 over the next two years. Okay, we're back live in Las Vegas, Nevada for EMC World 2012. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We go out to the events and find the stories and extract the signal from the noise, share that with you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we're here with Robert Matty, who's the Senior Director of IT Services at GlaxoSmithKline. Robert, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. We're here at EMC World. The keynotes are going on in the background. Pat Gelsinger is on right now. Joe Tucci was on this morning talking about office size keynotes, talking about the waves of change. We've all seen a number of waves of change. As an IT person, you probably used the technology shifts. I've seen a lot. Where do you put this one? Well, it's interesting. I think IT runs in many circles and I've been in the IT industry about 24 years and I've seen a number of circles that IT's gone through. We're seeing a shift to services right now and I think cloud is a good start at a shift for services. And what you see now with IT is that we're actually transforming our business into being more of a service manager as opposed to a service provider. I'm seeing a lot of transformation here. I think that's a recurring theme that you're going to see throughout EMC World this week is that shift to use the consumption of services and the use of commodity services and the shift to service management as opposed to service development and service delivery. Yes, we want to get into that, Robert. And so why don't we just set up Glaxo? I think people know who GSK is. Are you based in Philly? Talk about your role. Yeah, I am actually based outside of the Philadelphia area. GlaxoSmithKline is a large pharmaceutical company, Fortune 100 company. We make everything from vaccines to prescription pharmaceuticals, toothpaste, consumer products like sports drinks. We kind of cover the gamut here. My role, I'm the director of service integration. I run a rather large team that focuses on the delivery of large projects and programs. We also put service wrappers around the engineering and technology that comes out of our internal groups. Turn that over to the operations guys to run. We do things like documentation and quality and compliance. We also run release services and the developed service management tools as well. All right, so yeah, IT transformation is clearly a theme here. What does that mean? A transformation, I guess, just not IT transformation. What's going on in GSK in terms of transformation? There may be multiple transformations going on, a big company, but what does it mean to you? Well, what it means to me, and what I'm saying is if you look at our, let's go look at our business partners, our customers first. They're now getting used to this model where they can go and use an application, get an application in about a minute or two, start using the application, start making a difference right away addressing a business problem or using a tool or a set of tools that can address a business problem without ever talking to an IT person. So what we see is a shift to that use of commodity tools. We see the use of on-demand tool set and you see IT not really being part of that conversation with a business partner until after they've started using those tools. So what we're seeing is a shift, kind of like I spoke about earlier, to the consumption of services and what we're trying to do is get ahead of that curve and become more of a service manager and business partner and less of a custom developer designer and then releasing this customer solution out to the customer. So there's an increasingly large portion of what some people used to call shadow IT. Right. It's really more in the terms of self-service. Hey, I can get that app, I'm just going to do it. You said something interesting, you said IT's not involved in the initial decision to download the app and start it, but eventually they'll come back to IT. You didn't say those words exactly, but I inferred from what you said that IT eventually will get involved in the discussion. Are you getting involved because you're sort of pulling your way in or are they coming to you saying help? Like the old client server days. I'd actually say it's a little bit of both. And what's interesting is that they're used to using some of our services and what happens is they find an application that's useful and they want to integrate it with one of our existing services. And that's usually when they come to us and say, got this great app, I'd like to use it, but I can't because I don't know how to integrate it with your service. And at that point, we become involved. And unfortunately or fortunately for our customers, they're used to an immediate response, right? They can go out and get an app today. So they want an immediate response from IT. They want us to say, oh, yep, it's easy. We can integrate it right away. You can use your app. And by the way, go out and use any other app you want to get as well. It doesn't work that way. But it's still interesting because I know with a lot of IT organizations, I don't know about GSK, but the end customer or the client would get an immediate response and that was an instant negative response. I called it INR, right? No, we can't do that. Again, I'm inferring from your statements that you're not saying that. You're saying, hey, we'll embrace that model. We need some time. It's got to be extra secure. Or are you saying, sorry, we can't do that? I think we're undergoing a transformation at this point, right? So you've got the traditional role of IT, the no answer right away. And what you're seeing now is a shift to the consumerized applications. You're seeing a shift to the almost on demand application model. And I think you're going to see over time we're going to shift to using good enough services where they apply so that we can give that yes answer right away. Yeah, so we just conducted a Wikibon IT transformation survey asking folks, where are you in the maturity of your transformation? Two things stood out, and they were about equal. One was our transformation is primarily focused on infrastructure. And the second was our transformation, we're driving hard toward IT as a service and service catalogs. And then the other ones were like, we're not doing any transformation. We're just getting started. Clearly, you're indicating you're doing some type of transformation. How would you characterize it? Is it more focused today on the infrastructure? Or are you really working toward that service catalog, IT as a service model? I think we're fairly mature in that space. We have been doing IT service catalog and providing our in-house IT services to our customers out of a service catalog, almost self-service menu, one-stop shopping for our traditional services. We've been doing that for several years. Where we're starting to break new ground is in places like the internal private cloud and also adopting some of these on-demand applications that are coming in-house. For example, iPads and the applications that run on iPads. We're coming to terms with that now and trying to help the customers use the applications that make sense on those devices while still having access to our infrastructure. Are you building an app store? There is an app store development and progress. We were at SAP Sapphire last week, John, and we heard a lot about the app store for the enterprise. Well, I mean, the acceleration of AppStave has been, obviously, on top of mine, mainly to service the users within the environments. And, obviously, cloud will power that. The question that comes up behind that is, okay, what's under the covers? Automation, all kinds of new stuff that needs to go on. But the real fundamental thing that we're finding is that with big data, which is one of EMC's themes here, is that they talk about cloud as IT, big data is for business. Big data is really going to enable people to accelerate their cycle times in terms of product development, equities to acquiring customers. How are you guys viewing big data in terms of the role within IT internally and also externally for servicing your users? Well, interestingly enough, that's one of the reasons why I'm here at EMC World this week is to find out more about the big data space. We're currently looking at several big data applications out in the public cloud. So we're looking at cloud services as maybe our first foray into that space. And, of course, then you've got to ask questions around trust and security and things like that. Those are things we're just coming to grips with now. I mean, in the old world where networks were kind of confined inside the firewall, you had power workstations to jam on the computation side of it. Obviously, with the floating point applications involved and all kinds of crunching the data, but now you can use cloud for that. But also that brings up more possibilities within the company for the scientists and developers. How do you see that? Is there pressure there? Is there more of a mandate? There's certainly a lot of pressure there. And I think that, again, if you look at it from a business partner standpoint, our customers are going out looking at applications. So they're going to find the best application that suits their need at that time, whether that's something they can buy as an off-the-shelf application and use somewhere or they can go out to cloud and buy an application as a service, they're going to pick whatever works best for them, much like you would with a bring-your-own-device. What are some of the things you're looking for around big data? Are you evaluating it, trying to figure it out? I mean, I'll see, it's kind of obvious. Like, okay, I get the big data proposition, getting additional insights. What are you guys looking at trying to figure out? So I guess I get the big data proposition first off. I think secondly, what we're looking for is we're looking for a way to manage that customer application and the backend, the data backend interface. And so from my point of view, as I'm looking at it from a cloud point of view, I want to make sure that my customers have access to that backend and that's really the layer that I'm looking at. So the access to real time and latency issues. And not only that, but also the security aspect of that. So I want to make sure that the end, the business user that needs access to that data has access to that data and they can bring whatever app they want to use that data backend. Yeah, I mean, we talk about all the time with public cloud, it's like security leagues and hacks, et cetera. It has confidential information, really sensitive data, so advanced security seems to be the top priority. And there's not a lot of real proof points that have been developed. Now we're seeing some use cases where security and multi-tenancy, all those things are now requirements. And of course there's a whole compliance complexity around it. So there's some challenges and opportunities around that. Yeah, and I think from our perspective, there's no such thing as a private cloud. I think we're stuck in the hybrid space. I think we're going to have to end up supporting many cloud models. Making sure that our security model is right from the start is very important to us. Much like it is for almost anyone else with proprietary data that they want to protect. What are you seeing internally and as you look at the external marketplace for resources and then internally within your groups, what's the developer environment like? Cause obviously apps is an explosion of apps. What's the vibe there? What's the themes that certain frameworks that resonate? Is it agile development meets agile ITs kind of coming together? That's actually an interesting question because agile and IT were not two words to put together in the same sentence up until recently. So internally we're coming to grips with agile. Our cloud actually, our foray into cloud has forced some of that agility. If you look outside and look in the development space right now, the developers are just starting to adopt agile methodology too. And I think that the reason for that is because they don't have a large customer base that's driving them, driving that. And I think over time you'll see a significant shift. But right now I think that's right on the bleeding edge. Yeah, DevOps as we call it, we have a section we just started doing DevOps and figuring out ops and devs kind of working together. And it's interesting dynamic because developers are used to iterating, going fast and all of a sudden stuff breaks. Now, if you're in an ops world, that's just not an option. You can't be down, right? So it's an interesting balance between, okay, I want to be iterated on dev but I have to operate this as an ops dev or dev ops. So, it's a bleeding edge concept and we're tracking that. So Robert, I understand you just had a consolidation project that you've completed or maybe it's underway. Talk about that a little bit and was that a fundamental driver to your transformation? Actually, I think if you look at transformation it's probably a several year journey and we certainly started down that path by looking at building a new global data center and shutting down a significant number of our existing or aging data centers. So we're about halfway through that journey. We've consolidated from about 55 data centers down to the mid-20s and our ultimate goal is to get down to five. Over the course of the last three years we've built a large 70,000 square feet of race floor space data center, tier three data center, migrated about 3,500 applications into it, moved over 1,000 devices into it from existing data centers and shut down some fairly significant data centers as part of that process. As we progress through some of our further consolidation efforts we're still migrating applications into our large data center and retiring applications wherever possible. You know, I want to ask you, but we were listening earlier to Pat Gelsinger, John and I were in London for the mega launch, you know, the first mega launch and all the record breaking and we're hearing 42 new products and EMC is a product company, let's face it. At the same time, you know, I've always said that services is the company's secret weapon. You know, and a lot of people say, well, you know, the products, you know, they're not the best products or you know, you can argue that back and forth all day. To me, it's all about the services and I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Is that legit? Is that why you work with EMC or is it more the products? Talk about that a little bit. Well actually, I think over the course of the last three years we've probably been about 50-50 with EMC hardware and services. During this consolidation project we actually partnered with EMC to help put together a migration methodology for our application portfolio to move those applications into the global data center. Interestingly enough, we had a chat with Pat this morning and I asked him a very similar question and I said, so in two years is EMC a services company or is it a hardware company? And his answer is kind of aligned with mine which is for those applications where a service is good enough and that that's all we really need. EMC is a service company. In those instances where we've got proprietary applications or we have proprietary data and we absolutely care about the mission critical component of that, EMC is a hardware company that's going to help us put together a set of solutions that meet our needs to keep those mission critical apps up and running. I actually see it as a combination of both. So you're looking for a balance in your supply? Absolutely. Great products, great services. Yeah, okay. And so now the other thing is we're hearing this theme of, I want to run something else by transformation, business, IT, business, self. So we've said, and I wonder if we can get an IT practitioner's perspective, business or IT, that's cloud. That's cloud transforming IT and the infrastructure. Big data, that's transforming business. That's very business related. How do I get the value and how do I monetize data? And then self is, all right, how do I go beyond let's say managing loans or doing, being a backup admin to increasing my skill sets around whether it's being a cloud broker or a service provider or maybe it's a big data role as a data scientist. Is that just marketing BS or is that actually a line with what's happening inside your organization? That actually resonates with me and I keep telling my own team internally that we will over time care less about the nuts and bolts. So we won't care about what's inside of a frame. We won't care about what sits inside of a rack. What we care about is the services if we wrap around the nuts and bolts inside of those racks. And I think if you look at where I see, I guess where I see IT going, I see us moving to a role where we look at the service first, we then go look at the business need or the business requirements for that service and we essentially manage that service for the customer. So we become service managers. We become business partners because we need to understand what's important to our business partners and to ultimately provide the services that they need. And I think we then look to rely on a partner that can provide us with those services that meet our customer needs. So again, we care less about the nuts and bolts and we're shifting more towards that service model. Excellent, well Robert, thanks very much for taking some time out of your busy schedule to come on theCUBE. We always love to get the practitioners' perspective, the real world story, so appreciate your time. Great to meet you. It's my pleasure. And thanks for watching everybody. Now we'll be right back after this short break. This is SiliconANGLE.TV's continuous coverage of EMC World Live from Las Vegas. We'll be right back.