Reflections

Educating Business Leaders To Exploit Big Data

 

Bob Savage, Vice President and Managing Director, EMC Ireland

 

Across every sector and in every boardroom, Big Data is disrupting business models.

The challenge facing enterprises is how to monetise data and drive new revenues. To do that, organizations will need data savvy and business savvy innovators who can trigger a wave of next-generation applications and tightly honed business models and strategies. To keep pace with demand, governments and the private sector will need to invest in education programmes that can generate the skilled talent needed to exploit the global Big Data opportunity.

Standardize Without Compromise

 

Brian Gallagher, President, Enterprise Storage Division

 

Unique architecture for each business-critical application or standardize for efficiency?

I spend a lot of time talking with IT leaders around the world, so I get a first-hand account of the struggles, tradeoffs, and effective approaches of their IT transformation and journey to cloud, especially in dealing with business-critical databases and applications, like Oracle, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint and SAP. Frankly it’s the part of my job that I value the most, and there’s always a concentration of these discussions at EMC World. I consistently hear stories of vast landscapes of business-critical production, development and test environments that consume nearly 2/3 of the total IT budget. Why? Each business-critical environment seems big enough for its own unique infrastructure; they’re too important to clump all together in one big homogenized infrastructure; and well, it’s always been done this way.

What We Mean By Software-Defined Storage

 

Jeremy Burton, Executive Vice President, Product Operations and Marketing

 

It’s day two of EMC World 2013 in Las Vegas. Everybody here is talking about or asking about software-defined storage. Let me give you a couple of analogies to help you understand what we mean by software-defined storage and what we at EMC are doing. There are two main components to keep in mind.

What is Software-Defined Storage?

 

Amitabh Srivastava, President, Advanced Storage Division

 

The Times They Are a-Changin’

The speed at which our data is growing doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.   We’ve seen the predictions – a digital universe of 40 ZB by 2020 (according to IDC), the prevalence of cloud, and our industry moving to a data centric world.  The dynamic nature of our industry requires our data centers to be extremely flexible or “software-defined” so that we can easily program compute, network and storage resources to meet the needs of each tenant application.  But to truly build this type of agile and adaptive data center, it requires a software solution that can virtualize each component of the data center from its underlying hardware.

Connective Behaviors That Spur Innovation

 

Sheryl Chamberlain, Senior Director, EMC Corporate Office of the CTO

 

Leaders aspire to build ever more nimble and responsive businesses while seeking a competitive advantage in a global economy.  Today’s successful leaders must not only be strategic thinkers, but innovators as well. And the successful leaders of tomorrow must be able to drive organizational innovation by tapping into the knowledge and creativity of their teams.  Innovation is often the key driver of an organization’s growth and performance. It can be the single best way for a company to differentiate itself from competitors.  How can we help foster a culture of collaboration and creativity to help drive growth and success?  Fostering connectivity, first and foremost amongst other things, promotes creativity and spurs innovation.