BANGALORE, INDIA: Tom Clancy, vice president of EMC Education Services, a 400 people strong (with a base of 50 people in India) and five-year old concern of data storage giant EMC, believes that today there is more appreciation for storage than it was five years ago.

In an exclusive interview with CIOL, he talks about the newer interests in storage market and his outlook for the native market. Excerpts:

CIOL: What is the need for such education courses?

Tom Clancy: IT is always a fast-moving industry. The more products and solutions we come up with, it is a lot for people to absorb. We are trying to bridge the gap between the universities and industry.

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Our education services audiences are employees, partners, customers, academic alliances. During surveys, where we look at untrained customers versus trained customers, we find that trained customers are happier and more satisfied than their counterparts.

CIOL: Is your curriculum based on open standards?

Tom: When we build a course, we cater to the need. We offer information storage management classes to our employees, partners and customers, and also adapt the same class for universities. However, the courses are not specific to EMC. Although we use examples of EMC, our courses are open courses, as universities don't prefer it to be yet another product class.

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As we build our cloud architects a set of courses, we have kept it open. We need to do product training courses as we move on. However, in this space we want to be open. Even our competitors can buy these set of courses.

CIOL: How do you look at the similar programmes from your competitors?

Tom: I don't know about such courses. When we built our information management class, I don't think there were any open classes. We didn't find any such storage classes in at least 15 universities that we surveyed then. That is when we felt the need to bring this into the market.

Even now our competitors are coming to our academic alliance partnership courses and roping in students who have done our courses. Open standard courses are still not so prevalent in the marketplace.