This article is based on a 2019 interview with David Wakeman, VMware’s Senior Director for End User Computing, Asia Pacific and Japan, originally reported by Telangana Today / IANS.
VMware’s Strategic Bet on India
Enterprise software major VMware has identified India’s ongoing digitisation drive as one of its most significant growth opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region. Speaking to IANS, David Wakeman, VMware’s Senior Director for End User Computing, Asia Pacific and Japan, outlined how the company is positioning itself to support both large enterprises and government bodies as they extend digital services to a broader population.
The California-headquartered company had, at the time of the interview, announced a $2 billion investment in India over five years, earmarked for expanding facilities, growing headcount, and accelerating research and development activity in the country.
Where VMware Is Already Working in India
VMware had already embedded its technology inside some of India’s most prominent organisations by 2019, including:
- State Bank of India (SBI) – one of the world’s largest retail banks by customer base
- Bharti Airtel – a major telecommunications provider operating across India and Africa
- BookMyShow – a high-traffic consumer ticketing and entertainment platform
Wakeman highlighted work with Indian banks around workforce inclusion policies — specifically, enabling customers to conduct financial transactions via mobile devices rather than requiring a physical branch visit. He also noted conversations with insurance companies exploring how field and office staff can be empowered through digital tooling.
Workspace ONE: Delivering Any App on Any Device
A central part of VMware’s pitch to Indian enterprises is its Workspace ONE unified endpoint management (UEM) platform. The platform integrates three capabilities in a single solution:
- Access control – identity-aware, conditional access policies
- Application management – lifecycle management for native, web, and virtual applications
- Multi-platform endpoint management – covering iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Chrome OS devices
Workspace ONE is available both as a cloud-hosted SaaS service and as an on-premises deployment, giving organisations flexibility based on regulatory requirements or infrastructure preferences. Wakeman noted that VMware operates over 1,000 data centres globally for the platform and established a dedicated data centre in India approximately three years before the interview to support local SaaS delivery.
People Must Remain at the Centre of Digitisation
A recurring theme in Wakeman’s remarks was the risk of treating digitisation as a purely technical exercise. He was direct on this point:
“If we just look at digital for digital’s sake and miss the people a bit, that’s a problem. We’re spending a lot of time thinking about how technology and employee experience can come together.”
David Wakeman, Senior Director, End User Computing, APJ – VMware
He encouraged organisations embarking on digital transformation programmes to evaluate three dimensions beyond the technology itself:
- Employee experience – does the new tooling make it easier or harder for staff to do their jobs?
- Cultural access – does it open new pathways for under-represented groups to enter or remain in the workforce?
- Practical constraints – does it reduce burden on workers, including logistical challenges such as commuting or travel to physical locations?
India’s population of technology-savvy consumers, Wakeman argued, makes it an ideal early proving ground for new capabilities. “Indians are avid consumers of technology, so whenever we do something new or different, immediately you will see that it will show up here in India first,” he said.
Why Cloud Adoption in India Has Lagged Other APJ Markets
Despite enthusiasm for digital tools, Wakeman acknowledged that enterprise cloud adoption in India had been slower than in comparable markets such as Australia and Japan. He attributed this to two structural factors:
1. Regulatory and Compliance Constraints
Government agencies and regulated sectors such as banking have historically faced stricter compliance requirements around data residency and sovereign control. While markets like Australia and Japan had already seen more conservative government and financial-sector organisations begin migrating workloads to cloud, India’s equivalent sectors remained more cautious at the time of this interview.
2. The Cost Perception Problem
The second barrier was a widespread assumption that cloud should be cheaper than on-premises infrastructure. As Wakeman explained:
“Cloud is not necessarily cheaper than what people can do themselves on premise. The value proposition initially around what Cloud offers was first approached by the Indian market as a lower cost way than us running it, and it’s taken some time for the majority of clients to change and think about Cloud having a different set of value and property than just about the infrastructure being lesser.”
David Wakeman, VMware
This is a shift in framing that cloud vendors and their channel partners continue to navigate globally: moving the conversation from cost reduction to agility, scalability, and speed of innovation as the primary value drivers.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and IT Leaders
- Large-scale digitisation programmes succeed when employee experience is treated as a first-class outcome, not an afterthought.
- Regulatory compliance remains a significant brake on cloud adoption in government and financial sectors — on-premises and hybrid deployment options are not going away.
- The business case for cloud needs to be articulated in terms of agility and innovation velocity, not just infrastructure cost savings.
- Mobile-first approaches to service delivery (banking, insurance, government) are proving particularly impactful in markets with large under-served populations.
- Data residency — having a local cloud region or data centre — is often a prerequisite for regulated industries considering SaaS adoption.
Original reporting by IANS, as published by Telangana Today (December 2019).