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Storage education gaining importance in India

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CIOL Bureau
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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.

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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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Also Read: Acquisitions: The year that was for storage industry

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?

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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.

Also Read: Dell: All set to reign data storage with acquisitions

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.

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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.

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CIOL: How has been the growth so far from the academic alliance part?

Tom: The adoption of the courses have been increasing year-over-year. In 2009, there were about 3,500 students which almost doubled to 6,000 in 2010. In 2011 we have already registered 10,000 students by February.

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Earlier, mainly private universities partnered with us. However, in 2010 we saw several government universities also coming up and some of them even have made such courses mandatory for students. We have alliances with over 100 universities in India.

Five years ago we had to go the universities and tell them why storage is important, whereas today the universities are approaching us in turn.

India is a young and emerging country. Thus traction for newer things is lot more than the rest of the market. India is one of the most hungry and demanding market, which is ready to absorb whatever new is coming.

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We had launched a community on Facebook and opened it for students in India in the last quarter of 2010. This saw about 1000 visitors in the first three months. 

Moreover, there is a lot of interest from the areas of SAN, NAS, Storage virtualisation, Big Data, cloud, virtualisation, security etc.

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