As Kevin Roche, president of EMC’s Global Services, began his career several years ago at EMC, the leadership team made a commitment to move to a converged infrastructure. After acquiring VCE, the company recognized the industry shift from product to solution and began to change with it. This has led to industry-leading platforms and the ability to help enterprise clients make the transition.

Roche spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during EMC World 2016 about how EMC is preparing for the enterprise transformation by keeping the old skills and learning the new ones.

According to Roche, the customer will see the benefits as the company helps them develop a strategy that will get them through the transformational journey. “At the basic level, helping them to modernize [the theme of EMC World this year] their current infrastructure to drive some of that cost out and use that as innovation as you go forward, he said. He continued to say that the price of admission is that you have to be able to support the new environments.

Managing a tricky mix

Responding to how to balance future technology with today’s business environment, Roche said, “Our goal is to help our customers with their current infrastructure in recognizing that you can’t just throw everything away. There’s a financial commitment associated with the current infrastructure and therefore from a services side, we have to think about that in two dimensions.”

The first aspect Roche explains is to preserve that asset as much as you possibly can to help customers through the landing spot. For Roche, “That means having skills in the future but having skills that still say we have knowledge around all of our core products and that’s still relevant. Our customers live in today…preserve those skills and leverage it when you surround it with a solutions model.” This allows the customer to act upon demand that is new but they maintain skills to solve today’s business problems.

Managing the transformation

“As we move forward, our customers … want to say, ‘Help us prevent things from not working and provide us with valuable information and insights into that equation.’ That’s why over the past couple of years we’ve been investing around Big Data and Big Data analytics to change the conversation with our customers that becomes a little more predictive and proactive,” asserted Roche.

When it comes to upcoming trends that will need to be supported, Roche projected, “What I see in services over the next several years is this morphing from the intelligence around technology to something that’s more software oriented, and you have to have a different model and a different set of skills to make that happen.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE