 tell them. Okay, we are here at EMC World in Las Vegas. It is the biggest show for EMC as a company. EMC also owns VMworld and RSA. If you combine those three shows, as Jeremy Burton said, those numbers would be bigger than Oracle. So EMC is clearly thinking, not like the old EMC. If you look at the parts of VMware, EMC and RSA, you can throw a document in there. This is bigger than Oracle. So this is their core show. EMC is rolling out the big message around cloud and big data. And that's their theme, Dave. And they're kicking ass. And EMC is doing a great job. They're attracting some great talent, great management team. And they're making a change in the industry. Totally transformed the company from a storage industry to pure infrastructure player enabling massive change with virtualization and new applications. So it's exciting here. InterRop is right down the street. And we got all of the analysis covered on theCUBE with wikibond.org at SiliconANGLE.com. I'm John Furrier. I'm here with Dave Vellante. And our guest is Tony Kholish, SVP of Customer Service and Support. He's been on theCUBE in Palo Alto for the extraction point. Welcome to theCUBE, our flagship product at the events. ESPN in the trailer. We're still working on every dollar we make goes right into the equipment. And we're going to up our game every year, as we say to Jeremy Burton. So thanks for coming in. How you been? Very good. Thank you. So what's new with you here at the show? We talked a couple of weeks ago last month in Palo Alto. Take us through your EMC world agenda. What are you going through right here? Because I think folks want to know, what does an executive do? Are you talking to customers? Are you talking to the sales force? Before I do that, though, I'll harken back to our discussion in Palo Alto. We were talking about VCE and we were talking about the parent companies that owned it. And you said, well, doesn't Intel have a little chunk of that? Yeah, vice. Vice. I said, you know, we were going to do anything at Las Vegas. That would be the time to rebrand VCE. And I was quickly slapped down. It's not VMware, EMC and Cisco. It's virtual computing environment. Yeah, but Dave and I love the joke on the vice. It's kind of our inside joke. It's getting some virality in the marketplace. It's good. So Tony, obviously a lot going on in your world. I've been following EMC for a long time. It used to be actually a really easy company to understand, you know, kind of a one product company, but it's not anymore. It's a zillion product companies. As the products get more granular, that puts a ton of pressure on your organization to support these products. I mean, I often say I talk to customers about, you know, why do you buy it? A lot of times the answer is because I get great service. I get great support. So I mean, and the products are getting more complex. We're looking at a lot of big data action now. So how do you guys stay in the forefront of that? How do you continue to do a good job servicing customers? What kind of pressures does that put on you? How do you stay on top of it? Well, the management team, and it starts with that and just the innate culture that really truly exists at EMC is that basic service culture is something that you can't buy that I'm actually a custodian of. And it is really deep and it's really, really authentic. And, you know, that's as a starting moniacal, Pat Gelsinger says. And it's true. It really is. And you know, really, I mean, I heartfelt really believe that if you're going to do this job, any place in our industry EMC is the place to do it because you don't have to proselytize everybody does get so. So it's really focus now. Now, how about all this big data stuff? We're hearing about the big data. You got green plum coming on and eventually you're not supporting. Are you supporting green plum today? Okay, so that's already done. And, and, and that's just going to get more robust, more complicated. Right. What's the process for absorbing a new asset like that in? How do you make that seamless for a customer? Well, we start with adapting ourselves to the business model that we're trying to use for that particular product set. So we don't actually have a cookie cutter that says this is the way we do an integration. We take a look at the way the company is organizing the business. Is it actually being folded in or is it being organized as a mini company within a company? And we start with that as our template and say, how do we need to then adapt to that as an organization? And then we start off with some basic guiding principles about what do we want to achieve like basic service consistency? One of the things I think we do much better now than we used to do is look for things that they do really well, and don't kill them. And actually figure out how to identify those things and proliferate them around the rest of the service organization, because there's all these great ideas that are being generated by these companies in their startup mode. And we want to hold on to this. So you're not dogmatic about it, but you try to take the best of what you've learned before. That's right. Apply that, learn some things that are new, somehow save that corporate memory. Exactly. Yeah. And frankly, we weren't as good at it a few years ago as we are now, but we're maturing as a acquiring company. People don't think of services as they don't think of services and innovation in the same sentence. Why not? And is that fair? And can you can you talk about innovation and services? Yeah, I mean, I don't know why they don't because it's certainly a changing game and whether we want it to be or not, customers are demanding different ways to consume service and to not have service. You know, that's their best thing. So whether we like it or not, the marketplace is driving us to innovate. And we actually pride ourselves on that at EMC. So we have an attitude that we take when we're approaching services, which is how can we amplify our company's opportunities, not just adapt to and get ready for about how can we actually add a little fuel to the fire and either make the opportunity bigger or differentiate the company or take market share faster or something like that. So it starts with that attitude. And that has yielded, you know, kind of a lot of innovation over the last few years. Use a lot of technology in your support organization. I mean, talk a little bit about the technology that you use and how that's evolving. I mean, customers, you know, they used to just call up, right? Yeah, that's right. They don't do that anymore. I mean, some do, but a lot of different channels. How do you manage all those channels? What are they? You know, talk about that a little bit. Well, you know, that's one of our main themes is that we want to be able to engage customers in any channel that they choose under any scenario or circumstance that they find appropriate and in any language that they choose. And to your point, it used to be pick up the phone. And now we want to be able to say if you want to go to the website and you want to find things yourself, if you want to ask other customers how to solve problems, if you want to engage in chat and all those kinds of things we want to enable in addition to picking up the phone. That's been driving a lot of services, technology, innovation over the last few years. And the customer adoption has just been absolutely as outstanding of the new features we put out there. Now, I know in a lot of situations, so chat is growing, I presume, right? I mean, a lot of people like to use chat and a lot of companies that I've researched, their approach, their protocol is that they force their agents to handle simultaneous chats. We all know this, right? We call up a company, we go to the web, we're in a chat session and their response rate is very slow. I was in a chat the other day, I won't name the company. I'm like, hello? Are you there? Hello? Are you multitasking? And yeah, because they want them to manage three or four open chats simultaneously. Do you allow that at EMC when they're chatting or is it a one to one interaction? One to one. It's all one to one. It's all one to one. And we aim for a sub-two-minute response. Sub-two minute response? And is that the key metric? Is how fast you can respond and solve a problem? Well, the benchmarks show that after two minutes the abandon rate goes off the cliff. So that's about the time limit patient. Okay, so it's two minutes to engage. Two minutes to engage. Okay. And then we found through the nature of the interaction with chat we're solving problems two-thirds faster than any other channel. Really? Two-thirds faster? Two-thirds faster. And part of it is because we're using this technology with chat that engages the right engineer for the right kind of problem. So it avoids some of the things that we get with phone where somebody tries to interpret what the customer problem is, puts it in a queue for somebody to pick up and it might be right or might be wrong. This gets at a much higher hit rate. Somebody qualified to handle the problem, engaged in less than two minutes. So it's an IVR for chat like technology? Is that the way to think about it? It is. And it's effective. It is very effective. Tony, question for you and sorry about the background noise. I'm going to shut the pavilion down. Can you have them work on that? Please. There's a pavilion and that's a lean a little bit. Jeremy Burton, Pat Gelsinger, all the execs were on. All your peers. Cloud meets big data. That's the messaging. They all have to use big data in their job. You are living big data. We talked in Palo Alto. It's core to your mission to use data because you have to deal with customers and service them in whatever channel and vehicle that they need to be serviced at the level you are. And you guys are winning awards, big time, doing that. So you're kind of doing great in the world's changing. So what's your strategy for maintaining that level of performance of customer service and then how are you going to use big data to make it better? It's really very exciting times. I mean to your point we've been using management by metrics as a mantra for the last several years and you know we have one of the very first data scientists from my team actually. This guy is Frank Coleman who's just been really instrumental in bringing this stuff together so that we have one source of the truth, fact-based assessments of ourselves, fact-based conversations with sales people and customers and now these new tools that we have are opening up all kinds of new possibilities and to your point you know we respond to millions of service requests every year and when you think about how much intelligence that provides us that we can use in all kinds of ways if we actually had the right kind of tools to actually analyze it. Frankly we didn't have those tools until very recently and now we can start looking at things which are across that vast amount of service request data for things that can prevent problems from happening in the first place with customers and can make our processes better and can feed information to them quicker and so on. It's a very very exciting process. And then Jeremy Burton was talking about the marketing side of it to reach their customers. You guys are going to have to do the same but you have all the customer data because you service the customers. Is there going to be an intersection? Are you guys talking you and Jeremy and the marketing teams and the customer support teams? Yes I mean I expect that we will be one of the similar to the way our IT organization is with a lot of our virtualization technology. I expect that we will be one of the first adopters of you know making the story true. EMC is known for dog-fooding or drinking their own wine and look more if someone says better visual than dog fooding which is you know California term but drinking your own wine as another California term but what can you share the folks out there that you guys are doing internally that's the best practice that you're rolling out to your customers with bit with big data or in general just you know innovations well I do I think the services technology stuff is really really cutting-edge it's this critical mass of user experience functionality and we're talking in Mola before this is this concept of being able to let customers engage us in any channel that they choose in any circumstance that they think is appropriate and any any language that they choose is a real innovation for us and so that has a services technology component that's really really key and so we're starting to as we were talking about chat before and the next thing that we think is a real treasure trove of value to provide to customers is going to be the community forms and that's a some untapped potential and again in all languages so one of the cool things that we're going to do with forms for example as we're about to launch them in nine different languages but we're going to pre-populate them with content from the other languages and con and move the content back and forth so that we get this amplification effect well Tony you have a big data example of sort of dog-fooding I know we wrote about this on wikibon you guys at the TSI conference just recently won award I think it was your second year in a row that's right you won the award for using analytics in your business that's right so you're kind of using a form of big data I don't know how big it is actually a maybe you could talk about that a little bit what's that all about it's huge I mean as we were saying it's that we do millions of service requests a year and so that the data that we mine to be able to assess our performance is from that set of data one of the cool things that we do which I think has also got some more life coming with it with the new tools so we have this thing called an early warning system that really is a propensity for things to blow up at a customer either from technical risks or from political and emotional risk so things where we can see there's a set of circumstances going on with a customer that may be presenting some kind of outage risk or some kind of application failure risk as well as things which are things like they've just had a lot of service requests so maybe they're getting a little impatient with having to engage us all the time so we've been using that as further our history of trying to be proactive with the support we provide there's more now that we have these new tools with big data we can start doing that on a whole nother level about proactive service and getting really early indicators of technical and other risks that are going on with the customer. So this is an anticipatory capability that allows you to predict a potential event and avoid certain failures and other customer disasters. That's right and we want to start showing that to customers so so far we've been using that and we see some real potential and actually exposing that to customers to let them know that says look we saw these conditions occurring with you and here's what we did to take it off the table so that they you know it's good if they know that we're not waiting for that. You've given them some love there well it's we've come a long way from phone home haven't we. That really is I mean EMC was one of the innovators that actually I think the innovator of phone home if I recall certainly in the storage business and I would I think actually in the IT business in the early days John EMC basically you know Symmetrics had this phone home capability when there was a problem would phone into the war room and you know if you've ever been you know on a tour of EMC back in those days and I had your bottom modem you know that's exactly right you know they were all attached to mainframes and you got start ringing glory days baby that was you know and when ET was at some point now the customers are now connected in another way they're just diversely connected they got you know iPhones and mobile devices more connection points right and so it's omnidirectional access to your customer base so that's a data problem in and of itself but but I want to hear Tony your view on some of the challenges that you're seeing in the customer environment because EMC is changing its brand it's its customer base is growing more it's most a lot more solution-oriented yep multi-vendor we chatted about what are the some of the challenges what are the hard things that you guys have have accomplished and what are the challenges going forward well it's a good point is infusing new acquisition service organizations with the service culture is a big challenge and what something that we every single time presents some new challenges is that the EMC expectations among this customer base are really high so just as a basic old management challenge that remains every single time we do an acquisition and to the point you just we're getting better at it I think that's going to stop I hope not Pat Gelsinger is good we try to get Pat to tell us but there's a long list but you guys have been pretty successful in acquisitions I mean in general you know the feedback we hear from the entrepreneurs and is that operationally they've been very successful I mean obviously the speed bumps but no real class of failures yeah but you know it's it's both the service culture infusion and for us it's actually exhilarating because these new opportunities are exercising our rapid growth skills again you know as it's really fun to be in this situation have all these rocket ships to try to manage and the big theme here at EMC world that Dave and I have been highlighting and is the editorial around you know the sandbox of innovation with applications and cloud failing with PlayStation we see that out there and Amazon failed recently and and and that's kind of like the big kind of market forces here at the show the big sizzle is the Hadoop or big data but the stake the meat on the bone is a lot of the solution so we've talked to CSC and you know people are doing business there's money being made now it's maturing a bit and you know bottom of the first inning top of the second inning however you want to look at it but this is the real deal this is solutions deployment that's right reference architectures so you try and you try to get some data in on this so where does that affect your business it's a profoundly affecting the business so we're going through a very evolutionary but fundamental organizational change we introduce this thing called practices into our service organization in addition to field service and remote technical service and the idea of a practice is to align communities of interest in the service organization around these solutions and it's probably going to be the most impactful change you make in customer service over the coming years but it's incremental yeah yeah got it yeah so we're here with Tony Colish who is a frequent guest on the cube now you're an alum so that's good thanks for coming back and we're talking about innovation in services which you don't usually can connect services in innovation David's a balance I mean it's a the challenge is that Tony's been we talked about this at the Cube in Palo Alto it's in the culture at EMC we heard from Jeremy and the executive top executives that they like to experiment and be on the cutting edge and so when you're at the top of your game and winning awards in your mature company like EMC at scale you got to use the new tools and you got to experiment right so but you don't want to cut your throat you're talking about your customers right so I mean the pressure is on this is not like you know you can't just like try something oh it failed you know well one of the things we haven't satisfaction is goes down to the will plummet so you got the probably a very tough job in that you got to try the new tools keep the wheels on the bus got to keep it real and keep it high energy and high value refueling the plane while you're in midair so but one of these we haven't talked about is the the whole channels the we had Doug Wood on earlier yep and he has entry systems in his title and I said Doug entry systems used to mean a $75,000 clarion it doesn't anymore we see VNXE now my kids you know could use my family we go out get a VNXE you know I'd like to drop the price a little bit more but talk about that off off camera but you've had to figure out how to take that model and support a whole new channel talk about that a little bit how's that going I mean it's going very well I mean it for us it's the first manifestation of product and services coming together so the service access is right through the same UI that you use to configure the product so the services technology road map and the product road map are coming together for the first time in the VNX product line and you're asking about innovation before this is one of the places where I think we've got a real opportunity here what we since this is primarily a partner driven support experience what we want to try to do here which we think will be differentiate us from practically everybody else in the industry if not everybody else in the industry is again is to be able to stand up partner branded e-services sites so that the partners don't have the cost of standing up their own e-services infrastructure nor the cost of maintaining it and they deliver to their customers and to themselves the benefits having any services organization without a threat to their relationship yeah I want my name as a partner on that brand I don't want EMC coming in and reaching around and grabbing my customers exactly and you're saying you're sensitized to that issue yes I have a business model to support that and the technology infrastructure so this is where this notion of these convergence of things that we've been doing in the technology space and the things we've been doing in other areas are starting to come together in good pieces so for example in addition to you the sir the technology infrastructure our scale our multilingual scale is also there's not a whole lot of companies that have the kind of scale we do so one of the things that we could do for example is go grab market share amongst the partner community in China go build partner branded e-services that are really really content and functionality rich for the China marketplace and get their take market share before anybody else particular smaller competitors get there talk about the challenges around EMC's broads partnering strategy I mean VCE we talked a lot earlier yesterday about VCE vice as we call it you know EMC vice it's a very successful one and I saw Frank Hauke at the unisys party and he's excited to be taking over the helm but nine hundred people it's an army of people on that joint venture deploying these solutions and you have to support that I mean are you involved in that and to what level and can you share an update details on VCE sure and we recognize in the service organization almost two years ago when we first heard Palmer Ritz and Joe Tucci talking about the value proposition of the products that that if this caught on as caught on as an idea that the second thing out of customers mouth which is going to be well that's great but how do you support it so I reached out to my colleagues at Cisco and VMware about two years ago and said we got to do something unique here to provide a one company support experience to the customers that choose to go with VCE for their private cloud experience two years later that's working very very well the value proposition has turned out to be true and with a joint venture entity so now they we have an opportunity for to do things that probably would have been harder as parent organizations because now we can invest in VCE to build up support capabilities that we that would be harder for us to do and when they talk about a single throat to choke it's yours isn't it but it's also that same channel issue you got the channel conflict that that that was addressed you guys are now out of the competition with your partners the same time you can now support it you know that that is usually what kills joint ventures most joint ventures don't work if you look at that Dave the history of joint ventures I mean and usually it's just you know the industry's literally you know Barney deals as they say you know they love each other but nothing happens because the execution is too difficult so you know hats off to you there and I think I think the VCE success is the first time I've really seen a true void joint venture in tech in such diverse players I have to admit when I first heard about a Katie I said come on really I mean very skeptical and I think it's quite impressive what you've done in the last year or so Tony thanks so much for coming on the queue we're looking forward to working with you we're going to work with some of your folks we know we're going to do some services focus we're going to do some content development Dave and I are really excited about you know bringing in a CIO perspective around services and consulting and it's going to be something we're going to start covering heavily so we're looking forward to it thanks for your support Tony Colis SVP of customer support at EMC great executive also in California as well so just another another California migration of EMC I'm John Furrier with silkenangle.com with Dave Vellante wikibon.org we're going to wrap right now and go to us go to a package take a break and we're going to come back with some new new content from Dave and John