The following is an extensive set of notes from an interview of Jackie Wynn, VP of the Global Residency Practice at EMC and an IT veteran, with Wikibon CEO David Vellante, David Butler of Wikibon, and myself. In the interview she discusses:
- What residency consulting is and how it differs from what is normally considered consulting;
- EMC's focus as technology company and how services fit into that focus;
- How EMC's philosophy and culture concerning customer support differs from other companies and in particular HP, where she was an executve for several years; and,
- How virtualization, the private cloud, and changing business user expectations are creating a more complex IT environment that ensures a future for both project and residency consulting.
These notes have been corrected against a recording made by Wikibon but is purposely not a word-for-word transcription.
DV: Jackie, it's nice to meet you.
JW: Virtually, yes.
DV: Thank you for taking the time. Are you based in Massachusetts?
JW: I'm actually in Maryland, not far from our nation's capital. EMC's a global company, so we travel. Have EMC, will travel.
DV: We want to better understand the dimensions of EMC's services business, and Brian has been helping us do that with interviews with a variety of different executives. He obviously felt that the managed service component of the business is increasingly important. So maybe we could start with you introducing yourself.
JW: I've been with EMC almost a year. I am VP of Global Residency Practice. This is a significant part of our Technology Solutions & Services Business (TSS). I came from HP where I was for 15 years in several leadership roles including leader for their federal division, I then ran the public sector part of their imaging & printing group. I took several strategic roles back in Palo Alto doing strategy, M&As , worked with various consultants like Bane & Boston Consulting Group. I was fortunate to have a variety of general manager opportunities at HP.
DV: You said that at HP you were doing M&As. Any particularly interesting ones that you can talk about?
JW: They're all within HP now, so they aren't secret. I worked with Knightsbridge. Ian Wye, a small company, was another, and Peregrine. It was great because then when HP looked at the market you could grow organically or inorganically. We were growing well at an organic clip, but the leadership wanted to grow faster than market, so that was part of the acquisition strategy. And looking at where we had gaps in our portfolio.
DV: It's amazing to watch HP now.
JW: OMG. HP was a great company. I think it's just a good company right now. It's interesting to watch the different strategies that are taking place. It's still confused on whether it's going to be a software company, a services company. They still have significant products. I do like it that at EMC we aren't confused. We are a technology company, and services enables the consumption of that technology.
I do think HP needs to develop a cohesive strategy. The number of leaders in and out in the last 5 years is causing some strain in the organization.
DV: So you are VP of the Global Residencies Practice. What is that?
JW: Some people like to use a general term like staff OG. That is similar to talking about our storage product as a box versus an intelligent array. We have residents who do operating residency, and we have transitional residents. They do infrastructure support of various kinds for the client. It could be IT management services – day-to-day management, operations or IT assets, primarily EMC although we do operate some other platforms. In addition it could be operations services such as performance monitoring, configuration management, generation of management reports, etc.
We're also working with integration of services, things relevant to deployment services, virtualization, or cloud. We have the skills & training to help clients drive that level of infrastructure support.
DV: So it's not just 100% storage services?
JW: Storage services is the core, but anything having to do with archiving. EMC has done a great job at looking at the core of storage & then looking at adjacent things around that storage. E.g., how do you archive? How do you secure? So we have residents that are experts in all elements of our adjacent strategy.
DV: Why EMC? Why not one of your partners?
JW: The bigger question is why does a company need residency services. We have different types of residents with different skills, highly certified. They have different types of engagements from 3 months to 6 months to a year.
So why would a company need residency? One reason is time to value. Our residents understand our storage products better than anyone else, which means the ability to drive value from that purchase is huge. Also technology is changing rapidly, so it is difficult to keep your staff's skills & knowledge current. Companies are resource constrained & capped on headcount. These guys become the trusted adviser across the whole storage platform, to the point that customers ask us can they do more than EMC storage. So in some accounts they can be doing other companies' storage because clients see us as that level of expert. No one knows storage better than EMC, whether its an HP platform, Hatachi, NetApp. Users view EMC as the leader in storage technology products.
DV: So you feel your services are more mature in storage than some of the other companies you mentioned such as an HP that has a big services organization but does not have the specificity in storage vs. a NetApp that is very focused but not as big a services organization?
JW: It's some of the gap from a competitive standpoint. NetApp and HP have their own residency offerings. When you look at a customer's data center environment, they are pressured to operate more efficiently, more cost-effectively, the whole virtualized data center is happening. They see EMC as the leader in terms of our product preference. Looking at the Magic Quadrant in terms of preference in the marketplace & performance metrics, EMC storage products are clearly above some of the other competitors you just mentioned. It also is the quality of our products & the messaging we have in marketplace in terms of value.
DV: So these customers see you having deep knowledge & expertise & are asking you to help manage not only EMC storage but also other people's storage and provide services around adjacencies that are related to storage?
JW: So things like, EMC owns a company called RSA in security, we have backup and recovery. We now have big data with the acquisition of Isolon. So EMC has made some small acquisitions that are big opportunities for us to build around the core storage.
DV: How do you position relative to your partners? EMC is in an interesting place where big competitors like IBM & HP are competing with your service partners – CSC & Accenture. EMC & VMware are in a unique position to form ecosystem partnership & have done that VCE and Cisco, etc. Joe Tucci has said, “We will not compete with our service providers.” But aren't these services you talk about competitive to the partners?
JW: I would say two things. They are ancillary. When CSC and the others want to provide these services, who better to come to than EMC for these residency services? They're going to face the same time-to-value challenges that some of our other enterprise customers face. So we have not found it to be a competitive situation at all. As we work together, just like with VCE, Cisco, VMware, they come to us & we are placing virtualization residents. It is a very synergistic relationship.
DV: Collaborative comes to my mind. So you would provide value in an engagement alongside of a partner such as CSC. What parameters do you use to choose partners? Account affinity? Area of expertise? All of the above?
JW: I would say all of the above. These engagements are typically 3-to-6 months. We know the products, we come in, time-to-value, very collaborative. Then in some cases there should be some knowledge transfer to their own staff, or in some cases they want us to stay on & continue to manage this. It's the level of flexibility in our offerings as well as the skill set we offer.
DV: So the services partner sees you adding value to this engagement and everybody profits?
JW: Correct.
DV: Could you talk about how big data and cloud trends effect residency services. Are there unique characteristics or challenges involved in cloud & big data?
JW: There are a lot of challenges associated with big data, particularly when taking the messaage to the marketplace. Have had some situations relative to clients asking us for skill sets to help them. I think the message is starting to resonate in the marketplace. Right now we in training mode. We have gone to the marketplace to find some of those skills & started a training program to develop skills in house for business analytics and business knowledge. That is more in our professional consulting & services organization. We bump up there a little but in our messaging, it is really more around our consulting engagements, which are not part of my practice.
DV: So the big data is more up front consultative.
JW: So our residents work collaboratively with Tom Roloff. So they could do an engagement and then at some point decide they need an operating or transitional resident to help the customer with an aspect of their data center. So it is a collaborative opportunity. If they need certain expertise, we would then supply that.
DV: So you provide domain expertise and go on-site.
JW: Correct. Our residents go on site just as the consultants do. But while consultants have a timed engagement with critical milestones they have to deliver, our guys are typically in for 3-6 months and when the consultants have finished their engagement we help customer with additional aspects of implementation or management of that.
DV: We hear a lot of discussion around cloud. On one end of the spectrum are people who say cloud will change the world and completely transform IT and on the other end people are saying it is a buzz word of unclear meaning. What are you seeing in the customer base in terms of cloud adoption & how relevant & important it is to the fundamental IT strategies of the organizations you work with?
JW: I would say some customers have already jumped in to the journey to the cloud. They are smaller clients mostly. Most large enterprise clients will not take their whole data center and go to the cloud. They will start to virtualize pieces of their data center. We've already seen the virtualized server piece starting.
That is happening in the context of the pressure to control costs. The amount of IT services or maintenance costs spent on maintaining a data center is around 20%-40% of an IT budget. So the opportunity to manage that is huge. But a lot of the hesitation is relevant to security. That makes people a little cautious about moving to the cloud. So from EMC's standpoint with the RSA solution, we in a good position but the whole concern around security is putting a damper on embracing the cloud journey.
DV: One thing we're looking at at Wikibon is how fast will CIOs put their data into the cloud. It is attractive from a flexibility and cost standpoint, but there's risk. And you've seen major announcements from some of your competitors round public cloud. Last week at Oracle OpenWorld we saw the Oracle Public Cloud, which essentially is Oracle in the cloud – all Oracle. Yesterday IBM made several announcements around the Smart Cloud. Will EMC ever offer public cloud services along those lines or similar to Amazon?
JW: Interesting question. I don't know if I have enough insight to answer that. EMC has positioned itself around the hybrid cloud. Companies will have a private cloud with data they want to manage inside their firewalls. Then they will use some public cloud offerings. EMC is positioning in the hybrid cloud to give clients the opportunity to have that flexibility, which I think most companies want. Enterprises may deal with the whole Oracle piece and use the IBM Smart Cloud, but they also may want to keep some things in house such as legacy data.
DV: From a services standpoint do you care? If the customer wants you to come onsite and manage storage and is going with Oracle Public Cloud for some database work and their Fusion apps, can you help us there, too, is that something you would provide?
JW: Yes, it's something we would provide.
DV: So you're agnostic to this. Obviously you're EMC centric, but if the customer wants help, you'll provide it.
JW: Yes.
DV: The obvious follow-up question then is, as more data goes into the cloud, which is clearly happening, do you see the skill sets of residents changing in terms of their roles? Today it is very hands on, maybe deployment services, management of infrastructure, transfer of knowledge. Do you see as the public cloud and hybrid cloud picks up that the public portion becomes larger, how will the skill sets of residents change?
JW: There will still be a demand for some of the day-to-day management, where the customer still has some legacy systems and needs someone to manage them. I still get questions around managing IBM mainframes. The skills we're working on and that we are already developing in-house, if you Google cloud training, EMC pops up. The type of skills will change. They will become more focused on different consumption methodologies. Are they consuming the cloud services in the right manner? We would line up around our consulting organization, which does what they call the Cloud Assessment Workshop. Then we would implement around the transformation path. How do you start working around the client's current data center infrastructure?
So skills will change; they will become much more specialized around cloud consumption models but I think clients will still have legacy applications in their private cloud that will require knowledge that the residents will provide.
DV: Coming back to day-to-day reality, there is a big focus on the private cloud, a lot of virtualization going on. Big data is part of the discussion, but when I talk to EMC customers their discussion is, “We've got a lot of data.” They are trying to figure out how manage it and extract value from it. So you mentioned time-to-value several times. So in the context of virtualization and the data tsunami and internal clouds, what specifically do you mean by that, and can you give us some examples?
JW: Time-to-value is the opportunity to implement the productivity of your solution more quickly than others. So it's your time-to-value-to-market, its your time-to-value of the consumption of the technology. So how well you are consuming & adopting that technology. If it takes you two years, then that will impact your ROI.
DV: when customers choose your services, do they go through a detailed business case as they often do with a capital expenditure? And is time-to-value a key metric? Do they actually measure that, or do you help them measure that?
JW: That's more consultative, but I'm sure that whether its a capital expense or a OpEx expense, a lot of of diligence is going on now relative to any type of spending. They have various TCO tools we use to help them with that. So there's lots of question on that.
DV: You worked with a lot of large organizations and have quite a varied background. Now you come to EMC, largely a storage company but a very diverse storage company. What surprised you about EMC in the past year?
JW: First I am blown away by the passion & commitment of the EMC people. They are very smart, very passionate, willing to do anything to drive to a higher level of service excellence. Their level of customer intimacy is benchmark.
From the outside in EMC is a formidable customer. I didn't realize the level of intimacy they have in their accounts. It is very hard to displace EMC in accounts due to their commitment to service excellence, their level of customer intimacy. They will work very hard to get it right & to make sure their clients are happy. Everybody rallies.
DV: Do you have any examples you can share?
JW: Let's just say there are a number of them. I will check and see if I can give you some examples.
At HP services is a $30B organization. And then we've got our storage product. We were a well diversified company. $30B in our printing group, etc. However it doesn't always allow a lot of cross functional efforts for a client because it's always who's in charge.
At EMC we're a technology company. Services is here to enable the client. So we're going to do what it takes to continue to over-achieve. So there's no question about is that going to be on my P&L. Those discussions just don't happen.
DV: Is the EMC customer focus cultural, is it process, is it that EMC's a technology focused company?
JW: It's very cultural and due to the technology. It's who they are & they are very proud of that. When I was on the other side of the table we were in a large account – state of Michigan. We were doing a discovery phase and got the org chart and we didn't recognize one name. We asked in a meeting and the man said “Oh, that's my EMC resident. And we will take this proposal and vet it with him.” That shows the level of trusted adviser status these residents have in these accounts in terms of their value and overall knowledge. If something goes wrong that resident knows and is clear on the escalation and level of responsiveness to be sure we have a rapid response team. Sometimes with a big vendor like HP if you have these various products, printers on the network and you have services, is it the printer that's causing the problem? It's very cultural.
DV: My last question to you relates to IT complexity. You're at the heart of that. You hear a lot about the consumerization of IT, we've seen the ascendency of Apple and Google with mobile phones. The user experience is definitely becoming more simplified. Users of a certain age remember the DOS machine. But the back-end is still highly complex, and that's part of the reason why your residents exist. Do you see that complexity continuing? We have this vision that Nick Carr writes about IT as a utility, and IT doesn't matter. Will the IT utility happen in our lifetime, and will that obviate the need for residents, or is complexity increasing?
JW: I see IT becoming even more complex on the back end. We see that today in the complexity of the architecture. I think what I would say that that's coupled with a generation growing up that wants it now. So with that complexity comes demand for better knowledge, better resolution, increased customer support. While it may be viewed as a utility & simple, people will still demand a simpler interface, a faster response time, if something goes down they want it back up in five minutes. So I don't see residencies going away. I see them working in back office, dealing with the level of complexity associated with the architecture & type of design needed to provide that service.
DV: I agree. I think the back end is overwhelmingly complex. The pace of change is so dynamic, and the issues of security and privacy are becoming increasingly high-stakes, the management of all these resources, both internal and external, is becoming much more complicated, there is so much more data that we have to protect and archive, & get rid of. Figuring out what you need to keep and what you can get rid of is very complex. I would say that even if cloud comes to fore it will create a whole new set of issues that your organization will have to deal with. I really appreciate you taking some time with Bert and me to explain this. It's an interesting part of EMC that a lot of people aren't exposed to.
JW: In some cases what we found is that in other companies like HP or IBM, it is part of professional services rather than managed services. The fact that it's in our managed services portfolio is an interesting approach. You might go to a client and say we've got a number of these residents in your shop, maybe we should move you to a managed residency for you or the next step is to go to managed services in our storage area where it is a utility. So having that in the managed services area allows us to have that conversation with the customer along their continuum.
DV: This summer we launched ServicesAngle (www.servicesangle.com). The whole idea is that it is a publication in the services vertical, which we think is under-served. We're trying to help people better understand the intersection between the traditional IT services and all the new Web services and what it means for business advantage and time-to-value.
JW: I have a great niche because I sit on a number of boards. That intersection that you're talking about, I would use the term “demystify”. I think that's what you're trying to do because we have these conversations even around the CIO. Having a publication like yours will fill a void. There are lots of questions and no one's addressing this.
See more coverage on ServicesAngle.