Every CIO is struggling for answers to BYOD

Pat Gelsinger was Intel's first CTO, and many thought he would succeed Paul Otellini when he retired as Intel CEO. But in 2009, after 30 years at the chip maker, Gelsinger moved to EMC as president and COO, and last year moved to EMC company VMware as CEO. On a recent visit to Bangalore , he spoke to TOI about his focus at the cloud and virtualization software company . 

Corporate adoption of public clouds remains limited. Do you see this changing?

True, the large majority of what is running on public clouds like Amazon and Rackspace is not corporate workloads. It's Zynga. It's Netflix. And mobile-only internet-based services. What's happening from the corporation is this small sliver of almost entirely test and development. Inside corporations are these developers who can't get what they want from their IT department. So they use public clouds to get their job done. But if the corporation gets excited about the work and wants to deploy it, they can't do it in their internal datacentres because it's not compatible with, say, the Amazon resources used to develop it. Corporate IT requires SLAs (service level agreements), governance, privacy and other regulatory things that the current public clouds do not provide. This is why we now have our hybrid cloud solution that solves this problem by creating this seamlessness across the public-private environment . We'll have the same network, security, management , and compatible applications . 

Will you build your own datacentres?

We will use somebody else's datacentre, but it will be my brand and I'll take operational responsibility for it. 

You expect that with this corporates will go beyond test and development in public clouds?

Exactly. We were with a customer recently - a big media company - and their conclusion was that they could do two things based on our solution quickly. One was to drive up the utilization of their internal datacentres, which stood at about 50-60 %, because they would now be able to burst to our cloud whenever they thought their internal capacity was peaking . The second was to make us their DR (disaster recovery ) site, get DR as a service from us. DR represents around 25% of the overall IT budget. 

How do you see the BYOD (bring your own device to work) movement?

Every CIO is struggling for answers to BYOD -- how do they enable new apps on mobile devices, and yet be able to manage and secure this data. Our answer again is to try to bridge the two worlds - deliver all the management and infrastructure tools that IT requires, but do it in a way that doesn't change the end user experience. We are seeing a lot of growth in this area. 

Citrix found that in most companies, employees needed only email and a few other apps on their mobile devices, and not the full suite of corporate resources. So they now offer a limited BYOD solution that's substantially cheaper and simple to implement . 

They are adopting a different strategy than we are. Our strategy is to not focus on picking the apps for the end-user but enabling any app that IT would choose to be delivered. So we are taking an infrastructure view, just like we didn't pick which apps could be virtualized when we did virtualization. Citrix is a good company and are market leaders in certain portions of the market - we are number two in some areas - but we think the strategy we've laid out is getting a credible resonance from customers.