Partnerships are essential for EMC and in the Netherlands, as pointed out in a previous blog. Rens Koopman is responsible for, among others, strategic alliances. In this interview in our series on cloud systems and partner ecosystems, Rens takes us on a journey through changing end customer needs, data challenges and the hybrid must.
On top of being responsible for strategic alliances in the Netherlands, Rens Koopman is also responsible for government and industry at EMC Netherlands.
You have been with EMC since 2001 and are responsible for central government, industry, cloud providers and strategic alliances. How has EMC been adapting itself and its offering in a rapidly changing ICT landscape?
Rens Koopman: In recent years, EMC has done quite some thinking about how to position itself in the evolutions towards the cloud, the third platform and, along with that, the clear demand from the market to be able to do things easier and in more flexible ways.
The essential choice to make was either to become a full service company or to focus on being a good technology provider, working hand in hand with strong partners. We opted for the latter as we believe it’s the best way to develop and offer technologies and solutions to make cloud computing and other evolutions as easy as possible for the end customer.
This partner model is crucial for us so we built strong relationships with outsourcers and service providers. We don’t look at our service providers such as BT as customers but as real partners and, as opposed to many other companies, we even have built the partner model into the core of the way we do business.
Offering the end customers the benefits of choice and flexibility
What are the benefits of such an approach for EMC, the partners and the end customers?
The new BT data centre in Rotterdam where our partner EMC joins us
Rens Koopman: We help our partners to be hyper efficient in their own operations, for instance by enabling them lower TCO, do more with less and operate smarter and more efficiently on the level of their data centers. The other way around, partners such as BT obviously chose us, based on quality, costs, etc. too.
We also have a model whereby we create business at the forefront: we work out portfolio items, value stacks and value propositions with our partners and bring them to the market hand in hand.
To emphasize the crucial role of partnerships and how deep it is in our corporate DNA, a clear differentiator is the way we work with a double reward system. The account teams of BT and EMC work together and are both rewarded to avoid conflicts and really value the strength of collaboration in a tangible way
The key benefit of such a model for the end customers is that they can choose. They need functionality and have different ways to obtain it. They can buy the whole package or take it as a service. By offering a whole scale of business models we can – together – offer them the best choice to fulfil their needs.
The art of connecting: the third platform and the Internet of Things
How has the ICT landscape evolved and the approach EMC has regarding product development along with it?
Rens Koopman: Our products and services have been evolving along with the evolutions towards the third platform and the needs businesses have in this changing context.
To understand the impact of the third platform, it’s good to look at what has changed. Years ago, we were in what we call platform one now: mainly mainframes, millions of users and quite a lot applications. In the second stage we went to smaller server environments with hundreds of millions of users and tens of thousands of applications. Yet, everything was still quite structured.
In today’s cloud environment and the third platform, we have shifted to millions and even billions of users and millions of apps in a landscape that is not as structured as it used to be. Everyone wants to have access at all times on mobile device and private and business use of technology and applications are increasingly mixed.
The four pillars of the third platform (mobile, cloud, social and big data) have a huge impact. Organizations have more specific requirements in the way they access the ICT infrastructure and this impacts the products that are at the basis of these infrastructures, services and apps. They need to be optimized one-on-one to enable and offer the required infrastructure. One typical example of a specific requirement in the cloud concerns security: you can access everything but not everyone is allowed to.
Things go fast. There are so many users, so many changes, so much information,… Today, applications get developed in a week instead of in 9 months as in the past, So the infrastructure requirements have changed and continue to. This is clearly reflected in product changes. If you look at the way we handle product development, it’s always by taking into account that products need to be fit for multi-user environments and always secure in the core. If they’re not, you can hardly work nowadays with all compliance rules and cloud developments whereby people often don’t know where information or data sits but need to be able to retrieve it and of course make sure some people can’t access it in some cases.
Referring back to the partnership approach, when our products get developed we always keep in mind that a service provider at all times needs to able to work with them. In other words: multi-tenancy is built in: more customers need to access it in a shared environment, costs need to be manageable and at the same time there’s that need to give guarantee no one else can access their data, for instance.
In that sense, the whole product development is about the question how you deal with the data center where soon maybe 100, 200 or 250 customers will be on, while keeping costs transparent so the service provider can properly bill.
How do you see the impact of the Internet of things/everything?
Rens Koopman: Well, of course there is the matter of transporting, processing and storing data, knowing how much still is going to happen in this regard and the sheer explosion of data ahead of us. However, there are always solutions to cope with that, with bigger and faster approaches.
For us, there are additional concerns to address. Once you have stored all these data, how can you still access them? How do they remain secured? How do you make sure that certain data disappear after a while as is sometimes required by legislation, and thus to not be in breach of law.
Moreover, whatever network and infrastructure you have, people across the globe will always want to have access to all these data via mobile. This again brings along totally different requirements on the infrastructure level than working at a set time via a fixed terminal or PC.
Finally, on top of managing the data as just mentioned, businesses also need to be able to interpret, analyze and retrieve them. For us and within the offerings we develop with our partners to address customer challenges, this is really key.
Evolutions in the market and how the ecosystem responds
You mentioned a few changes in end customer demand earlier. What do they really boil down to and how is the hybrid approach related to it?
Rens Koopman: There is an evolution from Capex to Opex models: organizations want to pay for what they use and need far more flexibility.
Often you see big IT firms move from business model A to B which is hard. By working with partners we don’t only spread and share risk but also respond to the need of flexibility, preferably in an Open model. Companies used to decide whether to outsource or not in one big move, mainly based on assets. Now these decisions are taken more on the level of workloads rather than assets, when pondering whether something needs to be put in the cloud or not.
And those decisions are not final but dynamic. When developing an application, testing and development often happens outside the corporate firewall and production is kept inside. But once, production is refined and the app works well, it also gets put in the cloud, for instance. And the next moment, businesses can decide to take it back inside for, let’s say, security reasons.
This level of flexibility, increased demand and heightened dynamism by definition requires hybrid solutions. To me, hybrid is by definition something that is related with cloud because the cloud by definition is flexible. Flexibility is really a key word here as specific needs change the whole time, whether it’s to or from the private cloud, on premise, off premise, part public cloud and maybe next moment maybe back inside. Hybrid is a fixed component when you do cloud computing, be it Iaas, PaaS or Saas.
Finally, can you tell us more about the ecosystem of EMC itself and on which levels we work together as partners?
Rens Koopman : “software is really important in the positioning of EMC”
Rens Koopman: The way we work together depends on the context of the customer and service provider and I would distinguish between IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. When BT delivers IaaS, EMC’s part in it will typically be bigger. When you deliver PaaS, there is more platform software around it.
Regarding our own ecosystem: although we still do a lot around storage and related topics such as data, we immensely focus on software. In data centers we are about much more than infrastructure and offer lots of software to tackle some of the evolutions and tasks at hand in managing and operationalizing data as I mentioned earlier. This goes beyond the data center and also, for instance includes data analytics. And that’s another reason why partnerships are more important.
Software is really important in the positioning of EMC as you can see in the way we indeed work as a federation to serve customer needs.
You have EMC as company with RSA and Documentum but, in fact our approach is one of an EMC federation/ecosystem in which you also find companies that operate as separate entities within that federation such VMWare (85% EMC) and Pivotal (among others analytics and big data).
An ecosystem of solutions and companies, working within an ecosystem of partnerships to meet the needs of flexibility and agility organizations nowadays have.
Also read: The truth about cloud: Here today, gone tomorrow?
