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Companies across verticals are considering moving to hybrid cloud: Anantharaman Balakrishnan, Country Head, EMC

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Smita Vasudevan
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In an interaction with Dataquest, Anantharaman Balakrishnan, Country Head, EMC Global Services India, shares some key details on the company's strategic plans to solidify its position in the expanding cloud market in India

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Please elaborate a bit on your plans for the Indian Cloud market?

Today, cloud computing is revolutionizing IT by making it possible to run IT-as-a-Service to drive maximum efficiency. We are focused on helping customers build the right cloud strategy and are working closely with service providers to identify on-ground difficulties faced by customers and suggesting a solution that gives them the best business benefit. Based on the need of the hour, we have introduced four new services under EMC’s professional services portfolio for end-to-end turnkey operational management; to analyze application requirements and workload suitability; for IT transformation, and education services.

What are the biggest opportunity areas in the Indian market?

Cloud market in India is expected to hit the $1 bn mark by 2015. According to our 2014 EMC Survey with IT decision makers, around three quarters of the IT decision makers in India (76%) believe that a combination of public and private cloud services allows for a higher level of agility and security, and 31% have already deployed hybrid cloud. It is estimated that globally, nearly 50% of all large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

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Companies across industry verticals are considering moving to the hybrid cloud and there is definitely immense scope for the market to grow in India as well. Today, the EMC Federation of companies, is best positioned to help organizations adopt the hybrid cloud by addressing all the 3P’s— People, Platform & Processes. With many of the service providers having public, hosted private, and now moving towards hybrid cloud offerings, we are seeing an increasing awareness and options being offered by these CSPs (Cloud Service Providers) to our customers. Many of the enterprise customers have started looking towards moving workloads off-premise for multiple reasons—some on use case basis such as DR/archive/backup, some for hybrid cloud to bring in the optimum balance between private and pure public cloud, and finally a few for capex to opex considerations, promoting the IaaS adoption.

Across manufacturing, BFSI, IT/ITeS, healthcare, eCommerce verticals, we have seen companies gaining maximum value moving to cloud service providers. Midmarket has seen faster adoption while with datacenter transformation becoming critical for enterprises, we see CSPs adding great value in meeting the changing needs of enterprise businesses.

Can you highlight EMC's key investments and strategies in the cloud market ? 

EMC has partnered with cloud service providers such as Netmagic and Sungard Availability Services, as well as additional partners to be announced in the future, to target customers in the manufacturing, healthcare, retail, BFSI, and IT/ITeS sectors. Businesses are demanding more than ever from IT. They want choice in devices, rapid creation and deployment of new services, and flexibility as to where  applications live, how they are managed, and by whom. To meet these expectations, IT organizations must deliver ITas- a-Service (ITaaS) via a well-run hybrid cloud that brings together the performance, security, and control of private cloud with the flexibility and cost advantages of public cloud.

EMC in India has partnered with certain cloud service providers to offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service including storage, backup and replication in various flavours of public, shared, hosted private, and dedicated models. Our strategy is to enable these CSPs to create their service offerings on EMC Powered Resilient Infrastructure with best-of-the-breed solution stacks for security, high availability, and management ease for addressing the varying workload requirements of their customers. Our growth would be accelerated by the recently launched Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution. To create this solution, more than 40,000 EMC engineering hours were invested to deliver hardware, software, and services solution, designed to accelerate time-to-value, and enable the deployment of an enterprise hybrid cloud. Also, post the acquisition of Cloudscaling, Maginatics and Spanning, EMC would accelerate OpenStack-powered hybrid clouds to extend data protection to the cloud, and assure availability and data protection for ‘born in the cloud’ applications in India.

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