In a brief conversation with Business Standard’s Shivani Shinde, Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware, and T Srinivasan, MD of India and SAARC, talk about virtualisation and cloud computing and what they mean for India. Maritz also talks about his plans for the company, Vmware, which with a revenue of $2.9 billion, has been the proponent of virtualisation (the ability to create virtual versions of hardware, operating systems and storage that allows for utility computing) and cloud computing. Excerpts:
You took over the reins of the company at a difficult time in 2008, how has been the journey so far?
When I took over in 2008, I really didn’t see the recession coming. But we have a compelling value proposition in some ways. Virtualisation was essentially the remedy for the client-server generation that many of us have propagated. The ability to take control of servers for driving efficiency into infrastructure, and make things easy and simpler to manage has, and still is a compelling value proposition. We are way ahead of our competitors and boast of a robust team. However, the challenge that I have been working on is to build on that foundation to enable us to scale up as an organisation. In 2008, we were essentially an English speaking company as two-thirds of our revenues came from English speaking geographies of the US, the UK and Australia. In 2010, we are getting 50 per cent of our revenues from outside of the US.
How important is India for VMware?
India is a very important market for us as we have substantial operations here. One in every six employees of VMware is in India. Plus, we also have some of our big system integrators here. India as a market is a tremendous opportunity; by and large Indian firms are 2-3 years behind their US counterparts. We see an opportunity to accelerate our growth using our experience from other markets here. VMware has over 1,200 employees in India.
How ready is the Indian market for cloud adoption?
T Srinivasan, MD of India and SAARC: When we did our research a few months ago, we saw a lot of interest for cloud computing. The journey to the cloud begins with virtualisation, which is still in single high digits. So, there is much more ground to cover before we embark on anything ambitious. The other thing to remember is the dominance of Unix or Risc servers in data centres in India. Whereas cloud uses standardised architecture and hence the use of x86 platform. The market is opening up and we are seeing an uptake on cloud in smaller pockets, like augmenting server efficiency, or using cloud for mail services among the medium enterprises.
The tech industry has had technology frameworks like grid computing, ASP (could not pick up), virtualisation and other services model existing for many years. Why is it then that cloud computing is being hyped so much?
One interesting aspect of cloud computing is that it is enabling the emergence of measuring IT for the first time. I started working in the early 1990s at Intel and Andy Grover then said “if you cannot measure, you cannot manage it”. One of the problems with IT today is you cannot measure. From a CEO’s perspective, the only measure is what percentage of his revenue is spent on IT. There are technologies like virtualisation, with which we now have a level of standardisation too. You can go to a vendor like Amazon and get a standardised model. The ASP model was more akin to the Saas model. Twenty years back you could not have these systems as we could not scale them. Plus, there also has been a huge increase in bandwidth.
Analysts still believe that actual spends are towards server virtualisation. Is that true? And how does VMware address cloud computing?
Yes, server consolidation is still the focus. We think that most of the action and spend is to become more efficient and more cloud like in your internal operations, that’s what we call the private cloud. And that is where most of the action will be in the near future.Certain business above a certain size will adopt the hybrid model and we think cloud is about “how” rather than “where”. It’s about an approach to computing provided on standardisation that is metric driven and will yield interesting change in the industry.