By Nishant Arora,

Las Vegas : As both large and small and medium enterprises (SMBs) in India aim to modernise their data centres to address customers needs better, top-level VMware executives feel that the company is ready to help them achieve this daunting task.

The task is being facilitated by a robust research and development (R&D) infrastructure the Cloud infrastructure and business mobility leader has built over the years in India.

In the area of network virtualisation and security, the researchers in Pune are contributing significantly to the Next-Gen portfolio in “VMware NSX”.

The R&D centres are developing products that VMware markets to its global customers.

“India has a strong and unique value proposition for us. As countries in the Asia-Pacific and Japan region embrace digital technologies, I am positive that the Indian firms are now busy making plans to modernise their data centres to serve their customers efficiently,” Duncan Hewett, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific and Japan, VMware, told IANS.

The R&D teams in India are also contributing towards key software components to realise the implementation of the Hybrid Cloud.

According to Arun Kumar Parameswaran, Managing Director, VMware India, the country is fast removing “digital” roadblocks towards data modernisation, adopting secure virtualisation technologies and moving on to Cloud.

“When I meet the top Indian executives, apart from the cost, they are concerned about how secure our platforms are. I tell them that with a zero-trust infrastructure in place and cost-effective solutions on offer, VMware is a natural choice for them to keep their data secure,” Parameswaran told IANS on the sidelines of the “VMWorld 2017” conference here.

The company has renewed its focus towards telecom, banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), retail and a burgeoning start-up community as the firms look forward to embracing software-defined data centres.

Transforming networking and security is a main challenge for the company.

“The enterprises are asking about agility, automation and security. All our offerings – be it the network virtualisation and security platform ‘VMware NSX’, VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or ‘Workspace ONE’, remove barriers to Cloud migration and portability, increases IT efficiency and opens up new opportunities for customers,” Parameswaran added.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), VMware is the market share leader in both the worldwide cloud systems management and the data centre automation software markets, based on the 2016 revenue.

In India, the key innovations coming from VMware’s R&D centres are in the fields of software-defined networking, virtualisation, virtual desktops, digital workspace, enterprise mobility management, cloud automation and operations monitoring.

“Several customers in India want to modernise data centres and integrate Public Cloud into their infrastructure. But the penetration of virtualisation is still low in the country. Some of the large government and public companies have not yet virtualised their infrastructure,” Rajiv Ramaswami, Chief Operating Officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware, told IANS.

The State Bank of India is one example where the company has modernised its entire banking experience – from building new apps, virtual desktop infrastructure, access and storage in data centre and secure it.

“Over the time, public cloud services are going to increase in the country. Different companies are at the various stages of cloud adoption and would eventually fall in place,” Ramaswami said.

“Although we are not launching country-specific products but our key offerings have significant R&D components coming from India,” he added.

(Nishant Arora is in Las Vegas at the invitation of VMware. He can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)

—IANS