EMC is best known as a supplier of big storage hardware. Its heritage was in the mainframe world, but as the volume of corporate data has grown dramatically, EMC has changed too.
The firm has acquired 24 companies to broaden its portfolio, spending more than $4.5bn (£2.6bn) since 2003 to help meet customers’ information management needs. The reliance on hardware has also shifted, accounting for 74 per cent of sales in 2000 but just 47 per cent last year, mainly because of a much greater focus on software.
Computing talked exclusively to chairman and chief executive Joe Tucci at the EMC World user conference last week, about meeting the challenge of managing the information explosion.
What do your customers say is the biggest issue they are facing?
The number one problem for chief information officers (CIOs) is complexity. Their environments are too sensitive to change; they have to do change control and test and test before going into production, and that is not good for the business. It is not providing good value for the company.
How can CIOs overcome this complexity, especially as they cope with rapidly growing volumes of data?
It is not only management of information; everything that CIOs deal with is incredibly complex. You have storage and a storage area network, and switches and servers of varying kinds with different operating systems, and the applications on top of that.
If anything goes wrong in that chain – maybe because of an outage or something that makes information unavailable to users – a lot of time is spent on that problem. But it should be spent on creating new business processes, and supporting them with IT to get productivity gains or to get a solution to market that nobody else has, or to take out cost.
Most CIOs will tell you they spend too little time on those things, and way too much time making sure everything works together.
To deal with the information building up, I think CIOs need more information about their information: how it is used, how much they need to keep, how much they can put on different tiers of storage. And that is what we try to help them do, to make life easier.
What is the cause of this complexity in managing information?
CIOs are victims of the past. In the past you built a system for email, a system for enterprise resource planning, another one for each other application, and each of these was a unique and different environment. They are bound environments: the application, the data and the server are bound to each other.
Say you have a system running email: you know that between 5am and 8pm it is incredibly heavily used and after that very lightly used. But the resources are tied up for the whole time because it is tightly bound.
You need to have more dynamic binding, which is where virtualisation, services-oriented architectures and resource management come in.
These technologies allow you to bind the application during the daytime with more servers, storage and networks, and then at night you can take away some of those resources and use them to run batch systems or whatever you do overnight. CIOs cannot do that because everything is tightly bound today.
Companies that do the best job of building the bridge between where they are today and that vision are going to be successful. If you get there it will be better, but how do you get there when you cannot lose a day, or an hour, or even two minutes of business? There is a better world coming, but how do you get to it?
You don’t need to just provide the technology, you need to provide a bridge to it as well.
What are companies doing wrong in their strategy for managing information?
It is all about execution. Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t think many companies fail because they have a bad strategy; they fail because they have bad execution.
There are very successful companies that don’t have the best strategy, but have great execution. It is better to have a so-so strategy with great execution than a great strategy with terrible execution.
Do you expect the massive growth of data to continue?
A recent study from Berkeley University in California calculated that the world generates about 25 per cent more new information every year. And information is never stored once, it is typically stored at least twice, so you’re looking at more than 50 per cent growth in data stored. And this can go on forever.
Who is creating this data?
You are – individuals. If you take the same number of digital pictures with a camera that has more megapixels than your last one, that is more data being stored.
In our lifetime, a terabyte of data in the home will be normal. And you will store data at home as well as centrally on the network.
The amount of information is going to grow, but Moore’s Law will continue too. So you will see 50 to 60 per cent growth in data, but not 50 to 60 per cent growth in costs as well.
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