VMware has revealed plans to invest in Africa this year as it continues to snap up smaller companies in the cloud computing space.
Chris Norton, VMware regional director for southern Africa, says: “I'm bullish about 2010. Last year, everybody was grounded by the recession, and this year will exceed everyone's expectations in technology delivery.
“We are currently investing in headcount, and we have set our sights towards Africa. That's a frontier that we've dabbled in and we are going to make a more aggressive play into it at the end of the year.”
Norton adds that it will not only be VMware making big acquisitions this year. “There's going to be a lot of consolidation this year with big mergers being formed. The big organisations are going to get bigger, and this will make it harder for the smaller resellers to compete in many instances.”
Norton points out that cloud services are becoming more important to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). He says SMEs are struggling to make big investments in terms of IT infrastructure, and that the recession has set them back by six months.
End of IT assets
assets as trends such as virtualisation and cloud-enabled services drive the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets.
Norton agrees with the Gartner statement, saying the mass movement towards virtualisation and cloud-based computing means companies can focus on their core business.
He adds that the cost difference between a company owning its own servers and having them hosted is widening. However, Norton notes that banks will not move financial databases to the cloud because of security concerns.
“VMware is investing in assisting organisations which we believe have a viable business plan to move into the cloud space. But in my personal belief, VMware will continue to be a virtualisation technology provider. At this point in time, I don't believe it will become a hosted service provider.”
VMware recently purchased SpringSource for $420 million, in a deal signed off late last year. It also acquired Zimbra, a cloud-based e-mail calendar and collaboration software provider.
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