Sri Lanka strongly aligned VMware global vision - Ganesan Arumugam

Sara Pathirana

The Director, Partners for VMware India Ganesan Arumugam, recently was in the country and shared his views on the progress of VMware in the country. Speaking to Daily News Business, he said,"Sri Lanka is a key market for VMware and the focus for business in Sri Lanka is strongly aligned to the company's global vision. The year 2012 was very successful for VMware in the country. We made our presence in the country to cater to our growth and have built an enviable ecosystem of over 8 active partners." With his base in Bangalore in India, Arumugam's current role includes being responsible for the development of channel organization, planning and executing channel strategy and enhancing revenue growth through partners for VMWare India.

Currently, the major focus is expansion in the area of Colombo and the island of Maldives. In Sri Lanka, the business is completely 100% driven through their partners - which include Enable, KBSL, SoftLogic, Millennium IT and DMS among others.

"As our products are not vertically aligned, we see good traction across verticals. However, some verticals use IT more than the rest and hence the adoption of our products is more. BFSI and Telecom are the verticals where we have seen good traction in Sri Lanka. Today, we have a growing portfolio of customers across verticals in Sri Lanka, which now numbers to over 50," he added.

The virtualization market has matured significantly in the past year, where customers have begun to observe the benefits and advantages that virtualization offers them. The need to secure data centers, accumulate money on hardware, power and cooling are driving adoption of server virtualization. Virtualization platforms have also gained the support of the entire ecosystem of technologies - from servers to storage to networking to security the management in operating systems and to applications.

"There are three phases when it comes to virtualization at VMware. Customers become accustomed to the technology in the first phase. The customer goes into a testing environment, where they initially virtualize their tier-2 / tier-3 applications. This lets them get familiarized with the technology. The second phase is when they start running mission-critical applications - their ERP systems, CRM systems, SAP systems and so on. That's when they start saving a lot more money. The third phase is what we call the agility phase, which is more about speed and responsiveness," Arumugam explained.

Arumugam further added that a company's transition through these phases, varies as it depends on the industry or even the company itself. They had seen some companies that go really fast from stage one to stage two to stage three and they are assisting their customers on their journey from virtualization to the cloud with what they offer and believe that virtualization is the key underpinning technology to enable the cloud.

"Many organizations today do not have adequate disaster recovery (DR) protection for their applications and in most cases, disaster recovery is perceived as too pricey, intricate and unpredictable for any, but the most mission-critical applications. Disaster recovery is a form of insurance to protect IT assets when a disaster strikes. Just like good insurance, the best disaster recovery should provide great protection, with minimum hassle, at the lowest possible cost.

VMware provides the most consistent, cost-effective and simple disaster protection to all virtualized applications and organizations in Sri Lanka, which are increasingly looking at these solutions to secure their business," he concluded.