EMC World 2011: Q&A, Adrian McDonald, president of EMEA North

Yes, absolutely. We were also told EMC was in talks about more public sector engagment in the near future, with an announcement on the horizon.

Likewise, if you break it down to the sub-divisions of Government, health we are intimate to, criminal justice we are intimate to and Government enablement to help the citizen in an environment of credit crunch/debt reduction/everything else [we are part of].

Any final thoughts around EMC World 2011?

This big data stuff? It is real. Cloud went beyond hype and people are actually doing cloud today. This whole big data stuff is absolutely there.

We are in the industry, we are championing it and then you come out to a bunch of customers and walk out and think, oh my lord.

The first thing I used to sell was a 16kb memory board, which we used to drive round in our cars and install ourselves. Now, all of our enterprise sales people will be talking about multiple petabytes and the terminology starts to get a bit out there.

The first petabyte system we sold was in 2005. Now, we will commonly go out and sell multiple petabytes to most larger accounts and the emphasis on getting the benefit from big data is absolutely there.

For all the news from EMC World 2011, check out our round-up here.