Tom Roloff, the senior vice president of EMC’s Global Services business, stopped by theCube at EMC World 2013 to discuss how consultancy is driving the two biggest trends in enterprise IT: Big Data and cloud computing.

SiliconAngle CEO John Furrier and Wikibon’s Dave Vellante open the interview by highlighting that the company has changed a great deal since theCube’s debut at EMC World 2010. Roloff agrees: in his view, EMC has transformed from a storage vendor to an IT-as-a-service provider. The executive says that his firm supplies customers with solutions to transform their own businesses, but stresses that technology alone is not enough to accomplish this goal. His division provides the know-how organizations need to effectively implement and leverage EMC’s solutions.

A few years ago CIOs were talking about virtualization, consolidation and storage tiering. Today the focus is on Big Data, and EMC is tackling this trend head-on. Roloff says that the company is helping enterprises tap into their information by addressing industry-specific needs and minimizing the hassle associated with enterprise-scale Big Data deployments.

Vellante brings up Amazon Web Services and notes that what was once a developer platform is now being integrated into large-scale corporate environments. Roloff’s take on this trend is that it’s disrupting the traditional IT organization and reshaping the role of the CIO, turning them both into strategic enablers.

The public cloud is gaining traction in the enterprise, but many companies are still reluctant to trust their data with third party providers due to security concerns. Roloff predicts that this barrier will be eliminated within five years thanks to the fact security is becoming a major competitive differentiator for cloud vendors.

The executive concludes the interview with an overview of EMC’s efforts in the software-defined space, which the main highlight of this week’s conference.