Pat Gelsinger was Intel's first CTO, and many thought he would
succeed Paul Otellini when he retired as Intel CEO. But in 2009, after
30 years at the chip maker, Gelsinger moved to EMC as president and COO,
and last year moved to EMC company VMware as CEO. On a recent visit to
Bangalore , he spoke to TOI about his focus at the cloud and
virtualization software company .
Corporate adoption of public clouds remains limited. Do you see this changing?
True,
the large majority of what is running on public clouds like Amazon and
Rackspace is not corporate workloads. It's Zynga. It's Netflix. And
mobile-only internet-based services. What's happening from the
corporation is this small sliver of almost entirely test and
development. Inside corporations are these developers who can't get what
they want from their IT department. So they use public clouds to get
their job done. But if the corporation gets excited about the work and
wants to deploy it, they can't do it in their internal datacentres
because it's not compatible with, say, the Amazon resources used to
develop it. Corporate IT requires SLAs (service level agreements),
governance, privacy and other regulatory things that the current public
clouds do not provide. This is why we now have our hybrid cloud solution
that solves this problem by creating this seamlessness across the
public-private environment . We'll have the same network, security,
management , and compatible applications .
Will you build your own datacentres?
We will use somebody else's datacentre, but it will be my brand and I'll take operational responsibility for it.
You expect that with this corporates will go beyond test and development in public clouds?
Exactly.
We were with a customer recently - a big media company - and their
conclusion was that they could do two things based on our solution
quickly. One was to drive up the utilization of their internal
datacentres, which stood at about 50-60 %, because they would now be
able to burst to our cloud whenever they thought their internal capacity
was peaking . The second was to make us their DR (disaster recovery )
site, get DR as a service from us. DR represents around 25% of the
overall IT budget.
How do you see the BYOD (bring your own device to work) movement?
Every
CIO is struggling for answers to BYOD -- how do they enable new apps on
mobile devices, and yet be able to manage and secure this data. Our
answer again is to try to bridge the two worlds - deliver all the
management and infrastructure tools that IT requires, but do it in a way
that doesn't change the end user experience. We are seeing a lot of
growth in this area.
Citrix found that in most companies,
employees needed only email and a few other apps on their mobile
devices, and not the full suite of corporate resources. So they now
offer a limited BYOD solution that's substantially cheaper and simple to
implement .
They are adopting a different strategy than we
are. Our strategy is to not focus on picking the apps for the end-user
but enabling any app that IT would choose to be delivered. So we are
taking an infrastructure view, just like we didn't pick which apps could
be virtualized when we did virtualization. Citrix is a good company and
are market leaders in certain portions of the market - we are number
two in some areas - but we think the strategy we've laid out is getting a
credible resonance from customers.
