“VDI Business Will Increase More than 15% in 2014” Ganesan Arumugam, VMware India

After gaining 85% market share in server virtualization and 65 % in UC, VMware is aggressively pursuing VDI opportunities in India this year. Kalpana Singhal in an exclusive interaction with Ganesan Arumugam, Director, Channels & SMB, VMware learns more about their channel strategy and emerging trends in the tech industry.

Q1 Kindly share your focus other than cloud?

Ans – More than the cloud our major focus area is software defined data center that is how we can make data center mainstream of our virtualization portfolio, second is private cloud and UC, like how we can proliferate and increase our customer adoption in UC space and the third is cloud services that is all about leveraging on our VSPP partners in terms of growing the revenue with the existing partner as well as carrying the new service provider partner in to VSPP.

Q2 Globally VMware has witnessed a significant growth in the first quarter of 2014. Can you please share some India specific financial results?

Ans – No, we cannot share the India specific figures because we are not a legal entity and we are here part of global company. As per the Gartner we have 85% market share in server virtualization and 65% in UC category. According to recent Gartner study we are at number five.

Q3 VMware has unveiled a new version of its Horizon virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in India which according to you can handle 100 % desktops. How different and effective it is from your existing VDI lineup and will it incur an additional cost for your existing customers?

Ans – If you look at our end user computing platform perspective we have end to end solution. We have virtual desktop, managing the physical desktop as well as work space to deliver the application for the BI kind of environment. Under UC we bring in some of the new features and integration part of it for example how you do the application distribution and how you can deliver the applications to the desktop on WAN acceleration. Lot of enhancements has come now on the product side.

Q4 As compared to mature markets like US, Australia and Western part of the World, India is still in its infancy stage regarding adoption of VDI and cloud. How do you intend to drive the adoption of your product line up in the country?

Ans – Talking about the adoption rate I think it has just crossed the product session. In terms of the early adopters of any of the product or technology comes in, there are early adopters and we have just completed that and now it is more of a wide spread adoption. Therefore, we expect the market to grow much faster in the VDI space in India by next year. As far as we are concerned, now we already have UC specialist to focus more on the product line there will be a specialist sales force, technical team to address market and then we have focused partners, partner enablement and giving them training. So there will be a separate engine that will be driving the VDI business.

Q5 Give a brief about how your end to end solutions are better than that of players like IBM & Dell?

Ans – We are not into application, middleware and the database side. We are not in to that position. When we say end to end that means we are in to end to end infrastructure. Today if you look at IT infrastructure of any organization, their datacenter piece of it then with our virtualization solution we are actually virtualizing the entire datacenter. The other piece of the IT infrastructure is end user computing. That is Laptops, Desktops and the devices they have all about managing. From that perspective from the infra virtualization and the cloud and the management part of it we are there but we are not in to middleware or database and application. Wherein, IBM plays more on middleware database content management. On the application side you have Oracle, SAP but we are not into that space.

Q6 What are the challenges in India in respect to VDI & cloud adoption among enterprise?

Ans- You can’t compare the VDI business potential or revenue with the developed markets like US, Japan or Australia but if you look at it from the growth rate it will be much better than those markets who have early adopted this technology. Though we have smaller base of VDI market but the growth will be much more and we expect this growth to be more than 15% this year. As far as cloud is concerned it’s already happened. We have grown our cloud services from public to subscription model and that will continue to grow further.