‘We Help Our Indian Customers Become Cloud-smart’: VMware India Chief

Could you tell us about your association with the Indian government and what your work has been like in India so far?

We are almost there in every data center that the government operates. VMware is the digital foundation. We are like the plumbing. We work a lot with National Informatics Centre (NIC) and many states for multiple use cases. If you look at citizen services, we work with a lot of public sector organisations and deliver services to them. We are also very crucial for NPCI’s infrastructure and how they serve their customers. Additionally, we are very critical to how multiple states run their data centers. 

Our then CEO was here three to four years ago. He met with PM Modi and made a commitment to invest USD 2 billion in India in the next five years. We are well ahead of track in terms of realising that promise. So, we continue to invest in India. We continue to do the work that enables us to serve customers in India in ways that we hadn't done before. 

We also work with a lot of public sector banks. For instance, Indian Bank recently went through a merger with Allahabad Bank. We enabled the infrastructure to be migrated and helped run it without any outages. We helped make that transition smooth.

How are you helping your customers be cloud-smart?

We have seen the whole idea of people wanting to adopt cloud as a way to run infrastructure grow. But what's happened is that a lot of customers across the world have said ‘hey, the public cloud is exciting because it's not something that you need to pay for upfront. You can pay as you go, you can scale up rapidly, and you can get almost infinite capacity.’ And so, they went very aggressively into cloud but after the initial success they found that they can't just go with one cloud. Over 70 per cent of the customers that we work with have more than one cloud provider.

Now, managing different tools for different clouds has proven to be difficult for them. They need people with skills in different platforms to be able to take advantage of these. This has created a whole set of new challenges that they need to deal with. 

VMware helps customers take advantage of cloud in a manner that fits them best for their purpose. We announced vSphere 8 and vSan 8 in September. With the former, we now provide the ability to virtualise Data Processing Unit (DPU), which allows customers to reduce their cost of running their servers by about 20 per cent. We also announced VMware Aria, which is our set of management offerings.

In the next two to three years what are your plans? Will there be any difference in what you're offering?

We think our customers are asking us to help them be cloud-smart in India. That's the biggest challenge for our customers. There's a lot of opportunity in this space. They are not looking for one-size-fits-all kind of solutions. They want to be cloud-smart their own unique way. 

A lot of this is happening because of the explosion of applications. Whether you're a bank or a hospital, or a food service, apps are the primary mode of interfacing. VMware essentially provides them with the best possible cloud and app environment for each workload that they have. And that's really the opportunity in the next two to three years that you asked about. VMware is unique because we don't have a point of view that says that there is only one way to approach cloud. We are here to say that cloud opportunity exists for the tailor-made solution for your business. Our mission over the next two to three years is to help Indian customers be cloud-smart.