Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO of EMC (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

Sramana: You mention private clouds. How do you decide on what to put on the private cloud versus what to procure from the public cloud as part of your cloud strategy?

Sanjay: It is a journey. The journey that we are on at EMC is to virtualize our infrastructure. This will get us into the next level where we have a highly elastic cloud-like infrastructure; [we] call it our private cloud. I shared with you earlier that we have approximately 75% of the infrastructure virtualized at EMC today. Next year, our infrastructure will be close to 100% virtualized. So, I’m providing infrastructure and platforms, in a short time across the company, as a service in a private cloud-like environment. As for the applications, we are going top down. In the case of newer applications we require, if those are available in the cloud, we consider them, engage with respective vendors, and bring them in, for example, Salesforce. As more and more existing applications come up for renewal or there are new application requirements, we decide upon them case by case, based on scale requirements. Anything else that we decide to bring in-house, those need to address availability and have to be private cloud aware. In our case, it is a staggered decision set. However, if there is a functionality that we are looking to have in EMC and it is available in the cloud and meets our needs, I’m happy to go look at it. If it doesn’t, then it has to be virtualized and cloud enabled on-premise. So ideally, we work with a private cloud in our internal infrastructure at EMC. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO of EMC (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

Sramana: At EMC, now that you have this rather large virtualized infrastructure, are you able to charge back the different parts of the company based on their usage? Or is that something that you are planning to do or are interested in doing?

Sanjay: Yes, it is definitely a goal we have. Given the technology we have, we are at the point of being able to provide a lot of our infrastructure and some pieces of our platform as a service, if not charge back, at least the capability of being able to show back would be good. I am not as religious about charge back as I am about show back. Being able to run an efficient infrastructure and to be able to show the business, the true cost and value of what they pay for or the company pays for, is important to me. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO of EMC (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

How are IT organizations in large companies approaching clouds? We covered some bits of it in the post Large Enterprises: To Be or Not To Be In The Clouds. Private clouds came up as the preferred choice given the legacy, security, and continuity theme in a large enterprise. In the latest interview of our series Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing, Sramana talks to Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO of EMC. She uncovers additional aspects related to people and process evolution in large enterprises such as EMC, as they journey into the cloud. Sanjay shares his thoughts on how EMC is using their own core technologies to tier, consolidate, and virtualize to attain the business agility that the cloud promises.

Sanjay Mirchandani is senior vice president and chief information officer of EMC Corporation. He is responsible for extending EMC’s operational excellence and driving technological innovation, and he leads EMC’s network of global delivery centers in India, China, Russia, and Israel. Prior to joining EMC, Mirchandani was Microsoft’s regional vice president for enterprise services and Asia. Mirchandani earned a master’s in business administration from the University of Pittsburgh and a bachelor’s degree from Drew University.

EMC provides information infrastructure technology and solutions such as unified storage, content management, security, virtualization, backup and recovery, private clouds, virtual desktop infrastructure, efficiency, automation, and archiving. The company’s revenues for FY 2009 were $14 billion. EMC is headquartered in Hopkinton, MA, and has a global presence across the world with approximately 43,000 employees. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: What about higher education–specific vendors?

RS: I would put Apple in there. Apple would count as an education-specific vendor.

SM: How so? Do they have specific offerings for higher education?

RS: Every other year, Apple organizes a conference for CIOs in higher education. They have account executives who are focused only on higher education. Apple also has pricing models that are beneficial to the higher education sector. These are some of the things they do, and our Apple user base in higher education in general qualifies them as a vendor. This is a pretty significant shift to the Apple platform across higher education that has created an interesting and creative dynamic. This is an interesting dialogue happening among colleges and universities. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: I think when you talk in terms of e-mail or CRM, the basic e-mail or CRM, these are horizontal functionalities. You would definitely have an advantage if you use somebody else’s solution that has been built, tested, and scaled, and something that is scalable on this level has the right kind of support. There is no reason to reinvent that wheel for higher education specific solutions if there is such horizontal functionality available today. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 5)

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: There are applications on Salesforce that are specific to fundraising; have you looked at those in this process?

RS: Well, I wanted a solution that was specific to higher education, non-profit fundraising versus just non-profit fundraising and other areas. I also wanted this solution to be connected to our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in ways that made the two more valuable for our fundraisers. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Dr. Reed Sheard, CIO Of Westmont College (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Shaloo Shalini

SM: In addition to e-mail, what other workloads at Westmont College have you moved to the cloud?

RS: We followed that with other projects based on community input here at Westmont. Another thing we really wanted to get right was wireless. When I arrived, the existing wireless setup covered approximately 30% of the campus, and the performance and liability in that was that it did not meet end user expectations. >>>