Insights and Outcomes: The Changing Landscape of The Conversation

speechIn recent weeks, this blog has been home to several articles focused on the changing dynamics of business, technology, and how organizations are dealing with the new realities of a modern approach to IT enabled business outcomes.  Vic Bhagat, EMC’s Executive Vice President, Enterprise Business Solutions & Chief Information Officer, focused on the relevance of traditional IT when faced with the modern business challenges of today’s fast-paced, real time environments, and emphasized that in order “to evolve with the times and become a more client-centric, business savvy IT organization, we need to question all aspects of our technology, people and processes.”  Then, Mike Koehler, President of EMC’s Professional Services Organization, discussed the challenges of IT Transformation and the “Headwinds” related to Resistance, Inertia and Misalignment.  In both cases, these discussions focus on an approach to IT that supports the day-to-day needs of the business while reducing costs – a difference in cost savings that can and should fuel next generation capabilities. 

This, as you can imagine, poses some challenges for customers and prospects, and is a challenge that we had to overcome ourselves. While once upon a time we relied on specific products and feature sets, dying are the days of domain specific (compute, storage, network, etc.) disciplines, and dead is the idea of traditional application development methodologies. Instead, the winners in this next wave of IT-enabled businesses are those adapting flexible, automated, cloud-based infrastructures that support agile application approaches and embrace mobile, social, analytics, and data in real-time. So, how do we best enable that for our customers?

We start by changing the conversation.

The conversation began changing a few years ago as we focused on hybrid cloud and big data analytics. Now we see the conversation continuing to evolve, focusing on business relevant insights for customers and how our solutions address their opportunities to achieve quantifiable business outcomes. We need to holistically help customers accelerate their capabilities while simplifying the complexities of managing infrastructure and applications. As the conversation uncovers business outcomes, we need to help traditional IT translate and communicate outcomes to others outside of their organization. I have seen customers walk into a session at our executive briefing center expecting the conversation was going to be about the technology, and the result of the meeting is the development of a list of the appropriate people from their IT organization and the business to attend a workshop focused on prioritizing the potential outcomes and developing a plan to get there. As one customer said after recent briefing, the “value is tremendous when you can discuss the problem, identify a solution, and then see it in action.”

Instead of speeds and feeds or slots and watts, EMC aims to holistically help customers accelerate their capabilities while simplifying the complexities of managing traditional infrastructure and applications. Those are the keys to future success: simplification and acceleration. Not just in the data center, but across the entire enterprise.

To engage with EMC’s Executive Briefing program visit them at EMC.com/EBC or talk to your EMC Sales Representative.

About the Author: Bernie Baker