As enterprise community looks up to embracing cloud and virtualization techniques, VMware is one name which has earned a lot of respect and technological finesse when it comes to handling enterprise cloud solutions, in an exclusive chat with ChannelDrive.in, Ganesan Arumugam, Senior Director, Partners, VMware talks about how and why VMware is different from its closest competition and how it is helping the enterprise move towards their journey to cloud.
How does VMware look at its partner ecosystem in India?
We have different categories of partners, we have solution providers, then we have consulting and integration partners – these are partners like Wipro, TCS, Infosys – this is where we are involved in end to end large scale projects.
And third category of partners is our OEM partners who bundle our products with their solutions in the form of server and storage products.
Service providers or VSPP partners who provide cloud services. We work with them on pay per use licensing model. We have 40 service providers in India globally we have 2000 service providers. Under this category we are working with companies such as Wipro, HCL, Netmagic, Tata Communications, TCS, Sify, Ctrls etc in India.
Tier two partners the resellers or VARs, they bring 50 per cent of our business. We have various programs for them.
What is your go to market strategy in India?
We have three nati0nal distributors in the form of Ingram Micro, Avnet and Redington – so all our tier 2 partners work with these distributors. We work with these three distributors in terms of partner enablement and development and design the overall go to market plan for our partners.
And to support all this, we have our own sales and pre sales teams who work hand in hand with the partners and we make annual business plan with the partners.
Cloud also brings confusion to the partner community, how does VMware make sure that partner is confident enough to sell cloud and virtualization to their customers?
In our understanding, 85 per cent of the customers, they do their own data centers, they invest in their own data center development, and that is where our partners are focused in terms of supplying the license and implementing the solutions.
How can a partner increase profitability with associating with cloud?
There are three ways to achieve profitability with cloud.
Firstly, when our partners sell their hardware in terms of servers and storage, and help the customers set up their own cloud, so when they sell solutions for setting up their own cloud – this has got huge potential
Secondly, partners can offer their own cloud service. We have our VSPP partner program – where in partners build in services, it may be backup as a service, storage as a service, or infrastructure as a service or software as a service, they provide there services to their customers.
Third level of partners can white label cloud services or they can resell the cloud services from other cloud service providers like Microsoft, Amazon, Sify or Netmagic. But at the end of day, a partner’s strength lies in their relationship with the customers and building on their relationships, partners are adopting to the current trends and supplying the demands coming from their customers.
All the above initiatives are helping our partners grow with the cloud.
Where is the most action happening? Private cloud or public cloud?
Private cloud is quite well taken by the enterprise community as a lot of customers are looking at having their own data center. And according to our understanding, in the next three years, customers will shift only 15 per cent of the workloads to the public cloud. Remaining 85 per cent workload will remain in their own data center. So customers are looking forward to setting up their private clouds. However, some of the periphery applications, can be moved to the public cloud.
How many resellers does VMware has in India?
We have 75 resellers who are doing 50 per cent of our business. Rest of the 50 per cent is coming from OEM and SI partners. And if we look at our total business, it is all coming from our partners. We are a 100 per cent partner driven organization. At present, we do not want to increase the number of partners in India but we do want to increase the business coming from our partners.
Where is the biggest cloud adoption happening in India?
When it comes to current scenario, segments such as IT and ITES, government, banking and finance and manufacturing are adoting cloud technologies.
And moving forward, I think there is huge potential for the SMB segment, they are just starting with virtualisation now, SMBs have not yet ventured much into private cloud. This year and next year, we are expecting major business coming in from private cloud.
What are some of the challenges that cloud computing is facing today? How secure it is?
The challenge is pretty simple and it comes in the form of enterprise deciding on how much of data can be out on the cloud? The security part of it is a challenge today. But it is more of a mindset problem as cloud is as secure as any other technology.
We provide three layers of security. I don’t see there is any problem on the security front. It is more of an initial inhibition towards adoption of a new technology.
How do you look at the competition especially coming from Microsoft and Oracle?
As a technology enabler, we are three years ahead of our competition. For example today they are talking about V Motion, storage V Motion and DR solution, but we are having this for the past three years.
That is how we have moved on the storage side. We are working on how our customers can do storage virtualization and still it can be a part of the virtual platform, we are not only talking about the compute side.
When our competition is catching up on server virtualization, we are already talking about entire data center virtualization today. That’s what we talk about in our strategy, SDDC software defined data center, where we are talking about virtualising not only the compute layer, but also on storage, networking and the complete management as an integrated suite.
On the other hand, our competition relies on multiple vendors and multiple solutions to come close to what we are offering as an integrated suite. And we are already taking about network virtualization today.
Today we are talking about multi hyper visor management and when our competition is talking about basic management, we are talking about pro active management, through our operations management products. And in terms of VM density,
I can comfortably say that on an average, our customers run about 20 VMs in a server. Whereas when we talk about our competition, their best case scenario is about 7 or 8 VMs in a server. So these are some of the basic technological leads that we have over our closest competition.
Additionally, we are ahead in terms of the footprint of hypervisor, our hypervisor runs into a few MBs whereas our competition has it in a few GBs. So it is like 300 MB vs 15 GB.
So, today we are technologically better positioned than our closest competition. We have a better roadmap, we have solutions to virtualise the entire data center so that the customers can have the benefits of virtualization spread across their data center environment. So they can give special treatment to a virtual machine, which is running a critical application. We can define it as a VIP VM, so it gets all the resources in the storage and the network.
