You’ve recently taken over the role of country manger UK & Ireland for EMC. Can you give us more information about what the role entails?
It involves evaluating what we have in terms of resources – how many people, where they are and so on. CEO Joe Tucci has said that EMC needs to be [a] $27bn [company] by 2015 and the UK will form a big part of that as we’re the largest subsidiary outside of the US. Joe has also said that he wants 50% of the business to be international so my key role is to work out how the UK forms part of that wider strategy.
What are you going to do hit those growth targets?
There are three areas: First there is what we’re trying to achieve in terms of growth – how do we get out there? How do we get our messaging and products to market as quickly as possible? Second, further alliances and partnerships and third, how I can get EMC’s name and branding out there so people understand that we’re not just a storage company. We’re also a very large security company, we own VMware and are one of the foremost players in the cloud discussion. We also have a large group that looks after content – such as with our acquisition of Documentum.
One of EMC’s bigger recent acquisitions was that of Greenplum. What did you see in them and what are you brining to the market with that acquired technology?
We are going to see a massive increase in the amount of data out there and the ability for our customers to look at that data, analyse it and make business decisions has become increasingly more difficult. With Greenplum it enables us to put the data in and get a clear, business-based decision out of it.
Greenplum is massively scalable, it’s more cost-effective than Teradata or Netezza and we have very high hopes of what it can deliver for is.
And that move takes you into even more competition with the likes of IBM and Oracle in that space.
It does. We’re seeing a big consolidation in the market. I think the downturn has taken us on a new wave where only the strong parties with strong balance sheets will be able to take their message forward. I think we’ll continue to see consolidation in the market and the Greenplum acquisition opens up a whole new market for us where data is the most important thing.
This consolidation sees to mostly involve the Big Boys looking to become a one-stop shop for all enterprise IT needs. Is that something you’re looking at?
Our mantra is proving information infrastructure; how do we turn the binary into understandable data and thereby deliver business value. We are looking to be the foremost player in the information infrastructure space and we are already number one in most categories. But we are not trying to directly be the one-stop shop.
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You say you’re number one in the market but NetApp, for example, has been growing at a huge rate. How do you plan to hold off their challenge?
I think with some of the recent announcements around VNX and the acquisition of Isilon put us on another level. I’m not going to comment directly on NetApp but it’s our belief that we have better technology; the pure scope and variety of offerings we have over and above NetApp’s. We believe from a customer point of view we have a far more strategic offering that can take them on a journey to the cloud, drive down costs, help them to manage their data and make it more secure, which I would maintain NetApp’s aren’t able to do to the same extend we can.
But their growth figures would suggest they are doing something right.
But they are working from a lower base. We do see NetApp as a competitor but mainly in a particular space.
And what about the other competition… Dell, HP, IBM. What do you bring to the market they don’t?
We are all about information, that’s what we do. IBM and HP are not pure-play information infrastructure providers; they have other areas they have to focus on. Our single focus has enabled us to be number one in most of our target markets. I would argue that IBM and HP, because they’ve got a broader spectrum of focus, are not able to put the amount of dollars into R&D that we do.
You mentioned cloud as one of the big things at the moment…
Eighteen months ago customers would have said: ‘cloud, not too sure about that, don’t know if I want to do that’. Now I would say 75% of the customers I see are talking about making that journey. You need a data strategy around what you want to do with it, then you look at virtualising the infrastructure and, over time, bring it into a service-based offering.
Do you agree that the messages you and other vendors are putting out about cloud computing don’t match the reality at the moment in terms of deployments and so on?
It’s like, ‘Are we pushing it or are we being pulled?’ Eighteen months ago we were pushing but we’re now being pulled. There is genuine interest and concern about this massive amount of data they have to deal with it. We’re at an inflection point at the moment and people are accepting that they have to change.
