We intend to write the SDDC story in the Indian Market

In a candid interaction with the DQ Channels, Sunder Balasubramanian, Senior Director, General business, VMware talks about company’s aggressive growth plans in next few years and special focus on SDDC.

You have 20 years of experience in the IT industry. How are you going to implement your expertise to help VMware scale in business in next 3 to 5 years?

Sunder Balasubramanian: VMware is one of the few global companies having double digit growth. There is a fair amount of growth, we see in the virtualization space worldwide. In India, there is an equivalent growth in the virtualization space. Fundamentally, the company is poised for a very aggressive growth in next few years. VMware is a pioneer and the inventor of server virtualization. We have done a good job of building and maturing the market. We are one step ahead of competitors in the server virtualization space.

When you look at the data centers, compute is just one part of it. In the last couple of quarters, we are now looking forward to take the network and storage into the virtual layer. We have abstracted and pulled the compute power and made it available to the virtual infrastructure. We have abstracted compute, network and storage and put it into a virtual layer – this is what we call it as a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). In this ‘liquid world’, where businesses have become agile, we have specifically focused on how do we abstract other components of the data center and make it easily available on-premise, private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid cloud and how do we really get on applications served. That is the focus in terms of SDDC.

Secondly, End User Computing (UC) is the major area where we are making a lot of investment in product as well as in the market development on UC. Lastly, the acquisition of AirWatch completes the story. The market is already aware about server virtualization, but we are putting more emphasis on network and storage virtualization, hence, focusing on good education among partners. We have made the sharp investments in building our partners' capacity.

From the general business perspective, which are the key areas on which the focus would be on so that it aligns with the company’s vision of meeting the targets?

Sunder Balasubramanian: We have opened a brand new office in Bangalore. We have a state of the art Executive Briefing Center where customers can actually experience the network virtualization, storage virtualization, end user computing, and AirWatch. We encourage both our customers and partners to visit the center and actually touch and feel the technologies. Also, we have over 3000 engineers based out of Bangalore and based out of other regions available to assist our customers. We have also focused heavily on R&D division.

Since last couple of years, your foray has been into the cloud and mobility space. But somehow it is perceived in the market that you have been unable to shake that virtualization company perception as such?

Sunder Balasubramanian: We have created server virtualization space and therefore, there is a strong association with virtualization. It is not a negative thing really. Cloud is nothing but a big virtualized infrastructure and who else can do it better than VMware. We take virtualization from compute and move it to storage and network – that’s what we define as a cloud or SDDC.

How much of your time and expertise is going on in building the cloud capacity among your partners?

Sunder Balasubramanian: Partners are our extended sales arms. They go through same training what the internal staff goes from. The person who does internal training is the one responsible for partners training. So there is no differentiation in terms of training and certification among our internal sales force as well as partners. Last year, VMware spent around 300 million in partner development incentives and rewards out of a 6 billion turn over. We are very strongly a partner oriented company and we don’t shy away from making the investment on enabling the partners.

While talking about your cloud service offerings, vCloud Air service, as per the market statistics, is slowly emerging as the number two after AWS. What kind of USPs of your offering that has made it possible to reach to that level?

Sunder Balasubramanian: It is not fair to compare VMware with AWS or Google. What did well for us is the enterprise customer credibility. The vCloud Air service is offering a lot of options to the customers. So once you get to SDDC, you can put your data on premise, hybrid cloud or public cloud. It is not same as other giant cloud players.

How difficult is to change the mind set of customers and convince them to move to the cloud platform?

Sunder Balasubramanian: Periphery applications and non mission critical applications are easy to move to the Cloud. One can move his mission critical applications on the cloud and keep it private. So how do you deploy the form factor is the major factor cloud adoption in India. Permutations and combinations are driven by lots of rules and regulations. For example, BSFI and government applications will not go on a public cloud. Business is getting very aggressive and IT has become a service. Therefore, CIOs would definitely want to move to SDDC. Software defined element becomes very important in the data centers because business use is becoming very agile.

Post AirWatch acquisition, how you are capitalizing on the rising opportunity in the mobility domain?

Sunder Balasubramanian: AirWatch is getting integrated with Vmware and more and more VMware people are interacting with AirWatch customers now. AirWatch really brings sophistication of making sure that the critical part of data is protected. AirWatch is a very strong platform to address BYOD concept.

As per the market reports, you have cut down your Direct Managed Partners size from 80-85 to 36. What was rational behind cutting down the size of partners?

Sunder Balasubramanian: Fundamentally, there are three things: hunger, competency and capability. I would not call it over penetrated. Right now we need to sell the SDDC story which means only showing the committed and articulating the story and getting the accounts for VMware. We don’t want to tone down the partners but we are very flexible about who fits better in that list.

SIs bring the capability and they are instrumental in taking SDDC forward. We are more focusing on the top ten SIs. Also, we do persona based scaling for our managed partners. We recognize and acknowledge partners to bring opportunity for us. If a partner is profitable, then he is going to bring more opportunities for VMware.

After taking the new responsibility, what are the key thrust areas on which you will more focus on?

Sunder Balasubramanian: First of all the partner scalability. Secondly, how do we articulate the SDDC story in the market. The company is the phase of transition from a product company to a moreover holistic data center company and how to actually articulate to the customers that will be the focus area for me.