By Nishant Arora

New Delhi, Feb 28 (IANS): When it comes to delivering enhanced user experiences in the Cloud and mobile-first era, global Cloud infrastructure and business mobility leader VMware sees massive growth opportunities in India -- and telecom is going to be an interesting arena for the Dell EMC-owned company.

According to Arun Kumar Parameswaran, Managing Director, VMware India, the trend in India is in line with the changes being witnessed in the global telecom landscape.

"The new entrant [Reliance Jio] has altered the entire dynamics of the telecom landscape in more ways than we can imagine. The user experiences are happening at a very different cost structure now. Here, VMware is strongly placed to deliver value, both in terms of delivering agility and automation, while continuing to reduce the cost," Parameswaran told IANS in an interview.

"The trend is consistent across the world. Telecom operators are improving cost equations, agility, scalability and resource utilisation, etc," he added.

After establishing its presence in the banking and government institutions in the country, VMware is bullish on the vast telecommunications sector to further fuel its growth.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, who visited India in October last year, had told IANS that "the one sector that we have started to have much more success is the telecommunication sector".

VMware recently entered into a strategic partnership with Bharti Airtel. "Bharti Airtel will be making extensive use of our products," Gelsinger said.

In September, Vodafone entered into a software licensing agreement with VMware. As part of the agreement, VMware will be one of the vendors to support the operator's global rollout of Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) to accelerate its delivery of future products and services in a rapid, cost-efficient manner.

The game-changer for the telecom industry, said Parameswaran, is 5G -- and VMware, with its production-proven NFV platform, is ready to help telcos set off on the 5G journey.

"In the next 18-24 months, 5G will start showing up on everyone's radar and this is going to bring an entirely new cost infrastructure, along with a complete virtualised experience. We are investing heavily on this front because this is where the future lies," noted Parameswaran.

Earlier this month, Tech Mahindra partnered VMware to jointly develop, market and deliver solutions to accelerate network transformation for Communication Service Providers (CSPs).

The companies will combine VMware's NFV platform with Tech Mahindra's Network Services to help global CSPs accelerate new service delivery, open new market opportunities and improve IT and business economics.

At the "Mobile World Congress 2018" in Barcelona, Spain, this week, VMware demonstrated some exciting turn-key solutions and NFV use cases that give CSPs the ability to build a transformative architecture.

When it comes to business mobility, Parameswaran feels India is not lagging behind.

"The Indian banking sector adopted mobile at par with most of the Western economies. Office workplaces are transforming, thus enabling functions right at your doorsteps. In fact, use cases in India have become a lot more complex," Parameswaran emphasised.

The Indian enterprises are slowly but steadily moving towards adopting software-defined data centres (SDDCs).

"Three-four years back, a lot of people thought it was like VMware's new jargon for old wine. In a recent meeting with CIOs, they asked me: So what are you guys doing on SDDCs? I told him that we are the ones who created the vision around SDDCs and are here to help you adopt those," said Parameswaran, who has over 22 years of hi-tech experience across Asia Pacific and the US.

Today, almost all Indian enterprises wish to move their operations to SDDCs.

"This is the new architecture and everyone is looking at its adoption for a seamless compute, network, automation experience and what not. It is now widespread," Parameswaran told IANS.

VMware Cloud is now available on the market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) which brings VMware's SDDCs to the AWS Cloud, allowing customers to run applications across VMware vSphere-based private, public and hybrid Cloud environments, with optimised access to AWS services.

"True enterprise workload mobility will happen soon in India and VMware Cloud on AWS will be a big driving force, giving customers agile, scalable and secure experiences," the executive added.