Cloud firm VMware to soon have broader coverage in India: Top official

With an enhanced line of products like Hybrid Cloud which gives customers the full software-defined data centre (SDDC) experience, VMware will soon have a much broader coverage in India, a top executive of the company -- a leader in cloud infrastructure and mobility -- said here on Tuesday.

"VMware has been a very strong player in the enterprise space. We have covered the small and medium businesses (SMBs) market strategically and for us. It is not only tier I cities as we wish to cover tier II and tier III cities as well," Arun Kumar Parameswaran, Managing Director of VMware India, told IANS on the sidelines of the annual "vFORUM 2016" event here.

When asked about the Dell-VMware alignment and leveraging Dell's sound penetration into India's SMB market, Parameswaran said: "As per a recent International Data Corporation (IDC) report, we have seen a lot of activity in terms of server and PC shipments in India. Dell has been a good partner for us. With our new products and technologies, you will soon see a much broader coverage in India."

According to Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, the company has good collaboration with Dell-EMC and they have committed to accelerate VMware's revenue to billions of dollars.

VMware also announced the acquisition of Arkin Net, a leader in software-defined data centre security and operations at the event.

The California-based company registered $6.6 billion revenue last year and has more than 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners.

In the second quarter of 2016, VMware made announcements to further innovate its business mobility strategy and product offerings, including a new end-point security solution powered by Tanium -- "VMware TrustPoint" -- that delivers an integrated solution for unified endpoint management and security.

While talking about Cloud adoption in India, Gelsinger said that across the world, the virtualisation is over 80 per cent and in India, it is 30 per cent.

"India has been a backbone of cheap and good professional labour for IT globally and as a result, the country has not necessarily embraced the virtualisation as aggressively as others in the world have. The labour has been at the core of building SI infrastructure in India. That approach no longer remains as costs continue to rise with increase in customer expectation. So they cannot provide it anymore manually," Gelsinger explained.

"Now, we have seen the IT sector moving forward in India. I think India is realising technologies which are helpful for their transformation," he added.

Commenting on the "Digital India" initiative, Gelsinger said that VMware business has been growing steadily in India and the company is building fruitful relationships.

In April 2015, VMware inaugurated its campus in Bengaluru with a $120 million investment. The 438,000 square feet facility in South Bengaluru plays a strategic role in VMware's global growth strategy for the mobile Cloud era.

"This is in line with the company's commitment to invest $500 million in India by 2017," the company said.

VMware India, which employs over 3,500 employees and serves about 4,000 customers in the country, is second in size in R&D and support operations to those at VMware's headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

VMware's presence in India has expanded to six locations, including R&D centres in Bengaluru and Pune.

VMware and Amazon Web Service (AWS) recently announced a new Hybrid Cloud service, "VMware Cloud on AWS" that makes it easier for customers to run applications in a consistent hybrid environment using a common set of familiar software and tools.

(Sourabh Kulesh was in Mumbai at VMware's invitation. He can be contacted at sourabh.k@ians.in)

--IANS

sku/na/bg