Company to tap India’s engineering talent.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: VMware, the Palo Alto-based cloud and virtualization services company, has announced that it is planning to invest half a billion dollars in India over the next three years, as part of a plan to expand into the growing Indian marketplace.
“India continues to play a crucial role in our global product roadmap and growth strategy. The country’s outstanding engineering talent continues to impress us, and we stay committed to investing and growing our team here over the long term,” said VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger, in a statement.
Currently, VMware has a sizeable Research and Development presence on the subcontinent, with its Indian R&D facilities second only to those at its Palo Alto headquarters in terms of volume. The company has been in existence since it was founded in 1998, and came to India in 2005, where it has grown to serve around 3,500 customers and nearly 100 clients in just nine years.
The company’s Indian presence grew substantially in 2013, when it acquired Virginia-based mobile technology firm AirWatch and absorbed its 2,300 Indian employees, stationed in Bangalore.
It’s new investment into India, which equates to just over Rs. 3,000 crore in local currency, will go towards helping to optimize the country’s growing network infrastructure and maintaining reliable and secure data storage, mainly in the cloud. In a press release, VMware implied that it could be critical to helping India manage its growing technological presence.
“The investments earmarked will also enable VMware to further strengthen its leadership position in India’s fast maturing virtualization and cloud computing market,” Gelsinger also said.
The company did not specify how the $500 million investment would be broken up, nor when or in what kinds of installments the investment would be made. The company, publically traded on the NASDAQ, is one of the most successful IT companies in the US, with revenues of over $4.6 billion listed in 2012.