24x7 info will change corporate strategy

‘NEW DELHI: In a season when global CEOs are visiting India in droves and making mega buck investment announcements, another CEO visit would have been dubbed as routine.
But when the visiting CEO happens to be Joseph M Tucci, the high profile chairman and CEO of data storage giant EMC and a much acclaimed turnaround artist, CEOs and head honchos of Indian companies joined the who’s who of Indian bureaucracy to hear him at the Corporate Dossier Super Achiever’s Forum.

Mr Tucci on his part, was awe inspiring in his address on ‘leveraging information for global competitive advantage’. Mr Tucci found a riveted audience as he took them through the world where information will be on demand, all pervasive, and platform neutral. No wonder, the Nasscom CEO, Kiran Karnik introduced him as man with a “magic touch” and tech clairvoyant.

The chief of information and product life cycle management company didn’t disappoint as he presented bits and bytes on the digital and information era. “Stored information is growing at a CAGR of 60% on disk arrays. We live in an increasingly connected world where there are 900m internet users and 2bn mobile subscribers. This is leading to a virtuous cycle of information creation and sharing,” Mr Tucci told the gathering.

And today it’s not just the enterprises that create information, but individuals. It ranges from personal records, digital photos that people take and share, medical images (like MRI, optical tomography) to communications via e-mail, voice mail and SMS. “Everything is going digital,” Mr Tucci added.

“Today people use 6-mega pixel digital cameras, iPods, messaging, search, e-mail, peer-to-peer file sharing, pocket hard drives et al. This increasing digitisation of life is leading to need for information that will be available ‘on command’. People will have total ability to pick the time, place and device on which they access the information.”

This exciting world is not without its share of challenges. Where will all this information be stored? Actually everywhere, said the heavy built EMC chief. This includes mobile devices, homes, archives, regional offices and branches. “Information will be available 24x7xforever, which is changing the strategy of companies. There is a mind shift from an application-centric IT strategy to an IT-centric strategy. This also means a shift in approach from a primarily hardware centric or a platforms approach to a service oriented approach,” he said.
The audience just couldn’t stop asking questions after the provocative spiel. The free flowing questions ranged from ‘ease of personal storage versus central storage and how can India stop western information from eroding Indian values,’ to ‘why is EMC named after Einstein’s most famous equation?’ Mr Tucci’s answers were crisp and witty.

To the questions on Indian values, he replied, “welcome to the global world friend,” and had audience in splits. And as far as the EMC name is concerned, he explained, the founders of the company worked together in Intel and when they got together to form the company, one founders name started with E and he held 60% of the share, another founder’s name began with M while two founder’s name began with C and this crystallised in the name as we know it today.