 Well, so, let's see where it goes, I mean. Okay, we're back, are we on? Okay, we're back live inside the Cube, SiliconANGLE.tv's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, the founder, SiliconANGLE.tv, and I'm Joe, my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. We're here with Tom Roloff, a frequent Cube guest. Tom, great to see you. Good to see you, Dave. As always, head of EMC Consulting, and wow, what an event. This is just a super bowl for you guys. Fantastic, yeah, fantastic. It's great to see. I think we're growing a few thousand a year, it seems like, right? Yeah, we just had Jeremy on. He was very candid with the numbers, or he said 13,000 people here, but he said 9,000 paid. Usually the CMO doesn't die in that number, but it's a good number. It's good to see his parents in the numbers, but one thing he was highlighting is that 3,000 of those attendees are partners, so this is a social event, he really wants it to be social and comprehensive at the same time, so. It's a great way to exchange information with everybody, right? Not just about the new strategies from what we're talking about at the exec level, but also just getting down to the weeds on some things and getting some partners to go put hands on. Do you talk about the V Labs that we got going on? Some of the hands-on labs? No, no, just he talked about Area 51, we didn't talk about the V Labs, but tell us what's going on there. Well, you know, I think heavy investment by the technology groups here to go create an ability to go play with EMC gear. We've done that before, but now in a virtual lab kind of environment, so it's all on virtual machines, it's all on various EMC, VCE, and VMware technologies being used so that people can get very hands-on experience, not just with the EMC product, but with it as part of an architecture solution. Yeah, that's cool. I saw that actually a couple of years ago. Maybe it was last year at VMworld. Yeah, and we did the page out of that. That's right, that's right. Same idea. That's good. So, and then you guys had the CIO event. Absolutely. It was the second time you've done that, or? Yeah. You know, I love to see EMC building relationships with CIOs. I think as we start talking about IT transforming through cloud and the business getting transformed through big data, those are much more, you know, very senior level conversations. And so, certainly the consulting teams very involved in those conversations on a day-to-day basis, but it's great to see the company overall create a special event for CIO. So, it was fun to see. So, Tom, we just did a survey on Wikibon on IT transformation, kind of leading up to this event. And some of the things that came out of it is people really, we asked them, what are you going to be looking to the outside? Outside services for in 2012. Certainly cloud deployment. Some of them, cloud strategy, we're still trying to get our hands around cloud strategy, which is kind of interesting. And a big data strategy. Not at all big data deployment, you know. Hadoop deployments, big data deployments, way, way, way down, but big data strategy very high on the list. Are you seeing that in your business? Yeah, you know, on the big data side, I think everybody's worried about, are my competitors in my industry learning something about my industry that I'm not learning? What do they know that I don't know? But there's an element of, can you tell me what other people in financial services are doing with big data? Because if they're doing something I should be doing, I better find out about it quick, right? So, there's an element of where the consulting group has had a chance to kind of do a couple of different engagements. We'll bring some perspectives on, hey, this is the kind of big data challenge you ought to be thinking about, and they're like, we got that problem, right? So, and it becomes a, I'll be honest with you, I think on the big data side, the problems are actually not new, but the technology architectures and the fact that we can now get our arms around all this big data is new. And so, we're starting to be able to answer those problems in a different way, right? It doesn't require a three month consulting study. It can be a three week consulting study, and then rapid prototyping of some solutions. So, we're out talking to the field all the time. Customers, Dave's got the survey going, and we're also blogging in the services angle space. But one thing that's pretty clear, the messaging of EMC is so solid right now. You got Jeremy, who's just on CloudMeets big data. It's a nice cover story, because outside of the web verticals and financial services and government, which is real, the cutting edges right now. So, they're all on top of it. Outside of that, all the other major verticals, oil and gas, pharma, healthcare, all the usual Sussex media, you guys are targeting. They understand the mandate for big data and cloud, but they really need some advice. So, the good news is, your team's positioned perfectly with the consulting and the services side. So, what have you guys heard from there, and what are you delivering today in terms of solutions? Because we're hearing, hey, I just want to get, I want to learn more. So, it's kind of a learning environment. Again, outside of the web scale, and the real. Totally right, totally right. You know, I think this is one where, so we've always built EMC Consulting to have a vertical dimension to it. So, we, of the consultants in our group, about half of them have come from an industry, and basically consult only to that industry, the other half come in a horizontal dimension. That vertical capability and that vertical conversation is very important on the big data side, because our vertical consultants are actually talking to the line of business side of the house, right? So, they're talking to somebody who's running a part of a pharmaceutical company. You know, they're running R&D in a pharmaceutical company, and to them, big data problems are, they don't think of them as big data problems, right? They think about it as, how do I accelerate drug discovery, right? How do I get to the point where I understand how to shrink the life cycle of, you know, my R&D process? Those problems have been around for a long, long time, right? They have been business problems for a long, long time. Now we have a way to say, hey, you know, one of the ways to do that is to move data around in a very different way. So, the business problem has a technology angle to it now, that's essentially having the business and technology problems merge, right? Which I think is the interesting thing about the... What, share with the folks out there what you've learned around this, because what you're really talking about as the old sales model and service model is, go after the IT guys, you know, CIO and the worker bees down there. Now you're, the line of business dynamic is interesting because they're talking a different language. They're not saying, hey, give me, provision me more cloud. They're saying, hey, I want to drive more revenue. So, how have you, how do you approach that? You also got a huge team. Can you share with your strategy? Yeah, so, I mean, I think this is the, you know, we're very vertically oriented in that conversation, right? So, if we're talking to a telco, and the telco's problem is customer churn, that's been a problem in telco for forever, right? But now we can actually give them insights into customer churn, not just by looking at their internal structured data, but by looking at, you know, all kinds of information. We can sit there and say, you know, hey, did you realize that when three people that are frequently called by your subscriber leave the network, here's the impact on that person's chance of leaving the network, right? That's a different angle on churn. When a bank says, I don't know, John, that you've got the brokerage account and the banking account and, you know, the wealth management account, we don't know it's the same John, you know, that's been a problem for forever, right? Multi-channel and 360 degree view of a customer, that's the way a line of business person talks about, I got to understand my customers so I can market to them differently. So is EMC structure on verticals not territories? So EMC consulting is. Consulting. So EMC consulting, especially in the Americas, is, goes to market vertically and brings in a technology consulting capability as the vertical, as needed in that vertical. And that's especially useful in the big data. Yeah, so you give that telco example on churn and say everybody has that problem and now there's the big data issue, so it's more than just when your cell phone subscription is up, right? It could be the products that are in the portfolio, you know, Sprint gets iPhone, that changes the dynamic, the whole pricing model. So when you talk about this three week big data, you know, initiative for the strategy piece, you know, where does it start? Does it start by looking, obviously, objectives and things like that, but I mean, people must be trying to figure out what data is even out there that I can leverage. So you guys have expertise in that. And we'll walk in with a perspective and say, look, you know, these are the kind of classical problems that you've been talking about. And, you know, we know most of the accounts that we're working in and I don't know if it's churn that we're talking about, you know, we might say, look, churn is a, here's the problem. Here's the way you've been thinking about solving a churn problem. Here's the information you've been looking at to get insight into your churn. And there's all kinds of analytics being done on churn all the time, right? But let's imagine that we expanded the scope of the data that you're looking at into not just the structured data, but into some unstructured data that's sitting in your enterprise. What about unstructured data that's beyond your enterprise? In the demand chain, in the supply chain, if you can sit there and say, hey, when the new iPhone comes out, here's what happens to customer churn even in the existing iPhone environment, right? So we know when that new iPhone's coming out, how's that going to affect the appetite for people to consider switching to a different provider all of a sudden? You could bring all that information together now. Now it's a massive amount of information, right? It's no longer the stuff sitting in rows and columns in your structured databases. It's all kinds of information that's coming together. And now you get into a interesting, I wish I had all that information, how do I actually gather some insight out of all that information? Now it's a technology problem, right? So now it becomes a, how do I bring all that together? How do I look at it in one place? How do I analyze it? How do I get in front of that? And when we do, we can bring very different insights to an old problem. So Tom, I was at the EMC-CIO event in the fall that I saw you there, and then you've had another event here. And I thought you guys really nailed it. I mean, very, from an infrastructure standpoint, it was a home run, you know? And Sanjay talked about transformation. It's still a little infrastructure heavy. I thought one of the areas that, well, you talk to CIOs in the, for instance, SAP community, that I thought could be a little stronger for you guys is the whole mobility. And I'm wondering, because EMC Consulting usually sort of is ahead of the rest of the ship. So what's happening in mobility? Are you guys involved in those types of discussions? Are CIOs, I mean, it's clearly top of mind. Is it top of mind in your customers? Huge, huge. So we're doing some work in banking right now, right? Where, you know, I think we're helping a large credit card manufacturer to think about an e-wallet, right? So we can help them develop the application that is the e-wallet. But ultimately, we've got to create the user interface on the iPhone, on the iPad, on the mobile device that you and we will all be carrying around, right? Very strong conversations about what's that user experience like? How are we going to actually enable a mobile worker in that way? And by the way, what's the technology infrastructure that links that to home base, so to speak, right? I mean, particularly in banking, by the way, just huge amounts of effort right now being spent on how do I render information to a user in the way that they want to consume it? And how do I ensure that I've got a user interface and a way to interact with all that information that extends the enterprise's information to the user in the right way? I mean, huge, huge set of work there. So I wanted to follow up on that because, you know, traditional complaint of consultants is they come in, they do some great work, and then you say, okay, let's do it, and they can't turn strategy into execution. Obviously, that's a big part of your value proposition. You can do that. My specific question is, when you look at Pivotal Labs, the acquisition you guys made, how can you as EMC Consulting, in the context of strategy taking it to execution, take advantage of that? So I think that Pivotal Labs is such an interesting capability, right? I mean, the app dev side of big data is a huge issue. Ultimately, we got to get all that, you know, all that analytics data that we've got. We got to go figure out a way to put it into a workflow and we got to render it to the people in the right way. Pivotal Labs has, you know, a hugely unique way of using agile development techniques to go make that happen. And I think that's a critical part of extending the enterprise's information to the end user. By, you know, in their case, they've done a lot of work on the website, but I think it's very easily extendable to end user devices. Do you see leveraging that in your practice or is it too far afield right now? You know, I think we'll find ways, you know, Pivotal, I think, has a very strong set of capabilities and I want to find ways to ensure that we're bringing Pivotal into the things where Pivotal wants to help and my consulting team will handle certain other parts of it, right? I don't want to distract Pivotal too much but the opportunity to bring them in together would be a good thing. It is, you know, as somebody who's bought a couple of consultancies here at EMC, it's an amazing distraction all of a sudden when you bring in a new, you know, a new shiny object like that and all of a sudden tell- Turns the conversation- Right. You tell 2,000 salespeople, you know, here's an interesting thing, right? All of a sudden 2,000 people want to help, right? So, I think we got to do that in a measured way. And certainly it's a gateway drug, if you will, to that shiny object to a good land DevOps. So, you know, DevOps is becoming one of the hottest areas and Bill Schmarzo has been on theCUBE multiple times. They've called him the Dean of Big Data here because he's just so, he's big and he's good. But, you know, real time has been a big part of the conversation, Jeremy Burden, essentially teasing out, I kind of predicted that's the next pillar, a cloud of big data in real time. And so, that's a real conversation around business benefits. So, you know, having that shiny object in the DevOps space, so if you can bridge that app development, you'll win the hybrid cloud. You know, I think that's part of the idea behind the Pivotal Acquisition, right? I think they're excited about the analytics conversation we're having and the capabilities that they have in agile development of apps. I think the rest of the company just can't wait to find ways to bring them into the right conversations without defocusing them from what they're doing. So, from an execution standpoint, then what you're saying is a strategy is, okay, let's mind our business, we're growing enough to do on our own plate. Let them kind of integrate in slowly. They've got business that they're doing. Marcus not fully merged yet, is growing. You've got to get the workflow and the mechanics done, right? It's rather than throwing them all together. That's right. And let's be complimentary, right? I mean, they've got a great set of capabilities. Let's help them to grow into the enterprise accounts that we want them to grow into. Let's find complimentary ways to work together in those accounts. It's just not blocking them. It's just basically don't tinker with what's not broken. Just don't. Yeah, it's not broken yet. So, let's let it ride. Best move is no move right now, right? Yeah, I mean, this is, I think you've seen pretty good at, you know, we've done so many acquisitions as a company, right? I think the idea of, you know, there are times when you want to integrate quickly. There are times when you don't. This is one of those times when I think you don't. I think the Green Plum guys are taking a bite off that apple right now, because it's a real boost of energy for the Green Plum team, because they're now moving into a much more sexier, relevant area than just an appliance against pterodactyl, right? So they go, okay. Now they come to the real story. Absolutely right. And some real meat in the bone. Absolutely right. So, you know, let them play with it for a while. They're going to embrace it for a while. That's probably the right place for them to connect. Gilcook was all smiles at Pivotal when you were on the Maggie Perch show. Yeah, we had him on yesterday, by the way. Yeah, he was all smiles yesterday, too. Things are good there. Tom, I want to come back to cloud. We did a survey recently, and we asked one of the questions that we asked last year. And it was basically, you know, which are primary cloud strategies? Is it public? Is it private? Is it hybrid? You don't know. It's clouds of buzzword, blah, blah, blah. And one of the things that came out last year is a very small percentage of the audience, single digits, said that hybrid cloud was their primary strategy. So I said, okay, classic, you know, EMC marketing ahead of the reality. We did the same exact survey this month, and the number of shots of the roof went from like 9% to 37%. It was the single biggest strategy. What was the time frame between those two things? One year, exactly one year. And we surveyed the same people. It's the Wikibon practitioner base. And so that popped out. And I said, wow, that's quite amazing. So I'm looking for confirmation, you know? Oh, yeah. So are you seeing that? Oh, yeah. And if you roll back a year, was there a lot of skepticism on hybrid? Is that now changing? What's changed? Yeah, you know, so at times when I get in front of a larger audience, I get a chance to go, you know, give some perspectives on cloud. And I have used a number of slides as an introductory to that conversation. You know, and I think a year and a half ago, the slide said, you know, 90% of all data centers will have a private cloud strategy in 2012. And when I said that in late 2010, you know, people would come up to me afterward and say no way, right? This is all hype. This is not going to happen, right? When I have that conversation with people today, there is actually, I asked it of the CIOs at the CIO Connect event. There were 70 in the room and I said, which of you does not have a private cloud point of view and strategy in your enterprise? Nobody raised their hand, right? So in that audience, it was 100% who were doing the private cloud thing. Now a year and a half ago, people thought it was all hype. My second slide on that is in 2016, Gardner just went out and said in 2016, 50% of your data, even in regulated industries, will be sitting in a public cloud. And you know, you say that to people today and they're like, no way, right? In a regulated environment, there's no way I can, I can't afford to do that, right? But I think four years, so they say 2016 at Gardner, I think that's way too long. I think that is happening right now, right? So public clouds are taking to heart the complexities around governance, risk compliance of information. I think enterprises are thinking hard about what information can I actually let out and what would have to be true of the public cloud environment for me to put it out there. And once you get some things moving out in the public cloud and you've got a private cloud, now you do have a hybrid cloud strategy, right? Because ultimately those things have to be connected. Now you guys, speaking of cloud, you just announced the number of cloud services recently. So give us a quick update on that and then we'll, we got a break. Yeah, so I think global services overall is really excited about the cloud opportunity because it's, from a consulting side, there's a people process and technology angle to that, right? There's a technology architecture, which we got to get right. Then there's a process piece to that, how do we change the business processes in the data center around cloud and how do we get people to be ready for working in the cloud and they need different skill sets. So consulting is going to be very interested in the people process and technology side of cloud. But my compatriots in our technology solutions group, there's all kinds of EMC technologies that are a part of that, right? How do we make sure that we're creating a seamless way for a client to have a conversation that may be a little bit upstream when it's an architecture conversation, but rapidly gets into a specific conversation about, hey, VBlock is an interesting architecture for that converged infrastructure. How do we make sure that that's a much more seamless conversation for our clients? And then ultimately, how do we get a support organization that can support the architecture, not just the individual products? How do we get to the point where we say, you've got a cloud, we in EMC services can help you support that entire cloud architecture? EMC consulting, the tip of the spear of transformation, Tom Rolloff, always a pleasure. Great to see you. Tom, good to see you. Good to see you guys. All right, keep it right there. We'll be right back with Pat Kelsinger right after this. Thanks, guys.