Recently, Dave Vellante of Wikibon and John Furrier of SiliconANGLE got a chance to interview Tom Roloff, Senior VP of EMC Consulting, in theCube at EMC World 2011. Roloff heads up EMC’s information-centric expertise team for developing information infrastructures to solve today’s data-oriented business problems. However, as he explained during the interview, a lot of business data problems involve a lot more than just technology as we understand it.

They involve the people who use the technology.

Moving to the cloud highlights a lot of complex issues but the three ideals that need to be met include the fact that cloud-technology saves money, it changes the environment that a company addresses itself, and finally it brings up issues of trust. This is especially a common problem nowadays looking at what happened during the Amazon EC2 crash and underlying conjecture about Big Data and privacy.

“If I’m moving my data somewhere outside my four walls, how do I know that it’s protecting the privacy of my clients?” says Roloff about trust in the cloud. “Banks care about this. Healthcare cares about this… What this means for identity is a big part of the ‘your cloud’ framework.”

Addressing and enabling cloud-infrastructures and Big Data analytics that keep data safe and out of the hands of badguys (thus enabling greater trust) is a compelling portion of consulting. As more enterprise businesses reach into the cloud, they look to consulting agencies who understand their needs to be able to leverage the technology available to provide for those needs. Such as EMC’s RSA security division’s technology.

Monetizing the cloud is more than just saving money

Bringing cloud-computing and -storage to bear can certainly work to save a company money and help pad their bottom line, but it doesn’t help them very much if they can’t then reinvest the time and money they saved to give them an edge. As a result EMC Consulting looks at more than what they can save a company by enabling them with cloud infrastructure; they also attempt to articulate how the solution to their problem opens up solutions to other business problems that had been originally obstructed.

It’s not enough to just save people money, the biggest problems that enterprise users face in today’s market is one of agility and being able to adapt to changing conditions. Solutions using the cloud and Big Data both address the dynamic problems.

Tom Roloff says that consulting is first about the people involved and then about the technology. The first issue that a consultant must attend to happens to be a problem of articulating the priorities of the business and then use that to inform decisions on how to use the technology to resolve it. As a result, EMC Consulting doesn’t exist to just push EMC technology; but instead they exist to find the best-fit solution for the customer based on the articulation of their problem.

How the cloud and Big Data could help a customer service

An example narrative that Roloff brought to mind happens to be one about customer service which is a facet of business that Big Data has massive implications for. When a person calls in about a problem they’re having with equipment or a service, it behooves the customer service rep to have as much information at their fingertips as possible with some sort of management interface that gives them an at-a-look game plan for what might help the client. This sort of data might include the everyday notes of if the client has called in before, if they have similar problems, their account status and so on; but it might also include intangibles like have there been outages in their area.

Cloud-computing and -storage can empower customer service agents by putting more information at their fingertips; and Big Data analytics would provide the real-time smart agency to sift through the intangible and patterned information to fill out a priority dashboard. That dashboard could then be used by the customer service agent to find the quickest resolution to the customer’s problem (a majority of all problems fall into certain categories so it makes sense to prioritize those) and if the solution isn’t immediately available, the same technology should allow the rep to find what they need rather than get in their way.

Roloff made a very good case as to why enterprise level cloud technology and Big Data analytics should always begin and end with the people involved—with the technology used to solve those problems being framed in an understanding of what would get the job done to bridge data and human.

EMC Consulting is looking to build those bridges.