When your industry is characterized by explosive growth coupled with an increasing demand for ever more scarce experienced professionals, you need strong alignments to reach business goals. In
fact, many businesses just don't realize how critical developing true alignment with customers and their needs is to survival.

EMC's alignment strategy, refined by customer input and by lessons learned internally, has delivered beneficial results to EMC, its customers, its partners and its industry. During the past two years, EMC has aggressively sponsored and conducted industry surveys to identify the challenges facing global IT organizations.

In a recent EMC survey of more than 1,200 IT managers, respondents overwhelmingly reported that their employees' skills need to be developed to meet the growing complexity and volume of data. In
addition, these same managers forecasted aggressive plans for hiring storage professionals during the next twelve months, preferring to hire experienced professionals. With the looming storage skills gap, managers said they would accept hiring certified individuals as an alternative. They are concerned about finding and retaining storage talent.

IDC's research validates this concern. In the "The Expanding Digital Universe" (http://www.emc.com/about/destination/digital_universe/
pdf/Expanding_Digital_Universe_IDC_WhitePaper_022507.pdf), IDC predicts that the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated will grow to 988 exabytes (988 billion gigabytes) by 2010. In a separate study, EMC concluded that one million more storage professionals will be needed by 2012 to manage all this data.

Until recently, storage talent had to be developed on-the-job by experienced IT professionals. Many of the top performers within IT infrastructure management groups were focused on storage issues
because of the complexity of this IT discipline, and they consequently became experts. These IT professionals learned through experience, which placed an even higher premium on retaining that key talent. While on-the-job training and self-study are certainly options for developing storage knowledge, they do not qualify storage professionals, nor do they ensure the consistency of storage practices or performance. To address this lack of formal storage education, EMC developed a first-of-its-kind Storage Technology Foundation certification track as part of the EMC Proven Professional program. The track is targeted to IT professionals wishing to expand their knowledge of storage concepts and principles, offering Associate, Specialist and Expert levels of certification.

Nevertheless, existing IT professionals cannot fill the growing storage knowledge gap alone. For this reason, EMC developed the Academic Alliance program, partnering with colleges to provide courses that are focused on storage technologies. Courses are taught by college faculty, using EMC Education Services materials. The curriculum is "open," focusing on storage concepts rather than on EMC-specific products. There is no cost for colleges and universities to join the EMC Academic
Alliance and to obtain the supporting resources.

This storage curriculum is now offered at more than 125 colleges and universities worldwide. Storage Technology Foundations furnishes a comprehensive introduction to storage technology, providing awareness of storage management topics in an increasingly complex IT environment. Students learn about the latest storage architectures, such as Storage Subsystems, SAN, NAS, DAS, CAS, IP-SAN, replication technologies for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, and information security. Upon completion of the course, students have the opportunity to take the Storage Technology Foundation's certification exam and to achieve an EMC Proven Professional certification. The
openness of the curriculum allows students to work at any company in a storage discipline, regardless of what products and vendors the company uses.

Recent Pennsylvania State University graduate Timothy Reiner said, "Higher education has missed out on an increasingly important part of the computer sector, and this course provides an invaluable service to all who take it."

Reiner credits the Storage Technology Foundation's course for providing him with an advantage when interviewing for jobs. In fact, he strongly believes that his storage knowledge earned him his current
technical position. Today, he provides integration and implementation services at customer sites. "Becoming certified is very important," says Reiner, "It sets the playing field and gives everyone an opportunity to excel in the industry....(and) employers and peers respect it." He highly recommends the program to anyone serious about working in the storage industry.

The Academic Alliance program is the latest initiative of an EMC Education Services vision that began five years ago with the goal of using an educational alignment strategy as a competitive advantage. At
that time, education at EMC was primarily "event oriented." The training professionals functioned more as "order-takers," and were viewed within the company as vendors rather than as business partners.

Through a series of strategic organizational realignments and a committed focus on forming alignments at all levels of the organization, EMC Education Services has successfully demonstrated the power of transformation with a focus on consulting and partnering with internal and external customers. The conversations identify business problems, determine if training is the appropriate solution, and present holistic solutions. Our internal customers now think of EMC Education
Services as part of their own organization rather than as a separate entity to engage with only when the need arises.

Last year, a request was received for new hire training sessions. Rather than providing a standard response, the requestor was engaged to determine the business problem. The issue turned out to be far more complex than simply educating new hires. The consultation involved determining how to reduce the time senior consultants spent on lowlevel engagements. This business discussion resulted in the creation of a new entry level role. Recent college graduates were hired to fill
these positions and perform the less complex technical tasks formerly assigned to highly skilled employees. Ultimately, this program achieved millions in cost savings and was expanded into other organizations.

EMC's strategy is to create a learning framework that can be applied broadly across an entire company to quickly adapt and "scale" within a constantly changing environment. Each framework is built once and "reused" many times. This strategy of building flexible learning frameworks
and aligning them into new businesses and global markets has made training a competitive and strategic tool to address critical skill shortages and create new business opportunities. Training has transcended from knowledge transfer and skill readiness to a foundation for business strategy, execution, and competitive advantage.

This conversion takes training beyond a post-sales support utility and transforms the education services organization into a strategic differentiator and business enabler. Education service professionals know that a strong training portfolio creates product loyalty with customers and is essential to building and maintaining a highly proficient and world-class service organization. In today's tumultuous marketplace, businesses must focus on staying deeply aligned to their customers' evolving needs in order to succeed and prosper. Only through a relentless commitment to listen to customers' both internal and external - and to continually developing appropriate services to meet those customers' needs - can an organization achieve truly transformational change.

About the Author:

Tom Clancy is Vice President of Education Services and Productivity for EMC Corporation. In his career at EMC, Tom has held various field and corporate roles, primarily in partner management of Original Equipment Manufacturers, Independent
Software Vendors and Channels. Prior to Education Services, Tom managed Global Sales Productivity, focusing on field development, best practices and change execution. Since 2002, his chief responsibility has been to re-align training initiatives to meet the requirements of EMC's business model transformation from a hardware product company to a technology-led provider
of systems, software and services. Under Tom's direction, EMC has transitioned from traditional ILT to a much more blended JIT and situational learning approach for specialization and consulting.