Obsessed with Innovation

“The first big idea you are known for, becomes a problem for you,” said VMWare’s VP and MD In SEA and Korea, Sanjay Deshmukh.

He had been speaking about VMWare’s first ground-breaking virtualisation technology, vSphere, which paved the way to other innovations by the company.  Sanjay said, “It looms over our success as a company, and these are published numbers – 60-percent of our revenue from technologies besides this. It used to be 100-percent (vSphere),” Sanjay explained.

The other technologies that Sanjay meant is virtual technology, cloud management and end-user computing (EUC), not necessarily in this order, as Sanjay pointed out that each segment contributes equal share of 20-percent to VMWare’s revenue.

“Networking, in my mind is absolutely transformative. Traditional networking is about networking and not so much about security, “Sanjay said, adding that virtual networking enables the security to move from just protecting perimeters to protecting virtual machines or end user devices. “Security policies are consistent and will move along with the user, their apps and their data.”

VMware had acquired Nicira in 2012 to get into the virtual networking game.

Sanjay also talked about their cloud management piece, a solution that seems necessary because of a multi-cloud future that looms in the horizon.

“After ten years, the notion that has settled in the industry is a hybrid and multi-cloud future. Our innovation is to help manage workloads irrespective of which cloud they are on.”

VMware had acquired/ is going to acquire Wavefront and CloudHealth in 2017 and 2018 respectively, to address this. For example, CloudHealth provides visibility into clouds, and enables optimisation of resources.

“The promise we make through (CloudHealth) is a minimum 20-percent savings, by assessing workloads and recommending how to transition workloads across (your) (cloud) providers.

Wavefront on the other hand, is able to pick up insights about the full stack of workloads no matter which cloud they may be on. “Insights about app architecture and app performance is pumped into an AI (artificial intelligence) engine, for customers to do root cause analysis (RCA),” Sanjay said, explaining that the ultimate aim is to give better app availability, without the app having to be rearchitected for support by the various clouds.

In 2014, VMware acquired enterprise mobility management player, Airwatch.

The 5G strategy

After a hiatus of many months, VMware finally has a country manager in the form of Devan Parinpayanagam, who is looking to leverage his 10 years’ experience in networking technologies, to drive the VMWare narrative forward around virtual networking, and what it can offer telcos that are on a journey to 5G.

Our value proposition to telcos is that they can unify their infrastructure across three sites – network infrastructure, office and data centre – and all the way to infrastructure-as-a-service to serve customer needs,” Devan said.

“They can scale, there is better elasticity, better efficiency of resources and better security. The reason this is more relevant now is because 5G investment is making telcos rethink and as they refresh their investments in networking, they are trying to transform their IT environment this way.

“This is why we are investing in this, and investing on NFV (network function virtualisation) IPR (intellectual property rights) now,” Devan said.

The idea with NFV is that x86 computing servers can replace expensive and proprietary networking equipment, and the use of IT servers in networking environments opens up opportunity for VMware to layer their virtualisation technology seamlessly across these three different sites.

“This wasn’t possible before. Timing-wise (refreshing to 5G) is good for Malaysia. I like that sense of urgency to get this up and running from the government perspective,” Devan shared.

Internet of Things

In Japan, there is work with an automobile company and local service provider, to make intelligent electric cars.

Sanjay said when it comes to Malaysia, they are ready to talk to partners, to bring all the components of an Internet of Things (IoT) project together. Imagine, sensors, edge device, connectivity, and the VMWare piece.

“We have identified ourselves as the infrastructure company that will help manage the infrastructure and edge devices and sensors,” Sanjay said. “5G will enable new apps. 5G will accelerate all of this.”