Big Data’s out. The Industrial Internet is in. Contextualizing the promise of Big Data, this new trend around our buzzing, blinking connected devices, the Internet of Things, is expected to become big business. To support this up and coming market, we’ll need lateral cooperation across enterprise and consumer markets, bridging the mechanized systems and the individual experiences they power. The consumerization of IT is a promising and sustainable opportunity for infrastructure providers like EMC, attracting partners that have a firm presence in the consumer markets as well.

EMC is heavily invested in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data analytics. In 2012, EMC was one of the top six Big Data vendors according to revenue, . Back in April, GE, a leader in industrial technology and solutions, dumped $105 million into Pivotal, the EMC/VMware Big Data platform spinout. The Internet of Things is a market largely untapped, and EMC is seemingly making all of the right moves to entrench itself as a decisive and dominant player in the Internet of Things and Big Data analytics ecosystem of the future.

In today’s Profile series we hear from Chuck Hollis, VP of Global Marketing CTO for EMC. Below is a recent interview with Chuck, who gives us the inside scoop on his EMC’s vision of this blossoming market underlying the Internet of Things.

The interview focused on three key areas: enterprise cloud, consumer cloud and the enterprise + consumer cloud. Chuck thinks we’ll see two classes of storage architecture emerge, and shares his thoughts on deepening IT core patterns, and the immediate value of personal consumer data.
 

Enterprise Cloud

How will the internet of things impact storage infrastructure?

 
I suppose a good starting point is thinking about the information itself, and how it will be used. Clearly, we’re looking at an order-of-magnitude more information than the current internet world: many more autonomous devices, all streaming data.

Information itself seems to want to be used twice: processed immediately for quick reactions, and a more leisurely pass with deep analytics to extract more value. And these aren’t your familiar enterprise applications, either – they’re very different beasts with unique requirements.

New requirements usually mean new approaches from the technology side, and storage is certainly affected. I think we’ll see two classes of storage architectures that reflect this new demand. One group of storage architectures will be all about speed: in-memory database technologies augmented with plenty of flash for near-real time processing. And we’ll also see a second data substrate layer that’s mostly about scale-out capacity and bandwidth with high-capacity disk drives.

Both approaches will need dramatically increasing scale, and that’s why the current trend towards scale-out architectures is so relevant. That same scale will demand very different approaches to automation, convergence and integration – which is a key part of the software-defined data center discussion. Everything will need to be extremely programmable and re-configurable in much deeper and more fundamental ways than is the norm today.
 

The Internet of Things means more sensors and devices, and thus more data — where does security lie at the storage level? With the user, or with the IT department?

 
I suppose this is a “who is responsible for security?” question in disguise. Within organizations, it’s sort of like “who’s responsible for quality?” or “who’s responsible for customer satisfaction?” – and we all know that everyone in the organization needs to play a role. Information security isn’t a checklist item anymore: it’s a topic that’s frequently discussed at the board level.

Yes, IT usually takes the lead and plays a strong role, but we don’t want to live in a world where information security is IT’s job and nobody else should worry about it. For example, one of the toughest issues some people are wrestling with now is governance: what are permissible uses of all the data we’ve collected, and who decides? IT can certainly help guide and shape such a policy, but that’s ultimately a business decision.

I’m seeing that business users of all flavors are realizing that they have to be far more literate when it comes to handling information. You don’t get to step into a construction site without the prerequisite safety equipment and training; we’re finding that the same needs to be true when stepping into an information workplace.
 

Enterprise & Consumer Cloud

How does the consumerization of IT impact the cloud storage market? What will be the security, privacy and infrastructure challenges?

 
The first part is easy: we’ve all been exposed to simple and powerful consumer IT experiences outside of work, and we’re starting to demand the same simple and powerful experiences in the workplace as well. This is very hard for most IT organizations, but they’re starting to make progress in that direction by either building or brokering services modeled after the consumer services we’re all so familiar with.

I don’t really think in terms of a “cloud storage market”, storage is almost always used behind an application of some sort: like Outlook or enterprise sync-and-share. As more and more external services find their way into the IT portfolio, many are finding that considerable effort is required to understand the services, how they’re implemented, how information is protected and so on. The mission hasn’t changed, though – IT is still responsible for these topics.

When it comes to infrastructure, you’re finding many of the same patterns established in the online world finding their way deeper into core IT patterns: elastic private clouds, service catalogs, exposing information through APIs and so on. There are good answers out there; it’s putting them into practice that’s so challenging.
 

How can storage services & marketing be used to attract the consumer market at both the enterprise and/or consumer cloud?

 
I think it’s pretty easy: things that are easy to consume tend to get consumed more. Your product or service might not be as fully functional as others out there, but if it solves a particular problem and is dead-easy to discover, consume and integrate with everything else I use – you win.

In the case of enterprise, you have two audiences you care about: the business user and the IT group that looks after them. For example, EMC sells Syncplicity which has become a very popular enterprise sync-and-share application. There are always two sales cycles: one to the people who use it, and one to the people who have to run it. It’s not just end-users who demand a slick, integrated experience.
 

Consumer Cloud

Will the need for consumer-infrastructure create a Big Data model where we have a “Facebook” just for managing our personal data?

 
That’s an interesting idea, but I have to ask – would we pay for it? Do we really want a single dashboard for all of the personal data we touch and interact with? I can barely keep up as it is. But, more seriously, much of that information today ends up in our personal email: bank notifications, Facebook alerts – all of that.

I suppose at some point we might see an “email 2.0” that mines this data and organizes it in such a way that ends up being similar to what you suggest. Whether or not we’d end up using it – that’s an interesting question.
 

How will consumers gain access to the personal data being emitted from their toaster to their TV for the purpose of “shopping” themselves to other brands/companies? Does this make marketing foolproof because you’re marketing to the data points?

 
It’s not a new idea: the fact that we are personally sitting on potentially valuable information that we as individuals might want to monetize. And there are business models out there where you do something similar, e.g. fill out surveys in exchange for rewards. But this sort of low-grade sensor information doesn’t start to get valuable to a company until they’ve got millions of data points, so any potential rewards would likely be quite small on an individual basis. The “reward” in most cases is a better service: e.g. tell us about your appliances and we’ll tell you how you’re using them. Or let us store your email for you so we can serve you up ads you might find interesting.

The more data you have about your customers, the better marketing can be in terms of being relevant to us individually, but we are a far, far ways away from it ever being “foolproof”. Like you, I use many of these supposedly “smart” services that attempt to make recommendation based on their knowledge of me, and it’s pretty laughable sometimes — there’s still plenty of room for improvement!