EMC's David Goulden: 5 Advantages Of Hybrid Cloud

The EMC Cloud Vision

David Goulden -- CEO of EMC's Information Infrastructure business, known as EMC II -- envisions a hybrid cloud future.

Goulden asserts that adoption of hybrid cloud, and saving customers money by doing it, won't happen without "some reductions in hardware." He's arguing that customers will run their business partially in the cloud and partially along traditional IT lines, moving workloads back and forth between traditional, on-premise systems and cloud services as needed.

Goulden's blog comes just weeks after EMC's truce with activist investor Elliott Management came to an end. Elliott has been pressuring EMC to spin off its VMware unit and make other changes in order to increase shareholder value.

So far, EMC has resisted those efforts, saying the company's value will be greater as an amalgam of businesses that can service the kind of hybrid future Goulden predicts.

Click through to read some of his points on hybrid cloud.

The Customer Is Always Right

"Customers expect to be able to do what they want when they want on whatever device they want, quickly and easily and with personalized service," Goulden writes. "Companies serving them must meet those expectations with new generations of fast-changing applications."

Change -- Hit The Ground Running

Goulden stresses the importance of agility. Customers recognize the need to change and adapt quickly, and when they really drill down on what that means, they'll necessarily drive toward hybrid cloud, Goulden writes. "Digital business is not a one-time initiative, not just a new set of apps. It’s a permanent commitment to work differently, adapt quickly, and iterate faster. It’s a commitment to be technology-enabled and data-driven top-to-bottom. Such agility demands an agile platform -- hybrid cloud."

Saving Money

Many customers are driven to hybrid cloud by the need to cut costs, Goulden writes. He cites analyses from management consultant McKinsey & Co. and EMC indicating that enterprises that move to hybrid cloud cut operating expenses 24 percent after "better management yields some reductions in hardware, telecom and facilities expense."

"There are even bigger gains in software licenses and software maintenance as operations are integrated, simplified and automated," he wrote. "Implementing hybrid cloud can be the catalyst for rationalizing your infrastructure management software and retiring what’s underutilized or unnecessary."

Even Bigger Savings

The biggest savings come in customers' OPEX budget, Goulden writes. "The automation of hybrid cloud dramatically reduces the amount of labor needed to deploy new application software, and to monitor, operate, and make adjustments to the infrastructure," he says. "Tasks that used to take days are performed in minutes or seconds. By automating manual work, hybrid cloud creates the opportunity for dramatic IT OPEX cost reduction, and the option to redirect those savings into newer and higher value IT initiatives."

But Wait

"Let me introduce a caveat," Goulden writes. "Installing hybrid cloud technology is necessary, but not sufficient, for realizing the cost reductions. IT has to operate in new ways -- from infrastructure management to apps and services delivery. That’s where the real changes take place."