 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live at EMC World in Las Vegas, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the civil noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. Our next guest is Mike Kohler, the president of EMC Professional Services and guest Mike Von Slomsky, senior director of IT at Marko. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having us. Mike, great to see you again. So give us the update. Last year on theCUBE, we talked about the cloud and the opportunities. Where are we? Give us the update. A lot of work. Is it a heavy lift? It has been, we've talked on this show many, many times as we've talked about cloud and getting to the cloud. Last year we introduced the concept of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud here at EMC World. And that was a proof of concept. It showed very well. And what came out of that was the customer interests continue to grow from just getting to virtualization to really IT transformation and Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So the last year for us has been a lot of heavy lifting of taking those concepts and ideas we showed here around an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and turning that into a solution, both products, but also services. So obviously my role at services been a lot of heavy lifting because the services that sit around an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud are much, much different than a product implementation or just a transference of storage. We'll get some of the use cases and some of the educational things and kind of where the proof points are these days. But we have a customer on Mike Bonsomsky with IT and the insurance market company. So tell us. I mean, you're the guy who's got the problems that you're trying to solve and it's not an easy thing but there's a real advantages of doing it right. So take us through quick overview of the Hybrid Cloud solution that you guys are working on, what you've done, kind of where you were and then what iteration points did you go through to make that happen? Sure, Markel being a company that's largely grown through acquisition, we found ourselves being in a place where we really wanted to take a look at some data center consolidation, bring the infrastructure together so that we could bring the platforms together and the applications. Last year at EMC World we saw the EHE or the Hybrid Cloud being offered and we thought that was kind of a right time, a right fit and it fit our long-term strategy for where we wanted to go from hosting that private cloud and really bringing the standardization in so that as public cloud starts maturing, hybrid cloud, et cetera, we can really start taking advantage of it. So it was kind of a seamless fit of a good timing for us to get involved. So you had a lot of disparate kind of architectures. A lot of disparate architecture, right? A lot of different architectures and again we chose the Converged Data Center through VCE to kind of bring that together and in the past what was really different or hard for us in the cloud space was bringing the APIs together and trying to make all the components fit. Everybody had kind of an open API stack back then but nobody had taken the chance to integrate it and that was kind of the innovation we saw last year with the EHC presentation that made us make this public. So EMC World last year you saw the presentation so take me through just from my own kind of personal curiosity. You go back to the ranch, go back to the company. What do you say? Hey, I just saw this epic thing. Look at this really cool stuff. Let's do this. What happened? I mean, did you have to sell it through? Was it pretty much a no-brainer? Was there challenges going on? I think it married up with when we presented kind of what our five-year roadmap for IT was and how we wanted to bring the Converged Infrastructure together and start making a play on leveraging applications across divisions. It made sense to us because the standardization that the cloud brings, the automation that it brings fit exactly what we was into our plans. When you think about today where the old story, it takes five weeks to build a server and go through the process, et cetera. Our IT teams are spending so much time just trying to meet the demands of the business as opposed to looking at things like digital technology and hybrid cloud and big data, et cetera, where they can really bring that innovation and focus. Yeah, I want to drill down on some of the use cases around big data and a little drill down, but Mike, I want to go to your take on this because we're at Joe Tucci up on stage this morning and Joe, I've gotten to know Joe over the years and he's kind of afraid to come on theCUBE these days because it's the first CUBE experience, but Joe, you know it's coming back on any time. We'd love to have you. Storage is sexy, we know that. Gone beyond that. The education involved, so the use cases. So what we have here is classic pattern we're seeing in cloud which is, okay, there's some serious issues to resolve. Now there's kind of a road mapping and educational process going on in real time, kind of parallel paths of tool up, transformation and education. What do you guys see for use cases and what are some other customer situations like this that you've seen? Yeah, so it's funny because over the last year we really hone these conversations with our customers and we built and we engage with our customers. Not anyone customer starts at the same place. So everybody's either on a road to IT transformation and to a hybrid cloud scenario, but there's other customers that have never not even started. So we kind of go to where our customers are. We start with some of our customers are just completely undecided, meaning they don't really have a roadmap yet. They don't know how to get started. So we engage with them not on a, let's talk about implementation. Let's talk about building an IT transformation road map with you. There's another set of customers that may have that roadmap, but don't have a way to think about the legacy application environment because it's one thing to stand up the infrastructure doesn't produce value. So you actually put applications, either legacy transitioning over or building up new. So we do a lot of work with customers on the application transformation that goes on. What's the success for them? Because you have a couple of things. You guys, you work for EMC, but you've got EMC as those channel partners that will go talk to end user customers really trying to solve these hard problems and change the airplane engine out of 35,000 feet as they say. So it's challenging. So what have you seen has been successful? Do you guys come in and do a lot of the legwork? Do you guys, what's the partnership with the customer look like? And Mike, could you comment on your take after? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the values where we brought in EMC to help us just do the discovery piece. We knew we had a lot of disparate technologies out there, but at the same time, our guys are taking care of the day to day business. So EMC was able to come in and really augment us and help us figure out what do we have? Why do we have it? How's it connected? What's the conversation it's having? And more importantly, as we went through that data with them, do the analysis to come back and say, these are the things that are kind of cloud ready. You may need to make some changes. And these are some legacy platform things that may not be ready to fit. And that was really a big win for us to be able to get that decision analytics up front to decide how do we move forward from here? So it was a partnership you'd say? Absolutely. Was it like a menu of services? Or was it real time? It was more consultative, I think, yeah, yeah. Definitely. And that's what we're definitely seeing. You'd like to be as scripted and as menu-driven, but it really is, everybody's different. And so it is consultative-less engagements that have high customization around the customer model. But you must get some good data points around best practices. We didn't lock them in as recipes, if you will. Absolutely. And to the point of the discovery tools, the way we actually approach that, a lot of times we help customers build a business case. And so we've really gotten the nice templates down around what does legacy cost look like? What does it look like? And when you can get to the new model. And that's helpful. So you're learning with your customers? I mean, learning, yeah, we're refining the, yeah, we're evolving. I mean, we're evolved because this is, it's not just a technology conversation. It's about what do I do with my organization? What do I do with my applications? And what do I do with my infrastructure? So that's a much broader conversation consultative-led than we at EMC has just workly done. So Mike, talk about this transformation. So hybrid cloud is just a component. What's beyond hybrid cloud? Can you share more? And what did EMC bring to the table? Because digital transformation is like, now the buzzword, but that's essentially business transformation. Right. Well, again, I think what they bring to the table is, it's not just a technology change out. It really starts changing the business process, not only with an IT, but how that workflow and how the business operates. You know, and being able to bring that in and help us get a leg start of, you know, knowing the right questions to ask and how to ask them. And more importantly, how to start framing that workflow that needs to be put in place to start leveraging the technology that's underneath it is really one of the things that's made a big difference. How about operations? Because DevOps kind of comes into the conversation. You hear OpenStack out there, all this, you know, Gelsinger's up there about OpenStack and you got VMware, all this stuff going on. What about your ops? What has changed? And what's new and or different about how you guys run your ops? Because you got a little bit of multiple disparate stuff coming together. You get the hybrid cloud. What's kind of going on for your operating model? So from a software-defined hybrid cloud model, it really brought the platform teams together. You know, traditionally where you had the storage teams and the server teams and the network teams, now all of a sudden those guys are really performing the same type of functions underneath the software-defined type data center. And the same thing on the application development side, you know, by being able to stream in, you know, a small, medium, large service kind of on demand for them, but keeping them in a standard platform window is starting to change the way they approach their development. And the whole idea that, or the term that we've kind of coined is ruthless standardization. And that's been the big driver and part of what I think EMC's helped us get over the hurdle with so that when we get to the hybrid cloud question and we do want to look outside at a public offering, you know, our standardization is done or applications have conformed to something that's specific and it'll be much easier to make differences. Do you guys have a lot of developers on site? We do, we run almost three to 400 developers all in-house. What's the cloud development model for you guys? Is it, is there a DevOps ethos or is it more of? It's definitely evolving. I mean, we're brand new, we're building it out. So it's definitely an evolving model as we go forward. And that's part of what the teams are looking at today is exactly that. How do I change what I used to do in the past where maybe I had some servers stashed off the side and I'd go play with something versus I can rapidly stand it up and get something published and bring that into play. Mike, EMC, talk about the Federation's role in services because basically today's Federation Day here at EMC world, you have all the big guns up there, Tucci, Moritz, Gelsinger, they're kind of all hanging together. There's a unified front there, but they're all separate companies. You get to play across the Federation and has that relate to IT as a service and hybrid cloud. So we do, the Federation, it's a federation enterprise hybrid cloud is just that it's a federated offering. And so what we've done across the services organizations is sat in a room and said, what are the outcomes we want to drive from a service standpoint? But what does a customer want to buy? Forget the organizational structure of the Federation, but what are those outcomes? And then what we've done is lined our portfolios around that. So when we approach a customer, we talk about the outcome with customer buys that takes us up on that. We then have organized ourselves to a strong roles in program project management. VMware has very strong roles in the VMware technology. So we've already done pre-packaging of who does what and how that actually shows up in front of the customer. And you make that transparent to the customer that you bring them in when you want. No, I mean, transparent is in terms of touch points. Yeah, we want to make it look like one organization. And that is the goal and the mission. And customers should expect we bring the best to bear whenever it happens. And that's what we've been committed to do. So, Mike and Mark, I'll talk about the last minute we have here, kind of your challenges going forward, opportunities that will presented from these challenges as you solve them. And what's on the roadmap around things like big data? I mean, insurance, I mean, makes, you know, I mean, my friend's got a Tesla. I don't have that kind of dough yet, but it knows everywhere. He knows he rolls through the stop signs. He knows it. I mean, that's gold for insurance company. Well, absolutely. And it's just those types of things that the teams were hoping will be able to leverage their time now to do as opposed to today, where they're spending the same time just running the business, trying to keep the lights on, et cetera. It's really being able to shift that focus into the innovation side. And do a forward look with the business and understand what do they need? What do they think they want? And how can we leverage IT to provide that? So you'd say that you're level setting and then investing on top of that? Absolutely. Okay, so what's your advice to folks out there who are not here at EMC World or and are in the same situation we had earlier customer on. It's like an email service could go down at any minute. I mean, literally house on fire kind of situation to, you know, just organizational challenges. In your case, disparate architectures to getting level set and then transforming. What advice would you give those folks out there that you've learned that have been magnified through your experience? I think it's got to be, it's not just an IT play. It's really a business play and a change. And I think one of the things that we tried to do early on was engage our business and make them understand what was going to be different and how was it going to be different. And what IT could bring as a lever for them. I think that engagement is driven back down through the development community and our side Markel as well as the IT platform teams to start initiating those types of change. It always sounds easy to me, but I know it's not. What's the hardest thing about doing that? Getting business focus. Is it just the blocking and tackling the meetings? Is it just mindsets? It's the blocking and tackling and the learning that you got to remember. Not all of us are in the IT business, right? And so we can't come in and tell them about the greatest new widget we got. But what we can come in is talk about how their process works, how the workflow works and what kind of, you know, how can we leverage what we're bringing to the table. Business guy says data lake in the IT guys. No, no, we don't have data lakes, we have data. We have data. Lots of good marketing data lakes, good way to visualize it and certainly great opportunity once you get level set conversion infrastructure. You see big growth in that area. And that's where, you know, so for us in the services, the engagement we're having with customers is all about a big data visioning. It's how, what could it do for me? So to get everybody, the business minds open, IT minds open and what is the concept mean? And then we kind of go into a proof of value conversation because everyone wants to look at it and say, if I spend the money, is there anything real here? And so we're having a lot of proof of concept. I mean it's cliche, but outcome driven business now with internet of things, everything's connected. Everything's connected, but you know, a lot of people I think look at it and say, yeah, but I've got all these data warehouses and I've got all that, so what's different? And so that's where we spend a lot of time talking about the visioning of it. Well, I think, you know, the future EMC worlds we're going to have the new benchmark, which is if you don't have real-time data, you're going to fire it because it's all there. There's no excuse for it, that's exactly right. Everything's connected, you can measure everything. All right, a hybrid cloud, again, John and Martin since early days and it's super exciting. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing your story and your experience in journey of hybrid cloud federated solutions here. This is theCUBE, sharing everything here from EMC World 2015. We'll be right back after this short break.