 We're here for three days at EMC World in Las Vegas, our fourth year of EMC. We were back in 2010, Dave Vellante, and I first hooked up with theCUBE. Joe Tucci was on, and that set the stage for really the future of theCUBE. And EMC World has been a great place for us. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. Mike Keeler is here. He's the founder of the theCUBE World. He's the founder of the theCUBE World. He's the founder of the theCUBE World. He's the founder of the theCUBE World. He's the founder of the theCUBE World. He's the founder of the theCUBE World. Mike Keeler is here. He's the COO of EMC's Global Services Organization. Those who have watched this program regularly know we love to cover services. We love the services angle. Go to servicesangle.com and check out all the great content there. Mike, first of all, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you. I'm glad to be here. So big show. You guys had your partner summit. You kicked off this morning. Services, you guys always say we're a product company first, which is true, but EMC's always had a culture of great service. You guys will crawl through glass, bend over backwards, whatever cliche you want to use, EMC is renowned for its services. So tell us about what's going on here at the event, and then we'll get into it. Sure, absolutely. Again, thanks for allowing me to spend some time with you. So from a services angle, as you pointed out, EMC is long rich heritage and delivering great services. The journey we've been on and the transformation we've been on is really beginning to shape those services more directly around the portfolio of cloud big data and trust. So you're starting to see us really move into tightening up the offerings around that, but also as we start thinking about the journey that customers have got to go on, whether it be cloud, trust, or big data, helping them along that journey. Everything from traditional consulting, through design, deploy, implementation, operations, and education. So a full portfolio in terms of offerings, but the offerings very, very focused on the things we care the most about, which are cloud, trust, and big data. So you guys talk about transformation a lot. Talk about how your organization has transformed cloud, big data, and trust. Certainly trust has been around for a while, but cloud and big data are relatively new. Talk about how you transform the organization to successfully approach those opportunities. Absolutely, and so a little bit of the internal, the services organizations evolved with the company as we've gotten to the size company we are. It points along the way, there's inflection points of is the organizational construct of our services organization doing the right things for our marketplace and for our customers. And what we realized is we've gotten to size and scale that we need to actually change how we actually went to market with our services organization, how we built our portfolio, and actually how we align the delivery capability to actually go deliver against those offerings. So said differently, we've really streamlined the organization to have one go-to-market services organization that represent the entire portfolio, again, of cloud, big, data, and trust, but against a backdrop of a single portfolio of cloud, big, data, and trust, and what are the offerings along the evolution of the implementation or transformational journey that customers go through? And then lastly, transforming the skill sets around that and beginning to, as we need to evolve our skill sets, just like our customers need to evolve their skill sets. Mike, I got to ask you, we've always, we like to go back as we had theCUBE in so many events in multiple years, we like to go back in history, 2010 when Joe Tucci was on theCUBE, is only visited by the way, we got to talk to Joe about getting back, Joe Tucci, Joe, you got to come on theCUBE again. But that was the message around that Boston EMC world was about the journey to the private cloud. So I want to ask you, what are you guys doing now in the portfolio that's dramatically different than what you guys were doing in 2010? That's a reflection of the marketplace. Yeah, so great question, because I think one was just a pure alignment. When you get to 9,000 men and women actually delivering services day in and day out, you can find pockets of overlap and pockets of disconnect, of great capability, whether we did it internally, a lot of our transformation, as you guys have covered previously around the transformational journey of EMC, we haven't necessarily taken that next step to say, how do we take those learnings coming out of the company? Turn those, if you will, into intellectual capability and intellectual property that then we can actually go deploy with our customers as directly as a services organization, but also taking it all the way into our partner community, because productizing it effectively is what we're talking about doing now, and we're talking about really enhancing the journey and being able to, customers love to hear the EMC story of journey and transformation, and then they go home and say, I want that, and we had a gap from actually being able to take it from our story to actually offerings and capabilities that we could actually go deploy with our partners and our customers. You know, I'm always amazed, and I was talking to Tom Rolloff earlier around comparing EMC from storage-centric to now much more of a technology-centric company, obviously a portfolio. It looks a lot more like IBM, less like the old EMC. He's like, well, Joe Tucci would argue a little bit differently, we're more technology-driven, but I got to ask you, I mean, obviously the services is a big part of that, and you're productizing it. What are some of the demands? Because IBM is a lucrative services business, and there are, EMC's got huge installed base for its drive business, so you have an untapped market of new business. So can you talk about how you're attacking that new business? Yeah, absolutely, so a couple of things, because we've gotten very, very clear on what we are as a services organization, and I'm sure Tom talked to you about, we compare and contrast it to say, look, I don't want to be all things services, I'm not a broad-based, every service capability that could be put in the marketplace, that's really not what we're about. We really are trying to surround the services capability around our technology and around our offering, so again, we're kind of back to the thematics, we talk of a lot in the marketplace, cloud big data and trust, the extension of those products capabilities. In a lot of cases now, what we're starting to see is we're transitioning from a product-led company to actually a services or solutions-led, and so that journey of how to think about bringing a customer through a journey to the private cloud, a lot of times it starts with actually a services engagement, as opposed to a product sale, and so that's a huge transformation of the company, and it's a transformation of the actual product service offerings that we have. So to give you an anecdotal comment, I was talking to a CIO in Boston, ironically, nothing related to the EMC conversation, I was just asking about trends in general, I asked about EMC, they have over a billion dollar operating budget for IT, he was, oh no, we're rubber-stamping EMC drives all day long, and EMC's not going away. I'm like, great, so what do they do for service? I don't know, yeah. So, okay, you have to know in there, put a stake in the ground, and put a new Polaroid picture, or an Instagram picture in front of the clients, this is the new EMC consulting services portfolio, what is that pitch if you're in front of a client? So I do think it is this transfer, depending on how long people have been engaged with EMC as a company, they would categorically say, oh, you guys are the storage company, and they wouldn't naturally extend us into, oh, you're going to be one of my trusted advisors to carry me on the journey to the cloud. And for us, it's about proof points, and it's about places we've done that with. So we start with our EMC story to say, let me tell you about the journey of EMC, and what we've done to get to a virtualized environment, and a much better run environment if you will with IT. That then extends into stories around how we've done that with other customers. So for us, it really is not about necessarily the marketing message, but having that first conversation about, let me tell you definitively how we've actually done it to ourselves, and now we have actually taken that intellectual capability and turned that into offerings that we can actually provide to you. So I'll talk about some proof points around the customer excellence centers, because you guys have been, and SAP's been doing this, you guys have been doing this a lot with SAP, but I know you guys are starting to look at that now. Do you have more customer excellence centers? How do you turn those briefing centers into more solution centers? Because with virtualization, you guys are doing it internally, so I'm sure that's only one proof point, but what are you guys doing with customers? Any joint technology collaboration? Can you explain that? Yeah, so one of the new emerging trends, or at least customer demands we're seeing, is a lot of customers are wanting to get off their UNIX platform and get to a virtualized x86 platform. So we're actually doing a lot with SAP on that right now. So in a lot of cases, as you know, the ERPs of the world are hugely complex in there. At the heart of the lung, some would argue of a business. And so we're having a partner with customers to say, it's a journey to get off of the UNIX platform, but they see a world where, one, they can get better scale and performance, which is a good thing, because everybody's reaching for how they spend their capital dollars. But also, they see that as the jumping off point to a much better world as the world, SAPs of the world, talk about enhancing their portfolio. So we're doing a lot of that in joint relationships or joint efforts with our customer. We continue to see that to be the case, because again, a lot of these are, how do you change the production environment? You've got to do that hand in hand with a customer. In a lot of cases, we do that with partners as well, because again, we don't do it all, but we have been the journey transformational leader around this. I feel like the simpler IT gets the more complicated it gets. Cloud, it sounds good, then you really get into it. It's like, okay, I got to manage my privacy and my security. Now we're talking about the Software-Defined Data Center. Let's talk about that a little bit from a service standpoint. First of all, where are customers with regard to the Software-Defined Data Center, are they tuned into it? Are you helping them tune into it? What will EMC services role be in terms of getting people to Software-Defined Data Center? And what's the motivation for them? So a couple things. Right now, we're in a lot of conversations which is an educate to understand type of activity. And I think for us, just like we've done with Cloud, we'll continue to build a set of educational offerings around what does it mean? What does it mean from a business case? And on ROI, how do I go talk to business leaders around is there real value in moving to a Software-Defined Data Center? I think then that moves into the higher end consulting or advisory services to say, I'm not going to get this just like the journey to the Cloud is a multi-step process. We're building out offerings right now that begin to start customers down that journey with the recognition of that journey a couple of years in the running. And oh, by the way, there's still a lot of parts of the Software-Defined Data Center that have yet to be the technology be proven in the marketplace. And so we're starting to, in a couple of customers, do proof of concepts around how material difference the operating environment is, but the financial envelope, if you got to a Software-Defined Data Center. So I'd describe it as the early stages, but because we have earned the right to talk about journey to the Cloud, customers are naturally coming back to us to say, educate me on this and how to think about a Software-Defined Data Center. Yeah, so I want to come back with a question on that and sort of understand what you're learning. I know it's early, but the motivation for Software-Defined Data Center for a supplier, like EMC, I mean, it's both, you know, threat and opportunity, right? You're going to cannibalize your existing base, but at the same time, you're going to be able to integrate other applications faster. You're going to be able to have a much more facile and changeable environment. You're going to maybe open up new markets, you know, new partnerships. So what are you finding is the motivation for the customers? You touched on financial. Is that really the big motivation for those guys? You know, still in the early days, but the proof of concepts that we're actually working with customers, the economics are so compelling to get off of the siloed platforms that they're on into a world that, one, gives them more flexibility to move workloads where they want to be able to move workloads at the right economic or service level, but also with a view to, for the first time, customers are starting to see, I no longer have to make, when I make this decision to go to XYZ technology, that's a five or 10-year decision, they're starting to see this notion of a software-defined data center as a way out of ending up with a legacy environment of cost and structures that are very hard to get out of because we have real-world applications that run there and, you know, as we all know, it's hard to turn those applications off. So, you know, early days, but the economics are incredibly compelling. And the economics are around people and process, I would presume, right? I mean, that's 70, 30 pie chart? Yeah, it's surprisingly. And again, you know, we haven't got all the way through the studies, but it's people, it's processes, but it's also the technology. When you really start to think, being able to take out huge swaths of your legacy environment and begin to move those, that starts to change some very fundamental operating expenses that these IT organizations have. And it allows them to, again, go repurpose that money in the development of the next generation application. So, how about cloud evolution? I mean, we've been talking today in the Cube a lot about how we sort of went from, you know, as a development environment to, oh, the economy goes down, so I'm going to shift my CapEx to OpEx to now I'm going to really, a lot of it was driven by the business line, the shadow IT, that's been sort of the last couple of years. And now it seems to be, okay, CIOs are embracing cloud, we're actually going to help the organization get to this federated cloud approach. Can you talk about where customers are at with cloud and then again tie it into EMC services? Sure. So, you know, because in some cases, if you've been with cloud for a while, it feels like we've been talking about this for many years and you think, okay, this is time for us to get on a new topic, but the reality is, a lot of our customers are still on the journey. You know, you would say it is certainly a mainstream conversation, but because of the difficulty of the environments that most of the IT organizations are in today, we're still seeing a lot of basic blocking and tackling work to get to a virtualized cloud environment. The enhancement of that is really around the IT as a service, so thinking about the entire platform as a service. We're probably, you know, Mike's view of the world, we're 50 to 60% of the marketplace through that. Lots of great momentum to your point around, now business leaders are actually engaging in the conversation and helping the conversation. However, one of the things most recently we've seen is really business leaders, because of the marketplace, don't always understand what this means. And we can talk about it in technology terms, business leaders think about it in economics and business terms. And in a lot of cases, the IT organizations were coming to us saying, it's my business leader that doesn't help me, help educate my business leader. And so, from a services angle, we've now created a series of education classes that are focused on business leaders for educating them on what does it mean to get to the cloud? And what does it mean not from a technology standpoint, but from a business standpoint? So that's starting to help the marketplace as well, with business leaders getting much more of a grasp around how do they think about their journey to the cloud? And of course you've seen Amazon be a lot more aggressive about going after the traditional enterprise IT space. Is Amazon another quiver in the arrow for CIOs and EMC services? Is it something that a lot of customers are embracing? Is it the enemy? What's your point of view on that? Yeah, so I'll give you, most of the traditional customer view point of that is, is a lot of the Amazon services are actually happening outside of the IT organization. So lines of business are engaging with an Amazon to stand up what looks to be seemingly innocuous. So I just want to put a test site out there. I want to put a little bit of development, but we all know how this goes. Once it lands there it never leaves. So when you talk to those business leaders of why would you go to Amazon, they would look at their internal IT organization typically and say they're not nimble enough, they're not fast enough. Because most of the time, many of these public cloud providers, it's not the economics that drive them there, it's the speed with which they can actually get into production and get into business. And so it will be, it's a part of the ecosystem, no question. I think for the core IT organizations, it will be, first of all, getting their journey accelerated on being much more nimble around how they get to the cloud, or IT as a service infrastructure. And then ultimately how you actually knit something together like an Amazon website. Well there's a lot of bypassing going on. You know, we were talking to one enterprise customer, David, a peer insight at Wikibon.org, where they said, hey, one of the other things we're watching out for besides the Amazon shadow IT app tactic that you just mentioned is just people just going, putting the credit card down for Dropbox. And it's like, I need this NAS through IT. No, that's right. But that's what you're doing. I mean, that's a fact. Shadow IT is kind of like a legitimized little innovation area. And so I got to rein that in. And it's speed to market, right? I mean, you understand it when you have a conversation with the IT. And you know, do you have a rein it in program? So we actually do. We actually do. We actually do. So certified shadow IT. That's it, here you go. That's it. But we do have a lot of customers coming to us saying, help me get to a better answer. And so from our standpoint, it's simple things like a competitor to a Dropbox, right? That says, you can now control your data in your world as opposed to a third party world. That's a simple example. But the more complex example is really getting the transformational journey done with. It's validation. I mean, you sit there and you look at Dropbox and you say, you know, I just interviewed the VP of engineering at Stanford. Great guy, young kid. I mean, yeah, I don't think he even hasn't understands what really going on at IT from his standpoint. He's just putting up a cloud. But you got to be sitting there going, hey, Semantic, which owns McAfee's and the security business, why wouldn't they just put up a cloud? I mean, basically, I mean, not to say it's easy to do. I mean, I could put up a cloud. It's just called file sharing. So in a way, I'm oversimplifying it. But if your point is that's not the hard part, right? That is not the hard part. The hard part is then ultimately how you knit that together. And also the stage of company matters too, right? Because these smaller companies that are more nimble, they're just not taxed with all of the legacy environments and they're not taxed with all the rules, regulations, security that traditional Fortune 1000s are. And so I think all of these things are going to be part of the ecosystem. I think they're actually driving us. If you were an advisor or on the board of directors, I'd just say you're an advisor. You're to a friend who's CEO of box.net or so-called box.net, they call box now, but box and drop box. I mean, what are they running into? What freight train are they running straight into that they may or may not be aware of? So it will be a question of scale. They will get to a point in time where they will have to knit end-to-end business processes together. And if I've got part of my products in a public cloud X and part of it in Y, pretty soon customers are not going to want to engage with that business because of the difficulty of simple customer information, simple engagement business processes. That's where we see a lot of companies- So incoherent? Incoherent, yeah, pockets of data. So it's simple, right? If you look at a drop box and you say I'm just going to drop pictures and files, but now when that starts to be part of your ecosystem of your business process, that's where the trouble strikes. Okay. Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate how you're in charge of the portfolio of services, which is really a great opportunity for EMC. Congratulations, you got a 20-mile stair in front of you, valley of opportunity, huge install base of customers, and a great opportunity for new business. I'm sure you guys do well. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecaster throughout the Advanced Extracted Center from The Noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.