EMC Announces 'Leaders of the Modern Data Center'

An industry-first event recently took place as part of EMC's annual EMC World 2016 event, the first-ever “EMC Leaders of the Modern Data Center” awards event. Said event called attention to some of the biggest thought leaders in the data center industry, and just what these figures were doing to drive innovation and modernization in the data center.

Winners of the Leaders of the Modern Data Center awards included such industry figures as Callaway Golf, Lightstorm Entertainment, and Verizon Labs, all of which had new and interesting offerings in the data center. Companies winning awards here focused on various EMC-related technology operations, ranging from software-defined operations to cloud-enabled tools, to drive the next generation of cloud-based and big data solutions.

Data center operations have yielded a lot of disruption in recent years; a recent Vanson Bourne survey noted that just over half of the 4,000 business leaders surveyed had seen “significant disruption” in business as a result of these new digital technologies. That in turn led to 66 percent of businesses planning to invest large amounts in infrastructure—like data centers—to drive a more digital approach.

Callaway Golf took home a nod by bringing in EMC's XtremIO as part of their SAP environment, and also bringing in EMC's VNX, Data Domain, and Avamar systems to drive innovation. Formerly, it took Callaway five days to custom-design and ship a golf club for a customer, but thanks to its data center upgrades, it can now design and ship the day after an order arrives. Lightstorm Entertainment, makers of the Avatar movie brought in a five-petabyte-plus Isilon Data Lake that allows for much faster movie production and the kind of stunning, lifelike computer graphics that Avatar now allows it to be known for. Verizon Labs used several EMC tools in its cloud platform, which allowed it to bring out a complete software-defined networking (SDN) initiative.

The list of successes goes on from there, and EMC materials are becoming a growing part of data center success for a growing number of industries. Even where EMC materials aren't seen, the data center is a rapidly evolving system that's opening up faster design, better output, and new products and services outright. That should make the data center in general all the more popular, and for those looking to share in similar successes to EMC's winners, EMC will likely be the first stop to find success.

EMC has illustrated, with this first awards event, just what its product line can do and what kind of value it can deliver. That's likely to spawn a lot of interest, and give EMC at least a few new potential customers to work with. It's all thanks to an awards show that should prove a top-notch marketing idea for EMC.

Edited by Maurice Nagle