LSI Corporation (NASDAQ:LSI) designs semiconductors and software for storage and networking at datacenters and mobile networks. Founded in 1981 and headquartered in California, the company has a market cap of $4.38 billion.


In a candid chat with siliconindia, Gautam Srivastava, SVP-Corporate Marketing and Human Resources of LSI Corporation shares some interesting insights about the impact of hyperscale data centers in the IT space. He also talks about the lack of integration of hardware and software in IT in the present day enterprise and the challenges he faces in his job.

Q: What are the new technology trends that you see shaping the industry's future?
A: Very large or hyperscale datacenters, operated by Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu, are the fastest segment of server growth, built to accommodate the massive growth of consumer data and the shift to cloud storage. These companies are deploying technology in different ways with tremendous long-term implications for IT, including the enterprise. As a result, CPUs, memory, storage, and networking gear will become fungible resources that will be optimized for specific uses to achieve the highest performance with the lowest possible cost of operation. These hyperscale datacenters will emerge as did the utilities we are all familiar with, such as water and electricity, able to benefit from scale efficiencies around particular applications in this case search, e-commerce, or social networking. They will excel at a particular application (which many of them already do), but also able to deliver that application at a lower cost than anyone else. Ordinary enterprises will find it difficult to do this in-house as well or at as competitive a cost.

Q: From your point of view, what is that one technology need of enterprises which is not satisfactorily being met by current solutions present by vendors?
A: Integration. IT inside an enterprise is still challenged to integrate different hardware and software from a variety of vendors to provide a full suite of applications to its internal clients (typically office workers). I predict the solution will not be to find a new, better way to integrate disparate applications and their underlying infrastructure, but rather a typical IT department will, by design, do less by doing more of what is not differentiated (such as email, messaging, word processing, or other typical business applications) in the cloud, and only doing on premise what is strategic and differentiated. Moving to the cloud will alleviate a lot of energy managing things that do not matter to strategic outcomes, and ideally IT will do more of what does matter to strategic outcomes.