Innovation @ VMware

Last year I switched jobs from Cisco Systems to VMware. Both are great IT companies to work for, and I feel proud & fortunate to get a chance to work for both of these MNCs. Both are considered industry leaders and bitter rivals now a days with VMware entering the cloud and network virtualization market after the Nicira acquisition back in 2012. Never the less both Cisco ACI & VMware NSX products are doing great in the market despite of tough competition from numerous startup entering the arena lately. Another fact to be noted is that most of VMWare NSX software runs on top of Cisco hardware, so in a way they are still complimentary to each other!

Having worked at the telecom gateway development group (MITG - formerly Starent Networks) at Cisco for close to 5 years, I am glad that I made the decision to join the Networking & Security Business Unit of VMware, which is lead by none other than the inventor of SDN, our SVP Martin Casado. What I am really happy about working at VMware is the amount of innovation opportunity that it gives to its R&D employees through various events and activities. I am hereby mentioning a few of the opportunities which I got a chance to know and participate in at the VMware Pune office. I am sure there are many more avenues of innovation at VMware which I am yet to come across during my tenure here...

I was curious when I walked the corridors of VMWare Pune office for the first time, about the plethora of wall posters promoting R&D opportunities inside the organization. Are these mere marketing gimmicks or what? But after I joined the company and saw some of these events in action, I must say I am really impressed by the amount of innovation happening inside the organization.

First up was the India R&D hackathon event called Borathon. Its a two day event where groups compete to code and present prototypes of their own ideas around a particular emerging area of technology. The theme of the first Borathon was "container technology and its integration with VMware products". It was the hottest topic of discussion in the company when I joined. The next hackthon in Pune was based on the theme of "Internet Of Things" in which people who had never worked on embedded hardware built prototypes of brilliant ideas using Raspberry Pie boards in just a couple of days! The most recent Borathon was based on the theme of building apps for vCloud Air, which is the cloud services offering (similar to AWS) recently launched by VMware. Again we saw great ideas coming from all corners of the R&D organization including our managers!

The next was the annual tech event of VMWare R&D organization called RADIO. Many of the innovative VMware products and product features have begun as a paper at the RADIO conference. Its a great event to showcase your innovative ideas and garner support for the same. Every year BUs sponsor a few engineers to go & visit the event in SF. On similar lines there is an annual customer focused event called VMWorld which is attended by thousands of customers, partners, and analysts in the industry.

VMworld has a US version which happens in silicon valley and an european version which happens in Barcelona every year. It is a platform where the latest VMWare products are launched, an expo of vmware & parner solutions is held, and many hands on labs and demonstrations are conducted. Though this is essentially a sales organization event, BUs also sponsor a few of their R&D folks to attend this event.

This year my BU conducted a hackathon competition named NSBU JAMZ where cross-geo teams of 15-20 folks worked hard to deliver parts of our key demos for presenting at the  US VMWorld. One good thing about such hackathon events is that even if your team is not the winner, you get lots of nice goodies (as JAMZ participants we got excellent noise cancellation head phones apart from the usual t-shirts, USB thumb drives, bottles and back packs) and not to forget the great food served 24x7 during these events.

There is always a lot of fuel to keep the innovation going at VMware Pune. Some of the innovation inspiring events which I attended so far include a two days workshop on innovation, an innovation quiz, presentations by and focused group discussions with patent attorneys from US, next generation product discussions with visiting product managers from other VMware offices, etc.

My first submission of IDF at VMware (Idea Disclosure Form i.e. submission of an idea for filing patent with US PTO) happened earlier this year as a result of research work done in partnership with a professor from IIIT Delhi who visited our Pune office as part of our faculty internship program.

There are many programs which incubate & foster projects of innovation in VMware. One of them is the XLR8 program which is funded by CTO team to gather a team to build prototype of ideas which transform into the next generation products of VMware. Another is called "flings" under which any employee can release their own implementation of an idea for public use on the VMware website. It is something similar to the projects hosted under Google labs. Last month I participated in a hackathon based on the theme of building a Ruby on Rails CMS portal for an internal web application. These events serve as good avenues of learning something totally new apart from your routine work to enhance your skill set.

Coming to skill up-gradation at VMware... apart from the week long product specific training workshops for new joiners, there are many avenues of learning at VMware. Plenty of soft skills & tech skills workshops are conducted for a targeted set of audience e.g. managers, senior staff engineers, etc. For those wanting to enhance their skills in a particular technology area, there is a "Take 1" program using which one can attend professional courses/workshops/conferences with VMware sponsorship. After completion of certain years of service at VMware employees are also eligible for a "Take 2" program under which they can work on a project of their choice in another team/group for a couple of weeks. And then there is a "Take 3" program under which one can take a break of 3 months from their regular work to pursue an idea/project of their choice.

VMware also aims at nurturing the local talent and industry in various unique ways and one of those is by sponsoring and hosting events such as the CIIE Cloud GrowthCamp to groom the core teams of cloud-based startups in Pune. I was lucky to be invited to participate in this program from VMware's side and found it very inspiring to listen to and interact with the best startup innovators in the city.

Last week I and my team traveled to VMware Bangalore to attend a two day conference on security called MooseCon 2105. I was one of the speakers there and I had a fun time demonstrating real life hacks on web applications. The web security workshop was well conducted by the VSECR team, which is a group responsible for ensuring product security across all products at VMware.

Speaking about university relations at VMware India... VMware recruits the best of talent from India's IIT campuses every year. I can say that as I had the opportunity to visit IIT Kanpur last year for the campus selection. At the local level VMware has signed an MOU with COEP in Pune. Under this partnership every year VMware hires freshers from COEP, the students get onsite internship opportunities, VMware staff designs & delivers a curriculum course on the campus, sponsors and participates in their annual tech event (Mind Spark), etc. I was part of the selection panel for COEP campus recruitment event this year and we were happy to get a couple of good hires for our teams from the event.

Another good thing is that at VMware employees are encouraged to have active university connections as per their choice. I am continuing to guide engineering projects from various colleges in Pune university (so far I have guided projects in PICT, VIT, MIT, and Cummins) as an external guide in my personal capacity / under the Geeks of Pune banner. I also visit Sinhagad COE as a guest lecturer, and the topic of my last session there was "virtualization and software defined networking (SDN)".

In general I would say VMware is a great company to work for and I am having fun here. If you would like to join our R&D team in USA or India, check out our careers site and drop me a line if you find an interesting position listed there...

Happy Hacking!