MUMBAI, INDIA: EMC's journey from a center of excellence to a global command center mirrors the company's long-term strategy to emerge a global leader. In this conversation, Rajesh Janey, EMC India & SAARC president, talks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News about EMC's business strategy, focus areas of cloud computing and big data, business challenges and progress achieved in India
What strategy are you adopting to drive EMC business in India?
Janey: Since the start of India operations, EMC in India has evolved to be a critical contributor to company's long-term strategy by driving global innovation and revenue growth for the APJ region. EMC's India operations are also multi-dimensional — which is common to very few markets around the world. We have been evangelizing our technology solutions for information storage and information infrastructure for more than 10 years now; and are market leaders in network storage since the last seven years. In fact, last year has been one of the many milestones in India — we clocked our 1500th enterprise customer, our 100th city where we have support services and completed 10 years in India. Today, we address over 2000 customers.
EMC's India Centre of Excellence in Bangalore plays a key role in EMC's Global Innovation Network that promotes exploration, discovery and application of new technologies that will shape the information infrastructure of the future. Late last year, we opened our second only Global Command Center (GCC) and Critical Incident Response Center (CIRC) within the COE. The Bangalore GCC and CIRC play a key role of mirroring EMC's facilities in the United States, enabling the company to employ a 24x7x365 delivery model of service and support.
To address the storage knowledge gap in the industry, EMC has developed and invested in the education services. Under its education strategy, EMC has designed a vendor neutral, storage technology open curriculum, which is based on technology rather than product and offers EMC Academic Alliance Program (EAA). The consistent progress of EAA in India further reiterates company's commitment to grow the storage market in India and cater to the emerging storage technology knowledge gap here. In 2011 alone we have enrolled 45,000+ students and 50+ new EAA institutions.
Besides, Channel partners play a significant role in the cloud computing, which has been one of EMC's key fortes. EMC believes the channel also has to appreciate that in addition to cloud products there will be profuse opportunities in services as well. As one of the fastest growing economies and a country with immense human capital, India has been high on EMC's radar for several years now. Despite being among the last major global IT companies to enter India in 2000, we have been focused on growing our India operations.
Which are the business areas where EMC is focusing to strengthen its market position? What are the technology trends you witness in India and what are your views?
Janey: As we enter the new decade, storage veteran EMC is 30 years old globally. We are focused around key areas which are critical to the growth of enterprise businesses with Cloud computing and big data; clearly these are the two key focus areas for us. 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 cloud 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.
As per a study in 2011 by EMC-Zinnov Consulting, there is an increased preference to cloud adoption over the next five years in India. The total cloud market in India, currently at US$ 400 million will reach a value of US$ 4.5 billion by 2015; of which private cloud adoption will dominate and account for US$ 3.5 billion in revenues, growing at over 60 per cent. The study also highlights that private cloud market will create 1 lakh jobs by 2015 from 10,000 today — an opportunity for students and the workforce. Companies today are under-skilled in addressing cloud computing implementations in India.
Another focus area for EMC is Big Data. Although, the discussion on Big Data is at a preliminary stage with CIOs and IT managers today, the tempo is picking up real fast as CIOs are faced with enormous amount of important data sets and are turning to mine them for insights into business value. There is a lot of exponential raw information available to gather and harvest. All this requires a pre-determined plan of moving large data assets, securing them and a plan to drive analytics. Verticals that have been traditionally heavy consumer-centric and IT-savvy, such as retail, BFSI, or others which process significant amounts of information such as Oil & Gas and Healthcare for example are turning to apply existing data for business insight. While a market estimate is difficult to predict right now, it is clear that large enterprises who have gigantic portions of digital data are actively considering Big Data analytics.
Big Data is a rare and compelling opportunity to redefine how the organization uses information in new and fascinating ways. It will take strong leadership and commitment to depart from business as usual and educate organizations to extract untold value from the information that is all around us.
Though India is moving fast in the IT business, do you see any major challenges or hindrance for EMC's business?
Janey: India is a fast-growing market and we believe it will continue to grow. Indian organizations have an opportunity to adopt next-Gen technologies such as cloud and big data analytics. However, organizations need to be proactive and liberal in accepting the new-age ideas to transform business. Say for example — Telecom, BFSI, healthcare, government and retail sectors witness the maximum amount of data formation in India. Almost 95 per cent of their data remains idle and eventually burden the business. If Big Data analytics can be put into place, the same data can provide interesting insights into business forecasts and trends, which will help in shaping a thriving business strategy resulting in revenue generation.
From a regulatory and policy perspective, it is welcoming to see the government to come up with initiatives like Electronic Service Delivery Bill and Open Data Policy on the government front to encourage these practices. These bills, though still in the draft phase, have the potential to be the change agents if implemented.
At what rate is EMC business growing in India in the current year and how much revenue does the EMC India unit generate to the global business?
Janey: EMC has been growing at a significant pace in India. In fact, 2011 has been a great year for EMC in India. The company has been making significant investments in its business operations, technology portfolio and customer services to ensure market leadership. As per industry estimates (V&D 100), EMC remained a marked leader in FY 2010-11 in India's Network Storage category. EMC acquired more than 500 new customers in 2011 in India. Owing to its focused approach for the government vertical, EMC added UID, NICSI Data Center, State Data centers (5 states) and Census Project among others as key wins in India during the year.