At a press conference yesterday, VMware announced that its operations in the Middle East are showing signs of steady growth as enterprises in the region continue to drive the demand for virtualisation and cloud computing solutions.
According to Jean-Pierre Brulard, partner director for SEMEA at VMware, the demand for virtualisation and cloud computing solutions is driven by four correlated changes in the IT and business landscape. The changing architecture of businesses and workflows together with the increasing demand for multiple personal devices to enable ‘always-on’ connectivity at lower costs is creating new demands on IT teams and departments.
“Enterprises are therefore turning to the latest IT solutions to help them rethink how to build the infrastructure to bring all these devices together to deliver ‘anytime’ access to critical services. Technologies like virtualisation and cloud computing enable just this with the added benefits of agility and cost savings,” he said.
The news was shared as part of the VMware Forum and Partner Exchange (PEX) event in Dubai that attracted over 300 local customers and 200 partners in its very first year.
VMware also said that today, almost 50% of workloads run on VMware virtualisation solutions. Brulard said that the company has announced revenues in 2011 amounting to $3.77 billion, a growth of 32% from the previous year and today caters to 350,000 customers, 50,000 of whom are customers acquired over the last year.
To ensure that it stays ahead of the game, Brulard said that the company is consciously investing heavily in R&D and innovation. “We currently have 11,000 employees worldwide, 5000 of these employees are engineers and developers that create platforms to service the end customers’ every need. Our operations in the Middle East have grown at twice the rate of growth worldwide and we plan to double our presence in the region. This means over the next year, you will see us expand our team, solution portfolio and our professional expertise,” he said.
As part of this growth initiative, the company also announced that is had partnered with Trend Micro to deliver an agent less antivirus solution built for VMware virtualised desktops and data centres, “Which for customers’ means higher consolidation rates and cost savings, as well as faster performance and better manageability,” representatives said.
