 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We're here at Mobrow headquarters at wikibon.org. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of all the tech stars. And today we have a superstar in tech in global services. Julie Larson is the vice president of E-Services at EMC within the Global Services Organization. First time CUBE guest. Julie, welcome. Absolutely, thanks. Great to be here. Great to have you here. And so we were talking a little bit about your role off camera at EMC. But tell our audience, what does that actually entail, VP of E-Services within the Global Services Group? Great, yeah. I was brought into EMC about three years ago, Dave. And what the purpose was was to really look at services and say, how do we help our customers self-serve? Let's get them out of the phone cues to the degree that we can. Let's get the customers the ability to solve their own problems, get on the web, collaborate with other people, and really just re-engineer how services is going to run. Yeah, so we've had Tony Colish on the CUBE before, a couple of times actually. And it seems like you guys are really pushing the envelope on the self-service piece, the sort of new media. So talk about what's changed in support over the last, say, four or five years. Yeah, I think there's tremendous change and technology moves quickly, as you know. I think the big changes are certainly in the demographics. We see our audience in the business world now are the kids that came up on computers. They don't wanna pick up a phone for service unless they have to. They wanna go to the web and they wanna self-serve. So demographics is certainly one of them. I think cost of service is another big pivot, right? Instead of just big companies now requiring service, we've got a lot of small, medium business and customers who really want to try to self-serve and then just save the cost of service for the really tough problems. So we see that as well. And then I think just the changes in technology with mobility and with collaboration, the opportunity has just really exploded in the last few years. Yeah, we talked to Tony about things like chat and you're saying that people want self-service. And I'm presuming you're seeing, are you seeing as the demographic shifts to younger people, that is really a driver. Are people actively using chat? I mean, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, we have an explosion in chat. About a year ago we had about 1700 chat sessions a month. Right now we've got over 25,000 per month coming in and we actually see chat surpassing the phone cues in several of the product lines. And what we see there is the advantage of chat is really what I'll say instant gratification. You as a customer come to our site, you click into the chat, you define your problem, you are immediately tied into an engineer. So you're not going through some tiered routing of people that are trying to get you to the right engineer. You go directly to the right engineer. And about 85% of the time that engineer can solve your problem immediately while you're there chatting with them. So you aren't being passed and called back and emailed back. We have a very high solve rate on the first time in. Which is really what customers want, right? When you call somebody that you wanna know, I gotta get solved my problem as fast as possible but I'm curious as to how you deal with the problem that I find personally when I do chat. I feel like that the person on the other end, the tech is supporting like three or four or five others at simultaneously. And I feel like the response time to my questions is, like I'm chatting faster than he or she is chatting. How do you address that problem? Yeah, I think you're calling out one of the key pitfalls that people have done when they've implemented chat incorrectly. Our chat agents are supposed to take only one chat at a time maximum two to the point that you're making. If I'm chatting with more than two customers simultaneously, I'm gonna drop the ball. So our chat agents really handle one at a time two maximum. Another thing that I would call out with chat is if you, Dave, came into me on a chat session and I can't solve the problem, I have a whole army of agents behind me that I can internally collaborate with on my internal chat to help solve your problem as well. So we handle one or two at a time and then we have the backing of the whole agency staff. So that brings up an interesting philosophy because I think that many organizations go to vehicles like chat to cut cost but isn't that more expensive if your ratio of text to customers is one to one or one to two, isn't that more expensive for you? Yeah, that's actually a really interesting question and when we launched into chat with Tony Kholish, I think Tony was convinced that it could be both a customer's satisfied and a cost saver. I wasn't so convinced, to be honest with you. I came into it thinking this is largely a C-Sat play. It'll make the customers happy but it's not gonna save us any money. What we did find is that because you're not handing off cases and doing a callback model, the solve rate is high. Like I said, the first solve rate, we can actually solve cases in about a third of the time. The data would show that if a normal Sev-2 case takes X amount of time, the chat actually solves it in a third of a time. So to your point, even though it's more agent heavy when you're taking one or two at a time, you're condensing the solve time. Okay, so you're getting the costs back on that. So we've actually seen a cost savings and Tony was right on that. So chat is kind of social but there's a lot of other social media going on on Twitter, there's Facebook, there's LinkedIn. How are those vehicles affecting or are they affecting the support business? I think they're absolutely affecting the support business. I think the biggest pivot there in social is that companies need to embrace it. Like all big companies, most companies want to solve customer problems by themselves. So in other words, Dave has a problem, IEMC wanna solve that problem. But with collaboration, what we find with our community forums, for example, we have customers solving other customers' problems and we get that social collaboration going on and we're actually getting kind of the power or wisdom of the many. So no longer is just EMC having to solve our customer issues. We've actually got the social and collaboration going to solve those issues together. And we've seen really just a tremendous uptick in our community support forum and the ability for our customers to collaborate with one another there. I think also on the social front, we have things like Twitter, we have a lot of industry chatter going on and that's something that we can leverage to really better understand our customer requirements and what do they need. So I think social benefits the customers. It also benefits us as a corporation to hear what the customers are saying about us. So you guys actively monitor these social changes? We do probably, in my estimation, not enough. I think the big challenge has been there that if you monitor it as we do, there aren't a lot of great tools out in the industry yet to monitor socials. So what you get is you get kind of overload. So you've got so much going on out in the internet that how do I synthesize that and get it down to what's useful for me to make my experience better? So we've struggled with that a bit. We are doing the listing but I'm still looking for tools to do it better if they exist out there. The better filters that you can take action on as opposed to looking at the exhaust pipe or looking at the exhaust coming out of the pipe. Absolutely. Not being able to find the diamond in the rough. Okay, so now talk about, I mean we sort of touched upon it, but talk about how you've changed your investment strategy with regard to support. Yeah, luckily for me and for EMC and our customers, our managerial chain, Tony Colish, Howard Elias have heavily invested in the online experience front. And we've done that because we're all believers that really the future is any channel, any language for customer preference. So any channel in, any channel out. So in other words, a customer may wanna come in on a phone channel and they may want to be emailed back when you have a resolution. They may wanna come in on a chat channel and have you give them a mobile text alert if there's some type of follow up. So the investment has been heavily laid out because I think we all see the future as really any channel in, any channel out and online is really central to that. So Julia, talk about the data. So you have all this new data. Everybody talks about data growth and you saw these charts up into the right and I'm sure you see that in your business as well, you're talking about all the social media information. Are you able to apply analytics to that? How do you go about doing that? Talk about that a little bit. We've also heavily invested in analytics in the past few years that I've been with EMC. What we're trying to do there and I believe this is the win for the future is to mine the data and really look at the analytics that say what's being used on our website that's useful. So we, for example, look where our customers go. What's the most heavily used collateral? What are the most heavily used web pages? What are the most useful tools? So the analytics that we've put in place, again, are really to understand what's beneficial for the customer and to try to capture that information. On a personal front from a customer perspective, I truly believe the biggest change in the industry is that in the past, you or I went to a website and we searched around for things and we had to wade through all kinds of irrelevant data. The biggest pivot for the future is relevancy. And the only way that I can know what's relevant to Dave as a customer is to mine the data, mine the products that you use and mine what you're using on the site. Are you able to take that data and predict failures? I mean, everybody tries to, the industry for a while has talked about being more anticipatory and it started with phone home and that was sort of an intimate thing, but will analytics, predictive analytics, allow us to actually identify what's going to break before it breaks? So that is a place that we're actually investing in as well. I can't say we're launched yet, but we're looking to launch later 2012 and certainly more heavily in 2013. We have a project called Proactive Services and what we're doing with that is we're taking in the data from the call homes as well as looking at the trends coming in from our service requests. And what we're doing is based on analyzing those with an early warning algorithm. We take all of that data and we say, what are we kind of hearing from the devices and from the service requests? Let's put those through an early warning algorithm and come out with detection. It's almost, I like to use the analogy of a storm warning, the storm is coming and let's alert Dave that that storm's on the horizon. So the way that we're doing that is using data and using early warning algorithms. And our goal is then to display that to you, the customer and say, hey Dave, based on your topology, here's some things that could be impacting you and you may want to look into and here's what we recommend. So I've been following EMC for a long time and watched the company's history as it's grown up. And in the early days, you'd have these million dollar mainframe class boxes go in and you could afford to bring an army of services people in and that's how EMC sort of gains share against IBM and others and is renowned for its services. But as products get more simple, I think of things like you announced last year in January, the VNXE for example. And it's a child proof box. How has the support organization adapted to the move towards adoption of simplicity by smaller companies? Well, I think that for EMC you called it out the sweet spot has been really just top notch hands on service. But I think the company has really adopted the self service model again from the investment standpoint in VNXE, you called out Dave is a perfect example. When VNXE was launched, it was launched with a collaboration community forum. So when VNXE was launched, we have a community forum attached to that. We had multi-lingual attached to that so that people could chat in multi languages. We have the box, you know, as you said it's pretty much child proof. It's got all of the self service that we called out in the larger website built in there. So I think that people are excited about the opportunity to utilize that in the kind of small, medium business space. What does that do to the economics of the business? If I'm actually taking all this intelligence and this knowledge and codifying it and putting it into the box, does that sort of eat at the core of the services business? Or can you sort of stay ahead of that curve with new types of services? Talk about that a little bit from a business standpoint. From a business standpoint, so I'm a believer in this. My background really is in engineering and I took a move to services intentionally because I think services becomes a differentiator. And I don't think that self service erodes your cost model whatsoever. I think if you can win in the self service online game in VNXE, for example, and all the wonderful things that it provides from a self service standpoint that you can win in the product place. So in other words, you bundle your product and your services together. Service led sales is the old tagline, right? So I don't think you're gonna erode your costs by going there at all. Yeah, so and of course you're in a company that the CEO, Joe Tucci, and even the leader of global services, Howard Elias, always say we're a product company. So what's it like being a services professional in a product company, culturally? So I'll use another one. Behind every great man, there's a great woman, right? So I think that EMC is a tremendous product company and services is really that kind of great woman behind the product because services has been a differentiator and really has helped sell our products as well. And I think we're all very proud of that in services. I think that's true. I mean, I ask customers all the time if you had 100 points to allocate toward the why you buy pie, services always comes up with at least 50 points. Absolutely. And I don't see that changing. So I mean, I'm sure you agree. Services is what makes products sticky. Absolutely, and I think we're all seeing hardware commoditize. Anybody can do the hardware game and software is a differentiator certainly for some period of time but then everybody starts nipping at your heels there. So really services I think is the final frontier. So as I said before, EMC obviously has a very strong services culture. How do you know, how do you differentiate from the competition? Why do you think you're better? I think one, we have a tremendous leadership team in Joe Tucci, in Howard, in Tony Colish. We have a group of people leading that want to invest in the future. So this is a group that is saying to people like me and to the organization, we don't want to play to be even. We want to play to win. We want to be better. We want to leapfrog. Some examples, in places when I came in that we were actually I would say slightly behind in, we have pushed the envelope to try to leapfrog. Multilingual is a place that we've really leapfrogged in one and a half years. We've gotten a chat up in many, many languages up and running for example. We're trying to really leapfrog in the partner space as well. So heavy investment and I think in a really just leadership team that wants to leapfrog the competition. So you mentioned the partners and the channel. How do they, what's their role in services? Where do they pick up? Where do you leave off and how do you brand all that? Talk about that a little bit. I think EMC is moving. Certainly we've had such a wonderful direct model and now we're really embracing the partner community very, very heavily. And I see the partner role really in just collaborating with us to help our customers. EMC is investing heavily in the partner space too. We're looking at a partner portal that is going to run off our new website launch which is a one stop shop. So partners can come, they can look at everything from their sales leads to the marketing campaigns that are available to help them. They can look at our solutions and content. So we're really looking at one stop shop for the partners and really trying to enable them so that they are a partner. I really do see them helping us in all the places that EMC perhaps does need to lower some of the cost models that you've called out. So that's interesting. So you're talking about the partners actually becoming more intimate with through your website. How do you, how do they avoid portal creep, right? They've got all these different systems. They've got their CRM system. They maybe got the deal read system. They've got now the services portal. Have they talked to you about that and what's the answer? So absolutely they have. And you're calling out I think a really relevant problem. What we're seeing is in the larger partners they already have their own website as you're calling out. They already have their partner website and the last thing they want is to have to work with EMC's partner website. What we're doing in the larger partner space is providing service APIs. So instead of you, Dave, as partner having to come to my website, you can use my service APIs to use my chat or to use my solutions or to use my early warning detection for example, my proactive services. So for big company we will provide widgets that you can put onto your partner website of your own. When we get into the smaller partner space they don't have their own websites. And for them we will have our EMC partner website which they'll be able to use. And so from an architectural standpoint you can use our whole partner website or you can use the service APIs and put them on your own site. That's good, so you get the full spectrum covered. Absolutely. If you need the help, we've got it. If you want to pick and choose Chinese menu, here you go, take user APIs, take these widgets or use your own. Yep. And you guys are agnostic to whatever they do as long as they're working with you. Right, and exactly, and we really want to meet their needs so whatever fits their model best. Is that, I mean, is that different from your competition? Do you feel like you're ahead there? Are you catching up there? You mentioned some areas you're catching up. But where does that whole piece that you just mentioned? I think most of our competition, we've done a fairly good competitive analysis, has gone the route of you come to my corporate partner website. And I think where we can leave frog is providing some of the service APIs and allowing the larger partners to do their own thing. Yeah, I think that's a big deal for the channel being responsive to their business models is, you know, there's a big channel land grab going on right now. Absolutely. I think that's one piece that's often overlooked. People throw MDF funds at the channel. Absolutely. But it's these back-end business processes that I think are going to make the difference downstream. Yeah. All right, Julie, my last question. So let's talk about the future. We've touched on it, but so we're here today, 2012. If you look back sort of five years ago, so I kind of describe where services was and where's it going to be five years from now? Give us the little overview there. I think tremendous change and I think it's exciting and I'm really glad to be a part of it. I think the past has been customers largely sitting in an office at a PC desktop, phoning in for service and maybe using some very basic web skills. If we look to the future, I think our customers are working remotely. I think the bulk of them probably aren't sitting in offices. I think they're sitting wherever they want to be, whether that's the beach or their home office. I think they're all largely on mobile devices. So I think they're on everything from iPads to iPhones to whatever comes next in mobility. I think when we see mobility explode even further than it has, pretty soon you're not typing on your mobile device when you want service, you're speaking to your device. So I see text to speech coming into play. So what is the future? The future is our customers working anywhere they want, mobile enabled, probably talking to their mobile device and all of our online service offerings need to provide those capabilities. I think multilingual is a big change. I think because many of these companies are US based big corporations, we've kind of all dabbled in the global thing but with Asia pack rising, et cetera, I think we're gonna see multilingual be expected. It will be expected that we provide content and chat and tooling and other languages. So that'll be part of it. And if I had to wrap the bow around this, I would really say it's any channel in, in your own language, any channel out, mobile enabled and probably speak into your devices. So it's exciting time. My takeaway there is you're touching on all the four big trends in our industry. Cloud, mobile, social and big data. Cloud is really simplicity and self-service. You talked about that. Mobile is I want to consume services the way I want to consume it, when I want to consume it on whatever device. Social, we talked about chat and Twitter and other social channels becoming much more important, especially as the demographics get younger and big data, predictive analytics really changing the way in which organizations perform services and consume services. So Julie, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your vision with us. Great, what's great to be here. A lot of fun, thank you. Thanks everybody for watching and we'll see you next time. Great, thank you.