Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeetu Patel, GM of EMC Syncplicity (Part 1)

For a while, security and privacy concerns around the adoption of cloud computing were eased, which drove huge adoption of public cloud services. In this interview, we explore how the tide is turning and how even early adopters of public cloud are now concerned about security.

Sramana Mitra: Jeetu, let’s introduce our audience to you as well as to EMC Syncplicity.

Jeetu Patel: Thank you for having me here. I am Jeetu Patel, the General Manager of the Syncplicity business unit. Syncplicity is the file sync, share, and collaboration business unit within EMC. We made the acquisition of Syncplicity in May of 2012. Since then, we have had sky rocketing growth of this technology that I will describe to you in a moment. That’s essentially what I do for EMC and Syncplicity.

Sramana Mitra: Did you come to EMC as part of Syncplicity?

Jeetu Patel: I was brought into EMC about three years ago as Chief Technology Officer of one of the software divisions to help devise the cloud and mobile strategy. Part of that was to make sure we not only look at what’s going to happen in the next three years, but also what’s going to happen in the next 10 years – what will be the implications of cloud, mobile, social, big data, and some of the mega trends that are going to be in the enterprise and business market space. While I was looking at all of the different technologies that we have crafted a division for at EMC, one of the technologies we wanted to acquire rather than build by ourselves was this whole notion of how people interact, work with files, and collaborate with one another as knowledge workers. We are also looking at why that’s fundamentally getting re-factored as you move into the mobile environment where there is an increasing impact of social behaviors in the way that we work as the new millennial comes into the workforce.

It’s getting easier from a provisioning, management, and scale standpoint with the cloud. The reason why we wanted to acquire rather than build is because we wanted to get the user experience as well as SaaS DNA from the marketplace and combine that with the DNA we had of enterprise security and storage. We wanted to fuse those together to really create value in a way that hasn’t been created in the market, which we call as a huge white space prior to us coming in.

Sramana Mitra: From where you sit, what trends are you tracking in this industry?

Jeetu Patel: I think there are four major trends and one other that is starting to emerge. The four major trends are around this whole notion of cloud, mobile, social, and big data. If you think about those as macro trends, I think there’s going to be economies that will fundamentally change. These have been well agreed upon over the course of the past two to three years. 2014 is going to be a meaningful tipping point for some of these trends.

Sramana Mitra: Can you be more granular?

Jeetu Patel: Let’s go and specifically drill down into cloud. How does cloud work within the enterprise? Let’s drill down to a narrower audience. What are some of the major things that we are seeing in the cloud? Firstly, we’re starting to see that the way that applications get provisioned and expectations of the way that buying patterns work within organizations is fundamentally shifting. One of the major trends is application delivery. SaaS as an application delivery mechanism is different from the way it used to be.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeetu Patel, GM of EMC Syncplicity
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