 Okay, we're back here live at VMworld 2013. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE, Wikibon's flagship program. We go out to the events, expect a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante. Hi, everybody, and we are here at VMworld 2013. We're here in Moscone, South in San Francisco. Definitely stop by. We're at the street level and see us. Mike Keeler is here. He's the COO of EMC Global Services and a CUBE alum, Mike. Welcome back to theCUBE. Hey, thanks. I'm glad to be back. So, we're hearing a lot about the industry transforming. Pat Gelsinger gave a talk today. Just talked a lot about the heart and soul of VMware, but also talked about how customers over the last decade have really transformed their infrastructure. I know that's a topic that you guys talk a lot about. You're trying to help customers move things along. Tell us what's new in EMC Global Services and we'll get into the whole transformation thing and what you're seeing with customers. So thanks again for having me out. I mean, what's new at EMC Global Services? It really is all about IT transformation. So the conversation for us has moved much, much further into how you talk about IT and changing the fundamentals of the rigid structures that we've built up over many, many years in corporate IT. And what's happening is things like VMware and virtualization across the entire stack are creating new opportunities for business to actually go other places to have their IT needs met. And it's creating a dynamic where the core IT organizations have fundamentally got to think about how they transform their people, their processes and their technology. And so we've spent a lot of time with a whole lot of offerings new in the marketplace to help IT organizations actually embark on that journey and accelerate that journey. So I live in an old house and when I want to update that house I get really nervous, you know? If I want to put in a new kitchen or something, I say, oh, I got to be without a kitchen for four or five months. And the dough, and the dough you're going to pay. Yeah, I got to rip and replace that kitchen and we're going to be washing dishes in the bathtub. And the analogy applies to IT. How do you, the vendor community makes it sound so simple. How do you mask that complexity when you go through transformations with customers? So that is a very fair analogy. And that's where you start to see some of the emerging companies who don't have infrastructure. They stand it up overnight. And overnight they seem like the right answer for IT. And to your point, IT organizations over time, it's like a fine house. And that renovation, you've got to start room by room. So it's not an overnight transformation but it is more than just the technology because it is about the people and it is about the processes. One of the things we see a lot of is on the process and the people side, that's the trick that gets missed a lot. So IT organizations want to change. They want to be flexible. But at the same time, like everybody, they say, well, what's in it for me? And if they can't see how their job's going to change and their skill sets are going to grow, there's a little bit more resistance to it than what you would have with an early stage or a startup company. So Mike, I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit because you hear that a lot. It's people process technology and technology's easy. Always hears the easy part. It's people in process. So what does that mean? Let's start with the people. We're talking, are we talking skill sets? Are we talking about motivation? Are we talking incentives? Talk about what you mean. Double click on the people. So on the people and skill sets, it really is about the skills and capabilities. So historically, you had domains, right? Domains of storage. Domains of networking, domains of servers. And everybody had a skill and a capability. And as we start to move to this more flexible agile world, the lines blur. And so I may have been a great data storage analyst, but I didn't know a lot about networks, but I didn't have to. And so the reaching into moving out of your comfort zone and having to learn more about the network and more about the server than you ever did is sometimes a frightening experience, number one, but also it's how do you get time to actually go learn those skills? So we have a whole series of educational services and a whole set of residency programs that allow folks in the traditional IT organizations to actually gain those new experiences and those new domains that matter in the future. So what's best practice in your customer base from a management perspective? You know, the company says, okay, I got a retool. I got a reskill. That's an investment that I have to make. How receptive are customers to that? And what's your, you know, how do you sort of, I mean, obviously it's a good thing to do. It's a smart thing to do. It's the thing that the employees want to do. If you blow it, you're going to have a mass exodus. So for those who haven't had a lot of experience in that, you know, area, what do you guys advise? How do you get them through that not whole? So, you know, as I said, we've got a set of advisory services around how do you think about from a CIO's chair, how do I bring the organization along? We sometimes interact with the HR organization because it is about actually the human dynamics of bringing skill sets and people along. The other thing that we've got a long way to go on is the tool sets. So just like the individuals in the IT organization who've got a change and they've got to be more adaptable and flexible and broader in their scope, our tool sets have got to change, too. So we're spending a lot of time thinking about what are those integrated set of tool sets that if you got the people and you got the technology, now do I actually have the tools and insights to actually go manage this virtualized infrastructure? Generally, do you find customers are receptive to that human resource transformation? Yeah, actually, the further we get into a conversation that the highest levels of CIO, they're 100 out of 100 times are totally receptive to it. It's always a question of how and how long. And this is the challenge, right? Because business now has an option, so the CIO has absolutely the right agenda to want to go change the rigidity of what they've built to be more flexible, but the business isn't waiting for them. And so the balance and the transition is how fast can you move an organization and how fast can you move an IT organization before the business stays with you or gives up and goes somewhere else? We talk about process, let's look at that for a second. We talk about IT processes, we talk in business processes, both, I wonder if you can add some color to that. Yeah, I can double click on that as well. So the short answer is it's both. It's IT processes as it relates to how you engage with the business. So if you think about the historical patterns of IT, I built an annual plan or a three-year plan and I've set out a set of roadmaps that went on for three years. That's no longer the norm. The norm is a business wants to stand it up, wants to take it down, but some businesses use a lot with us, we want to fail fast. And so those processes of how you engage with IT and how IT becomes more flexible is an IT process that's got to change. Inside the four walls of IT, how we think about service management frameworks and how we think about running the organization. And that's now a dynamic between, a lot of that is internally within the IT organization, but a lot of it's also how I integrate public clouds and how do I integrate third parties into my overall service framework. And those dynamics are changing as well. Mike, we've been covering VMworld now. It's our fourth year doing theCUBE and it really kicked off at EMC World in 2010. So we've been following the EMC story for four years with theCUBE, documenting everything that moves and certainly Dave and I don't want to go into great detail now. But one of the things we loved about with EMC is the transformation message, right? But we were just commenting on the intro, that's done deal now, it's over. It's transforming, it's a verb. It's happening right now. HP just had some earnings. People were pointing to that. Dave Donatelli was recently moved out of a big position. Servers, storage, networking are down, yet the market's exploding, right? Microsoft's going to have a new CEO. These legacy installed incumbent leaders are shifting their sales, the wind's changing. So this is validation that the cloud is real. And we heard the executive from Brocade say, follow the apps. Apps are now driving the infrastructure. And with virtualization, it's really a great industry to be in. So with that, what's the customer like? Are they scared? Are they dear in the headlights? What are they, because it's happening so fast and IT doesn't move that fast. So I wouldn't describe it, you know, I think for a while, we saw some IT organization sit back and say, I've kind of been to this movie a while and it'll come back my way. I think for the first time, people have realized it's not coming back their way. And so I would call the other side are scared now. It's more of we're behind. So they were dear in the headlights. Now they're like, Tiger's ready to pounce on the new tire. I think it's now how quickly can they, you know, how can I get some of that time back that I may not have been most as reactive to? But it's clear it's a mandate. It's clear that it's a mandate. And that's when you see even our services from EMC, we're no longer really talking about services of how you implement our infrastructure. We really are talking about IT transformation. And that's a, you know, it is a services consultative led conversation that includes a much wider framework than just EMC core products. And so we're seeing lots of demand there. So EMC is known for massive drives and you guys have huge accounts and you guys have all the big names. I mean, you've been supplying massive about gear and the storage is not going away either. So more and more storage is kind of floating all different corners of the enterprises. But traditionally EMC wasn't on speed dial on services. Now you guys are earning the reputation. So what's it like walking into those big name accounts that are opportunities for you that they're writing PO's to you guys for drives and you know, you're like, hey, we want to talk services, which might be new. What do you say to those guys? Yeah, so a couple of things. One of the best things we did as a company was we started on this transformational journey many, many years ago. And so a lot of what you see is our offerings in the marketplace was the intellectual property that we took out of our core internal IT organization on how we transform. So whether that be financial metrics, templates for how do you think about moving from rigid to nimble structures. We took all that up and put that into intellectual property which is now part of what we actually wrap in our IT transformational services. And that message alone for an IT organization who you can really look at and say, I can see a company. I can see their journey and their transformation and I can see real evidence and made a difference. That's the conversation we have almost in every one of our customers right now. What's the commonality amongst all your customer base? If you can kind of boil it down to a couple key things that are happening across industries around this inflection point we're in because you got mobile, you got cloud, you got big data, you got security, all that stuff's happening. What is the commonality amongst all your customers right now? So it is this drive to get to the next generation application. So to the point of the earlier, about follow the applications, we're seeing that by industry, by industry vertical, it is all about the applications which then takes you into the secondary conversation of how do I get there with speed and agility. And businesses is again accelerating, it's not slowing down. And so the second major point is is we really are starting to see this. IT is starting to become a broker of services because it's no longer always going to happen in the four walls of their organization. What does agility mean when they say I want agility? What do they really mean by that? So a couple of things. A lot of times that's a cost conversation. I want to be able to turn it on, I want to be able to turn it off. And agility in that space in traditional IT just wasn't that agile. It is the notion of fail fast where businesses are saying look, I'm going to go try this. And I don't want to talk about capital for the next five years. And I don't want to talk about an infrastructure of people. I want to talk about stand it up, either fail or succeed. Scale it if it succeeds and shut it down if it doesn't. Is this one thing you could point to in this new era of modern era? And as you look at the employees that you're hiring and the personnel that you call on at your customer base, is there any common trends and traits of the winners? What do you see at the personnel level where you say, hey, you know, this person works for me. That's the people we call on. What's the common trait of the winners? The winners are picking a place to actually show success. So the ones we've seen not as successful is when they sit back for three months and study. How are they going to make this transformation? The winners, all common traits are is they will pick one app or one organization and they'll go after that one. They'll get dirty with that. Absolutely, and that success starts to breed more and more success. Mike, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about that dynamic between going from IT shop to cloud broker and acting more like a cloud service provider. When we talk to members of the Wikibon community, practitioners, you say, well, what are your big challenges? They say three things they point to. The top three, data growth, budget constraints and data protection and disaster recovery. Those are three things that either cloud service providers are pretty good at. They monetize data growth, their budgets are growing actually because they're selling services and they do pretty well at DR. So do you see the internal IT becoming sort of modeling after cloud service providers? How are they able to even keep pace? Yeah, so we do, we see it as an IT broker, IT broker of services, which is going to entail things that are done within the IT shop, but things that are also done through third party clouds brokers and providers. We've got a long way to go on this data security and data redundancy conversation and so we're doing a lot of work right now on what are the offerings and how do you help IT organizations maintain security across a hybrid environment where I don't control all of the variables on the other side. So we're seeing a lot of activity there. So we hear a lot about hybrid cloud, obviously VMware is playing that card. I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit in terms of how customers are choosing workloads to go internal versus external and which ones are actually moving data and there's some complexities there that people aren't clear on. I wonder if you could help us swim through that. Simply put, I mean, and we have a whole series of offerings around because customers come to us all the time. How do I think about this? And it really is a workload by workload decisioning. We see it as a, you've got to think about some applications in some environments are high performance, high integrity that have a set of characteristics that whether it's with a third party or internally you have to be respectful of. That has a cost structure to it. There's others that say, look, if it went down for two days it'd be painful but it wouldn't stop my business. And so we've got a whole series of framework and lenses that we take IT organizations through to start to think about the workloads themselves, the characteristics of it. And then we also carry the forward in the marketplace. What are the alternatives that would give them if they wanted to make choices for the outside? Here are providers that actually would provide that level of quality of service. How do you navigate through all the choices? So you've got you, you've got EMC Global Services as your service provider. You've got this ecosystem within EMC. You've got the Velocity Partners Program. You've got your part of the Federation, VMware announcing its own cloud. You've got customers who, some customers want to use Amazon. How do you navigate through all that? So for us, I mean, it's a question of EMC overall, our strategy around our partner ecosystem we've been working on in the past year. And so navigating it comes on two fronts. Number one, we just see a lot. So across our customer base, when customers choose some of these third parties, if we don't have experience with them, we see the experiences up close and personal. And in some cases I've got good examples where we went to some of these providers and we actually said we want you to be closer to the EMC way of thinking and have actually signed them up as partners. And so we take a very active approach in the marketplace with it and quite frankly want to have as many providers that have a certain skills and capabilities and offerings that we would be proud to bring into our customers. Like my last question is what should we be watching for as the industry goes through this transformation? You guys are sort of holding their hands. What are the key milestones that we should be looking at as independent observers, as indicators that we're succeeding? Yeah, so I think we've moved up the stack, right? From server virtualization to you're hearing a lot about software defined data center here at VMworld, I think the last leg of that stool is when we start to see the tools and capabilities of monitoring and management that start to deal with this hybrid cloud environment because that is, we believe, the world and where it's going to go. Not one size is going to fit all and not one provider's going to fit all. And we've still got room to grow there. Excellent. Okay, Michael, thanks for coming inside theCUBE, great. Service's opportunity is huge. Obviously when you have disruption, you have an inflection point, you have transformation that has actually happening with proof points and carnage on the side of the road. These big companies are retooling. We're seeing it in the industry. New upstarts are coming. People want services. They need direction. EMC, congratulations on all your great work, and all your support at EMC World. This is theCUBE. Jay John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.