One of the things I enjoy about my job is watching EMC evolve and change, sometimes much faster than anyone expects.
If you’re not an EMC watcher, you should probably skip this post.
If you are, it’s time to get out your scorecard, because changes are afoot.
During my time here, I can point to events that I think were clear landmarks in EMC’s evolution. The day we beat IBM in storage market share. The day we split our business into hardware, software and services, instead of just storage. Our first large strategic acquisition. And so on.
Monday of this week marked just such a transition point in my mind.
Prior to Monday, we were one sort of company. After Monday, it was clear we had evolved into a very different company.
Context
It’s been pretty obvious that EMC has been doing a lot over the last few years. By the numbers, somewhere around $10B in R+D and acquisitions over the last three years.
And the acquisitions look like a hit parade in emerging tech: VMware, RSA, Smarts, Documentum, et. al. And at the same time, we continued to invest in our core businesses.
During this period of time, customers and industry watchers have had all sorts of comments and concerns. Lots of head scratching all around.
What are you doing? How will EMC integrate all of this? What will it mean for customers? And what are you in the process of becoming?
All was made clear to me earlier this week.
EMC Evolving
During this recent period of heavy acquisition and R+D, lots of great things were happening inside and outside the company, but it felt a bit choppy.
Our portfolio kept expanding by leaps and bounds as we added ECM, virtualization, security, resource management, and much more. Not only were customers a bit dizzy from trying to keep up with what we were doing, those of us inside EMC were a bit dizzy as well.
It became hard to have a single, clean story that lasted any length of time. Our sale reps would invest the time in understanding how the new acquisition fit into the story, explain it to all their customers, and then have to do it all over again.
Inside the company, we continually added new people and new cultures in the organization. Org charts become historical snapshots of what we looked like a few weeks or months ago, but not today. Organizational design had to reflect the integrity of the acquired company, but at the same time begin the all-important integration work.
And there were more serious challenges. We kept adding the new customer-facing organizations of the acquired companies to the general mix and kept them largely intact. Keep in mind, we didn't want to break what we had bought -- we needed time for people to settle in and get comfortable before driving any signficant changes.
Customers and sales reps were faced with a bewildering array of specialties, coverage models and value propositions. The all-important customer support aspect was getting fragmented as well.
Customers wanted one face to EMC: one message, one coverage model, one services model.
One EMC
Joe Tucci called a three-day management meeting: about a hundred or so corporate types, plus all the field management – something like 700+ people from around the world. And starting first thing Monday morning, it was all laid out for us. Clearly and unambiguously.
We would be one company: EMC.
We had a unique opportunity: to help customers do more – much more -- with their single most precious asset -- information.
We had one strategy: information infrastructure.
We had one aspiration: to become the world’s preeminent information infrastructure technology company.
And we would reorganize the company to take the incredible portfolio we had built, and make it work together for customers.
Following Joe was Dave DeWalt. He described how the field organization would fundamentally shift to improve an integrated customer experience. One face to the customer. Consistent and repeatable value propositions. All backed up by coordinated teams of specialists.
Howard Elias followed and described how one Global Services organization would be redesigned to deliver a world-class service and support experience, regardless of product or geography. Global Services would be organized around what mattered to customers, rather than products or internal concerns.
Dave Donatelli spoke for the product side, and described how the concept of “product” had evolved to “solution”, and how engineering investments would shift towards creating more value around real-world customer use cases, rather than individual products.
There were wonderful previews, not only of individual cool technologies, but – more importantly – clear examples of how the technologies combined to create new solutions that few of us had ever even thought of. And how we’d sell it, support it, and so on.
OK, I make no apologies for being a company guy, but all of this taken together was downright inspirational. I think most everyone else in the room felt the same way.
From top to bottom, we all could see the planets align. We saw the opportunity. We saw what we had assembled over the last few years. And we saw a top-to-bottom strategy for exploiting the value we had created.
Perhaps the best part is what hadn’t changed in all of this.
The maniacal focus on customers.
The freedom to innovate, collaborate and do what’s right.
The focus on doing even better, rather than resting on laurels.
We were still EMC, but an evolved EMC.
The Impact
During the entire three-day session, you could feel the energy. I’ve been at these sorts of gatherings at EMC for over twelve years, and I had never quite felt that level of energy in the crowd.
It was contagious, and satisfying on a deep, fundamental level.
And, remember, we did this in Las Vegas, so there were plenty of distractions available if you wanted them. But everyone had their head in the game, went to the working sessions, sat through the report-outs, met among themselves during the breaks, and so on.
Everyone.
Yes, we knew it would take time to make all the changes work and work smoothly.
Yes, we knew we’d find problems along the way that no one could predict, and we’d have to react and fix them quickly.
Yes, there would be role changes and shifts in responsibilities for many people in the room.
And a lot of hard work.
But we were all signed up: emotionally and intellectually.
If you’re sitting outside of EMC (or maybe in one of the more distant outposts of the company), it’ll take a while for you to see the tangible effects of all of this.
Hey, it was just a management meeting, right?
But make no mistake, there was magic in the room. The company had evolved into its next state. We all saw it. I will predict that during this year, it’ll become tangibly and viscerally clear to most people in a variety of different ways.
And I, for one, think it’ll be a lot of fun in 2007.
Comments