 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, and this is theCUBE. SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of EMC World 2012. This is the third year of theCUBE at EMC World. We actually launched theCUBE at 2010 EMC World. And what we do at theCUBE, we bring you all the guests, the senior executives, the practitioners, the independent analysts, and we try to coordinate that information and share it with you, our community. And we love the services angle. I've said many, many times that customer service is the secret weapon of EMC, that nobody ever really talks about that much, but we like to talk about it. And we're here with Tony Kholish, who's the Senior Vice President of Customer Services at EMC. Tony, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you very much, Dave. It's always good to be here, really enjoy it, always. Yeah, good to see you again now. When we first met, sort of opened my eyes a little bit to some of the innovations that EMC was doing with customer service. I think customer service, it's not a topic that gets a lot of headlines, but you had talked a lot about, you know, social aspects, innovation that you guys were doing, business processes that you were changing, how customers are interacting with you in different ways. We had Julie Larson on theCUBE a couple of weeks ago, had some similar discussions. So, and then I know you met with John Furrier, too. And you guys had some really interesting discussions around social and how things are changing. So, bring us up to date on what's new in services in your area, and then we can really get into it. Okay, thanks. I always enjoy having this opportunity to talk to you guys. And, you know, you talk about services being the secret weapon, and that is definitely true at EMC. I still hear it, and it's still this passion. You know, we are the best customer services company, not just the service organization. Everybody at EMC does customer service, and so it makes my job and everybody in my job's life really easier. So, we're going through the same kind of transformation that's going on in the industry and in the company, and our framework for our transformation we call Agile Support, and what we're really talking about here is adapting ourselves to all the new types of demand for support services that we expect over the next three to five years. So, like a particularly noteworthy example is that the expectations of service providers who are using our technology are fundamentally different than servicing and user customers, for example. So, they have different expectations, same thing with our federal partners and customers who have different services protocols. So, that's one of the primary things that we need to do is adapt to these new types of services protocols. Key to this in the middle is that we want to be able to service that demand in any way that wants to interact with us. So, e-services is a major way, right? If they want to use chat as their primary interaction tool, they should be able to do that. They want to use social media, customers should be able to do that. They want to pick up the phone. They should be able to do that. And in every circumstance, they should be able to speak their native language. And the third part about our agile support transformation is being able to use the right kind of delivery methods for it. That includes delivering proactive information to them that helps them avoid risk, dedicated teams for our largest customers, partners in parts of the world, and so on. So, that's the framework that we're using is for calling agile support. Okay, so allowing people to interact however they want, that means you have to completely change, you said you used the term protocols. That's right. And you basically have to create a platform that's flexible enough because it's not going to stay the same. This is the big challenge I think you have. It used to be you pick up the phone and that's how you dealt with it. And now you get new channels. Today it's Twitter and Facebook. Who knows what tomorrow's going to be? So, how do you build a platform that's flexible enough to maintain that agility? So, we've been working on a continuous upgrade of our entire services technology infrastructure for the last three years. And that started to deliver some major benefits. This is not a new journey we're embarking on about trying to broaden the ways customers can interact with us, but you're absolutely right. We're going to be on this for a very long time. The chat thing for us was a huge success. Customers love it. And the next vein of value that we really think is going, that we want to tap into for EMC and providing to customers is social. And so we've been opening up these new and expanded ways of interacting through community forums that we do with our marketing partners in EMC. And that's been just getting tremendous, tremendous positive reception from customers. So for example, what we can do is deliver product information and product roadmap and strategies to constituencies who may not otherwise get it from us. Like if you can't come to EMC world, not exactly sure how you would get that. So we're driving a lot of that social network. We've opened up some new language formats for like customers in China to be able to talk amongst themselves and get that information and so on. That's the next frontier for us. You've mentioned chat a couple of times. We first met actually a few years ago and I was at an analyst meeting and you gave a talk. But we had a substantive conversation when I really first got into your business one-on-one, probably about a year ago, January. So about a year and a half ago. And you said something at that time that I've used since then, which is that your objective with chat is to create a great customer experience. It's not to lower your costs. And you have rules about how many open chats an individual can have at one time. And I always ask enterprise service providers now when I meet with them, how many people on average do you have, or customers do you have chatting with an individual, with a professional, with a tech? And the number ranges, oftentimes as many as three to four. And I'm wondering if that's a little bit. You have a different philosophy. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, chat should be completely as good as picking up the phone. And in order to do that, you have to have someone's attention. You can't do multiple phone calls particularly well. The same thing is true when you're chatting. So that's been our philosophy. And more customers use chat than the phone at EMC. And that happened at some point in 2011, which is incredible for you. Because I chat really fast. And I get pissed when somebody doesn't chat back right away. I say, hey, I'm here, I'm here. So I expect that. And the other thing you said is the number one most important metaphor for customers, how long it takes to resolve my problem. That's right. And so the longer I spend waiting for somebody on chat, the longer it's going to take to resolve my problem. And we might have cited some statistics that we had from last year, which have held true is that we're solving problems on average 65% faster through chat than any other means of interaction. And it's because of that nature, the interaction. You can really do that kind of, you don't do voicemail, you don't do all that kind of stuff. So customers love it. Quick response, quick resolution. It's essentially a synchronous conversation that you're having with somebody, even though it's an asynchronous technology. Okay, I wanted to stay on this topic a little bit and talk about, maybe we talked about the different touch points. But what really are you, what's your objective with your organization? I mean, where do you want to take this thing when you look ahead? So I think that we're going to look a lot different over the course of the next three years than we do right now. And I think we're going to have an organization of really following the way the company is going, which is around different disciplines of technology stacks and solutions and so on. And we have to orient our services delivery around that. So, you know, there's always going to be that need for deep product specific technical experience. But I think that that frankly, that's going to be the minority and having the context of how the technology is being used in a particular vertical or in a solution stack has got to be much more prominent in our organization than it is now. So the big thing, you know, whatever, 20 years ago was phone home, right? That was sort of a really disruptive innovation in services. And now I'm wondering is predictive analytics, does it have a similar disruptive capability? How can you use predictive analytics to figure out what's going to go wrong before it goes wrong and have that anticipatory services? Is that a pipe dream or is that reality? That's a reality and you're exactly right. There's a lot of value there and the big data play for us in customer service is really, really important. And building on the phone home stuff, which now seems kind of prehistoric, being able to extract the data that we get from our own equipment and putting that together with the other data that we get from servicing our customers is a very, very powerful set of data that we can use to predict risks better, scope them and prevent them than we ever had before. And we're really jumping on that. Yeah, so we actually, Jeff Kelly wrote a piece, he interviewed Jim Bampos about this and Jim's pretty innovative guy, as you know. So where are you in terms of actually delivering that value to customers? We do things right now called an early warning system, which was an innovation past the phone home thing where we take, we use an algorithmic approach to predict the likelihood of a situation occurring at a customer. And now what we're starting to do is pull these data sets together from the equipment coming home, applying rules to it, along with the install-based information the customer is starting to be able to, those projects are underway right now and those are big stuff and I expect we will be delivering some of that information to customers this year. And so two questions, so the inbound information, will social media over time play a role in the collection of that information and then will it also play a role in the distribution of that information? Absolutely, it's multiple channels in, multiple channels out, people will be able to consume this stuff and then however they want to, that's that middle piece of the agile support thing. So you guys will actually go out and extract information from social channels. Now, does that have to be customer initiated or is that something that you actually can envision you guys being proactive and sort of inferring from sentiment and things of that nature? Absolutely. Really, okay. Yes, I actually see, I don't look at it as that alien of a channel. There's an interaction going on between customers and EMC or among customers with each other which has value, potential to the customers and to EMC and we will tap into that for whether it's opportunity. It's an opportunity. Yeah, that's right. Now Tony, I have to ask you a personal question. So you came to EMC through an acquisition of Documentum. That's right. How did you end up in the services division? The software guy, right? That's right, well I ran a customer service for Documentum, for Dave DeWalt and then when Dave had a broader portfolio, he brought me along and so I ran this support for our software portfolio and then I got the opportunity to run remote support about six years ago and then I got, we brought the whole field service and customer support organization together a little more than two and a half years ago. So it's been a remarkable ride. I mean, seriously, I wouldn't do this job for any other company in the world, it was just amazing. We've been talking a lot this week about, of course, IT transformation. Everybody has it on their shirts and it's IT, it's business and it's you. And we've said IT is really, that's cloud. Cloud transformation is the IT piece. Business is about big data and finding value in the you is you guys provide a lot of consulting and training services to help people become cloud architects, maybe data scientists. So you see those types of transformations occur in your customer base. How does that all tie back to the customer services business? The roles are completely changing, Dave, they really are. So for the whole ability for a service person to be able to interact effectively through social media is completely different than picking up the phone. So there are these new roles that are emerging in customer service which are channel specific, right? So to be a good chat person is somewhat analogous to being somebody who can pick up the phone but somebody who is actually knows how to orchestrate an event on a social media site, provide value through it and extract value from it as a completely new support role and the data sciences role, that ability to start understanding all this data that we're getting and helping us be able to make meaning out of it and then put it out in a way that's consumable to the customer. These are fundamentally transformational new roles in customer service is just a couple of examples. Now my last question for you is what do you guys do from a customer service perspective at EMC World? I mean obviously big product show with 42 new products and what do you guys do specifically in services at this event? So we had a huge booth with a marketing which is focusing on all of our new services capabilities, all the new services delivery. So we just launched the refreshed e-services, power link support zone thing and that's what we're focused on while we're here is customers really want to understand what they can do with that technology that's new and that's what we're here for. So it's awareness of those new capabilities, a little marketing of it, some knowledge transfer, creating a little buzz and getting adoption up really of those new services. And then actually meeting face to face with as many customers as we possibly can. That's always a great event. Yeah, we have a number of EMC customers on this week. So CIO, some IT practitioners, some senior VP's and I always ask them if you had $100 to spend how would you allocate it on product and service? It's always at least $50 go to service and everybody can relate to that, right? When we get good service, we tip larger, we come back for more and as I say, it's EMC secret weapon. So Tony Colish, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It's always a pleasure seeing you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back, EMC World, this is theCUBE. We're live, we're going all day today, all day Wednesday, siliconangle.tv, check out wikibond.org. We'll be right back, keep it right there.