With the objective of creating more awareness on the benefits and importance of networked storage and concepts like information lifecycle management (ILM), EMC is tying up with technical education institutes. Besides that, another important objective of the EMC Academy program is to create a pool of storage professionals and specialists. Joel Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager, Midrange Systems Division, EMC spoke to VOICE&DATA on storage market in India and the EMC Academy program.

How do you view the current market for networked storage in India?
EMC has grown exponentially in the Indian market in the past year and we are now number one in India. However, we are a very small number one as the potential market in India is huge and we have been able to exploit only a small fraction of that. The concepts of networked storage and ILM are well understood and acknowledged in India. And the issue is not that corporations here don't want to spend on storage. The issue is the type of storage that would like to go for. A major drawback of the Indian market is that the concept of networked, shared storage is not as widely adopted in India as it is in the rest of the world.

How are you going to exploit that potential?
EMC plans to enter into tie ups with engineering colleges and universities in India to introduce IT storage–related curriculum in their courses. The education program is an initiative from EMC to address the shortfall of storage professionals in our country. The educational initiative is also being unveiled in India because EMC has a significant portion of its workforce based in this geography.

Joel Schwartz

We need to educate the engineers and other technical guys who are part of the IT department. And the best time to catch them is when they are going through their education. We decided to pilot the EMC Academy program in a big way in India because the market is so underdeveloped here. We thought it's important to create awareness. So the basic objectives of the program are to raise the awareness and provide an opportunity to educational institutions to offer education on storage. Moreover, with specialized training in storage, engineers can become more marketable.

Is the EMC Academy program modeled along the training and certification programs by Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM?
The program is modeled after those vendors' programs. However, we will have features that would make our programme unique. It would not be a revenue-generating exercise for EMC.

Have you set any targets for EMC Academy?
We want to cover as many cities and institutes as possible. Given this objective, we have set aggressive targets in terms of geographical coverage, number of institutes, and students we would like to touch. However, we are not going beyond tier 1 and 2 engineering colleges. Besides the educational institutes, we also intend to work with the various state governments.

Do we need storage specialists?
Considering the amount of data that is being generated today in every enterprise, there is definitely a need for storage specialists. Such specialists would be key to effective handling and management of data.

Ravi Shekhar Pandey