EMC, the leading provider of enterprise storage infrastructure, security and content management solutions, recently pledged an additional investment of USD1.5 billion in India over the next five years (2010 – 2014). That’s a three fold increase of its previous investment of USD 500 million (since 2006).

On September 9, the company also inaugurated a new 4.95 lakh square feet facility at Marathahalli Outer Ring Road, Bengaluru, which will serve as its Center of Excellence (COE) for R&D activities and global services. This state-of-the-art LEED Gold green certified facility can seat 3,500 people and is one of EMC’s largest R&D Centers outside the US.

We visited the new COE, toured its 25,000 square feet data Center and asked Sarv Saravanan, VP and MD, EMC India COE, about the key areas for this investment. Saravanan also updated us on EMC’s education initiatives for India.

Why is EMC giving so much importance to India now? Where does India fit in your plan to become a stronger global player?

We set up our operations here in 2003 and for the last two years the Center of Excellence has been an R&D center. We started with a small team and with no major agenda. By 2007 we employed 2,000 people and outsourced to the Tier-1 system integrators in India, who delivered some projects and services for us.

In 2007 we started thinking about how to become a better global company, to increase revenue prospects. We saw that India is a major hub for talent and one of the high growth markets. So we chose India as a strategic location for us to grow. China is another possible market for growth. Since then, we have been treading deeper in the areas of product competency and R&D. We are also ramping up our global services capability.

What are some of the innovations from the India COE? What’s the value proposition that you bring to the table?

One is NetWorker (a backup and recovery suite). What we did for the NetWorker product is made it more relevant for the low end of the market—the SMB/SME segment. It is an important segment for high growth. The RSA division has some security innovation originating from India, notably Access Manager and the Federated Identity Manager. (See box: ‘Made in India’). All this has happened in the last two and a half years.

EMC has innovation around information infrastructure. We try to understand how our products come together to deliver value. Customers talk about outcomes, not about the merits of storage or the merits of security. We work with partners to create solutions. We understand the customer processes. The partners bring in the domain knowledge and they address customer problems. They have the business knowledge and the process knowledge. Some of them have strong industry solutions frameworks. We bring our different products together----in the areas of storage, security, and content management, and help customers leverage on the integrated value of our technology.