Balaji Rao, Director – Sales, Enterprise, India & SAARC, VMware, discusses with Jasmine Desai the importance of software defined networking (SDN), hybrid clouds and trends in the Indian market. Excerpts…
What does the next wave of cloud adoption look like?
Most of our customers go through the plain vanilla virtualization as the step toward the cloud journey. The application is no more locked to the hardware and it can move freely. Phase two is towards virtualizing business critical applications and creating DR etc. Most of our customers are in phase two today. The third phase is where there will be a lot more automation in the form of cloud. It implies that provisioning is completely automated. Basically, they will automate processes that are manual, but virtualized. They will automate it further in the form of cloud. This is where the next phase of cloud adoption is going.
How do you think organizations will address the skill-gap issue?
For all products that we have, including the latest ones, we have trained around 7,000 people last year. Thus, there is good availability of trained people in the market. Now, we are focusing on different components of the cloud as far as the training goes.
Secondly, we have trained partners, to make sure that there is no dearth of skill availability. So we have system integrated partners, OEM partners, tier 2 partners. The third area is where we have our professional services. This is for very niche implementations, wherein partners may or may not have capabilities, we come into the picture. Internal IT is becoming IT as a service. We help them in solving dilemmas such as how should the charge-back mechanism be like? How much should they be charging? What is the road-map that the organization has for IT-as-a-service? This whole thing is laid down as IT as a journey. Once it is done, the customer knows the journey forward and fixes the necessary software components.
How will customers resonate with VMware as a storage vendor?
We are not on our way to becoming a storage vendor. We are wrapping storage hardware from hardware vendors with our software so that organizations get low cost SAN. Our product VSAN is in beta version. So there is storage already available in servers in form of disks. These disks are going up in numbers these days so there is lot of storage available in servers. There are certain number of servers and disks, and we are just wrapping that with software to create a SAN. We are just wrapping the disk with a software to create a SAN. Most organizations do not require an expensive SAN. The question is do they require independent storage for various components? Probably not. Organizations are looking at ways and means to reduce the cost of storage. For virtual desktop environment you do not need independent storage in the back-end if you have something like VSAN.
VMware NFX for customers would mean making a lot of changes internally. So how do you see customers going about making these changes?
We are in the early phase in terms of usage, where we can get customers to use the technology. It is promising that if the hypervisor can take care of the compute and memory can take care of the networking as well, there is going to be lot more flexibility in the networking area and lot more ease of architecture in the networking area. This fits very well into our vision of Software Defined Datacenter. Customers want the same level of ease in the way they manage compute and memory, to manage the network.
What trends are paving the way for these products in the Indian market?
We are looking at customers who are already in phase two of virtualization and are looking at software defined data center. Large organizations that also have a lot of legacy architecture take lot of time to move all components to SDC. One clear trend is that customers moving from UX to x86 platform. UX is lot more rigid than x86 platform. The number of VMs running on servers is increasing and the price of x86 is also coming down. Business critical applications are being virtualized and now organizations are looking at how to automate these as they go further.
