Keith Woolley

"I can't control the costs in the cloud with the hyperscalers, I just cannot control it. So, we've got an academic community that would really consume as much as you were giving them. So, if you're not careful, that cost model's going to run away very, very quickly with us."

"I couldn't be in a hyperscale environment where I didn't know from day to day what my cost model may be. So I needed something that we could actually position well, control correctly."

"I can now turn around and say to our research funders, this is a sovereign data center. You can see where the data is and you can audit the policies in which we've built these things with. So, our security policies are fully auditable, whereas before, we couldn't do that."

"segmentation, security, trust, as I say, sovereignty in the fact that we work in a UK environment at the moment, we are also governed by European policy for what we do with AI and the way in which we manage data as well as UK policy and they're different. And then we're working with worldwide policy around trust."

"the academic actually bought the equipment themselves. Now, they can spin it up themselves as though it's cloud. We can cost control it because we know where it is."

"the reason they weren't using me as a shop of choice was it came down to I was too expensive and I was too slow in responding. One of the first things that happened with VCF was our capability to automate. And so we've now put the technology in the hands of our academics through scripting."

"we also built a whole virtual desktop environment, which at the time was a VMware product, now is a fully integrated VDI product. So, we can now come along and you can now from anywhere in the world link into our VDI environment into our VCF cloud and work within the same compute and actual data sovereignty that we have across the globe."

"we gave digital equity to our students. And what we were finding were that we could take out the barriers between students that could or could not afford particular technologies and put a level playing field in there as well. So these were benefits we never envisaged in the first place, but have actually started to drive out here now."