Big data takes center stage at ninth annual EMC telecommunications summit

The ninth EMC Telecommunications Summit for Turkey, Emerging Africa and Middle East opened in Dubai today where Pat Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products, delivered the keynote. The Summit, attended by the region’s telecom CIOs and IT decision makers, has been taking place in the region every year since 2003, providing CIOs from the leading regional telecom operators with strategic insights to realize more agile, data-savvy and secure businesses.

IDC’s 2011 Digital Universe Study, Extracting Value from Chaos, which was sponsored by EMC, predicted the world would create a staggering 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) of digital information last year. It also stated that, over the next decade, the amount of information managed by enterprise datacenters will grow by a factor of 50, and the number of files the datacenter will have to deal with will grow by a factor of 75, at least. Meanwhile, the number of IT professionals in the world will grow by less than 1.5 times.

Data is growing faster than Moore's Law, and at the Summit today EMC issued a call to action, urging CIOs to make the leap from operating internal IT as a cost center to transforming it into a savvy internal service provider. A different architectural approach is required to keep up with and subsequently exploit exploding datasets and this is resulting in a defined focus on game-changing IT Transformation technologies, Big Data analytics and security.

The EMC Telecom Summit explores the best approaches to transform IT into a business enabler that offers new IT services while dealing with the increasing challenges of managing various unstructured data.

At the event, EMC demonstrated the competitive value hidden in Big Data and showcased the trusted solutions telecommunications companies are turning to in order to protect their environments from advanced threats and to have a single point of visibility and control (across physical, virtual, and cloud assets). According to EMC, increased automation in progressively broader and more dispersed IT environments is key to managing exploding datasets; this is what EMC is building into its storage assets, its compute and virtualization assets, as well as across its analytics framework, with a focus on swift and easy capacity expansion that does not generate onerous administrative requirements or impact on performance.