What is the roadmap and breadth of vision for VMware? Are you a ‘virtualization as an end in itself’ company?
Virtualization is not an end. It is the means to an end. Virtualization is what makes it possible for the current IT transformation to happen. It is a transformation that is making it possible to do significantly more with less, to reduce energy consumption, to simplify computing and make computing more reliable and secure. It is clear that as a class of software, virtualization is here to stay. It has become the new platform for computing – it has gained very fast customer and ecosystem adoption and is facilitating new and better ways to deliver and manage applications, separately from the underlying infrastructure.

How does virtualization interact with other emerging technologies such as SOA?
Probably the biggest trend in software applications in the past decade is Service Oriented Architecture or SOA. The idea behind SOA is that the big monolithic enterprise applications can be disaggregated into smaller, more nimble services that can be quickly re-assembled and re-used as dictated by business demands. New composite applications can be assembled almost on the fly by stringing existing services together. Large enterprise application vendors such as SAP and Oracle are re-tooling their application stacks to be SOA-compliant. While SOA brings high hopes for faster application deployment and easier ongoing management, it also brings about a new infrastructure challenge: disaggregating the big monolithic applications of yesterday into hundreds, potentially thousands of individual services means an exploding number of software application components that require their own infrastructure and management. Unless something changes, you have a recipe for more server sprawl than ever before.
Under the paradigm of one application per server, the average hardware utilization can be driven to negligible values. Virtualization provides the only way to address this challenge. By decoupling the hardware from the software, virtualization allows companies to separate the hardware investment from the software provisioning decisions, e.g. companies no longer need to precisely size hardware for a particular software application (or service). Instead, companies can purchase the hardware that makes sense from a financial standpoint, and allocate the available capacity to software components as needed. The tug of war between massive compute supply and smaller units of compute consumption will lead to the pervasive adoption of virtualization in the next few years.
VMware virtualization also makes it possible to treat a related set of applications (such as a multi-tier e-commerce site) as a single logical entity. This approach simplifies software management and will improve IT’s ability to deliver advanced services to their clients.

How would a typical roadmap, starting from virtualization, look like for a CIO who wants to progress towards emerging paradigms such as Utility Computing, Cloud Computing?
Technology decision makers are under pressure to deliver results. And while they need to stay abreast of new computing trends, they need to show positive results to their organizations in the short term. They are implementing technologies that will deliver demonstrable value in the short term, while positioning the company to be more flexible and agile in the future. Virtualization squarely meets these criteria – it delivers fast and rock-solid ROI in 6-9 months, while laying the foundation for a more flexible and agile computing platform for the future.
The typical progression of virtualization adoption occurs in 5 stages, each of which overlaps to some degree. The first stage is called Separate: Customers virtualize to separate the application from the operating system and hardware for development and test purposes. They can easily test whether applications will run smoothly on multiple OSs or whether multiple versions of an application will run smoothly on a single OS before the application is deployed into production. Applications can be developed and delivered faster, easier, more cost effectively and more reliably.
Next is Consolidate, where customers virtualize multiple servers and significantly increase the utilization rates on the hardware from 5-15 percent to 60-80 percent. They also improve their workload-to-administrator ratios by as much as two to three times and can routinely process more workloads on one-tenth or less the number of servers they used before VMware. It saves time, space, money and power.
The third stage is Aggregate. As multiple servers are virtualized across the datacenter, computing resources can be pooled and capacity can be delivered as needed. This is where many customers are today in their adoption of VMware virtualization. They get all the benefits of developing and delivering applications faster, easier, more cost-effectively with higher availability, along with the best insurance policy for business continuity and disaster recovery.
With our new management capabilities, customers can further Automate their datacenter and application delivery processes. By running applications in virtual machines, the application lifecycle – building, deploying, updating, monitoring, charging back, recovering, retiring can be fully self-automated, thus avoiding the risk and errors from manually managing the lifecycle process.
As customers embrace the promise of cloud computing, we’re providing technology that further decouples applications from operating systems to truly liberate the datacenter so that computing resources can be delivered on-demand, regardless of location – whether on premise or off premise, using owned or shared resources – and the quality-of-service level is always guaranteed. This is what we are providing at customer sites today. At VMworld Europe 2008 in Cannes, France, British Telecom presented exactly this vision and they are rolling it out today on VMware Infrastructure.

What’s the roadmap that you see the Indian market taking on virtualization?
We are already seeing companies in India move to a virtualized architecture. They are using it to consolidate, simplify, reduce power requirements and provide much better availability and disaster recovery capabilities. Due to widespread adoption elsewhere in the world and the very large growth in multiple sectors in India, companies throughout India are showing a tendency to embrace virtualization technology more quickly and move right into production usage.
Mahindra Mahindra, Chitale Dairy, and Lupin Laboratories are all examples of local users who have embraced virtualization as a means to contain server sprawl and improve availability as their infrastructures cope to scale to fast growing business demands.
In addition to datacenter virtualization, we are working on bringing our desktop virtualization to India in a way that is optimized for Indian companies.
We offer an ability to run desktops in the datacenter in virtual machines, providing greatly improved manageability and security, and at reduced costs and power consumption.
We have already seen many companies use it in India for people staffing call centers. In fact these are some of our largest deployments, in the thousands.