UPDATED 14:19 EDT / AUGUST 27 2014

A $10B goal for VMware: Here’s the plan to scale | #vmworld

one billion at a timeVMware, Inc. is revving its engines, hoping to scale from a $6 billion company to a $10 billion company, said VMware President and COO Carl Eschenbach. Whether it’s through new products like Airwatch or accessing new markets at home and abroad, Eschenbach said his company is poised to continue advancing innovation and driving value for their customers.

Describing VMware’s acquisition of AirWatch earlier in 2014, Eschenbach said, “We’ve achieved everything we expected to achieve out of that acquisition.” In July, VMware put the AirWatch products on their price list. Now, the VMware core sales team and channel partners can sell AirWatch products to their market of customers.

The next step, the COO continued, is leveraging VMware’s international footprint and broad client base to expand AirWatch deeper into VMware’s large accounts and to Europe and Asia Pacific.

Against AWS, VMware chooses flexibility as its main weapon

 

Both VMware and Amazon.com, Inc. are attempting to set the tone, to define the future of where the tech world is headed. In his interview on theCUBE, live from VMware’s annual trade show VMworld, show host Dave Vellante asked Eschenbach which company’s vision of the world will win out.

Eschenbach answered that he anticipates even many years from now, less than twenty percent of workloads will be run on the public cloud. While it’s clear that there’s ample opportunity in private and on premise, Eschenbach stressed “We need to make sure that we’re not locking any customer into an ‘or strategy’ — ” the type of situation where customers forced to choose between the types of cloud technologies they use. “It has to be an ‘and strategy’.” Eschenbach said.

This inclusive, customer-centric position is what Eschenbach thinks will differentiate VMware in the market. Their approach is to allow customers to move workflows “inside out and outside in.” The winner, Eschenbach said, will be the company that offers customers security, flexibility, and seamless integration so they can move their workloads on-premise and off-premise at will.

Read more after the video.

Federal market

 

Commenting that he appreciated Eschenbach’s approach, Vellante asked the VMware COO about his perspective on the CIA deal, in which Amazon triumphed over IBM, Corp. Responding, “You can think of the CIA transaction with AWS as a vertical cloud specifically to serve the CIA department,” Eschenbach said that he expects to see more vertical clouds emerge in coming years, but that he doesn’t expect Amazon to rule over the federal market.

At the time of the deal, Eschenbach said that VMware didn’t bid because it didn’t have its product in the market for the federal government, or the proper certifications necessary to service the federal market. Soon, though, VMware will have all the certifications it needs to build a vertical cloud and support federal government agencies. Eschenbach shared that be believes the market is still wide open, especially since the majority of the workloads are on-premise, and will continue to be competitive for years to come.

Offensive Strategies

 

When it comes to competing, Eschenbach said that VMware has a variety of offensive strategies up its sleeve. “We’re a very disruptive technology, innovation-led company in a very positive way.” This year, Eschenbach said that his company carefully scrutinized market dynamics, searching for potential changes in the way people may want to consume technology in the future. At the moment, they’re keeping an eye on “open source or opens stack, [and] the emergence of containers.” VMware, he said, doesn’t have to defend its strategy or turf, they’re actively expanding and seeking out new opportunities for growth and market expansion, without abandoning their commitment to offering customers flexibility of choice and substantial savings.

Continuing to offer expense savings

 

Capital expenditure (CAPEX) savings that VMware provided to customers over the past decade have had to do with consolidation, which produced an immediate return on investment. Now, VMware is growing; As a datacenter automation company, Eschenbach says, “We’re moving from compute and we’re doing the same on networking and we’re doing the same on storage.” He expects capital expense savings to continue as VMware expands its horizons: “I fundamentally believe that we have the opportunity to do the same across the rest of the physical state of the datacenter.”

In addition to CAPEX savings, Eschenbach expects VMware that when customers implement tools, like “management automation, orchestration, and proactive remediation,” across the software defined center, they’ll find additional operation expenditure savings, especially in labor costs.

 

VMware on a global scale

 

So far, taking their operation overseas has worked out in VMware’s favor. In fact, Eschenbach highlighted, “Greater than 50 percent of our business is outside of the U.S and North America.”

The company’s strategy has been to take their vCloud Air platform to some of the largest markets outside of the United States, including the UK, Australia, Japan, and China. Eschenbach says VMware had built out its own data centers to address “greater than 95 percent of the infrastructure as a service market in the world.” In the countries where VMware does not operate, the company relies on members its 3,900 strong partner network to service that market.

Partner relationships

 

A company that relies so heavily on its partners needs to maintain strong relationships throughout their entire ecosystem. Eschenbach notes that VMware’s goal is to bring all their partners with them into the mobile cloud era.

photo credit: mightymoss via photopin cc

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