SDDC can be Deployed in 15 minutes

Arun Kumar Parameswaran, Managing Director, VMware India recently interacted with Dataquest to share company’s strategy and roadmap for India market. Parameswaran has worked in the industry for a long time and has joined VMware last year from Red Hat India.

VMware has undergone significant expansion in the APJ region and today serves some 63,000 customers there. The company’s footprint in the Indian subcontinent comprises a workforce of approximately 2,300—including R&D staff, global support, operations, and a sales force—along with a presence in Bengaluru, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chennai, as well as Mumbai and New Delhi. Earlier last year VMware announced its intention for further investment of up to $500 mn over the next three years to help fund growing operations in India. Excerpts

What is VMware’s market strategy based at?

VMware is at the forefront of virtualization worldwide and has adopted three-pillar strategy. One of the trends which has emerged significantly today is Software-defined Datacenters (SDDC) because enterprises want to efficiently utilize and manage their resources. Thus, SDDC is one of our three pillar strategy. If you are following the enterprise IT segment, you may have noticed how important SDDCs are becoming. In a software-defined datacenter concept, all elements of the infrastructure—including networking, storage, CPU, and security—are virtualized and delivered as a service. So SDDC is a major part of our strategy.

Secondly, through my interactions with a host of CIOs, I discovered that enterprises are concerned about mobility. CIOs want to make their organizations mobile-ready so that they remain competitive. Plus, trends such as bring your own device (BYOD) have increased pressure on companies, because now employees are making choices based on the company’s BYOD policy. In addition, for CIOs mobility is not a technology decision, it is a business decision. So we are bullish about mobility market. VMware has acquired a company called AirWatch, which is a leading provider of enterprise mobile management and security solutions. This acquisition expands VMware’s end-user computing group; AirWatch’s offerings will form an expanded portfolio of mobile solutions that are complementary to VMware’s portfolio.

Storage is a critical part of VDI solutions as VDI solutions help utilize storage efficiently. To further strengthen, VMware has acquired another company CloudVolumes. CloudVolumes’ technology can disrupt the delivery of applications. So our VDI solutions are taking care of the app layer in the mobility space.

The third pillar of our strategy is hybrid cloud. VMware vCloud Air and VMware vCloud Air network service provider partners are delivering on the promise of hybrid cloud computing, enabling customers to seamlessly and securely extend their data center and applications to the cloud. With cloud services built on the trusted foundation of VMware technology, customers can provision new or move existing workloads between onsite data centers or internal private clouds to the public cloud, and back again as needed, creating a true hybrid cloud. VMware provides unprecedented flexibility and choice of cloud services on a local basis with vCloud Air and through the vCloud Air Network—the world’s largest network of validated cloud services based on VMware technology.

What is the difference in the first pillar of your strategy compared with the third pillar?

The difference between SDDC and hybrid cloud lies in terms of reaching out to customers who have different set of demands. In the SDDC strategy, the focus is at customers who want networking, storage, CPU, and security as a service. Whereas in the hybrid cloud strategy, VMware and its partners are delivering on the promise hybrid cloud computing, enabling customers to seamlessly and securely extend their datacenter and applications to the cloud. It helps customers provision new or move existing workloads between onsite datacenters or internal private clouds to the public cloud, and back again as needed, creating a true hybrid cloud. Why we have focused on hybrid cloud strategy is because most of our customers are moving from the public cloud and want solutions that bring the best of both worlds.

What kind of investments VMware is making in India? How aligned is your strategy with the global announcement of $500 mn investment in India?

We are very much on track as far as the announcement of $500 mn is concerned. VMware has projected investment of up to $500 mn in India over the next three years to help fund its growing operations in this market. The company’s R&D and support operations in India are second in size and scale only to those at VMware’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif, US.

India R&D centers play a critical role in every technology developed by VMWare. And this is not sustaining engineering but core engineering. The entire AirWatch team is based out of Bengaluru.

On go-to-market side, we are building a huge practice side for government. This is to leverage our technology in various government projects. As you know the government is bullish about cloud and mobile.

In addition, we are also investing heavily on our partner ecosystem. Overall our investments are aimed at growth.

What are the challenges while moving customers to the next level?

Virtualization has enabled our customers to save on several things such as real estate, server utilization, cooling, and power. But moving our customers to the next level that is from virtualization to SDDC is a challenge. SDDCs is a completely different architecture. It is like taking your infrastructure to the next level. You can virtualize a server in five minutes only but the network guy might say that it might take three day to align with the network given the SLA and other things. But SDDC brings all of this together and reduces the time significantly. And customers who are forward-looking are making the investments in SDDCs. And India is a leader in the SDDC space. It might sound surprising but it is true. We are able to deliver SDDC in just 15 minutes.

Which verticals do you see most adoption happening for SDDC?

There are a number of verticals which are coming forward. We have seen adoption happening in the BFSI, telecom, ITeS and government, etc, although manufacturing is a laggard for SDDC. We have footprint in different verticals.

Are there any offbeat implementations for your solutions? Or is it just the same customer-line investing in your solutions?

One set of companies are the ones which are entangled in legacy and licensing. The other set has begun their moves with virtualization, cloud, on-demand services, SaaS, multi-tenanted space, and mobility. We see a wide range of customers.

Since e-commerce marketing is booming in India and the e-commerce players are struggling with their IT infrastructure? How do you say Flipkart’s big billion day fiasco where their servers crashed midway?

I cannot comment on Flipkart specifically but most of these e-commerce players use open source technology. For e-commerce players it is critical to focus on delivery rather than becoming an R&D institution. I’ve worked with Red Hat and know the pains associated with open source technology. It is important that e-commerce players invest in out-of-the-box solutions so that they can focus on delivery. One unhappy customer is bad for these players.