EMC’s Tom Clancy believes the IT industry is at an unprecedented crossroads.

“If you look at the transformation we’re all talking about now, it’s all about Cloud and Big Data,” said Clancy, Vice President of Education Services at EMC. “This is the biggest transformation in the history of IT.”

Key to successfully navigating the converging worlds of Cloud and Big Data requires more than just new technologies and processes, Clancy said. “If you don’t have the right skilled people you will not be successful in that transformation.”

With that in mind, EMC today announced three new training courses, two geared towards helping data center architects make the successful journey to the cloud and another focused on the educating the next generation of Data Scientists.
Specifically, EMC’s new Cloud Infrastructure and Services course is a “foundational level course” for all current and future technical IT pros to gain a strong understanding of cloud architecture concepts and the role of services. Topics covered include an overview of basic data center architecture, an introduction to cloud computing and virtualization, cloud models and infrastructure, cloud security, and cloud migration.

The Cloud Architect IT-as-a-Service course is an expert-level course for cloud architects, designers, and consultants to aid in the transition from virtualized data centers to cloud-based, IT-as-a-Service environments. The course begins with a look at the business, organizational and architectural implications of IT-as-a-Service, then delves deep into discovery and assessment strategies, developing organization, governance and technology plans, security, life cycle planning and application development.

The third course covers Data Science and Big Data Analytics. It aims to help statisticians, mathematicians and others transition to the role of Data Scientist, a highly sought after role which requires a blend of skills to successfully apply analytics to large and varied data sets, according to Alok Shrivastava, Senior Director of Education Services at EMC.  Among topics covered include an introduction to Big Data and the Data Scientist role, Big Data Analytics in specific vertical industries, data exploration and visualization techniques, predictive modeling, analytics on unstructured data and Hadoop.

Speaking of the Data Science course, Shrivastava said the goal is to help students lay a foundation for a career as a Data Scientist. “It would be an insult to tell somebody you could come to a one week long course and become a data scientist,” Shrivastava said. “But what we can prepare them one is to kind of define what data scientist really means  — that’s a confusing field by itself – and then start to become a productive member of a data science team. It almost like an entry point, and then you can develop from there.”

Importantly, all three courses are “open,” meaning they do not focus exclusively on EMC products and services but include vendor neutral content and even competing tools and products, according to Clancy. “Everybody in IT can benefit from this,” Clancy said.

“When you look at the courses, the actual content, greater than 90% of it is about principals, concepts and best practices,” Clancy said. The remaining 10% does focus on real-world implementations sometimes using EMC technologies, but also products from competitors including Cisco and IBM, he said.

“From an education point-of-view, within our group what we talk about is leaders lead. And so we have the opportunity to go out there and be product focused or we can take an industry leadership position and go out and help the entire market,” Clancy said. “[The latter approach] is the one that we’re taking.”

ServicesANGLE

With a dearth of Data Scientists on the job market, education services and training are critical to building highly skilled Big Data Analytics staff. Successful IT-as-a-Service practices also require a new breed of cloud architect. It is incumbent upon the cloud and Big Data industries to develop comprehensive, practical training and education services to facilitate this transition. EMC’s new training courses are a step in the right direction, but EMC and other vendors must continue investing in Big Data and cloud education.