Interviews

“We Intend To Work With Partners Having Strong Networking Practices”

VMware
Rajiv Ramaswami
Executive Vice President and General Manager, Networking and Security Business, VMware

With the widespread adoption of cloud and mobile in the enterprise, the number of connected devices is only set to increase in the near future. In India, businesses across industry verticals are in various stages of their digital transformation and network virtualization, inarguably is the next logical step in making operations more agile and efficient. VMware, the server virtualization major is betting big on the emerging and relatively new concept of network virtualization.

In a candid interaction with Channel Times, Rajiv Ramaswami, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Networking and Security Business Unit, VMware shares insights on how VMware is witnessing a broad adoption of the technology in India and talks about the channel plans of the company for the large scale adoption of its NSX capabilities among Indian enterprises.

What trends do you see in the software defined environment in India? What are the significant changes happening in the networking space?

Infrastructure is moving from a traditional IT hardware oriented infrastructure to a software oriented infrastructure. Fundamentally, it is driven by better asset utilization and better agility in terms of IT being able to meet the needs of the business.

Networking is too undergoing a major transformation. For years networking was vertically integrated, where the company would make the chips, builds the operating system, put the boxes together and sell it out. Now over the last six years, we have seen major transformations in the bottom part of the infrastructure. Today, most servers are built on inter CPUs and networking switches are built on Broadcom silicon. At VMware, we are at the forefront of making the next big transformation, which is creating a network virtualization layer. Network virtualization is essentially an evolution of traditional networking.

With network virtualization we have introduced the concept called micro-segmentation to address the security concerns of organizations. Micro segmentation applies a firewall to every virtual machine and every application gets its own firewall. We do it by embedding that firewall inside of a hypervisor and distributing it across the entire infrastructure. This allows a very fine grain security control to be implemented inside datacenters. The micro segmentation protects the east-west traffic inside datacenters. Automation is very important for larger scale deployments and we are solving this issue with network virtualization. Another problem is application continuity or disaster recovery and with network virtualization, we ensure that the network and security are always on within data centres.

What is your focus in terms of leading a large scale adoption of NSX solution? What will be your market pitch in terms of getting more customers, big accounts?

We have realized that customers are going to have a mix of clouds. They are going to have their own internal data center and they are going to run some of their applications on public cloud or maybe multiple public clouds. So the concept of cross cloud services is going to take a lead in the near future. We offer a complete set of migration services to enable a customer to move his workloads from on-premise to off-premise and from one cloud to another cloud. We enable our customers to go run, manage, secure and connect their applications across multiple clouds.

We announced two things in VMWorld held recently. One was VMware Cloud Foundation, which effectively is a suite of vSphere and vision; and NSX. So those 3 are integrated, tested together along with a lifestyle manager that takes care of installing, automating everything and this whole stack can now be deployed within a matter of minutes instead of days. We have a whole set of business model, tools and use cases to help customer understand why they need to deploy NSX solution. We also have a large number of reference customers across many different industries. In India, where we are relatively young, we already have three very significant customers who leverage on NSX solution to address their needs. We continue to build our sales force and our SEM support organizations. Lastly, we are working on enabling our key partners in all the regions.

VMware is essentially known for a server virtualization but since past few years you are exploring different fields. Is it an attempt to portray the company as the holistic solution provider?

Yes. VMware started out as a server virtualization and that remains the first pillar of our business. Server virtualization is still the biggest chunk of our business which forms about 30 odd percent of our entire business. However, it has been steadily declining as a portion of our total business, but that doesn’t mean the business is going down. Other areas of our business like the NSX and end user computing are now picking up in a big way. Network virtualization, software defined storage and end-user computing are our next pillars of growth. Cloud infrastructure and business mobility are the two facets of our business and that is where I describe VMware.

What kind of channel engagement you have in India? What is your current channel base in terms of networking partners?

When we talk about our channel engagement, there are broadly three aspects to it. The first one category is the cloud partners such as IBM. The second is our technical alliance partners such as Junipers, Brockham, Aristas, Checkpoint, Palo Alto etc. and third one include the traditional partners. Apart from these partners, we are also looking at large systems integrators that we want to work with. We run a bunch of training programs for our partners to ensure that there they possess the capability and skills to deliver specific projects efficiently. Our approach is essential to focus on a specific set of partners because we want to make sure that we succeed with them in the network virtualization space.

In terms of channel strength in India, I don’t have any specific number at the point, but I think it is fair to say that almost every traditional partner that we work with has some form of networking business. Some have a stronger presence; some do it more as a pass through the business. So we are looking for the ones who have a stronger presence and who can actually help us have the conversation with the potential customers.

So will you be working the current partner ecosystem or you will hire a complete new set of partners for the network virtualization business?

I think it will be a mix of both. Like I said, we already have a whole lot of existing channel partners that we worked with. Some of them have strong networking practices and they are aligned with our vision of NSX as the next platform from a networking standpoint. They have the skills and resources and they need to get it aligned and train their people on NSX from a capability standpoint. So we have shortlisted some of our focused partners. We have also started working with some of the larger SI’s and rolling out training and enablement programs for them. We do need our partners to have a good base and knowledge of our traditional business.

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