by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Ideas, Entrepreneurship, Success Stories
Arun Kumar Parameswaran
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : When it comes to delivering enhanced user experiences in the Cloud and mobile-first era, global Cloud infrastructure and business mobility leader VMware sees massive growth opportunities in India — and telecom is going to be an interesting arena for the Dell EMC-owned company.
According to Arun Kumar Parameswaran, Managing Director, VMware India, the trend in India is in line with the changes being witnessed in the global telecom landscape.
“The new entrant [Reliance Jio] has altered the entire dynamics of the telecom landscape in more ways than we can imagine. The user experiences are happening at a very different cost structure now. Here, VMware is strongly placed to deliver value, both in terms of delivering agility and automation, while continuing to reduce the cost,” Parameswaran told IANS in an interview.
“The trend is consistent across the world. Telecom operators are improving cost equations, agility, scalability and resource utilisation, etc,” he added.
After establishing its presence in the banking and government institutions in the country, VMware is bullish on the vast telecommunications sector to further fuel its growth.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, who visited India in October last year, had told IANS that “the one sector that we have started to have much more success is the telecommunication sector”.
VMware recently entered into a strategic partnership with Bharti Airtel. “Bharti Airtel will be making extensive use of our products,” Gelsinger said.
In September, Vodafone entered into a software licensing agreement with VMware. As part of the agreement, VMware will be one of the vendors to support the operator’s global rollout of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) to accelerate its delivery of future products and services in a rapid, cost-efficient manner.
The game-changer for the telecom industry, said Parameswaran, is 5G — and VMware, with its production-proven NFV platform, is ready to help telcos set off on the 5G journey.
“In the next 18-24 months, 5G will start showing up on everyone’s radar and this is going to bring an entirely new cost infrastructure, along with a complete virtualised experience. We are investing heavily on this front because this is where the future lies,” noted Parameswaran.
Earlier this month, Tech Mahindra partnered VMware to jointly develop, market and deliver solutions to accelerate network transformation for Communication Service Providers (CSPs).
The companies will combine VMware’s NFV platform with Tech Mahindra’s Network Services to help global CSPs accelerate new service delivery, open new market opportunities and improve IT and business economics.
At the “Mobile World Congress 2018” in Barcelona, Spain, this week, VMware demonstrated some exciting turn-key solutions and NFV use cases that give CSPs the ability to build a transformative architecture.
When it comes to business mobility, Parameswaran feels India is not lagging behind.
“The Indian banking sector adopted mobile at par with most of the Western economies. Office workplaces are transforming, thus enabling functions right at your doorsteps. In fact, use cases in India have become a lot more complex,” Parameswaran emphasised.
The Indian enterprises are slowly but steadily moving towards adopting software-defined data centres (SDDCs).
“Three-four years back, a lot of people thought it was like VMware’s new jargon for old wine. In a recent meeting with CIOs, they asked me: So what are you guys doing on SDDCs? I told him that we are the ones who created the vision around SDDCs and are here to help you adopt those,” said Parameswaran, who has over 22 years of hi-tech experience across Asia Pacific and the US.
Today, almost all Indian enterprises wish to move their operations to SDDCs.
“This is the new architecture and everyone is looking at its adoption for a seamless compute, network, automation experience and what not. It is now widespread,” Parameswaran told IANS.
VMware Cloud is now available on the market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) which brings VMware’s SDDCs to the AWS Cloud, allowing customers to run applications across VMware vSphere-based private, public and hybrid Cloud environments, with optimised access to AWS services.
“True enterprise workload mobility will happen soon in India and VMware Cloud on AWS will be a big driving force, giving customers agile, scalable and secure experiences,” the executive added.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Markets, Networking, Sales, SMEs, Technology
New Delhi : Global IT security firm Quick Heal’s Enterprise Security brand Seqrite has discovered an advertisement on DarkNet forum that claims to have access to data of over 6,000 Indian businesses that include Internet Service Providers (ISPs), some of the key government organisations, banks and enterprises.
Seqrite Cyber Intelligence Labs, along with its partner seQtree InfoServices, tracked the advertisement where the unknown hacker has priced the information at 15 Bitcoins (nearly Rs 42 lakh) and is offering network takedown of affected organisations for an unspecified amount, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.
“This can be a major tool of mass disruption if a non-state actor gets hands on it,” Seqrite said on its website.
The organisations whose services may be at risk are: UIDAI (Aadhaar), Idea Telecom, Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), Flipkart, DRDO, Aircel, Reserve Bank of India, BSNL, SBI, TCS, ISRO, ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund, VMWare, Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation and various Indian state government portals, among others.
“We have alerted the government authorities well within time. If someone gets control over this massive data that is currently up for sale on DarkNet, the above mentioned organisations and enterprises can get affected,” Rohit Srivastwa, Senior Director, Cyber Education and Services at Quick Heal, told IANS.
Following a detailed investigation, researchers identified the affected organisation as India’s national Internet registry IRINN (Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers) which comes under the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI).
As a precautionary measure, Seqrite reached out to the government authorities and Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), recommending to them to alert all potentially affected organisations and urge them to change passwords and get their servers and systems patched with latest updates.
According to the researchers, the seller claims to have the ability to tamper the IP allocation pool, which could result in a serious outage or Denial of Service (DoS) attack-like condition.
“This could impact various content delivery network (CDN) and hosting providers as well. If the hacker gets an interested buyer, then an attack on the system could disrupt Internet IP allocation and affect Internet services in India,” the company said.
“Along with the access, the hacker is also selling credentials and various contractual business documents and claims to have access to a large database of Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC),” it added.
The IRINN provides allocation and registration services of IP addresses and autonomous system numbers.
It comes under NIXI which “is the neutral meeting point of the ISPs in India with the primary objective being the facilitation of exchange of domestic Internet traffic between peering ISP members”.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Markets, Medium Enterprise, SMEs, Technology
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
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Corporate, Corporate Governance, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
Las Vegas : With businesses in India aiming to embrace modern data centres and extend the benefits of mobility to employees, Cloud infrastructure and business mobility leader VMware has intensified efforts to engage with top-level government officials.
After establishing its presence in the country in 2005, VMware India has grown to become a strategic contributor to the company’s global innovation engine.
The R&D team in India plays a critical role in product development in all of VMware’s strategic imperatives — the software-defined data centre (SDDC), Hybrid Cloud and end-user computing.
“We make it a point to meet senior Indian leaders and officials whenever they are in the US. We met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Finance Minister Arun Jaitely and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu recently and offered to increase investment in India to enhance our footprint in the country,” Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operating Officer, Customer Operations at VMware, told IANS in an interview here.
“Going forward, we are set to meet senior government officials like Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant to extend support (for initiatives such as Digital India and Make in India) from our most strategic location globally, which is India,” India-born Poonen noted on the sidelines of the ongoing “VMWorld 2017” conference here.
The company’s research and development and support operations in India are second in size and scale only to those at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
Developers in Bengaluru and Pune contribute crucial components of VMware’s key technologies. The main technology areas are software-defined networking, virtualisation, virtual desktops, digital workspace, enterprise mobility management, cloud automation and operations monitoring.
In line with its commitment to invest $500 million in India by the end of this year, VMware in 2015 announced the inauguration of its state-of-the-art campus in Bengaluru — set up with an investment of $120 million.
The Dell-owned firm’s presence in India has now expanded to six locations, including R&D centres in Bengaluru and Pune.
“Mobility is fast changing India and the lifestyle of the next generation. The challenge ahead is to modernise data centres to meet the growing demand. VMware and its parent company Dell are looking at modernising the data centres — be it for enterprise, commercial or government,” said Poonen who will be visiting India in November.
Poonen joined VMware in August 2013 and is responsible for worldwide sales, services, ecosystems and alliances, global marketing and communications and cross-portfolio product marketing.
As enterprises the world over are moving from data centres to Cloud and desktop to mobile, said Poonen, the time is ripe for VMware to unleash its full potential in India.
“The Indian enterprises and small and medium businesses (SMBs) are looking at embracing mobile Cloud. We are capable of handling millions of devices and find no better place in the world than India to push for innovation that is at the cusp of digital transformation,” Poonen told IANS.
In July, VMware announced the opening of its first “AirWatch” data centre in India. The new data centre will deliver industry-leading AirWatch Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) technology to businesses.
The AirWatch technology lays the foundation for delivering digital workspaces through “Workspace ONE”.
“Our AirWatch business is rapidly growing in India. We are looking at sectors like banking and finance, telcos and manufacturing which want efficient and modern data centres with secure end points,” said Poonen, an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Powered by AirWatch technology, Workspace ONE is an enterprise platform that empowers all employees to easily and securely use the IT tools, applications and devices they need to be successful at their jobs.
“We have a very good team in India. The Dell teams work very closely with us. We also have a credible set of partners and a robust local network that is being empowered by us. I look forward to a great India journey ahead,” the top VMware executive added.
(Nishant Arora is in Las Vegas at the invitation of VMware. He can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
Las Vegas : As cyber attacks gain momentum despite the technology giants investing over $100 billion a year to protect data breaches, the time is ripe to turn to basics and put a simple security hygiene in place, VMwares Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger has emphasised.
“Attack factors have become more diverse. Fundamentally, we have failed the customers, as breaches are growing too fast for them to tackle,” Gelsinger told the audience as the company kicked off its annual ‘VMworld’ conference here on Monday.
According to Gelsinger, the Cloud infrastructure and business mobility leader has a three-pronged strategy to address the growing cyber threats.
“First is to secure the infrastructure, build and architect the data. The second is to deeply architect the entire ecosytem like controls, automation, validations and the security solutions, and then standardise those,” Gelsinger told the jam-packed Mandalay Bay Convention Centre that saw participation from over 20,000 attendees.
“Third, and the most important, is to turn to the basics. Learn from sport teams who follow the basic regimen over and over again. Every major breach in the last five years that made headlines happened because a simple cyber hygiene wasn’t followed somewhere,” the VMware CEO emphasised.
Gelsinger urged the tech industry to simplify the security solutions. “The role of the governments globally in making stronger cyber policies is equally important to ward off data breaches,” said Gelsinger.
“As enterprises the worldover move from data centres to Cloud and desktop to mobile, security has become paramount,” added Sanjay Poonen, COO, Customer Operations at VMware.
To bolster its claims, the company launched ‘AppDefense’ to protect applications running in either virtualised or Cloud environments.
The new security solution leverages the virtual infrastructure to monitor running applications and can detect and automate response to attacks that attempt to manipulate those applications.
“The growing frequency and cost of security incidents points to a fundamental flaw in security models that focus solely on chasing threats,” said Tom Corn, Senior Vice President, Security Products at VMware.
‘AppDefense’ delivers an intent-based security model that focuses on what the applications should do – the “known good” – rather than what the attackers do – the “known bad”.
“We believe it will do for compute, what VMware NSX and micro-segmentation did for the network — enable least privilege environments for critical applications,” Corn explained.
‘AppDefense’ enables customers improve the effectiveness of existing security controls.
It plans to integrate with IBM’s “QRadar” security analytics platform, enabling security teams respond to advanced and insider threats that cut across both on-premises and Cloud environments like IBM Cloud.
“The direct integration of ‘AppDefense’ with IBM Security technologies will allow additional analysis of this data by ‘Watson for Cyber Security’, which can provide analysts with a clearer understanding of the scope of advanced attacks,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, General Manager, IBM Security.
IBM Watson is an intelligent cognitive system. With it, people can analyse and interpret data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video and develop personalised solutions.
Meanwhile, global cyber security leader Trend Micro also announced that its “Deep Security” server security product is now available to customers of VMware Cloud on the market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“VMware Cloud on AWS” brings VMware’s software-defined data centre (SDDC) to the AWS Cloud, allowing customers to run applications across VMware vSphere-based private, public and hybrid Cloud environments, with optimised access to AWS services.
“With millions of VMs secured and nearly 2.5 billion protection hours in the Cloud, we have unparalleled experience and expertise to help our customers as they take advantage of the new ‘VMware Cloud on AWS’ offering,” noted Steve Quane, Executive Vice President of Network Defence and Hybrid Cloud Security for Trend Micro.
“VMware ‘AppDefense’ will infuse simple security hygiene into the entire IT ecosystem,” Gelsinger added.
(Nishant Arora is in Las Vegas at the invitation of VMware. He can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
