"We Help Corporates Modernize Datacenters, Transition to Digital"

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 a federation of companies. We haven’t structured our company to be a monolith that does everything. Instead, we have different companies such as Pivotal, RSA 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 and get them ready as a digital enterprise. 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. 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. While we were known for VMAX – 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. Our integration with Dell was announced in October 2015. Even though we were in the middle of the integration, the OND quarter was our biggest ever quarter in India. In order to grow, disruption is important. Fortunately, we have been able to build a team that understands this. 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 part. We have 3700 customers and partners that have added to our business and growth. 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 ways but we know it internally. Hardware is increasingly getting commoditized. 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. What are your major focus areas? In the converged infrastructure, there will be four layers that will be big – flash, scale out (keep adding on the side on compute and processing power) as against scale up, software defined everything, and cloud. These are the four pillars of the modern data center, and we are helping companies in this transition.