 Yeah, so Tom Clancy's the EMC's VP of Education and Services, and Tom, we know you have another friend out here, so we're going to have to try to sort this out. But for now, let's just get started. We're going to talk a little bit about cloud certifications. Howard talked about some of the investments that you're making. All right, great. Why don't we do that? Let's bring in your colleague. Craig? Craig Newell. Hi, Dave Vellante. Pleasure. Thanks for coming on. You're not John Furrier, but sit down. You're in the hot seat now, Craig. I see that. Yeah. Don't get any pressure, but that number is the number of people watching right now. 3,000. So we've got a good audience here watching us. Thanks to our friends at JustinTV and the audience out there. You guys are great. Appreciate you looking out for us. We are at EMC World. We're live. SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of EMC World 2011. We're here in Vegas. How are you guys feeling? Day one. Awesome. Yeah. It's been quite a show. We heard Tucci kick things off this morning. Gelsinger gave a great presentation. We just had Howard Eliasson talking a lot about the cloud. And we touched upon cloud certifications and what you guys are doing in that area. You know, a lot of companies are obviously transforming. And that means to IT professionals, you know, you got new skills come in. And so certification education is critical. So talk about, Tom, what your organization does, what the role is, and how some of the IT folks in the audience can take advantage of that. Okay. Sure. So I came out of the business. I was in the sales organization and the services organization. And for the last 10 years, I've been doing this education gig, which has been great. It's been one of the most exciting roles I've actually had, which surprised me. But what we do in our organization, we have primary responsibility for training sales partners customers services and customers and also universities. We have 500 universities around the world that take pieces of our curriculum. And we call that the academic alliance program. And that's one of our key strategies because we see a skills gap. And what we want to do is make sure the pipe back into the universities, building the next generation. So we do all the way from the students, if you will, the young 20-somethings all the way up to someone that might have been in IT career for 30 plus years. So my understanding is you have, and maybe correct, this is something for you. You've got a data center architect, which is a certification that you guys are offering, correct? And I presume that's like storage and networking and maybe virtualization expertise. And then that's a prerequisite for being a cloud architect. Is that right? That's a foundation certification that would be the prerequisite for a cloud architect. And then you'd roll into the series of training curriculum that are in place for a cloud architect. And then there's a cloud expert certification that's coming shortly thereafter. Okay, so what are those, Tom, you talked about the skills gap. What are those skills that are most in demand, that organizations should be thinking about delivering to their people? So it's really across the board. We've gone out and done a survey for the last five years. And it was surprising. The first year we did it, we saw that there was a huge gap in the world on sand. We've seen that closing. But there really is, if you look at the survey, it's sand, NAS, information management, and lately, last couple of years, virtualization and cloud certainly have come up. And the customers are telling us that we need to invest more in this. As a total industry, not just EMC, but our partners and customers too. Yeah, you can't do it all yourself. No, no. How about big data? When do you think we'll start to see customers say, hey, I need big data expertise. I need data scientist certification. I mean, you guys have this data scientist summit here, but how far away are we from that? We're working on it right now. So it's a funny thing. If you look at certification, a lot of times executives across the board, not just at EMC, but not at EMC, but across the industry, they're not really fully understanding what certification is and the value. But the data scientist thing was really funny because that request came down from the executives. It literally came from Howard Elias and Pat Gelsinger saying, we need to do this. So we understand certification, but Clancy and team, make sure you put a data scientist certification together as soon as possible. Our customers are looking for it. So Craig, you're with Wipro Technologies, a very innovative services company, one of the leaders in the industry, hot growing company. What's the relationship with EMC? How do you add value to this whole training and certification? Where do you pick up and where does EMC leave off? Sure. So Wipro has a cloud computing practice where we work with our clients to develop architectures, implement architectures, design strategy to move organizations to use cloud computing technologies and resources. So what we do is get that base foundation of education from EMC, leveraging their tools, various technologies that are in place, and design and implement solutions for our clients. Okay, and then you take that to market globally. And then how do you guys iterate these services? There's got to be a continuous improvement. How does that work? How do you collaborate on just making it better? Certification? Yes. Oh, great point. When we build a certification course or an exam, the education group doesn't do it on its own. We involve partners, customers, the field organizations, and they actually build the content with us. We also bring in engineering, so they help build the content, but they also help build the exam. So we're hoping that Craig's going to be involved in our cloud architect IT as a service course in exam coming up. Can we sign you up for that, Craig? Yes, sir. Are you in? How about third party accreditation? Do you look to other third parties and associations and talk about that a little bit? Well, if you look at our workforce planning, of course our field organization especially need to have third parties. So we'll look at it from a workforce planning point of view globally. However, from an education point of view, we formally offer VMware training, which is one of our hardest courses. We work with Cisco and Brocade. And there are some other vendors that we work with, but those are the top three. Right. So what's changing in the way in which education services? I presume it used to be belly to belly. Is it still all belly to belly? Is it not all online? How are you using social media? Are those things changing the way in which people consume this information? Craig and I were just talking about that. When we first started managing this group, it was about 90% ILT, instructor led training. Now it's probably about 70% ILT, but there is so much e-learning, video-based learning, distance learning, we cover it all. We also, in our organization, we built a YouTube. And what that allowed, so an ED YouTube, but what that allows is for user-generated content. You could have a person in China build a five-minute video and we could post it within 24 hours and everybody across the world gets to see that. So it's users helping out other users across the world. I've been wondering if we could use the cube for that. Why not, right? We can talk later. So talk about what's going on here at EMC World. Anything that you can share with us that's specific to the event? Well, a couple of things from Education Services. One, there's a person on our team, one of our technology leaders, Alok Shrivastava, and he'll be presenting the skills assessment survey, which is more than 1,000 customers giving their opinions on the skills gap. So that's one. And then we also have the test center. So we project that about 1,000 people will come in and get certified, like Craig, over the next couple of days. So Craig, talk about your experience specifically as it relates to this whole certification program. When did you start? How long did it take? What are the hidden costs involved? In other words, are there other prerequisites that people should know about that they need to sharpen their skills on? Start there. And then I want to ask you some other questions on how you would advise people. How did you get started? What did it take? What were some of the complexities? Sure. So when you look at the cloud computing architect certification, there are a series of prerequisites that are suggested. But to actually get the certification, you have to take the ISM certification exam as well. That's that foundation level certification. I attended the first class that they provided externally for cloud computing architect certifications. The class was very informative, very engaging, very interactive. There's a series of booklets that were created for content, as well as scenarios that we worked through during class to look at different architecture solutions around cloud computing, data center, failover things from that perspective. But overall, it was a very strong class. Our class, I think, was very intelligent. There was a lot of strong background from the individuals in the class, so it led for great discussion sessions. But the overall coursework was very strong. It was very supportive as to what we faced for the exam itself. Overall, a great class. How long did it take you to go through the program? It was a one-week class. Four days. Four days, very fast-paced. So total immersion into the subject matter. It really is. There's a little introduction, and then you get very deep into architecture, governance, risk management, things like that. And then when did this take place? This was mid-April, I believe. Mid-April, yes. So have you got a raise yet? Not more than that. Guy deserves a raise. He's also being very humble because the people that are in these classes, these are the cream of the crop. At a minimum, they need to be information storage management certified. The first level of EMC. They need to be VMware, VCP. And we are highly recommending that they be Cisco CCDA. Plus years of experience. We want this classroom to be extremely interactive. So it's pretty impressive if you can even get into the class. Okay, let's go through those again. So there's an information management certification, a VMware certification, Cisco, and then some N number of years. What would you recommend? At a minimum, three years. But the people in this class had a lot more than three years of experience. Very strong data center background. Most of the people were VCP certified, the VMware certification. Really having that engineer or architect level knowledge going into the class is very beneficial. So what advice would you give to others that are thinking about going through some similar certifications? Maybe things that you would have done differently if you had to do it over again? I don't think there's much I would do differently. I think it's a great course. I think it's good for the industry. So you have a series of resources that have a foundation level knowledge around cloud computing, architectures, to work with either your company or external clients, moving to cloud technologies and how you take them along that journey. Overall, it's something I would recommend, definitely. All right, Craig Newell from Wipro. Thanks very much for sharing your experiences with the EMC and partner certifications. Tom Clancy, old friend. Good to see you again. Yeah, it's been a while. It's good stuff going on here. You know, I used to work at a company called IDG. My old boss, Pat McGovern, used to say I want to take 10% of our budget and you have to spend that on training and certification. If you don't, you lose that. I thought that was always a very impressive thing as an employee. Okay, I want to invest through training because otherwise, this business changes so much, doesn't it? We have to reinvent ourselves every five years or else we're on the sidelines. So this was very useful, hopefully helpful to our audience. Guys, thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Thanks for having us. Great to have you. We'll see you around. Have a great rest of the EMC world.