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“The Cloud is expected to add 100,000 jobs in India in the next five years”
Storage major, EMC has come out with tailor made courses
for its partners and customers to instill Cloud skills among their workforce
with an open curriculum. Alok Shrivastava, Sr. Director, EMC Education
Services, talked to Pupul Dutta about the course and the Indian scenario
How has the response to your open storage technology course
been?
 On
realizing the vast skill gap and the need for strong basic education, EMC Education
Services designed a comprehensive ISM curriculum centered on technology principles,
rather than vendor-specific products. A small team began reaching out to top-tier
universities, encouraging them to adopt this open curriculum through the EMC
Academic Alliance (EAA) program. We moved ahead with this program by forging
partnerships with major independent training organizations that serve IT professionals
and adding the ISM curriculum to our professional certification program for
customers, employees, and partners at the same time. Since its inception in
2005 with Manipal Institute of Technology being the first institution to adopt
EAA, we are now 150+ strong with more than 60,000 students having been educated.
In 2011 alone, we have enrolled over 45,000 students and 30 plus EAA institutions.
Can you highlight the career opportunities that Cloud computing
would create?
The requirement for Cloud-skilled professionals is huge even today and it will
continue to grow. To give you a few examples, over 82% of the companies want
really strong Cloud skill sets within their workforce and out of that only 11%
believe they have it today. The second part to this is that a lot of new challenges
will be faced by Cloud-skilled professionals, which means that a lot of old
practices and habits will have to be broken. In the past, organizations had
teams focusing on databases, operating systems and networking and so on; in
the case of the Cloud, these walls will be broken down as everything will be
merged virtually. Therefore, we are looking at people who can not only cover
the breadth of the technology domain but also have a good degree of depth in
it.
The industry is full of experts on these varied technologies—OS, networking
etc. but they all have to work together in the Cloud environment.
Is EMC’s offering a unique proposition?
It is deeply entrenched in technology. Most courses available in the market
are either very high level or are specific to some products. What we have is
an open curriculum so it cuts across different technology vendors. We framed
the curriculum in such a way that professionals are able to design IT as a service
with the help of the Cloud.
How many partners do you have for whom you provide these
courses?
Our training and certification is overall the key component of the partner relationship.
It involves practically every partner that we work as they have people who have
been trained and certified by us.
How has the response been from Indian students or professionals?
Awareness is increasing and practically everyone wants to get into this (Cloud)
space. The numbers speak for themselves. In about six to seven months from the
time when we launched the first open curriculum course based on the Cloud, we
have enrolled over 2,000 professionals in the advanced level (globally). About
300+ are already certified Cloud architects. As we go broader, we expect the
trend to pick up tremendously.
Does EMC also promise placement?
The course is focused on the industry and, therefore, our customers, partners
or even the companies that we compete with, given their own set of requirements,
hire them. We do hire from the batches but it is more for the industry in general.
However, the fast growth of this segment is also expected to positively influence
the employment market in India. The private Cloud market in India currently
generates over 10,000 jobs (direct and indirect) and it is expected to add another
100,000 jobs in the next five years.
What would be India's role in creating Cloud-ready professionals?
Domestically, India has a growing IT industry for internal usage of the Cloud.
If you look at the skill sets requirement, the leading Indian IT industries
are playing a key role in the transformation of the Cloud.
If you look at the overall trend, we are seeing a rapid growth of about 16-17%
in the Cloud computing space. This technology is expected to become the de facto
standard of how IT would run in future, which is running more as a support factor
in any organization. The transformation has to happen and, typically, in any
project the transformation is successful based on two key factors namely technology
and people. Unless people are motivated to bring about a radical change in the
scenario, the Cloud as a solution would not be successful.
According to experts, not all managers understand what the Cloud is or how to
migrate to it. As the awareness of the management increases the success level
will go up.
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