>>the service experience has dramatically changed over the course of history within enterprise it once a purely break fixed business that put out fires technology services has become a linchpin of customer I. T. Execution strategies where companies carefully select technology partners to anticipate and remediate potential problems before they occur. Moreover, organizations have come to expect a cloud like experience for their entire I. T. Estate spanning on prem cloud cross clouds. And increasingly the edge and technology services are looked upon by customers to provide a layer that helps abstract that underlying complexity of I. T. So they can focus on what they do best welcome to the cubes ongoing virtual coverage of Dell technologies world with me today to talk about the modern services experience are Doug Schmidt, who is the president of Dell Technologies and Services and Alex Barreto. Senior vice president. Dell Technology Services gentlemen welcome to the cube. Great to see you >>Well thank you. Dave big traven us >>really. My pleasure. Doug and I wonder if you could start by just giving us a quick overview of the organization that you lied. What's new with with Dell technology services? >>Well, yeah, so you know, first of all I get the privilege along with my team of leading over 60,000 service professionals and partners and we support customers in over 170 countries and 54 languages. And we can cover the entire technology spectrum from the edge to the core to the cloud. And our expertise in this area is broad and deep as you can imagine. And we help our customers with their transformation with the indian services and this includes consulting, uh deployment, support, managed services, education services as well as asset recovery. So just to name a few, so we use all of this technology and this capability to help our customers with their digital transformation. >>Greatest Alex, what's your wheelhouse? What's your role in in the services, strategy and technology? >>Yeah, I have the great opportunity to drive strategy, operations and technology. We're doing exciting things across all three day. But in particularly the technology space when I think about the intersection of technology and customer experience, a lot of exciting things there, I'm sure we'll talk about today. >>Yeah. Doug I mean if you look at the past 12 months, I mean you certainly saw you know, a real shift to work from home technologies and you guys, you know all about, you know the story well. But one of the things that we've been talking about is the uptick that we're expecting and we're already seeing it in professional services because there is a talent gap, there's a skills shortage and people have to they have to get hybrid right, they have to fund their digital transformation, they need help. So there's been a lot of changes in the market during the past year. What are you hearing from customers? What are their priorities? How are they changing? >>Well yeah you've stated Dave look there's a lot of changes in the market during the last year clearly and what our customers are telling us and where they're changing priorities are are really centered around two things. The first uh is that all of us are helping our customers deliver a better experience to their customers right to end customers that matters. You know in a brand new study we commissioned from Forrester consulting. Actually 56% of I. T. Leaders said that improving customer experience is the top driver for their digital transformation efforts. The second thing that we're hearing and that I'm hearing is that they're asking us to assist in this digital transformation. In that same research that I talked to you about From Forrester, 81 of the Iraqi leaders said that they need to leverage external technology specific expertise to help their internal I. T. Teams be successful. And I think just to deep dive these two items, you know first it's on the first one for the customer experience. It's just crucial for customers to transform their C. X. To be competitive. That's for all of us and you know there's not an industry or a team around that's not going through this whether it's schools uh doing digital learning healthcare and all of the things you know recently I just talked to a doctor via the you know zoom. I mean these are all new experiences, right? Uh government and corporations. It's just it's very remote. It's very seamless. It's very timely and uh look the employee experience is also closely tied to this right to the customer experience. Obviously if your employees aren't able to perform in this environment you can't really deliver the customer experience and they need the right technology and tools to really deliver that. And that's where we at Dell Technologies and Dell Technology Services are really helping our customers. Uh The second area I mentioned was really about getting our customers ready for the future and you know, digital transformation is not a one and done. This is a ongoing journey uh that gets our customers to assist their customers and their team members. And look they're looking for trusted advisor who can you know, specialized in the experience they need uh to guide them through this. And you know, I. T. Is not just back office anymore, as you know, it's really about getting in front of this, breaking down the silos, helping all of the departments not just I. T. Everything with their business needs and really delivering these outcomes that are going to help them with the customer experience and the digital transformation. >>Yeah thank you for that. And and doug I mean the Consumer Ization of I. T. Has been going on for the better part of a decade or or or more the cloud obviously has affected how we think about the experience and pricing and the like and and we're hearing a lot about Apex from Dell tech right now. What's the role of services in apex? >>Well look services has always been a primary interface with our customers and will continue to play a major part of that. And this is really about services and our products and our great solutions and software all coming together to really deliver the best experience for our customers. But specifically speaking about services, look this will be about services helping our customers seamlessly integrate apex offers and leverage the best of our infrastructure management capabilities into end. And I talked a little bit about those at the beginning, but this will be helping the customers deploy apex monitor it operated, optimized support, Decommissioning all those things from the end in life cycle. And look, we'll leverage our advantages in the supply slain as well. And scale Apex globally working with Kevin Brown and the operations team. So it's about bringing all the strength of Dell along with services to deliver apex, you know, services also is going to help accelerate the value of the customers with for example, apex data storage as a service, which I'm sure you're hearing about will manage the infrastructure across the lifecycle and help our customers get the most out of all of this great technology, we're bringing >>so Alex and then dug maybe you can you can chime in but you guys, you talked talked talked about how important customer experiences can you tell us more about what services is doing to specifically enhance that customer experience? Yeah, >>sure. Thank David. And look, you talked about which I thought was great about the notion of services much more than just break fixed. So that customer experience now spans the entire services lifecycle. So when we talk, yes, it's really that entire Cf. So we're doing a couple of things to to really drive customer experience to the next level. In fact three distinct focus areas. The first one is really around artificial intelligence, machine learning and embedding that notion of A I into everything that we do, whether that support deployment services, managed services, consulting services, education services. The entire spectrum of our services offering now carries a I into the services offering. We started with support but now we expanded to the entire entire spectrum that drives efficiency and customers see that and feel that in terms of lower costs, greater speed, it drives value for our customers as well because they're able to generate new and appreciated insights. And second, if you think about the total customer experience, there are times when they do have to interact with us and that interaction now is food and it's a seamless, unified in simple experience that the customers have with us across the entire product set of Dell. So there's pc servers, network storage we provide, we provide a single unified view in a simple view for our customers. And then third, if you think about our services offers, we're modernizing them, talked a little bit about this as well. We're embedding technology into the services offering, make them better and faster. Good example, that is modern provisioning. We launched at the beginning this year. Great market feedback has new features, new capability, leverages our cloud infrastructure to deliver the services. >>You know, Alex, I want to stay on that for a minute because when I when I think about apex to me it's it's it's a cultural transformation that's going on. I mean look, Del is a tech technology company, have been product company and you know, services there to support that, but it's always you've always had to align with product. But now that I almost see the, you know, the product is aligning with the customer service experience and they're coming together like this. So so we talked about the changes and obviously the focus on C. X. Can you tell us more about the specific technologies that services is leveraging to affect that? >>Yeah it's a good question. Often we actually talked about products and services now and services is the product, as you said, they're really coming together and there are a number of things we're doing to drive that technology change both within apex and also outside apex of our regular Capex model. So a couple examples of things were around the data management side as an example using graph technologies to really contextualized data generate insights from that data regardless of how the data is structured, regardless of where the data is stored, represent those values. Were using that inside L. For services, we actually then monetizing that in providing that to our customers. We are consulting services and manage services. You talked about Apex Cloud is and hybrid Cloud is a big big area for us. Big focus here. In fact all the apex offers are actually they'll manage customer operators. So that managed services component is integrated and is a fundamental part of everything our other apex offers that we're putting in place. There are a couple of other areas. We're also excited about two of them to highlight specifically Five G and the Edge and five G. We see phenomenal growth and opportunities around for customers around the new digital transformation that they can do with five G. But enabling that is the carriers behind that infrastructure of five G, which we are supporting with our managed services, developing carrier grade specific managed services capabilities for carriers around the globe. And on the edge side with the growth and phenomenal exponential growth actually of data around the far edge being driven by sensors and greater compute needs and storage needs at the far edge, we're actually providing services for those specific data centers. They're very distributed some of them in urban areas, some of them in non urban ears and there's hundreds of them and they require remote services capabilities which we have that infrastructure today. So we're deploying that in this far edge space, another area that we're excited about five G the edge apex and then our core services capabilities, >>the edges like this, this really infinite technology opportunity. It's so we see the, you know, the data center and you see the cloud and okay, we were largely a remote set of cloud services. You're seeing the cloud come into the on prem, you're seeing on prem come into the cloud. So you've got the hybrid connections here, cross cloud and then even at the edge you've got layers of edge, you think about, you know, the autonomous vehicle, there's so much going on their custom silicon etcetera, it's okay you're not gonna get into the auto business, I don't think at least any time soon. But all that data that's being collected that has to get back to the cloud and much of its not gonna get persisted. A lot of it's gonna stay at the edge of a lot of it's gonna come back to the cloud. Everything is just exploding. You've gotta roll there. It's just these layers and connections that are coming through into this, this kind of ubiquitous matrix. I mean it's like the movie, it's amazing. Very exciting times. And doug. I wonder just going off here Doug. I wonder if we could give you the last word. Maybe I'm looking into the future beyond apex what's next for Dell tech services and your customers? >>Well, first of all, they did a great job on that. It is exciting. Look, and the reason we're putting so much effort into the emerging technologies uh we've talked about is to prepare uh you know assist our customers with this and you and you brought this up as well. Look, the vast amount of customer data uh that they're going to have to contend with is just staggering. 175 0 bytes of data will be created worldwide by 2025 according to D. C. And even more amazing about that is 30% of it is you know, projected to be processed real time. You're talking about that edge, right? And more than you know 50% of the enterprise generated data will be created and processed at that edge according to Gartner. So look it's gonna be exciting. And over the next 5 to 10 years we predict that all devices will be able to communicate anywhere on earth. And you know look these types of support tools to gather intelligence from billions of in point, uh, is going to be fascinating as well. And there will be new ways to consume the this knowledge seamlessly, making the relationship between us and the intelligence even more seamless and natural. You know, an example of that that we're working with right now is augmented reality a R out for our field resources. And, you know, we're seeing the capability, it's going to provide our field engineers and it's, it's pretty amazing gonna buy a better experience for our team members and a better experience for our customers. You know, and customers are going to have to contend with all of these challenges. And so we're modernizing to help them and kind of just summarizing up, you know, look, the value of services is really about shifting to intelligence as a service. And there's three ways uh, that this will really come about. One is our relationship with our customers is evolving from providing technology solutions. You mentioned this in your opening to being fully integrated as a business partner. That's the first one. Second one, we're helping to shape how our customers run their business from processes to resources to the experience they delivered to their end customer. That's number two and number three, it's really about uh measuring our success. Everything we do is about our customers achieving their business targets and their outcomes. And that's why we believe intelligence as a service is the future of services. >>And this is where technology plays such an important role in the services component of that as they set up front is the linchpin. There's an inverse relationship over the course of my career between the customer experience and the technical complexity. The simpler it gets for customers, the more complex it gets at the back end, and you've got to hide that complexity and that's a big part of where technology and services comes in. We're seeing the explosion of data as you said, and and the explosion of processing power is very exciting times, Alex and Doug. Thanks so much for coming to the Cuban, sharing the update on Dell Tech services in the future. I really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>All right, and thank you for watching everybody's day volonte for the Cube and our ongoing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021. The virtual edition will be right back.