The strategic shift: How Ford and Emirates NBD stopped paying the complexity tax for virtualization

The strategic shift: How Ford and Emirates NBD stopped paying the complexity tax for virtualization The business problem: When legacy meets agility The solution: One platform to unify the estate Lessons from the migration trenches The strategic results The future is autonomous and AI-ready A final word of advice About the author Ashesh Badani More like this Blog post Blog post Original podcast Original podcast Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share For most large-scale enterprises today, the hybrid cloud isn't a strategy, it’s just the reality. Most organizations are running in both worlds: they have modern, cloud-native applications in containers, and critical, often mission-critical, systems in virtual machines (VMs). The reality is that running two separate virtualization stacks creates silos, complexity, and unnecessary operational cost – what can be called the complexity tax. It slows down your operations and application teams, strains budgets, and ultimately makes it harder to deliver value to the business. We recently spoke with leaders who decided to tackle this fragmentation head-on: Sandeep Kulkarni from Ford Motor Co. and Ali Rey from Emirates NBD. They shared their journey of unifying VMs and containers on one cohesive platform. Their story offers a clear, straightforward playbook for any IT leader facing a similar challenge. Both Ford and Emirates NBD are giants in their respective industries, but they faced the same fundamental challenge: not every application needs to be modernized but they can be future-proofed with a modern platform. Ford , an iconic, 122-year-old brand, runs thousands of applications. While the company has an aggressive modernization journey underway, many core systems may remain in VMs waiting for the application modernization journey or due to their fundamental architecture, compliance, or legacy vendor support. Emirates NBD , one of the largest banks in the Middle East, operates 24/7.