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Exclusive Interview: Prajit Nair, Director Sales, VMware India

In an Exclusive Interview with DQ Channels, Prajit Nair, Director Sales- End User Computing, VMware India shared his business perspective and approach

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Ankit Parashar
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Exclusive Interview

In an Exclusive Interview with DQ Channels, Prajit Nair, Director Sales- End User Computing, VMware India shared his business perspective and approach during the lockdown situation and WFH scenario. He shared VMware India's different strategies to provide solution training and required upskilling to the partners.

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We all have now got used to remote working through collaboration tools during the lockdown since 25 March. What are the other technology trends that you have noticed?

The current situation has changed every facet of our lives over the last few weeks. While many IT organizations were accustomed to employees working from home, no one was prepared for the sheer scale of remote working as evidenced recently. As our CEO, Pat Gelsinger said, “This will permanently change the way we work, learn, connect, worship, and simply how we live in community with each other.”

The ongoing situation is resulting in several changes that are manifesting in some obvious and some not so obvious ways in which organizations look at productivity, network use, and application consumption.

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Enterprises – Productivity and collaboration tools will become increasingly important as employees continue to work remotely and access cloud applications from the confines of their homes. There would be an increased need for delivering corporate applications on any device securely through solutions beyond VPNs. This would lead to demand for solutions that manage non-domain joined machines like laptops, home pcs, rental laptops, corporate PCs shipped home during the lockdown, etc through modern endpoint management tools like VMware Workspace One.

Education – The adoption of online meeting tools such as Zoom, Hangouts, Microsoft Teams will increase video engagement and collaboration.

Healthcare – As healthcare professionals continue to work from hospitals, delivering healthcare to patients, network activity and client applications like virtual desktops will be heavily used to access electronic medical records and telemedicine.

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How easy or difficult was it for enterprises to switch over to the WFH environment at such a large scale?

Enterprises who had a well-defined Business Continuity Planning strategy in place well before the current situation, have found the transition to remote working models smoother and quicker. Organizations with strategic technology investments that ensure seamless connectivity, secure and flexible work environments have been able to mobilize quickly based on a strong IT architecture. In today’s state of the workforce, it’s more critical than ever that an employee is enabled to work remotely on any app on any device without compromising security.

As global digital transformation leaders, VMware is well equipped to accelerate the performance of organizational assets that are now remote. VMware is also well positioned to provide the elastic capacity to scale new virtual desktop users instantly and on-demand by leveraging Microsoft Azure/WVD via our Horizon Cloud on Azure Solution or the VMware Cloud on AWS. This allows customers to leverage VMware-based elastic capacity in the cloud in under 2 hours. As remote working continues to be the new norm, the focus is on choosing the right technology partner, one that can help organizations rapidly transform their infrastructure to allow remote working without losing out on productivity, efficiency, or security.

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Did SaaS adoption surge during this period?

Given the current situation where employees working remotely, companies are increasingly looking at adopting cloud-based services and digital workplaces, on an urgent basis. As solution providers, we have the advantage of supporting our customers virtually. Many of our customers and partners have asked us how we can help them maintain business continuity during these times. VMware has the capabilities to help customers across the globe enable their employees to work remotely, maintain productivity, increase connectivity, and provide for continuous secure access to applications regardless of the endpoint.

How does VMware provide solution training and required upskilling to the partners?

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As customers navigate these challenging times, VMware is working closely with partners to accelerate enterprise mobility and ensure that our end-customers implement their business continuity plans seamlessly in a secure environment, with minimal disruptions. Our partners are working closely with the customers to understand and anticipate their needs and support them with solutions they find value in. Our partners continue to act as trusted advisors, helping customers adapt and thrive.

We have made it easy for our partners to engage with us through a single agreement which enables them to pick the solution of their preference, to address and invest in training and upskilling their resources to meet market demands. In addition, we are especially funding programs to train and upskill our identified partners on our virtual desktop solution Horizon on-premise, Horizon on cloud offerings, and Workspace One secure endpoint management solution which delivers on any app on any device securely. We are working with partners who are able to cover and address all segments of the market across the country. These trainings are provided through virtual training programs enabled on virtual labs which gives a hands-on feel and experience to our partner resources.

The lockdown has thrown up an extraordinary business continuity problem. Do you see the challenge as an opportunity for IT Solution Providers and integrators? 

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Business Continuity Planning is top of the agenda for CIOs right now and we offer comprehensive solutions to meet those demands. We are doing everything we can to support the well-being of our extended VMware family -- our employees, customers, and partners. As leading innovators in enterprise technology, we understand how our timely business continuity solutions can help the communities at large to overcome some of the unprecedented challenges they have been facing. Our business is predicated on building the infrastructure and solutions optimized for the workplace of the future and we will continue to support organizations through our offerings.

VMware offers strategic solutions for the datacentre through our SDDC (Software-defined data center) solutions, private and hybrid cloud solutions, application modernization and management solutions, and cloud security solutions. We have received additional requests for cloud-based services and digital workplace as well. We have had requests where companies wanted to deploy solutions in their companies that will be quick to deploy, can maintain productivity, increase connectivity, and ensure access to any app on any device without compromising security. We are witnessing an increase in the number of customer inquiries about working with our Professional Services Team to help implement the technology rapidly and also train the teams on the technology.

Coming to the industry vertical, not all sectors have been able to respond to the change equally. Which verticals do you think have been adopting it faster?

While the IT industry has emerged as one of the firsts to rapidly adapt, the world is experiencing an unexpected spurt in the momentum of digital adoption, that is likely to carry forward and become permanent in the next few months. As agile business leaders align their strategies to consumer habits and demand, various industries are likely to follow suit. The need is felt across industry verticals that service customers in any form to rapidly adapt to the new way of working from home. In addition to the IT-enabled services sector,  we are seeing segments like Telcos, Banks and Financial Institutions, Pharmaceutical industries and even manufacturing organizations that are slowly planning to come out of lockdown, to be responding positively and enabling solutions to engage their employees and partners through secure work from anywhere solutions.

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