US cloud computing and virtualisation technology company VMware will step up focus on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model with India being the talent hub to enable a quick transition, its India-born chief executive Raghu Raghuraman told.

This comes as the company is gearing up to operate as an independent entity after it was spun off from Dell.

“We are ahead of the $2 billion run rate. We have the largest developer base in India ahead of Palo Alto,” Raghuraman said. “It is critically important for us, the investment continues.”

VMware employs over 6,000 professionals in India, a fifth of its global workforce.

In comparison, it has only 5,000 employees at its headquarters in Palo Alto.

In 2018, VMware committed to invest $2 billion to expand its India operations over five years.

The company, which develops products, provides customer service, internal accounts and taps local businesses, has expanded in Bengaluru, Pune and has also set up a unit in Chennai, home to the country’s SaaS products industry.

“As our portfolio expands into developer platforms and serving developers, platform operators and modernizing applications, India has the largest pool of developers, and it becomes an even more important sector for us. And then (there is the) growing SaaS (industry in India for talent) ".

“All of these signals point to the fact that we're going to continue investing in India significantly,” Raghuraman, a company veteran who took over as CEO in May, said.

Dell Technologies, which holds 80% stake in the company, has said that VMware would be spun off as an independent entity from November.

In the fiscal year ending 2021, VMWare reported revenue of $11.77 billion and had a market capitalisation of $63.61 billion.
“We have a phenomenal relationship with Dell and that will continue to be very strong. We have a go-to-market agreement as well as a technology collaboration agreement that is indexed on current performance and then goes from there,” he said.

Being independent will allow VMWare to grow its business and embrace competitors of Dell as partners, he added.

“Previously, while they (rivals of Dell) partnered with us, they did not partner with us in a more strategic function. This allows us to be truly (the) Switzerland of the industry,” said Raghuraman.

He was referring to the principle of neutrality, which is a key pillar of Switzerland’s foreign policy.

“We are entering what I would classify as the Second Age of the cloud, which is the multi-cloud era of computing, and you're going to see a tremendous acceleration of enterprise digital transformation, powered by multi-cloud computing,” Raghuraman said.

He said the next phase of digital transformation by global companies would be powered by the adoption of multiple cloud platforms and deploying applications on Edge (computing) with the rise of 5G. There will also be higher focus on developer talent, he added.