 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering EMC World 2016. Brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at EMC World 2016. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante and I said it's David Roche. Who's the president of EMC Global Services. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. It's great to be back. I think it was a year ago sitting in, almost in the same exact spot, guys. Thank you very much. Great to see you. Services is hot, obviously with this transformation, all the action. First of all, put the Dell EMC thing aside. If there was no merger, this show would have been popping with all the announcements. Nothing's missing a beat here on EMC. And certainly when you throw in the Dell opportunity and Joe Tucci mentioned Dell has financial services, all these new things are going on. And cloud transformation's in the middle of all the action. So traditional data center goes to the cloud. You have IoT on the horizon, Internet of Things. It puts a lot of pressure on you. So what's the state of the union for you? Tell us, what's going on for you? It's a great question. It's actually this adventure starts, you have to go play it back about three or four, five years ago, right? And I was fortunate about the same time I was joined by the company and Joe and the leadership team made the commitment to go into converged infrastructure. So VCE and that whole piece. It started to recognize that the world was going away from point product to solutions. And as soon as you start to talk about that, it creates a transformation within any services team. You get an opportunity to begin to start to see the role that services needs to play in delivering those solutions. And so now fast forward that forward. The converged platform has been a real leader for us, an industry leader for us. We've been great in that position. And that's creating the platforms for us now to answer those questions about cloud and the transformation and the world services gets to play. And we're going to do that in helping our customers in developing that strategy and helping them through that transformational journey they have to go through. It also at the basic level helping them to modernize the theme of the conference this year, modernize that current infrastructure to drive some of that cost out and use that for innovation as you go forward. And then price of admission, you got to be able to support these types of environments. And that's very different than 10 years ago where tell me your serial number, your oldest child's name, et cetera. It's no longer that. You have to say, I have a problem coming from the customer and you need to be in a position to help solve. And as a business outcome has always been kind of the backdrop for a lot of the conversations. And I like how you had to slide traditional like business and then the merging of business and you're in the middle of that. So I got to ask you the question and this is hard for you because your group's affected by it because you got to pick your path. Like if you go out too far into the future you have nothing really to sell. You're selling futures or you're trying to prepare for the future. At the same time you're bread and butter's traditional businesses. So how do you manage that? Because it's a tricky mix. It really is. You know, it's, I think Joe, Michael, David have really started really mentioned this earlier during the week, you know our goal is to help our customers with their current infrastructure and recognizing that you can't just throw everything away. There's a financial commitment associated with the current infrastructure and therefore, you know from a services side of that we have to think about that in two dimensions. One, preserve that asset as much as you possibly can to help our customers through that landing spot. And that means being in a position not only to have skills of the future but having skills that still say we have knowledge around all of our core products and that's still relevant. So we have to keep people trained on staff and available to be able to respond to the world that most of our customers live in today. And so that customer service experience says make sure you preserve those skills and then leverage those skills when you surround it with a solutions model and allowing people to say I have demand that looks different than the old stuff but that old stuff skill is really needed in helping us solve a problem and bring people into that journey. So we're kind of looking at this in two ways. How do we help our customers advise them through that transformation and then how do we support that in more of a predictive proactive solutions model really is what it draws on. Kevin, I've always been impressed with EMC's services business because it's always been very strong but it's never been the center of the company, right? Joe, Howard, Howard really is running services. You say, well, we're a product company, right? And so you've walked that fine line very, very successfully. You have great partnerships with other services companies. So two questions. How have you been able to do that consistently and what's the strategy going forward with regard to products versus services? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think if you, at least internally and I think David and Joe have been begin to pivot on, yeah, we're a great technology company, et cetera, but we're really a people company in the technology industry and that subtle change within our company validated that the focus we have within the company, the DNA that's made EMC really important and differentiate in the marketplace, that focus on customers is something that we want to keep preserving and that's around people and having the talent and skills to go help our customers with that. So the balancing act, the fortunate part for me is the company, not just services, has this maniacal focus around the customer's experience and that part I think has been really beneficial as we've transformed this company from a storage leader to now a leader and cloud big data and trust and I think that's been really important. So I think that part, we've been fortunate that the leadership team has really bought into that part of it. And then as we move forward, the types of things our customers are going to be looking for is they're not going to call us and say something's not working. They want to say is, help us prevent things from not working and provide us with valuable information and insights into that equation. And that's why over the past couple of years we've been investing around big data and big data analytics to change the conversation with our customers into something that becomes a little bit more predictive and proactive in that conversation in both the traditional customer service side as well as the advisory services. So the customers are transforming, everybody talks about digital transformation, they're trying to create different types of engagements with their customers through mobile, digital engagement, totally new ball game. How has EMC services responded to that? What kind of changes have you had to make internally? Yeah, over the past several years we've been investing in our consulting portfolio and the set of offers that really start to set the tone around helping our customers through that cloud journey. That transformation of modernizing their infrastructure and then also the transformation to go drive existing costs down while we start to mobilize the investments around, as you said, how do we become that digital transformation? And so we've developed the skills around very important parts of our offering in that advisory service, the consulting part of our portfolio. But not just that, we also want to enable a partner ecosystem because quite frankly we're not capable of being able to grow and expand to cover everybody in the marketplace. And so we're encouraging our channel partners and our systems integrators to really be strong partners with us in helping to bring that story to market. I think that's a really big part of it. I want to ask two questions for you. One, it's kind of like what's trending question. The other one is kind of like the innovation question. So the first deep, what's trending is there's been a lot of stuff happening on this digital transformation to cloud or whatnot. And some's unpredictable, like ransomware, for instance, has come out of the woodwork as a major threat and you guys have taken advantage of that with services, with air gaps or whatnot, good products and services. What's popped out of the woodwork that you can point to saying, hey, as a consequence of the digital transformation, these are the things that we didn't really see coming this fast that we're working on. And the second question is, on the innovation side, what are you guys doing on the innovation news app? My service is 360, is that an innovation for you guys? It is part of it. And I say, you know, as silly as this is going to sound, you know, I think Big Data Lake, although we've talked about that word in the industry for a while, is beginning to accelerate in what it can do in transforming companies, businesses, and business models. Data Lake is now the opportunity to break down internal to companies, and I will say EMC, those functional barriers where we provided data through the towers of service, engineering, HR, sales, et cetera, we're putting that data now into the lake and allowing people to be able to leverage that to have a more holistic view in its solution. And I see the Data Lake piece accelerating in the industry over the next several years because I think it is the great mobilizer on a customer experience, because it allows companies, and I'll say this what we've done internally, to start thinking about things from an end-to-end perspective, from the customer's experience all the way into how you go deliver, as opposed to historically those functional towers. Are you mobilizing in terms of focus of attention or a unification or both? A little bit of both, right? So it's starting to rally teams around a common cause as opposed to our functional towers within companies. And I'm seeing that happening in large and small companies that journey of taking advantage of what the lake can do and then leveraging that with cool remote tools to surround that for the visualization effect. And then on- So you kind of described- How about like the ransomware thing? What things have popped up that have been, whoa, we didn't brush fire or something like, is it security? Is it something like that? I mean, is there any unexpected things that have happened? You know, so far it really hasn't been something that has jumped out at me and said, wow, that's something, in the last year, I really think the pace of which things are playing at is nothing that's come out at me and said, that is something that I really hadn't seen coming on the radar screen. But that doesn't mean the rate of change that's happening in the marketplace, as we see here at this conference, has been incredible in what we've been doing. Sorry, David. It's okay, I want to come back to the data lake. Because you're basically saying the data lake is catalyzing transformation. It is. I feel like, though, Kevin, that the data lake is this, I agree with you, it's this horizontal data transport that's not in silos. But I also feel like it's, in some respects, it's low level plumbing, that there's so much more that can be done with data. Absolutely. And I'm wondering what you're seeing there and how EMC is participating. You're absolutely correct, right? If you describe the data lake as just the horizontal piece, then you're missing the opportunity that it presents, right? The data lake becomes the normalizer of breaking down these functional towers within companies. The value is, what do you go do with that data, right? And so what we've done internally is we said, since customers are such an important part of our focus, that whole MyService360 experience was leveraging data out of the data lake and putting it in front of our customers as value add predictable activities where they can begin to be part of the process in looking at the health of their environment and proactively working with us to making sure it continues to stay healthy. So it's not just the lake and the horizontal piece, the lake becomes the enabler for those mobile digital transformational apps that become differentiators in the market. So we can agree that, we all agree with the bromide, companies becoming data driven or they want to be data driven and we all agree on that. Digital is data. Yes. In your opinion, Kevin, is companies or organizations inability to value their data a barrier to understanding how they should protect that data, how they should, you know, exploit that data and how can you help, you know, cut through that barrier? Yeah, it's an important piece of this, right? So we just, I just did a talk a little while ago and we look at the whole data thing and in three elements, right? Technology and the horizontal piece, David, as you just said, but then there is a governance and process piece and there's a people piece of this. So it's almost a three legged stool in the data lake conversation. The technology piece ends up being the easiest piece of that equation, quite frankly, in terms of the technology you build to build the lake. The challenge becomes, are companies ready to step up and change process and governance around data? Because data now starts to transfer from traditionally the IT leader responsible for data to the business now taking responsibility for the data. That's a huge shift in that mindset. And then how do you put the governance and stewardship around the contents of that data so it's valuable? And then you've got to change people's way of doing business whether that your customer service person, your sales teams, et cetera, because the data is driving a different conversation, a different set of offers, a different digitalization conversation that is very different than what traditionally your teams have done within a company. So it's really interesting. I really appreciate you coming on to theCUBE and sharing your insight. I want to ask one final question during the segment is, as you look out as a president of global services, it is a global landscape. Loud is domiciling with the data, certainly in different regions and areas, certainly around the world. But you have to have the 20 mile stair out there and look at the next mountain to climb. What does that look like to you? Share your vision on what you guys need to do and what your customers are doing and what is that 20 mile stair that you have? Great question. I'm going to go back to some themes that I think are really important for us as you think about the landscape over the next couple of years. If you think about technology, what's going to happen? The shift of knowledge and IP goes from physical things to things in software or in cloud that has implications around business models for our customers. It has implications in terms of the services models you need to be able to support that. It changes from physically being on site to having competencies to be able to help in broad-based solutions. And so what I see for services over the next several years is this morphing from the intelligence around the technology to something that's more software-oriented, solutions-oriented and you have to have a different model and a different set of skills to go make that happen. And I think that's going to be one of the big trends that we're going to have to be able to support. And as customers go through that, I think we talked about this a little bit later. A little bit earlier, how do we help them to go through this transformation? I think that's going to be a critical part where we have to get repeatable. I think the key word I'm hearing from CIOs right now, simplicity, how I consume, how I order, how I get services. The word simplicity is going to be really critical in the eyes of most of our CIOs because they have to move quickly, safely and securely as we go forward. And the world services gets to play in that is helping to be an advocate to go make those changes necessary. Make it simple to consume services. Make it simple to help them in their transformation. Make it simpler for them to get value out of the investments that they're making. And of course, they don't want you to disrupt their business, of course. Absolutely. There's no disruption, no doubt. Exactly. Don't break anything. You're exactly correct. Kevin Rhodes, President of EMC Global Services here live in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. Looking back at the...