Do you think virtualization will eventually reduce hardware requirements?

Yes, of course. In the past, we built IT like roads. Digging up roads to make changes requires a considerable amount of effort. In the virtual world, you can make these changes, not just on the fly, but also monitor these changes and data flow through a single screen.

In the physical world you might have a switch from say Cisco, which opens a dedicated line linked to various computers. In a virtual world that allows expansion and movement of data and application suites on the fly, you could have virtual switches which can open up a secure channel only when required, for a small duration and only between the intended sender and receiver.

For example, in the case of a bank, the communication between the bank’s system and the Visa transaction system occurs for only a few minutes every day. The connection between the bank’s private cloud and Visa (the external cloud in this case) can be opened only for the required period using such a virtualized connection.

Cisco now builds such virtual switches, using our technologies and embeds them in their networking hardware. These virtual switches can be configured through a screen, just as one would configure a Cisco physical switch. So now this hardware manufacturer is building switches that do not exist in the real world but exist in the virtual world.

Several hardware manufacturers are offering products that feature virtualization capabilities at the hardware level. Do you think the hypervisor will start being offered as a part of the firmware at some point?

While several manufacturers would offer the hypervisor along with their products, I don’t see it becoming a part of the firmware or being delivered in that fashion as yet.

Many of your competitors (Microsoft, for example) have already started offering the hypervisor along with the operating system? How does this change the game for you?

The technology behind the Microsoft offering, is where we were five or six years ago. The number of virtual machines you can run on one server are significantly less on a Microsoft platform, as opposed to ours. The very argument for consolidation falls apart here.

What’s the future of virtualization? Where do see virtualization going from the cloud and thereafter?

The next stage of virtualization is the management tools that can enable a CIO or IT department within an organization to run a virtual data center rather than a physical data center. The ability to monitor data, applications and users in a secure, firewalled (if necessary), application-independent, and user-driven model, forms the basis of an internal (private) cloud.