"EMC is evolving from a storage co. to a data and services co."

Data Lake is the vehicle that starts to build a solution stack where EMC components are leveraged along with insights on what is going on in the open source industry and what other players are doing with respect to SAS and traditional data ware houses, said John Mallory is CTO of Analytics for EMC’s Emerging Technologies Division (ETD).

In an interview with CIOL, Mallory further spoke about on how EMC is disrupting itself and how today IT is customer is different from the traditional IT customer.

 Edited Excerpts

What is the concept behind Data Lake? Please tell us about EMC’s Data Lake business and what all it encompasses?

Data Lake is a very strategic and important move for EMC. Essentially we have realised that people don’t think of EMC as analytics or Data Lake company, they think of it is as a storage company. Though storage is an important part, like a foundation that we need to consider, but look at analytics which is what the Data Lake is all about, they really need to start thinking about an application stack approach, from storage and data on the bottom. Data Lake is the vehicle that starts to build a solution stack where EMC components are leveraged along with insights on what is goingon in the open source industry and what other players are doing with respect to SAS and traditional data ware houses. We have really started to integrate all this together because the problem that companies are facing is what is driving the concept of Data Lake.

When a company is growing in a specific environment, trying to solve one problem, you need an application stack, which does what is it supposed to do well but then another problem comes along and you have to go to other applications stack and pretty soon you have all this disconnected stacks where its applications compute data, and what this has led to is that environment becomes too complex to handle and the applications are not connected to each other and now the problem that comes along is all the new forms of data growing so fast because mobile devices, the content delivery over the internet and social media.

There is just too much of data growth and it is breaking all these silos. The concept of Data Lake has started to build a platform where all the raw data is landed, started to process and is integrated with the existing environment to keep the business running. In the process, it is becoming a vehicle that starts to transform infrastructure; it is more agile, saleable, cost-effective, capable and lower on risk.

What all businesses are contributing to the EMC’s Data Lake? What kinds of businesses are using the offerings?

They early adopters are the ones which have the biggest data problems, so three areas have really started leveraging these problems. The first is telecom providers, followed by financial services.

Then there are other areas where there are such complex businesses where marketing has their own data, trading has their own data, financial service industry really started to tie customers, what’s going on in their business in a consolidated view. So that requires consolidation of data. The other vertical that is driving the concept is Healthcare, mainly in the US because the healthcare companies are very complex with a lot of legal constraints. The real power in changing healthcare is looking holistically at the patient, the payment, the billing, and the clinical operations.

What are the biggest implications of Big Data today and what are the trends you are observing?

I like to think of big data in two ways because it is subject to individual interpretation. When we talk about the telecom, financial and healthcare industry, the data that is being dealt with is huge. The size of data can grow tenfold over the next 7 years. Raw data coming from internet is not structured and they have to grow through transformation process and that takes time to go from unstructured to structured so that the businesses can use and as the data gets bigger it takes more and more time to process . Social media and everything moving online, consumers expect results faster than ever. With big data you can process raw data as and when it comes in and not has to structure it first and do much more advanced analytics with greater agility.

How today’s IT customer is different from the traditional IT customer?

Several key requirements are changing. Data is being used as competitive advantage for businesses. So, businesses are looking at how they can change the model from cost to a business to data as an opportunity for the business. Another thing that the businesses are wrestling with is consumer’s expectations. Majority of people are carrying a laptop with them that is connected all the time. They have very different expectations from businesses. They want to interact with businesses wherever they go, which totally changes the nature of the services and applications. They have to provide infrastructure that can service all these mobile devices and apps that provide real time update. Finally they are really wrestling with, how they started to move from their legacy environments to generation environments. It is about analytics, cloud computing and mobility. The final is security. It is an almost unattended consequence of all of this. During all this change, at the same time introducing all these new vulnerabilities they never had to deal with before. There are a lot more costs and risks as well as expectations on these businesses.

How is EMC catering to these particular changes and challenges?

EMC is evolving from a storage company to a data and services Company and a cloud and analytics company. Growth, mobility, cloud, security, analytics and offer them integrated solutions.  We are growing to build foundation platforms and partnerships that focus on all these specific areas. We have developed something called the federations. Federation is founded on the core stuff that EMC does very well. Each of these business units is free to innovate and partner and use open source, some of these may be competitors but having this federation they are free to pursue their own vision; however, eventually, we can bring all these pieces together and integrate them and provide a full stack with more optimum solutions. That’s why EMC is focussing on data storage, data protection, and poor infrastructure to moving to solving business problems and helping businesses in transformation trough buying companies and a lot more IT in these areas and then structuring it where each of these focusses.

How unique is the Indian market compared to the other markets EMC deals with? How is it placed for the company?

India is a very strategic market for EMC in multiple directions. There is an important level of partnership with the IT companies that is very strategically important. There is a huge potential in India where there are several key digital transformation along with the program of smart cities connecting the country more than ever. We look at the mature markets which drive 60-70% of the business or the data in the world. India and China are two biggest untapped emerging markets. India has much more potential and only a couple of years down the road, bulk of the data is going to shift to the four BRIC countries rather than established economies. It is a huge market as the BRIC countries will drive 60% of the data. We look at what just happened with Foxconn. We need that expertise in EMC as well. Intellectual property companies here are really looking to providing solutions and building centres of excellence and then taking them worldwide.

Any immediate plans to have such partnerships in India?

We constantly want to meet more customers in India including the government. Also, we want to leverage all the talent here. There is a huge need for talented programmers in the areas of data science. We want to focus on growing partnerships and leveraging engineering relationships we already haveand building centres of excellences. The next plan is to work more closely globally and with the strategic service providers, to holistically solve customers’ problems. Next few years, we will be bringing more people into the market and building relationships.

Our future plans in the country is that we want to move from a data storage company to where we can consult with countries, companies and governments who are going through transformations and be their trusted advisors, bring together solutions that solve their problems and leverage open source and build on the federation. We are going to take the bigger perspective, how to build IT around that and integrate and help customers to solve their problems and provide solutions. To essentially be an IT transformation company.