 We've got Tom Roloff in the house, and Tom is a Cube alum. We've had Tom on a number of times. He runs EMC's consulting business, Senior Vice President. Great perspectives that he has. And we're going to talk about cloud, what people are doing in cloud, and how EMC is accelerating that. Come on in, Tom. Great to see you again. Oh, it's a pleasure. Yeah, so we have a clip of Tom. We'll roll after. We'll roll after. We've got 2,000 people watching. I want to thank everybody out there for watching. Love, love the audience when it comes in like that, Dave. It's like a wave. Thousands of people come in from Justin TV and other places. Thank you for watching. We're here at EMC World where tech innovation is happening. With EMC, the big muscle player here in their show. We're independent, siliconangle.com, wikibon.org. Covering it objectively. It's a great event, Dave. I mean, you've got a lot of big announcements. You know, the Hadoop announcements, which is going to have a lot of big impact to innovation. There's a lot of news out in the market today with PlayStation down. Billions of dollars lost in value. Amazon recently crashed. So there's a big message of services and new products. So Tom, roll off. Thanks for coming on. That's your business. Another EMC World, another event. We saw you last year at EMC World. We saw you at Oracle. Yeah, it was good. And probably two or three others. I can't remember. Great to see you both again. Cloud meets big data. Last year we talked about the journey to the private cloud. It was kind of new to people. People were saying, well, yeah, that makes sense. Where are you on the journey? Well, I really haven't started yet. But I've been busy. Private cloud, as Dave has been, what's been kind of there? Last year's theme, hybrid cloud seems to be the buzzword that everyone's talking about. And is that the intersection of the innovation and the reliable cloud? You know, I think it's a start. It's a start to be honest. So I think the private cloud story, like you said, it was sort of a last year story, Dave. But I think it's actually still a part of the story today. I think one of the things that we in the consulting space are spending a lot of time helping clients understand is what actually goes where? What part of your IT workload do you leave in a legacy environment? What part do you move into private cloud? What part do you think about the public cloud for? And if you have some things operating in a public cloud environment, like most large CIOs do, and some things sitting in your the own four walls of the data center, how do you bring those things together and make it a true hybrid cloud? So we spend a lot of time in the conversation of cloud today for us with clients is not how do I build a private cloud or how do I take virtualization to private cloud? But rather, how do I step back to a top-down view at all the work I do in IT and decide what goes where? What workload will put in the public cloud in the private cloud or leave in my legacy architecture? It's got to be top-down too, doesn't it? If you try doing that as bottoms up, you get too confused, you boil the ocean, it takes forever and you ultimately never get to the right answer. But there's a tendency when a lot of organizations do want to do a bottoms up, isn't there? So how do you sort of reconcile that? And I know, there's maybe money on the table. Okay, we want to do this bottoms up and it's going to fail. How do you deal with that? I actually think that the right answer is for most enterprises to do a little bit of both. So if you take even private cloud, frankly, private cloud was a bit of a bottoms up story. It was, we're going to help you virtualize a set of applications. We're going to start with the applications the CIO owns. And we're going to increment ourselves from IT owned apps into business critical apps and ultimately we're going to create IT as a service for a set of applications that are in the four walls of the data center. Very bottoms up kind of a story. Frankly, I think that story still has some traction in the enterprise. There are parts of the enterprise that do solve the problem in that direction. But what we find is that if that's all you're doing, you sometimes stall along the way. You don't actually get to really creating an IT as a service type of environment in your enterprise because there are some applications that don't belong in a private cloud, right? So when you combine a bottoms up turbo virtualization strategy with a top down view that says to the CIO, hey, when was the last time you looked at your entire IT budget and turned it on the side and asked yourself how much money can I save if I really took advantage of cloud in the extreme. And when we do that kind of exercise with clients, we help them think through, you know, is my CRM system better off at salesforce.com or better off of my own data center? How should I be thinking about email the service providers from the cloud versus hosting exchange myself? That mainframe application that I'm running over there, should it stay on a mainframe or is there a way to actually take some modern architecture and do something with a mainframe application? So supplementing that left to right virtualization to private cloud story with a top down view that says I'm taking the entire IT budget, I'm going to figure out what do I put in public cloud and private cloud and in legacy IT, that tends to create a lot more momentum around the conversation of what goes where. So how should customers decide what goes in actually more interestingly what doesn't go into that private cloud? Yeah, so we believe strongly that there are really three conversations there. The first is the economics. The economics of email in the public cloud is compelling frankly, right? And you need to understand what those economics are and how that compares to the economics of keeping email in your own hosted environment. So filter one would be take a given workload and by the way if I take email, don't just talk about what does exchange cost me. Talk about all the people that are managing the exchange environment that are managing the help desk that are taking the help desk calls around email and look at the total cost of your email environment and ask yourself what you're spending internally on email compared to what you would be spending if you moved it over to a public cloud or created a hybrid cloud architecture. So filter one is the economic filter. Filter two is one that is getting a lot of play and John you alluded to it, right? The idea of trust and security is I think a big part of this conversation now. When people say hey the economics of Amazon are better than the economics of my internal, you know, compute environment that's a very real conversation and you see the economics but if you it's not until something happens like what happened a few weeks ago that you ask yourself hey, is the public cloud environment or is the cloud environment I'm moving to actually trustworthy enough? Is it secure enough? And has the enterprise really thought through exactly what the trust requirements are of me moving perhaps email? You know if you're a manufacturing firm you might feel one way about email if you're a hospital you might feel very differently about email and the trust profile for what would have to be true of the public cloud environment for email in a hospital might be very different than the trust profile in a manufacturing firm. So after economics is a trust conversation and the third conversation which is actually the easiest is what's the functionality of the environment in the public cloud versus in my own four walls or in my own private cloud environment and you know that's one where familiarity with all the different offerings in the hybrid cloud is an important alternative we bring a lot of that capability to a CIO and we'll tell them a little bit about here's what B-Pause is doing with exchange here's what Verizon is doing with exchange you know here's what you could do yourself with exchange and so we can help you understand some of the different functionality differences between the alternatives as well. That's a great framework I like that economics the trust factor and the functionality in the cloud versus in those and on the second one on the trust we talk a lot about security you heard Joe talk about it you know of course it's the one of the evil villains of the cloud I don't know if we're getting any safer it's the bad guys are out there I almost feel like it's living in the country of Israel or state of Israel because you know there's risks going on but it's a capitalist society they're growing it's a safe environment every now and then some big profile thing happens and it kind of feel like the cloud is the same way the rewards outweigh the risks but my specific question is are you seeing privacy become more of an issue you're seeing Facebook and Google and Android and Apple tracking us on where we go are CIOs thinking about privacy yet? So I think they should be by the way I think the ones that are thinking hard about cloud are because you're exactly right it gets brought up in the context of cloud if I'm moving information somewhere outside of my four walls how do I know that it's protecting the privacy of the individual right and some industries by the way care a lot more about that than others banks care a lot about it you know so the heightens focus on certain regulated industries and what that means for the governance risk and compliance elements of managing information and what that means for identity is a very big part of I think the your cloud conversation so when we spend time in that middle part of the framework as you were saying right the trust part we're spending a lot of time with the CIO and with the organization saying what would have to be true about the environment that you're either building or maybe the public cloud environment you want to move to in order for you to be compliant with all the regulatory things that are pertinent to your business with all the policies you have about how you manage information and frankly with the types of risk profile that you may have to take on in whatever part of the cloud spectrum you want to put a certain workload it's a very big part of the conversation to be honest with you. Business as an IT I've always thought agile being fast and being nimble from put the credit card down get some test and development operations out in the cloud so cloud is enticing it's intoxicating to the IT guy because it's like hey I can reduce costs in one shot move everything to the cloud which it is intoxicating you could be drunk and then we have a playstation situation or an amazon.com situation but you're talking about complex IT and so that's Accenture, EMC consulting, ecosystem partnerships IT has to spend some dough to get that done so that's great we kind of get that but now when you start throwing in cloud meets big data that's an interesting dynamic because there's a lot of sizzle involved in that so where is the stake on this like how does that impact IT budget from your standpoint because you got to go deploy this stuff so can you talk about specifically how IT meets big data IT meets cloud and big data I think it's another one of the frankly the success factors of thinking about a cloud strategy is not just what goes where and how much money can I save and the savings are very substantial we do cloud strategies for clients we find 20-25% savings in IT budgets in a future state cloud architecture that leverages public, private and hybrid cloud so there's a lot of money on the table but the issue if we make cloud a story only about saving money, frankly the CIO becomes interested but we're failing to answer the real need of what cloud can do for the enterprise which is create the kind of agility that the business users really after so the idea that we're saving a ton of money and we should figure out what we're going to do with those savings ahead of time is really to me where the intersection between cloud and big data comes in because we're creating a massive business case for the enterprise on saving dollars we need to help the CIO answer the question of what is that savings going to do for the enterprise if all it does is hit the bottom line and we give it back to the CIO we've done something but frankly the CIO has been getting really beaten up for many years now saying you're not agile enough your enterprise, your IT organization is too unwieldy, it takes you too long to do certain things we need to help the CIO articulate how cloud is going to free up capital to allow him to create the business agility that frankly his business users really want from him the very big part of making cloud successful and of where cloud and big data intersect is to create the revenue stream implications of cloud savings so for example if we're helping a client consolidate data centers and come up with what's the private cloud and what's the public cloud and we're putting a couple hundred million dollars on the table and we're not helping them think through how a hundred million dollars can help them accelerate certain IT projects they've deferred for a while then we're not helping enough and if we're not getting to the point of saying here's a bunch of initiatives that the business users of your enterprise really want, it's a bank and they really need to understand a 360 degree view of a customer if we're not using cloud savings to help articulate how we can redeploy that saving into the analytics that the business really needs then I think we're only answering half the equation for the CIO and then to the difference, the next step is how do you monetize that data for example there's the theory out there and I first heard this from Tim O'Reilly the media publisher he said I've looked at, this is Tim speaking open source software and the way it's commoditizing traditional software and it dawned on Tim that the next source of competitive advantage in the IT industry is going to be data and information and how you package information to monetize that. Are you seeing those discussions directly in your customer base and can you share any sort of examples or so I'm extremely excited about the fact that the industry as a whole is talking about analytics and that I'm part of a company that is really embracing the fact that the ultimate value of IT is creating a seamless way to get information in the hands of a business user step way back right creating big data centers and housing big complicated IT infrastructure and maybe even creating applications those are just means to an end. The end at the end of the day is to affect decision making of a business user and you know if the IT organization is just a big set of data that's very complicated to navigate through then we get the reputation in IT perhaps of not being agile enough for the enterprise the promise to me of cloud architectures and of analytics is that we can create very fluid information architectures and we can get that information out of the silos that it sits in today and put it on the desktop of a business user and have it be something that affects the decision today you know we can we can swipe a credit card and have that information be informed by you know whether we should prove or deny that interaction can be informed by all the other transactions that that user has made with that credit card in a real time way. I think if we get to the point where analytics are that real time and interacting with the transaction processing in a real time way now we're starting to create the real promise of what we have IT for which is to help us make better decisions by business users in real time. Do you think the business users will wait for IT I mean you remember the whole distributed computing and the client server thing in many ways that was a failure right because we did it we spent like crazy and then finally CEOs said wait a minute we had to brain this back in you know IT we've been pounding on you for 10 years you know too slow too old too whatever now please take it over and fix this mess are we going to see something similar in data science in big data or we learned our lesson well so I think that's the tension that we're living in right I think I think frankly a lot of business users aren't asking IT about whether they want to use Amazon or use the public cloud right they're just getting it done and and you know I think part of what you're starting to see is some of those experiments and see maybe the dark side of some of those experience right because if you do allow that to go completely amok without any adult supervision you're going to wind up in a place where the business is at risk right so back to the trust concept of you know what the central part of cloud strategies and how trustworthy is that cloud environment that you're building I think there is a tension there between allowing a business user to make a decision that is optimal for their business at that moment and doing it in a way that is secure and trustworthy in the long term and I think what we have to do for CIOs is to help them balance that and frankly I think one of the things EMC Consulting is trying to do is help people balance exactly that tension Well I wanted to ask you about that I mean EMC Consulting is like this really powerful lever in the organization it's not you know a giant portion of the revenues but it's a very important component now of course EMC's marketing is fantastic we see it every year at EMC world you put forth these visions of cloud and big data and you guys in EMC Consulting are largely a catalyst for some of those initiatives but at the same time you have to be independent for the customer so how do you manage that natural tension You know I think EMC is learning that we can help with the business facing side of the equation right I think if the customer is expecting EMC Consulting to help them make a decision about whether they should use EMC storage or some competitor's storage they quickly find out that that's not the capability of EMC Consulting right there are really strong parts of EMC that can help that proposition of all of our products but if the customer is interested in information management challenge that frankly is independent of technology if it's a question about how do I get a 360 degree view of a customer at a bank if that's the kind of problem we're trying to solve that has ultimately a lot to do with technology but not initially the initial business problem is one that has to be articulated and framed and somewhat solved before we make decisions about technology and I think that's one of the things that EMC Consulting brings to the conversation is maybe an understanding of the depths of the technology architecture but not necessarily a bias to saying it's got to be solved one way or the other we're really starting with the business problem and allowing the technology to fold into that problem after the fact yeah that's a great point I mean you talk about that 360 degree view you talk to a lot of CIOs and CEOs I think a lot of times the problem is just recognition that this is a priority I mean take customer service in general we all have customer service stories right you call the cable company or the airline or whatever it is and you get put on hold and you're frustrated you're routed to the wrong person a million times and you just wonder do they not realize that they're going to lose business over this and so a lot of times you're right it's not a technology problem it's a prioritization problem do you help with that how do you help with that specifically as it relates to customer service that 360 degree is their hope absolutely right so this is interesting we've done a lot in contact center technology we've come up with ways to route calls more efficiently we've come up with ways to create pop-up screens for the attendant that is taking the call to make sure that he's got a certain set of information in front of him but unfortunately behind all of that is still a very siloed information architecture it's still very difficult for the person that is calling up your account to know exactly what you bought when you bought it what version of a certain product you might be on what was the last time you called and what are the things that happen in there and maybe even some of the intangible things how current is your account have we had an outage in your geographic area at some point in some way bringing all of those different islands of information together requires an information architecture which frankly too few companies have even in something as rudimentary as contact center spaces right so we do spend a lot of time with saying this is the information you're rendering to the person that's taking the call here's the information you're not rendering and how do we bring that information to bear as well and how do we prioritize what's most relevant about that and figure out a data architecture that allows you to bring all of that information to the fore very very quickly and frankly one of the other things that is what does that screen look like that the person is looking at right how do you quickly navigate through that and say this person wants to know about you know an add-on sale let me quickly be able to talk about that I'm talking about empowering that agent for example and that's not something people generally think about EMC as having a core competency but that's really what EMC consulting as an example might do I would say to you by the way that EMC technologies are increasingly able to answer the technology problem underneath that what EMC consulting brings to that is really starting with the business problem and saying let me solve the business problem that'll create a conversation about technology architectures and you know those are actually relevant to EMC and EMC I think wants to help, the rest of EMC wants to help with that kind of conversation so brainplumb plus isolan plus you know documentum coming together to go handle some of these siloed information architectures and bring them together as one architecture that's a technology point of view that EMC will bring to the conversation frankly EMC consulting is more worried about what is the business problem we can go solve and you know if the EMC technology can help solve that problem then we can definitely introduce the rest of EMC but I hope that we are maybe better positioned to answer the business problem because we understand some of the underlying technology issues underneath that. Interesting role we're here with Tom Roloff, Senior Vice President of EMC Consulting, talking about what EMC Consulting does, a lot of people may not know but EMC has a thriving consulting business and very strategic and I think it's a key piece of EMC because generally EMC sells directly to the IT people a lot of times those guys aren't the final decision makers so EMC Consulting sells more to the line of business CIOs and more senior executives so we're seeing right in front of us the transformation of EMC from a storage company to more of an enterprise supplier company with a 50 plus billion dollar market cap and it's great to see this transformation and be part of it so Tom Roloff thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, always a pleasure appreciate it, good to see you, thank you very much