I recently joined the EMC Office of the CTO after spending my entire 13-year EMC career designing, selling, and/or delivering our solutions. Essentially outside of corporate IT directly engaged with our customers, sales executives, and partners.
When the opportunity to join the Office of the CTO working on the inside directly with our product and solution engineering teams I wanted to make sure I maintained plenty of direct customer engagement. The new EMC Open Innovations Lab "OIL" service created that unique opportunity to be engaged both internally with those developing our products and solutions as well as with our customers and partners on a daily basis.
Starting a new team and service at a company as large as EMC is a challenge. I believe there are four key tasks that we had to accomplish immediately:
- Clearly define charter for the service
- Internal, and external credibility
- Add value to our customers, partners, and EMC sales
- Execution success
These are not the only tasks and more tasks need to be accomplished to insure sustained success but let me describe how we are addressing the critical startup tasks.
The EMC Open Innovations Lab charter is to engage with EMC customers, and partners to pilot first in kind solutions and to share the results and development back to our product and solution engineering teams. Essentially our team exists to engage with our customers to solve of the most challenging problems facing the industry today. I presenting our teams charter to a number of our customers, partners, and EMC product and solutions teams and received enthusiastic response. It is clear and compelling.
The second key task is establishing EMC and industry credibility. Our leadership starts with EMC Distinguished Engineer, Bala Ganeshan, Phd. Bala is one of those people when you say his name everyone knows him, and would do anything to support him. Our leadership has created immediate credibility.
Our next key task was to get engaged with our customers, partners, and product engineering teams and add value. We have been busy with two Big Data analytics projects. In addition, our team has stepped up to coordinate significant contributions to VMworld by the EMC Office of the CTO. This has established new credibility with our customers, partners, and product teams as we are previewing a number of new technologies around software defined networking, and storage this week at VMworld. We are recognized for quickly adding value.
The fourth key task is execution success. This week after about four weeks of work with customers, VMware, and Isilon storage engineering team we will be introducing the Hadoop Starter Kit. Based on the feedback from a number of customers finding Hadoop expensive, time consuming, and difficult to deploy we have designed, documented, and published a solution that make deploying Hadoop free, fast, and predictable. The feedback from the first previews has been outstanding which has established our execution credibility. The project has also helped us identify some of the improvements we need to make to sustain our execution excellence.
The startup of the EMC OIL service, and team has been successful and we are scaling the team to support more projects and engage with you. What first in kind pilot projects would you like to engage EMC OIL?
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