Chad Sakac

“Cloud computing is changing IT, but big data is changing the world,” says Chad Sakac, VP of EMC’s VMware Technology Alliance.

He says people see the onslaught of information and data every day, through Facebook and Twitter, but big data is more than that.

“Changing everything is analytics. How do you take all that information and get to the truth? To insight? You can get answers to questions you never asked in the first place. Very often, the questions you think of first are not the right questions to be asking.”

However, he explains, having insight is not good enough. “Taking those insights, you need to get to action.

“We think that through the combination of cloud for IT and big data for business, customers can get more efficiency, more control, more choice. But how do we take those ideas and make them real?” He says many companies are actually on their journey to the cloud, and it has a familiar project trajectory. “The journey, in my experience, has three distinct phases…”

In the first phase, the IT department uses the cloud for whatever it can, and whatever it has control over.

The second phase, he explains, is about virtualising things that matter. “Critical applications, things that support their core mission. People often ask if they virtualise certain things, like SAP, will it have a negative impact on performance. The answer is no. In fact, it can improve performance.”

The third and final phase, he says, is taking IT and making the IT as a service model work in their environment.

And the core ingredient to this is reliable virtualisation and cloud technology, Sakac concludes.