As part of the theme talks “Lead Your Transformation – How cloud can transform your IT and how Big Data can transform your business”, theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante invited Mike Koehler, Senior VP Global Services with EMC, to share his input on the matter during a live interview at EMC World this week.

From a services angle, EMC has a long history of delivering great services to its customers. The way Mike Koehler sees it, it’s more like a journey that is  beginning to shape the company’s services and portfolio. The range of services is great, assisting customers with everything from traditional consulting, design, implementation, operation and education. That means a full portfolio in terms of offerings, focusing on the things the company cares most about: cloud, trust and Big Data.

Building Services on trust

As far as the company’s transformation is concerned, trust has been around for a while, but cloud and Big Data are relatively new. The organization has changed to approach those new opportunities. In order to do the right thing for the for the marketplace and for the customers, EMC needed to change the way it went to the market with their services, and transforming the skill set around that (both theirs and the customers’) was a key factor.

Right now the company’s portfolio is significantly different than it was back in 2010, and the profile shifted from storage centric to technology centric. There is a whole untapped market of new business. The way to do that is by “comparing and contrasting”, as Mike put it.  EMC has no intention of becoming an all-service company. Rather, it is trying to surround the service capability around its technology and around its offerings. It has slowly transitioned from a company led by product sales to one led by production and solutions.

From storage to virtualization: sales into solutions

“The journey to the private cloud starts with the services engagement, as opposed to a product sale. That is a huge transformation of the company, and it’s a transformation of the actual service offerings,” says Koehler. Despite older customers still perceiving EMC as a storage company, it is transitioning to the virtualized environment. The briefing centers turn into solutions centers.

A new emerging trend is that nowadays, a lot of customers want to get out of their UNIX platforms and get to a virtualized SAD6 platform. The only way to change the production environment is to work hand in hand with the customers. Therefore, EMC is involved in a lot of educating-to-understand type of activities.

The value in software-led infrastructure

As for the real value in moving to software defined data centers, shifting into the higher end consulting, the motivation for the customers is that they have a clean way out of legacy environment of cost and structures. Setting up a software defined data center is a multi-step process.

The hard part is not implementing the cloud — at a basic level we call it file-sharing, but it’s more complicated than that; it’s knitting everything together. If a client has part of his business stored on one cloud and part of it on another, sooner or later he will get tired of the complications arising in the customer service department.