Government of Maharashtra Selects VMware to Support Cloud Initiative

To help support its initiative to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) to various state departments, the government of Maharashtra, India has selected VMware to provide virtualization and cloud infrastructure technology for its MahaGov Cloud project.

The VMware deployment is helping India’s wealthiest state lower the cost of hosting, improve the management of the state datacenter infrastructure and reduce the amount of time required to provision infrastructure for various state departments, according to Rajesh Aggarwal, secretary IT for the Government of Maharashtra.

“The Government of Maharashtra is committed to making e-governance a success in the state,” Aggarwal said in a statement. “We were confident that virtualization and cloud computing would play a critical role in enabling our vision for e-governance in the state of Maharashtra and have partnered with VMware, to help us on our cloud journey and fulfill this vision.”

The intention of the initiative is to encourage state departments to host their mission critical applications on the MahaGov Cloud. Maharashtra is the only government cloud in India that is running a production environment with a high volume of servers and applications, according to Aggarwal.

Based on the growing need for services and limited budgets, government IT departments need a more flexible and cost-effective model for computing, according to T. Srinivasan, managing director of VMware India and SAARC.

“We are delighted to partner with the Government of Maharashtra for the prestigious MahaGov Cloud, and are confident we can help them roll out their e-governance initiative,” Srinivasan said. “Our cloud solutions are helping governments transform their IT departments into efficient, flexible enterprises that can respond faster to emerging needs, while reducing IT infrastructure and operating costs. Virtualization provides organizations with an evolutionary path to cloud computing that preserves existing IT investments, security and control.”