 One of the topics that we've been talking about over the last several months and years here at Wikibon is the channel. There has been a huge channel land grab over the last couple of years and it's intensified I would say in the last 12 to 18 months. You've got the large companies in the computer industry realizing that the channel is becoming increasingly important and have really gone hard after that channel. We've seen companies completely transform their attitude to the channel and do a much, much better job servicing that important role. At the same time you have this new type of channel, the cloud service provider that's coming in and a lot of channel partners that we talk to at Wikibon are freaking out about the transformation and disruption that's causing to their business. Now much of the focus on the channel is on product. Of course large IT manufacturers they want to move hardware and software but what's lost oftentimes in the discussion is services. So the question is how do established IT industry players provide services and what role does the channel play? How do they complement? How do they compete with? How do they co-operate with the channel? Here with us today is Daniel Kotsie, who's with EMC. He's the vice president of the global services partners. He's the global lead for EMC based actually overseas. It's kind of a unique role and a new role for EMC so we're going to talk about these trends and some other activities going on at the company. Daniel, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks a lot and thanks for having us today with you. Yeah, pleasure seeing you and let's start with your role. So we were talking off camera, you said this is a new role for you and for EMC. So what is that role and what are your objectives? Okay, so first of all let me give you a little bit of background and where I'm coming from. Prior to taking that role one year ago, I used to run the professional services organization for EMC in Europe, Middle East and Africa. And one of the things that we realized in this part of the world is that the partner community is becoming a prevalent way of doing business as well. So when you have to cover so many countries, you have to work with a partner. So it's becoming more natural things to do. And I took that job because as you said, right, so we EMC being a technology company, we are really focusing on promoting and pushing our technology to the channel community. And the services was very often seen as being an afterthought, oh yes, we need to do services. Let's do something about it, right? And my belief is that no, we need to embed the services as a discussion from day one because it's no longer sufficient for a partner just to promote technology and to sell technology. But the customer wants, they want a solution which is well-fitted for their needs. And there is no solution without services. So then the question for us is how can we offer the best choice, make it easy for a partner community to not only pick up on the technology but also have the right portfolio of services that they can offer to the market. So that's basically my mission. I want to offer them a way to resell, a way to cooperate with us, and a way to become enabled, professional in delivering EMC services. So let's talk about where you draw that line. Your chairman and CEO, Joe Tucci, has often, very often said we're not going to compete with our channel partners, with our service provider partners. So he's made that clear statement. Other competitors have a more difficult time making that statement because a company like IBM essentially became a services company in the 90s and early 2000s. HP acquires EDS, Dell acquires Perot. At the same time, they have to partner as well. But how do you manage that? Granted, it's easier, but you still have a fairly important and sizable services business. So where do you draw the line? The first choice, working with a partner community, is to push them to become enabled to do the services. But if you are the services business manager in one of those partners, you will look at your services opportunity as well as a business and where can I make my profit. And you would like to have a choice. You would like to be able to say, yeah, it makes sense for me to be doing that services myself because that's really something which is helping me to differentiate from my competition. Or it's a better choice for me, basically, to go and resell a service of EMC and I can make some margin on that too. Or, oh yeah, here is a nice portfolio where we can assemble a new services with EMC and we can bring that value to the customer base, right? So I think moving from a pure, again, technical discussion to a business discussion is, I think, a good way to avoid the competition, knowing that we are still, we still prefer the partner to be enabled as a first choice. Now, if they don't want, then we can help them too. So your preference, make sure I understood that, your preference is that the partner delivers the services end to end with maybe you as a support mechanism. Eventually, if they don't have some capabilities or whatever, but the preferred choice is them to be enabled and them to be on the front end. We want them to keep their customer relationship, which is really their value at the end of the chain and services becoming basically an enabler into that discussion. When your partner delivers services, are those services partner branded? Are they EMC branded? Are they co-branded? How does that work? We do have a choice, right? So they can be partner branded. So the partner will go through the training and the certification and the online lab, the VLab and the guidance services that we have put together, which is one of the things that we are announcing today. And also the partner can call on us and basically say, can you come and work with us? And this would be a cooperative type of services. And in that mode, then we can do a co-branding. So it can be a partner branded services powered by EMC, for example. OK, so you don't care? And we are going to even go further in that discussion and even go into a model in the future where we would like to have an EMC branded services delivered by partner. OK, I mean, I said you don't care. You're agnostic to what the partner wants to do. Again, the main point here is that what choice is available for the partner in order for them to make it really profitable on their business. So we have some news. So you mentioned you have an announcement today. Talk about what you're announcing, and then we'll get into it. Right. So from a services point of view, we are announcing a simplification of our Velocity Services Program, where in the past we used to have different acronyms and names for defining what we were doing into implementation and support type of services. We have simplified all that. Now we are talking about Velocity Implementation Services, Velocity Remote Support Services, and a Velocity On-Site Support Services. That's a free main family, if you wish, of offer that a partner can go and get certified on and work with us. OK, so in terms of the simplification, what was the impetus for that? That was feedback from partners, from customers. Talk about that a little bit. Absolutely. So we have also set up a mechanism now to get more formal feedback from the partner community. And we have two ways to get that feedback. One, we have established what we are calling a services partner advisory board, where we have selected a number of our top partners, key partners across the world. And we are organizing events where we are showing to them what we have in our plan, what we have in our mind, and we are asking them for their feedback of what's working, what's not working, what do we need to improve. Based on that, we are very loud and clear that we are too complex, too difficult, we need to simplify. So that was one of the message. Another feedback that we have also put in place is a partner satisfaction survey, partner TC, if you wish, like a customer TC kind of things. And we are also collecting feedback on the relationships that they are having with EMC. TC is a total customer experience. Right. So think about the TP, total partner experience, how do they engage with us, how do they work with us? Daniel, can you talk about how you ensure quality? As a customer, I like the choice, but I work with a vertically integrated services supplier and I know at least that I got one throat to choke. So how do you ensure the quality and how do you address that single point of contact issue? So we have also established a quality program and we are measuring the quality at the customer level. So even if the solution is fully delivered by the partner, we are still doing a transactional survey at the customer level and the customer is basically telling us, yep, it was a good experience, no, it was not a good experience and for whatever reason. So then we look at that and we follow up on that and we are basically inspecting and monitoring the partner on the level of quality they are doing. If they don't deliver the right level of quality, then we are going to them, talking to them, looking at why is that, what plan can we put in place, an action plan, we can put in place, is it a lack of knowledge, lack of certification, wrong usage of the tool. So all this normal issue, right? And we work with the partner. The customer experience, the quality at the customer is really a key point that we want to ensure in the services definition. So you're trying to make that seamless. In other words, the total customer experience, the TCE activity that you do, you're extending that through to the partner. Now I know, we've met Jim Bampos a number of times, he's been on theCUBE before and he's very impressive capabilities and it's obvious that EMC puts a lot of investment in there. Where are you at in terms of how much that TCE ethos, if you will, has gotten to the channel? Is there no difference between internal EMC and the channel? I doubt it at this point, but how far along are you there? Yeah, when we look at the metrics, the statistics we are getting from the transactional survey, the level of quality is basically the same, right? It is, okay. On a global basis. Now of course you have some variation. One of the things we are working on today is still to increase the visibility to make it more globally consistent across the world, right? But for the data we have today, we compare the numbers and the survey and the satisfaction is basically at the same level. I want to talk about the Amazon effect. So you've got a situation, and we've been tracking this for a while now at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE, you've got this Gorilla Amazon coming into the enterprise that's putting a lot of pressure on not only the enterprise CIOs, but also the other cloud service providers and of course channel partners, because the service providers, the cloud service providers are becoming a big channel, and that is quite disruptive potentially to the channel. Are channel partners that you are working with looking to you for guidance as to how to become CSPs, cloud service providers? Are they actually transforming to do that? Talk about that a little bit. Absolutely. So what we are seeing is a partner community is really kind of questioning what they should become in the future. And my vision is that it should not be up to us to categorize a partner in a given category, right? So are you a reseller? Are you a distributor? Are you a service provider? They can become all that in the future. And they start to look at a different business model and different business opportunity. And what we have established is we have a cloud program, cloud services program, which has three main legs. One, which is what we are calling the cloud builder, which is helping the reseller to provide to their end customer private cloud solution, right, on the customer premises. There is a second program, which is a cloud service provider, the service provider program, which is designed for the reseller to look at the opportunity of them becoming a service provider in addition to their reselling model. And we can help them. We have defined reference architecture for storage as a service, backup as a service. We can help them with the services definition and the operation and signalized. And thirdly, we also recognize the fact that a reseller, the value of a reseller is very often also into their commercial and customer relationship. And they might not be willing to become a service provider, but they might be interested to resell a service coming from a service provider. So we are establishing a cloud reseller type of model as well in our ecosystem. So let me make sure I understand. So you have a velocity service provider program. So your partners could resell cloud services from those velocity service providers. Is that right? And take a look off the cone. That is great. I wonder if you could switch gears and talk about the portfolio. So you've got the typical portfolio of services from consulting and presumably some design and implementation and support services and training and education. How does that map to the channel? Is it sort of one-to-one? Is it different in the direct customer base than it is to the channel? I wonder if you could. No, we are trying to make it exactly the same. And we started initially the journey with a partner community, mainly talking about implementation services and support services. And this is why we are offering them the opportunity to become a velocity implement partner or velocity remote support. First level of call, right? So you're a customer. You call me. Partner is picking up the phone, making the first level of diagnosis, and then passing it to an engineering team. That could be EMC, right? Or if they can also go a little bit further and have also a non-site support capability where they would do the break fix. And the level three, which is really the engineering part of it, of course, that's EMC responsibility. So we have that today. We are also expanding that with a family of services, sorry, that we are calling the cooperative services where because we are the vendor, right? We are very close to the technology. And when you look at service like performance assessment or a configuration check, when you look at that service, there are two parts of it. One part which is close to the customer and one part which is close to the product. We EMC in these cooperative services, we keep the part which is close to the product and we deliver that to the partner who then bring it to the customer. So they keep their relationship with the customer and we provide the added value. So that's one thing we are doing. We are also looking at other opportunity in remote management, remote monitoring services that we have in our catalog that we would like to offer to the partner as well. So my goal is really to get to a point where the portfolio of services supporting the EMC mission of cloud, big data and trust will be exactly the same on the partner landscape and internally as well. I wonder, I mean, because you're based in Europe, I want to ask you because you're, I think in a position to answer this is, can you talk about, and you also have a global lead role, can you talk about the differences in regions? Over the last 10 or 20 years, have things changed regionally? Are there still stark differences and what are those differences? What I see is that this is becoming more and more global. Yeah, and the type of questions or the type of business opportunities that we are seeing does not really vary that much from one country to another one. At least when you talk about, let's call it the more developed country, right? When you are really remote into a developing country, then it's eventually a slightly different discussion, but for all the mature country, it's the same demand, the same concern as well. And it's for the customer, having a choice as well now to either buy a technology or to go for a service provider type of model at the same whatever you are in US or France or Germany or Japan, right? So that's the same issue. Now one of the other things you've obviously seen evolve over the last couple of decades is the whole outsourcing business. You remember the days when some people would just outsource their entire IT to somebody and say, here, well just, you run it. There were some high profile situations maybe 10, 15 years ago, and that seems to have changed. And of course it's being replaced by this, everything is a service type of thing. You also have this notion of hyperscale coming in. And what I mean by that is, if you think about the way Facebook is designing data centers. Now Facebook today is an outlier, but potentially it's a harbinger of the way the future is going to be. Is commodity infrastructure, software services laid on top. Absolutely, yeah. Something breaks, you throw it away. How do you see that affecting your business and the channel business going forward? Do you see the Facebooks of the world, that type of approach, and the enterprise IT is ever coming together, or are they on sort of separate tracks in your view? I think they will stay probably on a separate track for a while. But if I would be a CIO myself, I would look at any opportunity that I have to provide the right services to my end user customer, if you wish. So if I can bring to them the right application using an Amazon type of service or whatever, I should do it. Now if it is really a core application and I have to keep it internally, that's what I have to do. But can I then use an infrastructure platform and I build everything myself, or am I better off using a converged infrastructure, or am I better off basically going for also an infrastructure as a service? It's a choice now, right? So why not having all that in your catalog and making the right option? So that somewhat changes the role of the IT organization. Absolutely, yeah. Doesn't it, from one of implementer to potentially one of advisor, people call it Cloud Brokers, and how does EMC or does EMC help its partners and its customers make that transformation and actually decide what to put where? I think again, it's a, and we're not gonna talk about technology today, right? So but I think we have great technology which is really helping that journey, especially on the virtualization and all these kind of things. We can geek out if you want. No, I probably won't be the right person for that anyway. But also we, again, by recognizing the fact that we are not dictating any more and we have to offer a choice, I think that's the right attitude. Excellent. All right, Daniel, well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks, Dave. I really appreciate the discussion. All right, everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We're here at Wikibon headquarters. Thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll see you next time.