Why India is adopting VMware, despite other choices

BANGALORE, INDIA: Paul Harapin, vice president, business development & cloud, Asia Pacific Japan, VMware in an interaction, with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL, touches upon how cloud will be a different, but not difficult, for VMware and how does it look at its competitors. Excerpts:

CIOL: Do you think that unlike in your virtualization journey, where you were the pioneers, you will face more difficulties in the journey to cloud?

Paul: It is a different journey, however, not difficult. VMware is probably one of the biggest cloud providers. Some large vendors as well as small cloud providers are now building clouds based on a VMware technology.

Cloud is not a destination or a product, it is a way of doing computing and because it is flexible there will be many different types of clouds.

I am seeing community clouds coming up, where local counsels have customized services provided to them by cloud provider.

We give the flexibity to be in private cloud, and at the same time give the benefits of public cloud. We can take VMware applications and move them into our data centre. The customers can leave them there and VMWare will run it for them. The customer can just bring them in for disaster recovery or for a peak load.

We are still in the early days of that transformation and that would continue to flow through over the next few years. So, there is a lot of opportunity for us in the data centre, at the application level.

CIOL: How do you look at your competitors, such as Microsoft and Citrix, who are in the virtualization space as well in the cloud world?

Paul: We are very focused around virtualization and the cloud. We have reinstalled customer base, service provider base, and the technologies that we have and continue to enhance customer’s existing environment and building on that. We are also providing the customers a long term vision. We are not asking them to just virtualize, but are also saying that their applications need to change as well.

CIOL: Isn’t that something that your competitors also claim to be doing so?

Paul: Well, I think a lot of companies say they are doing the same. Just because you put the name on it does not mean it is the same thing. The proof in the pudding is that we have over 3,00,000 customers and are growing. We are seeing countries like India adopting our technology fast, even though there are choices out there.

We listen to our customers, and also look at what our competitors are doing, however, do not make our decisions based on what the latter do.

CIOL: When it comes to cloud, is India taking a wait and watch strategy or is it already in the phase where you see the cloud happening?

Paul: Yes. India is adopting virtualization very quickly. There are some natural synergies for a lot of organizations, particularly SMBs to move to cloud very quickly.

Even enterprise customers have also started to analyze how cloud will impact their business. Some customers, especially SMBs, are aligned to move to cloud very fast because it allows them to get moving quickly, and since costs are more optimized. Larger enterprises and government customers will always take a slightly more cautious approach.

The business imperatives and benefits are so overwhelming that technology innovates around areas such as security. A whole new industry has popped up around our technology that helps customers on virtualized firewalls, virtualized PABX systems, or virtualized IDS.

CIOL: What would be the best practices that you would advise enterprises who are looking at moving from virtualization towards cloud?

Paul: The way customers have started to look at cloud computing is very similarly to the way that they looked at virtualization.

There were a couple of problems when they started with virtualization. The ones that jumped on first were using old Windows NT applications, which were not supported. Hardware was not supporting it and so they virtualized applications because it allowed them to use all the modern hardware. They saw that with this other application were not being impacted.

So they started testing them in other environments also and today are running everything from their SAP and oracle to all their in house applications on VMware.

Cloud is also taking a similar journey. Some have started using cloud, but in a slower pace. Once a large bank or company does it, you will see everyone doing it as well.

However, cloud is not a either/or situation, it is a journey. A journey where VMware can take its customers from their data centre and from the public community of service providers to a hybrid, or data centre only or cloud model.