 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade and VCE. Hi everybody, it's Dave Vellante with Steve Chambers. We're back here at EMC World. Howard Elias is here, he's the president of EMC, Global Services Group Howard. It's great to see you again. Hey, great to see you Dave, Steve, you as well. Hey, so I want to talk about the Federation. You guys have really stepped up the Federation game demonstrating sort of the benefits of EMC across the Federation. Give us the update. What are customers telling you about the Federation? Yeah, and the reason for us stepping this up is that's exactly what our customers have been telling us. I mean, they actually do appreciate the Federation model of choice. So thank you very much for allowing me that choice and making sure there's open interfaces at every layer of the stack. But more and more of the customers have been saying, well, I choose you. I choose a pivotal platform on a VMware cloud with EMC infrastructure deployed on a V-block secured by RSA. And so, but you've not made it easy for me to consume that in a simplified engagement model. So that's really what we've stepped up is we've stepped up working together across the Federation, joint go-to-market. So we've identified targeted accounts that we go after collectively in a lined way. We actually have an organization now with a set of transformation advisors to actually work. They understand all of our Federation technologies and then can pull in from the various businesses what's needed. And then once the customer says, I'm ready to go, then we have the program management capability that coordinates the delivery of both technology and services across the Federation and even our partner ecosystem. Well, think about your career just at EMC and the way the Congress, I want you to talk about how the conversation has changed. And when you started at EMC, the industry was talking about storage networks and fiber channel and things like that. If you could get to see the CIO, maybe you could have a conversation about storage. What's the conversation like today with the CIOs? Yeah, it's, you could not be more right about the difference. We were literally at that IT infrastructure layer and we were still talking about RAID layouts within the storage network. And today, and certainly a very, still a very important constituency to us. And we're still core in the data center, of course. But the conversations are now not just CIO. They're all throughout the C-suite, the CFO, the CMO, the lines of business. And we're even making presentations now to the boards of companies. Because these are very strategic decisions about transforming not just IT, but transforming the business. Helping customers create the digital future that they need while making the existing IT infrastructure more efficient and more agile to be able to move into this new world. And the conversations now are all about business outcomes. IT is a means to an end. And so they really want business outcome. And a growing conversation with us is, you know what, I'm really even done on the infrastructure side. Can you just point me to a managed service, either yourself or with a partner in your ecosystem? So it's really at the C level, it is business outcome oriented and the most progressive customers are actually using this building of the digital future and IT transformation as business transformation, as operating model transformation. Yeah, we've heard a lot about the digital future today. It's kind of relatively new theme in the corner offices. Can you talk a little bit about what EMC services is doing, specifically in a federation context, to help customers navigate through that digital future? Yeah, so this is really, we've doubled down on that this year. Tom Roloff, who works in our organization, he built our consulting business and he comes from that background. And what we've done is given him a budget and a capability now. He's hired a several dozen, we call them transformation advisors. So they really, they're this confluence of understanding technology, about business and this notion of what you have to do with legacy infrastructure to reduce cost, invest in the new future for digital, but do it in a balanced and managed risk way. So these transformation advisors really come in and they're very consultative. They're actually not even trying to sell anything they want. They really come in and say, all right, well, what are you trying to accomplish? What are the challenges that you have? But importantly, where are you in the maturity curve? Because everybody is on a different part of the journey in some levels, not like people have sat still. So the transformation advisor really comes in and helps set the case up front. What's the strategy? What's the path that you're already on? And what are the key attributes that are important to you? And then we come back and work on building a strategy and building that strategy with Federation technologies, partnership technologies, ecosystem partners. And this is a very, very new thing that we've built. How about cloud? We're getting to your area a little bit. Upside up. You know, it started with converged infrastructure, right? You got that all started back in 2009 and probably quite a bit of planning before that. Where are we on that cloud adoption? You guys have announced new hybrid cloud capabilities across Federation hybrid cloud capabilities. Give us the update there. Yeah, I tell you, we've moved leaps and bounds literally in the last year. You know, I would say a year ago there was still a group of customers that were uncertain. Not sure what this cloud thing means and what's the difference between a private cloud and a public cloud. You know, you fast forward to today and all of our customers understand it's a hybrid cloud world. They just want to be able to deploy applications efficiently, be able to manage it very seamlessly, independent of where the infrastructure sits. And now the conversation with customers are, okay, I'm ready to go. So we actually, again, come in strategically and consultative and say, all right, well, you know, you've got on-premise, you've got managed private cloud, off-premise, you've got public cloud. So that's the continuum. Let's work with you on, you know, what constraints do you have? Are you in a regulated environment? Data privacy, data sovereignty. Do you want to do it on-prem or off-prem? Either because of those regulations? Maybe you even have a cultural bias one way or the other. But it doesn't matter, let's start because what's important is a common capability, common network, common management and orchestration layer, common security model so that you can just get started and then you can change your mind over time. When you look at the Federation today, Howard, though, I struggle, I think, who the AMC compete with? Who's like AMC in the market? Because you've got quite a unique mix there, haven't you, of products? So I've met a lot of customers today and I said, you know, who did you compare Extreme IO to and they explained they love the simplicity. But when you add all that package up, who do you see as also presenting to the boards of customers? Well, I mean, look, there's the traditional systems vendors out there that certainly are competing for this business. There's the new players like Amazon that basically say, well, I can do it all. You don't have to go through all these other things. And what we say is, look, we want to give the customers that complete choice across that spectrum. If you want to consume from us in a holistic way, an enterprise hybrid cloud solution or a business data lake solution, we'll provide you that. You want it directly from us or with a partner in our ecosystem, we'll do that. But we'll go compete head to head for that all flash array as well. And we've got no shortage of companies that want to do that. And I think it's that ability to understand where the customer is in the cycle. And we sort of have an internal saying, sell the vision, win the sale. Now, what does that mean? It means you've got to start at the highest level. What is the business outcome you're trying to deliver? And then you come down. Well, the customer want a solution. Well, I'm not really ready for a big solution. So maybe, well, how about a converged infrastructure offering? Yeah, that sounds good, but I still have, I want to look at your whole portfolio and ultimately it's about a product. And we'll intercept the customer at any level of maturity that they are. Last question, Howard, I know you got a role. So the services business has been changing. Always very labor intensive. Used to be a break fixed business. Now becoming more transformational. Where do you see it headed? And where do you want to see EMC services and the federation services? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we have a large business, $6 billion plus and growing, but we're still a small microcosm of the greater trillion dollar industry because we really want to work with partner ecosystem. And because we want to be a technology enabler of business outcomes, we actually work to try to do our best to automate and eliminate the, let's call it the lower level services so that we and our partners and most importantly our customers are spending their time in the dollars on the higher order bit at the application level, at the business process level, at the outcome level. And so we've seen a huge sea change in the ability to simplify the implementation of our technology, service that technology in more automated ways. We're doing some very cool, predictive and proactive analytic capability now that actually is able to take care of a problem before it even exists in the customer's environment. And I just see that continuing. And so working again with our product we use and our partner ecosystem, we want to pull out as much of that, let's call it lower level labor as much as we can so that we can get the skill sets moving up the stack. Howard Elias, amazing executive. You've had a great impact on EMC. We've seen you sort of walk that fine line between product and services very successfully and architect things like what has become VCE and now working on the Federation. So congratulations on all that progress and really appreciate your time. Thanks, appreciate spending a few minutes with you today. Thank you very much. Right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest right after this is theCUBE.