S'pore midmarket, public sector key for EMC

SINGAPORE--Storage giant EMC Corporation will be looking to grow its midmarket customer share here and build on "growing momentum" during the first half of 2011. Opportunities in cloud-based big data tools market also exists for public sector and enterprise customers, a company executive stated.

According to Eric Goh, managing director of EMC Singapore, the company's revenue growth in Singapore during the first half of 2011 grew by more than 50 percent year-on-year while its quarter-on-quarter revenue growth reached 9 percent in the second quarter. These statistics, he noted during a press briefing Thursday, were from IDC Asia-Pacific's quarterly disk storage systems research results.

Zooming in on the results, he noted that there is "growing momentum" in Singapore's midrange external disk storage market, of which EMC currently has a 24.1 percent share. This is because not only are enterprises acquiring these storage devices for their lower-end applications, midmarket customers are also adopting such equipment for core storage use, he explained.

"The midrange external disk storage business is expanding in proportion to the company's revenue as more small and midsize businesses (SMBs) look to invest in their core storage and information management systems, which is very important for them," Goh added.

The executive also pointed out that there's a growing interest and adoption among manufacturing companies for its midrange storage products, and this means the company is "executing correctly". He added this market will be one of his key priorities for the rest of the year.

Big data opportunities for government, enterprises
Asked which customer demographic has expressed interest in the opportunities resulting from the convergence of cloud computing and big data, Goh said large enterprises and public sector organizations would have the "resources and means" to leverage these technologies.

For companies with existing business intelligence capabilities, in particular, this would be an "evolutionary" step toward gaining more insight into their internal operations and external brand management, he noted.

The cloud-big data opportunity was identified by David Webster, president of EMC Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, during an earlier interview. He noted that cloud computing is a trend here to stay but big data analytics could possibly effect as much, if not more, transformation on how businesses utilize IT to improve performances.

That said, Goh acknowledged that the market for cloud-based big data tools here is "still a small percentage" and in the "early growth phase". In fact, while the technology is in place for "quick deployment", the company is still waiting for demand to pick up before partnering cloud service providers such as SingTel, for example, to provide big data services on demand.

Looking ahead, he also expressed optimism that the institutes of higher learning and independent software vendors in the media industry will show interest in big data analytics. Many academic institutions, for instance, already have in-house high-performance computing capabilities, but he believes that these organizations would eventually turn to third-party vendors for such analytical functionalities.

Within the Southeast Asia region, he identified Malaysia and Indonesia as markets with "innovative companies" starting to request for proof-of-concepts in utilizing big data on-demand. In Indonesia, scientists can make use of the compute resource for research on seismic activities, given that the country is prone to earthquakes, he noted.