At EMC World 2015, Chad Sakac, president of EMC Corp.’s Global Systems Engineering, stopped by theCUBE to discuss the growing needs of businesses with Stu Miniman and Steve Chambers. The talk started with a lighthearted conversation about Sakac’s blogging style and his tendency for very long and involved posts. Soon, things moved on to the more serious matter of EMC and its new federation concept.

Bringing it together

Sakac related how customers have been demanding that EMC and the partners it works with should operate as one. To solve this, EMC has built the federation on the idea of rallying around the points of convergence with its solutions. “You focus where the customer wants you, you build your solution stacks in a tightly coupled way and then you also acknowledge where you’re going to go on different paths,” Sakac said.

He then told a story about meeting with a group of customers who wanted the same technology base for their companies but had different plans for how to get there. Some wanted a prepackaged solution, while others wanted choice and options at every level.

Supporting the future

Next, the discussion came around to what companies were in danger from the changing landscape. A company built around services to deploy infrastructure is going to have a bad time, Sakac felt. Meanwhile, he saw a rising demand for services to help companies transform, to build new application stacks and to figure out data analytics.

“You cannot rally around a product anymore,” he said. “You have to rally around an idea.”

Ending the interview, Sakac fielded the question of how EMC handled the change in skills for supporting this new way of business. He replied that retraining alone didn’t work. Customers wanted its employees to provide support on the older systems in the usual ways. Instead, it had to look at customers who needed cutting-edge systems and brand new skills and then match those companies with the retrained employees. The lesson was that you have to support both the new and the familiar.

“You shouldn’t over-rotate on buzzword bingo,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s wall-to-wall coverage of EMC World 2015.