Leading business transformation via big data

Monday, 17 March 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

By Kinita Shenoy In conversation with the Daily FT, EMC South Asia Growth Markets Managing Director Ajit Nair discussed the various aspects of cloud, big data and trusted IT. EMC is a $ 23.2 billion technology major headquartered in Hopkington, United States, catering to 98% of the world’s Fortune 500 financial and insurance sector companies. According to Nair, the key purpose of the business is “pioneering cloud, big data and trusted IT and offering solutions in information storage, management, protection and analysis in order to help businesses achieve business agility and efficiency.” Nair described EMC as a confederation of business with four key brands focused on helping customers and partners transform their IT infrastructure, business processes and people. These four comprise of their main information infrastructure solution branch EMC, the software-defined data centre solutions arm VMware, next generation cloud and big/fast data applications branch Pivotal, and the security solutions branch RSA. Pivotal is currently valued at about a billion dollars. Differentiated value EMC’s differentiated value stems from their sustained and substantial investment in research and development – a cumulative $19.4 billion since 2003. During the same period, a further $18.8 billion was invested via acquisitions, having integrated over 70 technology companies. These included VMware in 2004, RSA in 2005, Isilon and Greenplum in 2011. "Sri Lanka’s country’s economy is undergoing a transformation and the country has an ambitious and strategic plan for growth. The Government has launched a significant drive in order to get businesses moving and government departments into the IT era. With a pool of highly-skilled, certified, English speaking professionals, Sri Lanka is becoming a major destination for BPO and IT services – notably for financial accounting and analysis, offshore legal services, medical diagnostics and architectural drawings – EMC South Asia Growth Markets Managing Director Ajit Nair"

In 2009, EMC joined forces with Cisco to create VCE and invent converged infrastructure (Vblock), and in 2013, EMC, VMware and GE created Pivotal to capitalise on big data. Considering a global perspective, EMC is foremost in high-end storage, mid-tier storage, with 65% global market share in back-up and provides a best-of-breed portfolio for enterprise data. The concept is that one platform can meet the broad range of needs in the enterprise across performance-optimised, capacity-optimised, availability and scalability. Nair asserted that while EMC had a high penetration in Sri Lanka, they had yet to work on comprehensively supporting companies via their security offerings. Questioned as to what EMC’s “information infrastructure” is, Nair explained that it looked at three elements of customers’ needs; cloud, big data, and trust. He added: “we help customers consolidate, store, protect and manage data while creating an optimation layer.” EMC’s offerings EMC’s offerings are vary from price to sophistication depending on individual companies needs – the extent and scope of the operation, the level of data backup restoration, and size. According to Nair, the storage offerings range from Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 2 million depending on requirements. He said: “We can help a group with continuity, avoiding downtime, and disaster recovery within the shortest possible time. We do this via central storage and backup. Furthermore, we can address issues of security and data loss prevention.” Nair explained that for groups with a number of companies or subsidiaries, gathering and analysing data in a central manner is key in order to draft marketing campaigns or respond as quickly as possible. The Pivotal branch has a suite of software with products and services that address application data, fast data and analytics. A team of data scientists deployed in Singapore help customers look at data and recommend the type of modelling required on a consultancy basis. The group’s key focus areas include leading IT transformation to the software-defined data centre, helping customers run IT as a service, delivering the maximum efficiency and agility possible, storage transformation to deliver software-defined storage, leading business transformation via big data and leading transformation to trusted IT. Strong commitment to Sri Lanka According to Nair, EMC has made a strong commitment to Sri Lanka since its renewed focus as part of its ASEAN growth market strategy, having shifted the country from its SAARC classification to ASEAN. He heads the strengthened management team focus on the market, which services over 200 customers in Sri Lanka in the telecommunications, BFSI, Government, software development and manufacturing segments, including local corporate bigwigs like Brandix, Hayleys and Softlogic. Nair added: “We see great opportunity for our best-of-breed storage, data protection and availability, security and converged infrastructure solutions.” Furthermore, as of January 2013, the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT) partnered with EMC and introduced courses on Information Storage & Management, Cloud Computing, Backup Recovery Systems & Architecture and Data Science & Big Data Analytics to engineering students. Sri Lanka’s potential Discussing EMC’s views on Sri Lanka’s potential, Nair responded that the country’s economy is undergoing a transformation and the country has an ambitious and strategic plan for growth. He said: “The Government has launched a significant drive in order to get businesses moving and government departments into the IT era. With a pool of highly-skilled, certified, English speaking professionals, Sri Lanka is becoming a major destination for BPO and IT services – notably for financial accounting and analysis, offshore legal services, medical diagnostics and architectural drawings.” He added that Sri Lanka’s IT and BPO sectors tripled exports and doubled the workforce in a little over five years, and according to Sri Lanka Association of Software and Services Companies (SLASSCOM), export revenues grew 182% to an estimated US$ 600 million in 2013, up from USD 213 million in 2007. Storage consolidation and virtualisation journeys Despite having a presence in Sri Lanka for over six years, Nair explained that EMC’s main focus will be addressing customer’s storage consolidation and virtualisation journeys. He added: “EMC has to look at requirements by providing storage and back up infrastructure to help VMware with the journey, then look at business continuity and automation. The whole idea most CIOs are challenged with is do more with less. While budgets and IT staff remain the same, workforce and capacity may increase. So things have to be automated. We have to ensure that we take advantage of the virtualisation journey Sri Lanka is on. “Big data solutions help businesses become more agile in response to changing environments. EMC is very well positioned to help customers due to the portfolio of solutions we have as well as the security offerings that helps us take them from the second to third platform of IT.”