EMC_SurvivalKit_A5_04_Digitaal

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SURVIVAL KIT
FOR THE CEO IN
THE DIGITAL WORLD

“When the winds of change blow,
some people build walls and other
build windmills.”
Chinese proverb
Editor: Jacques Boschung | Executive Editor: Philippe Gosseye | Research: Angelique Vander Kroft, José Delameilleure,
Laurence Van Elegem | Lay-out: Tina Smedts, De Poedelfabriek | Production: Delaware Digital, digital.delawareconsulting.com

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INTRODUCTION
Can the pace of change accelerate even
further in the years to come? Will the
technology industry still come up with new
paradigms and techniques to make IT more
flexible, more agile, more cost-effective? And
how will the IT decision-maker be able to
separate the hype from true innovation as
new terminology and acronyms appear?
These are some of the questions that come
to mind when I leaf through this collection
of blogs that I wrote over the last eighteen
months. We all know the answer to the
questions: the pace of change WILL accel-
erate and new technologies WILL spring up,
sometimes brought to us by startups that
are out to disrupt markets, sometimes de-
veloped in the labs of established technolo-
gy vendors, like EMC.
In writing these blogs in a stretch of one
and a half years, it’s fascinating to see how
our perception of technology trends has
changed, and how stuff that was a novelty
two years ago has turned into standard
dialogue in any business/IT conversation.
Concepts such as data lakes, hyper-con-
verged infrastructure and security analytics,
have become part of our everyday vocabu-
lary, virtually overnight.
Eighteen months of blogging equals a full
cycle in Moore’s law, that dictates a dou-
bling of data density in chip design every 18
months. No wonder the constant evolution
then, that you can read in these texts. Are
you ready for the next cycle? Then follow
me on my LinkedIn account, where I will
continue to share my view on the evolutions
that make our industry the most interesting
and challenging market to be in.
Have a good read.
Jacques Boschung
EMC Vice-President, Europe West
PS: to read more of my stories, follow me
on Twitter (@JacquesBoschung) or LinkedIn

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As leader of the Europe West region for EMC
I look after a diverse range of countries.
Yet within that diversity there are remarka-
ble commonalities as technologies disrupt
industries in equal measure, and consumer
trends force change from providers. One
such sector is that of the internet and IT ser-
vice provider, which is undergoing particular
pressures at the moment.
The market for corporate IT service
providers has been challenging and fast
evolving. The dynamics of Moore’s law and
its storage equivalent (which actually shows
a faster drop in cost per storage unit over
time, as disk densities increase, than CPU/
semiconductors see in Moore’s law) has set
an expectation that hosted and cloud IT ser-
vices will continue to get cheaper whilst SPs
are forced to continue investing, refreshing
and innovating their systems to deliver the
latest customer offerings.
The market for corporate IT service providers
has been challenging and fast evolving.
The rise of “shadow IT” in enterprises,
thanks to the innovations in the consumer
sphere from companies like DropBox, Apple,
Amazon and Google, is creating a strong de-
mand for enterprise-grade cloud services as
businesses seek to ensure good corporate
governance and compliance with data reg-
ulation laws – not least local data location
and security requirements that often restrict
the storage of sensitive customer data in US
data centres, for example. The shape and
nature of these services is being forced to
change at a far faster rate than is typical-
ly allowed for by SP infrastructure refresh
schedules or service development cycles.
The challenge for service providers in
Europe is to find a way to enable the agility
this sort of service delivery model requires
in a scalable way; SPs can’t be forced to
recapitalise their infrastructure too frequent-
ly, and therefore need to find an operating
model that delivers agility without incurring
painful costs. I believe there are five major
routes to this, and we’ve seen Western Euro-
pean SPs start to pioneer these already, in a
way that delivers an excellent total customer
experience without spiraling capital invest-
ment requirements.
I’ll expand on these in my next post, but
interested in your thoughts on the issue as
you see it in your market, or across your
region.
The new Service Provider business model part one

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In my last post I made the observation that
we were seeing accelerated change in the
service provider market as consumer trends
were forcing new service delivery models.
These in turn have catalyzed a new wave of
investment and innovation for SPs. In this
post,
I lay out five key trends that are enabling
and empowering European SPs to follow this
path without forcing unsustainable capital
commitments.
1. New finance models for infra-
structure investment:
First, SPs need to realise the options open
to them for capitalising their infrastructure
have changed dramatically. Despite the rela-
tive scarcity of traditional corporate finance
options from financial institutions, a few
vendors have innovative finance models that
allow a total transformation in the way that
IT investment is undertaken. For example,
pay-as-you-go or profit-share models, in
which major suppliers can become partners
Thanks to cheap consumer services, the
expectations of corporate IT have changed.
in the delivery of new IT services, taking
a share of both the profits – and the risk
involved – in bringing a new service to
market. This is the case in the Netherlands,
where our financial engagements with SPs
are often structured around the agreements
the service providers have with their cus-
tomers themselves.
2. Evolved product portfolios
for the cloud age:
Many SPs are still acclimatising to the new
customer expectations around commodity IT
service delivery. The reality is that, thanks
to cheap consumer services, the expecta-
tions have changed and in the main – rather
than trying to compete with the vast scale
of public cloud providers – enterprise SPs
The new Service Provider business model part two
must find a balance that allows them to
deliver high-value services that meet these
customer needs with significant value added
options; for example 99.999% availability,
stronger governance and corporate controls,
permanent deletion of data from public
cloud services, better e-discovery capabili-
ties, better back-up, recovery and continuity
options and beyond. In the Netherlands,
we’ve worked with Open Line to collabora-
tively develop and its ‘Smart Cloud Back-Up’
service in precisely this way, for example,
powered by our Avamar technology to in-
crease the efficiency and reduce the capital
cost of the back-up service to Open Line. >>

3. Meeting local data regulation
and compliance needs:
Related to route (2) above, there is growing
concern in light of the Patriot Act (amongst
other pieces of privacy legislation and Gov-
ernment practice around the world) that is
being reflected in different local law in every
country in Western Europe, as well as in
end-customer demands. Data often needs to
be held locally and many of the disruptive
entrants into the service provider market are
global and do not – or cannot – meet these
needs. There’s therefore an opportunity for
the innovative SP to define itself by its local
data centre, market knowledge, language
support and legal compliance to meet a new
class of customer needs. Look at Swiss-
com, for example, who are advertising new
services under the ‘Your data in Switzerland’
banner built on private cloud infrastructure
powered by EMC Atmos.
4. New infrastructure models to
escape the 80/20 rule:
The 80/20 rule references the fact that 80%
of IT cost is locked in maintenance, leaving
only 20% for innovation. In many ways this
is the defining requirement for the new SP
landscape. Doing IT in the way many of us
have done it since the decline of main-
frames began – what IDC calls the ‘second
platform’ of computing – doesn’t scale to the
agility required in a landscape where the Ap-
ple App Store and the iPhone have set cus-
tomer expectations. Rather, we need ‘third
platform ready’ infrastructure – converged
or proven IT infrastructure that free SPs
from the vicious cycle of maintenance and
management. If we can do this, additional
capacity will be freed to support innovation
and service development. Consider Reason-
Net in the Netherlands; using converged
infrastructure from VCE (a company founded
by EMC, Cisco & VMware), it was able to cut
deployment times for IT resources from days
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to minutes and dramatically lower per-unit
infrastructure costs for virtual machine &
other resource delivery. This will give it a
competitive edge in the 10 markets in which
it operates.
5. Enhanced governance and
security frameworks to cope with
the new attack surfaces:
Finally, these new services will change the
points of vulnerability for businesses. If you
have end-users that are syncing data to the
cloud in real time from end-user devices,
or using mobile applications to access
sensitive corporate data in a private cloud,
the mechanisms malicious users or cyber-at-
tackers have to gain access to sensitive
materials will change continually.
The expectations customers have for their
SPs are rising: to deliver a strong total
customer experience in this phenomenally
competitive context requires new levels
of agility and a new model for innovation.
It’s great that many European SPs are
already embracing these challenges, but the
game is changing on a monthly basis and
building the platform for innovation, agility
and change is as important as the specific
service innovations themselves. I believe
that this is the context of the new compet-
itive landscape for Service Providers in the
years ahead. I would be interested to hear
your experience in facing off against this
problem, and your thoughts on the above –
please let me know in the comments.
80% of IT cost is locked in
maintenance, leaving only
20% for innovation.

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Tough economic headwinds drive IT transformation
To call the market context in much of Europe
challenging would be an understatement.
As economies have walked a tightrope for
survival, businesses have struggled to find
growth and be profitable. Many businesses
have had to make difficult decisions around
headcount, and have been forced to be
extremely conservative when it comes to
hiring. Whilst a few of the major European
markets have started to see some recovery,
recruitment constraints, union intervention
and employment law in many of the individ-
ual markets in the region have further made
the job of building a team complex, to say
the least.
None of this broader context, however, has
had any significant impact on consumer de-
mand for digital services. Citizens still want
to bank online; share video and photos via
social and mobile networks, engage with
government, digital services and beyond.
Every forecast shows mobile and network
traffic growing exponentially, and our own
Digital Universe study shows digital data
growing 30-fold over the next few years.
The demand for a positive total customer
experience in a social media context further
amplifies the need for the business to be
agile and responsive. After all, once you
have bought an app from a smartphone ap-
plication store, your expectation for all other
services changes. This context – of cloud,
mobile, data-rich applications – is what
IDC calls the ‘third platform’ of computing,
and is something most businesses are still
unprepared for.
This puts pressure on the companies,
service providers and governments looking
to deliver services to their customers or
citizens. How can they deliver a world-class
experience when they cannot necessarily
build the team they need for it, nor do they
have the right infrastructure in place to
support it?
We’ve noticed three major trends in Euro-
pean enterprise IT that reflect the corporate
and government response to this; the move
to proven infrastructure, the move to con-
verged infrastructure and the acceleration of
service contracts.
I want to spend a little more time exploring
the first trend of `moving to proven infra-
structure’ in more detail:
Trend one - the `move to proven
infrastructure’
Proven infrastructure refers to pre-designed,
best-in-breed IT systems that maximize auto-
mation for those not yet ready to move to a
fully converged IT environment either due to
its cost or for other specific reasons. Whilst
not quite as simple to manage as fully
converged infrastructure, these pre-packaged
systems have all been tested as sold, unlike
bespoke systems built to specific require-
ments, and therefore come without many >>

To call the market context in
much of Europe challenging
would be an understatement.
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of the maintenance headaches traditional
systems give IT leaders. A major problem IT
leaders face is in bedding down the inter-
actions between fundamental infrastructure
building blocks – such as servers, storage
and network resources – which can take
significant efforts when the equipment and
software is not pre-designed and pre-tested
to work together.
Proven infrastructure templates have been
extremely popular in southern Europe. Italy,
in particular, has seen incredibly rapid adop-
tion here. The imperative stems from busi-
nesses under pressure to deliver operational
efficiencies and increased agility as they
face up to headcount and budget pressures.
Trend two - the `move to con-
verged infrastructure’
For many, managing an IT estate is an
ongoing firefighting job – estimates put the
level of IT investment spent on maintaining
IT infrastructure at around 80% of total
budgets. This `80/20’ rule means that there’s
very little resource left for service innova-
tion. The `move to convergence’ is squarely
focused on reducing the work involved in
maintaining your systems infrastructure, and
accelerating IT’s response time to demands
from the business.
Those that can find the funds, financing,
business case or business partner are
looking to a new wave of convergence to
help them increase the level of automation
they have in their IT. This convergence is
characterized by the consolidation of data
storage, network and compute resource into
a single platform with a single management
interface. This means that where, historically,
separate teams were needed to manage and
allocate data storage, network and compute
resources respectively to deliver a new en-
terprise application or consumer service, for
example – a single team can now take on
this task, in a fraction of the time.
Several of our customers, for example, have
implemented converged Vblock systems
from VCE – the company established by
Cisco and EMC, with funding from Intel and
VMware – driving upwards of 30% reduc-
tions in annual operating costs, optimizing
IT staff usage avoiding siloed team struc-
tures, thus providing value to the business
by being more agile & innovative and antic-
ipating and preparing to manage the growth
more efficiently. Crucially, they typically are
able to launch a new Vblock-based platform
within 45 days.
Of course, migration to converged infrastruc-
ture can be capital intensive, even with the
creative financing options available to IT
leaders today. We’ve noticed this trend is
more advanced in some of the financially
healthier, say wealthier European economies,
including the Nordics and Switzerland.

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Trend three - the `acceleration
of service contracts’
Restrictions on hiring sometimes cannot be
resolved purely through automation and
efficiency. Consequently, we’ve also seen
a rise in the number of managed service
and outsourced contracts for building and
managing IT infrastructure. This model of IT
service delivery can be extremely effective in
both managing long-term risk and delivering
against short-term objectives. Businesses
looking to pursue this should always try
to find partners that are able to provide
flexible cloud services that can be integrated
with their own Private Cloud or else they
may find themselves thinking of IT as a ‘fire
and forget’ resource rather than a strategic
tool for the continued growth and innova-
tion of their business.
IT responding to shifting
markets
In the world of tailoring, mass production
is the least ‘good’ option, made-to-measure
is better, and bespoke is the best. In the
‘third platform’ of enterprise computing,
the reverse is true. Converged infrastruc-
ture – homogeneous, standardized, simple
and scalable – delivers the automation and
agility businesses need to be dynamic and
drive growth in a challenging context.
Made-to-measure is a close second – cutting
out many of the administrative overheads of
IT and tackling the 80/20 rule.
Fully bespoke IT is increasingly a relic of the
past – an unaffordable luxury as businesses
struggle for growth and innovation with
smaller teams and tighter budgets, oper-
ating in a tougher economic reality. Many
European countries are keeping pace with
these trends as the markets continue to
shift.
Converged
infrastructure
delivers the auto-
mation and agility
businesses need to
be dynamic and
drive growth in a
challenging context.

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Not all converged infrastructures are created equal
Five reasons why converged infrastructure is booming
When Gartner recently published its first-ev-
er report and magic quadrant on ‘Integrat-
ed Systems’, the analyst firm described
this market as dynamic and experiencing
unusually high growth. Gartner estimates
the market will grow by 50 per cent, to
reach 6 billion dollars globally. Although
fairly new in the market, integrated systems
already account for 6 per cent of datacenter
spending. The analyst firm also described
the market for ‘integrated systems’ as
a multifaceted market, where different
categories of products compete: integrated
stack systems, integrated infrastructure sys-
tems, integrated reference architectures and
fabric-based computing. All of these cate-
gories are mostly referred to as ‘converged
infrastructure’, or even hyper-converged
infrastructure.
Why is this market for converged infrastruc-
ture growing this fast? Well, there’s actually
a few good reasons why. Let’s dive deeper
into some of them. Some are technical, but
some are not technical at all.
Shortage of skilled personnel
Anyone working in IT has been confronted,
at some time or other, with the fact that it
is hard to find specialists for all the differ-
ent technologies and functionalities that
are needed in a datacenter. The number
of technologies to support is growing at
breakneck speed, but IT budgets do not
necessarily take the same flight. Converged
infrastructure takes away a lot of the hassle
from its owner: converged infrastructure
comes pre-tested and pre-installed and the
vendor takes care of the tinkering to get
everything working together seamlessly. A
fully integrated, vendor-delivered, con-
verged infrastructure (CI) system greatly re-
duces the administrative burden on IT man-
agers by fundamentally remodeling how
systems are designed, deployed, optimized,
maintained, supported and upgraded. The
Converged infrastructure takes away
a lot of the hassle from its owner

virtualization layer on top of the hardware
elements hides a great deal of the com-
plexity to the operator. What’s more, these
systems come equipped with intelligence.
Very much like some car systems now alert
the driver to the fact that a tire is losing
its pressure, CI will alert the operator when
trouble is ahead. Or better still: the system
will invite the vendor to come solve the
problem. CI offers the CIO peace of mind.
Single point of contact
Although CI offers a combination of best-
of-breed storage, networking and compute
from multiple vendors (EMC and Cisco for
instance, adding VMware for virtualization),
there is one single point of contact in the
event of problems. So no multiple vendors
that can pass on the hot potato to one
another. Vendor management is a time-
You don’t have to
reinvent the wheel,
it comes attached
to a car instead.
consuming activity for CIOs, at the best of
times. But, by opting for CI, data center
managers stand to gain a considerable
amount of management time.
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Big up to the customer:
how banks can survive the era of disruption
These are truly scary times for the financial
industry. People used to trust banks. They
were serious. They were dependable. They
were too big to fail. And then – Bang! –
2007 happened. We had a major Global
Financial Crisis on our hands. People didn’t
like banks so much anymore. Gone was
their stable image. Customers behaved as
if they had found out that Santa Claus did
not exist. Governments, too, were pretty
resentful. They came up with strict rules
and regulations to smother the perilous
risk-taking instincts of banks.
On top of that, personal approach geniuses
like Amazon, Uber, Burberry, Zappos and
Disney have completely spoilt the bank’s
customers’ expectations. They now know
what digital is able to do. They demand
fast responses, simple solutions, access
any time, any place and to be recognized
across all channels. Which is quite difficult
for large financial institutions which tend
to struggle with slow legacy systems. Even
worse, those smart organisations that have
truly understood the power of digital, are
just picking up speed and bypassing banks
in the race to the customer. New innova-
tive, digitally driven start-ups are surfacing
every day while originally non-competing
companies are no longer sticking to their
own markets. Google launched a mobile
wallet. Vodafone started to offer payment
systems and lending activities. And then
there’s the ‘usual suspect’ challengers like
PayPal and the Bitcoin phenomenon. Or
the sharing economy which, for instance,
empowers the banks’ former customers to
‘crowdfund’ projects on peer-to-peer plat-
forms. Frightening times indeed, if
you are a bank.
Data as the new gold
The great news is that banks are sitting
on a goldmine of data, though. Big Data.
Which comes fast, in big numbers, and in
all flavours and colours. Financial institu-
tions have a lot of internal data, of course:
from transactions, loan portfolios, bank
visits, voice call logs, e-mails, website click-
streams, web chats, credit card histories,
risk assessments, etc. You name it, they
probably have it. Most of these traditional
relational data – which are neatly struc-
tured in databases — are already filtered
into tidy reports that offer some interesting
intelligence. Yet, the other, unstructured,
information – like call centre recordings —
is often considered as ‘too challenging’ to
analyse and thus often remains untapped.
Yet it is exactly there that the best goodies
lie, when it comes to unfolding actionable
customer insights. Even better when this
valuable information is mixed and matched >>

So much information. So much
potential for informed insights,
if analysed in real time.
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their markets. Not if these measures are
the sole target of the bank’s digital efforts.
Banks that keep looking inwards, instead
of onwards and forwards, will end up in a
lot of trouble.
When the customer
means business
It might almost seem controversial – though
it really is not — coming from someone
working in the technology industry, but I
am a strong believer in human relation-
ships. Everything should always evolve
around what’s best for the customer. And I
do not mean that in a marketing-y – “let’s
say that because it sounds good and the
others say it” - kind of way. I mean that in
a ‘dry’ data scientific and business strategy
manner. Business models of banks are be-
ing disrupted, as we speak. By competitors
coming from the most unexpected sides
as I already explained. They are no longer
players just like them, with legacy systems
to upkeep, rules to follow and margins to
think of. Today, they are ruthless young
wolves with one great idea, the digital
savviness to bring it cheap and fast to the
consumer and nothing to lose. Or they are
players coming from different markets, with
a fresh, new view on what money really is,
and how it should be handled.
The only way that banks will survive this
digitally driven behavioural revolution, is if
they use their biggest asset – information –
in order to understand how they can serve
and please their customers in the best way
possible. Service is the new black. As long
as it is personal and fast. It is how banks
will keep clients from fleeing. It is certainly
not a coincidence that Capgemini research
uncovered that banks applying analytics
to customer data have a four-percentage
point lead in market share over banks that
do not.
Every action banks undertake should be
measured to one supreme metric: “Is this
what is best for the customer?”. For one
reason only. If it’s not, he won’t stay. The
with unstructured information from external
sources. Like the information coming from
social media, the smart grid, demographic
statistics or even weather reports. Just im-
agine what kind of customized services an
insurance bank could offer their customers
if they leverage insights from mobile geolo-
cation data?
So much information. So much potential
for informed insights, if analysed in real
time. So many wise decisions to be made,
driven by all this data. So many customers
to please with customization. And yet so
many banks that mostly focus on internal
processes, on operational efficiency and
on cleaning up legacy systems. Or on
responding to legal or regulatory require-
ments as well as cost reduction. Do not
get me wrong: these are all very valid and
essential measurements. Yet they are not
how banks will survive the disruption of

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way to endure in this industry is to choose
for customer intimacy. Banks should not let
themselves be blindsided by regulations,
rules and optimization of processes and
cost. And if you think about it: even those
can be viewed as a way to protect and
serve the consumer as best as possible.
Because what are government regulations
other than a way to protect savers’ inter-
ests? Or what are optimized processes oth-
er than a way to free up time for a better
and faster service.
The other results from this kind of da-
ta-driven customer centricity — lowering of
operating and infrastructure costs, greater
efficiency, increased revenue, a boost in
cross-selling, etc. — are necessary and
even essential. But they ought never to
determine the strategy on their own. Be-
cause that is not how banks will be able to
keep reinventing themselves for this era of
digital disruption.
Winning trust back
by fighting fraud
Take fighting fraud. It is crucial that banks
do not lose any money to cybercrime. Ob-
viously. But it is even more important that
customers feel that their money, invest-
ments and privacy are safe in the hands of
their bank. Big Data solutions are the best
possible answer to the complex labyrinth
that cyber-attacks are. They enable banks
to monitor every event in real-time. They
provide the context to understand them in
detail, and be immediately alerted in case
of anomalies. The more data is collected,
the more secure the bank’s finances are.
Even the smallest breaches, that would
have gone unnoticed before, can now be
revealed. Big Data can, for instance, offer
behavioural authentication. It allows the
bank to know its customer so thoroughly
that it can be alarmed about the smallest
change in their habits. Like, for instance,
the country from which the user accesses
his account, or if he uses a tablet or smart-
phone to log in while he has never done so
before and even the speed with which he
usually types in his name and password.
Big Data also allows banks to ‘read’ con-
tent in chat forums and email chains with
unusual behaviour that could point to new
fraud methods. It allows you to recognize
known criminals and organizations, even if
they have masked their identities in very
sophisticated manner. In short, it keeps
customers feeling safe.
Valuing the customer
But, like I said, Big Data is at its most
valuable when it stimulates a 360 degree,
customer-focused approach. Which is not a
luxury, when one realizes that only 37% of
customers believe that banks understand
their needs and preferences adequately.
Big Data can allow banks to set the prices
of their insurance premiums based on the
risk profile of the policyholder: trustworthy >>

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er end of the line knows why the customer
went to the bank that same morning and
then did some online transactions and how
he can help.
I am not going to sugar-coat it. Many banks
will face big challenges before they can tap
into the power of Big Data. Too many data
silos, spread over too many departments
(57% of respondents in a Capgemini study)
and the shortage of people that are skilled
in data analytics (40% of respondents in
a Capgemini study) being some of the
most important ones. But more and more
banks seem to understand that Big Data is
no longer “just an option”. 60% of North
American financial institutions, for instance,
already believe that big data analytics
offers a significant competitive advantage.
90% of those think that successful big data
initiatives will define the winners of the
future. So, the real question is: will you be
one of those winners?
payers will then be happily compensated
for their dependability and the banks will
mostly attract profitable customers. It could
allow customers a smarter self-service by
offering them far-reaching analysis of their
spending behaviour and how it impacts
their savings. Big Data intelligence could
come in the form of an e-mail to a loyal
customer whose daughter just turned 18,
congratulating him or her and, at the same
time, proposing a profitable car insurance
policy tailored to the limited mileage
that she is going to be doing (as she has
been accepted to a college that lies just a
15-minute walk from her parent’s house and
is a member of several green NGOs like
Greenpeace). It might fuel a retention offer
after being notified of a social media post
about a disappointing banking incident. Big
Data could also help offer a better mobile
experience. To show how important the
latter is: a Forrester report showed that
40% of US citizens will move on if a bank’s
website is not mobile-optimized. Or it could
simply be a nice and fast call centre experi-
ence. Just because the operator at the oth-
Many banks will
face big challenges
before they can tap
into the power of
Big Data.

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Why Total Customer Experience
should always be on your agenda
If, like me, you’re in the business of working
with complex technological solutions, you’ll
probably agree that it’s sometimes all too
easy to forget about the people who will
actually be using your product or services.
Selling the latest and greatest tool should
never be the ultimate goal. True value
comes from delighting customers, by provid-
ing them with exactly what they need, and
by offering the right service on top of that.
Your clients must be certain that they can
rely on you to get the job done, to make it
work. The more you delight them, the easier
it becomes to sign new deals. It is a rolling
wheel.
The long-term relationship
between customer and supplier.
Total Customer Experience (TCE) is about
how your target audience perceives you.
Your product, your service, your marketing,
everything about your company has an
impact. Customer experience doesn’t start
when your sales rep has her first conver-
sation with a prospect, and it doesn’t end
when the dotted line is signed. The way
clients feel about a brand, is what defines
the long-term relationship between buyer
and seller.
While it would be hard to find a company
that doesn’t consider customer experience
important, it is not at all easy to incorporate
TCE in every aspect of running a business.
All too often, people are tied up with inter-
nal processes or entirely focused on what
they are making or selling. In some cases,
the crippling effect of office politics or poor
internal communication can interfere with
putting the customer first.
The dangers of leaving the
customer out of the picture
Leaving the target audience out of the
picture has a devastating effect on your
whole company in the long run. If you don’t
relentlessly stay focused, the danger of op-
erating in a bubble is lurking behind every
corner. Working in a bubble, where you and
your colleagues from across all departments
imagine what life is like for your purchasers,
and build and sell products accordingly,
is deceptively comfortable. It’s only when
up-sell or cross-sell opportunities are below
expectations, that you might wonder wheth-
er your solution actually relates to a real
world problem. Or that perhaps your “sell it
and forget it” approach is not as profitable
in the long run. Or that pushing a solution
without having fully engaged with the client
to understand his underlying need doesn’t
pay off. That’s when the bubble bursts.
That’s when it’s too late. >>

21
As a vice-president I mainly deal with sales,
presales, services and support depart-
ments, but even in those customer-facing
parts of an organization, it’s quite challeng-
ing to achieve TCE. The best professionals
can occasionally get caught up in internal
day-to-day activities and issues, and risk
losing sight of the target audience. My
job then is to make them re-focus on the
person they are doing all the work for and
who, ultimately, is also bringing in the
money for their paycheck. TCE is a work in
progress and a team effort. It’s a pet peeve
of mine, and I consider advocating custom-
er centricity as one of my main goals as a
business leader.
Putting the customer first
is not always easy
Throughout my career I have seen at first
hand how hard it can be to achieve truly out-
standing TCE. Not only because it takes a lot
of time and effort, but also because it some-
times means going against the grain. Back in
2009, when I was still running EMC Swit-
zerland, I experienced a significant outage
with one of our largest clients. I personally
spent several days on site, in their com-
mand center. My technical added value was
obviously close to zero. But just being there,
energizing the numerous EMC specialists in-
volved and keeping an open communication
channel with the impacted executives, turned
out to be key in how the customer perceived
the issue. It was a complex case, involving
multiple vendors, but EMC demonstrated
by far the strongest engagement and in-situ
presence. The client still reminds me positive-
ly about what we collectively achieved. This
anecdote is a showcase for the EMC culture
of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ and ‘whatev-
er it takes for the TCE’!
TCE brings you more
than loyalty
When a whole team is completely focused
on doing their best for the end-user, you’ll
find the clients are not the only ones who
benefit. If it’s all about TCE, there is a com-
mon goal and aspiration within the team.
As a business leader, it is not always easy
to convince people to be entirely custom-
er-centric. I have over 2,000 people in the
Europe West organization, and at the end
of the quarter I always thank them for their
efforts and I always refer to TCE. It’s why we
do what we do. And it unites us as a team.
What TCE means at EMC
At EMC, we take great pride in TCE.
We have a company-wide commitment to
consistently exceed expectations. Based on
our engage – enable – evolve scenario, we
actively listen to what prospects, clients
and partners need. We help them by pro-
viding the right solutions to their problems,
and we’re there when changing conditions
require new and innovative tools. Together,
we’re building the future of data storage,
and we’re in it for the long haul.

22
Why Server SAN is disrupting the storage market
Server SAN is a hot topic these days. This
new way of optimizing storage is a soft-
ware-only server-based storage area network
(SAN) that converges storage and compute
resources to form a single-layer, enter-
prise-grade storage product. An important
proof point about its rise in the market was
doubtlessly a Wikibon article stating that it
has the potential to disrupt the entire data
storage industry. The research piece predicts
that Server SAN “will become the predom-
inant storage approach by the end of the
decade”. And that its “compound annual
growth rate will amount to 27.5% ($20 bil-
lion) and with a long-term potential to grow
to over $50 billion”. Bold words indeed.
There is no way around it, though: soft-
ware-defined datacentres are indeed the
future of storage. It is merely a matter of
evolution. Datacentres used to be an amal-
gamation of hardware. But today software
has become their main element. And it
controls anything that needs to happen in
a datacentre. As VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger
recently said “software is eating the data-
centre”. And not just the servers, either. It
has an appetite for storage and networking
as well.
But why Server SAN? What was so `wrong’
with the Networked Storage SAN/NAS mod-
el? Well, nothing basically. It was and still is
a great alternative to the basic flaws of the
direct attached (DAS) model. The problem
is that IT departments around the world
sometimes used it as a point solution only,
not always benefitting from the full, com-
pany-wide, potential of the solution. They
basically isolated their storage infrastructure
in closed off silos. While, ironically, that was
just what SAN was invented for: to solve the
problem of unconnected storage silos. Serv-
er SAN is the perfect alternative, though. It
actually brings us back to the future. Back
to the original intent of SAN, before its
usage started going all pear-shaped. Server
SAN is a brilliant virtual layer on top of the
hardware architecture which ensures that the
infrastructure is connected, converged and
accessible at all times.
For those who are still not convinced about
the disruptive power of Server SAN – yes,
I am in a generous mood today – here are
What was so `wrong’ with the
Networked Storage SAN/NAS model?
Nothing, basically.

23
most of its advantages in a row. It converg-
es storage and compute into a single-layer
architecture. This means more capacity, very
low latency and better I/O performance,
as well as simplicity in design, build and
management. Certainly the latter will ease
the minds of CIOs and database managers
who will no longer need hyper-specialised
consultants to help them in the matter.
Server SAN does bring data much closer to
the server, so access and processing there-
fore happens a lot faster than with other
storage approaches. By allowing the client
to add commodity servers, storage and
network components, it also enables him to
scale out easily and without any downtime.
Or to decrease capacity when the need
arises. Talk about flexibility! Also it makes
storage software and services independent
of hardware: organisations can avoid single
vendor lock-in and simply choose the best
and most cost-effective solution.
Last but not least, Server SAN offers many
benefits in the realm of application design,
application operation, application per-
formance and infrastructure cost. That is
because it affords greater flexibility in how
a unit of storage capacity is mapped to the
applications. Above all, it removes numerous
architectural constraints for the developer!
Applications really leveraging Mobile and
Big Data capabilities are within reach with
SS technologies. So, there is no other way
around it. In a feature film about the future
of storage (I don’t know about you, but I
would definitely go see that movie), the
lead role will be software-defined. And that
is exactly why we introduced SCaleIO.

24
Six Hard Truths about Total Customer Experience
Anyone following EMC on social media
today cannot fail to notice: today is a
special day, a day on which we all have
‘Total Customer Experience’ even more top
of mind (if that’s possible) than other days.
All of EMC participate in the international
Customer Experience Day, and EMC Europe
West – true to our TCE nature – endeavors
to try even harder than all the rest.
Customer Experience Day is an internation-
ally recognized day founded by the Cus-
tomer Experience Professional Association
(CPXA), recognized by U.S. Congress and
celebrated by companies around the globe.
Many of our clients take part in the event
and so do we.
I see Total Customer Experience (TCE) as
the heartbeat of our organization. After
working with an international team over the
last years, here’s a short list of elemental
things we found out about TCE.
TCE is an attitude
TCE is not a department of a company. It’s
not a program you run among many others
in the company. It’s not even a mission.
No, it’s an attitude! I am very glad that TCE
is embedded in the DNA or our organi-
zation, and we even hire people on that
basis. When as managing director of EMC
Switzerland I was interviewing candidates,
I always asked if they were willing to drop
everything else and spend several evenings
at a customer’s site on an issue, just to
demonstrate management presence. If they
couldn’t cope with that, they needn’t bother
coming to EMC. Whatever it takes to please
the customer, that is our motto.
TCE brings long-term and
short-term gains
Some people find it hard to believe that
a corporation that is as quarter-driven as
EMC, can also be as focused on a long-
term commitment like TCE. Well, let me give
you an example of how being more ser-
vice-minded than your competitors can ac-
tually lead to more business. In one of the
country of my region, a customer I cannot
name for reasons of confidentiality adhered
to a dual-vendor strategy when it comes to
data storage. EMC Symmetrix VMAX, on the
one hand, one of our competitors – which I
will not name – on the other.
Happy employees create happy customers,
happy customers create happy employees.

25
When our competitor’s system experienced
a massive outage related to the SAN fabric,
our service people were at the customer
site fast, solving the problem, …. before the
competitor’s technical staff arrived. By the
time they got there, our customer service
specialist had fixed the competitor’s gear.
Shortly after that, we received a big order
from that client, who had actually decided
to drop his dual-vendor strategy for mis-
sion critical apps altogether and adopt an
EMC-only policy. So this was a big contract
that was effectively won by a service engi-
neer, rather than a sales rep.
Did you really doubt caring about the cus-
tomer does not bring you business both in
the long run and in the short term?
Happy employees
create happy customers…
…and happy customers create happy em-
ployees. For people working in an organ-
ization, it’s more rewarding to work with
clients they can help be successful than to
work with users that are always complain-
ing. TCE is a two-way street: if you work for
a company where everyone is depressed,
where everyone is becoming a bureaucrat
and is only trying to keep his own job,
you cannot focus on the customer as you
should.
TCE is on- and offline
TCE is sometimes associated with having a
lot of face time with the executive buying
your product. But it goes a lot further than
that. We talk a lot about the ‘digital cus-
tomer experience’ and I am convinced that
on- and offline can be very complementary
here. Of course you need to have one-to-
one conversations with decision-makers,
but you can also rely on digital tools
such as chat sessions to provide answers
instantly to anyone requesting support or
information. And the nice thing about this
complementarity is that it also helps draw
the entire organization (and the different
generations working in your company) into
the philosophy of TCE. Younger generations
who prefer online contact, can focus on
these digital conversations. Generations
who are more into the human touch, get
more quality time with the customer and
can steer their conversations in the direc-
tion of the value we are adding.
TCE is for any type of company
Superior TCE can be achieved not only
by start-ups, but also by large corpora-
tions. It may be easier to get the attitude
engrained in a start-up company, where
there are fewer clients to focus on. But, on
the other hand, large organizations have >>

26
more means to serve their clientele, and
have more breadth in the organization to
help out. It is true that some organizations
are really interested in the innovations
start-ups have, their value proposition
and their start-up mentality, but many are
waiting to buy from the start-up until EMC
has bought these companies. Because they
know we will add more quality assurance
to the products and have more staff to take
care of both the product and the services
around it.
Everyone is a Chief TCE Officer
TCE is a value chain, and every department
needs to engage in it. You always have
different departments working with the
customer: Sales and Presales, Service De-
livery and Customer Service. The junctions
between these teams need to be well-oiled,
and every department needs to be ready
to pick up a ball that another department
may have dropped. If something goes
wrong, don’t blame the other department
for messing up, but fix the issue. That’s
the only way TCE can work throughout an
organization.
Now you may wonder, what happens after
October 7th, the international ‘Customer
Experience Day’. Does everyone at EMC go
back to ‘business as usual’ until the next
TCE Day comes around? Well, we may just
do that. After all, TCE is embedded in our
daily routine anyway. TCE is not a one-day
commitment. October 7th is just one –
special – day out of 365 days in the year
where customers are central to anything we
do. Because, TCE is an attitude!

27
Everyone is
a Chief TCO
Officer

28
Analysing data is one thing, but ensuring
everyone is using the same vital information
is something else entirely, and that’s where
our enterprise-grade, online file sharing and
mobile collaboration tool Syncplicity comes
in. Ducati team members will be able to ac-
cess and share the information stored on Isi-
lon through Syncplicity. It enables data files
to be securely shared across a variety of
devices, including mobile, in a manner that
complies and is compatible with Ducati’s
existing IT infrastructure. Through Syncplicity,
relevant Ducati team members will be able
to access and share the information they
need, when they need it, thus helping to
create more efficient and effective operations
and communication within the team.
What Ducati is doing is, in essence, how
every company needs to operate when
working in a hypercompetitive environment.
Business leaders have to gather as much
racing season. Ducati will be using EMC
technology to gain a competitive edge in
the 2014 MotoGP and Superbike World
Championships. By using EMC’s Isilon and
Syncplicity solutions, better storage and
sharing of data will help Ducati make the
best use of its IT assets.
Ducati relies on the Isilon scale-out,
networked-attached, storage solution to
consolidate, manage and analyse its vital
performance data, including engine fluid
dynamics, test archiving and bike telemetry.
This powerful, efficient and simple storage
platform is central to Ducati’s data-led
approach to racing and will allow it to dis-
cover actionable insights around how it can
shave valuable milliseconds off its racers’
track times.
Speed! Like it or not, that’s what our soci-
ety is all about. Changes occur faster than
ever before and companies have to react to
changing customer needs and competitors’
strategic moves instantly. Sometimes I sit
back and wonder “can it go faster still?”.
It’s like watching a MotoGP or Superbike
World Championship. “It’s impossible that
they could go any faster,” you’d think. Well,
think again. Technology is there to make
Superbike racers go faster. And that very
same technology can help you outpace the
competition too.
Just recently, we concluded a major part-
nership with the Ducati Corse racing team
to support the company’s information
technology (IT) strategy for the 2014/2015
When milliseconds count…
Speed! Like it or not, that’s what our
society is all about.

29
data as possible, analyse it in real time and
make an informed decision, sometimes in a
split second. Well, perhaps not as instantly
as the team boss in a bike racing paddock,
but fast enough to grab the opportunities
at hand. Sharing the information across the
organization is equally important, as Ducati
well knew when implementing our Syncplic-
ity collaboration tool. Collaboration is the
name of the game if a company wants to
match its internal clock speed to the clock
speed of the outside world.
So next time you watch a MotoGP or
Superbike race on TV and are baffled by
the sheer speed of the bikes, consider
the fact that that sport is a data-driven,
collaborative effort. And remember that it’s
technology from EMC that is enabling the
Ducati team to become one of the fastest
in its league.

31
Allow me to calculate this for you: 10.000
hours equals 5 man-years. So, if you want
to explore working with – for instance –
hybrid clouds, you would need to invest 5
man-years of training before your IT team
gets it right. Is that the kind of investment
you want to make? Do you want to go
through trial-and-error while the business
community is watching you? I guess not.
Fortunately, there’s two parties you can
rely on to help you here: companies that
are building the solutions you require and
systems integrators that can implement the
offering and tune it to your specific needs.
Hybrid cloud is a case in point. Companies
have been moving to the public cloud for
a number of applications, but have found
out there were still some imperfections
concerning flexibility, SLAs and confiden-
tiality breaches. And they especially found
out public cloud can be a Hotel California
You are probably familiar with the ’10.000
hour rule’ as postulated by Malcolm
Gladwell in his great book Outliers. The
10.000 hour rule tells you that you need
10.000 hours of deliberate practice before
you master a skill completely. The classical
example that proves Gladwell’s theory are
The Beatles, who played all-night shows
night after night in Hamburg’s Ratkeller,
mastering music completely and moving
on to chart domination. Anyone who has
tried to excel in music, sports or any other
craftsmanship has found out the hard way:
there is no shortcut to success, only prac-
tice makes perfect.
Consider this, and think about what the
10.000 hour rule means for your IT-depart-
ment: with new technologies hitting the
market at ever-increasing speed, how can
your IT-professionals be successful without
going through 10.000 hours of practice?
Fast lane to the hybrid cloud
(The Eagles put in their 10.000 hours of
practice in the Troubadour and the Whiskey
A-go-go rather than the Hamburg Ratkeller
– can you blame them) where it’s easy to
check in, but nigh impossible to leave.
The hybrid cloud offers the best of both
worlds and allows you to no longer make
tradeoffs between the speed and agility of
public cloud services and the control and
security of private cloud infrastructure. EMC
recently launched EMC Enterprise Hybrid
Cloud Solution, a engineered ensemble
that integrates hardware, software and
services from EMC and VMware to unite the
strengths of private and public cloud.
The aspect I found most interesting in this
launch was the number of hours that EMC
spent in building this hybrid cloud offering.
We invested no less than 40.000 hours >>

32
of engineering in EMC’s labs to create a
solution that delivers cloud with self-service
and automation, built on top of virtualized
storage, compute and network with the
capability to broker services from a variety
of public cloud. 40.000 hours, that’s four
times the time it takes to master a skill.
That’s not the kind of investment you want
to make yourself, I am sure. And you don’t
need to, since our engineered hardware,
software and services solution accelerates
the time-to-value by delivering an Enter-
prise Hybrid Cloud in as little as 28 days.
At its core, EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud de-
livers foundational Infrastructure-as-a-Ser-
vice, while modular additions further
deliver Application Self-Service, Data Pro-
tection-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service
and Big Data Platform Provisioning. Now
how’s that for an integrated solution?
We certainly cannot underestimate the
role of the services providers in helping
enterprises implement the hybrid cloud.
Even if you can count on a technology
provider like EMC who sees total customer
experience as a way of life, you may still
require a third party that is very close to
you and that can help you tweak solutions
to your exact needs and can ensure good
integration between all the services you
require. The market for service providers
is changing, but I am glad to say we have
great partners in Europe who are making
the switch to the ‘third platform’ with us.
Together with us, they are building new
platforms that cater to agility and inno-
vation without losing focus stability and
security.
Over the last year, we have seen a shift in
the investments customers are making, and
the numbers tell us 15% of our revenue
now comes from ‘third platform’ invest-
ments. Many of our clients know for sure
that hybrid cloud is the way to go. Hybrid
cloud is the cradle where both existing
applications can be run, and the perfect
habitat for applications that are born in
the cloud. And by opting for an engineered
solution, you may even find a fast track
to success, without going through 10.000
hours of practice.
Over the last year,
we have seen a
shift in the invest-
ments customers
are making.

33
sometimes ageing population in the IT
department, and gives rise to ‘shadow IT’,
where tech-savvy employees take matters
into their own hands and simply buy cloud
services rather than turn to their internal IT
services provider.
At the recent Gartner Symposium, the
analyst firm stated that there are potential
disruptors in many companies. “Digital
start-ups sit inside your organization,
in your marketing department, in HR, in
logistics and in sales,” Peter Sondergaard
claimed during the opening keynote in
Barcelona. CIOs will need to cater to the
needs of these innovators, or they risk
losing relevancy.
Where is the talent?
The challenge is worsened by the fact that
IT is still one of the domains where we
are constantly looking for new employ-
More than ever, information technology is
driving business transformation. This is
good news for any IT department but it
comes as a blessing in disguise. With the
responsibilities come challenges and obsta-
cles to be surmounted. The skills needed
in the IT department are evolving with
both emerging technologies and changing
business demands. Fortunately, solutions
are available to turn IT consumption into
a self-service model, making services way
easier to deliver.
Nowadays, IT leaders must design, resource
and deploy for a world that’s digital first.
As digital has become the new normal,
technological prowess has turned into a
big differentiator for every organization,
especially for large corporations. Employees
are more demanding, especially as new
generations are climbing the corporate
ladder. This may cause a headache to a
Bridging the IT skills gap
ees,… but we fail to find them. The pace
of change in IT is so high, that we may
actually never be able to fill the skills gap,
as new chasms are appearing all the time.
Over the past year, we have all been crying
out for data scientists, people who can
combine a deep technical knowledge with
expertise in a certain market and an artistic
trait. They have to be data-driven, creative
people who can make a difference when it
comes to getting the true value out of data.
Some estimate that we are a couple of mil-
lion people short to unlock this potential.
That figure may appear preposterous, but
anyone who knows the exponential growth
of information, will know the truth of the
matter. >>

34
Another area where we currently see a
shortage, is that of storage architects.
Storage infrastructure is growing ever more
hybrid, especially now that flash technology
is becoming more common in enterprise
storage. At the same time, there is the
move towards software-defined storage,
where management software is playing a
major role in datacenter infrastructure. All
these trends require specific skills, and we
know that both enterprises and business
partners are having a hard time right now
getting the right skills in the right places.
Skills skepticism
This is one of the strange paradoxes we
noticed in the results of the surveys we ran
in the build-up to our series of EMC Forum
events throughout the region. Respondents
to the survey said they didn’t think IT has
the skills to keep up with the challenges
coming up, while, on the other hand, they
saw IT as a key strategic driver for their or-

35
ganizations. The numbers vary from region
to region and, in some countries, up to two
thirds of respondents were skeptical about
IT’s skill set.
The way to solve this paradox is perhaps
simpler than meets the eye. What we need
to do is help the IT department simplify
its tasks, by automating them. Users must
move to self-provisioning and self-service,
taking tedious work no one wants to per-
form in the first place, away from human
interaction. I believe we can take valuable
lessons here from manufacturing, where
automation is much more mature than in
the IT industry. Business users know what
self-service and self-provisioning are – they
use them in their personal public cloud
consumption on a daily basis. The automa-
tion tools are there for IT departments to
use: a product like ViPR enables effective
management of multivendor platforms,
and automates storage delivery to users
through a self-service catalog.
By automating as many tasks as possible,
the IT department can now free up capacity
to assist the transformation of the enter-
prise, helping create an agile organization.
And it doesn’t stop there. Self-service tools
will also aid business users to create new
innovative apps of their own, taking full
advantage of all the transformational pos-
sibilities of cloud, social and big data. By
sharing control with the users, IT empowers
them, so shadow IT is no longer a necessity.
With IT organizations evolving towards a
software-defined strategy, the gap will
narrow between business and IT, between
expectations and delivery, between stability
and innovation. This will allow IT to be in
the driver’s seat for innovation and change.
Nowadays, IT
leaders must
design, resource
and deploy for a
world that’s digital
first.

36
and other ‘connected things’. As IDC put
it in their excellent study ‘Enterprise Data
Lake Platforms: Deep Storage for Big Data
and Analytics’, “data lakes (DLs) can be
thought of as a corpus of unstructured and
semi-structured data collected and collated
from different sources into a single unified
data pool.” Unstructured is the new normal
when it comes to information strategy.
Bye bye (expensive) silo
The biggest advantage of a data lake lies,
of course, in the fact that every asset that
you want to analyze and base your deci-
sions on, can be found in this one place.
Gone are the days where DLs were stored
in different places on various platforms and
were duplicated several times. This caused
enterprises to overinvest in hardware,
stashing stuff over and over again. Since
an EDLP takes care of pooling all assets,
companies no longer need to overprovision
hardware for each and every silo.
Structured vs. unstructured
Enterprises are gathering bits by the Peta-
byte these days, and with the Internet of
Things (IoT) coming along, the stream of
information that needs to be stored, man-
aged and protected will grow further expo-
nentially. But more importantly: the nature
of these valuable assets is changing: data
is no longer structured, but also comes in
unstructured or semi-structured formats,
and the old way of storing everything
in a relational database no longer holds
ground. Unstructured and semi-structured
data will come from end-user comput-
ing (driven mainly by the proliferation of
BYOD devices) and from devices, sensors
One of the biggest controversies, these
days, is data lakes, and `enterprise data
lake platforms’ (EDLPs). Just like we had
heated debates some decades ago on
whether data warehouses were to be
preferred to data marts, discussions are
now running high about the correct term
for a pooling of all the information that an
organization has at its disposal. But let’s
not haggle over the right denomination of
this new principle now, let’s just look at
why EDLPs are so important and how they
are a safe and sure way for companies to
bring all their assets together. I see at least
four good reasons why this new concept
fits any organization.
Enterprise Data Lakes: yes, they are safe to swim in!
Data lakes are just another example of
how software, not hardware, is defining
the datacenter of the future. >>

38
Better management
and security
Pooling information comes with the added
bonus of better manageability and security.
Silos are hard to control and orchestrate,
by concentrating everything in one DL, at
least you have everything in one place,
easy to overview and far more secure. Most
EDLPs will contain highly sensitive data as
well as less valuable information, so, as a
whole, the system will need what is called
the ‘triple A of security’: authorization, audit
and authentication, for both users and
applications. Encryption will most probably
become standard for DLs, before long.
Agnostic on many fronts
The beauty of an EDLP lies in the fact that
it supports many standards, especially
open standards, both in input and access.
After all, the information in the DL will be
used in very different sets of applications,
for instance classical enterprise applications
such as SAP or Oracle, or new types of
applications that cater to evolutions like
cloud or mobile computing, or social me-
dia. EDLPs support a variety of file, object
and even block or object interfaces. The
same openness applies to access mecha-
nisms that can be open, standards-based
or even application-specific. The power of
this model: data types can be accessed by
different mechanisms without the need to
transform them into a different format. No
need for ETL (Extraction, Transformation,
Load); all the information can be analyzed
in place.
Is a DL something for me, you may ask?
Well, let me assure you: every industry has
a potential DL-use case. It can help you
put an end to a silo’d approach, acquire a
360 degree view of your customers, get an
insight into social media trends,… In fact,
there’s no end to the opportunities that an
EDLP can offer you. Just like moving to the
cloud, transitioning to a DL approach is a
journey that you will undertake in several
steps, the first one being the adoption
of a software-defined strategy. EDLPs are
just another example of how software, not
hardware, is defining the datacenter of the
future.

41
• The average business experienced more
than 25 working days of unexpected
downtime in the last 12 months;
• 27% of decision makers recognize they
are not spending enough to secure and
protect their information;
• 51% per cent of organizations lack a
disaster recovery plan for emerging work-
loads such as hybrid cloud, big data and
mobile – and only 6 per cent have a plan
for all three at once;
• A large majority of IT professionals doubt
their ability to recover information follow-
ing an incident.
These findings are a blow in the face of
everyone who is professionally active in in-
formation security. Strangely enough, as the
problem aggravates, companies are even
getting worse at addressing the issues. This
sounds harsh and, admittedly, there are a
number of mitigating circumstances. For
1,36 trilion euros. It’s an amazing number.
This is what enterprises lose every year
because of data loss and downtime, as
calculated in our recently released `Data
Protection Index’. To put this large amount
into perspective: 1,36 trilion euros is also
the world’s total military spend per year, or
the equivalent of nearly 50% of Germany’s
GDP (Gross Domestic Product). A staggering
fact like that would wake up anyone, you’d
think, who is trying to make his business
more profitable. Apparently not ... Maturi-
ty in most markets is still low, we found,
when it comes to Data Protection.
Let’s get some of the facts out of the way
first, from this survey conducted by Vanson
Bourne:
• Data loss is up 400% since 2012;
64 per cent of the enterprises surveyed
have experienced data loss or downtime
in the last 12 months;
Just how mature is your data protection?
starters, IT environments are evolving terri-
bly fast. Primary infrastructure is changing
so rapidly these days that the solution you
buy needs to evolve and mirror the emerg-
ing protection needs at the same speed.
This is no simple task. Secondly, buying
cycles don’t always support this agility. The
survey showed that 30 per cent of primary
data is now located in some form of cloud
storage. This demonstrates just how much
things have moved on in recent years. Com-
panies purchasing data protection solutions
on a three-year cycle may find that their
workloads are now different from the ones
that their backup strategy was designed to
protect. >>

42
Adding vendors to
get less result
Unfortunately, businesses make mistakes
in their attempt to solve the problem.
Many try to tackle the security situation by
applying different point-solutions that are
ill-fitting holistically. One of the conclusions
of the Data Protection Index is that as
companies turn to more companies for help
and let their investment run high, the cost
of data loss will increase as well. Managing
different solutions from multiple vendors is
no easy task, especially if it is not entirely
clear where one solution ends and another
starts.
But what struck me even more in the
results of this survey: the big differences in
data protection maturity between countries
and regions. The Vanson Bourne research-
ers plotted a curve by asking IT deci-
sion-makers specific questions about their
backup and recovery experiences, strategy
and IT infrastructure. Based on these re-
sults, all participants were divided into four
even segments of Laggards, Evaluators,
Adapters and Leaders. By way of contrast,
leaders will have a recovery time of one
hour or less – laggards will have a recovery
time of more than a day. Leaders will be
very confident of their ability to restore,
laggards will be uncertain.
The vast majority of businesses (87%) rank
in the bottom two categories (Laggards and
Evaluators), and only 13 per cent are clas-
sified by Vanson Bourne as being ‘ahead of
the curve’ (Adapters and Leaders). Although
the average maturity ranking across the
US, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions is very
close, some countries have a larger per-
centage of businesses that are ahead of the
maturity curve. To stay within my own re-
gion, Europe West, the Netherlands scores
best, with 20 per cent of enterprises in the
Adapters or Leaders categories, while my
home country Switzerland only has 6.4 per
cent in the top segments. On a global level,
China leads the pack with almost one out
of three companies performing well. Accord-
Throwing more
money at the
problem is not
the right answer.

43
ing to the researchers, Asian organizations
in countries such as China (Hong Kong
included) and Singapore tend to have more
of an appetite for innovation and technolo-
gy. Newer companies which are, of course,
more prevalent in emerging markets, are
also able to adopt technology easier than
large organizations with decades worth of
legacy IT infrastructure. These are, however,
not arguments we can use in comparing the
Netherlands and Switzerland. Of course we
know the Dutch are always open to new
things, and we Swiss are perhaps a tiny bit
conservative. But I’d be happy to hear your
opinion on the gap between the Nether-
lands and Switzerland when it comes to
Data Protection Maturity.
So what should you as a CIO learn from
this latest Data Protection Index and how
can you raise your level of maturity? As
stated above, throwing more money at
the problem is not the right answer. The
first step is to get the big picture and see
how you can protect all of your critical
data wherever it is, whatever happens and
whatever application it is used for. This will
provide you with a clear view of where the
gaps are between disparate vendor solu-
tions that you can then eradicate. Special
attention needs to be paid here to emerg-
ing workloads like hybrid cloud, mobile and
big data. Once you have that holistic over-
view of what you want to achieve with your
information security strategy and where
your current situation needs amending, you
can start raising your security maturity level
and get to the Leader category. Now that’s
a good resolution for 2015 !

44
now concede that digital disruption can
only be combatted with its own weapons.
Industry leaders expect a lot from the CIO:
(s)he needs to ensure that IT provides
competitive advantage, and, above all, he
will be measured on the ‘top line’ that his
strategy is delivering to the company.
Design to change
If the CIO is to live up to these expecta-
tions, he will need to change the modus
operandi of his department. To assure busi-
ness agility, he will no longer build to last,
but design to change. Rather than develop
everything in house, he will need to be-
come a broker of services, helping business
find the best solution at the right cost and
with an optimal level of security.
Fortunately, the CIO is not alone fighting
this uphill battle. One of the most impor-
tant trends of recent years is the move
towards ‘software defined’. As Netscape
founder Marc Andreessen puts it, ‘Software
and customers demand immediate, fric-
tionless access to mobile applications. The
megatrends I just mentioned are generating
vast quantities of customer and partner
data that require processing in real time to
build predictive models to support deci-
sions about the future.
With all of this going on, executives are
taking a long, hard look at the role of
information technology. While in the past,
CEOs could not be bothered to spend time
on IT strategy, they now consider it to be
the main driver of digital business innova-
tion, customer experience and growth. Top
decision-makers in enterprises and public
institutions have finally seen the light: they
We live in a VUCA world, where Volatility,
Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity
reign, and this might give people the
impression that we no longer need to plan
for the future. “Nothing is constant except
change, so why go through the trouble of
trying to see the bigger picture,” is what
some think. But the exact opposite is the
case: when agility becomes the new nor-
mal, IT architecture matters more than ever.
Every industry is being disrupted, especially
traditional verticals like retail or banking.
Even the public sector is redefining itself
because of megatrends such as the cloud,
mobile, social and big data. What we are
experiencing is a tectonic shift: end-users
On Rome and datacenters: architecture matters
We live in a VUCA world, where
Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity
and Ambiguity reign. >>

46
is eating the world’. As IT departments are
transitioning towards a model that provides
Agile and rapid application developments
and time-to-market, the DevOps model can-
not succeed if the underlying architecture
is not appropriately designed. This requires
excellent relations between business and
IT, with the CIO taking a holistic view on
where his company is going and how
digital strategy can support this evolution.
Architecture is often looked upon as one
of the most boring aspects of informa-
tion strategy, but without the right overall
design the whole house collapses. In that
respect, IT architecture is no different than
architecture in the building industry. Obvi-
ously, you cannot create beautiful cities like
Rome without a solid architecture. Then
why allow companies to develop informa-
tion systems without a holistic view? Archi-
tecture is only interesting when it provides
a good business outcome, but it is also a
prerequisite for success. In that respect,
probably the best architect for a company’s
IT is the CEO.
The Renaissance of IT
The hardest part in making this paradigm
shift, is the new skill set the CIO has to
adopt. With one eye on the business
imperatives and another on IT trends, the
CIO needs to stay on top of the curve of
software-defined and consider the bigger
picture. We all know ‘Senior Architect’ is
high on the list of jobs where demand
outreaches supply, but experienced vendors
like EMC have a solid consulting practice
that can help companies make the right
moves.
Rome was not built in a day, and no com-
pany can flip the switch overnight. Let’s not
forget that many an organization carries a
first (mainframes, minis) and second plat-
form (PC, client-server) legacy that slows
down the transition to the third platform
(mobile devices). To continue the parallel
with Rome: this city too had to build its
renaissance architecture taking into account
its legacy from the Middle Ages.
EMC is closely involved in the evolutions
I sketched earlier. And, in fact, the ‘EMC
Federation’ is, itself, adequately architected
to support enterprises in designing the
right architecture. With Pivotal, we have a
company that is focusing on Platform-as-a-
Service and agile application development.
VMware pioneered the software-defined
datacenter that is now helping legacy-rid-
den companies to grasp the nettle while
EMC Information Infrastructure, for its part,
provides the Holy Grail of software-defined
storage, converged and hyper-converged
infrastructures. The Federation is a flexi-
ble ensemble of specialists that provides
robust solutions to help companies design
for change, based on a solid architecture
that ensures longevity.

47
Start-ups and grown-ups
IT at start-ups is mostly superfluid: they are
in full development of new ideas end new
products and IT will follow wherever the
young starter is going. The equipment used
is often very cheap and especially in tech-
nology start-ups, the IT staff tinkers with
hardware and (open source) software to get
the most out of their investment.
In fact, that’s where a lot of innovation is
born. Just remember where Hadoop came
from. Not from a large enterprise where
business demands drove the CIO to inno-
vation. No, Hadoop was born at Google
when that company was still in its infancy
and developers created the Google File
System and Google MapReduce to establish
efficient and reliable access to data, using
organizations’. According to the author in a
recent Forbes blog, “those who will survive
disruption are those who understand when
to be fluid and when to be frozen. Both are
very different but complementary organi-
zational models which are inspired by the
natural laws of thermodynamics.”
Hinssen basically distinguishes three stages
in the life cycle of a company: they move
from being superfluid to fluid and frozen.
The fourth phase is when an enterprise
stops innovating and no longer adapts to
changing market situations. That is when
they become rigid. Rigid as in ‘rigor mortis’
and that’s usually when it all ends. Seeing
Hinssen put companies into these three (or
four) categories made me think about the
state of IT in many an enterprise. After all,
IT departments go through phases too as
they grow along with the company.
Let there be no doubt about it: every
industry will be disrupted. The timing may
differ and the impact may vary from one
sector to the next), but not one single com-
pany will escape the upheaval the digital
revolution is causing.
Enterprises need to arm themselves for
the changes that are coming, and as our
recent Information Generation survey
showed, business leaders admit they are
not future-ready yet. Customers’ changing
habits are forcing them to adapt process-
es, implement organizational changes and
evaluate the role of IT.
Last year I had the privilege of reading
a beta-version of “The Network Always
Wins’, the third book by thought leader
and visionary Peter Hinssen. As the book is
now becoming widely available, I revisit-
ed it and was struck by one of the points
Hinssen makes on the ‘thermodynamics of
How would you like your IT Sir? Frozen or fluid?
>>

48
As a company develops,
it migrates from superfluid
to fluid.

49
large clusters of cheap hardware. At small
outfits, everyone is the CIO and decisions
on where IT is going, are often taken by
the company founders themselves.
As a company develops, it migrates from
superfluid to fluid. This is not an overnight
change, but a gradual, silent evolution.
Perhaps someone will be appointed IT Di-
rector or CIO and, gradually, processes will
be set up and IT will really get organized
in a structured way. Procedures will be put
in place, quality control will be tightened.
After all, the superfluid phase cannot be
continued forever, if you don’t want to let
things get out of hand as the company
grows and takes on more staff.
The trick lies in keeping control, while
also retaining flexibility to evolve with the
new demands market conditions and both
internal and external customers impose. In
this third stage of the thermodynamics of
IT, parts of the infrastructure will be frozen
and will not change that often. Adaptations
will be incremental and, ideally, you will get
an overall situation that Gartner calls ‘bi-
modal’: a large number of IT-assets are sta-
bilized and controlled, while other elements
remain flexible and open to innovation. As
Hinssen points out, there is no obligation
to keep a fluid state continually, organiza-
tions will switch back and forth between
frozen and fluid.
I hope none of my readers finds his (or
her) IT department in the terminal state
in the thermodynamics of organizations,
namely rigid. In fact, that’s the situation
you get stuck in when IT has become the
master at saying ‘NO’. ‘No’ to new business
demands, ‘no’ to technological advances,
‘no’ to every sensible question... The CIO of
a rigid division is only interested in follow-
ing the strict rules that he has set. Proce-
dures dictate what can be done, and that’s
preciously little. This is the ideal environ-
ment for ‘Shadow IT’ to develop: confront-
ed with the corporate ‘negaholic’ that the
CIO has become, business users turn to the
cloud and use their credit card to purchase
IT services. The CIO has effectively dug his
own grave.
The right balance
As a vendor, we face a dual challenge: on
the one hand, it is our obligation to avoid
becoming rigid ourselves and, on the other
hand, we need to provide our customers
with exactly the right products and services
that enable them to switch back and forth
between a fluid and a frozen state. To my
mind, the hybrid cloud model that we are
propagating allows just that, offering the
right balance between agility and flexibility
and the ongoing requirement of trust and
control.

50
their users and, here too, software plays a
key role in what makes the difference be-
tween these players. Their music or video
services are constantly refreshed, catering
to the exact needs of their consumers. This
has a number of major consequences.
For one thing, the way software is con-
ceived is changing fundamentally: com-
panies can no longer afford long-term,
waterfall-style development. Instead they
are adopting agile ways to incorporate new
features in the apps, launching them seam-
lessly so that users don’t get interrupted.
On the contrary, users are contented and
value the app more.
Development platforms are changing along
with this paradigm shift, but this also
means we’re at the beginning of a new cy-
cle. Those of us who have grown old in the
IT industry know we are always constantly
repeating ourselves. Over the decades we
can check our vital stats on software-pow-
ered wearables. And companies like Philips
are now even building analytics into their
toothbrushes. See how pervasive software
has become?
And, of course, we cannot deny the role
that software is playing in the datacenter,
where the hardware parts are becoming
less of a differentiator and the value of the
different elements in the datacenter are
defined by the way we make them inter-
act: the systems architecture that decides
on the role of the components and the
software that orchestrates and automates
the workings of the datacenter. `Soft-
ware-defined datacenter’ simply means that
software is eating the datacenter too…
What differentiates one company from
another, for instance Spotify vs Pandora or
Netflix vs local media companies in Europe,
is the customer experience they deliver to
Our lives, these days, are ruled by software.
Just look around you: how many services or
objects do you use throughout the day that
are not software-driven? Software is quickly
turning into the core asset of companies.
In fact, every company is fast becoming a
software firm. This has important conse-
quences for how applications are being
developed inside companies, the way
companies work together and for the IT
industry as a whole.
Over the years, we have seen software
creep into everything that we use. To quote
Silicon Valley innovator and investor Marc
Andreessen: “software is eating the world”.
Tesla is mostly noted for its electric car, but
the essence of that vehicle is the software
that can be constantly updated through
wireless connectivity. When we read our
daily portion of news on websites, listen to
music or watch movies, software is running
the show. After we have gone running, we
Better apps means happier customers
>>

51
Over the years,
we have seen soft-
ware creep into
everything that
we use.

52
have gone from building our own software
(“our business is so specific, there is no
ready-made application for that”) over
actually buying off-the-shelf programs (as
soon as we found out that building soft-
ware was expensive, and prone to delays
and disasters) to composing applications
from standard building blocks. But I am
convinced that we are now at the start of a
new cycle, where enterprises will again see
building apps as their core business. That’s
how every company is becoming a software
firm.
For software developers, this is great news,
especially for systems application architects
and builders working for an enterprise that
has turned into a software powerhouse.
Agile development is at its best when done
by cross-functional teams that are intimate-
ly aware of the strategy of their company
and the wishes of their customers. So this
is bad news for the huge software factories
in India or other low-wage countries: they
are too remote from their clients, both geo-
graphically and mentally. Both the architec-
ture of the software, the development and
the testing need to be performed close to
the people setting the strategy and selling
and marketing the services.
Not only the development of apps that
are mobile, social-enabled and born in the
cloud is changing, so is the delivery of
these apps. Hence the importance of the
trend of Platform-as-a-Service. Worth noting
here is that the IT industry is slowly getting
used to the idea that not one company
can hire all the great minds to create new
platforms or applications. We are now all
realizing that our partner companies have
great minds innovating away and even our
competitors are employing bright minds
that are contributing to the advancement
of our business. This explains the drive
towards open source and, as you may
have heard, EMC and its sister companies,
Pivotal and VMware, are closely aligned
to several open source initiatives. Pivot-
al is playing a ‘pivotal’ role in the Cloud
Foundry Foundation, VMware is going to
great lengths to integrate with Open Stack.
From our end, at EMC World, we announced
CoprHD – an open source version of our
ViPR management software stack. By shar-
ing resources and bundling our talent with
both channel partners and competitors, we
are all helping to improve the quality of
software.
As in all evolutions, there will be winners
and losers in this trend and the best will
prevail. But let me assure you, the ultimate
winner will be the end-user, who will be
receiving better products and services and
whose customer experience will peak.

53
up the storage market through 2018. “And
although the ‘Full Silicon Datacenter’ may
still be some way off, flash is definitely on
the agenda at each and every enterprise.
The numbers are there to prove that.
Leading the market
In a recent article Gartner reported that
the Solid State Array market had grown by
a whooping 129% last year and become a
USD 1.4 billion market. The report shows
EMC leading that market with a share of
over 30%, while no other player has more
than 20%. This is all the more impressive
as EMC entered the all-flash array market
later than our competitors. But we became
market leader almost instantly, and actually
captured a 50% market share in the last
quarter of 2014. Our next closest compet-
optimization. And deservedly so: flash is
now something like 4,000 times faster than
the traditional spinning disk. The speed of
flash has followed Moore’s law, sometimes
even accelerating faster, and doubling every
year instead of doubling every 18 months.
And although hard disk technology has
evolved too, speeding up and becoming
more robust, there is no way that hard disk
drives will ever catch up. And let’s not for-
get that – unlike spinning disk – flash disks
never fail mechanically.
Having tested the water, organizations
have now built up enough trust in flash
technology to really allow it into the core
of their business critical applications, like
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and
Online Transaction Processing (OLTP).
To cite a recent report from Technology
Business Research, Inc: “Flash will displace
disk in mission-critical workloads, driving
Five years ago, CIOs wondered ‘why should
I use flash’, but the question has now
turned into ‘why should I NOT use flash”.
Anyone in charge of IT is looking for
ways to improve the performance of their
infrastructure, and flash is a sure way of
achieving that. The amount of data to be
captured, stored, managed and analyzed
has grown exponentially. By the year 2020
over 30 billion connected devices will be
producing 40 zettabytes of data. Many a
decision-maker will still be looking for the
needle in the haystack, but the haystack
has suddenly become way bigger… You
need high performance storage, these days,
to help you bring the right data to the right
place at the right time. Our XtremIO all-
flash array does just that.
The first applications for flash were to be
found in the area of performance increase,
with typical applications like Virtual
Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and database
Unleashing the beast in your datacenter
>>

54
itor took a meager 15% of the market in
the same period. In fact, in that quarter,
XtremIO made history by becoming the
fastest-growing enterprise storage product
ever – for the company, and the industry.
Especially large enterprises bought XtremIO
off us, and 40% of Fortune 200 companies
ordered our all-flash arrays in the final
quarter of 2014. That’s an amazing track
record.
It’s all about architecture
This market leadership should in fact not
have come as a surprise to anyone follow-
ing the market. XtremIO has the right archi-
tecture for the present and for the future.
That’s what makes XtremIO stand out. Flash
disks, in themselves, have been fairly com-
moditized, but it’s the way software brings
together the flash components that turns
XtremIO into a unique machine. XtremIO
was built with a number of data services in
mind, such as data management and data
deduplication. Extra services that are now
added to XtremIO can use that same basis,
while some of the other flash offerings out
there regularly need to rebuild the entire
stack to make sure everything still works
together. No re-architecture is needed for
XtremIO. The architecture of ‘the beast’ (as
XtremIO 4.0 was lovingly dubbed by its first
users) is its beauty. It can start small, but
grow big. It scales out linearly, delivering
consistent high performance while, all the
time, remaining simple and easy to use.
What makes XtremIO a genuinely Gen4
all flash array is that it finally delivers the
breakthrough scale-out architecture, con-
sistent performance, data reduction, thin
provisioning and manageability everyone
has been waiting for in an enterprise flash
array. More than its individual features,
XtremIO allows CIOs to completely rethink
all old assumptions about shared storage.
Workload consolidation, dynamic provision-
ing, production & test/development storage
consolidation, zero maintenance windows,
space-efficient snapshots and more are
now real opportunities that unlock the full
business value of flash across the data
center.
Let me assure you: this is only the be-
ginning of flash’s raid on the datacenter.
We will keep adding data services to our
all-flash arrays and to our hybrid systems.
And we will continue to disrupt the storage
area by bringing innovation to the market
fast. When it comes to flash, you ain’t seen
nothing yet !

55
Let me assure you: this is only
the beginning of flash’s raid
on the datacenter.

56
Orchestration has become
crucial in the workings of the
software-defined datacenter.

57
Become digital
Who will be the leaders in this biggest
upheaval in IT history? Well, companies
that are information-savvy and data-driven.
Being data-driven is a mindset in the first
place, but also a technological issue. GE
and Ford are prime examples of data-led
companies, basing their business model
and their decision-making processes on
sensor data and intelligent systems. To
achieve this, you will need to rediscover
the value of software and start building
new apps. Digital apps are completely
different than legacy apps: they have
1,000 times the users and produce 1,000
times more data than traditional apps. The
impact on both the front-end and the back-
end of your IT systems is massive.
purchasing online or even watching TV –
we are making new digital demands of the
businesses we deal with. A recent Institute
of the Future and Vanson Bourne survey
commissioned by EMC, labels us the ‘Infor-
mation Generation’, for never before have
we produced and consumed these gigantic
amounts of data.
The societal impact of information gener-
ation is enormous, and coping with the
new expectations in this area is one of
the biggest challenges for any custom-
er-facing organization. The report reveals
nearly every (96%) business leader polled
believes that new technology has forever
changed the rules of business, and they
acknowledge that business transformation
is critical. On the downside, they also admit
their companies are nowhere near ready to
tackle the challenges that lie ahead.
Most companies are simply not ready for
the future that awaits them. Worst of all:
business leaders know they are not up
to the challenge, and are still not taking
the measures that can help them survive.
Digital disruption will mean certain death
for enterprises that fail to adapt their in-
ternal systems to the pace of change their
customers are imposing on them.
Let’s get the facts straight first. By 2020
more than 7 billion people on at least
30 billion devices will have created 44
zettabytes of data, so Gartner and IDC
analysts tell us. Besides the technological
challenges this implies for the transport,
storage and protection of this data, these
numbers tell us that nearly every element
of our lives will be data-driven, if they
aren’t already. And whatever we are doing
– working, keeping fit, learning, playing,
Four survival tips for business leaders
>>

58
Transform IT
Focusing on digital apps is one thing,
modernizing your existing applications is
quite another. Let’s not forget the hundreds
or thousands of existing legacy data-
centers with their millions of old-school
applications that cost billions to build
and operate, and also generate trillions
of euro in revenue. You will need to lower
the cost of these apps and infrastructure,
by ruthlessly automating your datacenter
operations while, at the same time, dramat-
ically increasing innovation and improving
performance and reliability. Business agility
is a key attribute for your revamped IT and
hybrid cloud will enable that. It is ‘bon
ton’ to see hybrid cloud only as a stepping
stone in everyone’s journey to the public
cloud, but as VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger
stated at EMC World last May, “the hybrid
cloud is the cloud that we will live in for
decades to come. Cloud is an extension of
your on-premise infrastructure.” According
to IDC, only 30 per cent of applications will
reside in the public cloud by 2020. Inertia
is part of the explanation, but cyber secu-
rity and SLAs are far more prohibitive for
moving all systems to the public cloud.
Focus on cyber risk
As the number of devices and applications
grow exponentially, so does the threat level
to your information systems. Over the last
few years, cyber security has shifted from
end-point security, trying to protect all de-
vices towards real-time detection of security
breaches or attacks. Security analytics is a
great way to protect your assets, as it gives
security teams complete visibility to detect,
investigate and take targeted action against
even the most advanced kind of attacks,
before they can impact the business.
Stop building
the puzzle yourself
IT teams that still focus on assembling
modules piecemeal are destined to fail.
With so many options to choose from and
new technologies popping up every day, it
has become increasingly difficult for IT staff
4
to master the full range of possibilities.
Piecing the puzzle of servers, storage and
networking together has never been an
easy task, but these past few years, con-
verged infrastructure has come to the res-
cue, offering a combination of best-of-breed
solutions that come pre-tested and ready
to use. By opting for converged infrastruc-
ture in the context of a Software-defined
Data Center, IT staff can now spend its time
on another important challenge at hand,
namely engaging in conversations with
their internal customer to determine how
IT can best deliver on its digital promise.
With stakes as high as this, picking the
right IT partner to implement the advice
I just dispensed has become of the utmost
importance. I can only recommend you
talk to a partner who focuses on openness
and leaves you plenty of choice to find the
right solution to help you survive digital
disruption.

59
500 companies are renovating current infra-
structure and applications, while preparing
for their journey to the next level. Inside
enterprises, the biggest difference between
Platforms 2 and 3 lies in the applications
that are used and their demands on the
infrastructure. Classic enterprise workloads
like Enterprise Resource Planning or “core”
banking solutions are typical of the tradi-
tional setting. ERP, for instance, relies on
infrastructure resilience, while new world
applications like, for instance, the Uber-
app, rely on app resilience and are agnostic
of infrastructure. At the same time, the
way IT is provisioned and managed is very
different. That’s a huge gap, and it will not
be bridged overnight. What we have heard
in our discussions with CIOs and other
business leaders is that many are trying to
make savings on their platform 2 infrastruc-
employees from their desks, allowing them
to be productive wherever they want to be.
Cloud services are redefining IT infra-
structure, storing data in private or public
clouds, or combined in a hybrid system.
Big Data is a trend which is not so much
about the huge amounts of data captured,
but all about how you sort, filter and use
this data to create meaningful, real time
and actionable information. Overlaying all
of these trends is social networking, where
technology is allowing people not only to
communicate but to truly collaborate across
departmental, company and even national
borders. That is Platform 3, and the new
situation every business leader is confront-
ed with.
Bridging the gap
Taking the step from the client-server era
to the new reality can be daunting. As we
have seen over the last years, most Fortune
What will be your next car? Will it be a
traditional car using fuel, or are you fully
convinced it will be an electric car? Perhaps
you find the leap from gas-engine to
electric engine too big and you’d rather go
for a hybrid car? That way you can adapt
to some of the novelties that come with
driving electric, but still hold on to some of
the characteristics of the vehicle you have
gotten used to. Well, let me tell you, many
companies are hesitating just as much in
switching from Platform 2 to Platform 3.
And, fortunately, everyone is allowed to
make that move at his own pace.
The notion of the Third Platform was first
introduced by IDC a few years ago and
refers to the disruptive forces that are
brought on by the mega-trends of social,
mobile, cloud and big data. This is not your
father’s IT anymore. Through mobile devic-
es and apps, information can be accessed
from anywhere. Mobile broadband unchains
Gas or electric? Why not go hybrid?
>>

It is up to every individual
company to decide on the
speed it adopts along the way.
60

61
ture, to invest that money in setting up a
more modern structure.
To get there, some enterprises are building
a hybrid model, that reconciles both plat-
forms and helps them along this journey.
It makes their IT-model a lot more flexible
and cost-effective. This is very much in line
with the bi-modal strategy that Gartner has
been advocating for some time and that
urges companies to adopt a dual speed
approach where some parts of the IT infra-
structure remain stable, while a second part
focusses on breakthrough innovation.
At your own pace
At EMC World, we introduced VxRack,
which is probably the first ‘hybrid’ product
that helps companies make the transi-
tion toward Platform 3. VxRack is a new
hyper-converged offering that complements
VCE-converged infrastructure systems like
VBlock. VxRack marries the ease of use of
appliances with the robustness that comes
with hyper-converged systems, putting
them into one and the same box. What
results, is a significant boost in agility,
flexibility and performance and a reduction
in costs. VxRack is optimized for mas-
sive web-scale applications, and can grow
from dozens of servers and scale to many
thousands of servers. It helps enterprises
get ready for the realm of Platform 3, while
preserving many of their previous invest-
ments.
The journey will be long and windy, but it
is inevitable. Tough choices will be have to
be made. But it is up to every individual
company to decide on the speed it adopts
along the way. Some may want to use
seven league boots to get there fast, others
will take small steps and move along at
their own pace. Just as some people switch
to electric cars immediately, while others
take the intermediate solution of the hybrid
car. What counts is that you eventually
make that switch and reach that goal.

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