This week’s EMC World 2014 Event, held at The Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, is theCUBE’s fifth year in attendance and also one of the two live broadcasts brought to you by SiliconANGLE. In this interview, Darryl Smith, Chief Database Architect for EMC Global IT, joins Jeff Frick and Steve Kenniston to discuss how IT can evolve in order to remain relevant.

Kenniston began the interview by asking Smith to offer insight into the IT environment at EMC in terms of where it is today and the thought process of where he wants to take it. Smith explained that EMC’s IT shop has over 2,000 databases, and what takes up the most time is day-to-day maintenance. Also, facing tightening constraints along with others in the industry, EMC’s IT has a budget that shrunk seven percent last year. He went on to say that the paradigm of minimizing IT budgets, along with more databases to support, has to change in order to grow.

The Future State of IT

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Kenniston then asked Smith what the future state of IT will look like and what direction it should take.

Smith reiterated that one of things dragging IT down is the maintenance and day-to-day activities of a large number of databases, requiring several very specific skill sets amongst a whole different array.

“What I want to try and do is make it more of a database and provide that more of as a service,” Smith said, going on to explain that this isn’t a service for the end-users, where business units just simply place an order. The problem with this is that they don’t really understand what they need out of a database. Smith suggests providing the same capability with a broker-like service.

“The business knows that they need a database. They know they need an application,” Smith explained. “They’ll go to the database administrator, and the DBA will then be able to just log onto a webpage and literally just order up a database. Put that database in their hands in under an hour. Let them very quickly turn them around to the business.”

Smith then says that this is just day one. The day-to-day operations are what take a lot of effort. He likened the process of adding storage to a project, and this is how he broke it down:

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• Creator request
• Request routed to storage administrator
• Request routed to virtual administrator
• Request routed to system administrator
• DBA receives data files

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Smith’s solution for this offers DBAs the ability to log in to a webpage, change an order, and then have storage immediately applied to the database server. This gets rid of all of those layers.

The Threat of Shadow IT

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Frick then steered the interview over to the threat to Shadow IT. He asked Smith how this impacted his role and team.

Smith mentioned that, as a DBA in IT, one concern is relevancy. Businesses now have a choice: Go to the cloud, pay for a database and get it right away or go to IT, fill out a justification, sit down with solution architects and sculpt out the project. IT is now literally competing with cloud providers. If IT can’t do it and cloud can, the business is going to go out there.

Becoming More Proactive

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Frick went on to ask Smith about transformation between IT service guys and IT fulfillment guys within his organization.

Smith believes that IT professionals don’t hope that they’re whole career will mostly be about adding storage lungs. There’s a great opportunity for people to grow.

He mentioned that his organization has silos of infrastructure type folks that specialize in various areas. As those areas start to become more automated, that frees IT up from having to constantly add storage lungs and will allow for more focus on what can be done to enhance service offering. Additionally, there’s a lot of opportunity to learn more across the infrastructure spectrum, networking, storage and other sectors.

Adding to this topic, Kenniston brought up IDC’s projection that there will be a need for another eight million IT practitioners by 2020. He asked Smith how he sees this transforming inside IT itself.

Smith responded by saying that specialties like database administrators aren’t going to go away. However, there will be an explosion of more service type offerings. This includes:

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• People who specialize in being able to work between the business and IT
• More people managing what services can be offered
• People more focused on the line of business. This means that, when it comes to developing an application for a business, they can lead up that team from a technical point of view.
• People specializing in the fact that data is just exploding. This entails individuals who can think outside the box in order to merge technologies to get something that can work and scale large in performance and size.

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“If we’re freed up from having to deal with all the restrictive, inflexible policies of managing to a fixed budget, and we focus more on the needs of the business, not only are we going to become more relevant and easier to deal with, but we’re really going to help push the business forward,” said Smith.

Smith ended the interview with one his favorite quotes, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” It’s a great way to close out a discussion on what IT can do to evolve, and not only stay relevant, but to also become proactive drivers in business development.