like Runecast”

During case study interviews, when we get to the question, “Why did you choose Runecast over one of our competitors?” we most often hear that they couldn't find anything else that could do what Runecast can do:

• “We chose Runecast because it’s the only solution for effective proactive issue prevention in mission-critical VMware infrastructure” –Thierry Monney, IT System Engineer at Skyguide (Read Case Study)

• “There was no tool on the market that did what Runecast does. And from a cost perspective, it made more sense than to investigate VMware vRealize Operations. Given the cost and value that Runecast offered, it made no sense to even spend time trialing alternatives.” –Dan Monaghan, Cyber Security Officer at Aberystwyth University (Read Case Study)

• “Runecast is the only product we have seen that is fully comprehensive in coverage and meets our needs without having to use multiple tools and interfaces. It gives us a clear dashboard, and it reports what we need to know in a proactive manner that makes things simple with its intuitive interface and traffic-light color-coding system for judging level of criticality.” –Zeka Baydar, Systems Manager at Near East Bank (Read Case Study)

• “We are not aware of any other solution that integrates to such a level into the VMware suite, or one that can even do what Runecast does. Nothing else we saw covered the security compliance bits." –Nathanael Pearson, Head of IT & Telecoms at DHU Health Care (Read Case Study)

• “Runecast was a no-brainer, purely on effort saved. We instantly saw that it would save a whole lot of time, and for us time is money. And the cost of the Runecast license on top of the virtualization stack is virtually nothing. Every new project we do, we now include Runecast.” –Luke Mulcahy, Solution Architect/Director at FLEXdata (Read Case Study)

• "Runecast was the only solution we could find that provided the BSI coverage and automated security compliance audits that we were after for maintaining the team's ongoing BSI security posture." –Thomas Hauber, ‍Team Leader, Technology Division at Heilbronn District, Germany (Read Case Study)

“A Must-Have for Any VMware Environment”

In addition to frequently hearing that our solution is unparalleled, the following are among those IT professionals who have referred to our ‘Swiss Army Knife for VMware teams’ as a “must-have” solution.

• "From talking with potential partners, interviewing customers for case studies and reading blogs by many leading industry luminaries, such as Duncan Epping, Cormac Hogan and Vladan Seget, it is clear that Runecast is a ‘must-have’ in any VMware vSphere environment." –Jane Rimmer, vExpert and former London VMUG Leader

• "Runecast offers unique value with its KB correlation and compliance checks which makes it a must-have for any VMware environment." – Artur Krzywdzinski, NPX#22, VCDX 77, and Enterprise Architect at Nutanix

• "Runecast is a must-have tool for every VMware vSphere admin to proactively monitor their environment." – Ivo Beerens, vExpert and Solutions Consultant specialized in virtualization technologies

We Look Forward to Navigating 2024 with Our Customers

I am glad that I joined that customer call, as it did give me a couple of ideas as to how we might better convey some message here or there in the customer journey. Additionally, to assist their peers in finding the best solution on the market, that German customer that we had the call with agreed to do a case study with us in coming weeks. So be on the lookout for that on our Customer Success Stories page!

Lastly, I would like to brag a bit, as our daily dedication to customer needs recently helped to earn us a Frost & Sullivan’s 2023 New Product Innovation Award in the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) industry – for our unique on-prem CNAPP, strong overall performance, and "commitment to user experience." (Read more here)