“We want to virtualise all the services available in the data centre and control them at a software level”—
Ramesh Vantipalli, head EUC India and regional SE manager-South, VM ware India
QHP
has recently made a huge investment in the cloud space and is also banking on the hybrid cloud for its growth. There are other players also promoting the hybrid cloud over everything else. So what do you think will be a differentiator in this space, with respect to the services offered? The hybrid cloud is clearly the future. But an organisation has to be very cautious while choosing the service providers. One important aspect is that seamless management tools are required in the case of hybrid clouds. It is about how seamlessly one manages the entire environment. Our vision is that the front-end tools we give to the administrator should be a single glass pane and a seamless extension, whether the workload is running in a private cloud or a public cloud. Ease of use and seamless integration are propositions that any service provider can offer. The second important thing for the cloud is virtualisation. Without virtualisation, working on the cloud is not possible. We work with vendors, including HP, to make their pieces pluggable. So it is about cooperation between us to actually integrate our technologies into their cloud.
Besides, an IT admin must look at the solution being compatible with vendor-agnostic hardware. An organisation’s needs are best served when a vendor can offer a unified approach with respect to the hardware. Also, while choosing a hybrid cloud solution provider, an organisation should understand its own needs first. For example, in Bengaluru, we have an IT-ITeS company that takes on new projects from time to time. When it gets new projects, it wants the IT infrastructure to be in place. Everybody is working on SLAs these days and projects need to be delivered faster. If firms don’t have the compute capacity available locally, they want it seasonally. For instance, a firm might get a 3-month or 6-month long project and want to use a public cloud, but once