How VMware is tackling the Indian market

VMware is focusing on remote work technologies, cloud native application development as well as 5G and edge computing to gain a stronger foothold in India’s IT market.

Speaking at a regional media briefing on the sidelines of VMworld 2021, Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware, noted that many local and global companies in India now have remote workforce strategies to enable employees to work from home.

As such, these companies are looking to expand their technology capabilities to support employees who work from home most of the time rather than occasionally prior to the pandemic.

“Customers are coming back and rethinking their entire architecture on how they’re going to enable in a strategic fashion what we call the anywhere workforce,” he said.

Dhawan said there has also been “tremendous momentum” in cloud-based application development in India, which plays host to the engineering and software development teams of many VMware customers.

“A lot of decisions on DevOps and SRE [site reliability engineering] technologies are made out of India,” he said, adding that decisions on the tools that enable cloud application development are also being deliberated in the subcontinent.

A third area that VMware is eyeing in India is 5G, which has been gaining ground as major Indian telcos build out their 5G networks with edge computing capabilities. “We have customers engaged with us and our partners to help service providers and telcos bring on 5G and edge solutions,” he added.

Underpinning those three areas, Dhawan said, is the multicloud opportunity, which VMware has been capitalising to support workloads that run in hybrid environments comprising public and private cloud services. “Multicloud becomes this one umbrella sort of theme that’s consistent all over the globe, including in India,” he added.

This year’s VMworld was marked by renewed efforts by the virtualisation pioneer to grow its share in the market dotted with a growing number of suppliers of software that helps enterprises operate multi-cloud environments.

The efforts took the form of Cross-Cloud services, which include cloud infrastructure for operating and running enterprise apps; cloud management tools; security and networking that spans entire multicloud operations; and a digital workspace to support a distributed workforce along with edge solutions to deploy and manage edge-native applications.

During the briefing, Dhawan also reiterated VMware’s commitment to the Indian market. “About two and a half years ago, we committed to invest a couple of billion dollars in India, and we’re continuing to invest in customer-facing teams, R&D, as well as supporting our solutions across the entire customer journey, from transaction to backend support,” he said.

India’s tech sector currently makes up around 8% of its GDP. According to market research firm GlobalData, the domestic enterprise ICT market in India was projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 7% for the next five years.