EMC Isilon aims for bigger slice of pie in Malaysia

  • Believes its solutions and infra can help companies move to the ‘third platform’
  • Eyeing sectors like telco, FSI, media, government and healthcare for growth

EMC Isilon aims for bigger slice of pie in MalaysiaEMC Isilon, a division of storage systems giant EMC Corp, aims to grow its presence in Malaysia with its storage solutions and infrastructure.
 
“Our aim over the near- to medium-term is to grow our market share in Malaysia, and to be adopted as the core storage infrastructure – the foundation infrastructure that Malaysian enterprises would build their operations on,” said Charles Sevior, chief technology officer of EMC Isilon (Asia Pacific and Japan).
 
He claimed that the company’s storage infrastructure and solutions are able to fit in seamlessly next to enterprises’ existing infrastructure, and added that it is able to help companies transition their infrastructure into next-generation platforms.
 
“Our platform is firmly based on the second platform of IT, but uniquely, we are in position to take the company directly to the third platform. That’s the opportunity that EMC Isilon opens up to Malaysian enterprises,” Sevior said on a recent visit to Kuala Lumpur.
 
Analyst firm IDC defines the third platform of IT as mobile devices and apps, cloud services, mobile broadband networks, big data analytics and social technologies. The first platform was mainframe computer in the 1950s, while the second was the personal computer that revolutionised the IT industry between 1985 and 2005.
 
One of the trends EMC Isilon is banking on is the rise of big data analytics. Sevior said he believes that the company’s storage infrastructure and solutions can meet the needs of enterprises wanting to adopt big data analytics.
 
He sees several sectors as big adopters for big data analytics, with the telecommunications and financial sectors being the usual suspects.
 
“Telcos are traditionally a big adopter of big data analytics – they generate a lot of data and their networks have a lot of information.
 
“In the financial sector, banks are very interested in fraud and threat analytics for Internet banking, credit card fraud, and so forth,” he said.
 
Sevior also expects media companies to be big players in the big data analytics space.
 
“In the media sector it is also interesting – the consumer market is moving very rapidly from terrestrial television and normal live TV, into streaming and IPTV (Internet Protocol Television).
 
“So the opportunity that opens up is a direct one-to-one relationship with a single viewer. Each unique stream opens up the possibility to introduce targeted advertising and demographic categorisation, basically increasing the advertising yield.
 
“This helps the media company extend its relationships with its viewers, from just content, to areas like retail, location based services,” he said.
 
Sevior said that government and healthcare are also sectors EMC Isilon is targeting.
 
“There is a lot of information that government and healthcare industries hold,” he said, adding that they could use big data analytics to improve national health outcomes, better prepare for the treatment of disease, formulate social programmes for healthy living, and others.
 
“All with the objective of reducing hospital bills,” he said.

OneFS software version coming
 
Isilon was originally a Seattle, Washington-based network storage company that EMC acquired in 2010 for US$2.25 billion.
 
With the acquisition, EMC said that it would be better able to provide storage infrastructure for private and public cloud environments, with a focus on big data, the New York Times reported then.
 
EMC Isilon plans to release a software version of its OneFS operating and filesystem, which it describes as the intelligence behind its scale-out storage systems.
 
This software version of its OneFS technology would help the company better differentiate itself from its rivals, as well as give its customers more freedom and flexibility, Sevior claimed.
 
The date of the release has yet to be announced.
 
“EMC Isilon is hardware. Each time we release a new box, it’s bigger, it’s faster, it’s cheaper in terms of total cost of ownership, and so on. But it’s our software that’s the main differentiator.
 
“Every year, we release a new version of OneFS, with new features like Hadoop. We had Hadoop two years ago. It’s becoming an important part of our future. So, we will be releasing to the market a software version of OneFS.
 
“This will allow our customer to use OneFS in a couple of different environments, in bare-metal environments such as OCP (open compute project), or in a fully virtualised environment running on a hypervisor. We just want our customer access to what they want, with full flexibility,” he said.
 
Related Stories:
 
EMC Malaysia banks on the 'third platform' for growth
 
The 3rd Platform and the future of emerging Asean
 
EMC unveils new products to address tech megatrends
 
 
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