 Okay, we're back here live at EMC World. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We are on the ground in Las Vegas, but three days of wall-to-wall coverage, this is theCUBE. And we have a repeat, CUBE alumni on, and we're happy to dive into all the greatness here at EMC Services. I'm John Furrier, join my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante, wikibon.org. Tom Rolloff is here. He's the Senior Vice President of EMC's Global Services, an expanded role for Tom. You've been on many times really in the role of head of EMC's consulting business, what we used to call the tip of the spear, it still is. And so welcome back. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, John. Good to see you both. Yeah, so this is our fourth EMC World. You've probably been on for many, if not most of those. Talk about how things have evolved in the services organization over those last, you know, three or four years. Well, you know, it's been a fascinating journey. I think, you know, you and I were talking about how a few years ago we were a storage company, right, and I think maybe two or three years ago we were talking about how the transformation from IT, the storage company, for EMC, the storage company, to being more about cloud and the transformation of IT and now with the co-pivotal initiatives and it's, you know, Paul taking on the new role, the fact that we as a company are hoping to transform not just IT, but the business overall, right? So that's a big theme for us. And I think what I think EMC is very much aware of is that while we have some of the best technologies in the world to go make that happen, our clients are telling us technologies alone are not sufficient. We need people process and technology change and that creates a massive responsibility frankly for the services organization to be there to help our clients with those transformations. And so we're in the midst of trying to bring together all the different capabilities inside our services business, align them directly to the cloud trust and big data message and make sure that we've got a way to help a client from the beginning early phases of thinking about the impact of cloud or trust or big data all the way through to managing and helping them with the entire journey of transforming the way they run IT and hopefully having IT transform the way they run the business as well. So that's part of my responsibility and I'm very excited about it. Tom, you've been on theCUBE since our beginning. We were at EMC World 2010 when we were in the blogger lounge, Joe Tutti showed up, Michael Cappellas. You've been with us for all now four years now and we've always asked you the question but earlier on the intro package, David and I were talking about the EMC transformation and how you guys are starting to look more like IBM less like a storage vendor, mainly around the kinds of services device that you can just give us a snapshot of what has massively changed from 2010 to now because now it was like, hey, we got storage during the private cloud and a lot of storage conversations but now you're talking big data, you're talking cloud, you're talking about on-premise security, talk about your transformation in services because it's like IBM in terms of their range of services. So it is and it isn't, John, right? I think if Joe were sitting here or if he were sitting next to us here he'd say, look, we're a technology company, Tom and that is absolutely true, right? So we lead with technology always and I think that actually is an interesting differentiator from some of the very broadly distributed technology firms that are out there today. I think we believe that we've got some of the most interesting and compelling technologies that enable those kinds of transformations that we're talking about. But as I was just saying, technology is necessary but not sufficient, right? How do we get to the point where we've got the right technology, we're applying it to a problem like cloud, trust or big data but then we're really helping people not just implement a technology but helping them think about how does that technology change the way they run IT? How does that technology help them create a better alignment with the business? How does it change since 2010? Well, I mean, what thing can you point to saying? This was not happening in 2010. It's happening now at an accelerated rate. You know, I think our infrastructure conversation has gone from being a conversation about storage and the data center to being a conversation about IT as a service. And IT as a service becoming a cloud conversation. And by the way, not just within the four walls of the data center, right? So it's not just a my data center, it's my data center and the public cloud and how do I bring those together and how do I create a way for a CIO to become a broker of IT services, right? That's a very different conversation than three or four years ago. We were saying, hey, data center consolidation and storage tiering and virtualization are interesting things around how to transform a data center. Now we're talking about how those technologies are changing the way we run IT. So that's one example. I think the advent of big data is just a massive change, right? So everybody's always known that we have all this information that we're starting to store and we're starting to collect it and people were very interested in business intelligence and thinking about how do I look at all the structured data and look at it in a certain way. Now I think people are saying, that's just the tip of the iceberg there, right? It did want to jump in, but I got to, no, no, no, I'm going to ask about the big data because I want to, while you're on the big data. I'll get it eventually. Hold on, hold on. No, that's a good answer. I think that's exactly right. That's where everyone wants, they want everything satisfied, right? And that includes platform and infrastructure, right? So we're going there, but big data, right? So Dave and I were talking just as briefing last night and this morning about Hadoop, right? Hadoop was the definition of big data, but now that's not anymore. And actually the business model of open source and big data is to help people with training and support. Well, the clients don't want to hassle. So you guys are actually trying to eliminate the hassles. So they don't, so in a way, it should be easier. So the core business models of the Hadoop guys, Cloud Air and Ortonworks, is to provide training and support, which is inherently based on the fact that it's hard to use. So can you talk about what you found? Cause you guys have Hadoop proof of concepts and you have other big data stuff. How do you talk about that? Because the purists are all Hadoop and then you have a bigger range conversation. So number one, I think Hadoop is a seminal piece of the technology puzzle in terms of big data, right? So I do not want to minimize the fact that we wouldn't be having a conversation about the massive scale of big data and the ability to take structured, unstructured information and look at it as one if it wasn't for some of the technologies in Hadoop. But I think to your point, most clients aren't actually interested in stitching together a data architecture that leverages all these different components, right? So they're interested in more of a soup to nuts approach to how that gets done. We are with the GoPill initiative definitely creating an architecture that makes that much easier. And so what we're partnering with GoPill on the services side is we'll take an industry specific lens and we'll say, how does this industry consume information and what does that mean for its data architecture and how do we create a reference architecture that respects the specific needs of a given industry and accelerates the ability for that business user to use big data. I always say it's the trade up between easy to use and integration versus new capabilities and kind of like it is a balance. I mean, something to win purely with like, say, Cloudera and Hortonworks is some great use cases for, these are new questions, new answers, and then you got integrate and ease of use. Right, and I think there is a legacy, right? So I mean, most of, I mean, I think if you're starting a company up from scratch, maybe Cloudera and Hortonworks is exactly the way to go. In the enterprise space where EMC still has a significant presence, I think there's a legacy, right? And how do we combine some of these new technologies with what already exists to answer the questions that large enterprises are wrestling with? And I think that's absolutely something where the technology and the services that I've come to get at Dave, you're inching to save some. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I want to come back to the cloud conversation. I had a follow up from the discourse that you guys are having. And I want to talk about adoption, what's changed over the last 12 months. John and I were talking a while ago, we were at the AWS summit last week. So you see an Amazon come hard into the enterprise. But if you go all the way back to 2006, when Amazon announced the cloud, from 2006 to 2008 was something developer cloud. Obviously still is in a big way. 2008 and 2009 with the economic downturn, it seemed to us accelerated the movement to the cloud. A lot of people said, hey, we got to move to variable costs here, okay. And then in the last couple of years, let's say 2010, 2011, after that, it was kind of shadow IT, 2012. It seems like we're now entering the phase of deeper business integration. And you see in things like OpenStack, VMware has announced its own cloud. So what's changed in cloud adoption in the last 12 months? What's your angle on sort of the evolution of cloud? You know, I think the biggest change is that people are starting to realize how differently IT gets run. And that's a good news, bad news story, right? For the IT organization, that's a gut-wrenching set of changes. If I'm really going to embrace cloud and I'm going to have some workloads in the public cloud, maybe at Amazon or something, right? And I'm going to have some things in a private cloud or in some kind of virtualized environment. Man, that's a very different operating model from server storage network infrastructure with a management layer over the top. So the hard thing is for the IT organization to actually embrace those technologies and really run differently. The other side of the coin is that the business absolutely wants that, right? The business is sitting there saying, hey man, when I swipe that credit card at Amazon, it's super easy. How come it takes me forever to go work with you guys? So the smarter, I think, IT organizations are embracing that change and saying, here's a way for me to connect to the business. Here's a way for me to embrace the problem of shadow IT, right? The reason there's shadow IT now is not because I got a server under the desk, but because I've got an easy way to procure an environment much easier than going to my internal IT organization. How do I use the changes that I'm driving in the way that I'm architecting IT to change the way that I run IT and get me better connected to the business? I think that's a huge change that's going on right now and CIOs are wrestling with what their role is in that and how they become the strategic enabler of the business that they want to be. And I think some are embracing that really well. So you and John were talking about big data before. Are you seeing a convergence between the sort of big data activity and the cloud activity? I think there's some, right? I think ultimately as infrastructure becomes more standardized, more virtualized and more abstracted from the actual workloads, there's an opportunity to create an infrastructure platform that can support all the different things you want to go do with IT. And big data is just one of those things, right? So if we can get to the point where we're architecting the infrastructure in such a way that it supports my applications and my big data aspirations and my security implications, now I'm getting to the place where there is convergence because I'm respecting the requirements of the big data environments on my infrastructure architecture, but I'm also creating a way to maybe even separate and abstract those a little bit. One of your big vectors is of course trust. How is this affecting the conversation, this being the cloud conversations, the big data? How is it affecting the activities and conversation around trust and security? People, are they looking at it differently? They're certainly looking at it differently. How are they looking at it differently and how is EMC supporting them? We've talked a little bit about a trend that I think's been out there for a while, right? Which is that the enterprise is a little reluctant to go to the public cloud because it's not exactly sure what the trust profile of the public cloud is. And you and I have talked about the fact that over time the public cloud's going to be perhaps better at protecting the information than even the private cloud is. I think we're starting to see some of that, right? I think we're starting to see some public cloud providers who understand a specific domain, who are starting to say, I'm from your industry, I understand your regulatory environment, I'm going to architect things in such a way that you're going to feel comfortable moving that information to my SaaS, my public cloud environment. I think we're going to see more and more of that and in five years from now, we're going to sit there and say, wow, it's amazing that we ever thought in our own data centers that we could protect those four walls of the data center in a way that allows that it's better than what the public cloud is going to go do. Now, at the same time, the threat profile is continuing to evolve very quickly. And I think, as CIOs used to go from I'm not under attack and they were doing one of these, frankly, now there's becoming aware that they absolutely are under attack, they just don't know where. And so they got to get to the point where they're being much more aware of their environments and understanding what's going on in their environment and using big data and analytics and new capabilities around cloud to understand what people are doing inside their environment. And then maybe to go after them and react in a very different way. Well, in the public cloud, it's kind of a shared responsibility too, isn't it? That's where I would think that EMC maybe plays a role in helping fill that gap. Is that right or is that sort of EMC consulting? Is that your partners? How does that all sort of come to market? You know, I think it's a combination. I think the idea that various public cloud providers are embracing the trust message more, I think that's going to be a differentiator for them going forwards. We're absolutely helping them, right? So our RSA division, our backup and recovery technologies, our availability tools that we have, very much getting adopted by some public cloud providers at very fast rates. And I think they're going to differentiate their public cloud on the fact that it's trustworthy and secure. So services has a role to play in that. I think, you know, as in everything at EMC, I think the technology is sort of the linchpin and we hope to enable that broader conversation. So we're getting down to the wire here on time, but I do want to ask you one final question. So Dave and I in the intro, we're talking about how, you know, inflection points always try to, we always try to map where we were, what other inflection point kind of maps where we are today. And we've always said that, you know, this is an inflection point so massive it kind of combines client server with PC revolution kind of in one because it's so accelerated. So back in the day in the 80s and 90s, it was multi-vendor support. That was the big thing. I got this box, I got an EMC box, I got to support this, I got this controller plane, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Now it's different, opens the new multi-vendor, right? So I want to ask you, do you agree with that? And two, what does that mean? What does open mean? Open means choice. Is Amazon open? Is it closed? Is it locked in? So again, everyone's always afraid of lock in and they hire consultants to come in and help them figure it out. So that's obviously, there's needs there. How do you talk about that? When do you agree open and multi-vendor kind of? So I absolutely agree with the fact that choice is what the IT organization wants. And it's, you're seeing, I think, various vendors embracing choice more than others. And I think that clients are justifiably worried about IT vendors that are not as open as maybe they'd like them to be. So software models that are heavily, that have very heavy switching costs are things that clients want an alternative to. So there's absolutely a market opportunity there. And I think the whole shift to architecting your technology so that it works in a multi-vendor environment, EMC is very, very excited about that. You see us even embracing open in different ways now with the acquisition of NYSERA by VMware. The idea that we're much more a part of the open-source community. I think that's something that EMC is starting to embrace as well. Well, and you have the guy who's heading out to flash vision came from VMware, VP of Engineering. So you can see, that may not be publicly known, but it's on his LinkedIn profile, but that telegraphs a little bit. Yeah, I think, you know, he does one. I think if you look at some of the things we're starting to do in self-defined storage, you know, very much a heritage there of being more open as well in that regard. So I think that's a technology architecture decision first. And I think you see some vendors embracing that more than others, where we have architectural opportunities to become more open or more closed, we are always going towards the more open side. So I think that's an exciting development for our customers, frankly. I'll let you get the last word in on the, when you talk to CIOs and customers, what do you tell them your focus is for the year in terms of EMC consulting, cross the board for the services, what is the major transformation key messages you have conversations about? Yeah, I mean, we're hugely excited about cloud trust and big data. And the fact that we're transforming the way IT runs and letting IT transform in the way the business runs. And our main message to clients on that is technology is absolutely an integral part of making that happen, but it isn't enough. And we need to make sure that we're figuring out a way to help you understand where are you today in that transformation? Where are you going to be tomorrow? How do we get you from here to there as fast as possible in our services business is really here to help with those transformations and to guide clients through those transformations, hopefully with lessons learned from others. Obviously you have a lot of huge customer bases and they have drives from EMC now, hopefully software-defined storage and drives and networking from VMware. Tom Roloff, Senior Vice President of Services Portfolio here inside theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next break and then primetime segment, which we do now at theCUBE at the top of the hour. We'll be right back after the short break.