Bechtle organized its annual forum last Tuesday at the Swiss Tech Convention Center. An XXL event with more than 400 customers present to attend the multiple sessions and demos put together by the service provider and around thirty partners. Also present, the ICTjournal editorial team attended three presentations where the deployment of AI, Zero Trust and VMware licenses was discussed…
How to deploy Copilot…
Upon the release of Copilot for M365, Bechtle decided on a large internal deployment, both to benefit from the tool and to be able to share its first-hand experience with its customers. The service provider thus acquired 5,000 licenses of the assistant – enough to equip a third of its workforce – and developed a vast plan to deploy the tool and facilitate its adoption, explained Benjamin Melebeck, Team Leader Business Applications at Bechtle.
Benjamin Melebeck, Team Leader Business Applications at Bechtle.
The service provider has notably developed a platform (largely based on Viva tools) allowing employees to explore use cases, improve their skills or even share their best prompts with their colleagues.
According to Bechtle’s analysis, its French-speaking employees with Copilot use it today mainly in Teams (summaries of meetings and conversations), Outlook (summary of email flows, generation of drafts) and Word (design , rewriting, summaries). Rarely used, Copilot for Excel is gradually being enriched with features likely to increase user interest, underlined Benjamin Melebeck.
In addition to Copilot, Bechtle has tackled its more customized AI projects, both in IT and in HR and marketing. Solution Architect Data & Analytics, Cyril Lacroix notably presented LicenseQ, a RAG solution drawing on product documentation to obtain a clear summary of the licenses and conditions applying to it.
Cisco’s Zero Trust Approach
In another session, Cisco presented its extended Secure Access solution. Unveiled almost a year ago, this embodies Cisco’s approach to the Zero Trust paradigm and therefore its response to the problem of secure access to applications distributed in hybrid environments. Security specialist at Cisco, Alexis Gastaldello explained the multiple tools (often the result of acquisitions) that make up Secure Access.
Intended to offer effective security while simplifying the lives of users and administrators, the solution allows you to define sources (users and groups, typically in AD), destinations (on-prem applications, SaaS, etc.) , the conditions (posture, rights) authorizing the former to access the latter, and to automatically and dynamically deploy the technical means necessary for this access.
VMware with Broadcom sauce
In another session, Broadcom came to talk about VMware, whose acquisition from Dell announced in 2022 was finalized in December 2023. Since then, Broadcom has twice made drastic changes in the specialist’s portfolio and licensing models. of virtualization, causing a lot of tension and frustration among its customers and partners. The interest of the forum participants was therefore great, the session full and the questions numerous.
A well-known veteran of VMware in French-speaking Switzerland, Ralf von Gunten had to tackle the difficult exercise of explaining and clarifying the current situation, of which we understood that he himself was a spectator. “It’s as if we had changed companies twice in less than 6 months,” he commented.
An educator, the specialist sought to reassure the participants. He explained the greatly simplified structure of the VMware offering and the finer points of licensing changes. With Cédric Mégroz (Bechtle Suisse Team leader DataCenter), he also presented tools to facilitate the transition and described the operation of the VMware support portal, now integrated into that of Broadcom.
Ralf von Gunten also had some good news, such as the offer of free courses now available to customers and partners, and the partnership concluded between Broadcom and Dell for the continuation of combined offers, notably VxRail and vSAN.
