Vmware sets up Latin American headquarters in Brazil
Valor Econômico 02/12/2009
It is all about working the business foundations. That is the view of Steve Houck, the executive who took the newly-created office of Vice-President for Latin America of the American company. In recent years, the Vmware virtualization technology - which allows a computer to operate as if it were several computers with many different configurations and functions - has quickly spread through the departments of information technology (IT), almost by the word of mouth of professionals, who report reduction of costs and performance gains in their activities. The phenomenon has also been taking place in Brazil and in Latin America, but until a while ago VMware concentrated its international efforts in Europe and in the English-speaking countries. This guideline has changed. The proof is that Houck is moving to São Paulo, where the Vmware headquarters for Latin America will be located. In the middle of last year, Vmware started defining a strategy to work the increase in the block of countries formed by Brazil, Russia, India and China (Bric) in a better way, and that caused the need to create specific structures to command those operations. Vmware does not disclose the regional figures, but Houck emphasizes the Brazilian and Latin American markets grow faster than the global pace of expansion of the company, of 42% in the last fiscal year. He also affirmed the geographies accompany the average of the technology market, in which Latin America is responsible for 10% of the global sales and Brazil for 1% to 2% of the world sales. Despite a participation that reaches 70% of the market, VMware still has a lot to explore in virtualization. The estimate is that only 10% of the world servers are virtualized. With the fast expansion of the IT environments and the traffic in the communication networks, the demand for technology has a strong bias cut of increase. In the projections of the Gartner consulting company, the number of virtual machines will increase from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million in 2011. According to Houck, the next steps are showing that the technology can be applied outside the servers' environment and that it is also an option for small- and medium-size companies.