CIOL: How do you look at the economic recession? And what is Novell doing to cash in on the scenario?

SM: The recession plays in favour of virtualization. Technology that inculcates virtualization is cost effective because it helps you to consolidate and utilize hardware better.

Every CIO is today under pressure to see how he can increase the utilization of his expensive hardware from 20-30 per cent to 60-70 per cent. So, a technology that enables it gets a fillip during tough times.

There are three areas that Novell will be looking at:

Consolidation Planning: Novell can help people to make better plans, which allows them to execute those plans much faster in a more reliable way. If you consolidate your data centre faster, you realize ROI much faster.

So, Novell can help people to shrink budget and better manage their budget by allowing them to de-risk some of the consolidation projects by giving them better plans and building tighter plans with less resources.

Virtual Capacity Management: As the virtual machines sprawl, eventually you will need to add new hardwares in order to deal with the incoming request for new virtual machines.

Platespin Recon gives increased visibility into the virtualized space. With Recon, you can understand resources, recapture resources and better utilize the new environment. Thus allowing people to defer from the purchase of new hardware, which is otherwise an additional burden.

Disaster Management. Today people look at protecting their workload environment. They tend to spend a lot of money to protect the top of the system and spend very less for the rest of the system.

We have some innovative ways to protecting entire servers and also give you optimized performance, i.e. how quick you can restore your workload at a very reasonable price.

CIOL: Where do you see the demand coming from, especially during the tough time?

SM: We see a high level of interest in the government, banking and SMB sectors. In the last six months we have seen at least twenty large customers (40 per cent from SMBs) for the Platespin products, which was launched in the India market six-eight months back.

It is an interesting phenomenon because SMBs have always thought that disaster recovery is for large enterprises.

Actually this piece of technology that combines virtualization into disaster recovery, brings it down to the reach of more organizations in Indian market place. It is an enabling technology for an emerging market like India.

Platespin is growing to be one of our strongest product pipelines and we hope to see an increase in demand as we further move into the market.