MUMBAI: Cloud computing and virtualization software company, VMWare continues to see India as a strategic investment market, as it look to scale up its presence in the country in the coming quarters. In a chat with ET, COO of the company Sanjay Poonen said, “We continue to see this as a very important place for us… We are excited by the growth we see here…It’s an attractive place for engineering talent. We also see people who rise here and run things on their own. The number of patents is just growing and rising, acquisitions we have made are often companies that have heavy investments in India.”
The company had made a $2 billion investment in its Indian arm in 2018, which employs close to 6000 people. On a question on the job cuts in the global IT industry and in India in 2019 and VMware’s outlook on it, Pooren said, “We obviously want to always be efficient in terms of how we want to allocate our headcount but macro aspects of India remain the same which is a tech economy of engineers, speak the language, an economy that is growing at 4% GDP and country that’s favorable to foreign direct investment, peaceful- no major terrorism issues. “
On the recent consultation paper on cloud services introduced by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) which proposes that cloud-focussed companies would become members of a cloud industry body, he said “Any collection of companies and bodies that’s focused on standards, that’s focused on innovation through the cloud which is a significant part of where the economy is headed is a good thing. We will join any consortium of companies or be involved in research bodies that can drive innovation.”
However Poonen said that cloud adoption amongst Indian enterprises is yet to reach a tipping point, while smaller, digital-first companies continue to aggressively adopt cloud infrastructure, “Our core business is the enterprise and mid-market companies who have built their datacenters themselves. We have not seen a mass tipping of them on the cloud scale and we are watching that and want to be ready.”
The company was positive about the government’s approach to technology investments, he said. “The government of India has been very favourable courting tech investments.”
He believes that large Indian companies and enterprises will migrate their IT infrastructure from 5% currently to 30% on the cloud in the next five to ten years.
Source: Economic Times
