EMC World – First Impressions and Partner Summit May 6, 2013

I attended the Global Partner Summit this morning. First impressions at EMC World are great.  There were several panel discussions from leadership and rather than a play by play  I will just these take aways and random thoughts that stuck with me.

As an old airline guy I was pleasantly surprised to see that businesses technical challenges showing up over and over. The complexities of that market are ready made for everything we are doing with big data, analytics and unstructured information. From aircraft performance and customer service to my old stomping grounds in maintenance we are everywhere.

Anecdote from Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz : an airline CIO explained that a single trans-atlantic flight by a Boeing 777 could generate as much as 30 TB of data if we captured everything and that as more components become internet aware this will become a reality. Accenture’s subsidiary Navitarire for example is an ambitious offering taking on management all technology aspects of running an airline in the cloud and EMC technology is all over it. I will commit to learning more about this one.

In discussing the move to the cloud by our customers, Maritz also used the term third platform applications. I like this term much better than the weak attempts to get people ti use terms like Web 3.0. Certainly we see this in the content space as well and I’ll have more discussion on this front later in the week after the IIG keynotes and sessions get underway.

On the security front my take away is that we are witnessing the death of the perimeter. I would write a post on that but I have sworn off posts with death in the title. The RSA leadership called out the trend that soon the “internet of things” will result an expansion of the number of endpoints on the internet. Everything from refrigerators to jet engines (theres the airline reference) will have an IP address.While this expands our ability to understand what is happing to these devices in real time it also expands the risk. The industry focus in security needs to shift to accelerating the identification and responce to attack through real time intelligent analysis of the environment. Anti-virus and perimeter defenses are simply not able to defend your network at all of the potential points that the internet of things will create.

From a personal IIG perspective, we have certified over 75 partner solutions since relaunching that program and are seeing tremendous growth around solutions. Business models are changing and the partner ecosystem has to evolve with it and moving from a transactional services integration model to repeatable solution oriented relationships with our partners and customers is part of that transformation.

When I talk about partnering to people who don’t know what I do – I usually describe it in terms of being

• Entrepreneurial – It is symbiotic relationship where success of the business partner, the customer and EMC are equally important.
• Exponential – The reach and expertise of our partner ecosystem has the potential to take our joint solutions to levels we could never achieve on our own
• Essential – The market moves too fast for one organization to know everything about every opportunity and solve every problem alone.

These principles have not changed even as the platforms and business models do.

Lastly here is my personal list of sessions not to miss (check your schedule for time and location)

• Mike Mohen on Migrations and Upgrades
• Jeroen Van Rotterdam EMC Documentum Architecture & Overview
• Ed Bueche on Scalability and Performance
• Dave LeStrat on IIG Public Cloud Solutions

This is going to be an exciting week. Stop by the EMC Momentum section in the Solution Pavilion and don’t miss the hands on lab opportunities to see the products in action.