How does VMware solutions compare to other virtualization solutions in terms of technology and financials?
Deepak Narain: While we didn't invent virtualization, VMware practically invented the x86 virtualization market over a dozen years ago. We're the market leaders in virtualization from the datacenter down to the desktop. VMware is the gold standard in virtualization and cloud technology - we are the market leaders with over 80% of the market.
The virtual license production of the second quarter of this year has increased by 53% compared with last year. Tell us more?
Deepak Narain: The virtualization market is on a tear, according to Gartner globally at least 40% of architecture workloads have been virtualized, and the installed base is expected go grow fivefold from 2010 through 2015. This sort of growth is phenomenal, and we expect the momentum to continue for long, as 100% of workloads are eventually virtualized.
What are the benefits for virtualization?
Deepak Narain: At its core, virtualization is about squeezing the most out of your current infrastructure. By running several virtual machines on one system, virtualization allows you to maximize the return on your infrastructure investment and reduce energy utilization.
You can use virtualization to reduce the risk of IT outages, increase application availably and dramatically shorten disaster recovery times. But, the real benefit of virtualization is in increasing operational efficiency - by allowing automation of routine tasks, and reducing the complexity of the infrastructure, virtualization enables organizations to do a lot more with a lot less IT spend.
How much money can company save with server consolidation using virtualization?
Deepak Narain: There's no blanket answer, but most organizations embarking on virtualization projects are seeing a payback in a matter of a few months. Virtualization is all about reducing the total cost of ownership and we've helped a number of organizations reduce their IT spend significantly - both in terms of hardware costs and also in terms of operational costs.
What is the latest product from VMware? And how this product will help the customers?
Deepak Narain: We've just finished our biggest product launch in our history - over a dozen products were launched over the summer. All in all, the entire VMware product suite has been revamped with a very simple goal in mind - allow organizations to migrate their systems and their users into the cloud with confidence.
We announced a comprehensive Cloud Infrastructure Suite, anchored by vSphere5 - our flagship product and the gold standard in virtualization. This suite of products will allow customers to deploy business critical applications with confidence and add agility to their enterprise. We've just released View5, which uses virtualization to deliver a desktop virtual machine to desktops, laptops and mobile devices such as tablet computers and mobile phones. This allows IT to simplify desktop management and control, while preserving the end user experience over a LAN or WAN connection and enabling delivery of a Desktop-As-A-Service solution.
How the SMB sector can benefit from virtualization with less cost?
Deepak Narain: SMBs have limited resources and always trying to make do on tight budgets. Virtualization lowers your infrastructure costs - enabling to get the most of hardware infrastructure and maximizing productivity. According to a survey done by Gartner, SMBs are adopting virtualization at a rapid space and by 2012, slightly more than 75% expect to have server virtualization in wide use. As SMBs achieve higher levels of virtualization, more are continuing to turn to VMware for advanced capabilities such as fault tolerance, data recovery and high availability in order to improve business responsiveness, maximize uptime and simplify IT management. In fact, 88 percent of Gartner survey respondents indicated they are using some version of VMware.
This interview is a part of Alpha News latest issue.
