Hybrid Clouds and other IT rainbows

JAIPUR, INDIA: While he was at C-Change 2014, T Srinivasan, MD VMware India, SAARC took out a few minutes to give a glimpse of how he sees new portfolios, SDN, SDDC, Hardware trends and cloud formats affecting the industry. Excerpts.

What's this year been like for the company?

We have hit good revenue last year and saw some interesting launches in virtualization products like NSX. We continue on the path of Software-Defined Data Centres (SDDC), Hybrid Clouds, Storage etc. With more and more data centres getting virtualized, many new end user drivers will emerge. Acquisition of AirWatch has been a good effort in the direction of how personal applications are aligning in a world of corporate applications. Enterprise customers need new abilities to move inside and outside cloud.

How significant is the v Cloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) offering? Is it apt when we think of re-designing effort and legacy context? How do you reckon comparisons with Amazon etc in the IaaS space?

The comparison does not affect us. Think of enterprises, and we are talking of the need to re-develop certain platforms which is where we fit in well. While vCHS is an offering directed also for partners, it's about expanding our basket in giving customers more choices. Yes, enterprises with legacy applications will find it better, specially if they are running on a private cloud already.

Do you see trends like Open Compute project or hardware commoditization having on-ground implications soon?

It is quite fantastic and the reason it is possible is due to hardware like x86. Virtualisation helps in hardware provisioning here. It would be too soon to see it penetrating large scale enterprises though but gradually it will happen.

And Software Defined Networking (SDN) is good news again?

If you look at how everything is evolving, server virtualization is the first step but one still needs to make changes at network and storage levels. India will catch up on SDN trends but it will pick momentum in later part of the year. We are at a stage of some lighthouse customers now. Today technology is all about abstracting infrastructure so that one can focus on enabling strong and agile applications.