Head of VMware - about the company's strategy and work in Russia after the Dell deal with EMC

Recently, the attention of the IT public has attracted the activities of EMC (owns 80% of VMware and RSA ).

On October 12, Megamind wrote that Dell had come close to the acquisition of the EMC Corporation. The companies agreed on everything, it remains to carry out technical procedures and close the deal. Dell will pay EMC $ 67 billion. The deal, in fact, is the largest in history. EMC now costs twice as much as Dell.

On October 29, EMC and VMware announced their plans to launch a new cloud services business. To do this, they will create a new division based on the company Virtustream , which will combine the already created cloud solutions with the projects Virtustream. The company with the brand Virtustream will be owned simultaneously by VMware and EMC.
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Yesterday, November 3, it became known that Dell plans to sell assets worth $ 10 billion before acquiring EMC. This will reduce your debt load in anticipation of the purchase. Among the assets sold may be Quest Software and Perot Systems , SonicWall and the AppAssure program.

Head of the VMware representative office in Russia and the CIS Alexander Vasilenko told CNews about how the EMC deal with Dell will affect VMware partners, the company's strategy and trends in the global IT market.

"Megamind" leads the most interesting statements from the interview .

About EMC Takeover by Dell

To understand the changes, you need to remember what the situation was before this event. Three different companies worked on the market: Dell, EMC and VMware. The first company is private, it is controlled by the founder Michael Dell, who in 2013 bought it from shareholders and brought it out of the stock exchange. The remaining two companies are public, they are traded on the stock exchange and are subject to boards of directors. Important fact: EMC owned approximately 80% of VMware, but the companies always operated independently. Why was that? Because at the time of the purchase of a controlling stake in 2004, VMware already created a whole ecosystem of partners that needed to be preserved. EMC then chose the path of providing complete VMware autonomy.

We continued to work with all partners, including EMC competitors. At the very beginning there was a lot of talk that independence in such conditions was impossible, and that the owner of the controlling stake would still need some preferences for himself. More than 10 years passed, and the market was convinced that we were really independent all this time. What happened now? It was announced that Dell was buying all EMC shares from the market. That is, in fact, EMC will also become a private company, it will enter the corporation of Michael Dell. But for us nothing has changed - we are still an independent public company.

And now, like 11 years ago, I hear opinions, and suddenly VMware will work with only one corporation ... Nothing like that. From the very beginning, we are fundamentally creating platform-independent solutions. What is the point now to refuse this advantage and become attached to one manufacturer?

How relations with Russian partners will change after the transaction

Michael Dell himself has already answered this question. He stated unequivocally that VMware would remain an independent public company, in whose activities he would not interfere and would not restrict its relations with any other companies. At the moment, the transaction is not yet completed - it will be closed in a few months, because it must undergo a rather lengthy procedure. And when this happens, VMware will not change its positioning in the market and directions of work. Plans will remain as they were before the announcement of the transaction. In Russia, in connection with the latest announcements, there will be no changes for VMware customers. VMware's strategy is the same — helping our customers change with the changing world.

About global trends in IT markets

The main driver of change in the modern world is information technology. The impact of IT has led to the fact that today the critical factor of market dominance is not the size of the company, but the speed with which it is able to support change.

We can ask the CIO of any bank a question about his priorities, and hear not only the usual answers about technology, but also, for example, that he needs to look for ways to compete with new companies that do not belong to the banking sector, but are engaged, for example , electronic payments. Moreover, these companies work in a certain sense easier, because they play according to simpler rules, they are not in the sphere of attention of regulators.

All major banks have released mobile apps, they are all starting to work with new tools, such as social networks. This is because banks have an understanding: competition in this market will be tightened, and with methods that did not exist before.

The second factor affecting modern markets is the emergence of large companies that do not own visible tangible assets. Examples are known. Uber, a company that has not bought a single taxi car, has become the largest carrier in the world.

Or, for example, Airbnb, which does not own a single apartment, but who rents out housing throughout the world. Facebook is, in fact, the largest distributor of content, but does not create it. Suddenly, the business found out that to do business you do not need to own anything at all. This, if you will, is a transference of the concept of cloud technologies to business. And such a huge shift would have been impossible without an appropriate IT platform.

About VMware Strategy in a Changing World

The first direction is software-defined data centers, or a software-defined data center. We believe that in a modern data center all components should be software-defined (software-configurable): server, and network, and storage infrastructure. Plus, an appropriate management and security system is needed. Interestingly, VMware introduced the term software-defined about four years ago, and today it denotes one of the main trends changing the world.

In fact, now the whole IT world is becoming “software-defined”. It is not the one who has the faster hardware that wins in it, but the one who can provide additional service at the expense of the software part. If the first global direction of development of VMware is associated with the development of data centers, the second concerns the approach to the user.

He should receive the necessary corporate service on any device, at any point, in compliance with all security requirements. People use their own smartphones and tablets at work (BYOD concept), solve service tasks with their help, and these devices need to be integrated into the security system of each company. Prohibiting such use is useless. If you can not ban - head the process itself.