 "EMC gets ready for big data's big future in Asia")
Pivotal, an offshoot company created by EMC and VMware, has launched a big data innovation centre in Singapore to help customers which includes several Indian conglomerates and IT majors to execute advanced big data analytics projects.
“The company,” said Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal, “is looking at the big financial institutions, banks, telecom majors and Indian conglomerates for business. We are not really targeting the SME sector directly.” Pivotal has invested around $8 million in hardware and software and also hired a team of data scientists.
Steve Illingworth, Chief Technology Officer, Pivotal (Asia Pacific & Japan) said that they are already working with big Indian system integrators like Wipro, TCS, HCL among others. “We have started small projects on big data analytics for some Indian banks and big Indian businesses but we can’t share any more details at this point as they are in pilot stages,” Illingworth noted. Tapping Indian government for big data projects is also on the cards. Maritz said, “We know getting deals out of the government sector is a slow process but we are in talks with Indian government.”
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However, the company is having a difficult time finding the right skill sets in India. “It is not easy to find trained professionals in data science, storage & cloud platforms. We have been looking at various ways including launching a training programme to help our Indian development centre in Pune to create a pool of talented professionals who can work with us,” Maritz added.
A Zinnov-EMC study claims that India would require around 100,000 professionals in private cloud alone by 2015. A McKinsey report adds that world over there is a shortage of those who can analyze and interpret big data.
Realising that big data talent will not come from colleges unless a new curriculum is implemented, Pivotal’s parent company EMC has floated EMC Academic Alliance in collaboration with colleges and universities across the globe. The program offers curriculum-based education on technology topics such as virtualization, cloud computing, big data analytics, and information storage and management. In India, 200 academic institutions have joined the EMC Academic Alliance program. Pivotal’s Melissa Ries, vice president and GM (APAC & Japan), said, “We are hopeful of creating trained manpower for the industry with courses like EMC Academic Alliance.” Recently, Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode joined EMC Academic Alliance to offer Data Science & Big Data Analytics Course.
With over 200 employees in 10 countries and over 50 partners in the region, the new centre in Singapore is pegged to be a focal point for big data innovation. Pivotal Innovation Centre along with its partner Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) has already begun work on a flagship project with Singapore’s Government.