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Balaji Rao
Director-Sales, India & SAARC,
VMware Software India Pvt. Ltd.

Please provide us with an overview of the operations that VMware is having in India.
Currently we are having about 2000 people in India. Over the last eight years, offices have been opened in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad and Colombo in Sri Lanka, with R&D centres in Bangalore and Pune. So we are in fact spread all across the country. The development work that we are doing in India has global impact. A lot of development work that is being done in India has a global impact, because the software products finally get sold in the global market. Currently we are planning to expand the Bangalore facility to further improve the scope of the
work we are doing in India. The company has announced a multiyear investment of $120 million that includes a long term lease for a new 420,000 square foot building in South Bangalore, currently under construction. In fact, VMware’s India-based R&D and support operations are second in size and scale only to those at the company’s headquarters located in Palo Alto, California. VMware’s R&D operations in India make a significant contribution to the company’s portfolio of virtualisation and cloud computing products, all designed to help VMware customers navigate the journey to a new era of IT. Developers in Bangalore and Pune contribute important components of VMware’s key technologies – the software-defined data centre, hybrid cloud and
end-user computing.

Taking specifically of Maharashtra, you have been for the MahaGov Cloud project. Please tell us about the work that you are doing in this area.
The Government of Maharashtra has selected VMware virtualisation and cloud infrastructure technology for its MahaGov Cloud. As you must know, the MahaGov Cloud is an initiative by the Directorate of Information Technology (DIT), Government of Maharashtra, to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) to various state departments for their e-Governance initiatives. The Government of Maharashtra has deployed VMware vSphere®and VMware vCloud Director®to virtualize the state datacenter, which hosts the  MahaGov Cloud. Our company has been chosen after an extensive evaluation conducted by the Government of Maharashtra.
I would also like to inform you that VMware deployment has helped the Government of Maharashtra lower the cost of hosting, improve the management of the state datacenter infrastructure, and drastically reduce the time required to provision infrastructure for various state departments. This has encouraged state departments to host their mission critical applications on the MahaGov Cloud, making it the only government cloud in India that is running a production environment with a high volume of servers and applications.

 VMware Factsheet

hosts the MahaGov Cloud. Our company has been chosen after an extensive evaluation conducted by the Government of Maharashtra. I would also like to inform you that VMware deployment has helped the Government of Maharashtra lower the cost of hosting, improve the management of the state datacenter infrastructure, and drastically reduce the time required to provision infrastructure for various state departments. This has encouraged state departments to host their mission critical applications on the MahaGov Cloud, making it the only government cloud in India that is running a  production environment with a high volume of servers and applications.

What are the key solutions that you are providing to the Government?
Virtualisation is the key solution that we are providing. Currently VMware holds 80 percent market share in the virtualisation space. Our solutions are being adopted by many governments around the world. With limited budgets and a growing need for services, the governments need a more flexible and costeffective model for computing – one that allows them to operate more efficiently and respond faster to emerging needs. Our cloud solutions are helping governments transform their IT departments into efficient, flexible enterprises that can respond faster to emerging needs, while reducing IT infrastructure and operating costs. Virtualisation provides organizations with an evolutionary path to cloud computing that preserves existing IT investments, security, and control.

Selling to Government must have its own set of challenges? Tell us about the challenges that you are facing in dealing with the government departments in India.
The challenges that we face in India are of different type. If you look at some of our competitors in India, you will find that the price that they are offering is very low, but that is because their quality is not good. The government always procures through a process of tendering, and this makes it important for us to work hard for establishing our credentials. When we are able to show a good proof of concept and when we are able to show the benefits of virtualisation along with that the disaster recovery and security management, we are usually able to convince the government departments in India and elsewhere that they should go for our products.

What kinds of products you are having for the defence sector internationally? How do you see the Indian defence market evolving in the next few years?
The nature of the datacenter does not change when we are in defence sector. However, the nature of the applications can change; there will be lot of simulation and there is a lot of war gaming that happens. In some of the countries we are on top of submarines because there is so little space available and we have the ability to provide a completely secure solution, where if one server goes down the other takes-over immediately without any time lag. You don’t even know when one server goes down and the other becomes active. We are currently working to make that solution scalable. We are interested in the defence sector for a number of solutions that we can provide.

How does VMware see the Indian market?
India is a very important market for us. As I already said, we have our second largest development facility in Bangalore. We are committed to pursuing the huge opportunity for our solutions in India’s fast-growing and maturing market, as companies harness our technology to help them achieve the agility needed to compete in dynamic business arenas at home and overseas. We are also eager to work with the Central and various State governments in the country

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