The money will pay for a new 82,000-square-foot development center in Bangalore and for staff increases.VMware plans
to invest $100 million in India over the next two years, adding more
engineers and developers to its staff and increasing its research and
development operations with a new facility.
During a March 24 news conference in Bangalore, India, CEO Diane
Greene said the investment would include an 82,000-sqaure-foot
development center in the city and increase the number of in-country
engineers and developers to more than 1,000.
“India is also one of our fastest growing markets and where we have
increasingly important system integrator partners,” Greene said in a
statement. “For these reasons, we are now substantively increasing our
investment in India.”
Since last summer, when VMware – the leading vendor of x86
virtualization technology – announced an initial public offering for 10
percent of the company in the summer, the company has begun expanding
into emerging markets, such as India and China. VMware’s majority
stakeholder is parent company EMC.
The announcement also comes a week after Citrix said it had inked a deal with Lenovo
that will bring its XenServer virtualization product into the Chinese
market for the first time. Both Citrix and VMware are also facing new
competition from Microsoft in the virtualization market. The software
giant’s Hyper-V virtualization option for Windows Server 2008 is slated for an August release.
In her statement, Greene said the $100 million investment will help
expand VMware’s R&D efforts in India as well as grow its customer
base into emerging markets. Currently, VMware has about 300 customers
in India.
The move also allows VMware to diversify its customer base outside
the United States. As the U.S. economy continues to slow down, several
major IT companies, including Intel and Hewlett-Packard, have turned to
overseas revenues to offset their returns from the United States.
Infrastructure 
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