 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Hi buddy, this is Dave Vellante. We're back at EMC World 2015. Paul Conway is here with good friend Tom Roloft and with EMC Global Services. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Nice to see you, Dave. It's great to see you, Dave. So digital transformation, Tom, is the sort of watchword, isn't it? Everywhere we go, CIO, CEOs, talking about digital transformation. We were in London with a bunch of MIT professors talking about how the world is changing. Talk about your world. What's going on? Yeah, I mean, we see it everywhere, Dave. Honestly, it's the whole digital world and the mobile world and digitization and coming up with new applications and developing new applications on new platforms. That's after we were everybody wants to put their money. That's when they want to put their time and put their effort. Promise they're also running some legacy apps, right? They're still running the second platform applications. How do we create, we're helping them right now. Think through how do you free up money for that third platform to go after those digitization efforts? And how do you create perhaps one common architecture to manage both what you've got today and really what you want to build tomorrow? So that's a very exciting transformation agenda and we're all over that at this point. So Paul, talk about your role. I mean, Tom and I have known each other for years. Global services lead, what do you do? What's your focus? So I'm the senior director of sales strategy for the Americas for global services. And my primary function is to execute on the strategy that Tom and other senior leaders have put in place. So do a lot of field sales enablement, right? With the EMC consulting sales organization. I interface with folks like Tom and the other folks in our business, our portfolio organization, our delivery organization, very much acting as a voice of the field to make sure that what our clients are asking for, we back at corporate are putting the right solutions, offerings and go to market to go support with the clients. What are they asking for? Ultimately, it's kind of like what Tom just talked about. Most of our clients are trying to balance both worlds, driving more IT innovation, but while keeping the lights on from a legacy perspective. And what we're trying to do is come up with flexible ways to help them do that. Because not all clients are in the same spot. Some clients may look to Tom's organization to do some very large scale transformations. Other clients may look for help just getting going. And that's where our organization has some pretty unique ways to help do that. So Tom, you guys talk about platform two, platform three. David Goulden a few months ago introduced the concept of platform 2.5. Right. So, okay, it's a bridge, I guess. Is it a half way house? Is it a bridge? Is it a eventual? Is it a three ready? You know my HD ready TV back in the day I threw out. What's platform 2.5 and does it get me to platform three? You know, I think the verdict is out on some of this to be honest with you, right? So you're asking a very interesting question. You know, will we 10 years from now have platform 2.5 running every application in the enterprise? I'm not sure, but there are some things that will be needed to run platform three apps in optimal ways. But platform three is still pretty small right now, right? So there aren't a lot of clients that are able to say, I'm all in on creating a separate platform three environment that I'm going to run platform three on a completely different architecture, infrastructure, and I'll think about that completely separate from what I'm doing in platform two. Lots of clients right now are saying, I'm heavily invested in what I've got today. Is there a way to build a bridge? And I think that bridge is going to create an off ramp or I'd say an on ramp to platform three, which is very much something that EMC is working on already. So I think it's an interim step, Dave, with the next step will be, how do we enable that platform three migration even more quickly? So Paul, at EMC you have a number of visionaries. Tom, obviously he's been around for a while, very experienced, talking to a lot of customers. How do you translate what you're hearing from the field, what you're hearing from guys like Tom into action? So what we actually built, Dave, is really a framework to help clients go attack this market. We kind of boil it down into clients may be ready. They may have a business imperative that they need to go solve. And for that, we have specific solutions and service offerings we can offer them right out of the gate. They may be motivated where they may have a plan but they maybe just need some help to execute that plan. Or in some respects, they just may be uncertain, right? Or they may have a plan, but they don't really know where to start. And we have various capabilities depending on where those clients, where those clients may fit. We try to keep our go to market and to a very kind of simple way to engage with EMC and provide that level of flexibility to ultimately help them transform my team. Yeah, we've been talking about transformation for years and you know, when I think about, when we first started doing this, you know, EMC, we looked to like the hyperscale guys, you know, and said, okay, and they were doing a lot of infrastructure and now the talk is all about guys like Uber and Airbnb, Airbnb, who may not really own any technology whatsoever, but they're building businesses on top of this digital framework. So how have things changed in that regard? Maybe talk about that a little bit. Yeah, you know, I think all those new ideas that are coming out there, those new business models, right? They're actually IT business models, right? I mean, Uber doesn't exist without a different application and a different way to build an application, architect an application, ultimately run an application. And that application sits on an infrastructure that frankly is, you know, built from the start to be somewhat different. So we want to go bring that kind of logic to an enterprise that is trying to do the same thing, right? Just like in the dot-com boom, right? We were all worried about the dot-coms for a while. Ultimately in the dot-com boom, it was the legacy players. It was the guys with bricks and mortar that embraced the dot-com strategy that actually really got going. Like the number of dot-com startups that you remember today, like you might remember eBay and you might remember, you know, a few more, right? But there, but- Petz.com, yeah, what happened with that, right? Toys.com, Petz.com, I mean like they're just not, you know, that's not what happened because the customer was actually used to a different experience as well. So legacy organizations right now have a customer relationship. They're frantically trying to embrace this new technology and extend what they do into that new set of technologies. And I think there's a deep architectural conversation that we're in the midst of helping them wrestle with that allows them to monetize what they have, maybe get some savings and then invest it in this new future. So I think we're seeing the beginning of enterprise IT acting much more like an Airbnb or an Uber. And I was just going to actually build on that point too, Tom. And the conversations that we're having, Dave, in the field is, you know, there's really three elements to this whole transformation conversation, infrastructure, operating model and the application stack. And by far, and Tom, I'd love to hear your perspective too. That operating model conversation is, that's the biggest challenge for our enterprise IT customers today. There's some phenomenal technology out there today. We feel we have some pretty good offerings for our customers. But that whole people process conversation is what people are really trying to figure out. How do you take this legacy mode of delivering IT really as a customer service organization to now a new way of delivering IT more like a professional services organization or an actual business? Yeah. And we would tell you, we can transform the technology in 28 days, right? There's a new technology, we can transform it in 28 days. Yeah, we hear that a lot. Right? We hear that. But cloud in the box. Now you've got this cloud in the box and it's running like super awesome, great stuff that it's doing. How do you actually operate that environment? Well, that technology changed a set of business processes. It created a set of new roles that didn't exist before. It's a totally different way of running IT. How we help clients absorb that technology, leverage that technology and run that new technology, that's really what it's all about right now. Well, it's interesting. We're talking about the Ubers and Airbnb's Waze. What is Waze? It's this collection of technologies. So on the one hand, your traditional customers have to figure out, who's my competition? So that's maybe even the easier part, is you can kind of see him coming. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The other challenge is, where are opportunities for me to digitize my business that I haven't even thought of yet? So I understand you've got these workshops that you're doing. Do you get into that in these workshops? Maybe take us through what those are. You want to take that on? Yeah, sure. So kind of under that framework of ready, motivated, undecided, for those undecided clients, for example, we created an IT transformation workshop and it's a pretty lightweight way for us to open up a dialogue with those types of customers. And what we do is, at a very kind of quick and high level, is we really look at four dimensions. We look at a service strategy that a client may have. We look at their infrastructure transformation, their operating model transformation and their application level transformation. We have them do some upfront questionnaires. We run that through some comparisons of people that are in their industry, similar types of customers. And we go back to the client about two weeks later and we facilitate about a four-hour discussion. And what's interesting, we've done about 200 of these since we launched this program about two years ago. The adoption rate has really accelerated to the point where in Q4 we had about 50 requests for these workshops. In Q1 that just ended, we just had 90 requests for these types of workshops. Is it a four-pay service? There is a fee associated, but we will waive that fee. And many, if not all circumstances, there are some certain things that have to be considered. But the goal really is for us to get the senior leadership team of our clients in a room, engaged in talking about how do they start to really address this transformation paradigm. Okay, so maybe talk about some of the outcomes of these workshops? Yeah, so typically what we do by the end of the workshop, they get a deliverable and the biggest impact that our clients say is we try to categorize things that they can either do now because they have high business value with very low effort, start now, high business value, maybe somewhat higher effort, defer or consider. And what it helps us, helps our clients do is prioritize some very quick and easy wins that they can go or projects they can go execute on and start them down the path on this transformational journey. Because it's an overwhelming thing, right? I mean, IT transformation, for some clients that's a very large agenda, like how do I start that? Am I calling Amazon Web Services and figuring out how to connect that to my whatever, vSphere environment? How do I get started? And we've learned a bunch of lessons from helping clients in that regard so we can prioritize it that way. We can give them kind of a more logical roadmap. Let's just do this, then do this, then do this and you can get yourself there much faster if you've got the plan. So there's a lot of $5 fixes, essentially, that you give them. That's right, yeah. And you're going to see some immediate return. Exactly. That builds trust. For sure. For you to say, okay, that was good advice. Maybe we can go a little deeper. Exactly. And in war, like we were talking about some clients may not either have the time or may have a business imperative where they may need to jump in and do a larger scale transformation. They may not have time for a workshop, but we like to be able to offer that choice, right? Depending on where the customer is in their website. I will say we see a second class of customer, right? Mostly a CIO CTO driven customer in, you know, our larger accounts who have said, you know, I have thought through that problem and I have a point of view and I'm going to go left. I'm going down this path. And you do EMC as a federation and have something you can help me with that path. And if so, step up quick because I'm talking to all of your competitors right now. That's, it's a different customer, right? That's not a customer who says, I'm not exactly sure. I'm undecided. I don't know where to get started. That's a customer who's totally locked in on, I know what I got to get. I hear the outcomes I need. I got to save 20% of the budget on the platform to stuff. I got to free up that money and create a new DevOps environment. I got to do that in the next 60 days. I got to get my business engaged. I got to go now. That customer requires a different model, right? So we're going to market with that guy in a different way. And we see both of those kind of, you know, the more journey based approach and the more CIO level, even business and board level driven tops down approach. And one is saying, hey, teach me how to fish. Yeah. And the other is like, I'm going. You coming with me? That's right. That's right. So we're out of time. I wish we had more time. But last question. So are you seeing what I would call gain sharing model? Like you said, Tom, I got to save 20%. Are they getting it back to be able to invest in innovation? Or is it somebody else dealing? Yeah. What's going on? I'll answer that. I certainly want you to check. We actually just completed a phase one transformation with a client out in the Midwest, an industrial manufacturer that started with a workshop, by the way. And we showed that we could save them 15 million over the course of the first three to four years of this transformational journey that they expect to obviously take that 15 million that's been blessed and start to reapply it back into more of those innovative technologies. So it's a very real use case that's in flight right now. And I would say, quantifying that value up front, that's something the CIO motion almost requires. And then to the extent that the CIO makes a big bet with the EMC Federation to go do it, they will come around and say, what skin do you have in the game to help me with this? And are you willing to go get in this with more than just some contingent fees kind of thing? So we're actively involved in those conversations. And frankly, for the right customer and the right situation, we're very open to going down that road. All right, I'm sorry, we got to leave it there. We're out of time. Paul, Tom, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on, Paul. Absolutely, thank you very much. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE. We're live from EMC World 2015 and we'll be right back.