Mike Koehler, the COO for EMC Global Services, discussed the importance of the services portfolio in the company’s strategy. He sat down with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante, live from EMC World 2014.

Koehler referred to the services portfolio as the “pointy end of the spear.” The company’s customers are continuing on their journey to IT-as-a-Service, and want to understand where in their journey they are. To help customers, Koehler described EMC’s IT transformation workshop through which they spend half a day with a customer, assess where they are in their journey to the cloud.

This assessment “helps them prioritize where to spend their money,” Koehler explained, noting the workshop’s success with 200+ companies in their queue. The workshop is provided for free but it requires that the the IT leadership team take part.

Vellante then pointed out that offering such a workshop for free was part of the pre-sales process and would lead to more business, a fact which Koehler confirmed.

Commenting on the utility of EMC’s federation approach, Koehler detailed the need for multiple branches under EMC’s umbrella, because “EMC as a company did not solve it all,” noting the storage stalwart’s need for VMware, and Pivotal.

“For customers that want to go big, EMC’s starting to have that four-pillar approach. The challenge we’ve got is how you scale that. It’s so partner intensive,” Koehler said, and is being implemented in a handcrafted way.

Driving the IT transformation

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Asked if IT transformation is the driver for change as a result of broken IT processes, Koehler said that things aren’t necessarily broken. “It’s about cost, and speed and agility. In the enterprise space, customers have an install base, and those tend to slow down,” Koehler explained.

Hyperscale cloud service providers like Amazon give faster time to market, and the pricing structures around IT infrastructure are changing, too.

“We’re starting to see a lot of draw to ‘can we talk about a Big Data transformation,” said Koehler. “That, for us, is an emerging market that sits on top of IT-as-a-Service and ‘pick your cloud broker.'”

Koehler explained that as a result of EMC’s IT transformation workshop,  he had determined that “9 out of 10 times, the weakest point is the organizations’ skills.” Most are organized in silos, Koehler noted, saying “you can’t break those walls down because of the install base and the human dynamic. We have to come back with an educational package and create a dialogue around the jobs and skill sets.The companies who are successful and ahead of the transformation hold job descriptions that “are just fundamentally different,” according to Koehler.

Asked about the need to have business savvy CIOs and hiring people with a business background not a technical one,  Koehler said it was not common, “I am not sure I see it as a massive trend.” CIOs need to have business skills, but you cannot take business leaders and drop them in the IT organization.

See Koehler’s entire interview below: