“We are developing a BI-as-a-Service offering for internal users to analyze and unlock the value of their information”

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In these days of increased business volatility, does a CIO resort to tried and tested methods of doing business or stick his neck out and innovate? Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO, EMC shared his views on the ever changing role of the CIO with Venkatesh Ganesh

Is the CIO’s role in India more challenging as compared to other markets?

Having lived and worked in India for a number of years, I learned to traverse the regional diversity and geography, as well as the unique business challenges and opportunities. That said, the key tenets are the same. You must always partner with the business to understand what they need to succeed and how to enable it. Today’s technologies such as Cloud computing and big data are helping us to deliver agility to the business.

For years, CIOs strived to contain and manage structured and unstructured data using technologies like archiving and dedupe. However, rather than managing the data down, we now have an opportunity to harness Big Data with technologies like Greenplum, Isilon and Hadoop. With scale out capabilities and deep analytic processing power, we can now pour through data from many sources to identify leading indicators for smarter, faster business decisions. Structured, semi-structured, unstructured—today’s information needs encapsulate all of them in timeframes that are hugely compressed. This provides much needed agility to the business.

Tell us about your role as the CIO of EMC. How do decisions taken by you impact the top and bottom-line?

I have to straddle the line between technology and business but I am also excited by the opportunity to have conversations with the business about their goals, the challenges that they face and their growth and go-to-market opportunities. Rather than just providing technology, CIOs are now the facilitators of value and agility for the business helping impact the top and bottom lines. At EMC, we also take what we do and share it proactively with our customers externally via a program that we call IT Proven. In the third quarter, we saw double digit revenue growth for our Information Storage business, high-end storage portfolio and to SMBs too.

Do vendor handholding initiatives for the Cloud suffice?

Every CIO is well aware of the challenges that his business faces and a lot of them are open to innovation, provided it makes business sense—either in the near or in the long term. This is more so in the case of organizations in developing economies like India. In line with that, we recently came up with the concept of Cloud experience centers. This initiative, launched in May 2011 is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between EMC and Cisco with the twin facilities located at the EMC Center of Excellence and at the Cisco Globalization Center East. The objective is to provide Indian customers with an opportunity to experience the benefits and reliability of Cloud-based IT infrastructure.

You provide solutions for customers grappling with increased data. How did you manage EMC’s data growth?

Like our customers, we tend to use a lot of time-intensive, manual processes and shadow applications for crunching business data that, in turn, increases the potential for error. With new technologies blazing a trail to Big Data, we have begun to see significant management and analytical results in a number of areas of our business, including our corporate quality and security organizations. We are also developing a BI-as-a-Service offering for internal users to analyze and unlock the value of their information. Leveraging Greenplum, this service will use data from multiple sources and provide easy-to-use query tools and consulting services to harness business value through analytics. This will help our users to spend less time managing the technology and more accessing the information. To cite an example, we internally use Greenplum Modular Data Computing Appliance (DCA), for big data analytics. DCA allows enterprises to combine a relational database with enterprise-class Apache Hadoop in a single appliance to achieve structured and unstructured data processing.

A CIO’s role is still being seen as a support function. Is the maturity setting in both from a CEO and the Board perspective?

Like any business, we must be able to demonstrate the value that our IT initiatives bring to the business regardless of whether it is driving efficiencies or enabling next generation capabilities that advance our go-to-market strategy. In the old days, the majority of CIOs reported to the CFO. What is becoming clear is that today’s CIOs need both business and leadership skills as well as technological ability. It has been evident that self-confidence, entrepreneurial drive and the ability to inspire, nurture, and encourage talent are important in the CIO’s office in addition to at least as good a grasp of the organization’s strategy and operation as other senior executives. While it would be wrong to suggest that the CIO should report to the CEO in every organization, there is a clear trend here as IT becomes increasingly pervasive through the majority of organizations. At EMC, our leadership team and board of directors clearly see how we live and breathe the company’s vision for Cloud and Big Data, as well as how we are delivering strong results through our IT investment and innovation. In line with this vision, the CIOs role is of crucial importance in EMC.

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