On Tuesday at EMC World I had the pleasure of hosting the President of EMC’s Information Intelligence Group, Rick Devenuti, at EMC Backstage.
Rick has been with EMC for five years and oversees
all aspects of IIG’s business, including worldwide sales and services, channel
strategy, product development, marketing, strategic business and financial
initiatives, IT, technical support, and the Total Customer Experience program.
Rick stated during his keynote that he grew up a New York Mets fan! I was concerned that my status as a rabid Red Sox fan would lead to a painful discussion about 1986. But Rick and I kicked things off quite nicely as he talked about how IIG’s Syncplicity product is helping the Red Sox scouts analyze top talent! His team has put together a great video on Syncplicity and the Sox:
Rick explained the benefits of this particular Syncplicity solution:
- Scouts don’t have to use the clumsy FTP interface to transfer videos back to the Red Sox secure IT department. This interface requires fast, online connectivity, which is often severely lacking in whatever locale they are working in. The Syncplicity interface is easy. They drag the video into their folder, Syncplicity moves it securely at the most convenient opportunity, and the scout can turn in and get a good night’s sleep.
- The aggregation of all the videos uploaded via Syncplicity land on the Red Sox Isilon infrastructure, which allows for fast editing and all videos being gathered in one place. The integration of all video assets behind the Fenway firewall happens automatically.
- As scouts come and go within the Sox organization, the IT department has the ability to centrally control, via Syncplicity, the removal of video assets from all remote devices that departed employees were using.
After the Syncplicity conversation more questions were given to Rick from the Twitter stream, and he was able to add additional context and color to his keynotes in the following areas:
- Solutions/Partners: Rick shared that the five key vertical solutions that IIG supports (Energy/Engineering, Life Sciences, Healthcare, Public Sector, Financial Services) rely heavily on a partner ecosystem with strong expertise in those areas. These partners complement the expertise that IIG consultants have in those areas.
- Cloud: Rick dove into the On-Demand offering that IIG can supply, giving customers “as much cloud as they need”. Customers can choose On-Demand as an on-premise option (e.g. Private Cloud), or they can choose to host their content in an On-Demand off-premise option, run by IIG (e.g. virtual Private Cloud).
- Products: Rick spent quite a bit of time talking about the benefits of Syncplicity (as in the Red Sox use case), but he also mentioned how much he benefits from EMC’s new ViPR platform. Instead of having his engineering team focus on direct integration with a variety of different storage platforms and paradigms, his developers can integrate with the ViPR API and instantly integrate with a wide variety of heterogeneous storage platforms.
We ended the discussion by taking a Tweet from the community regarding migration. Rick stated that customers running legacy IIG infrastructure can benefit from a new Enterprise Migration Appliance, which moves objects directly from IIG’s database (as opposed to the latencies incurred via API access). Rick encouraged customers to request a free quote on this process by contacting their Documentum rep.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Fellow
