Q2 2010 A quarterly magazine for the EMC community worldwide

INSIDE: How Centera Virtual Archive is helping to conquer time and space

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

w EMC Apex’s Earth Day awardw Going for the gold in services

PLUS: How 2009’s Data Domain deal showed that cultural integration remains a mix of both science and art

We take a look at the human side of EMC’s Data General acquisition, more than a decade later

The dragonand the emerald

For Erin Motameni, the

logistics of the DG acquisition

represented only half the

adventure.

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01_r1.indd 1 6/22/10 2:08 PM

2 EMC.now | Q2 2010

EMC.now Q2 2010Volume 12Issue 2

features

6 Cover storyExamining the human side of the Data General acquisition, 11 years later.

13 Out of many, oneEMC’s years of acquisition and integra-tion know-how made a difference for the people of EMC Data Domain.

16 Going for the gold in servicesEnhancing its capabilities in business intelligence and data gathering has helped EMC maintain and even extend its top-ranked service position.

19 A virtual boon to Global ServicesEMC is increasing its commitment to virtual services delivery, a technique that blends onsite and offsite help from EMC experts.

22 Conquering time and spaceCentera Virtual Archive uses virtualiza-tion to meet the size, scope, and scale of where archiving is going.

24 At EMC Apex, Earth Day 2010 had special meaningThe extremely environmentally focused employees of EMC North Carolina had an extra reason to celebrate this year.

also inside

3 From the TELL EMC filesHow are we ensuring that EMC leads the journey to the private cloud?

4 Recent newsA best-ever first quarter. Plus, VMAX adds realism to a Hollywood set.

4 EMC.now, winner of 28 industry awards for communication excellence.

l Subscribe: www.emc.com/emcnow

editor’sdesk

EDITOR: Monya Keane SENIOR WRITER: Micky BacaDESIGN DIRECTOR: Ronn Campisi COORDINATOR: Jennifer BeesEDITORIAL BOARD: Becky DiSorbo, Bill Durling, Mark Fredrickson, Michael Gallant, Gil Press, Peter Schwartz, Anne-Caroline TanguyCopyright © EMC Corporation. Volume 12, Issue 2. Printed June 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission from EMC Corporation. EMC and EMC2 are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation and its subsidiaries. All other trademarks mentioned in this publication are the property of their respective owners. EMC.now may contain “forward-looking statements” as defi ned under the U.S. Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC’s fi lings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which can be found at www.emc.com/ir.

2 Printed on recycled paper consisting of 30% post-consumer waste.

In the second-ever issue of EMC.now, we ran a front-page feature in which Mike Ruettgers, then-president and CEO, explained EMC’s decision to buy Data General. He said, “We expect to draw some excellent talent from DG” and predicted that “this acquisition will make us an even stronger company than we already are.” He was right on both counts.

Then and now

I remember that morn-ing 11 years ago, walking to my desk at EMC’s 35 Park-wood Drive headquarters in Hopkinton, in the mo-ments before I learned the big news.

I’d published Volume 1, Issue 1 of EMC.now, the company’s brand-new newsletter, one week ear-lier. Heading upstairs, I contemplated what to run on the second issue’s cover.

The answer lay on the seat of my chair in the form of a printout of a news release with the headline, “EMC TO ACQUIRE DATA GENERAL.”

What? We’d bought a competitor?

After getting over the shock, I felt tremendous gratitude. It would be wonderful to get some much-needed help. At the time, EMC had more than 1,500 positions unfilled. The open-req prob-lem had become so severe that it was actually limiting our ability to grow as a company.

But as I was soon to learn, acquisition-related matters aren’t very simple and straightforward … especially when it comes to the human element.

This issue of EMC.now contains two stories reflecting integration and cultural acquisition, and they serve as in-teresting counterpoints to each other.

The first feature shares, in depth, the personal retro-spectives of people who experienced the acquisition of Data General from the “other side” of the equation. They were the ones whose company was being acquired.

The second feature is a story of Data Domain—another competitor that EMC acquired and integrated, albeit

much more recently, leveraging a decade-plus of accumulated acquisition and integration proficiency. That piece discusses the successful cultural mixing that has occurred over the past year, offering perspectives from EMC Data Domain employees Sean Lamb and Devin Hamilton.

I believe that together, these stories paint a portrait of how incredibly fused two former competitors can become when things are done right.

Cover photo of EMC SVP Erin Motameni by David Elmes

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 2 6/21/10 4:37 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 3

from thetell emc fi les

Feedback from the past quarter included a question about EMC’s cloud computing strategy.

j.s. tells emc: We’re hearing a lot about EMC hoping to ride the top of the next wave of IT, cloud computing. Can you explain our strategy? How do we ensure EMC leads the journey to the private cloud?

pat gelsinger, president & coo, emc information infrastructure products, replies: A good place to start is to define what we mean by cloud

computing. For EMC, the cloud is a highly virtualized environment where applications and services are no longer provisioned to specific hardware. Instead, they are managed to deliver service catalogs of resources. What’s more, hardware is optimized to be provisioned and automated to deliver the resource catalogs to the virtual machine layer.

A good example of this new IT model is the VCE vBlock infrastructure packages with EMC Ionix Unified In-frastructure Manager (UIM), which enables customers to manage vBlocks as a single entity. UIM provides integrated and simplified provisioning, configura-tion, change, and compliance manage-ment.

We see this model applying to private clouds, meaning clouds that serve as a company’s internal data center and are under the full control of the CIO. We also see this model applying to public clouds, where a service provider deliv-ers, say, compute and storage services or applications/SaaS offerings. EMC will be delivering these private and public clouds with common technologies that enable the federation of these internal resources and external resources.

A private cloud is much like today’s data centers. It is trusted, reliable, con-trolled, and secure. Simultaneously, a private cloud delivers the attributes—dynamic, cost-efficient, on-demand, and flexible—associated with public clouds.

In short, we see our vision of the private cloud bringing the best of both

worlds to our customers. And this vi-sion is resonating with customers and prospects because we are offering them a way to overcome the enormous chal-lenges they face today. Some studies show CIOs are spending 70% or more of their time and money just maintain-ing their infrastructure. This leaves less than 30% to invest in innovation and support strategic business projects. CIOs are eager to partner with us and are increasingly open to discussing how the private cloud will transform their world for the better.

Three powerful technology engines—virtualization, multi-core x86 Intel processors, and transformative storage technologies like flash—are driving a dramatic transformation at the tech-nology level of data centers. They are enabling customers’ IT organizations to move increasingly from IT productivity to business value and then to operat-ing IT as a service. What results is that IT becomes far more efficient and cost effective as well as dramatically more agile.

How will we capitalize on this transi-tion? First, we need to clearly and con-sistently communicate the compelling value of the private cloud. EMC World 2010 greatly advanced our differentiated positioning. Second, we need to continue to develop and deliver world-leading

products that are distinctive and aligned with our vision. Our VPLEX announce-ment at EMC World was a great ex-ample of this. Third, we need to partner with our customers as well as with key industry players to align and enable the broader industry value of our products. Our recent announcement of the expan-sion of our global strategic alliance with SAP was a great example of this.

This is a very exciting and promising time for EMC and fundamentally why I joined the company. I believe we will lead this newest and largest wave of IT and have an opportunity to make our-selves—and our customers—winners for a long time to come.

rTELL EMC Do you have a question or something to say? Receive a personalized response from a subject-matter expert or an EMC executive by visiting www.channelemc.isus.emc.com/channelemc/Tellemc/toc.asp. You’ll typically receive a response within three weeks. Or, if you prefer, you may submit feedback anonymously.

ZZZZZ

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 3 6/21/10 4:37 PM

4 EMC.now | Q2 2010

recent news Recapping the Q1 2010 achievements of EMC and its people

PEOPLE Twenty-year IT veteran JEREMY BURTON has joined EMC as EVP and Chief Marketing Offi cer, the fi rst person to hold that EMC title. Previously, he was president and CEO of Serena Software,

and he has held executive management and marketing positions at Symantec, Veritas, and Oracle.

After 26 years at Accenture, TERRY BREEN is now EMC’s SVP of Strategic Alliances. He is working closely with EMC’s technology integration and chan-nel distribution alliance teams to expand

the company’s go-to-market relationships with systems integrators, outsourcers, and service providers.

JAMES DISTASIO, a retired partner and 38-year veteran of Ernst & Young LLP, has joined EMC’s Board of Directors and is serving on the Board’s Audit Committee.

BEST FIRST QUARTER | EMC reported the best fi rst quarter in its history, with record Q1 revenue, high double-digit profi t growth, and all-time record free cash fl ow. 2010’s consolidated revenue was $3.9 billion, a 23% increase compared with the year-ago quarter. Q110 GAAP net income reached $373 million, an increase of 92% year over year.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci said, “EMC is off to a strong start in 2010. Our private cloud strategy and focus on four multibillion-dollar markets expected to experience rapid growth for many years to come are resonating with customers. We are confi dent in our ability to lead the next major wave of IT.”

ACQUISITION

In January, EMC acquired privately held Archer Technologies, provider of governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software, to join the RSA Security Division. The Archer GRC Framework combines with RSA offerings

for data-loss prevention, security information and event management, and advanced security operations.

MAKING STRIDES | In February, EMC Chief Sustainability Officer Kathrin Winkler testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communi-cations, Technology, and the Internet. She described how IT contributes to energy efficiency. In March, The Green Economy Post named Kathrin one of “10 Women Making Strides in Sus-tainability.”

ABOVE AND BEYOND | Christine Rossi (second from left) was the top recipient of EMC’s first annual Community Service awards, earning the Exemplary Service Award of $10,000 for the Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI) Foundation. Christine and her son have the genetic disease, which causes brittle bones. An OI board member for six years, she founded and chairs a fundraiser that has generated more than $325,000 for the foundation. She also is its national spokesperson. Twenty-six employees from around the globe also captured Motivator Awards ($5,000) or Stewardship Awards ($1,000) for their charities.

SEVEN-TIME WINNER | In Michigan, EMC’s General Motors account team celebrated EMC being named GM’s Supplier of the Year for the seventh time. The award is based on performance in the areas of quality, service, technology, and price. EVP Frank Hauck accepted the award on EMC’s behalf.

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 4 6/21/10 4:37 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 5

MILESTONE

R ayana Shetty of Tata Consulting Services in Banga-lore was the recipient of the 10,000th EMC Proven Pro-fessional Program Information Storage and Management certification. The curriculum educates IT professionals in a range of storage technologies, not just specific products.

KUDOS

CRN named EMC a 2010 CHANNEL CHAMPION of Storage Management Software/Data Protection Soft-ware. The editors rated 1,000 ven-dors in 21 categories, measuring perceptions of their products and services. This is IT’s largest tech-nology integrator market study; it is used by VARs and tech-nology integrators to evaluate vendors and their programs.

SUSTAINABILITY

In January, EMC was one of more than 80 U.S. corporations and organizations that took out full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal and Politico issuing a call for improved energy and climate change legislation.

At Citizen Schools in Boston, EMC, Google, and Cubist Pharmaceuticals co-hosted a meeting with Kumar Garg, policy analyst with the U.S. White House Office of Science and Technology. The panel discussed how to improve stu-dents’ participation and performance in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

EMC climbed from #48 to #19 on Corporate Responsibil-ity Magazine’s “100 Best Corporate Citizens” list. This list is based strictly on the ranked companies’ transparency in making their environmental, climate change, human rights, philanthropic, employee relations, financial performance, and governance data publicly available.

E-BOOKSTen EMC recruiting pros offer 100 JOB-SEARCH TIPS in a new e-book produced by HR, Creative Services, and the EMC.com team. The e-book advises job seekers while branding EMC as a great place to work. To download it, visit www.emc.com/collateral/article/100-job-search-tips.pdf.

Internationally renowned manage-ment consultant Jim Champy has published The Pull of Customers, The Push of Processes, an e-book featuring EMC. In it, he explores EMC’s history of re-engineering itself and cites the company’s customer-fi rst philosophy as a

major reason for its long-term success. The e-book is available at Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com.

TCE EXCELLENCE | In January, the Global EMC Field Optimization Project team, winner of EMC’s 2009 TCE Excel-lence Corporate Award, was honored at the Q409 Employee Quarterly Review. (l. to r.): Customer Service SVP Leo Colborne (ret.), CSS Global Field Program Director Bill Boehm, CSS Northeast Regional Service Director Mike McGonagle, CSS Americas Field Service Leader (and team leader) Chris Quirk, CSS Canada Regional Service Director Steve Sottile, CSS Field Program Manager Steve Scales, TCE Sr. Director John Wallace, and EVP Frank Hauck.

VMAX GOES PRIME TIME | EMC Symmetrix VMAX systems debuted on popular Fox TV show 24 on March 22, adding IT realism to the show’s “server room” set. Mary Lynn Rajskub, who portrays Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) Analyst Chloe O’Brian, worked in front of the bank of systems helping CTU defend the U.S. government against threats to national security. EMC loaned Fox Broadcasting Company the 10 empty frames as a product-placement strategy to gain brand exposure. ©

201

0 FO

X B

RO

AD

CAST

ING

CO

., KE

LSEY

MC

NEA

L/FO

X

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01_r1.indd 5 6/22/10 1:18 PM

6 EMC.now | Q2 2010

coverstory

From competitors to colleagues

In the middle of his business trip on August 9, 1999, Bob Solomon was sitting in Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport when he received the shocking call.

EMC—Data General Corporation’s arch-enemy—had made an offer to ac-quire his long-time employer.

It was fortunate that Bob was al-ready at the airport. He had 20 minutes to catch the next plane back to Boston and begin supporting the pre-acquisi-tion due diligence process.

Bob was Chief Technology Officer of Data General’s CLARiiON division, and he admits that he and his fellow DGers in the storage group had come to strongly dislike EMC during the previous several years. He’d been on the startup team that had created the groundbreaking CLARiiON storage ar-ray, its FLARE operating system, and its Navisphere management software. They’d grown the midrange technol-ogy into something that was competing head-on with other vendors’ best mid-range products and occasionally even with EMC’s enterprise-scale Symme-trix family.

Frequently in the field, DGers battled EMC’s hard-hitting, albeit ef-fective, sales tactics. At headquarters and in the labs, DGers fought EMC’s efforts to lure away their engineers to join what was rumored to be a hyper-demanding work culture.

Now this company was descending upon all 5,000 people at the Westboro, Massachusetts-based company, which had been Bob’s professional home for 12 years. His first thought as he headed back east: “How long before I quit?”

He didn’t quit. Today, Bob Solomon Bob Solomon

The dragonand the emerald

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 6 6/21/10 4:37 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 7

Looking at the human side of EMC’s Data General acquisition, more than a decade later

is the VP in charge of leading EMC’s alliance with VMware. He’s also an EMC Fellow. Not only did EMC turn out to be a company far different from what he expected, but it also provided him with a rewarding career and a positive workplace environment.

“I get to work with a lot of smart people,” he says. “We are leaders who realize that we have the opportunity to change the direction of our entire industry for the better.”

Fellow DGers throughout the com-pany echo Bob’s story as they look back from the place they now are happy to call home to an acquisition that left an indelible mark on their careers. Like Bob, hundreds of former DG employ-

ees (approximately 1,300, actually) not only remain employees of EMC, but they also are among its best and bright-est.

“EMC gained a lot of its future leaders from Data General,” says Joel Schwartz, SVP and GM, Common Stor-age Platform Operations, himself a DG transplant. “They are people in key po-sitions throughout the company.”

Heeding the CLARiiON callWhile most Data General employees were stunned by their storage com-petitor’s acquisition offer, they had no doubt what had motivated it. EMC wanted Data General’s CLARiiON fam-ily of midrange storage systems.

The EMC Sym-metrix line was su-premely successful in the high end of the enterprise storage market. CLARiiON, conversely, offered inroads to the com-mercial segment and its tens of thousands of customers needing midrange storage.

For its part, Data General—a legacy of the minicomputer era—was struggling financially. Its ex-ecutive leaders were in the market for a buyer, although they expected it to be equally likely that the company would be courted for its flag-

ship AViiON family of non-uniform memory access (NUMA) servers as for CLARiiON.

The CLARiiON division, function-ing like a startup within Data General, had reached revenue of half a billion dollars in its first five years. By 1999, CLARiiON sales were keeping the company afloat. But DG, as a whole, had posted a loss of $154 million in 1998. It didn’t have the R&D money available to take CLARiiON technology forward.

Meanwhile, just five miles down the road in Hopkinton, EMC was watching its revenues and stock price soar.

As the head of DG’s CLARiiON divi-sion, Joel had, for two months, been part of the tiny team of people from DG (code named “Dragon”) and EMC (code named “Emerald”) who were quietly putting the deal together prior to the announcement. At the time, CLARiiON owned 7% of the midrange storage segment, while competitor Hewlett-Packard owned 45%. Joel ac-knowledges he had serious questions about whether enterprise-focused EMC could embrace CLARiiON.

His questions were answered in subsequent quarters. (These days, Joel still looks with enjoyment at the framed chart near his office showing CLARiiON’s ascent to the midrange segment’s number-one spot in Q105.)

Being part of CLARiiON’s success is one of the many things Joel has enjoyed at EMC, a company that has given him “the opportunity to open up new markets and new businesses, and to lead very fast-growing businesses—from a product perspective, a market-

3 THE DG CLARIION family of midrange storage as it looked in August 1999.

Joel Schwartz

MIC

KY B

ACA

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 7 6/21/10 4:37 PM

8 EMC.now | Q2 20108

cover story

place perspective, and a geographic perspective.”

Rivalries and misperceptionsThe DG acquisition remains EMC’s biggest ever in terms of the number of employees affected and the revenue in play. Calling the transition challenging is an understatement.

In the preceding years for Data General, EMC had emerged as the enemy, in large part because EMC’s sales force was aggressive—sometimes excessively so. EMC became the psy-chological target against which all of Data General could unite. “It always helps to have a nemesis, and they were it,” Bob says.

At DG, the animosity was expressed on posters, t-shirts, and in the media. Bob and Joel vividly recall the day they decided to run a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal taking a jab at a statement they’d spotted buried in EMC’s Form 10-K filed on March 11, 1999.

In that 10-K, EMC had made the “mistake” of indicating it perceived DG as a competitive threat. The EMC statement excerpted in DG’s ad read, “The Company [EMC] believes that its major independent storage competitor in the UNIX and Windows NT markets is Data General Corporation.” The ad’s headline proclaimed, “Data General agrees with EMC.”

EMC’s singling-out of DG as its

major competitor was an overstate-ment, Joel knew. But he wasn’t about to miss the chance to exploit it. While EMC never responded to the Journal ad externally, DG people savored hear-ing rumors that it had annoyed EMC’s executives.

However, even as DGers were en-joying their PR victory, EMC had al-ready begun preliminary investigations into possibly acquiring DG.

“The transition was very different depending on where you were sitting,” recalls EMC’s HR SVP Erin Motameni. As Data General’s VP of Worldwide Human Resources, she was charged with everything from finding out who might lose their jobs in the deal, to determining how people’s employee benefits would transfer.

Erin found EMC’s senior executives welcoming but sensed that certain EMC groups were skeptical: There

appeared to be a perception that Data General employees would lack the almost pathologically intense EMC sense of urgency. “It was a feeling of hesitation that I perceived,” Erin says. “Some-times, when you mentioned you were from Data General, you’d hear, ‘Oh ...’”

All incoming DG employees received EMC badge numbers beginning with the number seven. To this day, some former DGers do not wear their badges facing out because of the stigma they felt back then.

Then there was that DG per-ception of EMC that the HR spe-cialists would have to help people

overcome. “When some-one would resign from DG to go to EMC, we always told them, ‘EMC is a sweat shop; they want your life,’” Erin says. “Then of course, when we were acquired, it wasn’t really an option for us to turn around and say, ‘Never mind. Every-thing’s going to be okay.’”

“Misperceptions ex-isted on both sides,” says

EMC EVP Frank Hauck, who oversaw DG integration activities following the acquisition’s close. “The fact is in those cases, we were both wrong about each other, but it eventually sorted itself out.”

Fast-track transitionMisperceptions aside, the sheer logis-tics of the integration were daunting.

Frank remembers finding it to be one of the toughest jobs he’s ever done. The task of figuring out who would be offered jobs and who would not was traumatic for him.

His work had started when, while on vacation, he received a call from EMC President and CEO Mike Ru-ettgers requesting that he handle the integration. Within 48 hours, Frank set up a dozen or so functional leadership teams containing EMC and DG repre-sentatives and began holding meetings to work out the many, many details.

The transition was expected to take 6-12 months. It was completed in less than three.

One group of DGers, however, found the transition especially dif-ficult. The assimilation of the R&D engineers would be among the most challenging hurdles. While EMC’s executives had been extremely eager to hire DG’s engineers, the two compa-nies’ engineering groups did not seem to mesh.

For many months after the acquisi-tion closed, the Symmetrix and CLARi-iON groups “just didn’t see eye-to-eye” on many architectural and develop-ment-related issues, Bob says. CLARi-iON engineers stayed in Southboro.

Erin Motameni

Linda Connly

DAV

ID E

LMES

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 8 6/21/10 4:38 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 9

There was little cross-pollination or collaboration. And, although it seems unbelievable now, many EMC engi-neers didn’t see merit in a midrange storage acquisition.

“We kept our distance from each other,” Bob says. “But eventually, peo-ple started realizing some really good ideas were coming out of both sides, that really talented engineers were working on both sides.”

Bob and Joel credit Joe Tucci, who had joined EMC as President and COO in January 2000, five months after the acquisition, with helping to create a co-hesive culture that erased the barriers.

A year later, Bob, the ex-DGer, was named CTO of the Storage Products Operations organization. His group united the EMC CLARiiON, EMC Symmetrix, and EMC Celerra engi-neering groups. “We’d achieved mutual engineering respect for each other,” Bob says.

Weathering uncertaintyDG’s Sales and Marketing employees faced a bleaker climate. Their talents were not as universally sought. The fact is, a lot of them weren’t offered jobs in EMC’s well-established sales and marketing force, Joel says.

Linda Connly was Director of DG’s Global Field & Healthcare Marketing team supporting the server division. She recalls feeling as if she was on the receiving end of pretty brutal attitudes from some EMCers at times—that DG people were “failing employees from a

3 EXACTLY THREE MONTHS before news of its acquisition by EMC would come to light, Data General bought space in The Wall Street Journal to run this full-page ad on Monday, May 10, 1999. The ad draws attention to an excerpt from EMC’s Q498 financial results, issued in a 10-K report dated March 11, 1999, in which EMC had affirmed that its “major independent storage competitor in the UNIX and Windows NT market is Data General Corporation.”

failing company.” She also was receiv-ing little communication about the fate of her 50-person worldwide staff. So, she took a “somewhat successful” pro-active approach. Linda began finding places for them herself by cold-calling her EMC counterparts.

After that, Linda says, she planned to leave the company. But the job mar-ket was deteriorating, so instead she took a staff job as Director of EMC Global Marketing Operations.

A short time later, she was sur-prised to be offered the job of Direc-tor of EMC Global Field Marketing. It wasn’t long before she discovered, first-hand, that EMC’s type-A sales

culture was perfect for her. Linda went on to become EMC’s first female sales VP and a big fan of EMC’s work environment. She says now, “I love this company. It’s been a great opportunity. The culture matches me.”

Few people faced greater acquisition-related challenges than Bill DePatie, who is today VP of Hardware Engineering in EMC’s Information Infra-structure Products division. A 13-year DG veteran, he had been Director of Hardware De-velopment for AViiON in 1999.

When EMC stated it would phase-out the AViiON line in two years (the earli-est the terms of the deal allowed), Bill was faced with “ramping down a prod-uct we believed in and an engineering organization we were incredibly proud of.” The process did take two years, and morale issues were taxing to ev-eryone.

But Bill and his nearly 200-person team found a silver lining: They pos-sessed experience other EMC engi-neering teams sought—including, most importantly, experience developing platforms based on Intel’s x86 archi-tectures. EMC was using Intel technol-ogy in the next generation of CLARi-iON storage, and as AViiON ramped down, CLARiiON logic development ramped up. Working with the CLARi-iON organization and other engineer-ing groups across EMC, Bill was able to find places for most of his team.

Bill later led the effort to converge EMC Celerra’s hardware platform architecture with CLARiiON’s, and he recently oversaw a similar architec-ture convergence with Symmetrix. In so doing, his team restructured and redefined hardware engineering pro-cesses company-wide for maximum efficiency.

Today, Bill leads a global organiza-tion that is developing all of EMC’s

Bill DePatie

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 9 6/21/10 4:38 PM

10 EMC.now | Q2 2010

hardware platforms. And EMC is just where he wants to be. “I love an envi-ronment where I am constantly being challenged,” he says.

For Erin in HR, the contrast of her new job was stark. At Data General, she had dealt with a rollercoaster of layoffs over the years. At EMC, her challenge lay in recruiting skilled workers fast enough to support EMC’s skyrocket-ing growth. Erin oversaw the hiring of more than 7,000 people in her first year. After two years, she became a key player in the effort to build a new, cen-tralized HR organization at EMC.

And in the years since, Erin has provided HR support to most of EMC’s major functional organizations. Two years ago, she became an SVP.

Most importantly, she says, she has worked to make EMC a better place to work. “It’s been fabulous, though I wouldn’t have guessed so in those first rocky months. I am just delighted to work here.”

Tech-wreck timeWhile groups inside EMC were inte-grating themselves, a massive outside force was about to finally break down the remaining barriers to CLARiiON’s acceptance by certain parts of the com-pany. The dot-com bust arrived.

Prior to the downturn, some

cover story

members of the core EMC sales force seemed to have too little incentive to embrace the midrange CLARiiON products. The fact was, selling a rela-tively less-expensive CLARiiON array with its mid-tier software just didn’t bring in the high commission that a big “bells-and-whistles” Symmetrix deal did. The whole situation was becoming frustrating for EMC’s leaders.

But when the technology-sector bust occurred, many EMC customers shrunk their IT purchasing budgets. EMC’s sales force began to look enthu-siastically at promoting the affordable CLARiiON; it stopped being seen as a “Hail Mary” move to make only when a

Symmetrix deal stalled.Finally, everyone had jumped

on board realizing CLARiiON’s tre-mendous inherent value. CLARi-iON, like a knight in signature pale-purple hued armor, was providing EMC with the chance of surviving years of harsh, industry-wide fi-nancial turmoil to come.

Joe Tucci supported the CLARi-iON push relentlessly, re-engaging Dell as a CLARiiON strategic selling partner (EMC had ended CLARiiON’s old OEM relationships in the acquisition) and bolstering the CLARiiON R&D budget.

The lengthy downturn also showcased the efficient practices that DG’s survival-seasoned em-ployees, accustomed to struggling with scarce resources, had brought with them to EMC.

What we learnedFormer DGers say EMC is today a company much different from the omi-nous entity that threatened to derail their careers.

One thing EMC’s leaders learned, Joel says, is how challenging such an integration can be. “Although it’s easy for us to say we have no problem dis-rupting ourselves, it is actually a very hard thing for a company to do,” he says.

In the acquisition, EMC obtained fresh perspectives on how to architect, engineer, and manufacture products. And it learned—after enduring CLARi-iON’s pointless two-year-long accep-tance delay—how important it is to get sales teams to embrace newly acquired products.

Back then, EMC had no significant processes already in place to handle the DG acquisition. Today, it is proud to be a world-class expert in the art of integrating acquired IT firms. “If we were to do this today,” Frank notes, “we’d let an acquired company of DG’s size run independently for a while. We just didn’t know to do that back then.”

Joel says the company is “far more welcoming today to new ideas and business styles, and that’s helping us expand into new markets.”

EMC really does understand that it can’t solve every problem organically. It’s obvious: Just look at the incred-ible positive impact that the people of DG—and of all the subsequent acquisi-tions—have had. s

3 DURING THE 1999 secret negotiations, EMC and DG were code named, respectively, “Emerald” and “Dragon” by legal teams preparing the paperwork for submission to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The code names came from the letters in the two companies’ real names. The irony is that, by many standards of measurement, EMC was actually the formidable “dragon,” while Data General was the precious “emerald.”

3 IDC’S TRACKING of “Worldwide Midtier External RAID Factory Revenue” shows the incredible market-share growth trajectory the CLARiiON family of storage systems experienced after EMC purchased Data General. (source: IDC Quarterly Storage Tracker, Q1 2005)

EMC/Dell 31%

HP 26%

nn HPnn NetAppnn Hitachi

nn EMC/Dellnn IBMnn Sun

Q4 01

Q4 02

Q4 03

Q1 05

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 10 6/21/10 4:38 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 11

EMC Principal Graph-ic Designer CHUCK VEIT was DG’s Manager of Presentation Graphic Services. He remem-bers “the waiting, and the not knowing” as the worst part of the transition. “Being acquired is scary,” he says. “I had been at DG for 16 years and seen ups and downs and repeated layoffs; these took place almost annually, so all of us were always concerned about our jobs. But an acquisition was far

worse than any ‘reduc-tion in force.’”

He had joined DG in 1983 and by 1999 was managing three employees and several contractors in an over-taxed graphic depart-ment that supported the company globally. Chuck had too much work and too few re-sources, but he found the twin challenges of meeting deadlines and satisfying customers to be exciting.

Although many of his colleagues took

severance packages following the acquisi-tion, he decided to “see where this would lead.” Chuck began his new EMC job design-ing materials for EMC executives, and it took him months to adjust to having enough time and resources to per-fect his designs. Now he gets to be “the man behind the curtain,” creating slides, posters, animations, graph-ics, and other creative ventures that present EMC to the world.

After 11 years, Chuck says he still enjoys the process of “getting into our executives’ heads” to turn their ideas into informative, visually compelling graphics.

“Every day is a new challenge,” he says. “You need to listen to what they say that they want, understand what they really mean, and return something to them that is better than what they asked for. And you have to do it again and again.”

Intrapreneur STEVE TODD, an EMC Dis-tinguished Engineer, says the acquisition by EMC happened at “the right time by the right company” for him.

Steve had been working on technol-ogy tied to CLARiiON and its prototypes and predecessors since ar-riving at Data General as a college co-op stu-dent in 1986. A long-time member of the CLARiiON software

development group, Steve watched his or-ganization evolve from being “the least cool place to be at DG,” into the company’s most financially successful business unit.

After working on CLARiiON systems for so many years, includ-ing helping to create CLARiiON’s Navi-sphere management software, Steve says he was ready for new challenges.

Post-acquisition, despite living through the awkward transition period for CLARiiON engineers, Steve says he was “thrilled with the work at EMC” and the opportunities it presented to him. After six months of work-ing in the CLARiiON group, Steve left South-boro to join EMC’s Ad-vanced Development Group in Hopkinton.

“I was a storage guy, and I was working for

the number-one stor-age company on the planet. And I learned plenty,” Steve says. He also accomplished plenty, helping to cre-ate technologies in-cluding Centera Seek, StorageScope, Power-Path Data Migration Enabler, and Centera Virtual Archive.

“I’ve had a lot of freedom to collaborate with literally hundreds of brilliant people,” Steve says. “I’m happy.”

Their stories

coverstory

They are making a difference, and they are doing it as members of the EMC team. Eleven years ago, however, each of the people on these pages was part of an equally tight-knit team at fi nancially beleaguered Data General. They were facing being bought by a competitor some of them disliked and others knew little about. Here are their thoughts and recollections.

The man behind the curtain

The right time

“ I like get-ting into our executives’ heads and being able to illustrate their ideas.”

“ It happened at the right time. I was ready to take on new challenges.”

DAV

ID E

LMES

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 11 6/21/10 4:38 PM

12 EMC.now | Q2 2010

cover story | their stories

ROY POTVIN, EMC Sr. Manager of Global Payroll, had been at Data General for 21 years when he received a call about the EMC deal while sitting on a Florida beach. He was a manufacturing materials manager then, and he was on a team implementing Six Sigma at DG.

According to the DG water cooler scut-tlebutt he was hear-ing, if he were lucky enough even to be offered a job at EMC, he and his teammates wouldn’t last more than six months. “The

presumption was that there weren’t a lot of synergies,” he recalls.

On that beach, Roy told himself, “Yikes, enjoy the vacation, it may be the last for a while.”

But it turned out there were plenty of synergies for Roy. Not only did he find cul-tural similarities, but his work ethic and job skills were an excel-lent fit.

As a materials manager, he was well-versed in using Oracle materials planning and procurement modules. EMC was embarking

on a years-long project to implement Catalyst, an Oracle-centered en-terprise resource plan-ning (ERP) platform. Roy was recruited and experienced his “bap-tism by fire” at EMC.

Later, he was called upon to use his Six Sigma experience as a lead in a six-member EMC Program Man-agement Office imple-menting Six Sigma. On the advice of long-term EMCers Rick Hirko, Scott Casavant, Joe Scott, John Curran, Irina Simmons, and Ed Golitko, Roy took a role in EMC Payroll and

has climbed the ranks to oversee the em-ployee payroll process worldwide.

“EMC gave me the opportunity to change and grow,” Roy says. “The fantastic individuals I’ve have had the pleasure of working with made the transition easier. It amazes me how good EMC’s current payroll organization is, how hard-working they are, and what an honor it is to be able to lead them. The intellect level and challenge-rich atmo-sphere here are very high; I like that.”

ROYNAN JONES, VP of EMC Global External Manufacturing, led the Purchasing Supplier Quality Group at DG’s Apex, North Carolina, manufacturing facility. She found the EMC deal to be “a pleasant surprise.” Operations under DG, she says, “were, to be honest, on life support.” EMC not only spelled salvation

for the Apex site, but it had working relation-ships with many of the same suppliers that DG Manufacturing did.

While it took some time, EMC and Data General manufacturing processes eventually blended exceptionally well. Today, the facility is a showcase of high-tech manufacturing.

Roynan, who had

been with Data Gen-eral for 15 years, stayed on in her purchasing director role at EMC, and she advanced in the Global External Manufacturing Group to become a vice president this year. As Roynan summarizes things, “I like the en-ergy, winning attitude, and opportunities at EMC.”

An opportunity-rich ride

A pleasant surprise

“ The intellect level and the challenge-rich atmos-phere here are very high.”

“I like the energy and

the winning attitude at

EMC.”

t IN A CEREMONY ON JANUARY 9, 2001, EMC donated DG’s first minicomputer—the still-operational “NOVA One”—to the Computer Museum History Center in California. Data General Founder Edson de Castro, with Henry Burkhardt III and Dick Sogge, had designed the NOVA. (l. to r.): Computer Museum Trustee Sam Fuller with Ed de Castro and EMC’s Joel Schwartz.

9 DATA GENERAL ran TV campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s; here is one of the slogans that appeared at the end of several ads.

9 AT AN AUGUST 9, 1999, NEWS CONFERENCE, DG CEO Ron Skates (l.) and Mike Ruettgers announced the acquisition.

MIC

KY B

ACA

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 12 6/21/10 4:38 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 13Photograph by Jen Siska

corporate culture and integration

For an already-big technology company, strategic acquisitions are an important way to grow revenue. EMC’s purchase last year of data deduplication powerhouse Data Domain was a great case in point. But acquisitions are mainly about people.

As a standalone company, Data Domain was the paramount provider of a game-changing technology called data deduplication, used to streamline backups of the ever-growing digital universe.

Data Domain’s acquisition in 2009 amplifi ed EMC’s capabilities in this crucial area of information storage and management.

In turn, EMC’s marketplace clout and global reach helped boost Data Domain’s sales dramatically post-acquisition.

Acquisitions, however, are primarily about people. Making sure the employees of an acquired company fi t smoothly into place at EMC, and making sure that EMC adapts to the new people and capabilities it has brought on board, is both an art and a science.

SEAN LAMB : “It was exciting to be around here when EMC finally ended up acquiring us, but there was still trepidation.”

Out of many,one

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01_r1.indd 13 6/22/10 3:33 PM

14 EMC.now | Q2 2010

Getting this right (dozens of times now) has helped EMC maintain and enhance its leadership position in the world of IT.

But with the Data Domain acquisition, things were more convoluted than usual. And, it wasn’t long before the stakes got very high indeed.

Tug of warThe challenges that come with any major acquisi-tion can be significant. In this case, not only was EMC trying to buy an active, thriving competitor, but also, long-time storage rival NetApp was trying to purchase Data Domain for itself.

The very public nature of this battle for a gem of the IT world was complicating the process and prompting a spectator-sport mentality at tech-nology and business news outlets and across the blogosphere.

Some media reports asserted that the East Coast corporate culture EMC allegedly embodied would be incompatible with Data Domain’s Silicon Valley DNA.

A year later, though, it’s clear that a cultural merger between EMC and Data Domain has been achieved with surprisingly few glitches. The re-sults are better than many people—including some people very directly affected by the situation—had predicted.

Rumors and realitySean Lamb handles customer-reference responsi-bilities as a member of EMC Data Domain’s mar-keting group, which reports up to EMC’s Informa-tion Infrastructure Products organization. He says

he was worried about what the ac-quisition would mean for him. “Data Domain had been clipping along,” he recalls. “We were doing very, very well in the storage dedupe market. It was a rapidly growing technology area. When both EMC and NetApp were looking at us, it quickly became an emotional roller-coaster for us employees.”

When that ride ended with a vic-tory by EMC, things felt relatively better. “It was exciting to be around here when EMC finally ended up acquiring us,” Sean says. “But there was still trepidation.” Initial concerns over job security and questions about working styles plagued him and oth-er Data Domain employees.

But for the most part, the integra-tion has been different—and easier—than what he envisioned.

“We were all hearing the fuss being made at the time about ‘East Coast versus West Coast’ differences.

I still have not found them yet,” Sean says. Instead, he found Data Domain’s and EMC’s cultures to be similar. “Both cultures are very driven. We’d heard rumors that EMC was ‘buttoned down,’ but from what I observe, that characteristic actually only manifests itself in how intensely EMC people focus on what they want to accomplish. And, again, that’s very similar to Data Domain,” he says.

Still, there have been changes. Since starting work at Data Domain in September 2008, almost a year prior to the acquisition, Sean had been work-ing with customers to help them evangelize dedu-plication technology at their companies and articu-late its benefits. “Now that all of EMC is involved,” Sean says, “I’ve noticed my meetings are much larger. At Data Domain, we sat with a few people in a room and hashed out something. Now we often have several times that number in the room, plus additional people participating by phone. It has been an eye opener. It also speaks to the massive resources of EMC.”

More people in a meeting often equates to more steps to accomplish a project. And, truthfully, if Sean is creating a customer profile now, he must think broadly not only about the profile’s content, but also about who at EMC should review it. “The list has grown, and that introduces the usual tacti-cal problems. But at the end of the day, when more people are interested, I end up with a better cus-tomer profile with a broader spectrum of insights,” he says.

On the whole, Sean says, EMC made the transi-tion easy for the people of Data Domain, in part by giving them access to additional resources. He says,

9 EMC USED ITS strong balance sheet to acquire four innovative growth companies in 2009, most notably Data Domain, whose deduplication technology identifies redundant files and data as they are being stored, providing a storage footprint that is 10 to 30 times smaller, on average, than the original dataset. Data Domain became the foundation of a new high-growth information infrastructure product division at EMC called Backup Recovery Systems (BRS). In the BRS division, Data Domain and Avamar each grew more than 100% as of Q110. (Although EMC purchased Data Domain in July 2009, this is a year-over-year comparison that assumes Data Domain had been acquired on January 1, 2009, and incorporates revenue reported by Data Domain during the period from January 1, 2009 through the date of its acquisition by EMC.)

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 14 6/21/10 4:38 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 15

“There was a lot of help available to us after we learned to maneuver around EMC and make use of its processes.”

An acquisition is different for everyoneA similar tale of initial concern followed by re-lief, then real enthusiasm, comes from Principal Systems Engineer Devin Hamilton. Back in 2005, Devin, who is based in Washington state, became the twelfth sales engineer hired at Data Domain. He remembers that the company’s global sales force was so small in those days, everyone fit into one group photo.

Today he says, “An acquisition experience is dif-ferent for everyone. It might seem extremely trau-matic to people who had never before been caught up in a tech buyout or lived through an IPO. That’s absolutely reasonable; so much change is going on. But for the folks here who have been around this industry for years, the possibility of acquisition was always present.”

The fears people expressed early on never re-ally materialized, and Devin reports that the EMC teams he now works with are very professional. Being a part of EMC has had an impact on his work efforts.

“When I started at Data Domain in 2005, my territory consisted of two customer accounts and three deployed systems. It was pure startup mode; we were given our sales tools and sent out to ‘con-quer and have a good time.’”

Their work brought results. By the time Data Domain went public in 2007, two years before the acquisition, Devin’s region consisted of more than 200 customers running 400 dedupe appliances. Today, he focuses on eight of EMC Data Domain’s most prominent, well-known enterprise accounts.

From Devin’s perspective, EMC changed Data Domain in two ways, both of them positive.

First, he has a larger bag of offerings to solve customers’ problems, and that’s handy. “Our tech-nology is dynamic and appropriate for many chal-lenges, but in a number of deployments, I’ve found that my customer requires other solutions in addi-tion to deduplication. I now have answers to basi-cally anything they may ask me for,” he says.

Second, being a part of EMC has been “sort of like signing up a giant, hugely proactive reseller,” Devin says. Pre-acquisition, Devin and one sales as-sociate covered his whole territory. Now they pro-vide their technical selling support to six different sales teams. “From a lead-generation perspective, we could not have asked for a better boost,” he says. “We have all kinds of new opportunities in environ-ments we had never tapped.”

The expanded sales teams are in the field, teeing up possible dedupe opportunities as they provide core storage product implementations. As a result of this accelerant, Devin is today penetrating ac-

counts he’d spent years trying to crack.“These days, I work with EMC people every

day,” he reports. “And it is great. One of the best, most helpful things that happened to me from an integration standpoint is that an EMC person manages the team I’m on now. I just call to ask any question I have about EMC’s systems or software; I don’t have to hunt for answers. The core EMC folks we interact with are just as motivated as we are. It has been a great fit.”

The only thing Devin has found somewhat hard to get used to involves product demonstrations. “We used to have our own regional lab that we’d access remotely to conduct demos,” he explains. The process was especially useful in isolated areas where Devin could still connect to the lab via Data Domain’s virtual private network.

EMC IT security policy restricts the access, so he has had to leverage resources out of corporate instead. It’s the kind of thing that can lead to fric-tion. But Devin accepts the situation philosophi-cally, regarding it as just a part of doing business within a big corporation.

Secrets to success“Differences of opinion may arise on occasion; that’s expected,” says Frank Slootman, former Data Domain CEO and now President of the EMC Back-up Recovery Systems division. “However, when you look from 90,000 feet at how this integration has unfolded, you see it has clearly gone extraordinari-ly well. The amount of revenue acceleration has been unbelievable. This company’s dedupe busi-ness has essentially doubled in size already.”

One reason the integration has gone well is that the two companies are equally serious about the pursuit of new business. Says Frank, “There is no fundamental argument about that.”

Another helper came from EMC’s communica-tion platforms. Polly Pearson, VP of Employment, Brand, and Strategy Engagement, notes that ZDNet and Harvard Business School have concluded that EMC uses some of the best social media prac-tices of any FORTUNE 500 firm. “Our internal EMC|ONE platform in particular helps us invert the old command-and-control management ap-proach and implode communication silos,” she says.

Devin says that as he and his colleagues have moved deeper into EMC, they have found many good people working throughout the company and established “a lot of first-rate, fast-growth-focused relationships.” He adds, “It helps that EMC had ac-quired many companies before ours. I feel that I’m working within a heterogeneous culture composed of many technologies, many regions, and many business practices, all trying really hard to move in synch. From what I see, EMC’s experience inte-grating companies definitely paid off for us.” s

One reason that the integration has gone well is that the two companies are equally serious about pursuing new business.

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 15 6/21/10 4:38 PM

16 EMC.now | Q2 2010

Olympic figure skaters don’t win gold if their jumps are excellent but their footwork and spins are me-diocre. Delivering gold-medal services to customers requires a similar act of com-plete cho-reography. At EMC, “Manage-ment by Metrics” is aiding this effort.

total customerexperience

No matter how good you are, you won’t make it to the winner’s circle if you don’t get everything right. That’s why the EMC Global Services orga-nization has been expanding its business intelligence capabili-ties.

Business intelligence—gained through consistent data collection and analysis—is how Global Services maintains and extends its top-ranked service position in the IT world. Global Services teams are checking with customers to make sure EMC is addressing what the customers care about. They are measuring and monitoring these relationships continually.

Gathering and using in-formation about customers, products, and processes to make service-delivery decisions isn’t a new concept. What is new is how this program, called Man-agement by Metrics, is helping EMC Global Services to collect and analyze data more consis-tently, then to act on that data to make improvements.

EMC receives about 1.4 mil-lion service requests annually via voice, web, and automated phone-home alert. Analyzing what prompts these service requests and tracking when and how they are resolved is crucial.

It’s also complicated. EMC’s support infrastructure today contains products from dozens

of acquisitions. Global Services teams are challenged by the sheer number, rapid growth, and breadth of the offerings. Just putting someone on a plane to go fix arrays is not logistically realistic anymore.

Not only were dozens of acquisitions resulting in a huge influx of products needing sup-port, but also, many individual product-dedicated business units were the ones tasked with delivering the support.

The process was disjointed. The whole situation simply wasn’t working well anymore. For the people of Global Servic-es, providing consistently good service, regardless of product or region, was beginning to feel as

if they’d expanded from manag-ing one Olympic team to man-aging 25 of them.

The Management by Metrics programIn the past, when various EMC groups gathered information about service delivery, each group would use its own termi-nology. Global Services, then, had to interpret all the incom-ing service-related information differently. It was difficult to collate and share information, much less use it to make appro-priate process improvements.

The Management by Metrics program was born in the form of a monthly review of key per-formance indicators (KPIs). A

Going for the

in services

g ld

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 16 6/21/10 4:38 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 17

“dashboard” system for deliver-ing that data soon followed. The dashboards let Global Services managers parse the data and review specific sets of measure-ments continuously or periodi-cally.

SVP Tony Kolish, who over-sees all of EMC’s Customer Support Services, recalls, “For a while at first, different busi-ness groups still ran their own dashboards, and people kept disagreeing about which one was right.” Tony instituted a policy to make just one dashboard official. Global Services would develop it, and it would be the only one referenced in reviews.

Getting to that “one version of the truth” wasn’t easy. Stake-holders repeatedly identified perceived problems with the information the new dashboard provided. Tony and his team kept revising, adjusting, and making the system work. Eventually, ev-eryone united around the Man-agement by Metrics process.

Management by Metrics helps EMC’s service professionals take proactive, pre-emptive action when possible. And it helps them greatly in making fact-based assessments of service perfor-mance because it brings to light the perspectives of customers and internal stakeholders.

Tony says, “Management by Metrics has replaced a collection of anecdotes with a service cul-ture based on solid facts.”

Management by Metrics made a big difference for Gordon Winters, Sr. Director of World-wide Technical Support for EMC Disk Library. That product has been available since April 2004, and Gordon’s team was witness-ing product-maturity issues gen-erating service calls.

“At first, we simply deployed more people to solve immediate problems,” Gordon says. “But as time went on, the Management by Metrics business intelligence data helped us understand the

problems better and deploy staff more efficiently. We could es-tablish priorities by zeroing-in on customer expectations, and things like our time-to-respond numbers and overall service-level objectives.”

The business intelligence data also revealed that Global Services could be more effective when reaching out to Engineer-ing during an incident escalation. “We weren’t getting to them fast enough and weren’t helping them really understand what we were doing and why,” Gordon explains.

The Management by Metrics dashboard documents specific problems and reveals problem patterns. That sets the stage for

genuine teamwork. Gordon says, “With the new kinds of data we’re seeing, we clarify what kind of Engineering support we need quickly, and we escalate issues to the appropriate people faster. It has been truly transfor-mational.”

Seeing through a customer’s eyesAlthough far more complex and sophisticated, EMC’s overall ap-proach to service is to some ex-tent comparable to the approach used by cable television compa-nies. It’s a tiered methodology ranging from online self-help for simple issues, to a call center with operators who can solve more thorny troubles, to field service specialists who travel to solve the most complicated problems. (Although make no mistake: EMC’s service profes-sionals aren’t “cable guys.” They are skilled experts in some of the

world’s most advanced and chal-lenging technical specialties.)

What EMC is doing differ-ently now, explains Frank Cole-man, Director of Operations for Customer Service, is focusing itself even more actively on the customer’s viewpoint. Specifi-cally, it is refining its metrics to ensure that EMC’s customer service processes really do meet that customer’s needs.

“If a customer has a service complaint, we evaluate it and validate the concerns right away, and we determine if it’s a one-off event or a full-blown trend,” Frank says. “The point is to concentrate on the important things.”

Customer Support Services

used to look only at how long a case sat in its service queue when measuring its “initial re-sponse” metric. Now the organi-zation is measuring things more specifically (for example, quan-tifying exactly how long it took to call that customer back). They want to see things through the customer’s eyes, and Manage-ment by Metrics has given them a whole new set of measure-ments of that customer’s view-point on progress being made.

“This is something that can help us to achieve continuous improvement on the business as well as the metrics,” Frank be-lieves. “As the business changes, so do the metrics: The metrics evolve with the business and ac-cording to customer feedback.”

For 2010, the focus is on using Management by Metrics to im-prove what’s known as “time-to-relief” even further, scrutinizing more deeply the speed at which

When a field service team figures out a good way to fix a particular problem, that resolution is easier to identify now. And the fix that the team finds is easier to roll-out to all of EMC Global Services.

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 17 6/21/10 4:38 PM

18 EMC.now | Q2 2010

Customer Support Services solves customers’ problems.

Management by Metrics boils down to gathering just one set of consistent metrics across field support and remote support, and across product families, busi-ness units, and geographies. It’s a comprehensive view of all of EMC’s support interactions for all products owned by a particu-lar customer and installed across all that customer’s locations worldwide.

It’s also fairly flexible. The dashboard has turned out to be adaptable in providing details to support the decisions that people in the Global Services organiza-tion must make.

Management by Metrics also promotes service innovation. Specifically, when a field service team figures out a good way to fix a particular problem, their solution is easier to identify through the metrics now. And the fix that they found is easier to roll-out to all of Global Ser-vices.

The system’s dashboards dis-play plenty of information: ser-vice demand levels for individual products, alignment with cus-tomer satisfaction survey results, comparisons with industry-standard support metrics, and so on. Global Services managers conduct monthly reviews of the

dashboards by product, region, business unit, and other parameters. They make sure the metrics they have are the right ones to collect, and that results are trending in the right direc-tion.

All of EMC’s big, global accounts have customized dashboards, and Global Services creates other individual customer dash-boards as needed.

One of the most innova-tive features of Manage-ment by Metrics is its early warning system. By pro-

actively monitoring customer-specific data, it will predict the likelihood of escalation for a service issue and will trigger the necessary intervention proac-tively. This capability definitely keeps customers happier and reduces costs for EMC.

Looking goodEMC regularly compares itself against industry benchmarks and finds that its service quality exceeds benchmarks in many ar-eas measured by the Technology Services Industry Association. (TSIA is an influential organiza-tion formerly known as the Ser-vice and Support Professionals Association, or SSPA.)

EMC Support Center opera-tions also undergo an annual Ser-vice Capability & Performance (SCP) audit. In 2009, EMC once again exceeded that audit’s com-pliance requirements as well as the SCP community’s bench-marked average.

The industry analyst commu-nity has been taking notice. EMC received a “Strong Positive” rat-ing in last year’s Gartner report MarketScope for Storage Services, North America, 2009. Of the 11 vendors evaluated for that re-port, EMC received the highest possible rating and was one of only two companies to do so.

And on May 5, at the Technol-

ogy Services World Conference in Santa Clara, California, TSIA presented its prestigious 2010 STAR Award for “Best Use of Metrics & Business Intelligence” to the EMC Global Services Management by Metrics initia-tive.

Another long-term plus: Management by Metrics is help-ing to support a global training and mentoring strategy at EMC. “We’ve been able to train more of our colleagues in India, China, and Ireland in the use of these metric tools,” says Bill Foniri, Sr. Director of Finance and Business Operations for EMC Global Cus-tomer Service.

Frank says, “Management by Metrics is becoming what I call a ‘plug in’ system, so, as EMC acquires companies or adds new products into the offering set, we’re plugging the products di-rectly into the service-measure-ment system at the same time.”

Global Services managers know they still have more work to do regarding time-to-resolu-tion and how they interact with Engineering to enhance quality. “But from a service-delivery standpoint, based on the custom-er satisfaction numbers we’re seeing, we’ve already achieved some tremendous accomplish-ments,” Bill says.

Once, too few people really knew where the information used to measure service suc-cess came from. And they didn’t know if they were seeing a com-plete picture. Now, there are no “secrets.” Says Tony, “We have consolidated around one source of truth. This is vitally important to us. Having fact-based assess-ments enables us to be more transparent, and it is profoundly changing the dynamics of how we relate to customers and stake-holders.”

The end result should be higher, more consistent scores worldwide that translate into “marketplace gold.” s

In Gartner’s MarketScope

for Storage Services, North America, 2009, analysts Adam

Couture and Bob Passmore

wrote, “EMC has put consider-

able capital and effort into

technologies to identify the

controllable touchpoints of

customer satis-faction.”

going for the gold

R AT I N G

Strong Negative Caution Promising Positive Strong

Positive

Brocade H

CSC H

Dell H

EMC H

Hitachi H

HP H

IBM H

NetApp H

Sun H

Symantec H

Unisys H

SOU

RC

E: G

ART

NER

, AU

GU

ST 2

0, 2

009

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 18 6/21/10 4:38 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 19

total customerexperience

A virtual boonto EMC Global Services

How many times this year have you heard, read, or used the word “virtual”? Well, you’re going to read it again, but this time, in a context rather different from the norm.

In the past year, EMC has been increas-ing its commitment to Virtual Services Deliv-ery, or VSD. This is not a technique for storage

or server virtualization. Rather, it is a technique for providing services to a customer by blend-ing together and deliv-ering help that comes from both onsite and offsite EMC experts.

A services team from EMC Global Services creates each custom support plan, consulting project, and implementation plan.

They assemble appro-priate onsite people and remote people and resources located around the world.

It’s a classic win-win situation. Cus-tomers gain access to a larger reservoir of EMC service talent for less money. EMC, meanwhile, makes more efficient use of its service experts and re-

sources company-wide.For EMC Customer

Support Services SVP Tony Kolish, imple-menting VSD was a “no-brainer.”

During a business trip two years ago to Bangalore, India, he had an “ah-ha” mo-ment. On his way to EMC’s offices, he gazed up at the long rows of gleaming office build-

BY THE NUMBERS During Q110, the EMC TSS global Virtual Services Delivery team steadily increased the number of hours it was allocating to customer projects. It ended the quarter with 18,582 hours of services delivered, an increase of 27% from the prior quarter, surpassing the team’s worldwide goal.

EMC Virtual Services Delivery

t EMC GLOBAL SERVICES ASSOCIATES at the Giza Necropolis on the outskirts of Cairo. These EMC Egypt COE employees are among the participants in the joint program between TSS and CSS.

,

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01_r1.indd 19 6/22/10 1:16 PM

20 EMC.now | Q2 2010

ings housing large-scale cus-tomer services operations for IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and other high-tech giants. “I thought about how far the IT industry has come in Bangalore and in cities like it around the world,” Tony says. “I thought about how the service skills of the people in these cities have become so advanced. Then I had the feeling EMC was somewhat exposed.”

Large IT corporations, including some EMC com-petitors, were using the great talent present in Ban-galore to deliver services remotely to their customers across the globe. The com-petition had dug in aggres-sively, taking advantage of Bangalore’s vast pool of IT services expertise.

Tony says, “We were not as far along as those other companies, which meant we couldn’t offer the pricing efficiencies for IT service engagements that they were offering. If we didn’t close the gap, we’d be unable to compete effectively.”

One global teamEMC was a little late to the

party, but it was definitely in a good position to be knock-ing at the door. The com-pany’s Centers of Excellence

VSD BOOSTS A TEAM TO THE TOP

Like the universe, the AT&T U-verse project is huge and constantly expanding. Since December 2004, a team from EMC has been helping AT&T deliver a better tele-vision experience than cable and enhance phone, video, and high-speed Internet interfaces.

In those years, the EMC team has been one of dozens of AT&T partners working to keep up with the many new technology releases and the 25 interfaces requiring maintenance.

In early 2009, AT&T signaled it was looking for more cost effi ciency than its then-primary project vendor, a global communications software/services fi rm, could provide.

EMC was ready to help. “By moving some of our work to seven people in Bangalore, we were able to offer AT&T better rates for the same work,” says EMC Account Partner Mike Souder, who supervises the relationship.

That ability ultimately prompted AT&T to name EMC as the new U-verse prime vendor.

“The miracle was that there was no delay in the transition, considering the magnitude of this project,” says Nabil Twyman, EMC Lead Analyst. “Team-building is something we do really well, and that made all the difference.”

So where does the project stand with EMC sitting atop the team? “The customer just renewed. They love us,” Nabil says.

9EGYPT This team of EMC customer service technicians are part of EMC Global Services. Based at the new EMC Cairo Center of Excellence, they are part of a close-knit yet worldwide community of employees dedicated to providing great support to EMC customers.

(COEs) and other centers around the world are home to an impressive, constantly growing pool of technical, customer support, and op-erational talent—people who are steeped in EMC technol-ogy.

This is global-scale ser-vice delivery, not outsourc-ing. Says Tony, “We began building out the Virtual Services Delivery program with EMC employees. We have a great ecosystem of technical support inside our COEs. It made sense to con-nect VSD to that existing ecosystem; our company has such a proud legacy of sup-port. We did not want to risk inserting lots of outsourced service workers who might not fully understand that legacy.”

Christine Lundberg, EMC Sr. Customer Support

Manager, reports that teams of customer service techni-cians in Hopkinton, Cairo, Germany, and in Pune in In-dia, are now working togeth-er to deliver service virtually and are helping each other sharpen their technical and managerial skills.

“I think this is also stretching our own capabili-ties as managers,” she says. “When you’re working with someone remotely, you have to focus a little more on team building and on sharp-ening your people-manage-ment skills.”

Some benefitsThe VSD process sig-nificantly reduces response time, eliminates service-request delays, and ensures that the right resources are supporting the customer.

Judy Capra, Sr. Director of the Global CSS Ionix and CST organizations, says, “Every minute we save is a minute we can give back to the customer and to our team of customer service technicians.”

Instead of having to ask for information, a customer service technician (CST) spends his or her time offer-ing higher-value assistance such as collecting logs for the customer.

Algorithms then assign and route an incoming ser-vice call to the most appro-priate queue. In some cases, an engagement might be all onsite, all remote, or some combination.

The VSD model helps customers by reducing their onsite service expenses, and it allows EMC to schedule services to better meet a customer’s needs—for ex-ample, scheduling a process to occur at night or on a weekend to minimize down-time, or to start a process sooner remotely instead of having to wait until an ap-

virtual services

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 20 6/21/10 4:38 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 21

propriate onsite resource becomes available to visit the customer.

Right people, right place, right timeEMC Presales team mem-bers formulate a custom plan; they have access to EMC Technology Solutions & Support (TSS) and EMC Consulting teams all over the world. That helps them build a plan with a perfect blend of talent and service approaches. And the fact that the remote service teams are stationed globally results in a faster service re-sponse to customers operat-ing in faraway locales.

John Salerno, Operations Director for the EMC New York/New Jersey Enterprise Division, notes that complex

service projects are espe-cially well-suited to the VSD process. In fact, “the area where a blended service model probably makes the most sense,” he says, “is with these long, complex projects where the customer and the EMC team have a chance to get comfortable with each other and with the blended service-delivery model.”

Many customers in John’s region already are quite comfortable with VSD. One of them, a global financial institution, specifi-cally requested that remote service delivery from EMC be included. John says, “To a customer like this, competi-tive pricing and value really matter. A service mix incor-porating some remote ser-vices offers them the value

they’re looking for.” “VSD represents an

incredible opportunity for us to provide a great Total Customer Experience,” says ML Krakauer, SVP of EMC Technology Solutions & Services, Storage Managed Services, and Presales. “In many parts of the world, we previously didn’t have the ‘critical mass’ of personnel to support our full portfo-lio of products. With VSD, we’ve gained that critical mass. VSD gives a tremen-dous boost to our service capabilities for customers operating in Africa and the Middle East, for instance,” she says.

Ian Arthur, Director, EMEA Global Sourcing & COE Egypt TSS, is familiar with what customers in those parts of the world need from EMC. “Sure, we all know the importance of managing costs,” he says, “but VSD also allows us to assist in our resource-management journey to get the right person in the right place at the right time. We haven’t always been able to do that in some parts of the world.”

Coming from behind to winThe gap between early ar-rivals to the VSD party and EMC is closing. In Q110, the company’s total global hours allocated to VSD projects in-creased by 27% over Q409.

Customer AT&T consid-

ers it vitally important that EMC construct a team to deliver a blend of onsite and remote services. When seven EMC Consulting employees in Bangalore joined together to provide the remote EMC Consulting VSD services for an AT&T project in the U.S. (see side-bar), Nabil Twyman, EMC Lead Analyst on the proj-ect, wanted to ensure that a possibly sharp learning curve and lack of personal relationships with the onsite EMC Global Services staff wouldn’t delay anything. “So, some of us on the team made the trip to Bangalore to speed up the knowledge transfer and relationship building,” Nabil says. “We’ve built a strong team that is achieving real success.”

EMC is now competing on its own terms. “First, we had to emphasize VSD simply to close the gap with competitors,” says Tom Rol-off, SVP of EMC Consulting. “As we accelerate the shift, we’re using the quality of our work and our talent to add service offerings, deliv-ered virtually, that competi-tors just don’t have.” s

9INDIA: A majority of the EMC Global Services team pose in front of the EMC Center of Excellence in Bangalore, India. This group includes employees representing EMC Customer Support Services, EMC Consulting, EMC Technology Solutions & Support, EMC Presales, and the EMC Residency Program.

STARTING THE PROCESS

When a customer needs service help—to migrate data, architect a backup platform, build a private cloud, and so on—an EMC Presales team member fi rst submits a Global Services Engagement Request Form. The standardized form, available in the Forms section of Outlook, is a valuable assessment tool, says Bangalore-based Madhulika Karan, Sr. VSD Program Manager. “That form, by itself, has been a huge step forward in giving us the information we need to bring in the right services,” she says.

The form automatically routes to EMC’s TSS VSD team in Bangalore. It provides the information that TSS needs to blend service delivery properly, including the customer’s products, location, type of call, and fi rst contact point.

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 21 6/21/10 4:38 PM

22 EMC.now | Q2 2010

The records of a little girl’s visit to the doctor today will become part of her lifelong digital med-ical history. But decades from now, the healthcare environment will be quite different.

Your home mortgage may take 30 years to pay off, but that data also will exist on a digital archive well beyond the loan’s expiration.

These days, all sorts of transactions live for decades, and the organizations handling them may operate across multiple regions or countries. Healthcare networks, banks, and many other en-terprises are contending with an onslaught of dig-ital information that will need years of protection while remaining accessible across sometimes-considerable distances.

Fortunately, a new EMC Centera layered soft-

ware offering is taking significant steps toward using virtualization to meet these types of long-term, long-distance archiving demands.

Unveiled in December 2009, the offering, called Centera Virtual Archive, enables customers to federate, or meld together, a collection of phys-ical Centera systems, then manage them as one.

Centera Virtual Archive 1.0 layers on top of Centera CentraStar firmware. It clusters together the multiple physical systems into the single tam-per-proof, campus-wide Centera Virtual Archive.

This product lets users manage four Centera clusters as one; it lets them use two-terabyte drives in their nodes, and it lets them deploy the hardware in a manner that achieves maximum space and power efficiency.

new technology

Centera Virtual Archive will help to redefine the data center

5 Archiving across the pond

EMC Corporate Systems Engi-neer Zeeshan Khan talks about the bright future of Cen-tera Virtual Ar-chive. The floor demonstration in the Technol-ogy Pavilion at EMC World 2010 in Boston represented a Centera system “in London” and another unit (rear) “in New York.” The setup simulates how EMC Centera Virtual Archive tech-nology will meld two physical Centera systems located in two faraway cities, creating one virtual archive.

time and space

ConqueringJU

STIN

KN

IGH

T

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 22 6/21/10 4:38 PM

Q2 2010 | EMC.now 23

The first-generation software is designed to deploy a virtual archive across a campus of data centers operating on one local area network (LAN). It is expected that upcoming versions will enable customers to create virtual archives across wide area networks (WANs) spanning thousands of miles.

That will be a truly significant IT break-through; however, Centera Product Marketing Manager Steve Spataro says Centera Virtual Ar-chive 1.0 is already groundbreaking. “People are talking about virtual storage. For data archives, Centera Virtual Archive is delivering.”

Centera CTO Mark O’Connell, the technolo-gy’s chief architect, believes these virtual archives will help customers meet the size, scope, and scale of where archiving is going. “Centera Virtual Archive aligns with the trend we’re seeing: more and more content being digitized—government documents, medical and financial records—your life since you were born,” he says.

Changing needsCentera content addressed storage (CAS), more commonly referred to as object-based storage, provides “digital fingerprinting” that ensures an original stored record hasn’t been altered. When EMC Centera, the world’s first CAS system, surged onto the scene in 2002, customers chose it over tape or optical storage because they wanted faster information access, more reliability, and a better total cost of ownership from their archives of unchanging or infrequently changing informa-tion (such as their e-mails, mortgage records, legal documents, or medical records).

Until now, though, if a hospital, bank, court district, or police department was archiving data to several physical Centera units, they couldn’t link those archives to each other.

Furthermore, if customers wanted to install additional access nodes or storage nodes within their existing Centera units, they also had to upgrade the boxes to the latest version of the Centera CentraStar operating system. That re-quirement contradicted EMC’s goal of allowing Centera customers to “set it and forget it.”

A Centera Virtual Archive solves those issues, clustering the systems regardless of which Cen-traStar version is running. That makes capacity upgrades easy. A virtual archive could conceiv-ably handle “practically unlimited expansion, including expansion over decades,” according to Peter Thayer, Sr. Director of Product Marketing in EMC’s Unified Storage organization. “Custom-ers want to know that their data will be retriev-able always.”

Steve adds, “The old technology would meld with the new technology. Don’t be surprised if

someday you come across a vintage 2005 Centera, a vintage 2010 Centera, and a vintage 2015 Cen-tera all working as one archive.”

Up next: Erasing geographic boundariesMany organizations have multiple physical loca-tions. For example, a healthcare consortium may operate three specialty clinics spread across one large medical office park, with each clinic ar-chiving its own patients’ records.

Right now, Virtual Archive 1.0 allows doctors working at any of the three clinics to tap simul-taneously into the archives sitting in all three clinics’ data centers, spread across the office park, connected by the LAN.

Soon, we’ll see international organizations cre-ating virtual archives that span the globe. In fact, it’s possible to purchase this solution right now via the submission of a Request for Price Quota-tion, known as an RPQ.

EMC Centera Engineering already has built and deployed a virtual archive test-bed that con-nects Russia, India, and the United States. In the Technology Pavilion at EMC World 2010, EMC demonstrated to customers a similar long-distance configuration connecting an archive in London with an archive in New York (see photo).

The long-distance capability will open up new use cases for Centera, Peter says. For instance, a Japanese bank may want to share certain ar-chived data across all of its German branches with its other European Union locations, yet share different archival data with its Tokyo head-quarters.

And, in China, healthcare facilities in metro-politan areas that are undergoing tremendous growth will need their digital medical records to be connected across thousands of miles.

Centera Virtual Archive has the potential to serve so many kinds of customers—from 25-bed local hospitals or community banks, to the world’s biggest international financial giants.

Being able to link data archives across the globe and use a single interface to manage them all will be “nirvana” to archive applications that require physical flexibility, says Bob Thibault, VP of Centera Global Engineering.

Already, Centera Virtual Archive 1.0 is a big help to customers on their journey to the private cloud. A virtual archive purpose-built to protect an organization’s unchanging data provides easy management and flexibility right where a custom-er needs it. And the assurance of content authen-ticity—always Centera’s hallmark—remains as big a selling point as ever. This virtualization technol-ogy extends EMC’s already solid leadership in the object-based storage segment and enhances Centera’s value to customers. s

A new EMC Centera offering is taking signifi cant steps to meet the demands of long-term, long-distance archiving.

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 23 6/21/10 4:39 PM

24 EMC.now | Q2 2010

corporatesustainability

There could hardly be a better observer of the culture of EMC North Carolina than Quality Manager Tim Fasolt, who’s worked there since 1979. And, according to Tim, “We’ve al-ways had a tradition of environmental awareness around here.”

Recently, the North Carolina De-partment of Environment and Natu-ral Resources (NCDENR) formally acknowledged that dedication. The agency named the EMC Apex manu-facturing facility a 2009 Environmen-tal Steward.

Environmental Stewards are orga-nizations that demonstrate leadership through a commitment to exemplary environmental performance beyond what is required by regulation. Says Tim, “It’s great to get this recognition for the hard work everyone has done.”

What the employees improvedEMCers at Apex love a challenge. They responded immediately when the site’s senior leaders decided to seek a Stew-ardship designation.

Bob Hawkins, VP of North Carolina Operations, appointed Tim “green czar,” asking him to work with the Facilities team and other groups to examine what Apex people were doing. Together, they uncovered opportuni-ties for improvements.

Tim says, “A nice thing about the NCDENR Environmental Stewardship Initiative is that the program assesses measurable progress. We’d always been committed to reducing waste and didn’t have a lot to clean up, but we could improve some areas,” such as:• REDUCING ELECTRICITY USE. Reduction achieved: 30% from 2006 to 2010.• REDUCING THE SITE’S CARBON FOOTPRINT by decreasing business travel/commuting and promoting videoconferencing and flexible work schedules. Fuel-use reduc-tion achieved: 84% from 2007 to 2009.

• REDUCING WATER USE. Reduction achieved: 13% from 2006 to 2008. (Slightly more water was needed in 2H09 to irrigate 2.6 acres of newly re-covered green space.)• INCREASING RECYCLING rather than sending material to landfills. Recycling increase achieved: 345% from 2006 to 2010. • REDUCING PAPER USE. Reduction achieved: 43% from 2008 to 2009.

Bob Hawkins says, “We appreciate how important environmental sus-tainability is, and we intend to keep reducing our impact, both within our community and throughout our supply chain.”

More to celebrateIn June, EMC Apex should pass the final audit certifying its compliance with Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series (OHSAS) 18001—the internationally recognized specifica-tion for occupational health and safety management systems.

Bryan Murray, EMC Sr. Health & Safety Engineer for the Americas, says, “At that point, all our big manufactur-ing facilities—Franklin, Cork, and Apex—will be certified. We’re showing our customers and our communities how much we care about following health and safety standards.” Bryan and his team have analyzed 160 processes to identify possible sources of injury before anything happens. He says, “It’s the best way to ensure our people stay safe.” s

At EMC Apex, an award makes Earth Day even more meaningful

Thanks to a team effort, EMC Apex now holds the highest level possible in North Carolina’s DENR Environmental Stewardship Initiative.

Environmentally focused employees of EMC North Carolina had extra reason

to celebrate this year

ALWAYS-GREENER BANGALORE

Nearly 9,000 miles from North Carolina, the sustainability superstars at the India Center of Excellence in Bangalore keep fi nding more and more ways to reduce and recycle.

Employees wrote a custom car-pooling application to help commuters fi nd coworkers with similar interests who live nearby. Within days, more than 100 people registered.

In March, staffers refurbished 20 laptops and donated them to Youth for Seva, a Bangalore-based nonprofi t dedicated to inspiring young people to volunteer.

The whole COE participated in Earth Hour 2010: After ensuring operations wouldn’t be affected, they doused lights in all areas for two evening hours.

EMC.nowQ2_2010.01.indd 24 6/21/10 4:39 PM