Another day, another great customer conversation.
This one was interesting, simply because it wasn't all about products and technology, it was more about people and process.
I found it an interesting exercise in IT organizational evolution -- see if this all sounds familiar to you?
The Basics
This was the first time EMC had formally had this customer back for an executive briefing. They'd been doing storage and related infrastructure with another vendor, and had hit a crisis point, so to speak.
All their current vendor seemed to want to do was sell more stuff, and not invest the time in helping them use their existing stuff more efficiently. And customer support with their existing vendor had gotten somewhat lackluster recently, and there had been some extended outages that took far longer to resolve than they expected.
So, they were shopping for a new storage vendor, and they had come to visit EMC.
We could stop right there, but there's more to the story.
Digging Deeper
As I asked about their business, something very important came to light -- the business was launching a game-changing application that was entirely unlike anything they'd done before.
There'd be a ton more data in this new world. And a whole slew of applications that didn't exist yet. And it was easy to see that the new environment was going to have to be mission-critical, and that sort of extreme operational model was relatively new to them.
Probing on the computing environment, they were pretty clear that they'd be investing less in their UNIX environment, and far more in their VMware farm going forward. They wanted to push the limit of what was possible with VMware.
A bit more digging uncovered that they didn't want to use a service provider for DR anymore, they wanted to bring it in-house, which was entirely a new proposition for their team.
There was more, but it was pretty clear that it wasn't just about finding a better storage vendor.
The Split In The Room
There were quite a few people in the room. At the front of the room was the technical team. They were itching to get into the details of how are arrays were built, how all the replication functionality worked, speeds and feeds -- you could almost see them wanting to get into the sheer technical joy of all of it.
I resisted the temptation. I mean, I like to geek out just like any other product guy, but this was not the time or the place.
In the back of the room was the senior IT management team. And they were far more interested in things like the people and process issues that were at centerstage in their proposed transition.
As the person leading the discussion, I had to spend some time bridging the gap between the two points of view.
I pointed out that -- if you let vendors -- they'll give you exactly what you ask for: sophisticated technology that may or may not solve your problems, or perhaps create new ones in the process.
Where To Go From Here?
First, I got agreement that the business was going to be expecting something very different from IT going forward than it did in the past -- driven by the new applications that was going to change their business permanently. All agreed.
Second, because of this, their IT function needed to think in terms of new IT infrastructure to support the new mission, as well as new skills and processes to support the new infrastructure. Agreed again.
Third, since all of this technology exists today and is being used in similar situations around the globe, the limiting factor is not the technology, but the people/process/skills issue. Put differently, they could move as fast as their organization was capable of -- and no faster.
Long pause to reflect on this one. A bit of discussion. Some frustration from the more adept technical people who didn't quite see the world this way.
Fourth, if they were under the gun to move quickly, we should first talk about the desired end-state (infrastructure, process, etc.) and then evaluate different scenarios that get them there sooner than later.
Finally, the inescapable conclusion is you're probably going to need skills you don't have today. Not that you couldn't acquire and grow these skills on your own if you had the luxury of time -- but the timescale is fixed by the business, hence you're going to need outside help.
A very long pause in the room as this all sank in.
The Discussion Changed
Within about 30 minutes, the discussion had permanently shifted from a technology/vendor discussion (my products are better than their products) to a "get you where you need to be faster, safer and better" discussion (our expertise, services and methodologies versus other alternatives).
And then the inevitable question came up -- if it's all about consulting and services, why wouldn't we go with an independent consultant? My answer was simple -- because we're not really in the services business to sell you more services, we're there to get you where you need to be with advanced technology.
Maybe I didn't express it the best possible way, but everyone in this business has an explicit economic motivation. I've notice that -- frequently -- consultants have this way of making the next logical step "more consulting". Just like software vendors often make it about "more software" and hardware vendors often make it about "more hardware".
Choose your poison.
Rephrased, I offered that I believed that EMC was motivated to see customers successful with our technology -- that's why we were proposing a services-led approach, rather than a product-led approach.
And, taken that way, our credentials were unmatched in the industry -- especially when it comes to transforming and building next-generation information infrastructure, and the people and processes to support it.
Wrapping It Up
The senior person in the room said it best towards the end: "Look, we know that every vendor out there has technology which can theoretically meet our needs, so don't waste everyone's time on this one. What we need is be as successful as we can be with a single vendor's technology -- so show me how we're going to do that with you."
I couldn't have said it better :-)
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