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Mobile Virtualization to make mobiles OS agnostic
By Benny Thomas   |   Thursday, 17 December 2009, 22:56 IST   |    1 Comments
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Mobile Virtualization to make mobiles OS agnostic
With virtualization gaining more ground in companies around the world, because of the cost benefits involved, companies like VMware are trying to cash in on this opportunity with their products that can help organizations move to the cloud. Though, there are certain apprehensions related to security and interoperability in a virtualized world, the trend shows that virtualization is here to stay. What more to say, even your mobile could also be virtualized in the near future. In an interview with SiliconIndia, T. Srinivasan, Managing Director of VMware India shares his views about the virtualization industry today and how it has grown over the years despite the apprehensions surrounding it. SI: What is the significance of launching Business Infrastructure Virtualization from VMware? TS: Business Infrastructure Virtualization is an evolution from where VMware was earlier, we started off as a company known for server virtualization, which is basically data center consolidation and from there we evolved into desktop virtualization, storage virtualization, network virtualization and others. Abstracting the infrastructure and providing it as a service is what we think will form the cloud. All components, applications, operating system, hardware, network and storage provided to the user is what will be the cloud. It could be internal or external clouds. So we believe that while most people started with server virtualization because there was cost benefit of doing it and no need of buying new hardware, so there was good capital expenditure and operating expenditure savings and lesser power usage. Today people are using it to make the business more agile. For example, when you need to roll out a new application or in an IT company if you want to start a new project you have to buy a new server, negotiate the price and get it delivered and installed. Just provisioning the server used to be a major hassle in terms of process involved. Today, companies are able to provision a server in one hour time. So basically that provides them with time to market advantage. The same is now the case with desktop also, so even you could provision a desktop when a new employee joins and you need to ensure that it needs to be rolled out quickly like during a merger and acquisition. Therefore, provisioning of desktops and servers are today becoming faster and quicker because of virtualization. Expand that to the entire infrastructure that's where you will get to the cloud. Business Infrastructure Virtualization is an evolution what VMware has done overtime. SI: Why is the adoption of desktop virtualization taking more time? TS: I think it is because of the user experience especially over a WAN or the protocol support that is required. People are still very possessive about the desktops, but that's changing and most companies are realizing that it is becoming a nightmare to manage desktops. Too many hassles, viruses and patching systems are becoming difficult to handle. Many companies have already outsourced their desktop management because of the complexity involved in managing it. With virtualization, we believe that you are able to centralize all the complexities, which means all your data backup, applying patches for viruses everything that you need can be done without the actual physical desktop. You could use your thin client, iPhone or any intelligent gadget to work on your data stored in the server and keep it updated. Because we had data on our desktops or laptops, some of that will still continue, but I think especially in industries where data is sensitive like finance and healthcare, most people don't even want to provide a desktop, they don't want provide desktops with DVD writers, pen drives, eventually it becomes a security threat. To that extent desktop virtualization helps in stricter control from the IT department. With our new launch we are providing users an experience which is as good as laptop. The earlier issues of latency and refresh have all gone away, now we get a real life experience like how it used to be in the physical world. SI: CIO's are apprehensive about virtualization over security and interoperability concerns, how do you convince them? TS: Let me take it in two ways, on the server side there is no issue in terms of apprehension, it may have been there several months ago but not anymore. Our products can run applications that are certified to work on the Windows, Linux or any other operating system on the X86 platform. Added to that when customers look at virtualization typically they ask us to do a proof of concept. We run their applications in the virtualized world and show it to them that it can be done. And today that apprehension is little bit in the past. But, sometimes with some of the software providers we may still have to show the proof of concept, but there is no issue on server side. On the security side, again I think VMware has evolved the systems within itself and through our partners to provide customers with enough security and compliance such that there is no worry about one virtual server being accessed by anybody else. There are domains within the virtual server, which are protected and cannot be accessed, so even when you move into a cloud you are assured that your data is not being seen or accessed by anyone who is not authorized to do so. That is why vSphere which is our new product launched 5-6 months ago assures that these are issues that will come to bear when you go into an internal or external cloud and we have addressed it. CIOs will need that reassurance. Today, because of the fact that we have over 180,000 users worldwide, we have probably virtualized every possible enterprise applications. What we have seen work here is the customer references of those who have used the product. The good thing for VMware is that most customers are happy to be references. The Cross referencing works very nicely, there will be apprehensions but if you tell them company X has already done it and you can actually speak to them and get their reassurance that works. Word of mouth reference is very useful in our environment. SI: What are the major trends that you see in the virtualization industry today? TS: There are different levels of users, there are customers who have tried virtualization and they want to do more virtualization in their environment. The second category people are not virtualized, but who want to get there. In the first category we are seeing more and more customers who are convinced that the initial investment was a good one, they are now beginning to move other applications into the virtual machine. People may have started with very simple test and development environment, but today they are moving into virtualizing Exchange or ERP applications or CRM applications. I think the maturity of the users is growing, having invested and tested it out already. Because of the savings and the benefits that the existing users have already achieved the new users now want to experiment. One of the things is that, in the datacenters we find a lot of UNIX installation and VMware doesn't play in this area, we are only in the X86 platform. SI: Your take on the comment by VMware Global CEO that "Virtualization is the mainframe of 20th century"? TS: I think he is right because the current trend is that most of the new computing applications are all virtualized and if you look back at what the mainframes did in the 50s-70s was to provide that corporate environment. In the last two decades we have seen that outside the mainframes there are several applications that are resident. Those today are becoming virtualized and per force they are centralized in the datacenters. Now, smaller machines have the same power and the datacenter is managed by those physical servers, which cater to several hundreds or thousands of virtual servers. Combined with that the desktop virtualization, which is also managed by the vSphere and server consolidation product makes it like the mainframe. Because everything is controlled, implemented and given to the users centrally, that's why the analogy is a good one. But, it doesn't cost that much because it runs on Intel chips, which is a standard hardware. SI: Your plan to launch mobile virtualization in 2010, what can customers expect from this? TS: Two things, one is that today intelligent phones are already capable of acting as desktops, which means that an iPhone can be a good interface to access your corporate data, which is centralized by way of desktop virtualization. The second thing is virtualizing the phone itself. Even within phone there are several operating systems, so what virtualization does is that it allows users to be operating system (OS) agnostic. It sits between the hardware and the application and it allows you to switch OS. So the ability to run an Android application on a Symbian OS is virtualizing on the mobile phone. They can be used as desktops or they can run applications that are virtualized. We have already demonstrated it in the VMworld Conference at San Francisco about two months back. Mobile payments and gateways are the order of the day. Everything will come to the mobile, so virtualization of that will also become important. This will be a major shift in terms of enterprise IT. SI: What are your hiring plans in India? TS: We continue to hire not only for back office facility, but also for the actual product development. One of the new products that we have launched around vSphere called Chargeback, which has the ability to bill users based on the usage of the system. This is fully developed by the centre in Bangalore. We are also ramping up our presence in the sales and marketing side by adding new partners. SI: What do you think about the Indian domestic market? TS: I think the indicators are positive, there has been a good response for our series. People are excited to hear from us and this shows that people are serious about implementing virtualization. Now, more people are turning to the technology and this is a good indicator of technology coming of age and customers willing to adopt it in their own environments. SI: What verticals do you more traction for virtualization? TS: There is traction across the board, especially the SAP customers in manufacturing, banking, telecom sector. The places where there is a predominance of the UNIX platform that will take longer because they don't want to migrate immediately, but all the newer stuff that is happening is all X86 virtualized. Data is very sensitive in banks or telecos and you need to protect it in way possible. Many people start with virtualizing peripheral applications and move to the core. SI: Financial sector is still apprehensive about virtualization, what is the user experience level in this vertical? TS: The user is completely transparent to virtualization. Therefore he will actually believe that he is running it like he used to and cost benefits to the company is a fallout of this. The apprehension with core banking is also gone now, which was said by several CIOs. Today it has come to a stage where banks officers don't want to go to branches that are not core banking functional. It has come to a stage where it is now mandatory that people need to have core banking and today even in rural areas people use SMS to check balances. With the growth of mobiles I don't think that we can stop that technology from moving forward. Virtualization is very transparent to the users, but very critical for IT departments. In order to ensure that the user experience is as rich as in the physical world we have announced a new protocol called PC over IP, which was built ground up to ensure that the experience is as functional as it used to be.

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