Multi-cloud is here to stay, it's for us to simplify it: VMware global CEO

In a Q&A over Zoom, Raghu Raghuram talks about his company's business propositions, and its plans post its spin off from Dell later this year

VMware, the company whose virtualisation software creates a virtual machine that acts like a real computer, later went to cover other areas including cybersecurity. The firm is now betting big on the multi-cloud opportunity that most enterprises today rely on. Its cloud management products help enterprises extend their private cloud to the public cloud, and run, manage, secure and connect all their applications across clouds and devices. The firm's financial year 2020-21 revenue was $11.8 billion, and its 'subscription and SaaS' revenue grew 38 per cent to $2.6 billion in the same period.

In a conversation over Zoom, global CEO Raghu Raghuram, who took over in May, spoke to Neha Alawadhi about the company's business propositions, its plans post its spin off from Dell later this year, and more. Edited excerpts:

Where do you think VMware fits in the global context, and where does India figure in that story?

Chapter-1 for VMware was server virtualisation, chapter-2 was the private cloud, and chapter-3 is multiple clouds. Our goal is to be the software platform for the multi-cloud enterprise. That's what we're trying to do globally, and the same concerns exist in Indian companies as well. Seventy-five per cent of VMware's customers are using two public clouds or more, 40 per cent are using three or more. And this applies to Indian customers as well. Multi-cloud is here to stay. The opportunity for us is how to make it easy, enable customers to go faster, enable them to spend less and give them the freedom of choice.

The digital effort of building and modernizing your applications is based out of teams in India. Secondly, there are companies in India that are executing this multi cloud strategy.

Many startups in India are scaling up fast. What kind of VMware products do these companies have access to for faster go-to-market?

Our Tanzu portfolio (suite of products that helps users run and manage multiple Kubernetes (K8S) clusters across public and private clouds) is built for, and by developers. At VMworld last week, we introduced a standard Community Edition of Tanzu, which is open source, a core free Kubernetes solution for deploying, managing, and running modern applications on Kubernetes, and it's targeted at the same developers that are building the next highly successful companies.

We also provide Spring Boot which is the favoured microservices option for folks that understand tools like Java.

Is your M&A strategy going to be different after your spin off from Dell later this year?

Yes, the Dell spin-off is on track for early November. It enables us to be a freestanding company, and gives us more flexibility in using our equity to do acquisitions down the road if we need to. But overall, our M&A strategy is going to be similar to what we have done the past few years. We generally tend to buy smaller technology companies, either buying talent or technology. We partner heavily, and the fact that we are now truly an independent company allows us to be the Switzerland of the industry.

How have these partnerships with hyperscalers like Google, Amazon Web Services and others been for you?

These partnerships are what I call a win-win-win solution. It's a win for us, for them (hyperscalers), and it's a win for the customer.

A lot has been said about the spin-off from Dell. How has your experience been, working with Michael Dell?

It's been awesome. He's been a great source of advice and mentorship, and, and he has a lot of industry insights that we benefit from. He's recently written a book, "Play nice but win," and that's how he talks to me as well- very focused on winning.

What are the top few learnings from the pandemic?

Overall, it has accelerated the pace of technological change. Let me pick a very common example. In the United States, telemedicine was virtually impossible even though the technology has been available for years. Now it is the norm or the preferred mode for a medical exchange with your doctor.

It has increased the level of online collaboration. It also has downsides too. I think it has increased the stress level of employees. Burnout is a very common thing if you're going back to back on Zoom all day. So it caused us to re-evaluate work life balance.