Sharpening the technology edge

Although it’s not officially designated as such, the EMC Santa Clara Innovation Center in California is in many ways the research and development (R&D) arm of EMC’s Global Solutions organization. Employees there are developing prototypes and proofs of concept that may turn into EMC Proven Solutions.

It all starts with listening. Todd Pavone, vice president of EMC Global Solutions, says the work under way at this center reminds him of a sales call that he and EMC cofounder Dick Egan made many years ago.

“We were visiting Fleet Bank,” Pavone recalls. “They asked us how we at EMC come up with such interesting solutions to customers’ pain points. Dick told them his secret was ‘not to let anyone get between me and my customer.’ I believe that Dick was conveying to them that when we listen, then everyone succeeds. When we’re told by a customer, ‘I wish I could do this or that with your products,’ it is an opportunity we just can’t ignore.”

Projects under way at the Santa Clara Innovation Center flow directly from customers’ requests for solutions. Sales and presales teams can then share with those customers the resulting white papers and presentations. Importantly, projects occurring at the center also reach customers in a compelling fashion via Santa Clara Executive Briefing Center (EBC) demonstrations.

Some demonstrations absolutely resonate with customers. Those demos then proceed to EMC’s Global Solutions Centers for possible development into proven solutions. It is an innovate-demonstrate-validate process.

Hong Kwek is the senior director of the Santa Clara Innovation Center. He originally set up the facility in 2006 as a traditional EMC Global Solutions Center to support the Santa Clara EBC. “But my colleague, Michael Tan, who is very creative, believed we could use it to offer more than just demos,” Kwek recalls. “Pretty soon, the team was creating solution prototypes that were as impressive as anything coming out of our labs in Cork or Tokyo.”

That got Kwek thinking. He says, “Draw a 25-mile circle around our facility’s location here in Silicon Valley, and you’ll find lots of adventurous companies—companies eager to explore what’s possible with IT.” Kwek transformed the Santa Clara Solutions Center into the Santa Clara Innovation Center in March 2008, and by June, he’d relocated there full-time from Hopkinton.

Innovation Center Architect and Manager Michael Tan says it is important to acknowledge the center’s distinctive role. “This is a very specialized form of R&D,” he says. “R&D engineers in the IT industry are usually looking outward roughly five years. Our focus is on now, or, at most, a few months from now.”

No EMC competitor is operating a facility that does exactly what this one does: combining technology evangelists with a partner- and customer-facing lab “to show customers and partners these integrated solutions that will move data centers forward,” Tan says.

It isn’t about asking customers to make a potentially disruptive jump to a different technology. Rather, the Innovation Center provides an evolutionary way to introduce revolutionary technologies. The success of the center is measured not by the creation of new products, but by how successfully it integrates existing EMC and partner technologies to address customer needs.

The staff is small; a half-dozen people run the center’s two labs. Inside one of those labs, the team builds integrated solutions behind a firewall that permits partners to log in to work on particular portions of a test environment. In the other lab—the EMC Santa Clara Solutions Center within the Santa Clara EBC—customers and salespeople see demos, proofs-of-concept, and presentations. Both labs make abundant use of software for virtualization, disaster recovery, backup, deduplication, and security, as well as various disk array and interconnect technologies.

“My office is right next door to [Santa Clara EBC Manager] John Morley’s,” says Tan. “The West Coast EBC plays such a significant role in our success by identifying the right themes, opportunities, and partners for us to work with. The staff at the EBC also keeps us connected with sales, and they handle most customer-facing administrative tasks.”

If all of this sounds like an operation of a high-end IT consulting organization, that’s not surprising. Most of the people affiliated with the center do come from consulting organizations such as Accenture or IBM Global Services. “We all understand that technology is worth nothing if users can’t put it together and receive benefits from it,” Tan says. But he and his colleagues also understand that these customers aren’t looking to rip and replace. That’s where EMC Sales figures into the equation.

Scottsdale, Arizona-based Michael La Fauci is an EMC technical business consultant for the Western Division. He considers the Santa Clara Innovation Center a strategic partner to the Santa Clara EBC. “Ever since we started asking our accounts to go with us to the Santa Clara EBC after it launched a few years ago, we’ve been quite successful in encouraging the customers to travel there by offering to show them cool stuff,” he says. “Now the solution center has become the innovation center. And our customers are seeing the emphasis that the staff there place on working with partners to create more sophisticated solutions. One of the first big projects I observed them tackling was virtualizing an SAP environment. If you can virtualize SAP, you can virtualize anything.”

Since its inception, the Innovation Center has had a low profile. However, George Cheng of EMC Global Solutions Marketing reports that customers increasingly want to get involved and “every conversation we’ve had with them has been positive. So we’re trying to get word out to our field that the work we do here can be very valuable. We can build and demonstrate to customers a proof-of-concept in just a few weeks. This shows them that EMC knows how to build solutions.”