The Hindu Business Line : VMWare targets SMEs for virtualisation software

Bangalore June 13 Virtualisation vendor VMWare is now planning to target small and medium businesses (SMB) in India. Virtualisation is a blanket of software that helps administrators manage servers better through a single interface. It masks the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors, and operating systems from server users.

VMWare has sales offices in three cities and will be adding two more by end of year. "Over the last one year, new products and channels have been added to reach out to the SMB," said Mr Jim Lenox, General Manager, Asia South, VMWare.

In India, BPO and ITeS firms are top on the company's sales agenda. Their use of desktops in large quantities, and the access of the desktops to servers for different applications, makes IT management in large centres a complex task. Automation built in to virtual machines aims to simplify this.

"With virtualisaiton, you can now just point, click and deploy a server, so the IT staff will be freed to do more than just racking & stacking," said Mr Lenox, adding that an ITeS company in India has set the bar by using virtualisation to manage 1,300 servers with just three IT staff. Two years ago, the efficiency of a server was only 8 per cent. With virtualisation, it can be extended to 80 per cent.

"Indians have leapfrogged the adoption of virtualisation. Mission critical applications are being entrusted to virtualised servers. There is a desire to cost effectively manage IT," said Mr Lenox. SMB manufacturers are adopting virtualisation software to avoid midnight BIOS repairs and weekend IT maintenance.

The global opportunity, according to Mr Lenox, was huge. "There are 25 million x86 servers and 475 million desktops in the world today. But less than 1 million servers and 5 million desktops are virtualised," he said. Microsoft's Virtual Server is the only competition to the firm.

Calling adoption of virtualisation `extreme' he said that the number of virtual machines will exceed the number of servers shipped this year. Another trend spotted was the change in role of the operating system. "As virtualisation manages the hardware, the OS can be left to handle the user. Virtualisation will handle the hardware and the OS can be chosen depending on the user's preferences."

Recently, the company announced it was selling 10 per cent of its stock to the public. The primary reasons, said Mr Raghu Raghuram, Vice-President, Datacenter and Desktop Platform Products, VMWare, were to reward investors and for employee acquisition and retention.