EMC – What do you mean you do more than storage ?

What consumers fail to grasp is that storage is merely a medium on which to store data and as technology evolves, so must the vendors and more importantly, the consumers !!! Information deluge is upon all of us – whether its consumers at home or at leading enterprises and change is inevitable.

Picture this….

Exactly as the picture depicts – businesses are facing spiralling challenges in keeping up with change and business transformation becomes an important conversation. So what has EMC been doing to differentiate itself from the pack ?

Yes – the bread and butter of the business is storage platforms but increasingly, customers are finding that vendor lock in and elasticity are playing a key part of the conversation internally. EMC has moved towards the strategy of offering hardware and software version of a lot of its portfolio e.g. ScaleIO, vVNX and ECS. This means that customers now have the opportunity to road test any of these products to see if they fit with their business requirements. More importantly, the commoditization of this hardware is a key step in allowing customers to become more agile with the growing needs of their internal customer base.

EMC is looked at as a traditional storage company providing the bricks and mortar of the datacenter but it is important to realise that the company understands that rigid frameworks are not always favourable to consumers. As the company embraces opensource platforms and also integration with cloud providers via its CloudArray product for VMAX3 and Cloud Tiering Appliance it is seeking to widen its arms and create a framework where the consumer decides what they want, when they want it and how. In my opinion, this is where the industry needs to be and this is where EMC can add real value.

I.T. Transformation to aid business challenges is more than just a myth and is imperative in this new era of Big Data and Cloud. EMC can offer many products and solutions to achieve business goals but the real enabler is the customizable ways in which to do this. Software products and opensource are making I.T. realise the time to market of implementing and completing projects on time and EMC are clearly tapping into this thought process already.