'First virtualization, then cloud: Not mere a statement'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Paul Harapin, vice president, business development & cloud, Asia Pacific Japan, VMware in an interaction, with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL, talks about the newer areas of business interest of VMware, tells us whether cloud is more important to them than virtualization and why do they keep saying the latter is the foundation for the former. Excerpts:

CIOL: Which are the newer areas that VMWare is looking into?

Paul Harapin: 1. Providing tools, services for cloud infrastructure

2. Application platforms

3. End-user computing management.

We are in talks with cloud providers and see how we can support them. We are also working with large Indian system integrators (SIs).

We see a huge opportunity in the cloud in application levels. Virtualization has created a transformation around technology in data centres so that they are more agile, and flexible. With data centre virtualization, we are helping them save on IT costs.

In terms of end-user computing management, customers are asking how they can manage devices such as iPad and iPhone, and also provide high levels of service, security and flexibility. We are confident that we will be able to provide our customers an access window so that they can access data, applications from any device, anywhere.

What is squeezed in the middle layer is the application, and VMware is addressing that in two ways. We are building a platform-as-a-service, called cloud foundry, and are also addressing developer market, which is very important for us here in India.

CIOL: With its new focus on cloud, does it mean that VMware is changing its strategy and now cloud will be more important than virtualization?

Paul: Well, Virtualization is the foundation of cloud. So, without virtualization we won't have cloud computing as we know it today. VMware invented virtualization and today it is the underpinning of cloud.

We are working with a lot of hosters, service providers and telcos in India to build public clouds, where certain new cases such as disaster recovery, development, access, or some applications that customers are happy to have outside their data centre. Small medium business market, too, is adopting cloud at a tremendous rate.

Customer will optimize private cloud, and then seek opportunity to use public cloud and look to how can they combine both.

CIOL: 'Virtualization is the foundation for the cloud', we have been hearing this statement from VMware for the past one year. Is this more of a marketing statement?

Paul: No, it is not. The whole reason the on-demand computing or utility computing did not work 15 years ago was because we did not have virtualization then.

If you go back 50 years and look at the mainframe technologies, it was all virtualized, we were running virtual machines and we were time sharing the hardware. What we have brought to computing now in cloud is very similar.

Instead of buying your own computers, run it and still pay when you are not using it, with cloud computing you can say that when you need you use the resource and when not you are paying for it.

Previously in a physical world, if you had a massive increase in hits to your websites, it crashed. However, not since utility computing came into the picture.

So, cloud computing does not really exist without virtualization.

CIOL: Will VMware be looking at providing an Amazon-style cloud?

Paul: At this point our major focus is on working with service provider community, with our vCloud programme, and not necessarily being a cloud provider ourselves. We will the platform provider, but not the infrastructure.