Scripting a success story

Manoj Chugh, President, India & SAARC for EMC Corporation, has built the vendor’s business in the country from the ground up. At this month's Idea Exchange, Express Computer hosted the man who wrote the script for the storage company's tremendous success in the region. He was greeted with a volley of questions from the editorial teams of the Business Publications Division of The Express Group.

For the last five years you have consistently led the market. However, that wasn't the case when you came to EMC back in 2003. To what do you attribute this turnaround?

When I joined the company in its third year of operations here in the country, it was a completely different ball game back then. The concept of Storage and Information Management was not really of any interest to many. The storage industry itself was at a nascent stage and investment towards storage solutions was a low priority area for CIOs as they didn’t think that it added much value. We had established players like HP, IBM and Sun who treated storage generically and bundled it with their server offerings since storage wasn’t really a product/solutions category yet. Besides, since we had just come into India, not too many people really knew who we were or what we did.

It was then that we decided to shake things up and charted a three-pronged growth strategy for ourselves. First and foremost, we thought that we needed to educate and grow the storage and information management market in the country and, therefore, engaged in fairly strong marketing activities such as direct interaction with customers, seminars, channel partner education programs and targeted PR campaigns etc. We also felt that we needed to expand our sales and marketing infrastructure and, hence, we hired a talented bunch of experienced sales managers who were driven and committed to our end objective. We set up offices and expanded our geographical reach throughout the country by adding channel partners. Thirdly, we also made substantial investments in strengthening our R&D efforts locally and used the talent pool in the country for product innovation.

It was this strategic push that allowed us to shift the balance in our favor and take on both the established players and the prevailing market conditions. If you recall, we changed the market dynamics. Back then, Direct Attached Storage (DAS) was almost the de-facto standard for storage and networked storage was nowhere near as popular as it is today. However, if you look at it now, networked storage has taken over completely and DAS stands at less than 10% of the overall market.

How have you fared in the last couple of quarters?

Well, we're still here; still at the top. That's an indication of how we have fared. Nevertheless, if you are asking me in terms of numbers, then unfortunately we do not break down our numbers by country at EMC and discuss them publicly as a matter of company policy. What I can tell you is that we continue to grow in double digits despite tight market conditions.

Can you tell us if the industry has recovered fully and whether spending is back to where it was earlier?

Things aren’t back to where they were just yet. The market will take some more time. We aren't growing at the same rate at which we were growing in 2007-08 ourselves. Granted, we have managed to achieve a double digit growth but it's not the same as it was then. It is still a work in progress.

EMC is said to have quite a mature partner ecosystem.

To what extent do you credit your success to your partners?

EMC is a technology company and our goal is to help customers leverage technology for their benefit. To this end, our technology partners and systems integrators play a vital role. Our technology partners are the ones who help us complete the overall infrastructure framework. These are techies, engineers with whom we fabricate the solutions and ready them for the customer. Once I have the solution and I'm deploying it at my customer's data center, I have to be aware of things like ‘How do I integrate this application?’ or ‘How do I change things at the backend without disturbing the existing processes and shift the underlying infrastructure in almost a seamless fashion with no downtime?’ This is an extremely important piece. One needs to understand the application, the operating environment, virtualization technologies, processes which the customers deploy and so on. It is our system integrator partners who enable all this and, therefore, partners play an extremely important role in our success story.

Are you involved in the UID project? Can EMC play a crucial role there?

One of the more important pieces of UID Project is the ability to store information related to Indian citizens. This is exactly what we do from a technology perspective, whether it is collecting information, storing it, securing it or even provisioning for disaster recovery. The technologies that we have can allow us to play an important role in projects such as UID.

What are the key challenges that user organizations face today in terms of information management?

Enterprises today have an information avalanche coming their way. In most cases, the IT infrastructure is already under considerable strain thanks to an unrelenting flow of information in both structured and unstructured forms. On top of this, all this digital information tends to replicate itself uncontrollably and is not subject to the traditional best-practices of the data center. In fact, the majority of today's IT infrastructure wasn’t designed to deal with information growth of this kind. Given this scenario, how to get the organization to rearchitect its infrastructure to make it more dynamic and information savvy remains a major challenge faced by many CIOs.

What are you doing to address the issue?

We are bullish about the adoption of information infrastructure technology in the Indian market and expect to work closely with customers that need our help in the days ahead. To this end, we are doing several things. First and foremost, we are pushing the agenda for educating user organizations to store, protect,

intelligently manage and automate information resources. In the last couple of years, we have build expertise beyond storage in areas such as content management, security, virtualization, storage resource management etc. We are constantly trying to come up with innovative customer engagement programs both directly as well as through channel partners.

Besides this, we continue the focus on the education program so that we are able to build and expand the pool of storage skilled professionals that could cater to the growing storage market in India.

Please tell us about your academic alliance programs in India. Do you plan on using some of the talent pool that's being created currently through this initiative?

We'd love to, but unfortunately we just can't get to them in time. On a more serious note, we initiated this program in 2006 as part of our CSR agenda. Back then, we would often get feedback from our customers and partners about the shortage of skilled storage professionals. An earlier estimate suggested that, by 2012, there would be a global shortage of about one million professionals. As the global leaders in information infrastructure solutions, we felt that it was our responsibility to help the industry deal with this challenge and somehow try and fill the gap and widen the pool of storage skilled professionals. The academic alliance program is a strategy devised by EMC, which it follows globally. Under this education strategy, we have designed a technology based, vendor neutral open curriculum which is taught by numerous academic institutions not just across the country but across the globe.

Since it began, we have received an overwhelming response from educational institutions as well as students. So far, EMC has tied-up with hundreds of educational institutions where thousands of students are undergoing the storage technology training as a part of their course.

You have been at the helm of affairs at EMC for several years now. Under your leadership, the company has grown tremendously and more importantly managed to sustain the momentum. What’s the secret to being a successful leader?

I have been fortunate that right from the beginning of my career I got to work in a variety of companies in various job roles. Cumulative learning and experience always helps. It was the case when I came to EMC. I already had a fair bit of experience in terms of how to run an organization in the leadership position. I have a rather direct style of doing things. When it comes to competition and business obstacles, I believe that half your battles are won in your mind. Being a team player working with the right set of people is equally important. One reason as to why we have managed to achieve so much success is because we are a hungry lot. We are an outfit that's full of people who are hungry for success. Lastly, when it comes to running an organization, it's extremely important to keep an eye on what's happening within the organization and to inspect every aspect of your operations as frequently as possible. This keeps everyone on their toes.