During the opening and technical Keynote presentations at this year’s Momentum, I sat, and diligently made notes of everything that was said.

When I started writing this Post, I realised that I was give a blow-by-blow account of the session, and that this was leading to a rather be a lot large (and more tedious) than I had originally intended. So – instead of that I will try and summarise the key points of the session. (I’ll get the other post finished later).

In the morning, Mark Lewis gave his vision on the “future”. He also explained that he is no longer President of IIG but the “Chief Strategy Officer”. In the afternoon keynote session, Rick Devenuti, the new President of the group introduced himself, and, more-or-less, repeated Mark’s message in his own way. Then Jeetu Patel, the new Chief Technology Officer, expanded on the message giving more depth to it.

The forecast is for cloud.

EMC have recognised that the world is changing.

• More and more information is being created, and is becoming richer (media files, etc) and more disperse (multiple locations).
• Regulations are increasing, requiring the keeping of more and more documents. At the same time, being able to easily locate information is becoming extremely important.
• The User is changing. The way information is consumed is changing, as well as the expectation of the user.

Technology is also evolving. The latest “wave” includes:

• cloud computing – the increase use of divergent ways of using information regardless of where a person is, is a driving force behind the adoption of the cloud.
• Mobile Internet – the way users connect to the internet are diverse, and includes such devices as iPads, smartphones, Kindles, etc, etc. The way the internet is being used is changing – there are new social and collaboration norms.

Mark Lewis who gave the above thoughts, also pointed out that businesses need to be able to survive they must have the ability to change quickly. A new “partnership” is required between the business, and IT, rather than IT just supplying solutions/technology that the users must use.

The message that came through from all the three speakers is that most innovation is happening on the consumer side, and that EMC has to be open to this, and willing to accept, respond to external changes. Their new Mission is to “help customers get maximum leverage through:

1. Help organisations to reduce risk
2. Increase Agility,
3. Lower cost”

A new Information Management Technology stack” (according to EMC) was shown that consisted of three layers:

Jeetu expanded on this by adding that the bottom layer also includes “Federation”. EMC recognises that information may reside in the repositories of different systems. They want to still add value.