We see talent issues in the country: EMC

EMC, which started out as a storage company, has extended its offerings. It develops, supports and delivers information management solutions.

Mr Rajesh Janey, President, EMC India, outlines trends on storage and data management in India.

EMC has been talking of challenges around handling large volumes of data and making sense of it. Do you see Indian enterprises adopting these solutions considering the current economic climate?

‘Big data' is not a buzz word but something that is happening on the ground. Consider these stats. In 1986, only one per cent of the entire world's data was stored digitally. Two decades later, it was over 94 per cent. The library of Congress stores about 235 petabytes of data and 88 per cent of American companies handle more data than that.

This trend has already started impacting Indian companies - whether start-ups or brick-and-mortar.

While Indian retailers can do a lot more of analytics around the data that they generate, some baby steps have already been taken. We work with a large retailer and based on our analytics data, they were able to increase sales of a certain segment of products by moving it into a different shop floor.

Another company is trying to figure out its HR process and by using analytics how it can bring down its workforce. Predictive analytics solutions that can make sense of this large amount of data at attractive price points and scalability will drive adoption in India.

What are your industry-academia initiatives?

Currently, we see talent issues in the country. There is a lack of availability of talent for our kind of work, which involves Intellectual Property (IP) and cutting edge technology work.

Our business has been strong – both in India. We see requirements in the areas of storage, cloud computing, backup recovery systems, data science and big data analytics technologies.

To address this, we are increasingly involving the academia in develop curriculum that can meet our needs.

We have partnered with institutions like Rajiv Gandhi Proudyogiki Vishwavidyalaya, Manipal Institute of Technology and some regional colleges.

We still have a long way to go but we feel that with our approach, students can look to a career in product development in areas such as ‘big data', which will considerably going ahead.

What kind of work is being done out of the India development centre?

We made an announcement this week on a solution that was developed from scratch out of India for the government sector. Saksham, the solution will help in automate workflow process in the government sector based on a template developed out of our Bangalore office.

Similarly, we are working on ‘video-surveillance-as-a-service' offering that is embedded in our storage box.

This is priced at Rs 25,000 and targeted at SMBs.

venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in

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