While CIOs are focusing on SMAC, EMC is still looked upon as a storage vendor. How do you want the company to be perceived in such transient times?
We call ourselves family of strategically aligned businesses that provide holistic solutions to our customers. We haven’t structured our company to be a monolith that does everything. Instead, we have different companies such as EMC II, Pivotal, Virtustream and VMware that focus on specific areas. The reason being we want to give our customers and partners choice and flexibility. EMC no doubt is very strong in storage which has been around 60-65 percent of the business. However, as of last few year, it has been more about virtualization, cloud, analytics, security, and agile development. We want customers to see EMC as an organization that can help them modernize their data center through IT transformation and get them ready for the future as a digital enterprise and transformation.
Does this mean that the storage business will plateau?
While we have grown other parts of the business consciously, we have continued to grow market share in storage as well. In 2015, our market share in India was 39 percent. In 2012 we were 22 percent. According to IDC, we were the only company that gained market share even as all the others lost. Apart from our growing market share, we are also helping our customers embrace the latest technology developments such as Flash, that increases performance, scalability as well as the efficiency for the organizations. The storage business will evolve to help organizations to modernize their data centres and help CIO’s achieve higher efficiency at optimized costs.
What makes EMC continue to grow?
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, EMC’s ability to disrupt itself has played an important part. We have never rested on our laurels and have stayed in touch with customer needs. While we were known for Symmetrix – a high-end monolith solution, we launched Clariion, a midrange system because the market was shifting that way. We were the first to introduce flash drives in 2007 and also the first to talk about software defined storage. In order to grow, disruption is important. Fortunately, we have been able to build a team that understands and embraces this development. Our integration with Dell was announced in October 2015. Even though this announcement was in in the middle of, the fourth quarter was our biggest ever quarter in India.
Secondly, our service capability has been a big differentiator. If an enterprise invests in a mission critical infrastructure that holds critical information, it would want it to be robust, secured and always on. We have proved ourselves on all these fronts.
Thirdly, our relationship with our customers and partners has also played a key part. We have 3700 customers and hundreds of partners that have added to our business and growth and help us achieve our goals.
Do you want EMC to be called a software company?
If you cut our revenues, a majority of it is software. Of the storage arrays that we ship, 50-60 percent of it is software. We may not report it that way but we know it internally.
Hardware is increasingly getting commoditized in today’s ever-evolving IT landscape. As organizations keep up with the blazing pace of digital transformation, EMC solutions enable the software-defined enterprises for efficiencies in 2nd platform applications and build new 3rd platform applications that deliver innovation in business models and technology infrastructure
How is software-defined storage coming up in India?
The Indian CIOs are quite aware of it. Some such deployments have already started. While enterprise are deploying it from an understanding perspective, new age companies are lapping it up. EMC is enabling it further. In January, we launched VxRail, a hyper converged infrastructure to further help customers leverage this trend.
How are you maximizing the IoT opportunity?
Are we doing something around sensors? The answer is no. What we are seeing in the market is that the value is shifting from a product to the data about the product. Data is coming at CIOs fast and ferocious. CIOs, therefore, not only have to ingest a lot of data, they need to make sense of it in real time and take action around it in real time. This is where we play. Our product portfolio helps organizations to make sense of this huge Data Lake with insight and analytics.
What are your major focus areas?
This year our theme is Modernize and we are focusing our efforts in 4 foundational pillars- flash, scale out, software-defined and cloud-enabled systems- which must be in place to deliver business results via the modern data centre. As demand for low latency performance has increased over the years, storage administrators have had to solve that problem by increasing the number of spindles in storage solutions.Dense, highly performing flash technologies dramatically reduce the cost of delivering consistent and predictable low latency performance while reducing the number of drives required. With increase in business and capacity requirements, scale out architectural designs allow customers to deploy systems with a low cost of entry while delivering a modular approach to scaling infrastructure.
Another key trend is the move toward commodity hardware, coupled with data services delivered as pure software. This new software defined model allows you to automate the configuration and deployment of IT services, delivering greater business agility and a more flexible, programmable approach to managing data services.
Finally, customers must be able to trust the systems they leverage and the vendors they do business with. EMC’s promise is not only to deliver the best in class platforms on which to run business critical applications, but through our RSA and Data Protection assets, we ensure information security and governance and provide local and remote data protection.
