EMC made headlines last Thursday with the opening of its South Asia Development Laboratory (SADL), a first ever of its kind in South East Asia, in a bid to bring its product development and engineering closer to its customers in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region.
The launching of the SADL is seen as part of the USD 160 million that EMC promised to invest in Singapore earlier this year in a five year plan that will stretch till 2012.
“EMC continues to invest in the APJ region because our customers here depend on our broad portfolio of technology and services to build a rock-solid information infrastructure that helps them store, protect, optimize and leverage their information for competitive advantage,” said Steven Leonard, president of EMC, Asia Pacific and Japan in a prepared statement.
EMC, which is present in 14 countries in APJ including Singapore, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia, considers APJ as its fastest growing market and promises the new lab to be customer centric, enhance collaboration and increase confidence in its customers and partners alike.
“ …by bringing EMC closer to customers in APJ, it allows us to be nimble,” William J Teuber, Jr, Vice Chairman of EMC told journalists at the official opening of SADL.
The SADL will play host to three entities. It homes the first EMC E-Lab, outside North America, has a separate lab for qualification of next generation digital storage solutions as well as a customer Proof-of-Concept center.
The E-Lab will focus on conducting end-to-end interoperability and integration testing, spanning all major platforms, infrastructure software component and networking element, advancements in product realization, engineering, manufacturing and value and supply chain techniques, tools and technologies. The primary purpose, according to EMC, for the testing conducted in E-lab is to ensure compatibility and interoperability and then go all the way to “qualification” by putting it on the EMC support Matrix (ESM).
The E-Lab in North America has been around for some 10 years and will be working closely with its Asian counterpart.
“The South Asia Development Laboratory supports our vision of providing customers, partners and even our competitors a unique understanding of how information infrastructure really works,” said Joel Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager, Common Storage Platform Operations, EMC.
“With SADL, we will be able to use the knowledge learned from our research and immediately apply it into our customer’s unique environment for their daily use.”
The Next Generation Digital Storage Solutions Lab will focus on the evaluation and qualification of the next generation of digital storage solutions that are used in EMC platforms and the Proof-of-Concept center will host prospective and existing partners and customers to look at real work implementations of EMC’s information infrastructure solutions.
EMC said it plans to work closely with its customers, partners such as HP, IBM, Cisco and Mc Data, and suppliers as well as Singapore’s top tertiary educations and research programme such as the Data Storage Institute. It will also be tying up with the Singapore National University in its recruitment drive. Presently, EMC has recruited some 40 R&D engineers both locally and internationally and plans to hit 100 recruits by the end of its five year timeline.
EMC expects SADL to act as a critical accelerator for the storage and hard-disk manufacturing ecosystem in Singapore, enhancing the nation’s position as base for high-technology engineering.
“Our decision to build a research center in Singapore was also due to three pull factors, First was the access to highly qualified researches from local universities and research centers. Second, was Singapore’s world-class infrastructure that supports a company like EMC to conduct our research in an optimal environment. Third, was its ideal business location to serve regional and global markets through it excellent connectivity,” said Ron Goh, President, EMC South Asia.
EMC declined to divulge exactly how much of the USD 160 million went into erecting the SADL. |
