INSIDE: How Centera Virtual Archive is helping to conquer time and space
Q2 2010
A quarterly magazine for the EMC community worldwide
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
w EMC Apex’s Earth Day award
w Going for the gold in services
We take a look at
the human side of
EMC’s Data General
acquisition, more
than a decade later
The dragon
and the emerald
PLUS: How 2009’s
Data Domain deal
showed that cultural
integration remains
a mix of both science
and art
For Erin
Motameni, the
logistics of the
DG acquisition
represented
only half the
adventure.
editor’s
desk
EMC.now
Q2 2010
Volume 12
Issue 2
features
Then and now
6 Cover story
Examining the human side of the Data
General acquisition, 11 years later.
13 Out of many, one
I remember that morning 11 years ago, walking to
my desk at EMC’s 35 Parkwood Drive headquarters
in Hopkinton, in the moments before I learned the
big news.
I’d published Volume
1, Issue 1 of EMC.now, the
company’s brand-new
newsletter, one week earlier. Heading upstairs, I
contemplated what to run
In the second-ever issue of EMC.now,
on the second issue’s cover.
we ran a front-page feature in which
The answer lay on the
Mike Ruettgers, then-president and
seat of my chair in the form
CEO, explained EMC’s decision to buy
Data General. He said, “We expect to
of a printout of a news
draw some excellent talent from DG”
release with the headline,
and predicted that “this acquisition will
“EMC TO ACQUIRE DATA make us an even stronger company than
we already are.” He was right on both
GENERAL.”
counts.
What? We’d bought a
competitor?
After getting over the shock, I felt tremendous gratitude. It
would be wonderful to get some much-needed help. At the time,
EMC had more than 1,500 positions unfilled. The open-req problem had become so severe that it was actually limiting our ability
to grow as a company.
But as I was soon to learn, acquisition-related matters aren’t
very simple and straightforward … especially when it
comes to the human element.
This issue of EMC.now contains two stories reflecting
integration and cultural acquisition, and they serve as interesting counterpoints to each other.
The first feature shares, in depth, the personal retrospectives of people who experienced the acquisition of
Data General from the “other side” of the equation. They
were the ones whose company was being acquired.
The second feature is a story of Data Domain—another
competitor that EMC acquired and integrated, albeit
much more recently, leveraging a decade-plus of accumulated
acquisition and integration proficiency. That piece discusses the
successful cultural mixing that has occurred over the past year,
offering perspectives from EMC Data Domain employees Sean
Lamb and Devin Hamilton.
I believe that together, these stories paint a portrait of how
incredibly fused two former competitors can become when things
are done right.
EMC’s years of acquisition and integration know-how made a difference for the
people of EMC Data Domain.
16 Going for the gold in services
Enhancing its capabilities in business
intelligence and data gathering has
helped EMC maintain and even extend
its top-ranked service position.
19 A virtual boon to Global Services
EMC is increasing its commitment to
virtual services delivery, a technique that
blends onsite and offsite help from EMC
experts.
22 Conquering time and space
Centera Virtual Archive uses virtualization to meet the size, scope, and scale of
where archiving is going.
24 At EMC Apex, Earth Day 2010 had
special meaning
The extremely environmentally focused
employees of EMC North Carolina had
an extra reason to celebrate this year.
also inside
3 From the TELL EMC files
How are we ensuring that EMC leads the
journey to the private cloud?
4 Recent news
A best-ever first quarter. Plus, VMAX
adds realism to a Hollywood set.
winner of 28 industry awards
4 EMC.now,
for communication excellence.
l
EDITOR: Monya Keane SENIOR WRITER: Micky Baca
DESIGN DIRECTOR: Ronn Campisi COORDINATOR: Jennifer Bees
EDITORIAL BOARD: Becky DiSorbo, Bill Durling, Mark Fredrickson,
Michael Gallant, Gil Press, Peter Schwartz, Anne-Caroline Tanguy
Copyright © EMC Corporation. Volume 12, Issue 2. Printed June 2010. All rights
reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by
2
any means, without prior permission from EMC Corporation. EMC and EMC
are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation and its subsidiaries. All other
trademarks mentioned in this publication are the property of their respective
owners. EMC.now may contain “forward-looking statements” as defined under the
U.S. Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected
in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors disclosed
previously and from time to time in EMC’s filings with the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission, which can be found at www.emc.com/ir.
2
2 EMC.now | Q2 2010
Subscribe: www.emc.com/emcnow
Printed on recycled paper consisting of 30% post-consumer waste.
Cover photo of EMC SVP Erin Motameni by David Elmes
from the
tell emc files
Feedback from the past quarter included a question about EMC’s
cloud computing strategy.
j.s. tells emc: We’re hearing a lot
about EMC hoping to ride the top of
the next wave of IT, cloud computing.
Can you explain our strategy? How do
we ensure EMC leads the journey to the
private cloud?
pat gelsinger,
president & coo,
emc information
infrastructure
products, replies:
A good place to start is to
define what we mean by cloud
computing. For EMC, the cloud is a
highly virtualized environment where
applications and services are no longer
provisioned to specific hardware.
Instead, they are managed to deliver
service catalogs of resources. What’s
more, hardware is optimized to be
provisioned and automated to deliver
the resource catalogs to the virtual
machine layer.
A good example of this new IT
model is the VCE vBlock infrastructure
packages with EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM), which
enables customers to manage vBlocks as
a single entity. UIM provides integrated
and simplified provisioning, configuration, change, and compliance management.
We see this model applying to private
clouds, meaning clouds that serve as a
company’s internal data center and are
under the full control of the CIO. We
also see this model applying to public
clouds, where a service provider delivers, say, compute and storage services or
applications/SaaS offerings. EMC will
be delivering these private and public
clouds with common technologies that
enable the federation of these internal
resources and external resources.
A private cloud is much like today’s
data centers. It is trusted, reliable, controlled, and secure. Simultaneously, a
private cloud delivers the attributes—
dynamic, cost-efficient, on-demand, and
flexible—associated with public clouds.
In short, we see our vision of the
private cloud bringing the best of both
ZZZZZ
worlds to our customers. And this vision is resonating with customers and
prospects because we are offering them
a way to overcome the enormous challenges they face today. Some studies
show CIOs are spending 70% or more
of their time and money just maintaining their infrastructure. This leaves less
than 30% to invest in innovation and
support strategic business projects. CIOs
are eager to partner with us and are
increasingly open to discussing how the
private cloud will transform their world
for the better.
Three powerful technology engines—
virtualization, multi-core x86 Intel
processors, and transformative storage
technologies like flash—are driving a
dramatic transformation at the technology level of data centers. They are
enabling customers’ IT organizations to
move increasingly from IT productivity
to business value and then to operating IT as a service. What results is that
IT becomes far more efficient and cost
effective as well as dramatically more
agile.
How will we capitalize on this transition? First, we need to clearly and consistently communicate the compelling
value of the private cloud. EMC World
2010 greatly advanced our differentiated
positioning. Second, we need to continue
to develop and deliver world-leading
products that are distinctive and aligned
with our vision. Our VPLEX announcement at EMC World was a great example of this. Third, we need to partner
with our customers as well as with key
industry players to align and enable the
broader industry value of our products.
Our recent announcement of the expansion of our global strategic alliance with
SAP was a great example of this.
This is a very exciting and promising
time for EMC and fundamentally why
I joined the company. I believe we will
lead this newest and largest wave of IT
and have an opportunity to make ourselves—and our customers—winners for
a long time to come.
r TELL EMC Do you have a
question or something to say?
Receive a personalized response
from a subject-matter expert or
an EMC executive by visiting
www.channelemc.isus.emc.
com/channelemc/Tellemc/toc.
asp. You’ll typically receive a
response within three weeks. Or,
if you prefer, you may submit
feedback anonymously.
Q2 2010 | EMC.now 3
recent
news Recapping the Q1 2010 achievements of EMC and its people
BEST FIRST QUARTER | EMC reported
the best first quarter in its history, with record
Q1 revenue, high double-digit profit growth, and
all-time record free cash flow. 2010’s consolidated
revenue was $3.9 billion, a 23% increase compared
with the year-ago quarter. Q110 GAAP net income
reached $373 million, an increase of 92% year over
year.
EMC CEO Joe Tucci said, “EMC is off to a
strong start in 2010. Our private cloud strategy and
focus on four multibillion-dollar markets expected
to experience rapid growth for many years to come
are resonating with customers. We are confident in
our ability to lead the next major wave of IT.”
PEOPLE
Twenty-year IT veteran JEREMY BURTON
has joined EMC as EVP and Chief
Marketing Officer, the first person to
hold that EMC title. Previously, he was
president and CEO of Serena Software,
and he has held executive management and marketing
positions at Symantec, Veritas, and Oracle.
After 26 years at Accenture, TERRY
BREEN is now EMC’s SVP of Strategic
Alliances. He is working closely with
EMC’s technology integration and channel distribution alliance teams to expand
the company’s go-to-market relationships with systems
integrators, outsourcers, and service providers.
JAMES DISTASIO , a retired partner and 38-year veteran of
Ernst & Young LLP, has joined EMC’s Board of Directors
and is serving on the Board’s Audit Committee.
ACQUISITION
In January, EMC acquired privately held
Archer Technologies, provider of governance,
risk, and compliance (GRC) software, to join
the RSA Security Division. The Archer GRC
Framework combines with RSA offerings
for data-loss prevention, security information and event
management, and advanced security operations.
ABOVE AND BEYOND |
Christine Rossi
(second from left) was the top recipient of EMC’s first
annual Community Service awards, earning the Exemplary
Service Award of $10,000 for the Osteogenesis Imperfecta
(OI) Foundation. Christine and her son have the genetic
disease, which causes brittle bones. An OI board member
for six years, she founded and chairs a fundraiser that has
generated more than $325,000 for the foundation. She also
is its national spokesperson. Twenty-six employees from
around the globe also captured Motivator Awards ($5,000)
or Stewardship Awards ($1,000) for their charities.
SEVEN-TIME WINNER | In Michigan,
EMC’s General Motors account team celebrated EMC
being named GM’s Supplier of the Year for the seventh
time. The award is based on performance in the areas
of quality, service, technology, and price. EVP Frank
Hauck accepted the award on EMC’s behalf.
MAKING STRIDES |
In February, EMC
Chief Sustainability Officer Kathrin Winkler testified
before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology,
and the Internet. She
described how IT
contributes to energy
efficiency. In March,
The Green Economy
Post named Kathrin
one of “10 Women
Making Strides in Sustainability.”
4 EMC.now | Q2 2010
TCE EXCELLENCE |
In January, the Global EMC Field Optimization Project team, winner of EMC’s 2009 TCE Excellence Corporate Award, was honored at the Q409 Employee Quarterly Review. (l. to r.): Customer Service SVP Leo Colborne
(ret.), CSS Global Field Program Director Bill Boehm, CSS Northeast Regional Service Director Mike McGonagle, CSS Americas
Field Service Leader (and team leader) Chris Quirk, CSS Canada Regional Service Director Steve Sottile, CSS Field Program
Manager Steve Scales, TCE Sr. Director John Wallace, and EVP Frank Hauck.
R ayana Shetty of Tata Consulting Services in Bangalore was the recipient of the 10,000th EMC Proven Professional Program Information Storage and Management
certification. The curriculum educates IT professionals in a
range of storage technologies, not just specific products.
KUDOS
CRN named EMC a 2010 CHANNEL
CHAMPION of Storage Management
Software/Data Protection Software. The editors rated 1,000 vendors in 21 categories, measuring
perceptions of their products and
services. This is IT’s largest technology integrator market study; it is used by VARs and technology integrators to evaluate vendors and their programs.
SUSTAINABILITY
In January, EMC was one of more than 80 U.S. corporations
and organizations that took out full-page ads in The Wall
Street Journal and Politico issuing a call for improved energy
and climate change legislation.
At Citizen Schools in Boston, EMC, Google, and Cubist
Pharmaceuticals co-hosted a meeting with Kumar Garg,
policy analyst with the U.S. White House Office of Science
and Technology. The panel discussed how to improve students’ participation and performance in STEM—science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics.
EMC climbed from #48 to #19 on Corporate Responsibility Magazine’s “100 Best Corporate Citizens” list. This list
is based strictly on the ranked companies’ transparency in
making their environmental, climate change, human rights,
philanthropic, employee relations, financial performance,
and governance data publicly available.
VMAX GOES PRIME TIME | EMC
Symmetrix VMAX systems debuted on popular Fox
TV show 24 on March 22, adding IT realism to the
show’s “server room” set. Mary Lynn Rajskub, who
portrays Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) Analyst Chloe
O’Brian, worked in
front of the bank
of systems helping
CTU defend the
U.S. government
against threats to
national security.
EMC loaned Fox
Broadcasting
Company the 10
empty frames as a
product-placement
strategy to gain
brand exposure.
© 2010 FOX BROADCASTING CO., KELSEY MCNEAL/FOX
MILESTONE
E-BOOKS
Ten EMC recruiting pros offer
100 JOB-SEARCH TIPS in a new ebook produced by HR, Creative
Services, and the EMC.com
team. The e-book advises job
seekers while branding EMC
as a great place to work. To download it, visit www.emc.
com/collateral/article/100-job-search-tips.pdf.
Internationally renowned management consultant Jim Champy has
published The Pull of Customers,
The Push of Processes, an e-book
featuring EMC. In it, he explores
EMC’s history of re-engineering
itself and cites the company’s
customer-first philosophy as a
major reason for its long-term success. The e-book is
available at Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com.
Q2 2010 | EMC.now 5
cover
story
From competitors to colleagues
The dragon
and the emerald
Bob Solomon
6 EMC.now | Q2 2010
In the middle of his business trip
on August 9, 1999, Bob Solomon was
sitting in Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport
when he received the shocking call.
EMC—Data General Corporation’s
arch-enemy—had made an offer to acquire his long-time employer.
It was fortunate that Bob was already at the airport. He had 20 minutes
to catch the next plane back to Boston
and begin supporting the pre-acquisition due diligence process.
Bob was Chief Technology Officer
of Data General’s CLARiiON division,
and he admits that he and his fellow
DGers in the storage group had come
to strongly dislike EMC during the
previous several years. He’d been on
the startup team that had created the
groundbreaking CLARiiON storage array, its FLARE operating system, and
its Navisphere management software.
They’d grown the midrange technology into something that was competing
head-on with other vendors’ best midrange products and occasionally even
with EMC’s enterprise-scale Symmetrix family.
Frequently in the field, DGers
battled EMC’s hard-hitting, albeit effective, sales tactics. At headquarters
and in the labs, DGers fought EMC’s
efforts to lure away their engineers to
join what was rumored to be a hyperdemanding work culture.
Now this company was descending
upon all 5,000 people at the Westboro,
Massachusetts-based company, which
had been Bob’s professional home for
12 years. His first thought as he headed
back east: “How long before I quit?”
He didn’t quit. Today, Bob Solomon
Looking at the human side of
EMC’s Data General acquisition,
more than a decade later
ees (approximately 1,300, actually) not
only remain employees of EMC, but
they also are among its best and brightest.
“EMC gained a lot of its future
leaders from Data General,” says Joel
Schwartz, SVP and GM, Common Storage Platform Operations, himself a DG
transplant. “They are people in key positions throughout the company.”
Heeding the CLARiiON call
While most Data General employees
were stunned by their storage competitor’s acquisition offer, they had
no doubt what had motivated it. EMC
wanted Data General’s CLARiiON family of midrange storage systems.
The EMC Symmetrix line was supremely successful
Joel Schwartz
in the high end of the
enterprise storage
market. CLARiiON,
conversely, offered
inroads to the commercial segment and
its tens of thousands
of customers needing
midrange storage.
For its part, Data
General—a legacy of
the minicomputer
era—was struggling
financially. Its executive leaders were
in the market for a
buyer, although they
expected it to be
equally likely that the
company would be
courted for its flagMICKY BACA
is the VP in charge of leading EMC’s
alliance with VMware. He’s also an
EMC Fellow. Not only did EMC turn
out to be a company far different from
what he expected, but it also provided
him with a rewarding career and a
positive workplace environment.
“I get to work with a lot of smart
people,” he says. “We are leaders who
realize that we have the opportunity
to change the direction of our entire
industry for the better.”
Fellow DGers throughout the company echo Bob’s story as they look back
from the place they now are happy to
call home to an acquisition that left an
indelible mark on their careers. Like
Bob, hundreds of former DG employ-
THE DG CLARIION family of midrange
3 storage
as it looked in August 1999.
ship AViiON family of non-uniform
memory access (NUMA) servers as for
CLARiiON.
The CLARiiON division, functioning like a startup within Data General,
had reached revenue of half a billion
dollars in its first five years. By 1999,
CLARiiON sales were keeping the
company afloat. But DG, as a whole,
had posted a loss of $154 million in
1998. It didn’t have the R&D money
available to take CLARiiON technology
forward.
Meanwhile, just five miles down the
road in Hopkinton, EMC was watching
its revenues and stock price soar.
As the head of DG’s CLARiiON division, Joel had, for two months, been
part of the tiny team of people from
DG (code named “Dragon”) and EMC
(code named “Emerald”) who were
quietly putting the deal together prior
to the announcement. At the time,
CLARiiON owned 7% of the midrange
storage segment, while competitor
Hewlett-Packard owned 45%. Joel acknowledges he had serious questions
about whether enterprise-focused
EMC could embrace CLARiiON.
His questions were answered in
subsequent quarters. (These days,
Joel still looks with enjoyment at the
framed chart near his office showing
CLARiiON’s ascent to the midrange
segment’s number-one spot in Q105.)
Being part of CLARiiON’s success
is one of the many things Joel has
enjoyed at EMC, a company that has
given him “the opportunity to open up
new markets and new businesses, and
to lead very fast-growing businesses—
from a product perspective, a marketQ2 2010 | EMC.now 7
cover story
Linda Connly
place perspective, and a geographic
perspective.”
Rivalries and misperceptions
The DG acquisition remains EMC’s
biggest ever in terms of the number of
employees affected and the revenue in
play. Calling the transition challenging
is an understatement.
In the preceding years for Data
General, EMC had emerged as the
enemy, in large part because EMC’s
sales force was aggressive—sometimes
excessively so. EMC became the psychological target against which all of
Data General could unite. “It always
helps to have a nemesis, and they were
it,” Bob says.
At DG, the animosity was expressed
on posters, t-shirts, and in the media.
Bob and Joel vividly recall the day
they decided to run a full-page ad in
The Wall Street Journal taking a jab at
a statement they’d spotted buried in
EMC’s Form 10-K filed on March 11,
1999.
In that 10-K, EMC had made the
“mistake” of indicating it perceived
DG as a competitive threat. The EMC
statement excerpted in DG’s ad read,
“The Company [EMC] believes that its
major independent storage competitor
in the UNIX and Windows NT markets
is Data General Corporation.” The ad’s
headline proclaimed, “Data General
agrees with EMC.”
EMC’s singling-out of DG as its
DAVID ELMES
Erin Motameni
8 EMC.now | Q2 2010
major competitor was an overstatement, Joel knew. But he wasn’t about
to miss the chance to exploit it. While
EMC never responded to the Journal
ad externally, DG people savored hearing rumors that it had annoyed EMC’s
executives.
However, even as DGers were enjoying their PR victory, EMC had already begun preliminary investigations
into possibly acquiring DG.
“The transition was very different
depending on where you were sitting,”
recalls EMC’s HR SVP Erin Motameni.
As Data General’s VP of Worldwide
Human Resources, she was charged
with everything from finding out who
might lose their jobs in the deal, to
determining how people’s employee
benefits would transfer.
Erin found EMC’s senior executives
welcoming but sensed that certain
EMC groups were skeptical: There
appeared to be a perception that
Data General employees would
lack the almost pathologically
intense EMC sense of urgency.
“It was a feeling of hesitation that
I perceived,” Erin says. “Sometimes, when you mentioned you
were from Data General, you’d
hear, ‘Oh ...’”
All incoming DG employees
received EMC badge numbers
beginning with the number seven.
To this day, some former DGers
do not wear their badges facing
out because of the stigma they felt
back then.
Then there was that DG perception of EMC that the HR specialists would have to help people
overcome. “When someone would resign from
DG to go to EMC, we
always told them, ‘EMC
is a sweat shop; they
want your life,’” Erin
says. “Then of course,
when we were acquired,
it wasn’t really an option
for us to turn around and
say, ‘Never mind. Everything’s going to be okay.’”
“Misperceptions existed on both sides,” says
EMC EVP Frank Hauck, who oversaw
DG integration activities following the
acquisition’s close. “The fact is in those
cases, we were both wrong about each
other, but it eventually sorted itself
out.”
Fast-track transition
Misperceptions aside, the sheer logistics of the integration were daunting.
Frank remembers finding it to be
one of the toughest jobs he’s ever done.
The task of figuring out who would be
offered jobs and who would not was
traumatic for him.
His work had started when, while
on vacation, he received a call from
EMC President and CEO Mike Ruettgers requesting that he handle the
integration. Within 48 hours, Frank set
up a dozen or so functional leadership
teams containing EMC and DG representatives and began holding meetings
to work out the many, many details.
The transition was expected to take
6-12 months. It was completed in less
than three.
One group of DGers, however,
found the transition especially difficult. The assimilation of the R&D
engineers would be among the most
challenging hurdles. While EMC’s
executives had been extremely eager
to hire DG’s engineers, the two companies’ engineering groups did not seem
to mesh.
For many months after the acquisition closed, the Symmetrix and CLARiiON groups “just didn’t see eye-to-eye”
on many architectural and development-related issues, Bob says. CLARiiON engineers stayed in Southboro.
There was little cross-pollination or
collaboration. And, although it seems
unbelievable now, many EMC engineers didn’t see merit in a midrange
storage acquisition.
“We kept our distance from each
other,” Bob says. “But eventually, people started realizing some really good
ideas were coming out of both sides,
that really talented engineers were
working on both sides.”
Bob and Joel credit Joe Tucci, who
had joined EMC as President and COO
in January 2000, five months after the
acquisition, with helping to create a cohesive culture that erased the barriers.
A year later, Bob, the ex-DGer, was
named CTO of the Storage Products
Operations organization. His group
united the EMC CLARiiON, EMC
Symmetrix, and EMC Celerra engineering groups. “We’d achieved mutual
engineering respect for each other,”
Bob says.
THREE MONTHS before news of its acquisition
3 EXACTLY
by EMC would come to light, Data General bought space in
The Wall Street Journal to run this full-page ad on Monday,
May 10, 1999. The ad draws attention to an excerpt from
EMC’s Q498 financial results, issued in a 10-K report dated
March 11, 1999, in which EMC had affirmed that its “major
independent storage competitor in the UNIX and Windows
NT market is Data General Corporation.”
failing company.” She also was receiving little communication about the fate
of her 50-person worldwide staff. So,
Weathering uncertainty
she took a “somewhat successful” proDG’s Sales and Marketing employees
active approach. Linda began finding
faced a bleaker climate. Their talents
places for them herself by cold-calling
were not as universally sought. The
her EMC counterparts.
fact is, a lot of them weren’t offered
After that, Linda says, she planned
jobs in EMC’s well-established sales
to leave the company. But the job marand marketing force, Joel says.
ket was deteriorating, so instead she
Linda Connly was Director of DG’s
took a staff job as Director of EMC
Global Field & Healthcare Marketing
Global Marketing Operations.
team supporting the server division.
A short time later, she was surShe recalls feeling as if she was on the
prised to be offered the job of Direcreceiving end of pretty brutal attitudes
tor of EMC Global Field Marketing.
from some EMCers at times—that DG
It wasn’t long before she discovered,
people were “failing employees from a
first-hand, that EMC’s type-A sales
culture was perfect for her.
Linda went on to become
EMC’s first female sales VP
Bill DePatie
and a big fan of EMC’s work
environment. She says now, “I
love this company. It’s been a
great opportunity. The culture
matches me.”
Few people faced greater
acquisition-related challenges
than Bill DePatie, who is today
VP of Hardware Engineering
in EMC’s Information Infrastructure Products division.
A 13-year DG veteran, he had
been Director of Hardware Development for AViiON in 1999.
When EMC stated it would phase-out
the AViiON line in two years (the earliest the terms of the deal allowed), Bill
was faced with “ramping down a product we believed in and an engineering
organization we were incredibly proud
of.” The process did take two years,
and morale issues were taxing to everyone.
But Bill and his nearly 200-person
team found a silver lining: They possessed experience other EMC engineering teams sought—including, most
importantly, experience developing
platforms based on Intel’s x86 architectures. EMC was using Intel technology in the next generation of CLARiiON storage, and as AViiON ramped
down, CLARiiON logic development
ramped up. Working with the CLARiiON organization and other engineering groups across EMC, Bill was able
to find places for most of his team.
Bill later led the effort to converge
EMC Celerra’s hardware platform
architecture with CLARiiON’s, and he
recently oversaw a similar architecture convergence with Symmetrix. In
so doing, his team restructured and
redefined hardware engineering processes company-wide for maximum
efficiency.
Today, Bill leads a global organization that is developing all of EMC’s
Q2 2010 | EMC.now 9
cover story
hardware platforms. And EMC is just
where he wants to be. “I love an environment where I am constantly being
challenged,” he says.
For Erin in HR, the contrast of her
new job was stark. At Data General, she
had dealt with a rollercoaster of layoffs
over the years. At EMC, her challenge
lay in recruiting skilled workers fast
enough to support EMC’s skyrocketing growth. Erin oversaw the hiring
of more than 7,000 people in her first
year. After two years, she became a key
player in the effort to build a new, centralized HR organization at EMC.
And in the years since, Erin has
provided HR support to most of EMC’s
major functional organizations. Two
years ago, she became an SVP.
Most importantly, she says, she has
worked to make EMC a better place
to work. “It’s been fabulous, though I
wouldn’t have guessed so in those first
rocky months. I am just delighted to
work here.”
Tech-wreck time
While groups inside EMC were integrating themselves, a massive outside
force was about to finally break down
the remaining barriers to CLARiiON’s
acceptance by certain parts of the company. The dot-com bust arrived.
Prior to the downturn, some
EMC/Dell
31%
HP
26%
Q4
01
Q4
02
nn HP
nn NetApp
nn Hitachi
Q4
03
nn EMC/Dell
nn IBM
nn Sun
IDC’S TRACKING of “Worldwide Midtier
3 External
RAID Factory Revenue” shows
the incredible market-share growth
trajectory the CLARiiON family of storage
systems experienced after EMC purchased
Data General. (source: IDC Quarterly
Storage Tracker, Q1 2005)
10 EMC.now | Q2 2010
Q1
05
DURING THE 1999 secret negotiations, EMC and DG
3 were
code named, respectively, “Emerald” and “Dragon” by
legal teams preparing the paperwork for submission to the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The code names
came from the letters in the two companies’ real names. The
irony is that, by many standards of measurement, EMC was
actually the formidable “dragon,” while Data General was the
precious “emerald.”
members of the core EMC sales force
seemed to have too little incentive
to embrace the midrange CLARiiON
products. The fact was, selling a relatively less-expensive CLARiiON array
with its mid-tier software just didn’t
bring in the high commission that a big
“bells-and-whistles” Symmetrix deal
did. The whole situation was becoming
frustrating for EMC’s leaders.
But when the technology-sector
bust occurred, many EMC customers
shrunk their IT purchasing budgets.
EMC’s sales force began to look enthusiastically at promoting the affordable
CLARiiON; it stopped being seen as a
“Hail Mary” move to make only when a
Symmetrix deal stalled.
Finally, everyone had jumped
on board realizing CLARiiON’s tremendous inherent value. CLARiiON, like a knight in signature palepurple hued armor, was providing
EMC with the chance of surviving
years of harsh, industry-wide financial turmoil to come.
Joe Tucci supported the CLARiiON push relentlessly, re-engaging
Dell as a CLARiiON strategic
selling partner (EMC had ended
CLARiiON’s old OEM relationships
in the acquisition) and bolstering
the CLARiiON R&D budget.
The lengthy downturn also
showcased the efficient practices
that DG’s survival-seasoned employees, accustomed to struggling
with scarce resources, had brought
with them to EMC.
What we learned
Former DGers say EMC is today a
company much different from the ominous entity that threatened to derail
their careers.
One thing EMC’s leaders learned,
Joel says, is how challenging such an
integration can be. “Although it’s easy
for us to say we have no problem disrupting ourselves, it is actually a very
hard thing for a company to do,” he
says.
In the acquisition, EMC obtained
fresh perspectives on how to architect,
engineer, and manufacture products.
And it learned—after enduring CLARiiON’s pointless two-year-long acceptance delay—how important it is to get
sales teams to embrace newly acquired
products.
Back then, EMC had no significant
processes already in place to handle
the DG acquisition. Today, it is proud
to be a world-class expert in the art of
integrating acquired IT firms. “If we
were to do this today,” Frank notes,
“we’d let an acquired company of DG’s
size run independently for a while. We
just didn’t know to do that back then.”
Joel says the company is “far more
welcoming today to new ideas and
business styles, and that’s helping us
expand into new markets.”
EMC really does understand that it
can’t solve every problem organically.
It’s obvious: Just look at the incredible positive impact that the people of
DG—and of all the subsequent acquisitions—have had. s
cover
story
Their stories
They are making a difference, and they are doing it as members of the EMC
team. Eleven years ago, however, each of the people on these pages was part of
an equally tight-knit team at financially beleaguered Data General. They were
facing being bought by a competitor some of them disliked and others knew
little about. Here are their thoughts and recollections.
The man behind the curtain
EMC Principal Graphic Designer CHUCK VEIT
was DG’s Manager of
Presentation Graphic
Services. He remembers “the waiting, and
the not knowing” as
the worst part of the
transition. “Being
acquired is scary,” he
says. “I had been at
DG for 16 years and
seen ups and downs
and repeated layoffs;
these took place almost
annually, so all of us
were always concerned
about our jobs. But
an acquisition was far
worse than any ‘reduction in force.’”
He had joined DG
in 1983 and by 1999
was managing three
employees and several
contractors in an overtaxed graphic department that supported
the company globally.
Chuck had too much
work and too few resources, but he found
the twin challenges of
meeting deadlines and
satisfying customers to
be exciting.
Although many of
his colleagues took
severance packages
following the acquisition, he decided to
“see where this would
lead.” Chuck began his
new EMC job designing materials for EMC
executives, and it took
him months to adjust
to having enough time
and resources to perfect his designs. Now
he gets to be “the man
behind the curtain,”
creating slides, posters,
animations, graphics, and other creative
ventures that present
EMC to the world.
After 11 years,
Chuck says he still
enjoys the process
of “getting into our
executives’ heads” to
turn their ideas into
informative, visually
compelling graphics.
“Every day is a new
challenge,” he says.
“You need to listen
to what they say that
they want, understand
what they really mean,
and return something
to them that is better
than what they asked
for. And you have to do
it again and again.”
like get“Iting
int
o our
executives’
heads and
being able to
illustrate their
ideas.”
The right time
Intrapreneur STEVE
DAVID ELMES
TODD , an EMC Dis-
“Itathappened
the right
time. I was
ready to
take on new
challenges.”
tinguished Engineer,
says the acquisition by
EMC happened at “the
right time by the right
company” for him.
Steve had been
working on technology tied to CLARiiON
and its prototypes and
predecessors since arriving at Data General
as a college co-op student in 1986. A longtime member of the
CLARiiON software
development group,
Steve watched his organization evolve from
being “the least cool
place to be at DG,” into
the company’s most
financially successful
business unit.
After working on
CLARiiON systems for
so many years, including helping to create
CLARiiON’s Navisphere management
software, Steve says
he was ready for new
challenges.
Post-acquisition,
despite living through
the awkward transition
period for CLARiiON
engineers, Steve says
he was “thrilled with
the work at EMC” and
the opportunities it
presented to him. After
six months of working in the CLARiiON
group, Steve left Southboro to join EMC’s Advanced Development
Group in Hopkinton.
“I was a storage guy,
and I was working for
the number-one storage company on the
planet. And I learned
plenty,” Steve says.
He also accomplished
plenty, helping to create technologies including Centera Seek,
StorageScope, PowerPath Data Migration
Enabler, and Centera
Virtual Archive.
“I’ve had a lot of
freedom to collaborate
with literally hundreds
of brilliant people,”
Steve says. “I’m happy.”
Q2 2010 | EMC.now 11
cover story | their stories
t IN A CEREMONY ON JANUARY
9, 2001, EMC donated DG’s
first minicomputer—the stilloperational “NOVA One”—to
the Computer Museum History
Center in California. Data
General Founder Edson de
Castro, with Henry Burkhardt
III and Dick Sogge, had
designed the NOVA. (l. to r.):
Computer Museum Trustee
Sam Fuller with Ed de Castro
and EMC’s Joel Schwartz.
9 AT AN AUGUST 9, 1999, NEWS CONFERENCE,
DG CEO Ron Skates (l.) and Mike Ruettgers
announced the acquisition.
ROY POTVIN , EMC Sr.
Manager of Global
Payroll, had been at
Data General for 21
years when he received
a call about the EMC
deal while sitting on
a Florida beach. He
was a manufacturing
materials manager
then, and he was on a
team implementing Six
Sigma at DG.
According to the
DG water cooler scuttlebutt he was hearing, if he were lucky
enough even to be
offered a job at EMC,
he and his teammates
wouldn’t last more
than six months. “The
presumption was that
there weren’t a lot of
synergies,” he recalls.
On that beach, Roy
told himself, “Yikes,
enjoy the vacation, it
may be the last for a
while.”
But it turned out
there were plenty of
synergies for Roy. Not
only did he find cultural similarities, but
his work ethic and job
skills were an excellent fit.
As a materials
manager, he was wellversed in using Oracle
materials planning and
procurement modules.
EMC was embarking
on a years-long project
to implement Catalyst,
an Oracle-centered enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.
Roy was recruited and
experienced his “baptism by fire” at EMC.
Later, he was called
upon to use his Six
Sigma experience as a
lead in a six-member
EMC Program Management Office implementing Six Sigma. On
the advice of long-term
EMCers Rick Hirko,
Scott Casavant, Joe
Scott, John Curran,
Irina Simmons, and Ed
Golitko, Roy took a role
in EMC Payroll and
has climbed the ranks
to oversee the employee payroll process
worldwide.
“EMC gave me
the opportunity to
change and grow,” Roy
says. “The fantastic
individuals I’ve have
had the pleasure of
working with made
the transition easier. It
amazes me how good
EMC’s current payroll
organization is, how
hard-working they are,
and what an honor it is
to be able to lead them.
The intellect level and
challenge-rich atmosphere here are very
high; I like that.”
MICKY BACA
An opportunity-rich ride
intellect
“The
level and the
challengerich atmosphere here
are very
high.”
A pleasant surprise
ROYNAN JONES , VP of
I like the
“energy
and
the winning
attitude at
EMC.”
12 EMC.now | Q2 2010
EMC Global External
Manufacturing, led the
Purchasing Supplier
Quality Group at DG’s
Apex, North Carolina,
manufacturing facility.
She found the EMC
deal to be “a pleasant
surprise.” Operations
under DG, she says,
“were, to be honest, on
life support.” EMC not
only spelled salvation
for the Apex site, but it
had working relationships with many of the
same suppliers that DG
Manufacturing did.
While it took some
time, EMC and Data
General manufacturing
processes eventually
blended exceptionally
well. Today, the facility
is a showcase of hightech manufacturing.
Roynan, who had
been with Data General for 15 years, stayed
on in her purchasing
director role at EMC,
and she advanced in
the Global External
Manufacturing Group
to become a vice
president this year. As
Roynan summarizes
things, “I like the energy, winning attitude,
and opportunities at
EMC.”
9 DATA
ran
TV campaigns
in the 1970s
and 1980s; here
is one of the
slogans that
appeared at the
end of several
ads.
GENERAL
corporate culture
and integration
For an already-big technology company, strategic
acquisitions are an important way to grow revenue. EMC’s
purchase last year of data deduplication powerhouse Data
Domain was a great case in point. But acquisitions are
mainly about people.
one
Out of many,
As a standalone
company, Data Domain
was the paramount
provider of a gamechanging technology
called data deduplication,
used to streamline
backups of the evergrowing digital universe.
Data Domain’s
acquisition in 2009
amplified EMC’s
capabilities in this crucial
area of information
storage and management.
In turn, EMC’s
marketplace clout and
global reach helped
boost Data Domain’s
sales dramatically postacquisition.
Acquisitions, however,
are primarily about
people. Making sure the
employees of an acquired
company fit smoothly
into place at EMC, and
making sure that EMC
adapts to the new people
and capabilities it has
brought on board, is both
an art and a science.
Photograph by Jen Siska
SEAN LAMB : “It was exciting to be
around here when EMC finally ended
up acquiring us, but there was still
trepidation.”
Q2 2010 | EMC.now 13
he was worried about what the acquisition would mean for him. “Data
Domain had been clipping along,” he
recalls. “We were doing very, very
well in the storage dedupe market.
It was a rapidly growing technology
area. When both EMC and NetApp
were looking at us, it quickly became
an emotional roller-coaster for us
employees.”
When that ride ended with a victory by EMC, things felt relatively
better. “It was exciting to be around
here when EMC finally ended up
acquiring us,” Sean says. “But there
was still trepidation.” Initial concerns
9 EMC USED ITS strong balance sheet to acquire four innovative growth companies in 2009,
most notably Data Domain, whose deduplication technology identifies redundant files and
over job security and questions about
data as they are being stored, providing a storage footprint that is 10 to 30 times smaller,
working styles plagued him and othon average, than the original dataset. Data Domain became the foundation of a new
er Data Domain employees.
high-growth information infrastructure product division at EMC called Backup Recovery
Systems (BRS). In the BRS division, Data Domain and Avamar each grew more than 100%
But for the most part, the integraas of Q110. (Although EMC purchased Data Domain in July 2009, this is a year-overtion
has been different—and easier—
year comparison that assumes Data Domain had been acquired on January 1, 2009, and
than what he envisioned.
incorporates revenue reported by Data Domain during the period from January 1, 2009
through the date of its acquisition by EMC.)
“We were all hearing the fuss
being made at the time about ‘East
Coast versus West Coast’ differences.
I still have not found them yet,” Sean says. Instead,
Getting this right (dozens of times now) has
he found Data Domain’s and EMC’s cultures to be
helped EMC maintain and enhance its leadership
similar. “Both cultures are very driven. We’d heard
position in the world of IT.
rumors that EMC was ‘buttoned down,’ but from
But with the Data Domain acquisition, things
what I observe, that characteristic actually only
were more convoluted than usual. And, it wasn’t
manifests itself in how intensely EMC people focus
long before the stakes got very high indeed.
on what they want to accomplish. And, again, that’s
very similar to Data Domain,” he says.
Tug of war
Still, there have been changes. Since starting
The challenges that come with any major acquisiwork at Data Domain in September 2008, almost a
tion can be significant. In this case, not only was
year prior to the acquisition, Sean had been workEMC trying to buy an active, thriving competitor,
ing with customers to help them evangelize dedubut also, long-time storage rival NetApp was trying
plication technology at their companies and articuto purchase Data Domain for itself.
late its benefits. “Now that all of EMC is involved,”
The very public nature of this battle for a gem
Sean says, “I’ve noticed my meetings are much
of the IT world was complicating the process and
larger. At Data Domain, we sat with a few people in
prompting a spectator-sport mentality at techa room and hashed out something. Now we often
nology and business news outlets and across the
have several times that number in the room, plus
blogosphere.
Some media reports asserted that the East Coast additional people participating by phone. It has
been an eye opener. It also speaks to the massive
corporate culture EMC allegedly embodied would
resources of EMC.”
be incompatible with Data Domain’s Silicon Valley
More people in a meeting often equates to more
DNA.
steps to accomplish a project. And, truthfully, if
A year later, though, it’s clear that a cultural
Sean is creating a customer profile now, he must
merger between EMC and Data Domain has been
think broadly not only about the profile’s content,
achieved with surprisingly few glitches. The rebut also about who at EMC should review it. “The
sults are better than many people—including some
list has grown, and that introduces the usual tactipeople very directly affected by the situation—had
cal problems. But at the end of the day, when more
predicted.
people are interested, I end up with a better customer profile with a broader spectrum of insights,”
Rumors and reality
he says.
Sean Lamb handles customer-reference responsiOn the whole, Sean says, EMC made the transibilities as a member of EMC Data Domain’s martion easy for the people of Data Domain, in part by
keting group, which reports up to EMC’s Informagiving them access to additional resources. He says,
tion Infrastructure Products organization. He says
14 EMC.now | Q2 2010
“There was a lot of help available to us after we
learned to maneuver around EMC and make use of
its processes.”
An acquisition is different for everyone
A similar tale of initial concern followed by relief, then real enthusiasm, comes from Principal
Systems Engineer Devin Hamilton. Back in 2005,
Devin, who is based in Washington state, became
the twelfth sales engineer hired at Data Domain.
He remembers that the company’s global sales
force was so small in those days, everyone fit into
one group photo.
Today he says, “An acquisition experience is different for everyone. It might seem extremely traumatic to people who had never before been caught
up in a tech buyout or lived through an IPO. That’s
absolutely reasonable; so much change is going on.
But for the folks here who have been around this
industry for years, the possibility of acquisition was
always present.”
The fears people expressed early on never really materialized, and Devin reports that the EMC
teams he now works with are very professional.
Being a part of EMC has had an impact on his work
efforts.
“When I started at Data Domain in 2005, my
territory consisted of two customer accounts and
three deployed systems. It was pure startup mode;
we were given our sales tools and sent out to ‘conquer and have a good time.’”
Their work brought results. By the time Data
Domain went public in 2007, two years before the
acquisition, Devin’s region consisted of more than
200 customers running 400 dedupe appliances.
Today, he focuses on eight of EMC Data Domain’s
most prominent, well-known enterprise accounts.
From Devin’s perspective, EMC changed Data
Domain in two ways, both of them positive.
First, he has a larger bag of offerings to solve
customers’ problems, and that’s handy. “Our technology is dynamic and appropriate for many challenges, but in a number of deployments, I’ve found
that my customer requires other solutions in addition to deduplication. I now have answers to basically anything they may ask me for,” he says.
Second, being a part of EMC has been “sort of
like signing up a giant, hugely proactive reseller,”
Devin says. Pre-acquisition, Devin and one sales associate covered his whole territory. Now they provide their technical selling support to six different
sales teams. “From a lead-generation perspective,
we could not have asked for a better boost,” he says.
“We have all kinds of new opportunities in environments we had never tapped.”
The expanded sales teams are in the field, teeing
up possible dedupe opportunities as they provide
core storage product implementations. As a result
of this accelerant, Devin is today penetrating ac-
counts he’d spent years trying to crack.
“These days, I work with EMC people every
day,” he reports. “And it is great. One of the best,
most helpful things that happened to me from
an integration standpoint is that an EMC person
manages the team I’m on now. I just call to ask any
question I have about EMC’s systems or software; I
don’t have to hunt for answers. The core EMC folks
we interact with are just as motivated as we are. It
has been a great fit.”
The only thing Devin has found somewhat hard
to get used to involves product demonstrations.
“We used to have our own regional lab that we’d
access remotely to conduct demos,” he explains.
The process was especially useful in isolated areas
where Devin could still connect to the lab via Data
Domain’s virtual private network.
EMC IT security policy restricts the access, so
he has had to leverage resources out of corporate
instead. It’s the kind of thing that can lead to friction. But Devin accepts the situation philosophically, regarding it as just a part of doing business
within a big corporation.
Secrets to success
“Differences of opinion may arise on occasion;
that’s expected,” says Frank Slootman, former Data
Domain CEO and now President of the EMC Backup Recovery Systems division. “However, when you
look from 90,000 feet at how this integration has
unfolded, you see it has clearly gone extraordinarily well. The amount of revenue acceleration has
been unbelievable. This company’s dedupe business has essentially doubled in size already.”
One reason the integration has gone well is that
the two companies are equally serious about the
pursuit of new business. Says Frank, “There is no
fundamental argument about that.”
Another helper came from EMC’s communication platforms. Polly Pearson, VP of Employment,
Brand, and Strategy Engagement, notes that ZDNet
and Harvard Business School have concluded that
EMC uses some of the best social media practices of any FORTUNE 500 firm. “Our internal
EMC|ONE platform in particular helps us invert
the old command-and-control management approach and implode communication silos,” she
says.
Devin says that as he and his colleagues have
moved deeper into EMC, they have found many
good people working throughout the company and
established “a lot of first-rate, fast-growth-focused
relationships.” He adds, “It helps that EMC had acquired many companies before ours. I feel that I’m
working within a heterogeneous culture composed
of many technologies, many regions, and many
business practices, all trying really hard to move
in synch. From what I see, EMC’s experience integrating companies definitely paid off for us.” s
One reason
that the
integration
has gone well
is that the two
companies are
equally serious
about pursuing
new business.
Q2 2010 | EMC.now 15
total customer
experience
Going for the
Olympic
figure
skaters
don’t win
gold if their
jumps are
excellent
but their
footwork
and spins
are mediocre.
Delivering
gold-medal
services to
customers
requires a
similar act
of complete choreography.
At EMC,
“Management by
Metrics” is
aiding this
effort.
No matter how good you
are, you won’t make it to the
winner’s circle if you don’t get
everything right. That’s why
the EMC Global Services organization has been expanding its
business intelligence capabilities.
Business intelligence—
gained through consistent data
collection and analysis—is how
Global Services maintains and
extends its top-ranked service
position in the IT world. Global
Services teams are checking
with customers to make sure
EMC is addressing what the
customers care about. They
are measuring and monitoring
these relationships continually.
Gathering and using information about customers,
products, and processes to make
service-delivery decisions isn’t
a new concept. What is new is
how this program, called Management by Metrics, is helping
EMC Global Services to collect
and analyze data more consistently, then to act on that data to
make improvements.
EMC receives about 1.4 million service requests annually
via voice, web, and automated
phone-home alert. Analyzing
what prompts these service
requests and tracking when and
how they are resolved is crucial.
It’s also complicated. EMC’s
support infrastructure today
contains products from dozens
16 EMC.now | Q2 2010
g ld
in
services
of acquisitions. Global Services
teams are challenged by the
sheer number, rapid growth,
and breadth of the offerings.
Just putting someone on a plane
to go fix arrays is not logistically
realistic anymore.
Not only were dozens of
acquisitions resulting in a huge
influx of products needing support, but also, many individual
product-dedicated business
units were the ones tasked with
delivering the support.
The process was disjointed.
The whole situation simply
wasn’t working well anymore.
For the people of Global Services, providing consistently good
service, regardless of product or
region, was beginning to feel as
if they’d expanded from managing one Olympic team to managing 25 of them.
The Management by Metrics
program
In the past, when various EMC
groups gathered information
about service delivery, each
group would use its own terminology. Global Services, then,
had to interpret all the incoming service-related information
differently. It was difficult to
collate and share information,
much less use it to make appropriate process improvements.
The Management by Metrics
program was born in the form
of a monthly review of key performance indicators (KPIs). A
“dashboard” system for delivering that data soon followed. The
dashboards let Global Services
managers parse the data and
review specific sets of measurements continuously or periodically.
SVP Tony Kolish, who oversees all of EMC’s Customer
Support Services, recalls, “For
a while at first, different business groups still ran their own
dashboards, and people kept
disagreeing about which one was
right.” Tony instituted a policy to
make just one dashboard official.
Global Services would develop
it, and it would be the only one
referenced in reviews.
Getting to that “one version
of the truth” wasn’t easy. Stakeholders repeatedly identified
perceived problems with the
information the new dashboard
provided. Tony and his team kept
revising, adjusting, and making
the system work. Eventually, everyone united around the Management by Metrics process.
Management by Metrics helps
EMC’s service professionals take
proactive, pre-emptive action
when possible. And it helps them
greatly in making fact-based
assessments of service performance because it brings to light
the perspectives of customers
and internal stakeholders.
Tony says, “Management by
Metrics has replaced a collection
of anecdotes with a service culture based on solid facts.”
Management by Metrics
made a big difference for Gordon
Winters, Sr. Director of Worldwide Technical Support for EMC
Disk Library. That product has
been available since April 2004,
and Gordon’s team was witnessing product-maturity issues generating service calls.
“At first, we simply deployed
more people to solve immediate
problems,” Gordon says. “But as
time went on, the Management
by Metrics business intelligence
data helped us understand the
problems better and deploy staff
more efficiently. We could establish priorities by zeroing-in
on customer expectations, and
things like our time-to-respond
numbers and overall servicelevel objectives.”
The business intelligence
data also revealed that Global
Services could be more effective
when reaching out to Engineering during an incident escalation.
“We weren’t getting to them
fast enough and weren’t helping
them really understand what we
were doing and why,” Gordon
explains.
The Management by Metrics
dashboard documents specific
problems and reveals problem
patterns. That sets the stage for
world’s most advanced and challenging technical specialties.)
What EMC is doing differently now, explains Frank Coleman, Director of Operations for
Customer Service, is focusing
itself even more actively on the
customer’s viewpoint. Specifically, it is refining its metrics to
ensure that EMC’s customer
service processes really do meet
that customer’s needs.
“If a customer has a service
complaint, we evaluate it and
validate the concerns right
away, and we determine if it’s
a one-off event or a full-blown
trend,” Frank says. “The point is
to concentrate on the important
things.”
Customer Support Services
When a field service team figures out a good way
to fix a particular problem, that resolution is easier
to identify now. And the fix that the team finds is
easier to roll-out to all of EMC Global Services.
genuine teamwork. Gordon says,
“With the new kinds of data
we’re seeing, we clarify what
kind of Engineering support we
need quickly, and we escalate
issues to the appropriate people
faster. It has been truly transformational.”
Seeing through a customer’s
eyes
Although far more complex and
sophisticated, EMC’s overall approach to service is to some extent comparable to the approach
used by cable television companies. It’s a tiered methodology
ranging from online self-help
for simple issues, to a call center
with operators who can solve
more thorny troubles, to field
service specialists who travel
to solve the most complicated
problems. (Although make no
mistake: EMC’s service professionals aren’t “cable guys.” They
are skilled experts in some of the
used to look only at how long
a case sat in its service queue
when measuring its “initial response” metric. Now the organization is measuring things more
specifically (for example, quantifying exactly how long it took
to call that customer back). They
want to see things through the
customer’s eyes, and Management by Metrics has given them
a whole new set of measurements of that customer’s viewpoint on progress being made.
“This is something that can
help us to achieve continuous
improvement on the business as
well as the metrics,” Frank believes. “As the business changes,
so do the metrics: The metrics
evolve with the business and according to customer feedback.”
For 2010, the focus is on using
Management by Metrics to improve what’s known as “time-torelief” even further, scrutinizing
more deeply the speed at which
Q2 2010 | EMC.now 17
going for the gold
R AT I N G
Brocade
CSC
Dell
EMC
Hitachi
HP
IBM
NetApp
Sun
Symantec
Unisys
In Gartner’s
MarketScope
for Storage
Services, North
America, 2009,
analysts Adam
Couture and
Bob Passmore
wrote, “EMC has
put considerable capital
and effort into
technologies
to identify the
controllable
touchpoints of
customer satisfaction.”
18 EMC.now | Q2 2010
SOURCE: GARTNER, AUGUST 20, 2009
Strong
Negative
dashboards by product,
region, business unit, and
Strong
Caution
Promising
Positive
Positive
other parameters. They
make sure the metrics they
H
have are the right ones to
H
collect, and that results are
H
trending in the right direcH
tion.
H
All of EMC’s big, global
accounts
have customized
H
dashboards, and Global
H
Services creates other
H
individual customer dashH
boards as needed.
One of the most innovaH
tive
features of ManageH
ment by Metrics is its early
warning system. By proactively monitoring customerCustomer Support Services
specific data, it will predict the
solves customers’ problems.
likelihood of escalation for a
Management by Metrics boils
service issue and will trigger the
down to gathering just one set of
necessary intervention proacconsistent metrics across field
tively. This capability definitely
support and remote support, and
keeps customers happier and
across product families, busireduces costs for EMC.
ness units, and geographies. It’s
a comprehensive view of all of
Looking good
EMC’s support interactions for
EMC regularly compares itself
all products owned by a particuagainst industry benchmarks
lar customer and installed across
and finds that its service quality
all that customer’s locations
exceeds benchmarks in many arworldwide.
eas measured by the Technology
It’s also fairly flexible. The
Services Industry Association.
dashboard has turned out to be
(TSIA is an influential organizaadaptable in providing details to
support the decisions that people tion formerly known as the Service and Support Professionals
in the Global Services organizaAssociation, or SSPA.)
tion must make.
EMC Support Center operaManagement by Metrics also
tions also undergo an annual Serpromotes service innovation.
vice Capability & Performance
Specifically, when a field service
(SCP) audit. In 2009, EMC once
team figures out a good way to
again exceeded that audit’s comfix a particular problem, their
pliance requirements as well as
solution is easier to identify
the SCP community’s benchthrough the metrics now. And
marked average.
the fix that they found is easier
The industry analyst commuto roll-out to all of Global Sernity has been taking notice. EMC
vices.
received a “Strong Positive” ratThe system’s dashboards dising in last year’s Gartner report
play plenty of information: service demand levels for individual MarketScope for Storage Services,
North America, 2009. Of the 11
products, alignment with customer satisfaction survey results, vendors evaluated for that report, EMC received the highest
comparisons with industrypossible rating and was one of
standard support metrics, and
only two companies to do so.
so on. Global Services managers
And on May 5, at the Technolconduct monthly reviews of the
ogy Services World Conference
in Santa Clara, California, TSIA
presented its prestigious 2010
STAR Award for “Best Use of
Metrics & Business Intelligence”
to the EMC Global Services
Management by Metrics initiative.
Another long-term plus:
Management by Metrics is helping to support a global training
and mentoring strategy at EMC.
“We’ve been able to train more
of our colleagues in India, China,
and Ireland in the use of these
metric tools,” says Bill Foniri, Sr.
Director of Finance and Business
Operations for EMC Global Customer Service.
Frank says, “Management by
Metrics is becoming what I call
a ‘plug in’ system, so, as EMC
acquires companies or adds new
products into the offering set,
we’re plugging the products directly into the service-measurement system at the same time.”
Global Services managers
know they still have more work
to do regarding time-to-resolution and how they interact with
Engineering to enhance quality.
“But from a service-delivery
standpoint, based on the customer satisfaction numbers we’re
seeing, we’ve already achieved
some tremendous accomplishments,” Bill says.
Once, too few people really
knew where the information
used to measure service success came from. And they didn’t
know if they were seeing a complete picture. Now, there are no
“secrets.” Says Tony, “We have
consolidated around one source
of truth. This is vitally important
to us. Having fact-based assessments enables us to be more
transparent, and it is profoundly
changing the dynamics of how
we relate to customers and stakeholders.”
The end result should be
higher, more consistent scores
worldwide that translate into
“marketplace gold.” s
total customer
experience
EMC Virtual Services Delivery
A virtual boon
to EMC Global Services
t EMC GLOBAL
SERVICES
ASSOCIATES
at the Giza
Necropolis on
the outskirts
of Cairo. These
EMC Egypt
COE employees
are among the
participants
in the joint
program
between TSS
and CSS.
How many times
this year have you
heard, read, or used the
word “virtual”? Well,
you’re going to read it
again, but this time, in a
context rather different
from the norm.
In the past year,
EMC has been increasing its commitment to
Virtual Services Delivery, or VSD. This is not
a technique for storage
,
or server virtualization.
Rather, it is a technique
for providing services
to a customer by blending together and delivering help that comes
from both onsite and
offsite EMC experts.
A services team
from EMC Global
Services creates each
custom support plan,
consulting project, and
implementation plan.
They assemble appropriate onsite people
and remote people
and resources located
around the world.
It’s a classic winwin situation. Customers gain access to
a larger reservoir of
EMC service talent
for less money. EMC,
meanwhile, makes
more efficient use of its
service experts and re-
sources company-wide.
For EMC Customer
Support Services SVP
Tony Kolish, implementing VSD was a
“no-brainer.”
During a business
trip two years ago to
Bangalore, India, he
had an “ah-ha” moment. On his way to
EMC’s offices, he gazed
up at the long rows of
gleaming office build-
BY THE NUMBERS During Q110, the EMC TSS global Virtual Services Delivery team steadily increased
the number of hours it was allocating to customer projects. It ended the quarter with 18,582 hours of
services delivered, an increase of 27% from the prior quarter, surpassing the team’s worldwide goal.
Q2 2010 | EMC.now 19
virtual services
ings housing large-scale customer services operations
for IBM, Oracle, Microsoft,
and other high-tech giants.
“I thought about how far
the IT industry has come
in Bangalore and in cities
like it around the world,”
Tony says. “I thought about
how the service skills of the
people in these cities have
become so advanced. Then
I had the feeling EMC was
somewhat exposed.”
Large IT corporations,
including some EMC competitors, were using the
great talent present in Bangalore to deliver services
remotely to their customers
across the globe. The competition had dug in aggressively, taking advantage of
Bangalore’s vast pool of IT
services expertise.
Tony says, “We were not
as far along as those other
companies, which meant we
couldn’t offer the pricing
efficiencies for IT service
engagements that they were
offering. If we didn’t close
the gap, we’d be unable to
compete effectively.”
One global team
EMC was a little late to the
VSD BOOSTS A TEAM TO THE TOP
Like the universe, the AT&T U-verse project is huge and
constantly expanding. Since December 2004, a team
from EMC has been helping AT&T deliver a better television experience than cable and enhance phone, video,
and high-speed Internet interfaces.
In those years, the EMC team has been one of dozens
of AT&T partners working to keep up with the many new
technology releases and the 25 interfaces requiring
maintenance.
In early 2009, AT&T signaled it was looking for more
cost efficiency than its then-primary project vendor, a
global communications software/services firm, could
provide.
EMC was ready to help. “By moving some of our
work to seven people in Bangalore, we were able to
offer AT&T better rates for the same work,” says EMC
Account Partner Mike Souder, who supervises the
relationship.
That ability ultimately prompted AT&T to name EMC
as the new U-verse prime vendor.
“The miracle was that there was no delay in the
transition, considering the magnitude of this project,”
says Nabil Twyman, EMC Lead Analyst. “Team-building
is something we do really well, and that made all the
difference.”
So where does the project stand with EMC sitting
atop the team? “The customer just renewed. They love
us,” Nabil says.
party, but it was definitely in
a good position to be knocking at the door. The company’s Centers of Excellence
9 EGYPT This team of EMC customer service technicians are part
of EMC Global Services. Based at the new EMC Cairo Center of
Excellence, they are part of a close-knit yet worldwide community of
employees dedicated to providing great support to EMC customers.
20 EMC.now | Q2 2010
(COEs) and other centers
around the world are home
to an impressive, constantly
growing pool of technical,
customer support, and operational talent—people who
are steeped in EMC technology.
This is global-scale service delivery, not outsourcing. Says Tony, “We began
building out the Virtual
Services Delivery program
with EMC employees. We
have a great ecosystem of
technical support inside our
COEs. It made sense to connect VSD to that existing
ecosystem; our company has
such a proud legacy of support. We did not want to risk
inserting lots of outsourced
service workers who might
not fully understand that
legacy.”
Christine Lundberg,
EMC Sr. Customer Support
Manager, reports that teams
of customer service technicians in Hopkinton, Cairo,
Germany, and in Pune in India, are now working together to deliver service virtually
and are helping each other
sharpen their technical and
managerial skills.
“I think this is also
stretching our own capabilities as managers,” she says.
“When you’re working with
someone remotely, you have
to focus a little more on
team building and on sharpening your people-management skills.”
Some benefits
The VSD process significantly reduces response
time, eliminates servicerequest delays, and ensures
that the right resources are
supporting the customer.
Judy Capra, Sr. Director
of the Global CSS Ionix and
CST organizations, says,
“Every minute we save is
a minute we can give back
to the customer and to our
team of customer service
technicians.”
Instead of having to ask
for information, a customer
service technician (CST)
spends his or her time offering higher-value assistance
such as collecting logs for
the customer.
Algorithms then assign
and route an incoming service call to the most appropriate queue. In some cases,
an engagement might be all
onsite, all remote, or some
combination.
The VSD model helps
customers by reducing their
onsite service expenses, and
it allows EMC to schedule
services to better meet a
customer’s needs—for example, scheduling a process
to occur at night or on a
weekend to minimize downtime, or to start a process
sooner remotely instead of
having to wait until an ap-
9 INDIA: A majority of the EMC
propriate onsite resource
becomes available to visit
the customer.
Right people, right place,
right time
EMC Presales team members formulate a custom
plan; they have access to
EMC Technology Solutions
& Support (TSS) and EMC
Consulting teams all over
the world. That helps them
build a plan with a perfect
blend of talent and service
approaches. And the fact
that the remote service
teams are stationed globally
results in a faster service response to customers operating in faraway locales.
John Salerno, Operations
Director for the EMC New
York/New Jersey Enterprise
Division, notes that complex
service projects are especially well-suited to the VSD
process. In fact, “the area
where a blended service
model probably makes the
most sense,” he says, “is with
these long, complex projects
where the customer and the
EMC team have a chance to
get comfortable with each
other and with the blended
service-delivery model.”
Many customers in
John’s region already are
quite comfortable with
VSD. One of them, a global
financial institution, specifically requested that remote
service delivery from EMC
be included. John says, “To a
customer like this, competitive pricing and value really
matter. A service mix incorporating some remote services offers them the value
STARTING THE PROCESS
When a customer needs service help—to migrate data,
architect a backup platform, build a private cloud, and
so on—an EMC Presales team member first submits
a Global Services Engagement Request Form. The
standardized form, available in the Forms section of
Outlook, is a valuable assessment tool, says Bangalorebased Madhulika Karan, Sr. VSD Program Manager.
“That form, by itself, has been a huge step forward in
giving us the information we need to bring in the right
services,” she says.
The form automatically routes to EMC’s TSS VSD
team in Bangalore. It provides the information that TSS
needs to blend service delivery properly, including the
customer’s products, location, type of call, and first
contact point.
they’re looking for.”
“VSD represents an
incredible opportunity for
us to provide a great Total
Customer Experience,” says
ML Krakauer, SVP of EMC
Technology Solutions &
Services, Storage Managed
Services, and Presales. “In
many parts of the world, we
previously didn’t have the
‘critical mass’ of personnel
to support our full portfolio of products. With VSD,
we’ve gained that critical
mass. VSD gives a tremendous boost to our service
capabilities for customers
operating in Africa and the
Middle East, for instance,”
she says.
Ian Arthur, Director,
EMEA Global Sourcing &
COE Egypt TSS, is familiar
with what customers in
those parts of the world
need from EMC. “Sure, we
all know the importance of
managing costs,” he says,
“but VSD also allows us
to assist in our resourcemanagement journey to get
the right person in the right
place at the right time. We
haven’t always been able to
do that in some parts of the
world.”
Coming from behind to win
The gap between early arrivals to the VSD party and
EMC is closing. In Q110, the
company’s total global hours
allocated to VSD projects increased by 27% over Q409.
Customer AT&T consid-
Global Services team pose in
front of the EMC Center of
Excellence in Bangalore, India.
This group includes employees
representing EMC Customer
Support Services, EMC
Consulting, EMC Technology
Solutions & Support, EMC
Presales, and the EMC Residency
Program.
ers it vitally important that
EMC construct a team to
deliver a blend of onsite
and remote services. When
seven EMC Consulting
employees in Bangalore
joined together to provide
the remote EMC Consulting
VSD services for an AT&T
project in the U.S. (see sidebar), Nabil Twyman, EMC
Lead Analyst on the project, wanted to ensure that
a possibly sharp learning
curve and lack of personal
relationships with the onsite
EMC Global Services staff
wouldn’t delay anything.
“So, some of us on the team
made the trip to Bangalore
to speed up the knowledge
transfer and relationship
building,” Nabil says. “We’ve
built a strong team that is
achieving real success.”
EMC is now competing
on its own terms. “First,
we had to emphasize VSD
simply to close the gap with
competitors,” says Tom Roloff, SVP of EMC Consulting.
“As we accelerate the shift,
we’re using the quality of
our work and our talent to
add service offerings, delivered virtually, that competitors just don’t have.” s
Q2 2010 | EMC.now 21
new
technology
Centera Virtual Archive will help to
redefine the data center
Conquering
time
and
space
5 Archiving
across the
EMC Corporate
Systems Engineer Zeeshan
Khan talks
about the bright
future of Centera Virtual Archive. The floor
demonstration
in the Technology Pavilion
at EMC World
2010 in Boston
represented a
Centera system
“in London”
and another
unit (rear) “in
New York.” The
setup simulates
how EMC
Centera Virtual
Archive technology will meld
two physical
Centera systems
located in two
faraway cities,
creating one
virtual archive.
JUSTIN KNIGHT
pond
The records of a little girl’s visit to the doctor
today will become part of her lifelong digital medical history. But decades from now, the healthcare
environment will be quite different.
Your home mortgage may take 30 years to pay
off, but that data also will exist on a digital archive
well beyond the loan’s expiration.
These days, all sorts of transactions live for
decades, and the organizations handling them
may operate across multiple regions or countries.
Healthcare networks, banks, and many other enterprises are contending with an onslaught of digital information that will need years of protection
while remaining accessible across sometimesconsiderable distances.
Fortunately, a new EMC Centera layered soft-
22 EMC.now | Q2 2010
ware offering is taking significant steps toward
using virtualization to meet these types of longterm, long-distance archiving demands.
Unveiled in December 2009, the offering,
called Centera Virtual Archive, enables customers
to federate, or meld together, a collection of physical Centera systems, then manage them as one.
Centera Virtual Archive 1.0 layers on top of
Centera CentraStar firmware. It clusters together
the multiple physical systems into the single tamper-proof, campus-wide Centera Virtual Archive.
This product lets users manage four Centera
clusters as one; it lets them use two-terabyte
drives in their nodes, and it lets them deploy the
hardware in a manner that achieves maximum
space and power efficiency.
The first-generation software is designed to
deploy a virtual archive across a campus of data
centers operating on one local area network
(LAN). It is expected that upcoming versions will
enable customers to create virtual archives across
wide area networks (WANs) spanning thousands
of miles.
That will be a truly significant IT breakthrough; however, Centera Product Marketing
Manager Steve Spataro says Centera Virtual Archive 1.0 is already groundbreaking. “People are
talking about virtual storage. For data archives,
Centera Virtual Archive is delivering.”
Centera CTO Mark O’Connell, the technology’s chief architect, believes these virtual archives
will help customers meet the size, scope, and
scale of where archiving is going. “Centera Virtual
Archive aligns with the trend we’re seeing: more
and more content being digitized—government
documents, medical and financial records—your
life since you were born,” he says.
Changing needs
Centera content addressed storage (CAS), more
commonly referred to as object-based storage,
provides “digital fingerprinting” that ensures an
original stored record hasn’t been altered. When
EMC Centera, the world’s first CAS system,
surged onto the scene in 2002, customers chose it
over tape or optical storage because they wanted
faster information access, more reliability, and a
better total cost of ownership from their archives
of unchanging or infrequently changing information (such as their e-mails, mortgage records,
legal documents, or medical records).
Until now, though, if a hospital, bank, court
district, or police department was archiving data
to several physical Centera units, they couldn’t
link those archives to each other.
Furthermore, if customers wanted to install
additional access nodes or storage nodes within
their existing Centera units, they also had to
upgrade the boxes to the latest version of the
Centera CentraStar operating system. That requirement contradicted EMC’s goal of allowing
Centera customers to “set it and forget it.”
A Centera Virtual Archive solves those issues,
clustering the systems regardless of which CentraStar version is running. That makes capacity
upgrades easy. A virtual archive could conceivably handle “practically unlimited expansion,
including expansion over decades,” according to
Peter Thayer, Sr. Director of Product Marketing
in EMC’s Unified Storage organization. “Customers want to know that their data will be retrievable always.”
Steve adds, “The old technology would meld
with the new technology. Don’t be surprised if
someday you come across a vintage 2005 Centera,
a vintage 2010 Centera, and a vintage 2015 Centera all working as one archive.”
Up next: Erasing geographic boundaries
Many organizations have multiple physical locations. For example, a healthcare consortium may
operate three specialty clinics spread across one
large medical office park, with each clinic archiving its own patients’ records.
Right now, Virtual Archive 1.0 allows doctors
working at any of the three clinics to tap simultaneously into the archives sitting in all three
clinics’ data centers, spread across the office park,
connected by the LAN.
Soon, we’ll see international organizations creating virtual archives that span the globe. In fact,
it’s possible to purchase this solution right now
via the submission of a Request for Price Quotation, known as an RPQ.
EMC Centera Engineering already has built
and deployed a virtual archive test-bed that connects Russia, India, and the United States. In
the Technology Pavilion at EMC World 2010,
EMC demonstrated to customers a similar longdistance configuration connecting an archive in
London with an archive in New York (see photo).
The long-distance capability will open up new
use cases for Centera, Peter says. For instance,
a Japanese bank may want to share certain archived data across all of its German branches
with its other European Union locations, yet
share different archival data with its Tokyo headquarters.
And, in China, healthcare facilities in metropolitan areas that are undergoing tremendous
growth will need their digital medical records to
be connected across thousands of miles.
Centera Virtual Archive has the potential to
serve so many kinds of customers—from 25-bed
local hospitals or community banks, to the world’s
biggest international financial giants.
Being able to link data archives across the
globe and use a single interface to manage them
all will be “nirvana” to archive applications that
require physical flexibility, says Bob Thibault, VP
of Centera Global Engineering.
Already, Centera Virtual Archive 1.0 is a big
help to customers on their journey to the private
cloud. A virtual archive purpose-built to protect
an organization’s unchanging data provides easy
management and flexibility right where a customer needs it. And the assurance of content authenticity—always Centera’s hallmark—remains as big
a selling point as ever. This virtualization technology extends EMC’s already solid leadership in
the object-based storage segment and enhances
Centera’s value to customers. s
A new EMC
Centera
offering
is taking
significant
steps to
meet the
demands
of longterm, longdistance
archiving.
Q2 2010 | EMC.now 23
corporate
sustainability
At EMC Apex, an award makes Earth Day even more meaningful
Thanks to a team effort, EMC Apex now holds the highest level possible in North Carolina’s DENR Environmental Stewardship Initiative.
There could hardly be a better
observer of the culture of EMC North
Carolina than Quality Manager Tim
Fasolt, who’s worked there since 1979.
And, according to Tim, “We’ve always had a tradition of environmental
awareness around here.”
Recently, the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources (NCDENR) formally
acknowledged that dedication. The
agency named the EMC Apex manufacturing facility a 2009 Environmental Steward.
ALWAYS-GREENER BANGALORE
Nearly 9,000 miles from North Carolina,
the sustainability superstars at the India
Center of Excellence in Bangalore keep
finding more and more ways to reduce
and recycle.
Employees wrote a custom car-pooling
application to help commuters find
coworkers with similar interests who live
nearby. Within days, more than 100 people
registered.
In March, staffers refurbished 20 laptops
and donated them to Youth for Seva, a
Bangalore-based nonprofit dedicated to
inspiring young people to volunteer.
The whole COE participated in Earth Hour
2010: After ensuring operations wouldn’t
be affected, they doused lights in all
areas for two evening hours.
24 EMC.now | Q2 2010
Environmentally focused
employees of EMC North
Carolina had extra reason
to celebrate this year
Environmental Stewards are organizations that demonstrate leadership
through a commitment to exemplary
environmental performance beyond
what is required by regulation. Says
Tim, “It’s great to get this recognition
for the hard work everyone has done.”
What the employees improved
EMCers at Apex love a challenge. They
responded immediately when the site’s
senior leaders decided to seek a Stewardship designation.
Bob Hawkins, VP of North Carolina
Operations, appointed Tim “green
czar,” asking him to work with the
Facilities team and other groups to
examine what Apex people were doing.
Together, they uncovered opportunities for improvements.
Tim says, “A nice thing about the
NCDENR Environmental Stewardship
Initiative is that the program assesses
measurable progress. We’d always
been committed to reducing waste and
didn’t have a lot to clean up, but we
could improve some areas,” such as:
• REDUCING ELECTRICITY USE. Reduction
achieved: 30% from 2006 to 2010.
• REDUCING THE SITE’S CARBON FOOTPRINT by
decreasing business travel/commuting
and promoting videoconferencing and
flexible work schedules. Fuel-use reduction achieved: 84% from 2007 to 2009.
• REDUCING WATER USE. Reduction
achieved: 13% from 2006 to 2008.
(Slightly more water was needed in
2H09 to irrigate 2.6 acres of newly recovered green space.)
• INCREASING RECYCLING rather than
sending material to landfills. Recycling
increase achieved: 345% from 2006 to
2010.
• REDUCING PAPER USE. Reduction
achieved: 43% from 2008 to 2009.
Bob Hawkins says, “We appreciate
how important environmental sustainability is, and we intend to keep
reducing our impact, both within our
community and throughout our supply
chain.”
More to celebrate
In June, EMC Apex should pass the
final audit certifying its compliance
with Occupational Health and Safety
Assessment Series (OHSAS) 18001—the
internationally recognized specification for occupational health and safety
management systems.
Bryan Murray, EMC Sr. Health &
Safety Engineer for the Americas, says,
“At that point, all our big manufacturing facilities—Franklin, Cork, and
Apex—will be certified. We’re showing
our customers and our communities
how much we care about following
health and safety standards.” Bryan and
his team have analyzed 160 processes
to identify possible sources of injury
before anything happens. He says, “It’s
the best way to ensure our people stay
safe.” s