EMC drives virtualisation strategy

EMC is changing the way it's driving its strategy into the virtual environment.

This announcement was made at the EMC Momentum 2009 conference. The event kicked off this week in Athens, Greece, with around 300 global partners and almost 1 500 delegates attending the content management gathering.

According to EMC Content Management Archiving (CMA) division chief marketing officer Whitney Tidmarsh, the company was inspired by ancient Greek history to use the past as a guide to tackle future problems.

This year's conference theme - inspired by the past and primed for the future - points to the fact that EMC leverages past success to address future business problems, she explained.

Mark Lewis, EMC president, CMA division, said EMC wants to drive its enterprise content management business into the virtual infrastructure space. He predicts that software-as-a-service-based applications will become one of the most critical components of EMC's future strategy.

“Imagine the potential we have for information management to really change what's happening in the industries and business today, and what we can do with the tools and technology at hand; the potential is limitless,” Lewis pointed out.

According to Lewis, this year, EMC has reorganised the CMA division by realigning its focus on governance, information access and process. “Governance to us is about moving from application-centricity to information-centric management. It doesn't matter the application that created the information; what matters is that you need to be able to manage consistent policies of that information.”

Lewis said the consequences for organisations not managing their information are severe. “By the end of the year, the world will have 1.8 zettabytes of information. This information is mostly unstructured and unmanaged. It's not good enough just to have information; you need to be able to manage it, and it's becoming more regulated with new privacy laws.”

Lewis pointed out that cloud computing and cloud-based storage are an important part of EMC's strategy. “The limiting factor of SaaS applications is having to put information on the cloud with secure information management. However, we believe both can happen with the benefits of cloud without having to change the policies of managing the information.”