Steve Leonard, President, Asia Pacific/Japan, EMC Corporation talks about the company’s key focus areas and how the company is geared to offer enterprise real-time business insights as data is being accessed and consumed through various endpoint devices anytime, anywhere.
Q] What kind of shift do you see in the enterprise IT space?
The shift has been towards consumerization of IT and iPad is the best example that validates this trend. Enterprise users are clear on what technologies they want to use, where they want to use it and how.
Companies today need to provide information to a wide range of devices and can no longer mandate what technology users use.This has put lot of pressure on IT departments to make information secure and at the same time deliver it at all times.

Q] How is EMC trying to position itself in terms of its offerings?
We are really rotating around key areas which we feel are critical to enterprise businesses. Cloud computing and big data are clearly the two key focus areas for us.

Speaking on the cloud, whatever we do, we label it as IT as a service. Moving forward most organizations will use a combination of internal and external IT services to get the job done and cloud will offer them the flexibility to use resources.

We anticipate that hybrid clouds will be the eventual goal of customers once they have advanced on their journey to the private cloud to a point where they can choose what resources they want to manage in-house and allow others to be managed externally. Trust in the cloud will play a key part for CIOs in determining how much goes on the public cloud, and what stays in the private cloud.

Speaking on big data, an EMC-sponsored IDC report early this year revealed that the amount of data amassed by consumers and businesses is expected to increase by 44 times in this decade. Today, enterprises are seeking to make better use of their data warehouses for advanced analytics. But as data warehouses get bigger, enterprises are facing scalability, performance degradation and management complexity, and are seeking ways to enable more concurrent users to access the data for business applications.

We have developed an approach that simplifies how companies incorporate both structured and unstructured data in analytics to gain competitive advantage.

So the convergence of cloud computing and big data analytics will transform the manner in which businesses utilize IT to improve performances. We are really putting a lot of effort in both these areas.

Q] EMC generated a lot of enthusiasm on its vision around data federation. Can you tell us more on the topic?
Data federation is similar to what has been done with virtualization for servers. We consolidated multiple servers on a single piece of hardware and then grouped these servers together to have distributed resource scheduling to get pool of resources.

To move these virtual machines over long distances has not been possible as they are tied to physical storage. With data federation we are trying to replicate what we did with servers for storage.

The federation of compute and storage resources will allow entire data centres to be virtualized and managed as a single resource. This allows enterprises to rethink their entire data centre strategies, their locations, the number of them and ultimately the role that each plays in the overall IT environment.

We introduced VPLEX technology last year that allows organizations to non-disruptively move thousands of virtual machines and petabytes of information over thousands of miles. They can schedule daily batch processes in locations with lower energy costs, easily shift IT operations out of the way of regional disasters, and dynamically balance workloads as the business day progresses around the globe.

We are making some progress in this area and already have some customers in Asia using the technology.