'Everything we do under software strategy is underscored by ILM'

How old is your ILM strategy?

The official announcement of the ILM strategy for the company was in August
this year. However, we were looking at that for quite some time. Internally, we
knew how we are going to align our resources across the company. Everything we
do now in  the company is
ILM, whether it is building new hardware or building
software applications or services.

Everyone is taking about ILM. So how are you different?

We think, we are uniquely qualified. We understand storage. We have been in
the software business for a long time. Veritas has been in the software industry
too, but it does not make storage devices. So it does not have a deep
understanding of that part of DNA. We have got the advantage of having both sets
of DNA. We think that is an incredible advantage for our customers.

What is EMC’s open software strategy and roadmap?

Given that software is a key to the success of ILM, we believe that the
software should be ‘open’. It should support the leading databases,
applications and servers in the industry–all the variants of Unix, Windows,
etc.–as well as storage array vendors and application vendors. Another aspect
is that open software should leverage standards as they come to the market
place. And more importantly as we acquire companies or build new products, we
have to build to the same standard.

Will it not confuse the clients further with these buzz words? They just
need a solution…

This is a more complete discussion and because we are factoring in better
cost-effectiveness, we think this gets our customers’ attention. We focus on
lowering the total cost of ownership. I think any CIO who is worth the position
wants to have that discussion. So far, we have not had any pushback from
customers.

Could you elaborate on ‘pay-by-use’ Open Scale model?

Open Scale allows CIOs to procure at pre-determined prices a series of
hardware, software and services rolled into one contract. It is just an easier
way of consuming storage and a business model appealing to some customers.