EMC supports all round transformation of enterprises

EMC offerings in backup and recovery, enterprise content management, unified storage, big data, enterprise storage, data federation, archiving, security, and deduplication help customers build next generation information management infrastructures. It also supports and enables them to offer IT-as-a-Service as part of their journey to cloud computing.   An interaction with  Anantharaman Balakrishnan, Country Head, EMC Global Services India at EMC IT Solutions India Private Limited on EMC’s global trends and what’s up for channels and customers in India.

1. What is the latest news from EMC – globally?

At EMC we believe that each division is a Federation that can solve individual problems on its own, and if required, combine to deliver solutions in tandem as well.  The components of the Federation are ‘EMC Information Intelligence’ called EMCII, the traditional storage elements and others that come with it.  RSA is the security division. Pivotal is platform for cloud and big data applications.  We have VMware which is the virtualization division, which is not a wholly owned company like RSA.

EMC now has a strong presence in the SMAC space as well as Internet of Things.  With Big Data  with cloud as the base, as Pivotal’s play and VMware’s AirWatch component that addresses the mobile space both individually and as a federation, we believe that we can address the SMAC landscape.  Pivotal Labs helps develop agile applications, and it has been engaged in building applications for trend-setting companies on the Internet.  The focus is on getting the customers globally  into a ‘transformational journey’.

2. How does EMC help in this transformational journey?

Globally, enterprises with a legacy infrastructure, need to be more agile and customer-centric with the onset of mobility.  Mobility is the biggest challenge for CIOs worldwide but it is at the center of the digital phenomena, and the biggest challenge for the CIO these days.  A decade ago, a CIO was an MIS or an EDP person – but now, he has to work on becoming the chief digital officer. It is her or his responsibility to enable the organization leverage digital technologies and put a digital strategy to the enterprise.  The CIO has essentially to keep the ‘lights on’ and also ‘invest in innovation’.  If, 70% of his budget is going to run SAP or Oracle, or keep ‘lights on’, his innovation will come from the ‘cloud platform’ or ‘big data’.  Cloud becomes an imperative in today’s world, and that means identifying an outsourcing partner or an infrastructure. EMC can help for innovations like these – we can help optimize and virtualize the infrastructure, and put up a footprint using converged infrastructure.  The entire converged infrastructure has building blocks – we call it V blocks – as a single data centre box sort of scenario – the hardware building block on which the consulting piece is built, making IT a service offered to their stakeholder and constituents.  The cloud offers up to 24% reduction in the overall running expenses.  Going beyond installation and migration, if we are able to plough this reduction into innovation like Hadoop or various information channels, collate data and   offer analytics as a value add, that is the world we are looking at.

EMC has an organization called Isilon which manufactures storage that has got excellent scale out capabilities – that run into Petabytes without any risks. We can offer Pivotal or Hadoop that does the big data and analytics, freeing up budgets for much needed innovations.   We have been helping customers across the world to leverage cross reduction for transformation.

Our transformation division helps customers, so we work as system integrators, helping address the rest of the pieces.

3. How does EMC’s solutions help Indian customers?

We are always generating data that is constantly going to some app.  This data will grow multi-fold in the next few years, especially in the developed world – the US, Europe and Australia.    Today there are many startups that provide more cost effective and innovative ways to manage this large volume of data.   AirWatch (a part of VMware) has bigger markets in India than in countries like Australia.   The geographical scale will have a major impact – countries like Brazil, China and India will produce more data than Britain or Australia.  There are also lot of technology requirements in India and there are brands like Azure setting up data centres in India in anticipation of this demand.  EMC covers the entire landscape.  For Enterprise, we have Vmax 3.0 system to support backup directly from the Vmax storage to the backup device without the backup software – we call it DirectConnect, taking the backup cost out of the system since that software is redundant.

There are many applications that are small but great on performance – EMC has an all flash array in the market.  Our ExtremeIO  AllFlash solution has been the fastest to reach USD 1B, since certain applications require absolutely high end performance for huge amounts of data compression and deduplication.  We had proposed   9:1 dedup for a bank, for instance- for every 90 TB, only 10 TB of Flash memory would be used, and we almost ended up performing 1:12.  So there are lot of benefits in the data centre space – and this will ensure that we will be a segment leader for a quite a long time.

IDC has put us in the leadership position in 2011, 13 and 14, largely because we introduce relevant innovations and technology. For instance, where enterprises have a limited backup time, for huge amounts of data, they struggle to backup within a particular 24 hour window.  We deployed dedup and then set up a DR to backup over the WAN.  They were not only able to achieve their time objective but also meet compliance.

Our assessment division helps the customers decide on public or private clouds. In India, both global MNC’s and Indian enterprises usually have 4 or 5 divisions.  Each of these divisions installs individual hardware which is sometimes underutilised.  By building a private cloud which is automated for ‘VM (virtual machine) allocation, we optimise the use of the hardware.  We have built these solutions along with our COE.

4. How does EMC position itself in the area of SMAC?

Enterprises are trying to leverage the positives of the digital ecosystem.  We focus on offering products that streamline business functions, improve customer experience, and increasing efficiencies.

From the product space – for example, for start-ups EMC has solutions which help for long term retention, if data generated cannot be utilised immediately.  They leverage ECS appliance (Elastic Cloud Storage).  If they don’t want to keep data backup in the cloud, we have a solution called Cloud Array – which helps backup.  These are new solutions but we see a huge market in this space for telcos – data is kept for compliance, analysis etc.,

There are situations where there are both EMC and non EMC storage and they need to be monitored under a single console. We have a software defined layer which gives a converged management called VIPR, which defines all of these as a single logical entity and managed by a layer called SRM. Finally, it is all about virtualizing and automation, helping the CIO make the business more digital.

5. Can you comment on the acquisition growth of EMC?           

We have an offering called ‘Federated Enterprise Hybrid Cloud’ – FEHC,   based on converged infrastructure, built on VMware’s virtualization and networking portfolio called NSX. We can help innovative strategies by putting the cloud on this.  Templates for Linux, SharePoint or Windows, are prebuilt into this platform and churned out when required.

The customer therefore spends little time on giving his inputs and automating the configurations.  This is much faster than building systems grounds up.  With Platform of Service – we have EMC, VMware, RSA (Security Layer) and Pivotal– Virtustream that has been able to provide applications like SAP at production level on the cloud.   There are world class organizations that are using SAP, but might not want to use their own premises to run the ERP opting for opex model.   EMC, through Virtustream, offers to provide SAP at production level and manage as it as a service over the cloud to the customer on pay per use basis.

6. What has EMC for Channels in India?

Our partners have been with us on our journey to the leadership position.  Partners who have started small, after 4 years, have started doing business with Enterprise.  They have matured massively in terms of quality of support, and in meeting customer’s requirements.  Our channel program called EMC solution provider – is more from a specialization perspective – say a Telco or a Banking specialization.

Apart from this we have ‘Business Partner Program’ which includes data service providers.  We have a specific Go-To-Market team.   These data service providers work with the sales people of the organizations to build solutions for the end customer.   Our new product lines are lapped by the channels. We have a product called VSPEX-BLUE – entirely channel driven – which is essentially our solutions in a box.

7. Which industries are the focus areas of EMC?

There are four verticals – the first and the largest vertical for us has been IT/ITES.  We have done well in Government vertical – especially the mission mode projects – where we have deployed our storage, Hadoop solutions, in projects like UID.  Our solutions have been deployed in Ministry of External Affairs, CDAC or UID too.   We have increased our focus on healthcare initiatives of the Government and also getting opportunities from initiatives like Digital India and Make in India. Our presence in PSUs and defence is on the increase as well. The third focus industry is Telco – especially new opportunities though many are repeat customers of EMC.  The fourth is BFSI – where the focus is on compliance and opportunities around new banking licenses.