Bangkok Post : EMC eases path to corporate clouds

VIRTUALISATION

Recognising customer demand to simplify complex IT systems and reduce costs is accelerating adoption by businesses of virtual computing models and driving EMC to adopt an aggressive strategy to enter the private-community cloud as well as the IT system management market.

Nathakorn Potejanasaja

Nathakorn Potejanasaja, new Country Manager for EMC in Thailand, said the company has set up a special team to help enterprise customers to migrate their existing data centres to next-generation virtualised data centres and private clouds.

The team will utilise global resource expertise to deliver Vblock Infrastructure packages as fully integrated, tested, validated and ready-to-go/ready-to-grow packages that combine virtualisation, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware with end-to-end vendor accountability.

Akkamon Srihiran, Global Services Manager, EMC Global Services Thailand, added that the tangible benefits of cost-saving depend on the level of virtualisation each organisation deploys.

Nathakorn continued that VCE will help enterprise to implement their own private clouds and EMC plans to help industry groups implement community clouds.

A community cloud refers to one in which different companies from the same industry share certain common service and applications to help reduce costs.

Moreover, EMC will bring more solutions to the Thai market, especially in products from its Ionix system management software division, and seek the best partners.

Akkamon added that the Ionix solution will evaluate and analyse impacts on business from IT and identify root causes of problems faced by data centres.

For example, if an IT department needs to shut down some servers that contain certain applications, it can be hard to predict how this will affect other systems.

The company also recently announced its vision for fully automated storage tiering (FAST) and delivery of its first technology to revolutionise the way data storage is managed by delivering automation capabilities across all primary EMC storage platforms.

This would enable organisations to easily create and apply tiering policies to transparently automate the control, placement, and movement of data within the storage system based on business needs.

Nathakorn continued that the company has a lot of technologies that help organisations build and manage their information infrastructure, although this may not be emphasised in the Thai market.

However he expects that this year will see an opportunity for the company to increase its revenue on top of that from existing customers in the telecom, banking and government sectors.

He expects that within two years, the company will have doubled its revenue and gained the greatest market share rank in high-end external storage.

Currently it is ranked number three in this field in Thailand, although it is already the market leader in some other Southeast Asian nations.

Meanwhile, EMC led Thailand's total external midrange storage market with a share of 30.55 percent.

"Thailand remains one of EMC's key strategic locations in the region, with IT spending this year expected to grow to 6.8 percent, up one percent on last year," Nathakorn concluded.