In a previous post I discussed a strategy for establishing research directions between EMC’s Cairo Center of Excellence (COE) and Egyptian Universities and national technologists. The exchange will focus on cloud technology, which is an area of considerable interest and growth as Egypt begins deploying more agile IT infrastructures. Different organizations in Egypt are interested in partnering with EMC given the large number of cloud assets the corporation brings to the table.
I used the following diagram to explain the knowledge exchange that will occur first. This exchange will be the foundational starting point for exploring research and innovation partnerships.
I’d like to use the rest of this post to describe the left-hand side of the diagram. There are two areas that are particularly relevant for research discussions:
- The internal cloud being built by EMC’s IT organization. EMC desires to build a cloud that satisfies the use cases of EMC’s 50,000+ person organization. This cloud will span multiple geographies, support Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Hybrid cloud services, application mobility, etc., etc,. etc. In order to pull this off the EMC IT has an architectural roadmap that extends years into the future. Some of these architectural tasks are so far out that EMC IT is not even sure how (or if) the features will (or can) be implemented. These tasks make excellent candidates for research partnerships.
- EMC’s Product Portfolio contains a myriad of products that satisfy many of the five characteristics of cloud computing (as defined by NIST):
- On-demand self service
- Broad network access
- Resource pooling (multi-tenancy)
- Rapid Elasticity
- Measured Service
As these products are described to our Egyptian collaborators, “gaps” will appear as they describe their own cloud requirements and use cases. These gaps also serve as excellent candidates for research partnerships.
The suite of cloud products is substantial. In a future post I will present an overview of the cloud technology portfolio and explain the process of “gap mapping” to research projects in more detail.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
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