This is a set of fairly complete notes on an interview with Patrick Dennis, Vice President of Global Presales for EMC. Dennis's organization plays a consulting role for EMC customers that is particularly important in this era in which cloud computing, virtualization, big data, nd mobile computing are changing customer expectations. Customers aren’t looking for ‘just’ products anymore necessarily, but for the right solution for their business need. This is putting technology second in the equation – a departure from traditional practices. Presales looks at customers' environments and challenges, determines how best to address the issues they face, and only then proposes the right technology for the task. Interviewing Mr. Dennis are Alex Williams, editor of ServicesANGLE.com and Bert Latamore of Wikibon.
PD: When the team approached me they said you folks would be interested in understanding our point-of-view. There's a shift we're having to make in our thinking & in the way we interface with clients to address the new demands around industry shifts like the adoption of virtualization, cloud, big data, securing their environments. With my role running presales, which is the connection between our customers & our technology, customers are expecting us to bring a different type of value to the table, help them understand how to better integrate our technology to help them solve problems.
For many customers a journey is taking place, and that can be across the customer's organization inclusive of lines-of-business, which might be new to some people in IT. You need to understand what the customer's architecture looks like today & perhaps how to guide them to reach a new or different architecture & how you can talk to them about the decisions they are making along the way & whether any of those are congruent with that goal or divergent. It puts a different kind of pressure on our workforce. Customers want us to partner with them to lead them to these new architectures as part of our relationship, which is significantly different from the traditional producer-consumer business model.
One way we foster thinking about these challenges is we continue to give our employees access to cloud-based infrastructure & technologies, so not only are they talking to these customers about these capabilities, but they are using them internally. So they get to see both sides. They can discus these technologies with a customer in their own terms and share how we're doing some of these things today. And our approach ranges from how we keep track of what goes on at a client site to next year more aggressive training & education so they can see educational modules on demand in the format they prefer on their devices. We think this is a wholesale change in how people think about IT. There's impacts here for consumers & for enterprises. We want our organization to understand both because customers are being faced with both sides of that challenge.
AW: Are you seeing confusion about how to include things like cloud services and big data in company IT architectures?
PD: We see some of that. We think the first step is to understand what you have in your existing architecture, inclusive of both infrastructure elements and the application landscape, & help the customer describe a future state that's different. When you lay out the current architecture and future architecture, you find some nice ways to make progress, whether that's through decisions that need to be made over the course of the year anyway such as replacing aging technology, or addressing something more strategic and project-based like: “Should we think about analytics the way we have historically, or is there a different approach?” When you talk to customers about making progress over time, there's some really clear approaches emerging.
AW: What kinds of requests are you getting from customers for services? I have been hearing that customers are concerned about how to incorporate these new technologies and services and are looking for help from services organizations. Are you seeing that?
PD: I'd answer that question two ways. We're seeing great growth in these segments of our business.
Another approach we're using is you don't have to wait for every customer to say they want to start one using these new technologies. In a sense we're establishing an architectural approach with our clients, we're doing that systematically with our presales organization customer-by-customer on a very large scale. We're doing it in many sections of North America, through ATJ, parts of EMEA. It's difficult to tell if the demand we see afterward is net new demand or whether it comes from bringing value to the customer and saying, “Here's a way to think about things differently.”
What's really cool is now we're beginning to measure the progress we're making in these areas. We've found that one group of clients have these jointly developed architectures. We take a very customer-centric view in EMC about how you do presales, and we did an analysis of our top customers and found that one of the things we do with our best clients, who are also most satisfied with us, are these joint architectures.
So as much as there's great market momentum, which is absolutely the case, we're also trying to bring this to our clients. We're convinced that there's a lot of value for customers to think about this now & make it part of their plan.
AW: What do you mean by joint architectures?
PD: Part of the process is we work with a client to understand how the infrastructure & application technology fit together for them today. What does the application landscape look like, what is the infrastructure & network that supports that information architecture, what is the backup & recovery capability, what is the business continuity? So we start by understanding the current state. Then we can establish plans with those clients to help them get to a more ??-based infrastructure or help them get an analytics platform.
AW: So getting back to the analytics, what is happening there exactly?
PD: Any customer with an existing analytics capability that is getting pressure from the business to do something new, whether it is provide analytics capabilities more quickly or give them a different view, perhaps of what customers are most likely to buy next, and to achieve this next set of analytics problems. Customers are thinking about do you use the approach they used in the past or think about a platform that will allow you to integrate less structured elements, such as social media components. Whether you want to join together data sources across the enterprise in a more open fashion. In those scenarios customers are really looking to EMC to help them.
BL: I'm seeing a shift driven by the cloud computing vendors from looking at IT as a collection of technologies to seeing it as business services with costs and benefits that can be quantified in business & financial terms. The growth of cloud computing is redefining IT from a collection of technologies to a focus on business services whose costs and benefits can be quantified in business and financial terms. Are you seeing pressure & change in your clients because of that?
PD: We see it in different capacities. That trend is taking place, and like other shifts some customers are earlier than others in that in that journey. It is a discussion we try to have with customers because we think we have some real capabilities, & we're proud of them. So I agree that as you move to cloud-based infrastructures, customers are interested in service levels, how quickly they can get a service that's been requested by the business available to the business. Those are the kinds of things that are of more interest to people that they are taking about today more than whether you can describe a component's availability or interoperability.
BL: How is EMC itself adapting to this more service-oriented world, and how are its products changing to reflect that? So you are used to selling into shops where you have a storage smokestack, and next to it is a server smokestack, etc. That's all going to go away. It's not a new concept – in fact I first encountered it around 1990 when I was working for Gartner. But up until now very few companies have done it. So how are your products changing to reflect this more service integration? Or are they?
PD: We feel like we are doing some things and have been doing things to get prepared for this. Many of those things have to do with our ability to integrate in virtualization layers. As we think about those individual components in the data center, there are a few places where you can bring them together, & they begin to converge. Rapid adoption virtualization technology is one of those. And if you think about the level of integration EMC has with VMware capabilities, we think it's second to none, and it helps customers bring their infrastructure together in that virtualization layer.
There's also other things we need to do & have been doing with the products that allow them to interoperate with things like converged networks. Or if you don't want to do this one piece at a time you can work with EMC, Cisco, and VMware in a VCE format and get some of that in a more complete package up front & quickly. We see some clients approaching this by transforming individual pieces of their data center infrastructure and some clients who are interested in migrating to a next-generation infrastructure. So we see different approaches.
AW: Do you see variations in this in different vertical markets, for instance more interest in the financial sector than other markets?
PB: I think the service providers are thinking about things in unique and different ways. We want to help them bring the highest level of service to their clients as quickly as they can. For many of them that involves thinking about markets differently. I'm sure people are seeing that across the industry. Companies with a lot of scale can get benefits from private cloud infrastructure, so we see large clients that are interested in that. We do see places where technology is so related to the business that there are certain verticals – we talked about financial services, and oil & gas may be another example, media a third – where you're making infrastructure decisions that are so important to running that segment of your business that they are viewed more as a business decision than an IT decision.
When we think about the 1990s, one thing that is changing between that point-in-time and today is the number of applications our customers use that are producing competitive advantage for them. In the insurance industry, financial services, you couldn't do high- frequency trading without technology. We can do more robust policy pricing in insurance with technology. In medical people are doing interesting things that for instance let you see a patient in 3D without touching them with a scalpel. When you think about those industries, you see that we have kind of moved from a place where technology played a supporting role to where it plays a central role. In many cases it's helping the industry move forward or actually differentiate.
AW: How does analytics fit into this?
PD: To give you a simple example, at Oracle OpenWorld Pat Gelsinger and ?? were onstage giving an example of how you could use analytics to adjust somebody's insurance policy based on their behaviors. In the insurance industry that's something that could provide an advantage. And I think that's just one. In healthcare, the ability to diagnose a patient without touching them with a scalpel. That's unique. Then in financial services, just how much the way the trades are executed has changed. Those are all things that help those firms compete.
AW: Are companies concerned about outgrowing their data centers, and are they looking at decreasing their environmental impact either in their present data centers or when they do build new data centers?
PB: It varies from client to client. There's probably an adjacent conversation here. Some companies are very focused on their green footprint. We certainly see companies thinking hard about the floorspace in the data center and how they can make it more efficient so they can avoid expanding internally. Then a lot of customers are considering public cloud alternatives for some of their capabilities. As they think about service levels & the business services that need to be delivered, there's cases where companies are thinking about that as a way to avoid some of those investments.
AW: I see a lot of new data centers going up in Portland, Oregon, where I am.
PD: The thing about data centers is – and this goes back to how critical data technology is – these days you don't find organizations that aren't investing in these things. I think some of this is related to growth. Also something people lose sight of is as things go to more near real time and embrace things like big data, there are so many opportunities for people to pursue in technology that we will continue to see growth. I think that's part of what's exciting about this. It's not about how in IT we can contract, its about how customers can find new ways to run parts of their business or to go to market. The set of capabilities it takes to do that are the kind of things that keeps a presales engineer excited about working with a client.
We take a lot of pride as an organization in the successes our clients have. I see people who were customers who are now in more senior roles in different organizations or projects I worked on with clients that are now parts of how we live our lives. That's really exciting. It's exciting to be a part of that, & it's exciting to know you're helping your customer do those things. It's a big part of the job satisfaction you get in presales. At EMC, because we place a premium on the level of customer intimacy we have, we take a lot of pride in the work of our clients worldwide. I frequently get notes from clients that say “We couldn't have been as successful without your help.” We love getting those. And we know our people thrive on helping customers be successful. I spend time studying the benchmarks & metrics we use to assess whether we are doing a good job. We are proud about what we do for our clients, and our clients say they are happy that we approach presales the way we do, which is placing a high value on understanding our customer before we move on to recommending solutions.
BL: At the beginning of this conversation you said that your organization is also using cloud services internally, partly to gain experience. I'd be really interested in hearing a little about what you're doing there?
PD: It's a work in progress here in presales. But we're starting to use software from a well-known industry-leading supplier to help us manage our customer relationships. We're also moving to a format where we are quoting & doing some of the tasks we need to do to execute a presales job remotely and then bringing them together for our presales professionals with cloud infrastructures. We call that a shared service approach. Our shared service centers connect with a cloud service technology to receive requests from presales professionals to perform a service and then the presales professionals receive back the deliverables from the shared services centers on those same cloud infrastructures.
Later this quarter and then into Q1 we'll start offering some of those same capabilities to our presales professionals on their mobile devices, since we know that's another of the major trends shaping how IT works. So we want people to have a mobile experience. They will be doing that on both their smartphones as well as things like iPads. So we're continuing to build capabilities into these folks' daily lives so they can understand what it's like to use this kind of technology. People are really excited about it, and we think it's a way to make it real for everybody. This is how people will do things in the future, and it's actually available today.
BL: I would think that the iPad or tablets in general would be just ideal tools for anybody in sales or presales. You could create something and hand it right to the client.
PD: Yeah, well think about this. We're moving to a stage now where these shared service centers will be able to take a photo of a whiteboard diagram that we drew with a client on a smartphone, ship it to a shared service center, and by the time the presales person reaches their destination later that day it will be a PowerPoint or a video. We have that technology integrated that way to do something that would have taken a lot more time.
AW: Will you carry around a videocam now or what are your tools?
PD: To do that particular task all you need is the camera on a smartphone. We tend to use my iPhone in demonstrations, but it would work with any other.
We really think that's the beginning. We make a huge investment in training & education for presales teams. To the best of our knowledge it's in the neighborhood of twice most of our competition, and in the coming year we want to get that training to presales people in a more near-real-time manner and a format they would prefer by again getting it to mobile devices. We started that process this year in an early pilot, and this coming year we will be doing it on a much larger scale.
BL: I would think there is a big advantage there because I presume your presales people spend most of their time out of the office.
PD: That's right.
BL: So being able to reach that resource through the Internet on whatever device happens to be handy to them at the time, which probably is not going to be a desktop device, I would think would be a tremendous advantage.
PD: If you think about the life of a presales person, you said it exactly right. So let's take someone who uses public transportation. So they jump on a train and head to the customer site, and they can go through some of their quarterly required training on that train to make sure they are up-to-speed on a new release of a product. They can be reviewing a demo whiteboard before that next sales call. They can be getting an update on a best practice that somebody shared from a customer call they'd made. Not that long ago that person would have been sitting in front of a desk.
Later that day somebody would be using that same device perhaps to capture that whiteboard or make notes about a quote they need to put together. And rather than drawing that diagram out themselves they'll ship it to a shared service center to get that drawing back; rather than developing that quote themselves, they'll get that quote back from the shared service center. There's a productivity benefit for our presales team, but it also provides a much faster turn-around time to our clients. It will allow us to be a little more consistent, it will allow us to apply best practices, so we think this is a win for everybody. We are very excited about the progress we made so far, and next year we expect to be on the trajectory to best-in-class.
AW: We cover a lot of big data topics on ServicesAngle. In particular we write a lot about Hadoop. What are you seeing out there? Are people asking about it? What's your general kind of pitch on what people are doing?
PD: I think there's a lot of interest in it, and I'm really excited that we decided to take the position that we did around Hadoop early on, working on that kind of distribution & making it a core part of our story. It is fantastic technology for people to tap into information that they haven't considered using in certain ways before, simply couldn't have been used. We think it's really exciting. These kind of platforms allow customers to challenge themselves to think about different ways to analyze their business, go to market with their customers, interact with their customers, affect their sales force. We're seeing this technology as allowing people to reconsider many of those things. And it's exciting that the industry is embracing open source & understanding all the value that open source and that community can bring to enterprises. We think that's very cool as it relates to Hadoop & very cool as it relates to the industry broadly.
AW: Are people buying these appliances?
PD: The appliances are certainly a way for us to bring technology to a client. Appliances add one approach that is right for a certain section of clients, and other clients want to use a different approach. I'm happy that at EMC we have a set of options for customers to consider. There certainly is an advantage to clients to taking out a lot of the complexity of the configurations and integrations. It allows you to do some things in both packaging & delivery that's more robust & can be faster time-to-value. Then for some clients it isn't the right approach. I think the appliance business is a good business and will continue to grow. And I think you'll see growth & interest in alternative approaches as well. So I don't see one replacing the other, I see them as complimentary.
AW: What are some of the alternative approaches you are seeing.
PD: Using the software stack deployed in a traditional data center or seeing the software stack deployed on cloud infrastructure. Those are approaches that customers absolutely are looking to do these things. And I think when you take the solution-oriented approach back to where you are taking the architecture over time, if you start to measure the customer's objectives, that helps you make some of these decisions. So perhaps we want to make a step today that helps us move towards a more mature analytics capability for that customer in the long haul. We may make a different decision for instance if we need really fast, immediate time-to-value on a new analytics application or a particular BI need.
To me one of the threads that keeps coming up in these conversations is I do believe that the shift to cloud-based infrastructure & the shift toward being able to derive value from big data allows people think about time horizons that are different. As customers look out longer, it helps them make better, more informed decisions about how you realize that journey. And that takes us back to the beginning of this conversation, which is how you start. One way you start is you make decisions on what you have and some decisions about where you're going and what will be important to you in the future. That helps you make some of these decisions.
That set of decisions is where you get the value from the presales professional because they can consult with you on what is the best approach for your set of requirements. When you work with individual customers, how far they are along following any particular industry trend is different. Having a trusted technical advisor helping you make some of those decisions is really important. That's one of the things that we think differentiates our approach from some of the other people in IT.
We're proud of both the folks and technology we have in this company. We are proud of the presales organization and the value it is bringing to our customers. We think it is a critical organization to helping customers get the benefit out of their relationship with EMC. We want people to know how much focus we put on doing a good job day in & day out for our clients. It's not just something we talk about. The architectural approach we discussed was based on customer feedback. The adoption of these cloud services that we discussed are things we did to improve our relationship with our clients. And the training & education we put together for people is based on the feedback we get from our clients. We want our customers to know that we spend a lot of time thinking about them so we can bring them the right solutions.