“Everybody is worrying about ‘Are my competitors in my industry learning something that I’m not?’” he says. “There’s an element of ‘Can you tell me what other people in financial services are doing with big data because if they’re doing something I should be doing, I’d better find out about it quick.’”

Big data discussions with customers are almost always involve LOB management and the CIO in large enterprises. And they are vertical-industry centric since each vertical has its own set of business problems. As a result, about half of EMC’s consultants come out of a specific vertical industry, know the business issues of that industry, and only talk to business leaders in that vertical, and EMC Global Consulting is organized by vertical industries rather than territories. The other half are technology consultants that are horizontal and join the engagement after the initial business planning is finished.

Also, despite common belief, most of the business issues EMC consults on are not new problems. “So if you’re talking to a telco and the problem is customer churn, that’s been a problem with telcos forever. Or when a bank officer says, ‘I don’t know if the John Smith who has a brokerage account, the John Smith who has a bank account, and the John Smith who has a wealth management account is the same John Smith or three different John Smiths’, that’s been a problem in banking forever.”

Nor is data analysis a new idea for these industries. The telcos, for instance, have been analyzing their customer data almost since the days of Alexander Graham Bell.

What big data does is allow companies to expand the data set being analyzed far beyond just the rows and columns in their structured databases to include unstructured data inside the company and outside in the cloud, he said. “Now you can bring all that information together. It’s a massive amount of information. Then how do I get some insight out of all that information? Now it’s a technology problem. So these engagements merge business and technology problems.”

Mobile Computing

Big data is not the only major area of transformation concerning companies today. Mobile computing is another. “In banking in particular, huge amounts of effort are being spent right now on ‘How do I render information to users in the way they want to consume it, and how do I design a user interface and a way to interact with all that information in the right way.’”

So for instance he said EMC Consulting is working with a large credit card company on designing an e-wallet. The application is not challenging, “but ultimately we have to create the user interface for the iPhone, the iPad, etc., that you and I will ultimately be carrying around. There’s a strong conversation about what the user experience will be like and how we will enable the mobile worker.”

Cloud Computing

Global consulting is also excited about the opportunity in cloud development. This has three components, he said: people, process, and technology. Most companies are past the planning stage now and are implementing, which is a huge change from two years ago, when very few large industry CIOs even thought cloud was real – almost all those he talked to said it was all hype. “When I asked the 70 CIOs at our CIO Connect Event Monday who did not have a private cloud strategy, nobody raised their hand.”

And in the last year, the trend has shifted from private to hybrid cloud. In the annual Wikibon IT Transformation Survey,  just completed, for instance, 37% of respondents indicated that they were building hybrid clouds, a huge jump from a year ago when only about 9% were considering hybrid.

Gartner has just published a report saying that by 2016, 50% of large corporate data, even in regulated industries, will be sitting in a public cloud, he said. “You say that to people today, and they say, ‘No way!’ But I think four years is way too long. I think it’s happening right now.”

Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• Head of Unified Storage Talks Consumption Models, Flash at EMC World 2012
• EMC Customer Services in Continuous Upgrade Mode
• Cloudera CEO and his Backers Discuss Accel’s New $100M Big Data Fund
• Cloud Meets Big Data Meets…Customer Service?
• Tom Roloff Talks About Big Data and Cloud Enterprise Solutions

Vellante mentioned that EMC’s portfolio has transformed across the board with acquisitions, Isilon, flash, and software.

“Clearly with the acquisition of XtremIO, as we understand the taxonomy of the industry today, we have all the pieces we need,” said Gelsinger. “But far be it for me to say that we’ve ended innovation in this space at that level. So, I’ll never say never: we haven’t cornered the market on new innovative ideas but at least we understand the taxonomy now. We got the pieces we need, period.”

He went on to explain how all the products that EMC has gathered tie together in a synergy that deliver not just fabric, connectivity, storage, and analytics, but also the availability to mean that all EMC products are extensions of each other. A customer can grab ahold of one product and then look around the portfolio and discover that if they want to upgrade sideways or expand their project, there it is already in EMC’s inventory and it fits right in for them.

Furrier asked Gelsinger to speak about “frictionless data movement” and what’s called data viscosity or otherwise and understanding of how much analysis and business methodology is tied up in not just access but being capable of making sure data is where it is when it’s needed. Gelsinger sees the metaphor as a “data pool” instead of a data island, how private silos are a thing of the past, and that what’s important is virtualizing the data.

Now people don’t just need to store that data, but they need to store it with context and they need to be able to protect it. All of these elements mean that the raw data is just as important as the metadata attached to it as well as the application path for moving it from place to place or accessing it for analysis. All of these elements come together with EMC products in not just providing storage for massive amounts of data but rapid, protected availability.

EMC as a disruptive player in the data center infrastructure market

“What is it? We view our vision as centering around three things: cloud, big data, on a foundation of trust…” says Gelsinger. “And we see those things becoming the foundations for data and IT of the future. It is being the most disruptive player for data center infrastructure writ large.”

He sees EMC as wanting to be the primary data center infrastructure provider for everyone from big to small, enterprise IT, and even on-the-ground solutions.

“We are a products and technology company, 17,000 engineers,” he continues, “and we’re going to keep growing our engineering capacity. We’re going to increase our percent R&D over time.”

EMC has been huge in acquisitions and successful choices over the past few years. We’ve seen them grow from a storage company into an all-in-one infrastructure company who don’t just provide solutions, but bring together other companies who offer hardware, software, communication, and products that organically blur together.

Impact on niche communities

Gelsinger says that through all the different markets he saw two that were very ad hoc and extremely unstructured: the university (academic) community and the startup community. So EMC took a hard look at those cultures and started up projects to align to them.

He says that they started platforms that would cater to their needs, workshops to explain how they could use data infrastructure products to aid their missions. While much of both of these cultures work from the basis of people and they also often produce a great deal of data—generally with very low budgets in the beginning looking at academic—meant that it was a good place for EMC to insert themselves into the smaller niche aspects of big data and storage.

Click here for a slideshow of images from the interview

EMC culture and Gelsinger on “being a cool global company”

“In successful companies cultures are never static, you have to keep moving them forward, changing them, evolving them,” says Gelsinger. “I think we really have evolved as a leader and a much cooler place to participate in. As a thought leader in the industry we’re on the leading edge of the cloud, we’re on the leading edge of big data.

“But the next layer of the transformation really about is about being a global company. With all the success we’ve had with expanding the company success globally, I have to be as cool in Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao, Bangalore, São Paulo, etc. I have to be seen as a cool leader in all of those places as well.

“I think we’ve gone from East Coast to a broad data center play,” he continues, “and the next phase for us is to really be a cool global company.”

EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012 is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Mobile VMs will Come to the Data for Analysis says EMC’s Gelsinger
• VSPEX is Channel Partner Friendly, says EMC CMO Jeremy Burton
• HP Data Thrust is Delivering Performance in the Cloud, says HP Exec
• EMC’s Pat Gelsinger Talks Flash Catch Up in Storage Array
• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• EMC Positioning As Big Data Leader, Says CMO Burton

Schmarzo said he has also observed the angst from technology leaders afraid of making a bad decision regarding big data. Many times these leaders are so concerned with making a misstep that they become completely paralyzed and do nothing. Schmarzo continued by saying, “Many are more focused on making mistakes than on making game changing moves.” Dave Vellante supported his assessment adding, “The new big data culture has to be a let’s try it culture. You’re going to get it wrong.”

Schmarzo and Vellante went on to discuss the trend of companies attempting to create long-term big data strategies. Both agreed that this is somewhat a wasted effort. The market is simply moving too fast and evolving too significantly to allow planning three years or five years out. The market in three years will likely be radically different from the market today. When asked how he advises companies on getting started with a big data strategy, Schmarzo said he encourages companies to just stick their foot in the water – pick a business problem and then understand how new data sources and technologies like Hadoop can help uncover new insights that will help drive business value. Start with one problem and evolve gradually.

Schmarzo continued to explain that although Hadoop is wildly popular big data does not equal Hadoop. A richer ecosystem of tools exists to help businesses meet their goals. Hadoop does what it does well, but there are many more options available. Companies need to understand what they are attempting to accomplish and then select the right tools to help them meet their goals. Companies need to think holistically about their big data architecture.

The discussion concluded with an examination of the disconnect between the traditional business intelligence market and the new world of big data. In many ways, the business intelligence market is about looking back. Schmarzo said that although some see business intelligence as a failure, the technology accomplished what it was designed for. However, modern businesses require more real-time and predictive analytics and the capability to access external and unstructured data sources something that business intelligence is well suited for.

EMC CTO Discusses the Current State of Big Data is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff
• EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC Positioning As Big Data Leader, Says CMO Burton
• EMC Commitment to Channel Expressed in Sales Strategy Changes
• What Non-Nerdy Skills Do Data Scientists Need?

Kicking off was a discussion on customer perspective and how people want proof-points.  Building infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure provides no value.  EMC translates value as being around agility, speed, and time to market, marking a shift in how some internal customers think about things.  They want services faster, not necessarily perfect but quicker so work can start together and get it right.

The business is working through layers on top of cloud, thus we are looking at services such as platform as a services, true Business Intelligence as a service.  The environment is also seeing introduction of thousands of devices a month into network.  So the customer is interested in layers and is evaluating how to bring true user experience and give our users productivity outside of email.

One of the visions is – BI as a service, being the first layer of value on cloud infrastructure.  A significant area in shadow IT is business reporting.   This is typically spawned because of the notions that IT can’t report fast enough, or report in the way we want, or as frequently and in the format they are looking for.  This is usually focused around some kind of reporting system.  EMC is addressing this by using a layered approach, that being the basic component of cloud infrastructure, Greenplum technologies, and delivering one version of the truth, taking away the noise of “where is the data”.

This approach helps customers build skills to the analytics they want and provides them with data science as a service.  Clients are free to use SAS or Microsoft reporting tools at that point, or any tools they would like to integrate.  In essence, with delivery of competency around the tools, data scientists are enabled with subject matter expertise around the data, freeing the customer to go off with that information in any way they want.

Sanjay discusses some of the work and thought that drives the current mission of his team.  An inspired analysis takes place of where data resides and the response to that being an enablement of platform, delivering competency around the tools and really delivering value to the business.   As far as credentials, the data tiers and best practices are applied to the access model throughout.

Wikibon’s recent IT transformation survey was discussed, and disclosed some interesting tidbits about shadow IT trends.  In response, Sanjay shares that present day cloud computing out in the open and has come out of dark corners.  So the challenge is to embrace it or get out fo the way.  EMC’s product has to act as the brokers of value – not about authorship, or about where it was built or where it was written,  but how soon can we add value to the business.

Transforming IT is about infrastructure, self-service, automation, cataloging into one presentable service.  Sanjay’s goal is to break down the big box of IT into little black boxes, so customers can pick and choose what they want at price points and service level they want.  All of this will be presented as much as an automated service catalog as possible. Getting there means there is a lot of transformation involved.  Transforming IT was all about IT, and Sanjay uses an analogy of the components of a factory that is built.  Transforming the business in that same analogy is building the widgets you want on that factory floor.  Transforming you is the factor that Sanjay states is the most pivotal, but likely to receive the least attention.  It is critical because it covers the bits of the end user and the knowledge of what people need to do with these efforts, then drive value from it.   Transformation is occurring at all levels of business into new levels that go beyond normal business function and into new innovation.  It is up to IT to adapt to that transformation.

EMC’s project Propel is discussed.  A go-live date is on the horizon.  The virtualized SAP implementation on vBlock allows EMC to ‘trim the fat’ and take their environment into the future.  Core systems have been revamped from the app layer to every layer – a complete rebuild and new line of business solutions.  Only data and database are coming over to the new system.  All the other components are brand new.  EMC is focused on not only transforming the business, but they are undergoing that transformation themselves, truly living the transformation as well as preaching it.

EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff
• EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC CTO Discusses the Current State of Big Data
• EMC Positioning As Big Data Leader, Says CMO Burton
• EMC Commitment to Channel Expressed in Sales Strategy Changes
• What Non-Nerdy Skills Do Data Scientists Need?

How serious is this? Every sales organization is commission driven, Taylor said in an interview in the SiliconAngle Cube from EMCWorld 2012 (see full video below). The way to change sales people’s behavior and the culture is to change the commission structure. “That is what we’ve done with our sales force. If a sales rep breaks a rule of engagement with a partner, their commission will be directly impacted. That will have a significant impact.”

For the first time, EMC ran a global partner conference in parallel to EMCworld this year. It drew more than 3,000 partners from more than 80 countries and included its own keynote sessions with top EMC executives who discussed company strategy and the roles channel partners can play, and on subsequent days presentations of specific presentations from all the EMC product, operational, and enablement groups.

“The interest and response has been outstanding,” Taylor said.

Another measure of EMC commitment is VSPEX, which was created in part to meet the needs of partners for flexibility and creativity in the solutions they deliver to their customers. VSPEX is a blueprint of guaranteed tested full systems including storage, network, and servers. While the storage must be EMC, the servers and networking can come from several vendors, and several different configurations are included to meet different needs. This allows partners to be more creative in the infrastructure they deliver with the confidence that it will all work together and that EMC will back them up if problems develop down the line. And EMC will put the partner’s name on the box along with its own.

In the six weeks since the VSPEX announcement, more than 140 partners have signed up for the training they need to bring VSPEX to market, Kahout says. “We’ve all been having meetings with partners, and invariably the conversation comes back to VSPEX. They’re very interested in the opportunity it gives them to get into the market with a differentiated, higher value solution.”

EMC is opening hundreds of enterprise accounts with millions of dollars or run-rate business across its three major markets to partner participation. And as the program proves itself, it plans to open more, Kahout says.

EMC is providing its partners with comprehensive training, products, and support to allow them to succeed in large, fast-growing markets, he says. It announced a Cooperative Services program during the partner conference as part of this strategy. “We are getting our partners aligned with the rest of EMC. Once everybody’s in line, they get to harvest the fruits of that investment collectively.”

EMC Commitment to Channel Expressed in Sales Strategy Changes is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• EMC Positioning As Big Data Leader, Says CMO Burton
• VCE Chairman Michael Capellas Cheers On Convergence in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC to Integrate Avamar, Data Domain to Create End-to-End Solution
• Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff

Napolitano dedicated some time to note the more positive energy of this year’s gathering, which he credited to a more enthusiastic approach to the ecosystem that resembles VMware’s in a lot of ways.  From here, the conversation shifted to the channel.

Napolitano has faith in his company’s partnership with SAP and HANA, its in-memory analytics appliance. At the same time, however, he’s nearly as optimistic about the expectations that memory will replace storage because, as he put it, the current price tag just doesn’t justify a mass migration from EMC’s storage products.

The vendor in turn is investing a great deal into staying ahead of what is, at least for the time being, still a very profitable market. This year’s conference is all about building on the momentum from the 2011 megalaunch of over 40 products, and once again Napolitano highlighted the emphasis on the partner base.

Among the 42 products debuting at EMC World are several VNX and DataDomain solutions available exclusively through the channel, a decision that came as a result of a drastic expansion after previous conference.  There’s also the addition of thousands of new partners to the ecosystem, and approximately 6,000 to 7,000 new customers.

From here on, the discussion focused on the actual products fueling all this growth. The executive explained how vCenter Operations Manager fills an analytics gap EMC discovered after it started lagging behind competitors in this area, and revealed that the software will be integrated with VNX and VNXe in the future.

The interview with Napolitano in all covered a lot of ground, including how flash fits into the picture, VCE, as well as additional insight about the market and other areas.  For the full scoop check out the video below.

Head of Unified Storage Talks Consumption Models, Flash at EMC World 2012 is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff
• EMC Customer Services in Continuous Upgrade Mode
• EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• EMC Positioning As Big Data Leader, Says CMO Burton
• EMC Commitment to Channel Expressed in Sales Strategy Changes

Vellante spoke with Capellas about why VCE is so important from a practitioner’s perspective. “I want to write one place, and I don’t really want to care about the physical layer beneath it,” Capellas said about infrastructure. “Between both Cisco and EMC, we knew there would be a convergence between where the network starts and compute ends.”

He continued, mentioning the expectations on new mainframes that could be created via bridging within the convergence between computation and communication.

IBM, he says, has a lot of understanding of the software stack for mainframes, and they added services in the cloud layer to that. In a way, IBM validates markets when it enters into them and “a high tide floats all ships.”

VCE wants to take the absolute best-in-class, such as Cisco with networking and fabric, and Intel blades for the compute and approach from both sides. It’s fitting this is being discussed at EMC World 2012 as EMC has seen a great deal of promise in VCE and sought to invest in VCE’s solution systems and coupled in VMware to virtualize the infrastructure.

Much of his discussion is about virtualization and whole-product solution and this maps back to previous interviews about companies who provide not just service but infrastructures. Between Cisco for network, Intel for computation (blades), and EMC for the rapid storage means that they have everything they need for a virtualizable infrastructure fabric.

We’ve seen a few use-cases of this enter the market and it feels a lot like hardware infrastructure to support a private cloud. Recently, the Tyler Independent School District, the largest in Northeast Texas, looked to VCE to help power their educational computer systems and provide a highly virtualized data center, giving students and faculty unfettered and rapid access to applications in their own secure private cloud.

Schools and other segments aren’t technology companies, they’re service sectors who work with people and they rely on their IT departments to do the heavy lifting and provisions. As a result, by choosing VCE the Tyler IDS of Texas allowed some of that weight to be taken off with the server support and left them to look to providing the proper software and applications for the educational environment onto that infrastructure.

Other sectors might also benefit from this sort of drop-in solution as well, believes Capellas and that’s what makes VCE the powerful startup it is right now.

[Edit May 23, 2012: Correction made to reflect Michael Capellas's proper title within VCE.]

VCE Chairman Michael Capellas Cheers On Convergence in theCube at EMC World 2012 is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• EMC and VCE Integrate Management Suite with VMware
• EMC’s Stuck on Tape, Speeds Mainframe Performance
• Texas Becomes Altar as EMC and Cisco Reunite in the Cloud
• Infographic: Public vs Private Cloud
• EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT

Many experts say Zuckerberg deserves the position because he planned it, dreamed it and worked it out. He focused on his mission on making Facebook the number one social network in the world.

Facebook became a public company on May 18, 2012, and the first American company to debut in NASDAQ with a valuation above $100 billion. It was another big success for Zuckerberg’s influence on the social network that has changed the way people relate to one another.

During the early days of Facebook inception he said,

“When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power. By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.”

Surprising Zuckerberg facts

Mark Zuckerberg started “Thefacebook” because he wanted one online directory where all students could be listed at Harvard University.

Zuckerberg didn’t like the concept of putting banner ads on the site. He rented a house near Stanford after he dropped out from the university and to cover the cost of staff and running the site, he started looking into other advertising systems.

“We hate banner ads…lately we’ve been putting thought into other advertising systems that would be less offensive.  Right now we put up what we need…it’s not that cheap — we have to make $40,000 a month or something, but it works,” he said.

In 2011, Mark Zuckerberg tops the ranking of the 100 most powerful media person published by the Guardian newspaper, ahead of Rupert Murdoch, Larry Page and Steve Jobs.

Zuckerberg now owns roughly 28 percent of Facebook. By Facebook’s current valuation, he’s richer by another $24 billion.

With the current asset valuation of Facebook, the entire GDP of Afghanistan ($17.9 billion), Nepal ($18.3 billion) and Jamaica ($14.7 billion) is lower than Zuckerberg’s company market value. In addition, the entire earnings of the porn industry of the US (at $10 billion) is also lower than Mark Zuckerberg’s current value.

Moreover, the combined salaries of all NBA ($2.09 billion), MLB ($2.9 billion) and NFL ($3 billion) players is smaller than Mark Zuckerberg’s worth. And U.S. video game sales for 2011 were estimated at about $17 billion, still smaller than the assets under Zuckerberg.  Comparatively, at 28 Bill Gates had earned just $100 million, about $23 billion less than Zuckerberg’s worth at the same age.

Indeed, at 28 Zuckerberg is exactly half the age of the average S&P 500 CEO, but the IPO offering makes his company worth more than iconic companies such as Disney, Ford and Kraft Foods.

On a personal front, Zuckerberg doesn’t own a T.V. and he doesn’t like public gatherings, especially if he has to make a speech.

His friends on Facebook have access to his e-mail address and his cell-phone number. Zuckerberg has granted them access to browse his photograph albums, including the one titled “The Great Goat Roast of 2009.”

He’s like an addict when it comes to programming, and works like robot. More often than not he would stay awake, coding for days when he started the social network.

“I keep programmer time sometimes…programmers tend to stay up really late and work when everyone else is asleep. So it’s not really uncommon for me to stay up until 6 or 8 in the morning,” said Zuckerberg. “But the business world does not operate between 5 pm and 8 am, so that requires some waking up for.”

The lighter side of Mark

On the eve of Facebook’s IPO, Mark Zuckerberg published an unusual witty letter to potential investors.

“For years, you’ve wasted your time on Facebook.  Now here’s your chance to waste your money on it, too,” Zuckerberg said. “Facebook is the most successful social network in the world, enabling millions to share information of no interest with people they barely know.”

He continued, “Every time someone clicks on a Facebook ad, Facebook makes money.  And while no one has ever done this on purpose, millions have done it by mistake while drunk.  We totally stole this idea from iTunes.”

“Finally, if you invest in Facebook, you’ll be far from alone.  As a result of using Facebook for the past few years, over 900 million people in the world have suffered mild to moderate brain damage, impairing their ability to make reasoned judgments.  These will be your fellow Facebook investors.”

And some most interesting things about Zuckerberg have appeared on various social media sites with the full intend of headlining Zuckerberg’s life. On the day of IPO, CDZA music wrote a musical that’s all about Mark Zuckerberg (see below).

Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker made this music video about the history and future of Facebook just before the IPO.

And here are some more funny videos, including Facebook in Real Life, and The Social Network Parody Movie.

The Best of Mark Zuckerberg is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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• Facebook Waited Too Long to Go Public: Initial IPO Reactions
• IPO Websites’ Speed Test; Fusion-io Oddly Fails
• Will Facebook Enter IPO Sooner Than Expected?
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• Pinterest Joins the List of $1 Billion Dollar Enterprises
• Facebook IPO Sets Sights on $1 Trillion as Zuckerberg Inspires His Engineers

Chat has been a huge success, he said in an interview from the Cube at EMC World 2012 (see full video below). “More people contact us through chat than any other channel today. And we are solving problems 65% faster through chat than any other means of interaction.”

One reason for the success, he said, is that EMC has a specific rule that service agents can only do one chat session at a time, rather than the three or four that is common with many companies. That means that each customer gets individual attention and fast action.

Social media in the form of community forums was the next step, and it also “is getting a tremendous positive reception.” These forums provide an opportunity for customers to exchange thoughts, tips, solutions for problems, and just discuss their experience and situation in general with peers as well as EMC support personnel. They also provide a virtual meeting place where C-level EMC management as well as experts in specific areas can communicate with groups of customers. This gives customers a chance to learn about product road maps and company strategies and initiatives that in the past they only had at a few events a year at most.

The next challenge that EMC is meeting is to deliver those services in the native language of the customer, regardless of what that is. This applies to printed information as well as service delivered live over all channels – phone, chat, and social media.

This requires new skills. Linguistic skills, obviously, but also the ability to conduct good chat sessions or to arrange and conduct a meeting over social media. And the focus of service is gradually changing. The need for product-specific technical information is gradually shrinking, and information on how a product is used in a particular vertical is becoming more prominent. That means that EMC has to retrain its service personnel in these skills and new information.

The other major challenge for EMC is to harness big data technology to make its service more proactive. This includes data from the “Phone Home” system in which EMC hardware products in customer data centers report their status automatically to EMC, from service interactions via phone and chat, and from social media. is very powerful for predicting and preventing problems. This is proving to be very powerful.

“We are creating an early warning system using an algorithmic approach to predicting the likelihood of a particular problem at a particular customer site,” he said. “We hope to start sharing this information with customers before the end of the year.” This potentially could take the concept of customer service to a new level.

EMC Customer Services in Continuous Upgrade Mode is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Fear and Opportunity Drive Big Data in Business, Says Tom Roloff
• Head of Unified Storage Talks Consumption Models, Flash at EMC World 2012
• Cloud Meets Big Data Meets…Customer Service?
• EMC President Pat Gelsinger Materializes Data Infrastructure in theCube at EMC World 2012
• EMC CIO Talks Transformation of People, Business and IT
• EMC Positioning As Big Data Leader, Says CMO Burton

“We’re seeing a real focus on big data as a business issue, not merely by wild-eyed visionaries in Silicon Valley, but by some of the biggest, business-focused vendors on the planet. And that’s because customers … recognize they have big data problems, and they need a big data solution.”

Despite the entry of these big players, the market is growing faster than the competition. CloudEra is seeing growth on every metric – total size of the clusters its existing customers are running, the pipeline of new business, the size of the investment that customers are making in the infrastructure are all sharply up. “Certainly our last year was tremendous, and we’re looking forward to an even bigger 2012.”

The big data market is moving forward rapidly in technology focus as well. For the first two years that CloudEra was in business, “we were trying to convince people that this platform was important.” Today Hadoop is the “anointed winner in the big data platform is space. So the question in big data now is what are you going to do with it? How are you going to get at it? What kinds of applications are going to make it available?”

That is where the commercial vendors are working, building those applications on top of Hadoop and hBase. “IBM’s Big Insights offering is very powerful, very interesting.”

Another product Olson cites as particularly interesting is the new version of Informatica PowerCenter/PowerExchange.  “It supports Hadoop natively, so you can integrate data from Hadoop with all your other infrastructure.”


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Hadoop/hBase Big Data Market Booming, Says CloudEra CEO is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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