EMC has announced multiple data centre products and services fundamental to customers’ modern data centre transformation initiatives. This transformation is leading to complex data centre priorities: maintaining traditional business applications as efficiently and in a low-cost manner as possible without compromising service integrity, and using those savings to support next-gen application development needs. Each requires different investments, which largely come from the same (typically flat) IT budget. The first step toward balancing these conflicted IT priorities is to modernise the infrastructure on which IT is built.
According to an EMC-commissioned survey* conducted by Vanson Bourne:
Over half (52%) of 4,000 business leaders surveyed across 16 countries say that as a result of digital technologies, they have experienced significant disruption in their industries
Nearly half (48%) of the respondents say they don’t know what their industry will look like in three years’ time
About two-thirds (62%) of respondents say they have witnessed new competitive entrants into their industries as a result of digital initiatives
More than half (56%) cite customer demand as a driving force behind the need to digitally transform
Nearly three quarters (73%) of companies agree that a centralised technology strategy needs to be a priority and
Two thirds (66%) are planning to invest in IT infrastructure and digital skills leadership
The new foundational offerings are designed to support and accelerate customers’ digital transformation initiatives and address the four major pillars of the modern data centre – flash, scale-out, software-defined and cloud-enabled. The solutions announced at EMC World include:
EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM) is an expansion of EMC’s Copy Data Management portfolio which helps customers tackle data sprawl and reduce the cost of storing and managing multiple copies of the same data. eCDM enables customers to modernise their storage and protection strategy with discovery, automation and optimisation of copy data to reduce costs and streamline operations. eCDM provides companies with a pan-enterprise solution to monitor, manage and analyse copy data.
ViPR Controller 3.0 is designed to help customers transition to the modern data centre by bridging traditional and cloud native environments.
Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC) is an engineered turnkey developer platform for cloud-native application development and deployment.
VCE VxRack System 1000 with new 'Neutrino' nodes is a software-defined hyperconverged rack-scale engineered system designed to provide a turnkey cloud-native IaaS experience. Using a VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes customers can deploy an enterprise-grade IaaS in just a few days. The flexibility of the VxRack System is rooted in its rack-scale design, allowing enterprises, ISVs and service providers to leverage different node types for different workloads as they accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.
Colm Keegan, Senior Analyst, ESG said: “Organisations need to drive out costs associated with IT and one of the best ways to do this is to buy vs build infrastructure. The VxRack System 1000 Series with its choice of optimised nodes is making it possible for more workloads to run on engineered systems so IT organizations can spend their time delivering new services and applications that drive the business. The new Neutrino Nodes are bringing the simplicity, predictability and speed to cloud native IaaS environments.”
Chad Sakac, President, VCE, the Converged Platforms Division of EMC said: “The VxRack System 1000 Series is helping IT organisations solve challenges by providing new ways of serving workloads associated with both traditional and growing web and mobile applications. As open source technologies for the development of cloud-native applications and services become more prevalent, IT organisations need a stable platform like the VxRack with Neutrino Nodes for onsite IaaS that can successfully run production workloads.”
The new ability to stripe two DSSD D5 systems together in a single rack to deliver 2X the IOPS, bandwidth and capacity, one-third the latency and a lower TCO than the fastest converged solution for Oracle databases in the market today.
Also new is VCE VxRack System with DSSD, a storage, networking and compute system with a single preconfigured, optimised solution for databases and data warehouses.
New Virtustream Storage Cloud is a global cloud storage platform offering enterprise levels of resiliency and performance combined with true web scale. The launch of Virtustream Storage Cloud represents the latest expansion in capabilities for Virtustream which, over the course of the last ten months as an EMC company, has continued to innovate on its core enterprise-class, mission-critical infrastructure-as-a-service platform while enhancing the portfolio with a comprehensive set of managed services capabilities for both on- and off-premises implementations.
MyService360, built using EMC’s internal data lake. It provides analytics and visualisation tools. The new EMC MyService360 cloud-based service dashboard - available at no additional cost to customers registered with EMC Online Support - provides a visually compelling, near real-time visibility into the health and status of a customer’s entire EMC data centre environment. MyService360 provides IT with analysis of EMC product code levels, connectivity status, capacity alerts, service activity by site, and more.
Managing extreme archival scenarios
The Enterprise Content Division (ECD) separately announced that EMC can power archiving scenarios at petabyte scale. As enterprises modernise their data centre and applications, a solution that archives legacy apps to reduce costs – while continuing to make data available to the organisation – is required, EMC said. EMC InfoArchive 4.0 enhances the ability to secure and leverage large amounts of critical application data, including extreme archiving scenarios with structured and TV coverage. The solution has a new, horizontally scalable architecture, and also combines flexible reporting and easy accessibility.
"Extreme archiving scenarios at petabyte scale are becoming increasingly important for two reasons,” said Jeroen van Rotterdam, CTO of EMC’s Enterprise Content Division. “First, managing the amount of structured and unstructured data created and processed today is tremendously challenging. Second, the pressure to maintain compliant data in highly regulated industries, such as financial services, has intensified. Customers require the right solution to address both of these challenges, as well as to achieve cost savings and better data insights, which ultimately drive better business decisions.”
“Many of today’s organisations struggle with managing vast amounts of data residing in both production applications and legacy systems,” said Laura DuBois, Group Vice President for IDC's enterprise storage, server and system infrastructure software research. “Solutions like EMC’s InfoArchive 4.0 help firms address this challenge, while preserving the value of content in a single, compliant, easily accessible and scalable archive.”
EMC InfoArchive 4.0’s compliance capabilities enable retention management, legal holds, data masking and PCI compliance without the need to copy or reprocess data after it has been ingested. EMC InfoArchive 4.0 can also meet enterprise-scale compliance scenarios such as Dodd-Frank in the United States, MiFID2/R in the European Union and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OFSI) E-13 in Canada. EMC InfoArchive 4.0 also provides out-of-the-box compliant data access for Hadoop.
Noted JD Sillion, Chief Solutions Officer, Flatirons Solutions, which has a presence in India, South Korea and Iran: “EMC InfoArchive 4.0 allows Flatirons to manage even larger volumes of data and content for our application retirement clients. EMC’s robust, straightforward and well-supported technology means we can quickly provide solutions that have modern user experiences on a trusted platform that meets demanding regulatory, governance, audit and reporting mandates. InfoArchive 4.0 helps accelerate our customers’ return on investment in application retirement.”
Added Douglas Vargo, Vice President, US-based Paragon Solutions, which has an office in India: "Our clients in the financial services, insurance and life science industries encounter a wide variety of compliance requirements, such as retention, data encryption, electronic signature, time stamping and more. The new features in EMC’s InfoArchive 4.0 address these challenges, making regulatory compliance and corporate records governance easier to manage.”
Transforming work with content
EMC's Enterprise Content Division also announced EMC LEAP, a suite of purpose-built, cloud-native content apps designed to revolutionise the content management industry.
EMC LEAP apps are designed to work with any content repository, but are engineered to work better with the Documentum family of products.
EMC is partnering with DocuSign to enable digital enterprise workflows
EMC announces LEAP Together Program including new customer loyalty benefits
“Our goal with the EMC LEAP family is to humanise the experience of interacting with business content,” said Rohit Ghai, President of EMC’s Enterprise Content Division. “Beautiful, intuitive, and purpose-built apps drive engagement, which has a ripple effect. Customer engagement drives loyalty; employee engagement improves productivity; and partner and supplier engagement fosters better collaboration across the value chain. This level of engagement enables superior customer service, greater agility and new business opportunities, and is a key marker of a successful digital business.”
The EMC LEAP family will consist of both EMC and third-party content apps, a modular platform and a premier marketplace. EMC LEAP apps are interoperable with existing content repositories, but engineered to work 'better together' with the Documentum family of content management products. Repository independence allows content to be managed in place – without customers having to migrate their content – unlike other solutions in the market.
“EMC LEAP is a game changer; it’s a few small apps for users, one giant leap for ECM,” said Savinay Berry, Vice President of Products for EMC’s Enterprise Content Division. “We’ve taken a fundamentally different approach to ECM, while building on more than 25 years of experience in managing critical content for industry-leading organisations. Now, interacting and engaging with business content is effortless. The EMC LEAP family seamlessly integrates with existing systems and can easily be configured in minutes for different use cases and industry vertical requirements.”
EMC is introducing five apps focused on a variety of content management use cases, a new partner and customer success programme, and a new partnership with DocuSign:
LEAP Courier offers a new way to power business processes that depend on structured document exchange across organisational boundaries. It provides a consumer-grade user experience for secure and structured document exchange, validation and tracking. It is easily adaptable to different use cases, configurable in minutes without any additional development.
LEAP Snap delivers the power of enterprise-grade document capture to all business users. Its Advanced Recognition feature automatically captures, categorises and organises documents and related document information in real-time, turning unstructured content into actionable digital business information. The solution is simple, enables users to spin up an environment in less than five minutes, and includes a template design service to start the capture process without the need for any configuration or development.
LEAP Concert enables the creation of documents in a collaborative but controlled environment. Organisations can easily set up or import a working document to begin dividing up tasks on the project. LEAP Concert includes the ability to identify and assign work to be done on the document, and simple review workflows allow sections to be approved and completed, advancing the overall progress of the document. Project owners can protect existing content, only allowing users to modify the individual sections that have been assigned to them.
LEAP Express is a lightweight app designed to browse, access, search and approve all content, no matter where it lives. Express supports multiple form factors including Web, tablet and mobile, leveraging the latest design paradigms and security features such as touch ID. Repository independence enables a unified view of all documents and tasks, eliminating the need to jump across different, custom apps to effectively work with content.
LEAP Focus improves the document consumption experience on mobile devices. It allows for fast, yet detailed reading and reviewing of business documents like sales contracts and agreements on the go. It eliminates the frustrating “pinch-to-zoom” experience by automatically reformatting the document based on selected font size for the device, and reduces the requirement to view documents on non-mobile devices.
As part of its vision to provide customers with premier content apps, EMC is partnering with DocuSign. DocuSign is the global e-signature and digital transaction management (DTM) provider. "LEAP is a game-changing set of software as a service (SaaS)-based content applications that advance EMC’s vision for next-generation enterprise content solutions,” said Mark Register, SVP of Business Development and Channels at DocuSign.
LEAP Together is a programme designed to provide customers and partners with additional benefits and ensure faster time to value with their LEAP apps. For existing customers, EMC is offering a Loyalty Tier, granting free access to its new LEAP suite of apps. Designed to reward EMC customers for their continuing loyalty to the Documentum family of products, this new programme will enable all current, maintenance-paying customers to immediately access and begin using relevant EMC LEAP apps free of charge. Customers will also enjoy superior customer support with dedicated LEAP Customer Success Managers, who will help deploy and ensure apps are running smoothly in their infrastructure.
In addition EMC is expanding support for its partner community by launching a new SaaS Solution Provider Track within the ECD Business Partner Program. By establishing a SaaS specialty, ECD is providing approved partners with specific benefits and requirements that are aligned with the SaaS paradigm. Partners will receive financial incentives to drive adoption of the SaaS programme and new sales of LEAP apps. As new apps become generally available, partners will have the opportunity to resell apps and services, with additional programme features to be launched later this year.
Jamaluddin Kokan, Senior Technology Architect from EMC customer InfoSys said, “I’m impressed with how intuitive the EMC LEAP apps are, and how easily they can be configured in a matter of minutes for different use cases. The EMC offerings have the look and feel of consumer apps, are simple to implement, and will allow all of our clients to easily and quickly engage with content.”
Noted Melissa Webster, Program Vice President, Content and Digital Media Technologies, IDC: “The nature of work is changing. Businesses need to collaborate digitally with customers, partners, suppliers, and employees – in real time, from any device. This requires intuitive, cloud-based apps that let them easily co-create, contribute, and share information – and coordinate efforts. Collaboration is also a vital part of business processes, and enterprises can lose critical context when collaboration is disconnected from the business focus. It requires fundamentally reimagining content collaboration. EMC’s LEAP suite makes that LEAP.”
Scott Schaftlein, Managing Director, Accenture Interactive, an EMC partner said: “When we’re consulting with organisations on digital transformation, adoption and speed to market are key C-level concerns. We’re excited to see EMC LEAP bring a new level of innovation for EMC, as we believe a relentless focus on intuitive, modular solutions will drive faster speed to market and enable better adoption of new, digital capabilities.”
Mario Duckett, Vice President of Enterprise Content Solutions, MetaSource, which has offices in India and China stated: “EMC’s LEAP suite offers a set of easy-to-use content apps and services in a platform that is solving complex business problems, yet also opens up new opportunities for the SMB space. We’ve been a successful SaaS and Captiva provider for many years, and we’re excited to see how customers will leverage Snap, which packs the power of enterprise-grade capture into a simple app that any casual business worker can use.”
Erik Raper, Senior Vice President, Paragon Solutions said: “EMC’s new collection of content-centric apps underscores its appreciation of domain-centric solutions. EMC LEAP extends the value of Documentum to enable digital transformation and bring customers high-quality, industry-specific solutions, in a simplified app experience.”
Affordable all-flash
EMC also announced EMC Unity, a new family of all-flash storage systems delivering affordable file and block storage for small and medium-sized IT departments. Unity joins EMC’s portfolio of all-flash storage arrays – XtremIO All Flash and DSSD D5 – to round out the purpose-built solutions available to fit virtually any data centre use case.
New EMC Unity family is designed specifically for small, mid-sized and departmental enterprise IT deployments
Available in all-flash array, hybrid array, software-defined and converged configurations
Order-of-magnitude leaps in performance and simplicity over the current generation of competing data storage products
Rich set of unified file and block storage services in a dense 2U footprint, unmatched by competing data storage offerings
EMC Unity offers cloud-like proactive management and monitoring through a modern HTML5 task-oriented interface that leads the user through daily operations and integrates with VMware and Microsoft ecosystems for easy third-party management. Proactive Assist capabilities give IT control, visibility and automated management of Unity storage systems.
Unity service data can also be viewed within EMC MyService360, a new online service providing customers with real-time visibility into the health and wellness of their EMC environment. With the ability to scale up to 3 PB and up to 300K IOPS, EMC Unity is the industry’s first data storage solution for midsized IT to be available in all of the following unified configurations:
Purpose-built: Unity can be designed from the ground up for the flash data centre. Additionally, Unity can be deployed in a hybrid configuration to meet individual business requirements
Software-defined: UnityVSA offers the advanced file and block storage and data management features of Unity to be easily deployed as a virtual appliance
Converged: VCE Vblock and VxBlock System 350 configurations are available
Designed for all flash, Unity provides some of the best flash economics in the industry, starting under US$18,000. Additional inline data services will be added in the future to further lower the effective $/GB cost. Unity also introduces a new level of affordability for customers deploying hybrid arrays, with prices starting under US$10,000. Unity provides incredible unified storage density, with up to 80TB of all-flash storage in a dense, 2U array.
Sean Wedige, CTO, Global Enterprise Solutions at Rackspace, which is an EMC customer noted: “At Rackspace, we deploy a lot of storage arrays - we have to in order to support our customers’ growing needs for storage. And it’s business critical for us to do that quickly, simply and without downtime. Unity’s simple user interface and inflight patching means we can count on the fingers of one hand the number of clicks needed for provisioning, and can help ensure we never have to come offline to add more capacity. Unity provides us with a new level of flexibility and affordability; benefits that we’re then able to pass on to our customers.”
Commented Mark Peters, Practice Director and Senior Analyst, ESG: “Businesses with midsized IT needs don’t want a stripped-down or supposedly-simplified enterprise storage array – instead, such businesses need a solution that is built from the ground up with their needs in mind. With Unity, EMC is combining its decade of flash expertise with its trusted midsized storage market knowledge and leadership in order to deliver an all-flash solution that that has all of the features expected in the enterprise, but packaged affordably to meet midsized IT needs.”
Jack Rondoni, Vice President of Storage Networking, Brocade, an EMC partner said: “Legacy networks were not designed to achieve the maximum potential of flash. Brocade has created innovative networking solutions that can be combined with EMC storage arrays to deliver simple management, incredible performance and flexible deployment options. When leveraged together, EMC Unity and Brocade Fibre Channel and IP storage networking help modernise the data centre with the power and simplicity of flash.”
Jeff Boudreau, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mid-Range Solutions, Core Technologies Division at EMC said: “EMC Unity offers modern data centre simplicity and all-flash performance in an affordable package. Designed specifically to get the most out of all-flash media, EMC is making it simpler and more affordable for both SMEs and enterprises to modernise their data centres. With the launch of Unity, 2016 is truly the Year of All-Flash for EMC.”
Interested?
EMC InfoArchive 4.0 will be generally available on June 13, 2016. EMC InfoArchive is volume priced, by the number of TBs ingested.
LEAP Courier and LEAP Snap are generally available in June. LEAP Concert, LEAP Express, and LEAP Focus are in active recruitment for beta customers this quarter with general availability in the 2H16. All LEAP solutions are available on pay-per-use subscription basis and use value-based pricing. Through the LEAP Together Program and Loyalty Tier, existing customers will get free access to equivalent apps.
EMC Unity all-flash configurations start at under US$18,000. Hybrid array configurations start at under US$10,000.
VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes support for OpenStack is orderable and available in Q316. VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes support for Photon Platform and Hadoop Apache will be available next year. VxRack System 1000 is highly customisable; configurations start at US$300,000.
Hashtags: #EMCWORLD, #MMTM16, #VxRack
*Vanson Bourne survey of 4,000 business leaders across 16 countries from mid-size to large enterprises, primarily drawn from 12 industries. Respondents were selected according to job function (from business owners to decision-makers in marketing, customer service, R&D and finance etc.). The full research will be released in summer (Q2 to Q3) of 2016.
According to an EMC-commissioned survey* conducted by Vanson Bourne:
Over half (52%) of 4,000 business leaders surveyed across 16 countries say that as a result of digital technologies, they have experienced significant disruption in their industries
Nearly half (48%) of the respondents say they don’t know what their industry will look like in three years’ time
About two-thirds (62%) of respondents say they have witnessed new competitive entrants into their industries as a result of digital initiatives
More than half (56%) cite customer demand as a driving force behind the need to digitally transform
Nearly three quarters (73%) of companies agree that a centralised technology strategy needs to be a priority and
Two thirds (66%) are planning to invest in IT infrastructure and digital skills leadership
David Goulden, EMC Information Infrastructure CEO said at the time of the launch, "The IT industry is in a state of massive transformation, resulting in both disruption and great opportunity. Every business leader, across every industry, is facing the dilemma of how to support and grow traditional IT infrastructure while modernising the data centre in order to support the development of new applications and advance their digital agendas. Some are doing all of this simultaneously. The products and services announced today will help advance the customer's journey to build a modern data center in order to thrive as a digital business."
The new foundational offerings are designed to support and accelerate customers’ digital transformation initiatives and address the four major pillars of the modern data centre – flash, scale-out, software-defined and cloud-enabled. The solutions announced at EMC World include:
EMC Enterprise Copy Data Management (eCDM) is an expansion of EMC’s Copy Data Management portfolio which helps customers tackle data sprawl and reduce the cost of storing and managing multiple copies of the same data. eCDM enables customers to modernise their storage and protection strategy with discovery, automation and optimisation of copy data to reduce costs and streamline operations. eCDM provides companies with a pan-enterprise solution to monitor, manage and analyse copy data.
ViPR Controller 3.0 is designed to help customers transition to the modern data centre by bridging traditional and cloud native environments.
Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC) is an engineered turnkey developer platform for cloud-native application development and deployment.
VCE VxRack System 1000 with new 'Neutrino' nodes is a software-defined hyperconverged rack-scale engineered system designed to provide a turnkey cloud-native IaaS experience. Using a VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes customers can deploy an enterprise-grade IaaS in just a few days. The flexibility of the VxRack System is rooted in its rack-scale design, allowing enterprises, ISVs and service providers to leverage different node types for different workloads as they accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.
Colm Keegan, Senior Analyst, ESG said: “Organisations need to drive out costs associated with IT and one of the best ways to do this is to buy vs build infrastructure. The VxRack System 1000 Series with its choice of optimised nodes is making it possible for more workloads to run on engineered systems so IT organizations can spend their time delivering new services and applications that drive the business. The new Neutrino Nodes are bringing the simplicity, predictability and speed to cloud native IaaS environments.”
Chad Sakac, President, VCE, the Converged Platforms Division of EMC said: “The VxRack System 1000 Series is helping IT organisations solve challenges by providing new ways of serving workloads associated with both traditional and growing web and mobile applications. As open source technologies for the development of cloud-native applications and services become more prevalent, IT organisations need a stable platform like the VxRack with Neutrino Nodes for onsite IaaS that can successfully run production workloads.”
Also new is VCE VxRack System with DSSD, a storage, networking and compute system with a single preconfigured, optimised solution for databases and data warehouses.
New Virtustream Storage Cloud is a global cloud storage platform offering enterprise levels of resiliency and performance combined with true web scale. The launch of Virtustream Storage Cloud represents the latest expansion in capabilities for Virtustream which, over the course of the last ten months as an EMC company, has continued to innovate on its core enterprise-class, mission-critical infrastructure-as-a-service platform while enhancing the portfolio with a comprehensive set of managed services capabilities for both on- and off-premises implementations.
MyService360, built using EMC’s internal data lake. It provides analytics and visualisation tools. The new EMC MyService360 cloud-based service dashboard - available at no additional cost to customers registered with EMC Online Support - provides a visually compelling, near real-time visibility into the health and status of a customer’s entire EMC data centre environment. MyService360 provides IT with analysis of EMC product code levels, connectivity status, capacity alerts, service activity by site, and more.
Managing extreme archival scenarios
The Enterprise Content Division (ECD) separately announced that EMC can power archiving scenarios at petabyte scale. As enterprises modernise their data centre and applications, a solution that archives legacy apps to reduce costs – while continuing to make data available to the organisation – is required, EMC said. EMC InfoArchive 4.0 enhances the ability to secure and leverage large amounts of critical application data, including extreme archiving scenarios with structured and TV coverage. The solution has a new, horizontally scalable architecture, and also combines flexible reporting and easy accessibility.
"Extreme archiving scenarios at petabyte scale are becoming increasingly important for two reasons,” said Jeroen van Rotterdam, CTO of EMC’s Enterprise Content Division. “First, managing the amount of structured and unstructured data created and processed today is tremendously challenging. Second, the pressure to maintain compliant data in highly regulated industries, such as financial services, has intensified. Customers require the right solution to address both of these challenges, as well as to achieve cost savings and better data insights, which ultimately drive better business decisions.”
“Many of today’s organisations struggle with managing vast amounts of data residing in both production applications and legacy systems,” said Laura DuBois, Group Vice President for IDC's enterprise storage, server and system infrastructure software research. “Solutions like EMC’s InfoArchive 4.0 help firms address this challenge, while preserving the value of content in a single, compliant, easily accessible and scalable archive.”
EMC InfoArchive 4.0’s compliance capabilities enable retention management, legal holds, data masking and PCI compliance without the need to copy or reprocess data after it has been ingested. EMC InfoArchive 4.0 can also meet enterprise-scale compliance scenarios such as Dodd-Frank in the United States, MiFID2/R in the European Union and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OFSI) E-13 in Canada. EMC InfoArchive 4.0 also provides out-of-the-box compliant data access for Hadoop.
Noted JD Sillion, Chief Solutions Officer, Flatirons Solutions, which has a presence in India, South Korea and Iran: “EMC InfoArchive 4.0 allows Flatirons to manage even larger volumes of data and content for our application retirement clients. EMC’s robust, straightforward and well-supported technology means we can quickly provide solutions that have modern user experiences on a trusted platform that meets demanding regulatory, governance, audit and reporting mandates. InfoArchive 4.0 helps accelerate our customers’ return on investment in application retirement.”
Added Douglas Vargo, Vice President, US-based Paragon Solutions, which has an office in India: "Our clients in the financial services, insurance and life science industries encounter a wide variety of compliance requirements, such as retention, data encryption, electronic signature, time stamping and more. The new features in EMC’s InfoArchive 4.0 address these challenges, making regulatory compliance and corporate records governance easier to manage.”
Transforming work with content
EMC's Enterprise Content Division also announced EMC LEAP, a suite of purpose-built, cloud-native content apps designed to revolutionise the content management industry.
EMC LEAP apps are designed to work with any content repository, but are engineered to work better with the Documentum family of products.
EMC is partnering with DocuSign to enable digital enterprise workflows
EMC announces LEAP Together Program including new customer loyalty benefits
“Our goal with the EMC LEAP family is to humanise the experience of interacting with business content,” said Rohit Ghai, President of EMC’s Enterprise Content Division. “Beautiful, intuitive, and purpose-built apps drive engagement, which has a ripple effect. Customer engagement drives loyalty; employee engagement improves productivity; and partner and supplier engagement fosters better collaboration across the value chain. This level of engagement enables superior customer service, greater agility and new business opportunities, and is a key marker of a successful digital business.”
The EMC LEAP family will consist of both EMC and third-party content apps, a modular platform and a premier marketplace. EMC LEAP apps are interoperable with existing content repositories, but engineered to work 'better together' with the Documentum family of content management products. Repository independence allows content to be managed in place – without customers having to migrate their content – unlike other solutions in the market.
“EMC LEAP is a game changer; it’s a few small apps for users, one giant leap for ECM,” said Savinay Berry, Vice President of Products for EMC’s Enterprise Content Division. “We’ve taken a fundamentally different approach to ECM, while building on more than 25 years of experience in managing critical content for industry-leading organisations. Now, interacting and engaging with business content is effortless. The EMC LEAP family seamlessly integrates with existing systems and can easily be configured in minutes for different use cases and industry vertical requirements.”
EMC is introducing five apps focused on a variety of content management use cases, a new partner and customer success programme, and a new partnership with DocuSign:
LEAP Courier offers a new way to power business processes that depend on structured document exchange across organisational boundaries. It provides a consumer-grade user experience for secure and structured document exchange, validation and tracking. It is easily adaptable to different use cases, configurable in minutes without any additional development.
LEAP Snap delivers the power of enterprise-grade document capture to all business users. Its Advanced Recognition feature automatically captures, categorises and organises documents and related document information in real-time, turning unstructured content into actionable digital business information. The solution is simple, enables users to spin up an environment in less than five minutes, and includes a template design service to start the capture process without the need for any configuration or development.
LEAP Concert enables the creation of documents in a collaborative but controlled environment. Organisations can easily set up or import a working document to begin dividing up tasks on the project. LEAP Concert includes the ability to identify and assign work to be done on the document, and simple review workflows allow sections to be approved and completed, advancing the overall progress of the document. Project owners can protect existing content, only allowing users to modify the individual sections that have been assigned to them.
LEAP Express is a lightweight app designed to browse, access, search and approve all content, no matter where it lives. Express supports multiple form factors including Web, tablet and mobile, leveraging the latest design paradigms and security features such as touch ID. Repository independence enables a unified view of all documents and tasks, eliminating the need to jump across different, custom apps to effectively work with content.
LEAP Focus improves the document consumption experience on mobile devices. It allows for fast, yet detailed reading and reviewing of business documents like sales contracts and agreements on the go. It eliminates the frustrating “pinch-to-zoom” experience by automatically reformatting the document based on selected font size for the device, and reduces the requirement to view documents on non-mobile devices.
As part of its vision to provide customers with premier content apps, EMC is partnering with DocuSign. DocuSign is the global e-signature and digital transaction management (DTM) provider. "LEAP is a game-changing set of software as a service (SaaS)-based content applications that advance EMC’s vision for next-generation enterprise content solutions,” said Mark Register, SVP of Business Development and Channels at DocuSign.
LEAP Together is a programme designed to provide customers and partners with additional benefits and ensure faster time to value with their LEAP apps. For existing customers, EMC is offering a Loyalty Tier, granting free access to its new LEAP suite of apps. Designed to reward EMC customers for their continuing loyalty to the Documentum family of products, this new programme will enable all current, maintenance-paying customers to immediately access and begin using relevant EMC LEAP apps free of charge. Customers will also enjoy superior customer support with dedicated LEAP Customer Success Managers, who will help deploy and ensure apps are running smoothly in their infrastructure.
In addition EMC is expanding support for its partner community by launching a new SaaS Solution Provider Track within the ECD Business Partner Program. By establishing a SaaS specialty, ECD is providing approved partners with specific benefits and requirements that are aligned with the SaaS paradigm. Partners will receive financial incentives to drive adoption of the SaaS programme and new sales of LEAP apps. As new apps become generally available, partners will have the opportunity to resell apps and services, with additional programme features to be launched later this year.
Jamaluddin Kokan, Senior Technology Architect from EMC customer InfoSys said, “I’m impressed with how intuitive the EMC LEAP apps are, and how easily they can be configured in a matter of minutes for different use cases. The EMC offerings have the look and feel of consumer apps, are simple to implement, and will allow all of our clients to easily and quickly engage with content.”
Noted Melissa Webster, Program Vice President, Content and Digital Media Technologies, IDC: “The nature of work is changing. Businesses need to collaborate digitally with customers, partners, suppliers, and employees – in real time, from any device. This requires intuitive, cloud-based apps that let them easily co-create, contribute, and share information – and coordinate efforts. Collaboration is also a vital part of business processes, and enterprises can lose critical context when collaboration is disconnected from the business focus. It requires fundamentally reimagining content collaboration. EMC’s LEAP suite makes that LEAP.”
Scott Schaftlein, Managing Director, Accenture Interactive, an EMC partner said: “When we’re consulting with organisations on digital transformation, adoption and speed to market are key C-level concerns. We’re excited to see EMC LEAP bring a new level of innovation for EMC, as we believe a relentless focus on intuitive, modular solutions will drive faster speed to market and enable better adoption of new, digital capabilities.”
Mario Duckett, Vice President of Enterprise Content Solutions, MetaSource, which has offices in India and China stated: “EMC’s LEAP suite offers a set of easy-to-use content apps and services in a platform that is solving complex business problems, yet also opens up new opportunities for the SMB space. We’ve been a successful SaaS and Captiva provider for many years, and we’re excited to see how customers will leverage Snap, which packs the power of enterprise-grade capture into a simple app that any casual business worker can use.”
Erik Raper, Senior Vice President, Paragon Solutions said: “EMC’s new collection of content-centric apps underscores its appreciation of domain-centric solutions. EMC LEAP extends the value of Documentum to enable digital transformation and bring customers high-quality, industry-specific solutions, in a simplified app experience.”
Affordable all-flash
EMC also announced EMC Unity, a new family of all-flash storage systems delivering affordable file and block storage for small and medium-sized IT departments. Unity joins EMC’s portfolio of all-flash storage arrays – XtremIO All Flash and DSSD D5 – to round out the purpose-built solutions available to fit virtually any data centre use case.
New EMC Unity family is designed specifically for small, mid-sized and departmental enterprise IT deployments
Available in all-flash array, hybrid array, software-defined and converged configurations
Order-of-magnitude leaps in performance and simplicity over the current generation of competing data storage products
Rich set of unified file and block storage services in a dense 2U footprint, unmatched by competing data storage offerings
EMC Unity offers cloud-like proactive management and monitoring through a modern HTML5 task-oriented interface that leads the user through daily operations and integrates with VMware and Microsoft ecosystems for easy third-party management. Proactive Assist capabilities give IT control, visibility and automated management of Unity storage systems.
Unity service data can also be viewed within EMC MyService360, a new online service providing customers with real-time visibility into the health and wellness of their EMC environment. With the ability to scale up to 3 PB and up to 300K IOPS, EMC Unity is the industry’s first data storage solution for midsized IT to be available in all of the following unified configurations:
Purpose-built: Unity can be designed from the ground up for the flash data centre. Additionally, Unity can be deployed in a hybrid configuration to meet individual business requirements
Software-defined: UnityVSA offers the advanced file and block storage and data management features of Unity to be easily deployed as a virtual appliance
Converged: VCE Vblock and VxBlock System 350 configurations are available
Designed for all flash, Unity provides some of the best flash economics in the industry, starting under US$18,000. Additional inline data services will be added in the future to further lower the effective $/GB cost. Unity also introduces a new level of affordability for customers deploying hybrid arrays, with prices starting under US$10,000. Unity provides incredible unified storage density, with up to 80TB of all-flash storage in a dense, 2U array.
Sean Wedige, CTO, Global Enterprise Solutions at Rackspace, which is an EMC customer noted: “At Rackspace, we deploy a lot of storage arrays - we have to in order to support our customers’ growing needs for storage. And it’s business critical for us to do that quickly, simply and without downtime. Unity’s simple user interface and inflight patching means we can count on the fingers of one hand the number of clicks needed for provisioning, and can help ensure we never have to come offline to add more capacity. Unity provides us with a new level of flexibility and affordability; benefits that we’re then able to pass on to our customers.”
Commented Mark Peters, Practice Director and Senior Analyst, ESG: “Businesses with midsized IT needs don’t want a stripped-down or supposedly-simplified enterprise storage array – instead, such businesses need a solution that is built from the ground up with their needs in mind. With Unity, EMC is combining its decade of flash expertise with its trusted midsized storage market knowledge and leadership in order to deliver an all-flash solution that that has all of the features expected in the enterprise, but packaged affordably to meet midsized IT needs.”
Jack Rondoni, Vice President of Storage Networking, Brocade, an EMC partner said: “Legacy networks were not designed to achieve the maximum potential of flash. Brocade has created innovative networking solutions that can be combined with EMC storage arrays to deliver simple management, incredible performance and flexible deployment options. When leveraged together, EMC Unity and Brocade Fibre Channel and IP storage networking help modernise the data centre with the power and simplicity of flash.”
Jeff Boudreau, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mid-Range Solutions, Core Technologies Division at EMC said: “EMC Unity offers modern data centre simplicity and all-flash performance in an affordable package. Designed specifically to get the most out of all-flash media, EMC is making it simpler and more affordable for both SMEs and enterprises to modernise their data centres. With the launch of Unity, 2016 is truly the Year of All-Flash for EMC.”
Interested?
EMC InfoArchive 4.0 will be generally available on June 13, 2016. EMC InfoArchive is volume priced, by the number of TBs ingested.
LEAP Courier and LEAP Snap are generally available in June. LEAP Concert, LEAP Express, and LEAP Focus are in active recruitment for beta customers this quarter with general availability in the 2H16. All LEAP solutions are available on pay-per-use subscription basis and use value-based pricing. Through the LEAP Together Program and Loyalty Tier, existing customers will get free access to equivalent apps.
EMC Unity all-flash configurations start at under US$18,000. Hybrid array configurations start at under US$10,000.
VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes support for OpenStack is orderable and available in Q316. VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes support for Photon Platform and Hadoop Apache will be available next year. VxRack System 1000 is highly customisable; configurations start at US$300,000.
Hashtags: #EMCWORLD, #MMTM16, #VxRack
*Vanson Bourne survey of 4,000 business leaders across 16 countries from mid-size to large enterprises, primarily drawn from 12 industries. Respondents were selected according to job function (from business owners to decision-makers in marketing, customer service, R&D and finance etc.). The full research will be released in summer (Q2 to Q3) of 2016.
posted from Bloggeroid
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