Bullish on India market, VMware plans to expand cloud software technology

Even though the telecom sector is going through a rough patch in India, it is looking to do more with less, which cloud software technology major VMware sees as a big opportunity area, its managing director India, Pradeep Nair said.  

“Some of the most compelling use cases of our technology have been in banks and telecom companies. What they’re asking us for is that they be more accountable with their spends, and there’s greater scrutiny about how spending is happening. But they are, today, challenging us to say, show me how I can innovate better because I have to do more with less,” he said.

He added that while there is a constrained environment in the telecom industry, but they also know that India is a market that has grown and they do not want to be left behind. “So they’re not throwing money at the problem, but they say show me true innovation,” Nair said. 

Another area that VMware considers a big opportunity is government clients, and the firm works with both Central and State governments on different projects.

In 2018, VMware, a Dell Technologies unit, said it would invest $2 billion in India, most of which would be going into expanding head count, creating facilities for the increased workforce and expanding to more markets in the country. 

“We are expanding coverage in terms of markets. We’ve usually been very strong in the metro cities. We are expanding beyond that through our partners into multiple locations outside of tier-1 cities. We’re also spending on women who’ve who taken a break from work. Women participation in the labour force in India is probably one of the metrics that has dropped a bit over over a few years. We have this programme called Tara that we launched a year back...the target is about 15,000 women who’ve taken a break from work. (We invest so that) they get equipped with the skills that they need to, to compete in the job market again,” Nair added. 

VMware traditionally makes virtualization software, which creates a virtual machine that acts like a real computer. This helps companies cut IT costs by saving on server and storage space.

It has also been investing seriously in cybersecurity and is expanding its capability to new software development. Last year, it bought Pivotal Software, which makes tools for software developers working on cloud services, for $2.7 billion. VMware also bought Carbon Black, which has a cloud security platform that uses big data and 

behavioral analytics to protect against cyber attacks, for about $2 billion.

It has also been expanding its capability in Kubernetes technology, an open source based technology that makes deployment and scaling up of applications faster. It is increasingly becoming popular in software development, almost at par with the Java programming language. VMware has expanded its capability in Kubernetes through its acquisition of companies called Bitnami and Heptio. 

“We’ve been very acquisitive as a company (and) made a lot of acquisitions over the last year or so. Almost all of them had development capability in India. I think companies we acquired have built their businesses on talent in India, and hopefully that will continue,” Nair said.