As customers start their journey to the cloud, EMC is also on a journey, says EMC SVP of Global Services Mike Koehler. On the one hand, EMC services has grown to an inflection point where it needs to reorganize into a single organization including traditional consulting in support of its products, education, and higher level business and IT planning services, he said in The Cube from EMCworld 2013. At the same time services has to expand to provide the extra services customers struggling with their transition to cloud, whether public, private, or hybrid, need.

And the organization as a whole is beginning to make a transition to a software-led sales strategy as it finds that those customers need high level help both in identifying the business reasons for moving to a cloud architecture and then in planning how to make that transition. This, he says, is a big change for an organization with a rich heritage of providing lower-level services to customers in support of product sales.

“We don’t want to be an all things services organization,” he says. “We are trying to build the services organization around our product offerings as an extension of product capabilities.” But as EMC grows that also means helping to change the company image with its clients from that of a hardware and specifically storage vendor to a trusted partner in their journey to software-led cloud computing.

That has started as customers turned to EMC to help them finally shed their legacy Unix systems and move to a virtualized x86 environment. This is a hard journey in itself, he says. “The ERPs of the world are hugely complex and the heart of the business. So it is hard to move off those legacy servers that run those ERPs systems.”

On the other hand, the performance and flexibility of a virtualized x86 server environment, and the huge savings that it provides through the jump in utilization, is compelling, and EMC Services has become a transformation leader in this area. One major advantage for IT in moving to a software-led environment is that the huge jump in utilization allows them to finally get rid of “huge swaths of the legacy environment.” That saves IT large amounts of Opex that then can be invested in innovative development to help drive IT and business transformation. And that allows IT to become flexible enough to react quickly to business needs. That, he says, helps it prevent business units and departments from turning directly to outside services like AWS.

“The traditional customer view is that lots of Amazon services adoption is happening outside the IT organization,” he says. “A business unit thinks it will just do a little development on AWS because IT isn’t nimble enough. But you know that once it’s in, it never leaves. So for IT the issue often is how fast they can get there.”

One of the roles EMC has taken is in providing education both for IT, which needs to gain new skills, and for business leaders, who need to understand the compelling business advantages of moving to a cloud environment. That, he says, has moved EMC services in the direction of higher end business consulting. And both it and customers have to recognize that moving to a cloud infrastructure will be a two-or-more year journey and that the technologies required for some parts of the software-defined data center have yet to be proven.

“So it is early stages,” he says. “But because we have earned the right to talk about the journey to the cloud, customers are coming back to us as a trusted partner in this transformation.”