The emphasis of the Government is to transform India into a knowledge economy, complete with Smart Cities, which can be achieved only through optimum usage of the new-age technologies, says Abhijit Potnis, Director-Technology Services, EMC, India and SAARC, in an interview of Arpit Gupta of Elets News Network (ENN)
Director- Technology Services
EMC, India and SAARC
How has been the journey of EMC in India? What is the strategy to further expand here?
EMC in India is doing very well, overall business-wise sentiments have been pretty positive, as we have had a good tale to tell the market. From business stand point, if you take the data growth and overall business paradigm in India, it has been growing business for EMC. Whatever we tried to start doing this year, including initiating newer technologies like Flash in the country, it has worked…storage has been moving from hard disk to Flash. We changed the game from being only a hardware company to a software-defined storage company. We see a lot of updates from the customers in that direction as well. Additionally, if you look at the standard product lines from data protection as well as big data projects on Scale-out Storage (Isilon), it has been really working well for us.
Do you feel cloud, modern data centre infra and modern data centre architecture will drive business for EMC?
India’s digital information explosion in the enterprise space is being driven by things like BYOD, evolving policy landscape demanding greater compliance, increasing use of technologies like Web 2.0 and virtualisation (desktop, servers etc.), applications like CRM, ERP, and database and analytics, among others. To manage this information explosion, it is important for enterprises to invest in technologies that can help them drive better operational efficiencies and save cost. This will lead to growth of technologies like Cloud Computing and Virtualisation.
Enterprise IT budgets and skilled workforce are not growing remotely as fast as the Digital Universe. As per the EMC IDC Digital Universe study, gap between Digital Information generated and available storage capacity will grow from a third in 2012 to ninth by 2020. Also India spent $0.87 per GB to manage data, which is much lower than other markets like China, the US and western Europe. On the skills front, there will be demand for 1,00,000 private cloud professionals (EMC Zinnov Study) alone and around 18,000-20,000 Big Data professionals (NASSCOM) in the next few years. This indicates the potential for cloud and data centre to drive business in India. How is EMC participating in the digital initiatives of the Government of India? While the emphasis of the Government is to transform India into a knowledge economy com-
How is EMC participating in the digital initiatives of the Government of India?
While the emphasis of the Government is to transform India into a knowledge economy complete with smart cities, this can only be achieved through optimum usage of the new generation technologies. Today, there is a need for shifting to the digital space and change gears to redefine the way government departments and organisations do business, involve people and processes to build a modern efficient business ecosystem.
We have been playing a role on various digital initiatives of the Government from past as well as future. So, if you talk about smart cities, our focus and success so far has been on video surveillance in smart cities. We are already working on Pune and Mumbai City surveillance projects. We are also partnering for airport surveillance. We are also engaging on the citizen services and governance that is where our historic engagement with governments and past success paid off in 2015. So, whether it was UIDAI, our interaction with NIC on various projects for citizen services, or whether it was things like Central Board of Excise and Customs, Directorate of Income Tax, these are the initiatives where EMC was part of the execution process.
IMPACT OF DELL-EMC MERGER
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| The combination of Dell and EMC will create more customer and partner value than any technology solutions provider in the industry. We shall be best positioned to maximise legacy investments with leadership in storage, servers, virtualisation and PCs, and to build a bridge to the future through leading innovation in digital transformations, software-defined data centre, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security. |
What will be the impact of the Dell-EMC mega-merger in India?
We are very excited about the merger. The combination of Dell and EMC will position us to create more customer and partner value than any technology solutions provider in the industry. We shall be best positioned to maximise legacy investments with leadership in storage, servers, virtualisation and PCs, and to build a bridge to the future through leading innovation in digital transformation, software-defined data centre, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security. In fact, as a combined company, Dell and EMC will have leadership positions in 22 Gartner Magic Quadrants, and once complete, it will create the largest privately held IT company in the world.
The acquisition will have a lot of positive impact on the overall system integration and partners will get tremendous value out of the deal. Channel will have more to offer and address customer requirements from compute, storage, cloud, CI and security.
Besides innovations in Flash, software-defined and other offerings EMC has accelerated its strategy around Cloud and Big Data for enterprise customers. What is the vision and future plan?
In the last one year, EMC has successfully increased addressable market for its partners with Cloud Computing, Data Protection Solution (DPS), Isilon, Big Data & Analytics portfolio, in addition to the existing vast product line up. EMC is working with its partners on several levels – marketing, lead generation, business planning and pre-sales support.
EMC’s focus is to tap the burgeoning market, especially sectors such as BFSI, Telecom and Government. Our key priority will be to help our customers accelerate their journey to what IDC calls the Third Platform. We will do this through enabling technologies of All-Flash, Converged Infra and our existing leadership with products such VMAX and VNX.
Hyper-Converged infrastructure is currently one of the most rapidly growing methods for deploying IT in the datacentre, as IT departments seek ways to adjust to their new role in business and new responsibilities entrusted on them. EMC, along with VMware, has jointly launched its new range of Hyper-Converged solutions called VxRail under its VCE brand which will also be our focus for the year 2016.
EMC believes that the leap to Digital Transformation and Innovation is well served by a modern data centre. A Modern data centre will need three areas of focus: (a) Infrastructure Modernisation (Software Defined Datacentre), Industry Leading Converged Infrastructure solutions; (b) Automation (DevOps); and (c) Application Modernisation (Applications written for Cloud Native Platforms, ready for Social & Mobile). EMC Global Services can help customers on their journey to Digital Transformation with Services around Infrastructure Modernisation.
EMC Global Services can help customers identify the right applications and datasets, which can move to the Cloud and help build the Hybrid Cloud roadmap for the customer. We can also help architect and design Business Continuity solutions for customers depending upon required business outcomes.