EMC Looks to Increase Number of IT-Savvy Business Executives

How Well Do You Know the Cloud?

IT people quickly get frustrated talking with business people whom they perceive as ignorant of some of the more basic IT concepts, especially when it comes to cloud computing and Big Data. Similarly, business people get frustrated listening to IT people who can’t seem to express concepts in terms the average business person understands.

It’s not all that clear if we’ll ever get IT folks comfortable with business concepts and terminology. In fact, it’s probably going to be a lot easier to teach business people some basic IT concepts than it will be to teach IT people business fundamentals.

With those issues in mind, EMC this week announced an effort to extend the appeal of its educational services efforts to business people. According to Tom Clancy, vice president of educational services for EMC, taking the time to educate business people about the value of cloud computing and Big Data has never been more important. The IT industry as a whole is on the threshold of a major transformation, and yet business leaders have little comprehension of the return on investment they should expect to see from investing in cloud computing and Big Data, says Clancy.

What they do understand, says Clancy, is that companies such as Google, Yahoo and LinkedIn are seeing massive returns on making these kinds of investments. What’s not clear to business people is to what degree they should be applying those same concepts to their own business.

Clancy says EMC is committed to delivering these educational courses in the most vendor-agnostic way possible so prospective students shouldn’t view these classes as a veiled EMC sales pitch. If anything, Clancy says these courses will be difficult to get into given the demand for the insight and the stringent requirements EMC intends to apply to anybody the company decides to accept into the program.

There’s no doubt that there’s a hunger for knowledge out there these days when it comes to transforming enterprise IT. Whether business people will look to EMC to gain the knowledge remains to be seen. But the one thing that is for certain is that in return for a couple of days of time, business executives for better or worse might finally know enough to be really dangerous.