Head of Asia-Pacific & Japan, VMware Sanjay Mirchandani say cloud will be largely private in near future

As the public cloud goes mainstream, VMware is trying to temper the exuberance around it. The Silicon Valley-based company is the cash cow for its parent firm EMC, the data storage company that was recently acquired by PC-maker Dell. Dell has said VMware will continue to be run independently. Sanjay Mirchandani, head of VMware’s Asia-Pacific & Japan (APJ) business, spoke with TOI at a recent event here.
Where does India figure in your global plans?
VMware India is a microcosm of VMware globally .This is the second largest site -about 3,500 people -and every function of VMware globally is represented here.There is core innovation coming out of India. And we have global teams -the operation teams, the shared services team for finance –supporting that.
Globally, what percentage of VMware’s revenues come from cloud services?
We don’t disclose the breakup. The estimate is that, in 2020, 75% of all IT spend is still going to be on-premise.Five years from now, only 25% of all IT spend is going to be on the public cloud, 75% is going to be in private data centres. We are the market leaders on this side (private cloud), as you start moving towards the public, we will set up an architecture that makes it highly portable for you to move from private to public and the other way round, what we call hybridity.
You are saying the shift to public cloud is not as dramatic as some say it is?
Yes, so we are saying, it is not an overnight journey . If you get the architecture right, then your ability to transition from phase one to phase two, from virtualization to automation to private cloud to public cloud is going to be seamless. That is what we are doing with our Indian customers. Because a lot of our Indian customers have not even done server virtualization. Take Digital India, the bulk of the services that have been launched in the past 12 months have all gone on the VMware cloud that the National Informatics Centre (NIC) has deployed.The NIC cloud is expanding at a furious rate and it is a private cloud. Some states like Maharashtra have built their own private cloud on VMware.
How do you position yourselves in the market vis-a-vis Amazon and Azure?
People often ask me the question, private or public cloud? The answer is, both. What is fundamental to this unified hybrid cloud is that the architecture has to be portable.A lot of my customers today realize that the path to the public cloud is a one-way trip because the public cloud providers are very happy to suck you in. But the moment you say that I am leaving the public cloud, there is nothing to facilitate going back. Then you will be rebuilding everything from scratch, by hand again. Our whole vision is that the journey between private and public has to be completely seamless and 100% portable. And our stance lie in the enterprise, because we understand the environment very well. Whereas guys like Amazon, they play more on the startup and smaller market space.
(The correspondent was in San Francisco at the invitation of VMware)