VMware is bullish about expanding into Africa, having made significant investments in Nigeria, Mauritius, Namibia and Rwanda.
This is according to Chris Norton, VMware regional director for southern Africa, speaking during a roundtable event at the Virtualisation Forum, held at Vodaworld in Midrand, yesterday.
Norton said its African business is an important revenue stream for the virtualisation company, and that it plans to expand aggressively in the coming years. “Now that we have a stable critical mass, VMware's intention is to expand what we've done in SA and to make more investments into the rest of Africa within the next couple of years.”
Norton also revealed that VMware will target the small to medium enterprise (SME) segment. This follows the recent roll-out of its free virtualised automated management tool, called VMware Go, which the company is driving as an introduction to virtualisation, to capture the SME market.
Norton added that SMEs have the same needs as larger enterprises, except they don't have the scalability, financial muscle, and understanding of how to deploy large-scale virtualisation systems. “We are a relatively mature market in terms of the large blue chip enterprises, but in terms of the SMEs we still have a way to go,” he noted.
Growing virtualisation
Matt Piercy, VMware regional director for northern Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), said it was revealed during the VMworld conference in San Francisco, which saw 12 500 delegates, that VMware has grown significantly despite the economic climate. It has acquired 21 000 customers in the first six months of the year.
Another point Piercy discussed was the acquisition of SpringSource, which VMware concluded earlier this month. SpringSource is a Web application development company and, according to Piercy, more than 50% of all Java applications are developed through the Spring framework.
“We acquired the company because we see the future of data centres as being data-centric, and we can run these applications and link them straight into the virtual data centre. We will run it as a completely separate division, but the benefit for VMware is that applications will have the necessary technologies built in them to leverage the virtual infrastructure that underpins the environment,” he explained.
Thinking differently
Richard Garsthagen, VMware senior evangelist, EMEA, urged companies to change the way they think, as virtualisation is different from a physical machine and brings with it cost savings and efficiency.
“VMware has made some significant changes and we are forcing companies to re-think how they do things. We are seeing more happening in cloud computing, with a lot of emotional and legal issues coming into play. Companies are asking us, if they move something into the cloud, how secure will their data be?
“We are changing the game for security with our VMware Safe concept that enables a new way to facilitate security for the virtual environment. It will improve security significantly and enable easier implementation of security,” he said.
Garsthagen added that desktop virtualisation is picking up, with Citrix and VMware being the biggest contenders in the virtualised desktop environment. VMware's other competitors include Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.
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