In tough times, IT is also about improving workforce productivity

As a CIO, Sanjay Mirchandani is responsible for extending
EMCs operational excellence and driving technological innovations to meet the
current and future needs of the business. Reporting to David Goulden, EMCs
chief financial officer, Mirchandani also leads EMCs network of global delivery
centers in India, China, Russia, and Israel.

Before taking this role, Mirchandani served as the senior
vice president leading the EMC office of globalization. In this role he
identified global growth opportunities and built the EMC processes and
infrastructure required for global expansion. He was also responsible for
bringing in new strategic international partners into EMCs Global Alliances
program. Excerpts

C onsidering that EMC is a technology company,
managing the IT infrastructure would not be a big task for you. What unique
challenges does EMC face on the IT front?

Our challenges on the IT front are similar to some of our largest customers.
EMC has grown very rapidly over the years, and we are geographically dispersed
across the globe. We have also grown through acquisition and every acquisition
comes with a level of complexity and diversity. We reflect the environment and
challenges that our customers have. As an added dimension, EMC also produces
information infrastructure products. Our approach to IT is simpleto be our
first and best customer. First in adopting and using our technologies and at the
same time providing best practices for ourselves and also for our end customers.
EMC has around 40,000 armchair CIOs (employees) and I get great technology
inputs from them on a daily basis.

In the last eighteen months, all CIOs are facing similar
challengescentered on cost and efficiency. Any business that runs efficiently
is good. In good times one can become a little more flexible, however in tough
times one has to be efficient. It is all about efficiency and it is not limited
to only IT, but also IT making the overall business more efficient. Agility in
IT delivery is paramount. Gone are the days when something used to take two
years for completion. IT needs to bring solutions to the table before there is a
stated issue.

In tough times, IT is also about improving workforce
productivity. Giving employees the right productivity tools is very important.
The next important thing in IT is building the future. When one gets efficient,
one tries to cut out the excess in the system but there is a limit to which it
can be done. That can be done by building scalable infrastructure for businesses
and investing in focused areas of business interest. The next important thing
for IT is what EMC calls first and best. We believe that everything we do either
works perfectly or it doesnt. Operational efficiency, business transformation,
and customer intimacy are three guiding principles for EMC as an organization
and IT plays an important role in that.

How has EMC used virtualization?

Our IT journey began in 2004 and continued till 2008. To begin with we had
an ageing data center resulting in inefficiencies due to increase in the number
of applications, servers, and storage in our five worldwide data centers. The
scope for improvement in terms of saving space, power, and cooling was limited
and we were breaching the limit in terms of storage. The upgradation costs were
significant. This got us thinking on how to address the issue. And we approached
it in three waysby improving data center efficiency, managing storage
infrastructure, and improving server efficiency by using virtualization.
Virtualization software was used to consolidate 1,250 servers down to just 250.
In all of this, we used our own storage products. EMC saved $12 mn as a result
of this initiative.

The difference between EMC and other technology providers is
that we use our own products alongside industry leading products which we dont
manufacture. We made investments in management, automation, storage, network,
server consolidation, security models, and SOA. All this has led to a journey
for a private cloud. EMC is moving towards building its own private cloud which
is 100% virtualized on the Intel architecture.

What are your views on private cloud versus public cloud?

Private cloud has two parts to it. There is an internal cloud, which is the
next generation data center evolving into internal cloud and there could be a
federated version of cloud which is hosted by cloud providers, and collectively,
one has this as a part of the private cloud. The public cloud can be anything as
a serviceplatform, compute, or application. Most CIOs would look at mixing and
matching both. One is not going to stop having a data center even if it is
private cloud enabled. Data center is going to evolve into a private cloud and
is likely to get federated giving enterprises more choices and can have
something like everything as a service from third party providers. EMC has an
offering called Mozi which offers back-up and recovery as a service.

What are the challenges CIOs are facing on account of
explosion of unstructured data and how do you think they should address them?

There is no doubt that there is an explosion in digital information,
irrespective of the economic situation. Exchange of all information gets stored
somewhere and is managed by companies in some way. One has to give knowledge
workers the tools to be productive and structure them. To manage unstructured
information, companies need to adapt, adopt, and embrace web 2.0 technologies
because it enables real-time collaboration and at the same time gives real-time
feedback. This is the pulse of the business as these are vibrant, self-service
tools in which no one has to intervene. The idea should be to foster that rather
than manage. At EMC, we have EMC1 as a collaboration tool for all of our
employees.

What kind of interactions do you have with your CEO and
CFO?

All our discussions are centered around the fact that EMC is the first and
the best customer and we have access to our technology before it is ready and
sometimes even before a customer sees it. Most of the conversations we have are
on strategic level.

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in