Welcome to 2015!

Well - the year is of to a quick start.  I hope you all had a GREAT holiday with your friends and family, and are as energized as I am :-)

In the spirit of transparency, I want to share publicly the "welcome to 2015" email I sent to the internal EMC SE community.  Only slightly edited to keep some confidential info out - but the bulk of it (including all the spirit) is contained within.

If you want to see the inside of communications within EMC (at least what I say :-), read on after the break!

My EMC Brothers and Sisters, welcome to 2015!  Together, with our colleagues at VMware, Pivotal, RSA and IIG, as well as our key technology and GTM partners, we really changed the world in our own way in 2014, delighting customers everywhere.

THANK YOU!

In the beginning of 2014 I noted that "the external changes in the market will continue to accelerate, and will continue to challenge us as a company, and as a team to adapt and evolve.  It's the time to be audacious, not incremental."

The audacious things I saw through 2014 inspired and energized me! 

The veteran EMC'ers coaching and mentoring our newbies, and in turn finding new gears as those same new EMC'ers taught them new things.  Account SE's leading the over-arching architectural transformation for our customers.  I saw specialist SEs partnering with the Account SEs to put flesh on the bones of those proposals by bringing the necessary "401" technology and solution depth.  Our Alliance/SI, SP, and Partner SEs bringing together the ecosystem to make the solution for each customer ultimately happen. 

. And we did it while undergoing a ton of change.  Think of the tighter alignment of the DPAD and Isilon Specialists, and the cluster Specialty SE leadership structure as a whole.  Think of the rollout of the Minors program.  Think of the hundreds of new SEs in the team, the new leaders, the people who were promoted or moved into other roles.

This showed up in our Great Places to Work survey results - thank you for making your voice heard loudly!  EMC Presales had a 94% response rate in 2014 vs. 88% in 2013 - which means a total of 801 more people made their voice heard.  Your feedback (good/bad/ugly) is very valuable for the whole leadership team.  EMC Presales improved in 45 areas, stayed flat in 11, and decreased in 2.  We will continue to strive to keep improving where we are already doing well and deepen our commitment to improve our shortcomings.  Overall, we scored 88 on the "Taking everything into account I would say this is a great place to work" - beating the Top 25 Multi-National Companies (who average at 87)! 

EMC is indeed a great place to work, you as individuals as well as the whole team of EMC Presales is a huge part of that!

Looking forward, and in the spirit of embracing change, I'm going to try something different this quarter rather than going into detail about the roadmap, the plan, the programs, the contests.

Instead, I want to tell you THREE reasons why I'm personally pumped about 2015, and why I know it's going to be an awesome year:

ONE: Our Strategy, our Products and our Solutions.

Like all of you, I spend a lot of time with our customers, and I never find myself thinking: "we are on a totally different planet from this customer and cannot help them." 

Our core strategy around a solution stack that is architected horizontally, with best of breed technology at EACH layer, and always designed for an open model at EACH layer, coupled with a business model designed for self-disruption - well there is no other way to say it: It's right.

We are in a position like NO OTHER COMPANY to:

• A: Help our customers get efficient, fast, and agile around the applications that run their current business.  We do this using our Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) approach - along with all the constituent solution elements from the Core Technology Division and our Converged Infrastructure business.  Think of how we revolutionize our customers with XtremIO.  With VMAX3.  With VNX.  With VPLEX.  With Recoverpoint.  With Data Domain.  With Vblock.  With ViPR SRM & ViPR Controller.  Think of all the examples you saw yourself in 2014.  Then, throw in the fact that 2015 will see EMC enter the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure market with the same force that we entered the AFA market.  In 2014 we navigated the knothole of blending our maintaining and extending large revenue pools (VNX/VMAX) and sustained high growth things like Isilon, XtremIO, and Data Domain.  Balancing this is a challenge that has killed lesser companies.  Today the emerging technologies make up more than 60% of our traditional base, which means we are navigating wisely, and our customers are voting with their dollars.  Even if we stopped there, we are a technology powerhouse and 2015 will be awesome - but of course, we don't stop there.
• B: .we also help our customers transfer those savings and invest into new applications, new ways of analyzing data to generate a whole new business.  Think of what we can do with everything in the Emerging Technology Division and Pivotal.  I've had SP customers indicate that ECS is helping them win customers away from S3 on an economic basis!  Think of what we can do at our enterprise customers with Isilon around crazy NAS workflows and the expanded HDFS support.  Think of the incredible solutions we saw in 2014 around ScaleIO amped up to a whole new level in 2015.  And of course as we've said publicly, 2015 will see DSSD arrive on the scene and will positively melt people's faces.  2015 will also see an expansion of our Converged Infrastructure strategy to include CI built for this new world of net new applications built on containerization, built on next-generation data fabrics.  In 2014, our brothers and sisters at Pivotal drove a miracle, making Cloud Foundry the "Linux of PaaS", far and away the leader in the open PaaS marketplace, creating another dynamo in the Cloud Foundry Foundation.  It's still early days of this transition, but PaaS and next generation data fabrics are building the "new houses" of next-generation applications.  In turn, EMC is building the "foundation" in the form of new infrastructure for those new apps - both on premise and at our SP Partners.  This will be in new forms of converged infrastructure, and the infrastructure software stacks that create value on commodity hardware.

Pause for a second, and think about "A" and "B" above. 

Can ANYONE else say both of those to the degree we can?  

That's the FIRST reason 2015 is going to be awesome, and trust me, we are just getting started!

TWO: Our Culture

While the Federation must keep changing - the principal at the core of "openness" and embracing disruption and change is timeless.  This is at the heart of our EMC DNA.  We love looking at challenge and saying "Bring it on!"  Looking at disruption and saying "how can we make that change go faster!"

We have a unique culture, you know that more than I do, and we each contribute in our own way.  As a part of that culture we are the best, well oiled "execution machine" in the industry, and when the mission calls for us to chew gum (drive quarterly goals through tactical wins) and juggle (drive long term architectural transformation in the market) we say. "No problem, I've got this!!!" 

We also have a strange and delightful autonomous culture.  I love meeting EMC'ers at every stage of their EMC careers.  Each of us brings new ideas, new innovations to the mix. Occasionally I cringe when I see things independently

discovered, and work replicated, but this is a small price to pay for the fact that everyone is moving the ball down the field in their own way.

THREE: Our people

I'm always in awe of YOU, the individuals at EMC.  Striving to help, striving to make an impact.  We debate, we struggle, and we stretch.  I'm glad to say that we will go into 2015 and I don't see material structural changes in the SE team.  Yes, we'll keep evolving parts:

• We have realized we just can't keep loading the same expectations on the Account SE.  We made strides on cutting down mandatory quarterly training, but then it started to all add up again.  We think we can redefine training by really building personalized training, and moving to a more modern way of doing just-in time training.  Based on their customers some Account SEs get the job of driving architectural transformation by looking at "infrastructure up."  Others get the same job done by driving architectural transformation by looking at "business use cases and applications down." Both types of Account SE architect solutions are correct but from a different orientation.  Both types of Account SE are both equally important in BOTH "P2" and "P3."  It's crazy to give everyone the same training package, and asking them to be all things to all people - so expect us to start customizing the training packages (while continuing to make everything optionally available).
• We will continue to redefine what it means to be an EMC Specialist SE.  Some things will never change - Specialists are the 401 experts in their particular area of knowledge - the ninja, the surgeon.  Our Specialists need care and feeding that is different than the Account SE's, but we are one team, and share one goal - and win together.  We will keep working to make sure that the structure, the support, the linkage to product and solutions teams keeps enhancing, while keeping with the principle that we are ONE EMC team, and we win together.
• We have a critical team of SE's who live in a world that is all about enabling others to succeed.  I'm talking about all the SE's focused on the Partners, on our Alliance/SI partners, on our Service Provider Partners.  These indirect roles are becoming more and more important every day as our Go-To-Market keeps evolving.
• The Presales Leadership team thinks we can bring more to you in terms of career development.  We think we can bring more to you in terms of mobility.  We are listening to your feedback about what we can do to improve the PAC, Principal, and Global Architect roles and connective tissue.  I would encourage you to check out the all new, refreshed, and completely awesome Inside EMC community for Presales talent topics: It's All About Talent, which is a subspace on the Presales Channel.
• We think (I know!) that we can keep making strides on information accessibility, on openness, on tools, and on shared services.  These are already great in some places, good in others, and others, we can always improve.

What I want you to take away from this message:

• We enter 2015 with everything we need to make 2015 awesome.  We all make choices every day.  We all control our own destinies, our own careers, our own learning.  At every turn, we must look to have an impact on EMC, our customers, on the communities we are a part of, and ultimately, on the world.   Let's be awesome to one another.
• Our Presales Manifesto holds true.  When it comes to work things, we put the customer first, company second, our self-centered considerations third.  We are technologists.  We are evangelists.  We live ONE EMC.  We live the 75/25 model.  A positive force we are!
• Our Presales Mission holds true: "Leading and architecting our clients' transformation through solution-oriented technical wins, leveraging the ecosystem."  While we are fundamentally aligned with Sales, the Presales mission is our part of what binds us all together in the larger EMC Global organization.  Together, We Make It Real.
• The EMC II Mission holds true: "EMC is the undisputed leader in information infrastructure and converged infrastructure for platform 2 and platform 3, and do it in a way that is open and gives our customers choice."
• The Strategy and our Priorities in 2015 map to those Principles, that Mission - and holds true.  Strategies (and the priorities they create) aren't like a flag - flapping in the wind.  Rather, they are like bedrock that you can build a great city on. 

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There are a whole bunch of detail roadmap items and priorities I'm needing to censor here :-)  If you're a partner - come to the EMC breakout at PEX, I'll share everything there!

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I'm proud and humbled to work with such a great global group of EMC SE's, and more broadly, ALL my fellow EMC'ers.
I enter the New Year energized, passionate, and excited about what we will do in 2015!  We all feed off each other, and it brings a smile to my face, a spring in my step that I know that I can count on YOUR energy, YOUR passion, and YOUR excitement!

Comments

[Knieriemen]

I came here for the censored content... ;)

Happy New Year Chad!