VMware GM: NSX Adoption Accelerating With Customers, Partners

VMware's NSX software defined networking platform is hitting its stride with customers and the channel adoption accelerating at a rapid pace, VMware Network and Security Business Unit General Manager Steve Mullaney said.

The NSX software has already been adopted by 200 customers since it hit the VMware price list in June, with even more rapid growth expected down the road.

"We have hit the curve where we are now crossing the chasm,’ said Mullaney in a keynote address before about 118 IT executives at the 18th annual GreenPages cloud summit at the Sheraton Portsmouth Harborside Hotel in Portsmouth, N.H. ’We’ll add hundreds of customers per quarter this year."

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VMware also is seeing an accelerated pace of solution providers now selling NSX with hundreds of partners increasing to "high-digit hundreds by the end of the year and thousands in 2015," said Mullaney.

The fourth quarter of last year was the turning point for increased NSX adoption with customers like Starbucks, WestJet and Medtronic, a conservative Midwest medical device company, adopting NSX, said Mullaney. "This isn't the traditional early adopters," he said.

Mullaney also pointed to a recent VMware sales rep reporting that he had five "one call" deal closes for NSX in the last quarter. That kind of fast-paced decision by customers on $100,000 deals is one more sign that NSX adoption is moving into mainstream with the midmarket and even smaller companies, said Mullaney.

Mullaney said the rapid adoption is being propelled by the big security advantage that NSX is powering as a critical component in a software defined data center. NSX provides a distributed automated security environment that dramatically improves security cost-effectively in an IT environment in an age when security spending is out of control, said Mullaney.

WestJet, a Canadian airline company, is one of the companies adopting NSX because of the security advantages. In a video testimonial, Richard Sillito, a security technologist for WestJet, said the airline simply could not have achieved the security gains it needed without an NSX software defined data center approach versus a physical hardware-based approach.

Starbucks also moved to NSX as a means of implementing a "zero trust security model," characterized by micro segmentation-based security policies, said Mullaney.

Mullaney urged solution providers to move quickly to become part of the first wave of solution providers selling NSX, acting as strategic advisers for clients. He praised GreenPages for breaking ground in helping to deploy NSX.

"The solution providers that consider themselves to be strategic advisers to their customers have to be starting to learn about this now," he said. "Now is the time. The good thing about being early and first is you do it right. You are not rushing anything. You are not getting the product out too soon. You are not forcing people to take it because you are years ahead of everyone else. When you are behind, you have to cut corners. You have to push it when it is not ready."

PUBLISHED AUG. 5, 2014