VMware uses Aussie experience to storm Asia

VMware plans to use the experience gained in making Australia the most virtualised nation in the world, to ratchet up massive growth in the Asian region.

"We're probably seeing more thought about structured cloud-based execution in Australia than anywhere else," Andrew Dutton, VMware's general manager for Asia, Pacific and Japan (AJP), told the media at this week's VMworld event in San Francisco, California.

"In fact, a lot of the intellectual property [announced at VMworld] came out of the learnings from Australia, specifically out of large government customers, like Centrelink."

Overall, the Asian market for virtualisation with endpoint connectivity has been lagging significantly behind Australia. But according to senior VMware executives, it's now growing faster than anywhere else in the world.

"VMware has virtualised about 80 per cent of all of the applications that are across Asia Pacific, and last year was the first year that more applications were running on a virtualised than a physical platform," Dutton said.

VMware had previously estimated the total global market for virtualisation as approximately US$30 billion a year, said incoming chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger.

"At this VMworld, we redefined our total available market, as we have launched our software-defined datacentre (SDD) strategy, from US$30 billion to US$50 billion. So, we've expanded the total market for us. And Asia, overall, is our least penetrated market of an expanding market," he said.

"We do see that there [are] tremendous and continuing markets in this highly-disruptive cloud, social, mobile, big-data era."

Dutton cited Forrester Research as saying 64 per cent of companies across Asia Pacific have either started or intend to start on a path to cloud services. Asians are also the heaviest users of mobile devices in the world, he said, with 780 million Android devices in use in mainland China alone.

VMware has 3000 employees in Asia Pacific. Its development centres in Pune and Bangalore, India, have around 800 staff out of a total headcount of 1800. There's around 600 developers in China, split between Beijing and Shanghai.

These international teams are the primary development organisation for two of products announced this week: vCloud Suite 5.1; the company's first solution for SDD and the alpha version of Horizon Suite, a platform for delivering a virtual desktop interface (VDI) to mobile workers.

"They are driving a lot of the strategy and the development of that strategy. It's quite exciting. It's worked out quite well for the suites," Gelsinger said.

Chief technology officer Steve Herrod said that VMware will continue to grow its international development capabilities, making use of local talent, as well localising products for the Asian market.

"[VMware will] start building a stronger partnership between the local development teams and the sales and marketing teams in those regions, to get that closed-loop feedback for how to make the products appropriate and meet the feature needs of the local markets, as well," Herrod said.

VMware is confident that the Asian growth will continue for the foreseeable future.

"I'm not saying the growth just with VMware will continue, but I think we're seeing, in every market, this idea of saving huge amounts of money, [and] in some cases like India, saving a huge amount of electricity by virtualisation," Dutton said.

"I just can't see an end to it any time soon."

Stilgherrian travelled to VMworld as a guest of VMware.