A retiring EMC storage evangelist shares his thoughts on the IT industry

Dave Rabinowitz, longtime EMC storage evangelist, joined the company in 1994. He has spent 15 years working with customers in EMC’s Executive Briefing Center in Hopkinton as well as at EMC forums and one-on-one customer events.

Rabinowitz began his IT career in 1968 as a programmer at IBM but quickly shifted to the side of the industry that he most enjoyed—working with and supporting customers. He made a career out of bridging the gap between technology and why it is of value to the customer, and he had a lot of fun doing it. As he retired from EMC recently to pursue travels, photography, and spending time with his two grandchildren, Rabinowitz shared these insights about his work.

emc.com: What is the biggest challenge EMC faces today versus when you joined the company 15 years ago?

When I came here, it was pretty much one product. Today, the good news is that we have more than 100 products, and the bad news is we’ve got more than 100 products. It’s not about technology. We are very, very rich in technology. The real challenge in communication with our customers is to understand what their business needs are. Once we understand what their business requirements are in terms of availability, throughput recoverability, performance, and connectivity, we can craft exactly the right solution. So they spend as much money as they need without wasting it, and they get the service levels they want.

emc.com: What kind of conversation would you have with customers to understand their business needs?

For every technical person, there’s an epiphany. I’ll describe it to you as an anecdote from my mentor, Jeff Goldberg (the late EMC vice president): Somebody calls on a customer with a little flipchart and 30, 40, or 50 slides printed out. The customer says, “Look, I’ve got to go out and get some coffee. I’ll be back in a few minutes. What I want you to do is pick the best three. I don’t need to know the intricate details.”

What that spells out is the need to listen instead of concentrating on showing how smart you are technically. If you’re listening sufficiently, you suddenly hear, “I need that reservoir of technical information in the background, but what I really want are the best three. What’s in it for me, what’s the end result, and why should I do business with you?” So, I’d say it’s just through listening.

emc.com: Are there any formal methods that you’ve used in getting them engaged and getting them to describe their businesses and challenges? Or, is it just conversation, visiting them and talking to them?

For me, it’s always been conversational. One of the things that has worked well for me in the briefing center is, I walk in and say, “If you really want PowerPoint, I have slides.” Even though I work on a flipchart and do something similar presentation to presentation, I am reactive to each individual customer and what the issue is.

You may walk in thinking that because the salespeople have an agenda to make their quota they’ve got to sell this product, that that’s why the customer is here. If you undo that, sometimes you get a little unpopular. But if you have the right conversation, you end up with a better opportunity and a different relationship with the customer going forward. You didn’t just flaunt a product.

emc.com: Talk about the old days when EMC introduced storage-to-storage replication with EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF). What kind of conversations did you have with customers at that time about this completely new thing that they couldn’t do before? People were discovering other reasons to use this rather than just recovery.

SRDF became available in October 1994. Since then, it’s grown in terms of its features, functions, capabilities, and the number of methodologies you can apply. The first perception of SRDF use was a reaction to the first World Trade Center incident when people realized that the normal way of doing things just wasn’t going to hack it.

If you’re faced with a problem of this kind, there are three ways to deal with it: denial, doing the same thing faster, or doing something different. Conventionally, what most people did in our business was to do the same thing they’d always done, but try and do it faster. The traditional disaster recovery was based on tape. So no matter how fast you did back up and recovery, it was never going to be fast enough.

So you’re faced with the third alternative, which is what EMC embraced—do it differently. The first interaction about SRDF with most customers was about proving that the technology could work. Once we did that, the product began to move much more easily.

The first real application of SRDF was by MCI when they wanted to move a data center from the Washington area to Nebraska. Traditional methodology meant they were going to be off the air for a long time. So we adapted SRDF so it could replicate data a very long way, get 95 percent of the data in Nebraska, and take a much shorter outage for the last five percent. It was done with a very, very tiny outage compared to any methodology known to man at that point in time.

emc.com: Any thoughts on where the industry is going? As you know, for a number of years now, we’ve heard that IT doesn’t matter. We’ve heard that everything is being commoditized and now, with cloud computing and other things, you don’t need to actually invest in IT inside your company.

It really is a business and a solution delivery model. It’s not a technology problem. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Once upon a time, timesharing was a big industry. You could get terminals relatively cheaply but nobody could afford computers. Everybody would dial into a big IBM machine or whatever it was and use their resources.

Processes changed, costs came down, and the PC microprocessor arrived. We could now bring all this capability in-house. Then we had a proliferation of distributed systems and, from a business integrity point of view, it became difficult to manage. Centralization became the best thing again.

In some ways, cloud computing offers some terrific capabilities. So I’d say all of the above—central, distributed, cloud—still remain tools to be deployed in a way that makes sense from a business perspective.

emc.com: So the IT professional is not going away because organizations will still need people inside the company who will take a combination of tools at any given moment and craft it to meet specific needs?

Yes. What service can I offer you at what cost, and is it worth it?

emc.com: Fifteen years here, what were the greatest moments?

I was in a unique situation by being in front of customers all the time in different places with a very strong portfolio of capability that EMC offered. I think I built up something of a reputation. People came back. Every year I’d talk to the same group of people, and we’d talk about what was new. Having that trust, having people come in wanting to shake my hand and wanting to renew the conversation, that was the best part of it all for me.

I’ll give credit to a lot of people—to managers and facilitators—who recognized people like me and my peers and to have said, “Just get on and do what you do well.” They have given us the freedom to do these things, and I really want to pay tribute.

I can’t think of a moment when I ever woke up and said, “I can’t stand the idea of going into the office.” On the other hand, as Jeff Goldberg said, “You’ve got to remember a couple of things about life. You’ve got to maintain a balance.” He used to say he had never walked through a cemetery and seen a gravestone upon which was inscribed, “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.” You’ve got to be a responsible employee, you’ve got to be a member of a community, and you’ve still got to have your family. I’ve really had that three-phrase approach to life.