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EMC made headlines in Asia with the opening of the South Asian Development Lab in November-- an innovative executive briefing center poised to bring closer all of EMC’s partners and customers within the region. SDA finds out exactly what are the main intentions behind this new initiative, how EMC sees this growing its business in the region and the impact the new center will have on businesses.

SDA: What are the primary reasons behind EMC’s decision to set up the South Asia Development Laboratory (SADL) in Singapore?

Steven Say: SADL is part of EMC’s global strategy and APJ growth engine. EMC’s objective of building the SADL in Singapore is to leverage on the engineering and R&D talent that is available in Singapore and around Singapore. Today our recruitment is mainly focused on the local universities, National University of Singapore (NUS) & Nanyang Technological University (NTU), which have world class engineering programs. We also balanced it out with about 20-30 percent of experienced hires, engineers who have been in the industry for between 5-10 years with a couple who have been in the industry for between 15 years.

SDA: EMC said it is looking to recruit some 100 Research & Development (R&D) engineers for this facility. Is EMC only looking to hire locally in Singapore or will it be setting its sights further at other countries in the region? Do you have a training program for the fresh grads?

Steven Say: Before SADL officially opened, we were operating for the last four months out of our Seagate facility. In that time frame we have aggressively recruited close to 30 R&D engineers. It has been a very successful recruitment drive for us. We have managed to attract some of the top talents out of the engineering schools in NUS, NTU and some from foreign universities.

The engineering graduates that we have brought on board have a very good mix of nationalities around the region. We have a good mix from Singapore, India, China, Philippines, and Pakistan and a handful from overseas university such as Australia and the US.

SDA: Do you have a training program for the fresh grads

Steven Say: Yes we do have a structured training program. The moment they [the fresh graduates] start coming on board, they are assigned a mentor who would be a senior engineer based out of our US E-Lab. They will be on a 30-60-90 day training program through a combination of E-learning, instructor led training as well as on the job training. By end of 2007 we are looking to hire 50 engineers and then we will progressively grow that over the 5 years to 100.

SDA: Could you tell us more about the facilities we can expect in SADL?

Steven Say: The facilities that we have built out here are geared towards our customers with our customers first in mind. SADL is designed to be an executive briefing centre. With our solution center we are poised to demonstrate proven solutions that work in our customer environment-- real life implementation of EMC products and solutions. We have 3 development labs at SADL.

The first is our Proof-Of Concept lab. In here, we invite our key customers to come in with their business problems and even their systems where we then set it up alongside with EMC solutions, and prove that EMC solutions will work and fit their business requirements.

The second is our Engineering Lab (E-Lab). The E-lab has been running for that past 10 years very successfully in our US headquarters and has been delivering high value to our business as well as to our customers. E-lab goes beyond quality testing and compatibility testing. We will test the interoperability of multi-vendor systems that our customers would typically have in their environment. We test until it fails. And we know how it fails, how it behaves and how to make it work.

The EMC E-lab promise is that we will stand behind and assure that the configuration of EMC solutions in the customer multi-vendor environment will work. So, we in E-lab do the most vigorous end to end integration and interoperability and in the end, qualify the EMC solution that will work for the customer.
The value that we will bring to the customer in this sense would be that it will save the customer time, so that they themselves do not have to do this testing themselves. It will also save them cost of the implementation and also it minimizes their risk of implementations because they will be receiving a solution that is already proven to work. Most of all it also simplifies the operations so that when the customer buys EMC’s solutions they have that piece of mind to know and to be assured that it will guarantee to work. And once it is qualified to work and labeled with the EMC E-lab tested label, there is a guarantee that goes behind it.

With E-Lab as part of SADL in the APJ region, what we bring is our engineering capability much closer to our customers as well as our partners. I think what’s key in E-Lab is our strong partnership over the last ten years in E-Lab operations. We have built very strong partnerships with IT vendors such as IBM, HP, Sun, Cisco, and Brocade. We can bring that to our customers in this part of the world, and we are going even beyond that.

Our engineers who come onboard report directly to our US E-lab. Literally the spore E-lab is a larger extension of our US E-lab. We basically work together as one team.

The third area, which is the Disk Drive Qualification Lab (DDQL), is where we evaluate and qualify the single most critical component in our storage hardware offering that is the Hard Disk Drive. Because of our main disk suppliers such as Seagate and Hitachi, who have their manufacturing operations here in Singapore and also the availability of our ecosystem, component suppliers around Singapore and within Singapore, we find that it is more strategic for us to locate our DDQL in Singapore in addition to the existing ones in Massachusetts and Ireland.

This will be our 3rd DDQL and in here we work very closely with our manufacturers and suppliers such as Seagate, Hitachi and Fujitsu. It is a further strengthening of our partnership with them. In the E-Lab arena we will be working close with the Hua Weis of the world. These are the FC switches suppliers, SAN connectivity and in the near future the IP storage partners as well.

SDA: How much of the regions business accounts for EMC’s worldwide revenue today and does EMC see this changing with the introduction of the SADL?

Steven Say: EMC’s APJ business accounts for 10 percent of our world wide revenue business. In terms of growth, APJ Is our strongest growing region. We are talking about in excess of 32 percent year on year growth. So with growth we fuse investment.

We had a record breaking year the past year so I think the challenge is really to sustain our growth. We want to grow in new markets in APJ. We want to grow in the big markets such as Japan, which we have traditionally not been doing as well as we would have expected. So there is a great appetite to grow our presence and our business even in China and India and some of the emerging markets.

SDA: Although Singapore remains a key producer of hard disks, it has been hit with layoffs in recent years as companies such as Western Digital and Seagate shift manufacturing to lower-cost destinations like Malaysia and China. Why did EMC choose to set up the SADL in Singapore instead of opting for lower-cost regions?

Steven Say: There is great R&D infrastructure in Singapore and also great engineering talent that is readily available out of Singapore and around Singapore. We also have strong support form the Government and the Economic Development Board (EDB) that is also co investing in this strategic initiative which makes it very attractive for EMC.

SDA: EMC has said that it will be investing SG $250 million over the next 5 years in Singapore as part of its APJ growth strategy. How much of this was dedicated to the new SADL and could you let us in on the other investment projects we can expect?

Steven Say: For the SADL-- Part if it, not a lot of it. The remaining is really for partner enablement and support for customers. SADL is all about collaboration and partnership-- partnership with suppliers, customers and also manufacturers. So a lot of this money goes into building up the partnership and enabling our channel partners to come in and work in every area of SADL.

The money is also for investing in our customers which is very critical. SADL now gives us the capability to allow our key, strategic customers who have been doing business with EMC for a number of years on a global capacity, such as government and banking customers, and work alongside with us on new initiatives that will be a direct input into our product development. This has never happened before out of this region.

SDA: As part of the SADL, EMC is working closely with partners such as HP, IBM, Cisco and McData.

Steven Say: We have started many partnerships. Some of which are new and some of which are extending. We work closely with NCS, which is a new partnership for EMC. For example our EMC smart solution for resource management is a software solution where we enable customers to proactively minimize their IT infrastructure downtime. We have worked closely with NCS to support one of our top customers, NUS who was our first customer to embark on the smart solution.

We have also worked very closely with Dell for a number of years not just on hardware but on server virtualization solutions. Using EMC’s VmWare, helping customers to maximise the implementation of the infrastructure resource and lowering the environmental impact through the reducing of power consumption.

SDA: What are the specific impacts these partnerships will have on businesses and the enterprise technology landscape in Singapore and Asia Pacific?

Steven Say: What it brings to the customers would be that with our close partnerships and our close collaboration we will actually be able to be in a much better position to cut the cycle time in qualifying our products and our solutions and we will be able to enhance the time to market for our products.

Disk Drive Qualification is really the first phase in our product development where we first have to qualify the disk drive that goes into our hardware. E-Lab is almost like the last step in our product development where you qualify the entire storage and systems before it goes out to the market. So being involved with the first and the final step in product development life cycle part of SADL is most critical as we tend to cut the cycle time and reduce time to market, bringing the solutions out to the customer much quicker.

The key difference in SADL is that we have a unique opportunity with sales and services so that with this facility we are able to demonstrate to our customers EMC’s commitment in investing in our customers, to make the facility available to them where we can work closely with them and help to solve their problems together. Without having to fly our customers across half the globe into our HQ, we are able to now bring that capability almost to their doorstep. With this we are well positioned to support our customers around the region, even potential customers and help to grow our APJ biz.

SDA: You were recently appointed as the first Director of the SADL. What strategies will you be implementing under your leadership to ensure this facility lives up to its expectations? What will be your first area of focus?

Steven Say: My first area of focus will be the customer. First and foremost we built SADL for the customers. Myself being a customer of EMC for many years prior to joining EMC, I am very passionate about how a vendor or a partner like EMC could be better positioned to serve the customer. With SADL, my first priority would be to look at how with SADL being a very unique capability-- that it is an integration of our corporate engineering and our sales and services-- we are much able to better serve our customers in being able to listen to their business problems and work closely with them to find a solution.

So with SADL, I hope to be able to build up the talent in E-Lab and in the engineering team. Collaborating and partnering closely with our sales and services team together to find a solution that is proven to work for the customer. In SADL we are able to invite our customers to come in and go to the whiteboard and look at the problem and find solutions together. That is what I hope to see SADAL achieve in the very near term.

Longer term plans would include making SADL so successful whereby we will start populating more of SADL within and beyond the region and we can set a new model for customer engagement and growth engines for the business.

SDA: If you were to build the next SADL, where would you decide to build it and why?

Steven Say: We could be possibly talking about extending SADL to larger part of the region although SADL is located strategically in Singapore it is set to serve the entire APJ region. But at the same time EMC also has a number of R&D centers around the region such as in China and India and we also have a number of solution centers located around APJ such as Sydney, Tokyo, China and India.

Going forward we will be looking at how we could innovatively pool our resources and capability together and make available to our customers solutions sets that have already been made available to the various centers.

SDA: In June 2006, EMC’s Chairman President and CEO Joe Tucci, announced plans to invest USD 500 million in India and the same amount in China by 2010. Could you update us on these plans?

Steven Say: In china we have grown very aggressively beyond our initial forecast so therefore we have extended beyond our shanghai center and set up a new one in Beijing. China has seen a very strong growth and I believe we will continue to growth. We have decided to commit another 500 mill USD to china which will bring EMC’s APJ investments to over 1.5 billion.