‘EMC focuses on building skillsets’
How is big data picking up in India?
In India, we are witnessing a lot of interest in big data. There are 2 significant things—storage of big data and analytics of big data.
On storage, there is a lot of demand coming from oil and gas sector, animation industry, healthcare, etc. On the analytics segment, retail, telecom, and banking are going in for big data. Predictive analytics solutions that can make sense of large amounts of data at attractive price points and scalability will drive adoption in India.
How do you perceive the implementation of big data in the next 5 years?
Why 5 years? Even now, if given an option, organizations would like to take advantage of the information they know or the information that is already available in the social media. Actionable intelligence will facilitate to bring the useful information back to the structured data.
We are currently working with some large corporates, who term it as a ‘transformation journey’; and have opted for big data analytics.
Technologies like GreenPlan are making it much more affordable to build real-time analytics to go beyond structured and unstructured. Earlier, it was a complex deployment but now they can start small and can keep building on it. The technologies have become much more affordable.
What are your strategies to leverage big data?
We have invested heavily on big data. We invested over $1.5 bn in India for 5 years from 2010 to 2014. This is an overall investment which goes into center of excellency, sales development, expansion of R&D, and marketing.
EMC is focusing on building skillsets. There is a tremendous gap of skillsets in the industry. Through EMC Academic Alliance programme, we are collaborating with institutions in the areas of storage, cloud computing, backup recovery systems, architecture and data science, and big data analytics technologies. We intend to create data scientists. We are addressing an entire gamut of things on big data. We are also working with our partners to build solutions around big data.
How is the response from the telecom sector?
The response is good. Two of our large customers are from the telecom vertical—one is a service provider and the other is a VAS provider.
Telecom is one key area as there are large numbers of customers and there is a need to analyse data in real time. Big data offers real-time analytics and real-time feedback. So, it is possible to tweet the plan in real time and benefit from it.
Big data is not just about pure play storage, it is about volume of the storage, velocity of the storage, complexity, variety that is structured and unstructured—that is one of the significant advantages.