A: Organisations today are looking for a more secure, cost-effective and automated platform to deliver cloud-based services. The joint venture on vSphere provides all of these features efficiently. VMware’s vSphere is the cornerstone of this technology collaboration.

A: We expect more organisations, especially small and medium businesses, to increasingly buy core IT solutions (such as email) that deliver cloud-like simplicity to user experience. Our plan is to broaden vCloud portfolio leveraging Zimbra — a leading vendor of email and collaboration software — as an on- premise solution for our medium and smaller customers.

Our mission is to help customers achieve cloud-like efficiency and oper-ational improvements across major IT areas. With Zimbra, we are going to focus on core infrastructure applications and services, email communications being a universal one. VMware can now address solutions that span from the datacentre to the cloud by optimising infrastructure usage through IAAS, desktops through DAAS, development through PAAS, and core infrastructure and third- party applications through SAAS.

A: This initial release of the VMware ‘Go’ platform is targeted at the lower spectrum of the users, but any organisation can use this technology for its advantage. VMware ‘Go’ presents a predefined set of processes targeted towards easy and simple deployments, but that doesn’t mean the platform won’t be tailored to support more enterprise level features.

A: VMware welcomes collaboration in the virtualisation space between partners and vendors. It helps in two ways. Firstly, collaboration makes adherence to standards such as DMTF.org more stringent, which is good for vendors, customers and partners alike. Secondly, it validates the fact that the vision and direction we have taken is correct. The market is following us and will continue to follow us in the future too. We defend yourself by doing two things — manage our costs and increase productivity in our overall business, which will lead to better quality products.

A: The facts show quite clearly where we intend to focus on providing the most cost-effective, automated and secure cloud computing platforms in the world. Implementing this plan is a long-term strategy, which we are now just starting to deploy “en-masse” with the cooperation of some of the largest ISPs. Secondly, we have not really exploited the virtual desktop market to its fullest potential. To begin with, we are in a good position to lead in this space. Finally, the key to all of this working well is automation and interloper- ability by adhering to pre-defined industry standards. Process automation around chargeback, operations management, disaster recovery, self- service portals and application standardisation regardless of operating system provide us market leadership and future growth.

A: Quite simply, instead of having to walk, email or call up somebody to ask the same question every few days, CIOs will be able to simply go to an operations portal to see for themselves. Simply watching a few blinking lights in the data centre can’t tell you how well that application is helping or costing the business.

What VMware is trying to help customers do is get away from the ‘plumbing’ aspects of IT and get back to automating business through IT. The new question CIOs will ask is: How can I make my IT integrated processes more efficient? VMware virtualisation management products and principles are the only enterprise-level tools that provide this business view. Just as SAP streamlined the isolated application and business processes back in the 1970s, VMware is doing the same to the datacentre.

A: We are committed to provide more automation and collaboration within our core product set. We will work towards increased efficiency across our management stack and a proliferation of our VMware View virtual desktop products and several more such initiatives that solidify our lead in the cloud computing arena.

gyana.swain@9dot9.in