 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC Brocade and VCE. Welcome back to Las Vegas. We're here at EMC World 2015. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon and you are watching SiliconANGLE TV's live coverage from EMC World 2015. Really excited to have with me for this segment. Kevin Roche who's the president of EMC Customer Service. Kevin, welcome back to the program. Thanks Stu, I appreciate it. Thanks for the invitation. Yeah, thanks so much. So, you know, boy, we've had a lot going on on the show. I remember last year, one of the big themes that we talked about was transformation. And I think from the Customer Service organization, you've seen a lot of that. This is the update, you know, what's the top of mind for your group? You know, what are you helping to transform and move your organization? Sure, so there's a couple of things, right? I'm really excited about, and I apologize, I'm losing my voice a little bit, so it's been a busy week. There's a couple of things that have been going on, right? From a Customer Services standpoint, we've been really starting to leverage the data and information that we've had and driving a more predictive, proactive, solution support model. And that's really where we're going within Customer Service. But if you take it up a level and we look at what we're doing with total customer experience, so the true end-to-end experience that our customers have, we're really excited about some of the things that are going on there. And the leveraging of big data to provide that analytics in a closed-loop process with our customers would just see some really interesting things with that. Yeah, so Kevin, I think EMC is really well known for the total customer experience. You know, we've had Frank Kalk on the program, talked about it, what VCE has done. Question I have for you following up on that is, it's tough in some of these new models we're going from, I talked to Vic Bagat, yes, on Monday, the CIO of EMC, and he said, you know, those 24 month, $10 million projects don't happen this month. I need shorter, quicker ones, and I have to imagine that that has an impact on services. Do you change some of the service levels there, or does everybody get, you know, the fully EMC experience? It's interesting, you know, what we see an evolving model, right? We see our customers now, instead of calling about a point product in a question, they're talking about a solution. I have a challenge or a problem, and then how can you help me? So we're really seeing a change in dynamics on how we're interacting, and therefore the solutions that we have to bring to that are going to be a little bit different. And, you know, a big part of that is, if you wait for the issue to happen, we're going to be challenged. And so what we've been trying to do is get ahead of the issue, and be more proactive and predictive, and we're leveraging the data, big data, and big data analytics that we've been driving with Vic's team to be able to get in front of those issues with our customers, and we've had great reception from our top customers on that. Yeah, so I'm wondering if you could help unpack that big data piece a little bit for us. Lots of people don't really understand the Federation model, and I know that the solution that you have spans outside of EMC, working with VMware and Pivotal. We're going to be digging in with a lot of that solution group today. You know, how does that work? How do you all put the solution together? How does the support piece work? Can you explain how that happens? We'll take it a couple of different dimensions, right? So first the partnership starts with Vic Bogat, as we mentioned earlier in our CIO. We have a partnership from a business standpoint and with the IT infrastructure team to build out our big data platform. That big data platform is being leveraged across the entire EMC portfolio. So we're not just looking at service data, we're looking at sales information, we're looking at install base information, and we're driving that into one place where we begin to leverage data and the experience with our customers. So the first step in that partnership is our internal IT team using the whole Federation and bringing a big data platform for us to be able to leverage. The second part of that is the business, once you have that big data platform, is beginning to realize silos of information is not as effective as having a holistic view of that data and being able to report a total customer experience and that part has been really exciting. And then the third part of that is, once you get information that becomes valuable for our customers, how do we begin to leverage and use that across the Federation in the support model? And we've been working closely with VMware and Pivotal on bringing an end-to-end solution as it relates to our customers. All right, so the other one of the many trends that's really transforming our industry is cloud. I like what I heard from you, kind of the eating your own dog food on that. How's cloud impacting what you're doing? So cloud becomes a solution. Solution drives a different type of behavior and information that we have to go drive towards. Once you start talking about cloud and big data and trust, you really start talking about those things as solutions, the bringing together of services and products and technologies, not only from your company but across the Federation and our provider ecosystem. And so for us, when we talk about cloud and what's happening, it's really driving an interaction that's different than what we've traditionally done. And so we've been looking at ways where we can bring a solution-oriented approach with our customers. We're really kind of driving an experience where we say we don't understand completely that issue, but we're going to bring the right talent and skills to that demand and make sure that we have the right people aligned. And that's a matter of knowing the people, knowing the skills, the demand structure, et cetera, coming in and bringing that together in a seamless experience. Yeah, so we've had so many changes going on in the industry. I wonder as these change goes on, how you measure what's happening? Because if I'm installing a storage array, I know how long it takes, I know how many hours it did, I can call up and take care of things. As I build solutions and I do cloud, I'm having a lot more smaller touch points. So how do you measure kind of the voice of the customer and what's happening there? Yeah, we really, about two years ago, we really embarked on a focused program around voice of customer, voice of partner, voice of field, and then the quality metrics around the experience our customers have. We didn't believe one place was the only place that we wanted to get data. And so we've leveraged that information, put it into our big data warehouse and started to look at different trends from what our customers are sharing, what our field leaders are saying, what we're hearing from our partners and what we're looking at from a quality data standpoint. Not just product quality, but the experience of that service experience that's going on. And we're excited about what that's bringing together. That's translating into improvements in our customer satisfaction experience, the net promoter and our loyalty scores, et cetera. We're seeing something change and we're seeing the progress that we're making because we've been able to leverage that big data in bringing a solution-oriented approach to what our customers are looking for. All right, so how do you know whether the investment you're making are working? Yeah, it's, you know, the big part about this is, first of all, you have to listen to your customers and that happens in a number of different listening posts that we have out there, right? So voice of customer, we're looking at our loyalty data that's coming back once a quarter and we're looking at and listening to what our customers are saying there. We're looking at what's coming out of our CSAT results and we're saying, what's our results from that? We're looking at it from a quality and a DUDL and a metrics that you traditionally think about from a technology standpoint. We're starting to put that together and looking at what those results are. So let's start from the customer. Our CSAT numbers from across the globe and our different theaters are at industry levels right now, they're best in class. And those are not just what we report but also what we're hearing in the industry and we're getting recognized by some great industry pundits who are talking about the innovation we're bringing to that, et cetera. And so we're excited about what that's doing and our service levels, our customer satisfaction, service levels have never been higher for us. In addition, we said we wanted to take a look at the whole loyalty experience and what our customers are seeing from an end-to-end standpoint. How we're doing in the sales cycle, how they're deploying our technology, how they're consuming and servicing it. And we're seeing our loyalty results just off the charts moving in the right direction. We decided last year to look at the Temkin Report as a way to start to say, let's take an industry view of loyalty and we were very proud last year VMware and EMC, top three of 60 technology vendors out in the industry in delivering a net promoter score, loyalty score of 43 or greater. And we're just really excited about those as proof points, not because we think it's the right proof point but because the customers and the industry people are saying, hey, we're moving in the right direction. All right, well congratulations on that, Kevin. Thank you, appreciate it. So, you know, this is a user conference. So 14,000 people here, what I always loved about EMC World is get to talk to those practitioners, talk to what they're doing, they usually give some pretty honest feedback. How's the week been going for you? What's kind of the top of mind issues for them? You know, what are they saying you're doing great? And you know, what areas are they hoping that you help them along that journey? Yeah, I'll give you a great example. We had a super meeting, breakfast meeting earlier this week with one of our large global customers and I think the summary was best stated by our customer. Hey, we like what you're doing. We like your technology and we like the service experience that we have. But here's some of the things that we need help with. You can't think about just as your product. We actually need you to start to help us to give visibility when we look at our integrated data center solution, which might not have all EMC technology. How can you help diagnose and point in areas where you can see other people's issues or challenges and give us some assistance in helping in the problem resolution? And I think that's one of the things us and other technology vendors have to go off and do. How do we begin to bring that experience more seamless and holistically considering the complexity that's in the data center of our customers? And I think that's one of the things that's really driving us. Yeah, we talk a lot about what this new digital era is going to do to how users consume technology. We're in many ways trying to help automate things and take away some of those challenges that they have. How do you see the role of your organization evolving over time? I mean, you know, we know orchestration is not going to take people out of it completely, but how much is that push going to come? Yeah, it's really interesting. So some of this data that we've been talking about in the Big Data Lake experience, that is being positioned with our customers to help give them visibility into their environment to become more proactive. Part of that information is that same information is being used to be leveraged to drive back into our product groups. And we're sharing with our product groups what we're seeing from a customer experience so we begin to build that into the product right up front. So what I call those ex-ability features that are really critical that reduces the touch points. And as I've said within our company, rapid and successful implementation and deployment of EMC technology, that's what's really driving us. We want to get value to our customers as quickly as we possibly can. And so that data is helping that experience and driving that piece of it. So a lot of great things are happening down that path. We're pretty excited about that piece of it. Yeah, it's interesting. What we've been talking at Wikibon about, especially in the big data space, is while the initial opportunities are very much services-led, we think that software is going to be the big winner here. I mean, yes, we've been all saying for many years, software is eating the world, but it's really going to be that marginal economics of software are really going to overtake what services do. Services are scalable. If I knew every customer I need to touch them, what do you think at an industry level, what does that mean? And from EMC's standpoint, I mean, you don't have 100,000 services people doing professional services. So how do you feel EMC's position and what's your commentary on the industry? Yeah, it's interesting. So we have, first of all, a great number of our super fantastic partners out there. So when I think about services and both professional and customer services, if we only think about that as EMC badged as the only way to solve, quite frankly, we're going to be in a world of hurt. So the most important thing, I think our technology vendor, whether that's software related or hardware related, is to begin to share openly our knowledge, our experience and our insights into what products are happening. So we're making a big bet on knowledge and making knowledge available to our customers and our partners in a proactive way to help them in the resolution of that. And we think that's going to be really important, particularly in the evolution of software becoming a critical part of their staff. So we see that as a critical piece of it. In exposing more data in a way that allows you to look at it from a mobile standpoint, your desktop, et cetera. So those are the key things that we have to do over the next 12 to 15 months. Yeah, so I mean, you bring up a great point. Education services, we've talked to the EMC group on that. You've got certification for cloud, certification for big data. What's the update on how you're helping kind of train the industry on what's going on? Well, I mentioned earlier about the use of big data in providing those proactive visibility into our customer's environment. What we also see in that is not only sharing with them the health of their environment or potential risks in their environment, we want to start to share with them ways to reduce and mitigate that risk. One way to do that is we believe education and getting their teams trained not only in the technology, but around these integrated solutions becomes key to our success as a partnership between our customers and what EMC brings to the business. And so Ed Services is going to be a really critical part of that equation. Yeah, it's been a lot of discussion here at the show about just some of the transitions that are going on. And EMC wants to make sure not to overpivot too far. I mean, platform three is great, but the NoSQL space is pretty small compared to what's there. Hadoop is phenomenal, but it's not like Microsoft Exchange is out there. How do you manage some of that in the field? Yeah, it's really, this is a critical balance that's going on right now today. The things that EMC has done historically really well around our deep knowledge, around our technology. You can't let go of that. You still have to build that. You have to nurture that and you still have to have those skills. But what we feel is going to be really important is to look at the solutions like an open stack, like Hadoop, that says I have a problem that's solutions oriented. I want to bring in the deep technical understanding that I have within our teams and bring that to swarm, intelligence swarm, the solutions on that. So we really believe the balance is, as I've said to a number of my team members across the globe, it's great. And we want you to continue to have that deep technical knowledge about a product or a product family. But we also want to start having you look sideways. We want you to see how that deep technology integrates with other pieces because we think ultimately that's the experience our customers are looking for. Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about the people because there's got to be some new hiring going on for that new skill set. EMC has also done acquisitions in the past to pull on teams to do that. If I remember right, even Chad Sackage came in for a small, ice-cozzy solution provider. I worked with him in the early days on that. So how do you get that new skill set? Yes, part of that's coming in through acquisitions which is really great. I'll tell you the one thing that I've been extremely impressed. This is my fifth year now at EMC. I've been extremely impressed with the investment we make at what we call our GSAP program. We're bringing in associate people into the company that are thinking differently on how you solve problems, that are bringing in skill sets that quite frankly are driving us to different types of solutions and approaches to solutions, which is really amazing. So we are looking at the investment in entry-level folks with a GSAP skill set that can approach a problem totally different and the historical way of doing that and we're really excited about what that can bring. So our investment is continue to leverage the deep technical knowledge we have of our team and begin to introduce through acquisitions and GSAP into making that happen. And the one thing that we have done really well, all of those acquired companies now have one global customer service experience. It all comes from one place and one expectations our customers should have and I think that's a real value that we should be leveraging. So I'm curious, if you look at the consumer side of the market, social media plays a real important part as to how we communicate with there. I know kind of the B2B piece that EMC does but from your part of the organization, how much is there interaction? I mean, are people complaining about some deployment and that escalating things? Yeah, we hear some of that and that should be out there and it's a great source of feedback. As I mentioned earlier, our total customer experience program that when we look at the holistic view, it's going to be really important for us to make sure that social and the social media points, we get information from that to help drive our experience. And so social media, social and social feedback is going to be a critical part because it provides what I'll call that agile field feedback, the need to move quickly based on experiences that our customers and our partners are having and I think that's going to be a critical piece of it for us. All right, so Kevin, I want to give you the last word. EMC World 2015, what do you want your customers walking away from the show thinking about EMC? Well, the first thing I want to say is thank you because the whole process really starts with a partnership and whether it's the great days and everything's working fine or those days when things don't go right. The partnership that we have and the times that I'm involved with escalations, I really appreciate their professionalism and support through the entire process. So the first statement is thank you. The second is we are committed to continuously improve what we do for you. We have I think an engine of continuous improvement. We're not going to get it right on day one, but we believe that that has to be ingrained in what we do. And the third piece is we're heading to a predictive proactive solution support model. All right, well thank you so much for joining us. We understand most of this time should be with your customers, your partners. We're going to have a lot of them here on the program throughout the rest of the day. Check out siliconangle.tv. All the videos will be up on demand. Check out wikibon.com for our research and we will be right back with lots more coverage right after this quick break.