Q&A: EMC's Mark Lewis

Mark Lewis discusses EMC's content management strategy

At EMC World 2009, vnunet.com sat down with Mark Lewis to discuss the latest content management initiatives at the storage firm.

vnunet.com: What was the key message you delivered at EMC World today?
Mark Lewis: The message today is all about judging software solutions and building information management solutions to get a good return on investment (ROI). We joke that it's about getting ROI as well as a return on information. For us it becomes: how can you take all the information you have and leverage it for more value in the organisation? Value can come through greater insight, knowledge and intelligence leveraged across applications, or it can come through simply having compliance, legal aspects and e-discovery working.

Whereas last year at EMC World, the enterprise management division discussed the launch of new products focussed on Web 2.0, collaboration and improving customer service, now the division seems more centred around backing up EMC's push to this virtual cloud. Where's the Web 2.0 aspect gone?
There's clearly this next-generation infrastructure force in cloud computing, cloud storage and all the pieces we are very much in the middle of, both with VMware and EMC. Across our division, we have always been the group that wants to connect information to the business. We tend to sell more to businesses and have offerings that are less based on IT infrastructure needs. For example, today I was talking about how to connect to clouds and how to use clouds on the Web 2.0 front.

Our mission is to bring [Web 2.0] technology into the secure enterprise. We are there to federate information and supply enterprise repositories to help businesses manage their data, but we are also there to help businesses use Web 2.0 technologies in our product set like CenterStage to allow the extended enterprise to collaborate securely. We want to give our customers access to secure wikis and blogs for their project teams and project developers. We're not about to go and compete with Facebook, and we're also not going to compete with SharePoint.

The whole industry is talking about Twitter and real-time information. Are there any plans to integrate micro-blogging capabilities with CenterStage?
I absolutely think so. I won't disclose any plans or anything. I never fail to underestimate people's desire to communicate more, and in more channels. I thought Facebook would have been the extent people would have wanted to go to when they type in they are having dinner, but I was wrong. They now have Twitter and that is a whole new form of communication. We understand this and our focus is to embrace it if it can be used for the enterprise and secured for those organisations to use. We will never create a Facebook, but we do want to create a secure online community for collaboration.

So when can we expect these updates to CenterStage Essentials?
I hate to give predictions, but I'm sure we will have good things to say when we are in Athens in the fall.

The Atmos cloud storage service was your project when you were EMC chief technology officer. Until today's announcement at EMC World, it was service providers that delivered the storage but now, with Atmos Online, customers can manage their own resources over the internet. Does the new online version of Atmos conflict with the partnership EMC was building with service providers?
We believe that, to be a better supplier to service providers and to improve the way service providers federate clouds, we need to have some level of operation ourselves. Nobody should believe in any way that we don't want to fully embrace service providers and what they bring to the table, but if we don't do a bit of delivery ourselves and understand it, we would not believe in ourselves to build a great product for them.

What do you consider the main competitor to Atmos?
Clearly Amazon S3 [Simple Storage Service] is the most similarly recognised product in the market, but Atmos goes well beyond it because of its levels of storage, persistency and data protection capabilities.

Today you spoke of a new composition platform that allows customers to quickly compose business applications. EMC has launched a competition called the Designer's Challenge that calls on customers to build a case management application with the xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP). If you were developing an application for the challenge, what would yours be?
My application would be a US-centric small management application that would keep track of all state and local government spending. Customers will be able to do some interesting things with the platform and the associated workflow tools. With xCP, they can build robust and specific applications to support anything from insurance claims management to dog licences. Anything that involves a lot of content and processes can be automated, and that's the idea.

Our hope is that xCP becomes - and I hate to use the analogy - the iPhone platform of composite-centric applications. A lot of people will see how easy it is to use and how it allows a lot of unique applications to be created without a large amount of effort.