The Real Rock Stars of EMC World: EMC IT

There's a veritable river of information, perspectives and opinions coming out of EMC World this week.  Not to mention about a bazillion tweets on the #EMCworld hashtag.

While all the keynotes were excellent, the one that I thought really stood out came from the EMC IT organization.  Sanjay Mirchandani and his team did an excellent job of bridging the gap between theory and practice while adding a healthy dose of pragmatism to the whole private cloud discussion.

Their team also did yeoman's duty manning a booth on the floor and meeting with literally dozens and dozens of customers during the show. 

They weren't really there to sell anything, just to share their experiences openly and honestly as one IT team to another.

In this post, I wanted to share the presentation along with my own personal commentary.  If you'd like to see the presentation as a video (complete with a few very cool demos), check this out.  There's also a download link for the complete set of slides I'm using here.

The Private Cloud Has A Silver Lining

Let's face it -- people generally don't like disruptive change.  And IT professionals are no different in that regard.

And, taken in its totality, the transformation from "IT as silos of technology" to "IT as a service" can appear very disruptive to many people.

Sanjay and his team don't minimize the hard work and the challenges involved, but they do a good job of sharing the upside as well. 

And I think that resonates well with most IT professionals -- they have no objection to hard work, they just want to know what the payoff will ultimately be.

What's On The Mind of CIOs?

Strange observation: it struck me that just about everyone in the EMC World audience either (a) works for a CIO, or (b) wants to sell something to a CIO.  So hearing directly from a CIO is usually an interesting topic for just about everyone in our industry.

If you haven't met Sanjay, he's great.  Smart, passionate, funny -- and he doesn't take himself too seriously. 

He is most definitely not a career IT guy.  He's an ambitious business executive who is leading EMC IT through a transition.  And we're meeting more CIOs like Sanjay each and every day. 

BTW, I'm saving that graphic.  It should come in handy some day :-)

Answer: A Lot

Like any other executive position, there's not just one or two things on his mind -- there's a lot.  He put up a representational list just to illustrate the point.

But I think he pulled a few punches.  When I meet with leaders like Sanjay, the real agenda seems to boil down to "transformation" and "organization".

Things are changing -- and the real agenda is to lead the IT organization through a transformation -- as quickly as possible, and without blowing things up.

Not only is Sanjay up to the challenge, I think he's doing an exceptional job at leading the transformation.  Please keep in mind, my sample size is quite large -- over the years, I've met with literally hundreds of IT organizations. 

I think we're quite lucky to have him in this role at EMC.

Netting It Out

With complex messages, simplicity is essential, so Sanjay boils it down to two things: revenue and efficiency.

Revenue means not only doing a better job at what you're doing today, but speed and agility in creating new offers and entering new markets. 

All revenue is good.  New revenue from new sources -- well, that's extra-special in the business world.

Considering he's running IT for a large IT vendor, things move very fast indeed.  EMC's industry is itself in the process of transformation, and speed matters greatly right now.

Efficiency is more than doing things better and cheaper.  That's considered to be table stakes -- delivering better services (more reliable, more performance, more secure) at an ever-lowering cost-to-serve.

No, "efficiency" also means speed and flexibility in this context.  When the business needs something from IT, we put a huge premium on getting things going as quickly as possible. 

Long planning horizons, year-long projects, etc. -- no business leader wants to hear that from their IT organization.

What Cloud Means To Him

The goal of EMC IT's private cloud initiative is very pragmatic indeed -- to be world-class at delivering IT-as-a-service.  The measurement of success isn't internal to IT, it's as viewed by the business stakeholders.

This shift in perspective (from internal to IT to external) is perhaps the hardest thing to engender in the majority of IT organizations I work with. 

IT organizations tend to be incredibly internally focused in a way that other business functions generally aren't. It's very rare indeed that IT uses a KPI process that includes the non-IT view. 

I greatly hope to see more of this in the future.  If you look at other "as a service" models (let's take phone networks as an example), it really doesn't matter what the phone company thinks of itself.  What really matters is what their customers think of the service.

IT within a corporate setting should be no different. 

Look at the #1 thing on his list: business agility.  It's the ability to change things quickly-- up, down, sideways, etc.  At EMC, we're moving so fast that we value this flexibility above all else.

There's a familiar theme for #2, and that's saving money.  Not in a drop-to-the-bottom-line sense, but more in a reinvest-in-the-business kind of sense.  The more we save on infrastructure et. al., the more we can spend on innovation.  That is, if we have the "business agility" from IT as mentioned above.

And #3 is also familiar: continually improving our quality of service -- as seen by the business.  From my outside perspective, we're pretty good in that regard, but there's always room for improvement.

And, yes, Sanjay believes that all three are achievable without inherent tradeoffs. 

That's howhe justifies his investment in transitioning his infrastructure and organization to a private cloud model.

EMC IT At A Glance

In terms of numbers, we've got a decent-sized IT organization.  But, unlike other companies, we need an incredibly wide range of services from our IT organization with no one predominant theme.

"The business" is a rather meaningless abstraction; more realistic is "the businesses" given our diversity. 

Many needs, one infrastructure -> private cloud.

The notion of "internal users" is also not holding up well -- much of our IT is external facing: customers, partners, et. al. 

These outside systems use our EMC systems as part of their own businesses in many regards, so we need to expand that concept as well.

EMC IT Under Scutiny

Like any other organization, EMC IT wants to benchmark itself against the best of the best. 

There's a continual stream of external evaluation and measurement, which -- incidentally -- has resulted in some interesting recognition from different external organizations.

I wrote about one external assessment here done by ESG -- there's more to share, but I think you get the picture: these guys might not be the best in the world, but they're pretty darn good.

Doing IT Ain't Easy, Especially If It's EMC

You might think there's an inherent skepticism associated with having the IT organization of an IT vendor talk about IT. 

In one sense, you're right -- there's a strong preference for not only EMC products and service, but those associated with our ecosystem as well.

But, in another sense, these guys are real -- they have the same sorts of challenges that every IT organization encounters -- and they don't have the benefit of an EMC customer-facing team  (sales, presales, consulting, support, etc.) to help make everything smooth and simple.

Take a look at this "worry bubble" chart that Sanjay shared -- how many of these apply to your organization?  Probably most (if not all) of them. 

And, yes, EMC IT has to pay for everything they use, just like everyone else ...

Sanjay likes to joke that, at EMC, about 43,000 people have an opinion about what IT should be doing. 

It sort of comes with the territory :-)

Phase One Of The Three-Phase Model

During EMC World, we frequently shared a three-part reference model to describe the journey to a private cloud.

Phase one is grabbing the low-hanging fruit.  Most people have either done this, or in the process of doing it.

For some reason, everyone at the show was using the term I've been using for years (e.g. "crapplications") to describe the vast array of IT that IT owns -- print servers, file servers, mail servers, et. al. 

Although the business benefits from these functions, there's no direct "business owner" in the traditional sense -- ownership usually falls to the IT organization.  So, in most cases, that's where virtualization was done first.

And EMC was no exception.

At a high level, there was no rocket science here, although I'm sure there was a lot of hard work from everyone involved.

Standalone servers and storage were replaced by virtualized shared servers and storage. 

Storage was lightly tiered (nothing exotic or advanced), and a few management process changes were put into place -- again, nothing substantial or exotic.

Just so you're clear, "SAN" in this context doesn't always imply traditional FC SAN -- there's a lot of NAS in use as well.

But in another sense, the work had just begun.  Yes, the technology had changed (more virtualized, more dynamic), but the operational model and the consumption model was still the same.

Results of Phase One

We've had a number of organizations come in and verify our results during this period of IT transformation, and these are the sorts of numbers that come back -- and, yes, they're considerable. 

Small things done well can make a huge impact at scale.  Even consolidating small applications that IT owns, and consolidating/tiering storage. 

But that's in the past -- what lies ahead?

Sanjay makes the point that there's no easy way to bypass this phase -- you've got to get comfortable with the technology before you can do anything further.

"Building a foundation" as he puts it.  Obviously, one that pays for itself.

Phase Two -- Business Production

Things like QoS don't really become a concern in phase one.  Nor do things like backup, security, integrated management, etc.

When we start talking about business applications, not only is the domain larger but the requirements much, much steeper.  After all, these are the applications that generate revenue and run the business in a direct and visceral sense.

Have a bad day with one of these, and there'll be hell to pay :-)

To start with, the environment is more highly pooled and dynamic.  Not only does this drive up utilization, it also helps to handle big demand spikes as well -- there's plenty of on-demand capacity to soak up on a moment's notice.

But leveraging this more highly consolidated environment means a lot of heavy lifting for the operations team.  A new approach to monitoring service levels was required.  Traditional security measures didn't really fit here.  Even data protection had to be revisited.

The benefits were still there, but more work was required.

Not just technology -- but challenging fundamental assumptions around core IT processes, the root of how work gets done.  Processes change, and people have to change as well.

But our EMC IT team is making progress.  Put differently, they've not only changed the technology model, but made progress in changing the operational model as well. 

The consumption model hasn't changed yet, but that's coming ...

The Phase 2 Status Report

I'd consider this more of a snapshot on progress-to-date, rather than the end result.

On one level, it's pretty clear that EMC IT is making a good progress.  And what IT leader wouldn't want to put up those sorts of impacts in an executive review?

But I think the real impactful story can't be seen from this slide.

The Softer Side Of Business Value

Yes, there are some nice metrics to go consider, above and beyond the considerable savings seen in the first phase.  The numbers don't capture the new run rate well, though.  The IT infrastructure team is now playing at an entirely different level in cost-to-serve.

Security is better than it was.  Service delivery is better than it was.  Those numbers aren't up there, but they deserve to be.

Perhaps the hardest thing to capture in all of this is the reaction from the business.  Sure, everyone is glad that money is being saved, security and service levels are better, etc.

What you can't see is the new perception between EMC IT and the business.  The team is now far more responsive than they used to be.  Things that are important to us get done faster than ever before. 

The words "business agility" look so darn sterile sitting on slide in a big font, but -- essentially -- that's exactly what is happening.

And the status of the EMC IT organization in the corporate community continues to grow and grow.

This is now the cool team, they make things happen, they get things done.

And what IT professional wouldn't want to have that sort of relationship and branding with business leaders?

Sure, they're saving the company money.  Sure they're more reliable and secure.  But I'd expect that as "table stakes" from any IT organization.  And, as a stockholder, that's a good thing -- in an abstract way.

But -- across the business -- the EMC IT team is starting to make a real and visceral business impact.  Many of us are extremely pleased to work this new business partner.

And what IT organization wouldn't want that sort of relationship with the business?

Phase 3 -- IT As A Service

There are actually *two* meanings to this phrase, if you think about it.

One is the interaction between EMC IT and the various internal business customers -- a strong and pronounced move to a portal-based self-service model with "showback" of resources used -- we don't do a lot of cross-charging here at EMC.

Not every mission-critical application needs a self-service portal, but -- if you consider everything we're doing across the business to innovate: develop products, analyze the business, support customers and partners in new ways -- they usually involve some aspect of IT infrastructure.

And giving people what they need, when they need it, and without too much fuss -- that's rocket fuel for any business model built on accelerated innovation.

We've already got aspects of this portal-based, self-service showback model running in parts of the business, but that's not enough.

The goal is to mainstream this capability across the business.  Much in the same way we always have given people a desktop, an email account, a phone line, etc. -- we want to add on-demand IT infrastructure resources to the mix.

Whether it's a virtual desktop experience, someone doing business analytics, or whatever -- direct IT engagement with traditional IT personnel and process just doesn't add much value anymore -- something I think we'll see across the industry before too long.

The second meaning of "IT as a service" has nothing to do with business users, it has to do with how those services are sourced.

EMC IT, like everyone else, wants access to a rich ecosystem of compatible service providers they can use to complement and extend their own native capabilities -- having flexibility, while retaining control.

And they fully intend to leverage different aspects of this emerging ecosystem -- for cost, geography or expertise reasons -- as it develops.  Not everything has to be done directly by IT in this new world.

No U-Turns

One of the things that effective leaders do is set direction in a clear and unambiguous way, and Sanjay is no exception.

He'll bluntly say that EMC needs to be 100% virtualized. 

He won't allow any technology or process into the environment that doesn't support that goal.  Not one piece of hardware, software or application -- period.

Application vendors -- are you listening?

He's worked with his architecture team to define clear roadmaps of successive capabilities that will be needed to support that overall goal.

Consider this a "roadmap" of sorts -- but, in one sense, it only talks about technologies, and not about making them real.

The Project-Based Approach

I've talked elsewhere about the need for a governance model to accelerate the transition (and mitigate inherent risks), but -- beneath that -- there's a need for separate-but-coordinated projects to accelerate the transition.

I'm sure that every organization will break things up differently, but here's how EMC IT is doing it.

For IT Production (phase 1 using the model presented here), the major project was to accelerate highly-dense utilization and low-touch operational models, using Vblocks as the primary building block.

For Business Production (phase 2 using the model), the major projects were a complete redesign of the storage infrastructure to be more virtualized, coupled with an end-to-end redesign of both information protection (backup, replication) as well as security (using primarily RSA products, naturally).

And Approaching IT-As-A-Service

The current EMC IT initiatives are starting to build on these strong foundations to change how IT is delivered and consumed by the business.

Here are some useful examples.

First, they're tackling the all-important transition from managing individual technology silos to orchestrating fully virtualized services end-to-end.  This is hard work: there's a passle of new technology to consider as well as new operational models and associated skill sets.

They're also creating a variety of self-service environemts around IaaS/PaaS to support a wide variety of high-value use cases across the business -- application development, business analytics -- whatever!

And, finally, they're making great progress in delivering desktop-as-a-service with a focus on not only reducing costs, but enhancing and securing user experiences for our knowledge workers.

A pretty ambitious agenda, but they're succeeding in accelerating change, and the business is giving them all sorts of support and encouragement as they move forward.

Managing Through A Transition

EMC IT is also sharing what they're doing to accelerate the transition.  I shared an early version of their cloud governance model a while back as just one example.

Perhaps the most important thing Sanjay talked about was the people side of this journey. 

Let's face it, any value an organization brings is entirely dependent on its people, and that includes IT organizations as well.

When faced with rapid and transformative changes (technology model, operational model, consumption model), it's natural human instinct to want to slow things down a bit, which is precisely the opposite of what the business wants.

New Skills Required

Sanjay's message is incredibly clear: there's enormous opportunities emerging for a new class of IT professional who understands how cloud-like models can be used to business advantage.

He shared some interesting examples of people he's looking for right now, and not sometime in the future.

If we consider that IT is built differently in this world (fully virtualized pools of resources, orchestrated and secured using next-gen models, etc.), there's a distinct shift from the "build once, use once" legacy world to a "build once, use many" model of the cloud world.

It's not enough to be a server expert, or a network expert, or a storage expert.  You need to understand key design principles from a slew of different new technologies, and articulate how they might fit together.

As a result, we've got a new set of roles in the organization: cloud architect.  That's a job description that didn't exist last year -- at least, at EMC!

Now let's consider how IT is consumed differently in the cloud world.  All of the sudden, there's a handful of new roles to go consider.

For example, a cloud capacity planner.  Not only for planning internal consumption, but figuring out when and where it makes sense to use compatible service providers for capacity as well.

Or how about a cloud services manager?  Someone who continually redefines and refines the services portfolio, measures for KPIs and drives continual improvement? 

Or how about a new generation of business solution consultants, who can engage with business leaders and extend their notions of "what is now possible" in this new world?

Of course, these environments are run and operated differently.  We don't really need storage admins, network admins or server admins -- we'd like cloud infrastructure admins, please. 

And since process redesign is so important to capturing the benefits, we'll need cloud process engineers to help us with this work.

And when it comes to governance, once again new skills are required, and entirely new roles that didn't exist previously.  Cloud security architects, for example.  And cloud GRC (governance, risk and compliance) managers.

All of these are roles we're hiring for today.  BTW, if you think you fit the bill -- and want to work for an extremely progressive IT organization -- you should consider applying.

Not to be blunt here, but scarcity of supply drives always up market prices.  And these sorts of skills will be in very short supply for quite a while :-)

EMC IT's Journey Has Begun

The team has gone through phase 1 (IT applications), made serious progress on phase 2 (business production) and started to make inroads on phase 3 (IT as a service).

In terms of cost savings and cost avoidance, the journey has more than paid for itself -- the numbers speak for themselves.  But what Sanjay and his team can't quantify is the incredibly business value being delivered through their new-found agility -- that's probably a much bigger number indeed.

They've re-engineered their organization and their culture.  They've spent time to share with others what they're doing, and their experiences along the way.

I consider them an incredibly valuable asset to anyone considering a similar transformation.