A couple of weeks ago I was a part of the first ever Indian edition of VMware Explore, our flagship event that brings together VMware leaders, customers, partners and the larger ecosystem of innovators and technologists. It was a fantastic platform to hear from customers and partners about their roadmaps in a post pandemic economy and an opportunity to convey our strategies and vision to a large audience. From the conversations I had during the event and from the larger discussions around the future of digital transformation, it is evident that the Indian market is aware, savvy and determined to leverage best in class product innovation to drive the next phase of its digital journey.
The Indian market has been characterized by a quickly evolving digital transformation narrative, focussed Government push for digitization and innovation at a scale that is not witnessed elsewhere in the world. In 2022 India ranked 40th in the Global Innovation Index. It also has a thriving start-up ecosystem that is pushing the envelope on digital innovation. We have a deep and diverse pool of developer talent in the country, and savvy technology leaders who understand and value the potential of technology driven progress.
As a result, the lines separating technology and business are rapidly blurring – technology now has a seat at the boardroom and future roadmaps are built on the basis of a sound digital foundation. It wouldn’t be farfetched to say that most companies across sectors today are tech companies building and delivering products for their customers with a strong digital foundation. In this market context, there is little wonder that cloud is increasingly being perceived as a critical enabler of growth. Here too India has made a giant leap from the private cloud focus of a decade ago to widespread adoption of multi clouds. Accelerated cloud native app development, cloud management, and cost optimization are at the top of every CIOs agenda as they strive for the next phase of innovation and growth.
VMware has been an integral part of India’s digital technology landscape for more than 15 years. And during this time, it has consistently delivered the technology that the country needed to take its transformation agenda forward. We understand innovation that can take a country’s economic development ahead. After all, innovation is in our DNA. Twenty five (25) years ago, our founders changed the compute paradigm with the first products they delivered and today, we are continuing to fuel SaaS innovations in a multi cloud and AI driven world. With our large R&D team, product support teams, IT teams and operational teams, we represent a complete microcosm of the VMware global organization.
We have helped the world transition from on-prem to cloud first, and understand the challenges that come with multiple clouds. As organizations moved to cloud first infrastructures, they picked specific clouds for specific requirements. Each one came with a separate set of tools and security protocols leading to a highly complex and fragmented infrastructure. We are now working with organizations to help them move from this state of cloud chaos to cloud smart – simplified management of multi clouds and cross cloud services, to allow the organization to focus on transformation rather than day to day management. We see a unique opportunity in India where organizations have the opportunity to leapfrog from cloud first to cloud smart without actually experiencing the challenges of the cloud chaos stage. Our cloud smart strategy and comprehensive cross cloud portfolio is ready to help Indian organizations unlock the full potential of multi clouds and modernized applications. Most of our customer engagements in India go back a long way and we have helped them at every stage of their digital transformation journey. It stands to reason that we will be part of their cloud smart transformation as well.
In fact, several of our Indian customers have already built a robust digital foundation and are pushing ahead on their cloud smart journeys. A leading Indian bank that we have been working with since 2009, has always been a digital leader and innovator. It is now in the process of implementing its Digital 2.0 strategy to deliver a superlative experience for its customers, partners, employees. It has moved significant applications on cloud and cut down on go to market time significantly. Its Digital strategy focuses on a Human Centered Design Principle to drive a Differentiated customer experience, to build & scale Do It Yourself models. It intends to capitalize on embedded finance models in collaboration with the larger ecosystem. The strategy is modular, available, scalable and secure by design and leverages data and analytics to drive personalization and better decision making. It intends to be a Digital Centre of Excellence – a new age organization with relevant skills to drive agility. This digital smart approach saved the bank 200+ man hours, reduced IT infrastructure TTR from 8 days to under 2 hours, and saved 8 thousand metric tonnes of carbon. It helped reduce operational costs, ensured consistent operations, and enhanced the IT teams’ ability to develop new products faster, enhanced performance and scalability of storage and consume as you go apps. It also helped deliver improved digital experiences and enhanced employee productivity.
In another example, a leading stock exchange in the country has been seamlessly handling extraordinarily high-ticket volumes to power the country’s objective of becoming a USD 5 trillion economy by 2025. And we are proud to say that our technology stack powers this organization’s incredible performance. The organization moved from on prem to the cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS, part of our cross-cloud services. It now operates on a more flexible and scalable environment that allows it to handle increasing transaction volumes and support the development of modernized applications seamlessly and securely. We helped it move to a remote working environment without any operational disruption when India went into lockdown in the early days of the pandemic. Our technology ensured that the organization continued to function normally and even helped it scale up to handle up to 4 billion orders per day.
Of course, we believe innovation isn't just about technology. It's also about people. We believe that our success is directly tied to the talent and creativity of our employees. Our biggest strength in India is our diverse team of over 10,000 technology professionals who we support with our EPIC 2 values, and culture of innovation. We believe in fostering creativity and that paradigm changing ideas can come from anyone. We work closely with our colleagues in other parts of the world to share knowledge, ideas, and best practices. By leveraging the expertise of our global team, we are able to develop solutions that are both innovative and practical. Our engineers are encouraged to participate in our numerous collaborative projects, conferences, technical talks, and events.
Above all, we believe that true innovation is not possible without a diverse team and inclusive work culture. Our commitment to driving DEI goes beyond just our organization, as industry leaders we are committed to fostering greater diversity in the Indian technology sector. We aim to bring women back to the workforce with VMinclusion Taara, a unique upskilling and return to work program for women. VMware Nakshatra is a paid internship program for women who are looking to make a return to the workforce and are interested in working across a wide range of roles within VMware. VMware Nirmaan provides a powerful platform for networking, collaboration, mentorship, and learning for mid to senior level women in the ecosystem. At VMware Explore India, we also held the 6th edition of VMware Nirmaan that saw enthusiastic participation from not just technologists but also allies within the industry.
I believe that India is well on its way to achieving its objective of becoming a global economic superpower. It already has the digital foundation required for this, along with the developer talent, and innovation mindset. And VMware can help it streamline and optimize its future technology roadmap with intelligent, innovative solutions that can help it build on a cloud smart infrastructure.