With India among one of its fastest-growing regions, VMWare, the cloud software as a service company, is earmarking $2 billion to boost its business there and bring on more engineers.
Patrick Gelsinger, Chief Executive at VMWare, threw down the gauntlet with its Indian aspirations in an interview with the Economic Times in which he revealed the $2 billion investment will happen during the course of the next five years. "We are building on the good momentum. We will expand our innovation and R&D and overall business capacity to support our global capability. We will expand our go-to-market capacity to reach more into the marketplace," the executive said in the interview. "It is primarily the people resources that we are accounting for in the $2 billion. We will either be opening new offices or expanding the current ones to support those people." While Gelsinger wouldn't say what its growth rate is in India he did say it surpasses the company’s overall global growth rate of 12%.
Indian Companies Are Going Digital At A Fast Rate
In addition to being one of the most populous countries in the world, India is attractive to the likes of VMWare because it is in the process of digitally transforming businesses and is doing it at a faster rate than other countries around the globe. At least that's what Dmitri Chen, COO Asia-Pacific at Dell EMC told The Economic Times last month. He also touted the highly skilled tech-savvy workforce residing in the country. "I think people can see that there's an opportunity that's pretty unprecedented on where business and technology converges. We are seeing an aggressive shift among organisations towards technology investments, automation and changing their entire businesses into software oriented cultures" Chen said at the time in the report.
VMWare Want To Build Out Its Talent Pool In India
The investments are going largely to build up the talent at the company so it can expand research and development and enhance its sales teams in Bangalore, Pune, and Chennai. The Economic Times noted some of the investment will also go to hire employees for customer support and back office roles in IT and other departments. VMWare is going after the government in Indian, telecom companies and the financial services sector with its products. Currently, VMWare, a unit of Dell Technologies, offers companies a cloud infrastructure and virtualization software both in the U.S. and abroad. In India, it has around 5,000 employees, reported The Economic Times with the majority in research and product development. It has been expanding over the past few years and offers companies cloud services to manage IT and multi-cloud and multi-device platforms.
Some of the $2 billion is going to bankroll a project with Women Who Code in which it will train 15,000 females on how to use VMWare products during the next 24 months. Some of those trained coders will come on board with VMWare while the majority will be hired at the companies that use VMWare. That will not only help the company lure new developers its way but expand acceptance of its products with the developers' community in India.
