EMC brings together nearly 700 IT professionals

The convergence between Cloud Computing and Big Data, the central theme of the seventh edition of the EMC Forum user congress held in Madrid.

This week the seventh edition of the annual congress of users of EMC Spain, EMC Forum. Under the motto “When cloud meets Big Data”, nearly 700 IT professionals analyzed the latest trends that are revolutionizing the world of information technologies.

EMC Forum is the annual event that the company has been holding with great success for the last seven years, thus becoming an unmissable event for leaders in the IT sector who want to learn about the latest trends related to storage management, virtualization, security, content management, Cloud Computing and Big Data.

This year EMC Forum had the collaboration of Abast, Alteda, Anadat Consulting, Arcait, Brocade, Business Integration (BT), Cisco, Colt Enterprise Services, Comparex, Diasa Informática, Ermestel, F5, Informática El Corte Inglés, Intel, Iomega, IPM, ITCM Solutions, Kroll Ontrack, Magirus, Omega Peripherals, Promovisa, Prosol, Samsung, SAP, SAS, SCC, Seidor, Soltel Computer Solutions, Tecnocom, Tecnoquest, Telefónica, Telindus, Telvent, Unisys, Unitronics, VCE and VMWare.

The opening of the event was led by Fernando de la Prida, general director of EMC for Spain, who analyzed the current situation of the company and the technological keys of the market for the coming months. "What we propose from EMC is to redefine the use of infrastructure in a much more efficient way and this implies using it as a service. Above the infrastructure, there are the layers of management, security and business applications. From EMC we propose a system with technology to support each and every one of these layers," commented de la Prida.

Cloud Advantages

Frank Hauck, president of VCE, the alliance formed by EMC, VMware and Cisco, in his presentation titled “Simplify your life…Start with the Data Center”, addressed the advantages associated with the new CPDs. "The advantage of the cloud is that it allows companies to offer better IT services, faster and cheaper than traditional data center models. VCE allows you to deploy a cloud infrastructure faster and more easily since all the main components (network, storage, virtualization, security and management) are pre-integrated and tested on a single platform," Hauck said in his presentation.

The exponential growth of information and Big Data are transforming the way IT managers manage their information. This challenge and the tremendous potential of adequate management of this data was the main topic of the presentation by Antonio Gallego, Client Solutions Director for Spain at EMC.

Por su parte, Francisco Dalmau, director de negocio de Backup & Recovery de EMC para España, Portugal y Grecia expuso cómo las nuevas soluciones de backup y recovery de EMC optimizan el trabajo diario de las organizaciones.

Posteriormente, Alan Cooney, Regional IT Manager Europe West & Nordics de EMC explicó cómo EMC ha predicado con el ejemplo y apostado por el centro de datos del futuro en su ponencia “Liderando una transformación de IT”. Según sus palabras, “nuestra misión como compañía es facilitar el viaje de nuestros clientes hacia el cloud computing. Nosotros empezamos nuestro propio viaje en el año 2004 mediante la virtualización, consolidación y estandarización, construyendo las bases de nuestra infraestructura cloud. Esto nos ha reportado ahorros de 104,5 millones de dólares, incluyendo en torno a 88,3 millones de dólares que hemos ahorrado en equipos y 16,2 millones de ahorro en costes operativos, debido a un incremento en la eficiencia energética, en los sistemas de refrigeración y en el uso del espacio”.

The closing of the morning was the round table moderated by Joaquín Potel, commercial director of Large Accounts at EMC and titled "The Cisco, VMware and EMC alliance as a solution to new technological and business challenges." Alfonso Ramírez, general director of VMware for Iberia, José Manuel Petisco, general director of Cisco Spain and Fernando de la Prida, general director of EMC for Spain, participated in this debate. Attendees discussed topics such as the real level of cloud adoption in Spanish companies, the hybrid cloud and the main inhibitors for cloud development, specifically security and the need for real cloud computing offers.

After lunch, parallel sessions were held on three fundamental topics for information management: Big Data, Cloud Computing and IT Transformation.