VMware is planning to spend $500 million over the next three years to expand its operations in India, which Gartner predicts will become the world’s fastest growing enterprise software market through 2016.

The move comes as the virtualization giant works to extend its reach beyond the data center via the vCloud Hybrid Service, an infrastructure-as-a-service solution that competes against AWS and offers full interoperability with on-premise virtual environments. The platform is currently available from five data centers, including a relatively new facility in the London suburb of Slough that was launched last October and officially went online a month and a half ago.

VMware’s Indian engineering and support operations are already only second in size to its Palo Alto headquarters, the company said in a statement picked up by The Hindu. The new investment, which will include about $70 million of unused funds from a $120 million investment plan originally announced last year, will narrow the gap considerably.

“India continues to play a crucial role in our global product roadmap and growth strategy. The country’s outstanding engineering talent continues to impress us, and we stay committed to investing and growing our team here over the long term,” VMware CEO and theCUBE alumnus Pat Gelsinger said during a Wednesday press conference in Bangalore.

The executive also noted that his firm, which is majority owned by storage industry stalwart EMC and constitutes a key component of its software-defined data center vision, is open to making small, strategic acquisitions that could complement its existing solutions portfolio. The company made a total of 12 purchases since its foundation, most recently AirWatch, a maker of enterprise mobility management software it picked up for $1.54 billion in January.

VMware isn’t the only enterprise tech titan with global ambitions. A few months before the AirWatch acquisition was announced, IBM committed $1.2 billion to building 15 additional cloud data centers around the world in 2014. And last month, Cisco revealed that it will also invest more than a billion dollars over the next two years to expand its infrastructure footprint overseas. Both vendors are trying to capitalize on the rapidly growing international demand for cloud services, much of which is coming from existing enterprise customers that have same requirements as their U.S peers: low latency and the ability to store sensitive data in their home jurisdictions.

image courtesy VMware