EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced the opening of the EMC Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence/Analytics Competency Centre to support its ongoing commitment to help organisations achieve cost efficiencies and reduce “time to value” in data warehouse deployments. This new Competency Centre is focused on delivering application-specific solutions by bringing together EMC engineering resources focused on data warehouse/business intelligence with those of all of the industry leading data warehouse/business intelligence vendors including, Greenplum, IBM, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, ParAccel, Sybase, Teradata and Vertica.  This centralised engineering lab provides customers with a unique “one stop shopping” experience to identify the appropriate solution to meet their data warehouse/business intelligence needs.

Data warehouse/business intelligence environments today are larger, often using tens or hundreds of terabytes of storage, more complex and have become more critical and more integral to the business process.  While EMC has deep expertise with data warehouse/business intelligence environments, the Competency Centre now enables EMC and all the leading application vendors to conduct co-engineering activities to leverage their software with the EMC CLARiiON and EMC Symmetrix networked storage systems to provide an optimised storage area network (SAN) solution that addresses these emerging challenges including ease of use, high reliability and energy efficiency.
               
“The Competency Centre is another example of EMC leveraging its technology leadership to make it easy for customers to deploy a solution that has been architected and tested for optimum information access and availability,” said Brian Babineau, Senior Analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.  “Right now, companies must rely on information assets for decision support functions and they most certainly do not have the time and resources to integrate multiple data warehouse and business intelligence components on their own.  Most people equate innovation to developing a new feature or product, but it can also manifest in developing, testing and optimising an integrated solution which solves a specific problem.”

The Competency Centre provides IT organisations with the unique ability to evaluate, plan, and architect their implementation with both EMC as their information infrastructure provider and their Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence software provider. By working closely with each Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence vendor, EMC has consolidated the expertise and resources unique to these environments in white papers and consulting services for planning and design as well as integrated application solutions. EMC Consulting supports the new Competency Centre by providing the expertise needed to develop effective business intelligence strategies, information architectures and data analytics that deliver improved decision-making.

 “Data warehouse/business intelligence applications are becoming an integral part of the IT landscape.  Customers want a flexible, manageable and cost-effective information infrastructure that supports the new business requirements, and that is where EMC can help,” said Chuck Hollis EMC’s Vice President, Global Marketing Chief Technology Officer.  “EMC has invested in the technology, services and partnerships required to deliver integrated solutions to effectively manage data warehouse/business intelligence environments. The EMC’s new application Competency Centre will help customers better understand how to address their business goals today and in the future and choose the appropriate solution to achieve these needs.”

Located in EMC’s Santa Clara, California facility, the EMC Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence/Analytics Competency Centre also has Cisco TelePresence to link to EMC’s Executive Briefing Centres in Hopkinton, Mass. to provide customers state of the art video conferencing access to the resources.  Having co-engineering and sales support from EMC and all the leading application vendors onsite makes it convenient and easy for EMC customers and prospects to have a three-way discussion about their data warehouse and business intelligence needs.  Live demos based on workload and configurations can be conducted to illustrate tight integration between EMC storage and each of the vendor’s application results in an integrated and optimised solution for data warehouse and business intelligence.