It's work in progress

What are the trends in the virtual stratosphere that you see from where you stand?

From a cloud standpoint we are clearly seeing maturity happening. Also people are looking at private clouds. We have signed up for about 40 service providers for public cloud and that shows we are quickly moving towards maturity. Today even the erstwhile concern about security is a lot muted.

How is the debate over open vs. proprietary and the resultant lock-in issues affecting VMware?

Any VMware product that you see is available on open options. Depending on the level of complexity you want, the levels can be updated. When customers need support and upgrades, they go for other options. Open source alternatives will always be available for any technology.

What impact have the cloud foundry outages left, if any?

In case of VMware we do not run the systems ourselves. In case of Amazon, once the data enters the environment the customer can not come back as it is a one big ticket scenario.

Standards and cloud stacks keep affecting the industry as the compartmentalization of private vs. public has diluted. What's your peek?

Standards are evolving and it is a work in progress. It's important for many areas like audit or reporting. The public cloud will be for non-critical applications as per the level of standards. Most people will start private cloud implementations.

Any interesting developments happening in your portfolio?

Virtualisation's role for mobile devices is the next hot area. We are working with some mobile companies to explore solutions which will give applications on the go. Basically we are moving towards self-service environments.

Your message to CIOs?

As people virtualise more, they need management tools to handle the virtual environments. They need to pay attention to this area.