Competition keeps Vmware vigilant

The cloud is crowded today. With rivals, new challenges and adoption issues mushrooming at a brisk pace, virtualization pioneers like VMware are bracing themselves up for the changing market dynamics.

Founded in 1998 and acquired by EMC in 2004, clocking a revenue mark of $1.9 billion in FY08, VMware today boasts of 130,000 customers and claims to have spread its virtualization expertise across platforms, infrastructure automation, infra management etc.

Jim Lenox, general manager, Asia South, Vmware, has been taking care of new and existing markets and strategic partnerships in regions like South East Asia. Here, he talks about Indian enterprise market, security alarms and competitive onslaught in this chat with Pratima H of CyberMedia News.

The recent past has been a hotbed of acquisition activities. With wins like Dunes (virtualization orchestration specialist), Foedus, Thinstall (application virtualization software), etc, what’s your inorganic direction ahead?

Acquisitions are faster and cheaper alternatives for growth for sure. Talent and supplementary technology areas are good drivers. Thinstall made sense on desktop strategy. Our recent deals have enabled us to prove that VMware is not just into managing hardware resources but in application areas too.

Oracle’s acquisition of Virtual Iron, which has almost been tagged as a cheaper alternative to VMware, or the acquisition of Xen Hypervisor have stirred up the market. Citrix’s win on Xen Source, and other deals by Microsoft and Red Hat apart from their organic build-up, shows signs of how aggressive other players are getting. Does that bother you?

Well, all I can say is that competition is always good. It keeps us vigilant. We certainly don’t take all the competitive action around lightly and we know that we are sharing a space here. So, though we are in a lead as pioneers, we keep getting better and extending the gap as we keep investing and evolving.

On-chip virtualization is emerging as another hot area of activity between chip makers and other players. Intel and Virtual Iron are some examples to begin with. Also we are witnessing OEM deals around companies like Dell (that has bought virtualization-optimized SCSI storage company Equal Logic), IBM, HP etc. Would it be a complementary streak or another competitive area for virtualization specialists?

We have good partnerships with both Intel and AMD. It might appear and sound competitive but it’s actually complimentary. We have enabled and worked closely with silicon specialists. We are working together on architectures and many other areas. Be it an OEM or SI partners, nobody has virtualization as architecture and we help them better their solutions.

Security concerns have almost hammered the virtualization technology to fatigue by now. There have also been instances of bugs being spotted by the likes of Core Security Technologies, including application bugs. How are you grappling with the security vulnerability?

It is indeed a big challenge. Virtual machines, as a logical replica of the physical ones, have their own uniqueness and own set of priority areas and security is high up in that list.

VMSafe is an initiative to make a virtual machine as much secure as possible. We have worked with security-related patches and shared APIs with vendors. There are other solutions coming out in 2009. We are always working on allaying concerns on security and taking care of it in all our existing and upcoming actions.

How exciting are Indian enterprises in terms of adoption rate?

Indian space can be categorized in two ways. First is the big-ticket investment segment and second are those with legacy or internal IT environments. Here virtualization is typically the first step to ascend on the IT side. Whether it’s a legacy customer having a two-hour conversion exercise or a big one consolidating many servers, enterprises in India have started consolidating and reaching a point of perfect adoption.

We have five offices in India and the adoption is picking great across sectors like banks, BPOs, manufacturing space and even Dairies. It is an interesting market for us with unique driving forces here. Support is another area of high-priority business here.