expert

ALEXANDER VASILENKO, head of the VMware representative office in Russia and the CIS, told Kommersant correspondent LEONID KHOMERIKI about what is happening in the market of virtualization and software-defined data centers in Russia and how these technologies help customers develop during a crisis.

— What can IT give to customers today, in extremely difficult times?

— Information technology today faces seemingly mutually exclusive tasks: on the one hand, it is necessary to reduce costs, on the other hand, it is necessary to make business work faster and more flexible. For example, a company is conducting regional expansion and needs to open offices throughout Russia, as was the case with Rosgosstrakh Bank. The old approach - purchasing and installing equipment, training staff in the regions, etc. - takes six months to a year. The new approach is to build a flexible IT platform. But another problem is that there are no appropriate people on the ground who could deploy such an IT infrastructure. Centralized solutions come to the rescue in such situations. A “cloud” is created within the company with a small reserve of power so that, if necessary, additional resources can be allocated on demand. Or they can be expanded very quickly, and the company can use standard servers rather than specialized ones. In the case of Rosgosstrakh Bank, instead of six months, it was possible to deploy virtual desktop infrastructure in the branch network in one and a half months. In a crisis, companies are more likely to use these technologies because they allow customers to spend less and get more. It is during a crisis that, due to speed and flexibility, any company can capture a significant market share, ahead of slower competitors.

— What trends exist in the market today?

— Today we see an active transition to a new concept of corporate mobility. The idea is that any user can access corporate resources from anywhere in the world while complying with all necessary security requirements. Whether you're sitting on the beach or working on a business trip, you should have exactly the same access to all systems as if you were working from the office.

— The introduction of such technologies requires capital expenditures. Mobility and remote access are good, but how relevant are these technologies? Sounds like just another new trend. What about the cost-effectiveness of using such solutions?

— Remote access to corporate services and applications significantly expands the capabilities of employees, and therefore increases the speed and flexibility of business. Some categories of workers, such as sales representatives, have the opportunity to work effectively regardless of their location. Businesses, in turn, can reduce costs by reducing employee travel to headquarters and remote offices or by reducing the volume of purchased devices, allowing employees to use their own devices, often more functional than the company can afford.

This may seem strange, but as the practice of some Western companies shows, many young people, when applying for a job, may even refuse the employer’s offer, provided that they do not have the opportunity to use familiar devices for work - tablets and smartphones. One of our clients shared that they lost a great candidate simply because their corporate mobile standards didn't meet his expectations. This is an example of the impact of technology on business, albeit indirectly: due to the lack of the necessary level of mobility, the company has lost a valuable resource.

— IT budgets in companies today are not growing. How does this affect your financial performance?

— Most of our customers in Russia have IT budgets fixed in rubles. In rubles, our financial indicators continue to grow, despite the crisis. Virtualization is one of the few areas in the IT business where such a direct assessment is possible. Less equipment, fewer maintenance personnel, smaller data center footprints and less electricity are needed. Together with the customer, we can directly evaluate the savings when using our solutions. This is a huge advantage for VMware over many vendors from other market segments. An annual survey of our global customers showed that, collectively, customers estimate savings from using VMware products in the region of $10 billion annually. At the same time, according to their own assessment, if all of our components are used, for example, such as network-level virtualization, the total savings could exceed $50 billion per year. Only the use of basic VMware server virtualization has allowed the world to save more electricity than, for example, Denmark consumes in a year.

— Do you see progress in the IT market when compared with the first quarter of this year? Can we say that the situation has improved?

— Any fluctuation leads to the fact that the business takes the position “I’d better wait a little.” In this sense, the ups and downs in exchange rates that have occurred recently have frozen a number of projects. Some of them are now being unfrozen because the ruble has begun to strengthen. There is a feeling that the situation is leveling out.

— What is the sales forecast for the current year?

— We do not make forecasts for individual regions. Globally, the company plans to achieve a turnover of $10 billion in two to three years. At the end of 2014, the company’s turnover exceeded $6 billion for the first time. Thanks to this, VMware not only firmly entered the top of the world’s largest software companies providing services to the corporate sector, but also now ranks fifth in it place.

— Are you planning to develop new directions?

— Yes, the company is actively expanding its business by acquiring good projects. Recent acquisitions include AirWatch, which manages users' mobile devices. For example, let's take a bank that has a large number of employees with their own mobile devices. Most expect to be able to access corporate resources, such as email, while maintaining the privacy of their personal information. We have a solution that allows you to control the use of corporate services from personal devices, ensuring a clear separation between personal and corporate data. De facto, VMware offers to virtualize corporate and personal user profiles. If an employee leaves the company or loses his phone, the bank’s IT service has the ability to delete a corporate profile or control the user’s actions in this profile. Depending on geolocation, employees can access certain functions of mobile devices. For example, the camera on their phones is blocked when they are in a certain geolocation - say, in a design bureau developing technical innovations. Another example: certain data can only be provided within the office and only for a fixed meeting time.

— Do you expect competition from new successful startups in the coming years?

— Now we are promoting the concept of software-defined data centers - Software-Defined Data Centers, when an entire data center is virtualized. Such an architecture must include a security system, as well as a monitoring and control system. It is very difficult to develop a solution that covers the entire range of these functions: it is simply impossible to create it from scratch in a year or two. Our product has been developed over 15 years. There will never be many such players who offer a product that covers all tasks. But, of course, niche projects and startups will appear. They often have two options: either be bought by larger companies, as was the case with AirWatch or Nicira (a 30-person network virtualization company, VMware bought Nicira in 2012 for $1.26 billion), or develop independently to a large corporation, as was once the case with VMware. But the second path will take a lot of time and investment.

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