Mr Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, is bullish about technology spending this year, but he also says global happenings — be it the Japan tragedy or the West Asian crisis could have an impact on business and investments.

“We saw good growth and spending in 2009-10; it was like feast after fasting. But we don't live in isolation. We live in a global world and there are still risks in the economy. A Japan or a West Asian crisis will have an impact — we don't quite know what it is yet,” said Mr Maritz, who was in the city on Wednesday.

With revenues of $2.9 billion in 2010, 250,000 customers and 9,000 employees, VMware is the market leader in the virtualisation space and cloud infrastructure.

Mr Maritz counts India as a very important part of VMware's investments. “About 15 per cent of our employees are here and globally we are dependent upon operations and R&D in Bangalore. We are investing heavily in quality and quantity of sales operations. The opportunities are big here.”

VMware delivers virtualisation and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable organisations to scale up their businesses.

Speaking on the flavour of the day – cloud computing, Mr Maritz said, “The whole industry has cloud fever today but we need to anchor ourselves in reality. The reality is IT today is too complex and is actually slowing organisations down. Customers want flexibility in solutions. That is where cloud comes in.”

But it cannot be done in an ad-hoc manner. “Any company of a certain size can't afford to move lock, stock and barrel to the cloud. It has to be done incrementally, keeping in mind what will work for them. Virtualisation helps doo that. It takes existing legacy applications on the cloud journey.”

Virtualisation is the process of scaling up processes by creating a virtual (not actual) version of existing infrastructure to deliver greater compute power and efficiency. VMware is in the business of providing virtual machines and software that will help achieve this.

In India, it has around 1,000 customers such as Bajaj, Patni, Shoppers' Stop, Mahindra and ICICI Bank. Commenting on the adoption of virtualisation in India, Mr T. Srinivasan, Managing Director – India and SAARC, said, “India is in level one of adoption — that of server virtualisation. Next comes storage and network virtualisation.”

comment COMMENT NOW