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With the launch of EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) solution and services today, it makes me think back to how this all started. We’ve been asked for the past couple of years, through thousands of conversations with our customers around IT Proven, to sell them what we did internally to achieve our own IT transformation. Now that process was long—probably 10 years in the making—but it’s world class today. However, the issue was that it was not just a technology problem that we solved, and honestly, our response in those conversations was, “Well, we have no idea what to sell you.” There was no SKU or bundle of SKUs to sell what we’d done. Because it was systems integration work, consulting work and it spanned across companies—EMC and VMware for starters. But now, for customers who are ready to embrace hybrid cloud, we have a solution that has most of the components that we use to run our own shop. It has IT as a service and infrastructure as a service elements. It provides a basic portal. It provides automation, virtualization, and a completely integrated stack. It’s the foundation ITaaS model out of a box. That’s EHC. And that’s a first. We also developed a set of services around that to take customers from foundational to highly advanced. And those services can be purchased as a bundle as well.
So instead of 10 to 12 to 14 months, we’re looking at deployment times of one month to less for the foundational solution. And then instead of years, several months to possibly a year depending on desired end state, to get to well run. Before this, it was taking customers a year just to integrate the technology components, if they could at all. Of course, not all organizations are ready to make this leap. They want to embrace IT as a service so they can become more agile and responsive to the business; They need help understanding its impact on people and process; and they’re not sure what to do. But they know they need to do something. That’s why we created the no fee IT Transformation Workshop (ITTW) so we could directly address these needs. This allows customers to get on the IT transformation highway, instead of sitting by the side of the road and watching everyone go by. These workshops engage CIOs and their direct reports to help them understand where they are and where they want to be, and to benchmark themselves against others. It measures the IT organization across four dimensions: infrastructure, applications, operating model, and service strategy. And we help drive consensus on what “good” looks like for them. Not everyone’s definition of IT as a service is the same, and in fact it should not be. We then give them very prescriptive guidance on where they need to go and how to get there. And across the board, common priorities emerge: a standard set of services and a standard set of infrastructure is critical, the need for automation, and the operating model. How do they transition their people from one skill set to another? What are the processes they need to use, as well as what training and curriculum needs to be built to help them? For example, during one of these workshops, a global financial services client got IT and business execs from key lines of business to agree on a common cloud vision and on the best path forward. The client actually went back to its board and said, “We need to revamp our strategy for where IT will be in three to five years because we had it wrong. And now we know how to proceed.” Typically these workshops uncover skills gaps. And that’s where Tom Clancy and EMC’s Education Services can add so much value. For more than seven years, they’ve been investigating the skills gap associated with global IT trends. That gap is one of the biggest barriers to accelerating cloud transformation. For example, our surveys show that 84 percent consider in-house cloud architecture and design skills critical. Yet only 14 percent say they have the skills in-house.
When I talk to CIOs about people and process transformation, they’re shaking their heads enthusiastically up and down because they so badly want to take advantage of the curriculum we’ve developed to help them. It makes their lives a lot easier. And it’s a perfect complement to the IT transformation workshop. EMC is establishing a new standard for simplicity, choice and agility for hybrid cloud deployments. I encourage you to click here to watch the EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Solution and services Live event broadcast and launch.
EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud: ITaaS Out of the Box |
The EMC curriculum is built on the educational foundation that we developed during our own IT transformation. It includes a knowledge and skills assessment (also no fee) to really focus on an organization’s most pressing needs. In other words, where should they start? And then it offers a step-by-step plan to get from where they are today to where they want to be. That plan includes the EMC Learning Environment (ELE), which lives behind the customer’s firewall and offers desktop access to hundreds of courses for all levels and roles.