Opening & Introduction: An Interview with Yan Ness
Today, we are talking to Yan Ness, CEO VergeIO about the way world of IT infrastructure is evolving at an unprecedented pace, with businesses demanding greater efficiency, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness. In fact, as organizations navigate the challenges of virtualization, the need for an intuitive, high-performance alternative to traditional solutions has never been greater.
At the forefront of this transformation is Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO, a company that is redefining how enterprises approach IT infrastructure. VergeIO has been making waves with its ultraconverged platform, VergeOS, which promises to simplify virtualization while delivering record-setting performance. With a strong focus on enhancing customer experience (CX), VergeIO has seen significant growth in both customer adoption and industry recognition.
In this exclusive interview, Yan Ness shares insights into VergeIO’s CX strategies, customer-driven innovations, and the company’s vision for 2025. Moreover, from seamless onboarding and AI-powered optimizations to building trust in an era of cloud transformation, we dive into what makes VergeIO a game-changer in the ultraconverged infrastructure space.
Welcome Yan Ness, CEO VergeIO
Q1. Enhancing Customer Experience (CX): VergeIO has seen significant growth in new customers and inbound inquiries. What specific CX initiatives have contributed to this success, and how do you plan to enhance the customer journey in 2025?
YN: At VergeIO, we believe that today’s IT infrastructure has become needlessly complex and prohibitively expensive. Our mission is to change that by bringing elegant simplicity to the forefront of virtualization. So, dramatically improving the CX of managing infrastructure is our North Star in many of our decisions. There’s no one single thing or activity that delivers exemplary service. IT professionals are screaming for better experiences and we’re delivering that.
Q2. Onboarding & Support: With nearly 100 new partners added in Q4, how is VergeIO ensuring seamless onboarding, training, and support to maintain a high-quality experience for both partners and end customers?
YN: Adding nearly 100 new partners in a quarter requires a structured and scalable approach to onboarding. We’ve developed comprehensive training programs that include live sessions, on-demand courses, and hands-on labs to ensure new partners can quickly become proficient in VergeOS.
For end customers, we provide a guided deployment experience, a growing knowledge base, and a dedicated support team. Our goal is to ensure that both partners and customers can confidently adopt and maximize the benefits of VergeOS with minimal friction.
Customer Feedback and Customer Needs
Q3. Customer Feedback Loop: How does VergeIO integrate customer feedback into its VergeOS enhancements? Can you share an example where user insights led to a major platform improvement?
YN: Customer input plays a major role in shaping VergeOS. We have a structured process for collecting feedback through direct conversations, support interactions, and our online community. One recent example of this in action is our ioOptimize technology. Customers asked for better ways to maximize performance while minimizing resource consumption, so we developed ioOptimize to dynamically adjust workloads for efficiency, reducing unnecessary overhead and improving system responsiveness.
Another example is our approach to licensing flexibility. We adjusted our licensing model based on customer feedback to provide more scalability, ensuring customers can grow their environments at their own pace.
Q4. Personalization & Customer Needs: AI workloads are becoming a major focus area. How is VergeIO tailoring solutions to meet the evolving and diverse needs of enterprise customers, especially those transitioning from VMware?
YN: VergeOS is tailor made to replace VMware, and even without having to replace hardware. We do that for dozens of companies a quarter. Companies are picking us because our architecture is perfectly suited for those AI workloads of the future. You’ll see us make using AI even easier as we continue to virtualize those workloads and tools.
Trust and Confidence
Q5. Reliability & Trust: With record-setting performance demonstrations at AWS Re:Invent, how is VergeIO building trust and confidence among enterprise customers to position itself as the go-to VMware alternative?
YN: Our record setting performance ensures enterprises that VergeOS can handle the data intense workloads of the future, including AI. This builds trust and confidence that our architecture will enable, not hinder, their adoption of the latest new hardware and algorithms of the future. This, combined with the ease of migration, makes it a low risk project, which also builds confidence.
Beyond performance, we’re focused on reliability. We work closely with customers to validate VergeOS in their environments before full-scale adoption, ensuring they have confidence in its stability, efficiency, and long-term value.
CX Metrics
Q6. Self-Service & Automation: Given the rise in inbound web inquiries, what role does automation and self-service play in improving customer interactions while maintaining a personalized experience?
YN: Self-service and self-education is critical for our audience. They do not want to talk or online chat with a person. They tend to want to research for themselves. Even scouring 3rd party review sites. Then they want to try the software, without speaking with someone. In fact, we’d prefer more, not fewer, human interactions with our prospects.
Q7. CX Metrics & Measurement: Beyond revenue and partner growth, what key CX metrics does VergeIO track to measure customer satisfaction and long-term engagement?
YN: We measure customer experience using a mix of qualitative and quantitative metrics, including:
Support Resolution Time – Tracking how quickly we resolve customer inquiries.
Adoption and Expansion Rates – Understanding how customers scale their VergeOS deployments over time.
Engagement Metrics – Monitoring participation in training, community discussions, and knowledge base usage.
Unexceptional Experiences – Twice a week we call out any customer who had any type of unexceptional experience and someone owns turning that around.
These metrics help us continuously refine our approach and ensure we’re delivering a high-quality experience and have a tight feedback loop on our success and failures.
Future of Customer Experience
Q8. Future Customer-Centric Innovations: Looking ahead, what new customer experience-driven innovations can we expect from VergeIO in 2025 to further differentiate it in the ultraconverged infrastructure space?
YN: Future Customer-Centric Innovations
Looking ahead, we’re focused on innovations that enhance performance, efficiency and ease of use. Some of the key areas we’re working on include:
Enhanced partner enablement tools – Providing new ways for partners to accelerate customer adoption.
Advancements in AI-driven optimization – Leveraging AI to further enhance workload efficiency, system tuning and predictive analytics.
Chat with natural language interface for managing your infrastructure.
AI to deliver virtual sales and support engineers
Customer experience is inherently a focus in our mission.
At VergeIO, we believe that today’s IT infrastructure has become needlessly complex and prohibitively expensive. Our mission is to change that by bringing elegant simplicity to the forefront of virtualization.
Closing
Finally, as our conversation with Yan Ness comes to a close, one thing is clear—VergeIO is not just offering an alternative to legacy virtualization solutions; it is reshaping the future of IT infrastructure with a customer-first approach. As a matter of fact, by prioritizing simplicity, performance, and continuous innovation, the company is empowering enterprises to navigate digital transformation with confidence.
With an exciting roadmap for 2025, including AI-driven optimizations, enhanced partner enablement, and a commitment to self-service solutions, VergeIO is well-positioned to lead the next wave of IT evolution. In fact, as organizations seek more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective virtualization solutions, VergeIO’s mission to deliver elegant simplicity is set to make a lasting impact.
Thank you, Yan, for sharing your insights. In fact, we look forward to seeing how VergeIO continues to redefine the customer experience in the years ahead.
