 Okay, welcome back to EMC World, this is theCUBE, our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise. This is Silicon Engels exclusive coverage of EMC World, bringing an independent perspective with analystwookiebond.org, Dave Vellante, my co-host, and we have a special guest, Stella Lowe, as the Vice President of Global Communications for EMC, new to the job, bringing a fresh perspective. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, great to be here. Well, you enable us to be here, you guys are very welcome. Well, you enable us to be here, you guys are out there enabling the press and doing all that great stuff, we're seeing all the news come on, we're doing our share to pump out some signal, extract that signal from the noise here, it's a great show. So, tell us about your new job. Yeah, absolutely. And your objectives, what are you guys working on? So, the first thing is that I emigrated to the States about 28 days ago. Welcome. Thank you. So, it's been a busy month, let's say, that with also organizing everything for EMC World, so it's great to be here. My new role is about bringing all the different aspects of communications under one umbrella. So, that's internal communications as well as executive communications, as well as PR and AR, and aligning them with marketing in a closer way too. And also, making what we do more global. So, we're very good at doing stuff in pockets around the world. But what we need to do is join those dots and make it a more cohesive and comprehensive program. Well, in a pretty short timeframe, we've already seen the impact at EMC World, and I've attended many, and I've been popping in and out of the analysts and the press sessions. The component of international, the contribution from the international community is significant this year. And I presume that was deliberate. Can you talk about that a little bit? Absolutely. So, this year we had a record-breaking press and analyst event. So, we had 160 journalists, we had over 100 analysts, industry analysts, and for example, on the journalist side, 90 of those were from Amir alone. So, the majority of our journalist contingent were from international markets. On the analyst side, for the first time we had analysts from Latin America. We had a 200% uplift on the analysts that came from APJ, and something like a 60% uplift in the Amir analysts. So, a complete shift of kind of, you know, the trend that we've been going on before. Yeah, it's a great opportunity for us. It's also a challenge too, because you now have a different mix of individuals. How do you manage all that? We do. So, we were very conscious that two-thirds of our journalists were completely net new to EMC World, completely, never been here before. And 50% of our analysts, which is quite a big number. So, we wanted to make sure that we weren't just talking about the news and the announcements in our press program, but we were also explaining who EMC was, what they do, what we do, and a little bit more of our personality. So, for example, there's an announcement there. For example, one of the things that we did that we've never done before is we introduced a section today about global commitment. And this is something that the staff within EMC feel very, really passionate about. So, this is our commitment to sustainability, to community involvement programs, to stair medication, and it's stuff that the staff feel passionate about, that we never get to show, and we never get to talk about. We didn't know how that would go down with the press. Is it something they're interested in? We're not talking technology. We're trying to show the personality of EMC. And it was amazing how many journalists came up afterwards, not just to me, but to those individuals that spoke on that program and said, we want to know more about this stuff. We want to know more behind the technology. So, and I think that's important, that we reach out beyond just talking about technology. And so that's another objective we need to do. They've always been really big on education here at EMC World. And you got to educate the press, but also it's a global market. And we got first signs of this with Jeremy when a year or two years ago, they had the first mega launch. We were in New York, and then we flew to London after we did the New York. And that was a international back-to-back event. Now you're doing simultaneous. So this global perspective is pretty interesting. How do you pull it off? What's your game plan? What's your plans to take this to the next level global? Because obviously EMC is transforming as a company and Jeremy wants some sizzle and steak on the table for all the journalists. Absolutely, so one of the things we need to do is we need to produce content beyond press releases. Okay, so to give something in our international markets and in all our countries, something that they could use. So if you've got an agency in Finland and they have a remit to put out three press releases a quarter, there's no point in bombarding them with 28 press releases, right? You need to give them something, meter some content, and also help them prioritize about what we should be talking about. So we need to formalize, so there's a lot, we're doing all this stuff, but we just need to formalize it, and then we need to align it globally and do it properly globally. What have you learned here at EMC, and share the perspective, because you've had a great experience, obviously a successful one with the global perspective, as well as the North America press. What are some of your observations? Where are you going to double down? And what are you, have you going to, we're going to put that to the side, but what are you going to double down on? Yeah, I think we need to be clearer about our messaging and make it simpler for our own spokespeople and for our agencies and how we articulate that. So we do have very clear set messaging and we have people that are really good at developing that stuff. So what I want to do is start to lift some of that out to make it simpler for people to articulate within the business. So that's one big thing. We talked about global alignment and bringing the team globally together. So on my management team, it's already happened, we have a representative from Mamiya, we have Matt Buckley, we have somebody from APJ, which is Ellie Warner, we have someone from Latin America, which is Paulina. So that we're getting that, so they are part of the conversation and they are developing the solution. We're developing the solution together. This is not something that we're going to do in corporate and roll out and kind of throw over the wall and expect them to execute. We're going to develop it together so it suits all markets. One of the major trends that we're tracking here at SiliconANGLE, Wikibon is the crowd, right? And we have the crowd spots product that we're proud of, we're building and we're learning. It's so early, but comms professionals in PR tend to be, the press release needs evolving. You mentioned you guys are going beyond that. But when the crowds involved, like they are online, you have a lot more signals coming in and comms professionals really can see that action and put deploy solutions and understand that. And so this is blending of integrated marketing with comms. Can you share your vision on that? And I know Jeremy's data driven and I know he's going that way, but as a comms professional where you're influencing the crowd, you got journalists, you're reaching influences and new influencers, what's your vision on that? I'm a huge fan of social. And I now don't see a differentiation between traditional media and social media. It's just media. We have to make sure that we're utilizing it all across the board. And this comes back to what I was talking about earlier about simplifying some of our messaging and also not everything needs to be a 20 page document. How do we put things out on video? How do we put things out in infographics? How do we do that stuff? So really just kind of changing and mixing up how we communicate. I know Stella, you have to go, but I wanted to ask one last question around the Federation. So there's another dimension of your role, which is as complexity, which is the communications across and about the Federation. So how do you manage that with your colleagues, with your peers? How does that all going to shake out? Yeah, I mean, we have a kind of shared services model and that shared services model varies depending on which part of the Federation we're dealing with. So some parts of that Federation, someone like the MWARE, they have their own setup with comms and we kind of link up where we need to on joint announcements. But generally, if they need to put out a global announcement, they have their own organization to do that. And then we have people like RSA, which are part of EMC infrastructure, and they very much make use of the shared model that we have. With Pivotal, we're now sitting down and we need to work out how we're going to work together. And they're a startup, we have lots of resources and we want to make sure that we are helping them with their message, get that message out there and they're able to leverage what we have and vice versa. My final question is, well first, thanks for EMC for supporting us and being really hospitable to theCUBE. It's our fourth year here and we're real proud to watch the transformation of EMC and just really grow and just everything's connecting. The messaging's great and all the execution. But I want you to share with the folks out there that are watching and might watch later. You've been talking to the press, you're seeing what's being written, you're seeing all the buzz, you're looking at the radar, you're seeing the grid. What's the takeaway from EMC world? What's the vibe, share a perspective around what's the experience here? Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, the overall theme at EMC world is leading your transformation and what we're hoping that people can take away from this is that everybody is empowered to lead their own transformation. So in comms, we're going through our transformation and we need to look at our own technology and how we deal with stuff but I think that's happening everywhere in all organizations. So that's what we want the IT people here and the business people to take away is with this world changing so much, this tsunami of data coming towards us, this new cloud world, security has changed and it's completely transformed. We've just heard from the backup guys. People, transformation is the game, isn't it? And it's just, it's doing great. The business results are coming in, the success in the business model, the innovation has been great here at EMC world. Stella Lowe, the new vice president of communications, new paradigm, new corporate structure, a lot of brands, a lot of integration, congratulations, you guys are doing great. Very successful EMC world, congratulations. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back with our next guest and their wrap up for day three and we're going to put a bow around EMC world 2013 in a short moment so stay with us and we'll be right back after this short break.