 So yeah, so here's what the really neat part is that the thing is that Joe said we're directly from our customers. This is the insight that we get by running Total Customer Experience. We feel the customer's pain and we have to develop technology, solutions, and services to address those customer needs. So what Joe said earlier today and the challenge is about disruptive technology, trust, security, flexibility. These are areas that our customers are continually pointing out as areas of concern. Our challenge is how do we deliver today, tomorrow, and in the future to address cloud and big data? But Total Customer Experience is the basis by which we do it. So Total Customer Experience has a couple parts. The first part is we listen. We have different listening posts throughout the company available to our customers and partners to have them understand exactly what are their current challenges? What are the things that they're top of mind for them? Then we make investments. We actually take their feedback. We prioritize it based on the impactful things that are most important to customers' success. And then we make investments. And we deliver. And we deliver consistently. And it is an official TCE program office that we run this model basically every week. And so it represents the voice of the customer. It represents our listening posts. It represents our investments. And hopefully our customers are seeing exactly what we're delivering now and in the future based on today and tomorrow. Yes, we are. That's it. Right, exactly. Well said. Yeah, so we are, we actually, I'm not sure when we acquired Green Plum as within the last year, but we have a fully integrated environment with Green Plum now, fully enabled. So we are living, we are the, I'll take the guinea pig scenario, that's fine. We deal between quality and voice of customer data. We deal with hundreds of millions of records on a regular basis. So we have the same challenge our customers do. How do we take this massive amount of data, create some intelligence out of it, drive information or recommendations back to the business that represent the customer. So we are a living use case and we are virtualizing a lot of our environments. And we're recognizing that when customers speak to us about the challenges, we live it every day. And that's the best use case, I think you could possibly imagine. So we're in good shape. We'll share, Mike. Okay, I guess we'll share, Mike. Little technical difficulties. You're the guinea pig for us. We can get the mic on here. The big data scenario though really hits your wheelhouse though. Let's talk about the analytics. That's your job, you deal with data. So talk about some of the things that you're seeing now with servicing the clients. You need to have that customer experience. We've talked with, I think actually a Green Plum customer, ClickFox, which is in the business of essentially using big data to provide a better customer experience. Talk about what you're seeing inside EMC. I mean, we talked privately before we started that it's at the beginning your team's coming together, but you have essentially data scientists on your team. And we're going to hear about that theme here at EMC World where data science is now probably the hottest job title available. And then the summit about it. Yeah, it's great because I always speak about when you run a total customer experience program, what is the most challenging thing that we have to do? One of them is analyzing the massive amounts of data we have. And again, creating some intelligent information about it. I can give you just one quick little case study. It used to take us upwards of six hours to run a customer report before the integration of Green Plum. It's now down to a little under eight minutes. So here's a great example of the type of data that we have internally. We received a US patent last November. And the US patent was based on the amount of quality data that we manage in the business and the amount of voice a customer we manage. We run a correlation between those two data elements and we drive recommendations that are based on multiple data points. So here's your example of big data. How much data do we have to deal with on a daily basis? You think of our internal systems. Look at the complexity of just the parts that we have to look at from a quality perspective. Then take all the voice a customer data, run that correlation engine. I mean, that's a massive amount of data and we have to turn it into information. Executives, when they listen to us in terms of where should they make their investment our ROI model. What is it based on? It's based on big data. It's based on turning data into recommendations. And we are absolutely the guinea pig inside of EMC. Well, I mean, you bring up a good point. I mean, you're talking about the running reports from hours to days to hours. Yeah, hours to minutes. Hours to minutes. This is the value proposition of the cloud. So better economics, better time to market. Sure. And data is the center of it. But I mean, are there challenges and where are we in the life cycle? I mean, in how early are we? I see there's some demonstrable benefits you have now. What are you seeing? Yeah, I think we're pretty early on right now. I mean, I think one of the challenges one is figuring out what data elements you have to integrate into big data, right? The disparate teams that are working on multiple data elements, they're disparate systems. So one of our big challenges we have right now is how do we take, you know, there's two, I look at it as three separate challenges. One is how do we look at the data that we have to turn into intelligent information? Turning that into intelligent information takes a set of analytics, right? I think as you pointed out, data scientists and tag on some analytical capabilities on top of that is just one of the hottest things in the industry. But even more important than that is how do you deliver that information, right? At what facility? You know, you take it right now, we have reports that go all over the world for our internal customers. So some of the challenges are what's the data you need to manage? Where does this exist? How do you analyze it? And I think most importantly is does the recommendations you make make sense to the business in a communicable, actionable format? What's EMC's approach for total customer experience and what's different about what you guys are doing? Yeah, an incredibly disciplined approach. Starts at the top, right? Joe Tucci's a firm believer of paying attention to customers and partners and enabling future technology. It's a very disciplined approach where we take a set of collection mechanisms for our customers worldwide. We take a set of competitive data. We look at quality data. We drive recommendations and we're developing an ROI model now to say, you know, we're in competition with voice of the business, voice of the market, voice of the economy. So when we produce the recommendations to our internal stakeholders, we have to produce an ROI model because what's the investment worth to them? So I think that the unique differentiators are we take quality and voice of the customer together. We have a formal program, a disciplined approach and a proven, we're actually starting a program called TCE proven. So over the last couple of years we've been listening to customers. We're delivering results. Wouldn't it be nice for our own customers and partners to understand exactly what we're delivering? It's so fun to watch the green plum in influence on EMC and the Isilon and the acquisitions and some of the things Joe Tucci is talking about because, you know, Silicon Angle and Wikibon, we talk about, you know, cloud meets big data all the time and that's really a relevant and trend that's totally going to impact IT. Oh, sure. And, you know, the big data revolution is about, you know, business value. So one of those touch points that people can relate to is the iPhone, Android, Facebook, social media, Twitter, blogging and your customers profiles change their expectation of their user experience on the internet and how they communicate with their peer groups has changed. So that's fundamentally a social media phenomenon. Sure. How do you view that? And that's, the customers now can talk to themselves like online in a high velocity frictionless environment and you can't control that anymore. So what's your strategy there? Well, there's a couple of things I think going back to your point that customers can talk to one another. I mean, we started a couple of years ago in the global services division, the chat program, right? Customers are helping solve each other's problems. They're not even involving us, right? So there's a great use of technology but you bring up an interesting point of what is social media presenting in terms of TCE and voice to the customer? We're launching a bunch of initiatives internally to look at how do we mine data better? How do we discover what customers are saying about us in a social media content, a less formal, it's not a survey or a structured approach. It's a very open approach and we're looking to people like yourselves that can help us in terms of understanding what our customers are saying. And again, more importantly here, it comes back to big data and cloud again. How do we take that data and make sense of it to our internal stakeholders to drive recommendations representative of our customers? So it's a huge challenge. Have we got it all figured out yet? No, but it's a fun journey to be on, especially with EMC IT as our major enabler. We're here at EMC World 2011 inside the Blogger Lounge and we're talking about big data meets cloud. That's the theme for the show, we are Jim Bampos and this is a really groundbreaking event for EMC because last year during the private cloud was the core theme. Now it's cloud meets big data. That's the next step in their evolution transformation as Joe Tucci says. So it's important and cloud has been in the news with a lot of Amazon going down, RSA got hacked, PlayStation Network got hacked. And then you got emerging sandboxes of innovation like Hadoop and Open Source. And these are powerful dynamics. And so EMC transformation has been interesting as a storage company to an information infrastructure company and the M&A activities have been interesting. Talk about EMC's discipline that you just talked about with regard to, as they say, dog food and eating their own dog food. We've had Sanjay on, who's the CIO, and they talk about we have the biggest virtualized infrastructure. You now have them talking about having an IT infrastructure, no one else has with Vblock and Vplex and all that good stuff. So how are you guys dog fooding big data? So can you share any insights specifically around initiatives in the company that are going to leverage big data and cloud to provide new value? Yeah, I think there's a couple of good case studies being happening right now. I think one is the one we talked about already in total customer experience. But I'll go back to the eating your own dog food. I mean, Paul Moritz is the guy who, according to his own lord, coined that phrase. But it exists in EMC and I think Sanjay is a great representative of, when we look at acquisitions, they're two sides of the business. One side is, how do we bring the acquisition into the sort of a normal play of EMC way of doing business? That's a longer term and I think Joe has a very nice way of acquiring companies and bringing them into the fold. On the flip side, Sanjay's got a bigger part. I'd say it was probably four or five days after we bought Green Plum that the email came down to Sanjay to say, okay, when are we enabling a Green Plum in our IT infrastructure? And we happen to be one of the early guinea pigs two weeks after that. So I would confidently say that when EMC says it eats its own dog food, I would be absolutely confident that we are the ones. Let me put it another way too. You know, we bring up an interesting challenge with the quality aspect of EMC because when you bring in these type of acquisitions, quality is a different challenge. Look at Hadoop, open source. There's an extraordinary challenge with managing quality to that because you've got an open source set of components. You're compiling it. You're bundling it in your own enterprise systems. You're offering it to your customers. That's an extraordinary challenge. So here's another example of using big data around the industry to collect all of this data about how customers are using our products, where they see our challenges, where they see the opportunities for growth. And again, this is where we're taking and eating our own dog food, leveraging, you know, a lot of infrastructure, VCE, Vblocks is another area that we're leveraging within TCE program. So huge future ahead of us. It's really nice to be able to sit in EMC, use our acquisitions components and portfolio, look at how we're doing the same things to address our customer challenges. I'll tell you one quick little other story. Recently we went through a whole analysis of what technology and what vendors we ought to use in terms of our total customer experience program. And we actually used EMC's customer feedback to determine how we should judge our vendors for when they come up for proposal. So we took our own customers, we looked at their challenges and we looked at our own and said, wow, look at that, they actually match. What do we learn from them? How can we use what we do internally at EMC based on the challenges of our customers? And then you've got Pat Gelsinger from last year, he's going to have some footage later, he's going to come by today. So Pat Gelsinger will be here at 6.30, we're going to do a special with Pat. He talked last year about being humble and you guys have changed a lot of the product mix. How does that affect your job in terms of, you guys are much more services focused than you've ever been, being an infrastructure company versus a storage company. Right. You've got VCE out there, Joint Venture, you've got some acquisitions, they're doing a lot of services. A lot of your customers, your deliverables are changing. How does that change your TCE and your view of your organization? Well, it changes in a couple of ways. One, managing quality is a little different than a traditional box that gets put into a customer environment and you manage that box. You're now managing multiple solutions, you're managing multiple levels of architecture. I think the biggest change for the Total Customer Experience Program is recognizing the different layers of customers that we have to deal with in our accounts. The challenges for a CIO versus the challenges for the people on the floor, the traditional storage guy is no longer the traditional storage guy. He's no longer our traditional, I mean, there's certainly a lot of customers that are still following that footprint, but you hit it dead on. Pat comes in, he's phenomenally connecting the dots, that's the best way I'll put it, connecting technology and innovation with acquisition, with services led, with customer needs. And Total Customer Experience has changed a little bit around a core technology play to a solutions, to an integrated solutions component to our customers. So managing quality, managing Total Customer Experience has some challenges, but believe it or not, we flip right back to our internal organization and look at how our internal IT department helps solve our customer's problems and take advantage of that. Talk about your vision for the future. I mean, obviously you're in an important part of EMC, TCE and your whole world is about data. Share with the folks out there your vision for how big data analytics is going to change for you and for society. Yeah, for us, I think the challenge is extraordinary because we have so many data elements we're dealing with now and the complexity of what quality means to a customer. Traditional quality is my box running or my disk spinning. Can I get access to my storage? Versus now it's an integrated solution. So what does quality really mean to a customer? So that's one extraordinary challenge which manages data 10x to what we normally, traditionally manages quality. There are two future components of Total Customer Experience as it relates to our customers. One I think we talked about already, which is the social media aspect. What are customers saying? How can we help them in terms of integrating better solutions toward the future? The second component is something we call customer value. Customer experience is really good around the elements of a disciplined formal approach. But let me put a value proposition out there for you for value described as price you pay for the quality of product you get based on the image you're buying from them. Now think about how that manages itself into the new world of EMC. What is our image? What is, I mean, product quality bar none with most reliable products in the world. But again, it's a little different flavor and customer value means- And your marketing's changing too. Look at Jeremy Burden's come in and this is the first EMC world. Really, we've had full control of the messaging and it's pretty clear that its cloud meets big data. I mean, we can't really deny it's everywhere. So he's done a good job. And he said last year on the cube that messaging was important to him. But your image is changing. So now your expectations, does that change your results? I mean, how do you factor that in? Well, I think this is the transition of value. This is the transition from a traditional sort of loyalty metric, if you will, into more of a value metric. What is the value we're providing our customers more than just a simple box? It is a solution. So it is changing TCE. There's no question about it. It's changing the way in which we manage data, the way in which we drive recommendations because we're driving more toward the value. And I'll ask the challenging question. I think we clearly understand what loyal customers mean to EMC. What does EMC mean to loyal customers? This is the value component. What value are we providing? Because we have to get better at that. And your touch points are changing too. You have VCE, you're very partner focused. So you have implementations with partners to size and channel partners. And you've got VNX out there now in the lower end and mid-range. So you bought up a great point. We're launching TPE total partner experience too. So we understand the landscape is changing quickly in terms of our dependencies on partners. So we're going to be doing a very formal discipline approach around partners too. Good deal, good deal. So Jim, thank you for coming into the queue. Appreciate it. Any final words you want to share with the folks out there before we go to a package? Yeah, the final words I'd like to share really are around. We do listen. We do make investments. We do deliver. It's more important now than ever that we understand customers' challenges of getting to big data and cloud. And I think, you know, I encourage our customers to participate in any program we have. Big cloud, big cloud works. Big cloud works, big cloud little, yeah. All kinds of integrate. Big cloud and data. And data. So come and continue to share with us. That's the most important message I can say is we are listening. Share with us your challenges and let us try to help you and let us try to learn with you. As Joe said, we're here to learn as much as you are. So it's not just about liking it on Facebook. I mean, that's normal marketing. Hey, like it on Facebook. We see that everywhere around here. Text-like, I mean, that's gestural data. That's not real data. I mean, that's an applause. It's a clap. It's important because you're getting them into a community. But that's just the beginning. How do you look at beyond Facebook? You got the likes. You got a little aggregation of a community going. But you want more data. You want them to share all of it. Anything in particular that you guys like to see from your customers? If you could have a magic wand and saying, hey customers, share with us. I think there are two things. There are challenges. There are successes with EMC. And I think, what does the future bring to that? What are their biggest areas of concern? So we can really listen and understand that. I think we have some great facilities to do that. But it's not just about today and what we're delivering today, it's about our challenges in the future. And I think the program run by the executive team in terms of total customer experience, they are in fact listening. And we just have to be able to understand all of the challenges and all of the arenas that customers can speak to us about. So we're listening. What's your final question is, what is your plan for the year? What do you hope to accomplish by EMC World next year? I think better demonstrated results in the TCE Proven Program. I think a demonstrated value metric in terms of our customers being able to really understand the value that we provide and they provide us. And I think finally to be able to come back a year from now with a solid set of results and say, here's exactly where we're making the investments today and tomorrow and here's how we're accepting your challenges in the future. All right, Jim Bampost with EMC, Vice President of Customer Quality, which has run the Total Customer Experience Program. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it.