>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>No, that, that you guys. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone. Live here on the floor in Las Vegas with Dell tech world 2022 cube coverage. I'm John for, with Dave Volante, Allison Ducey, chief marketing officer executive vice president of Dell technologies. Welcome back to the queue. Thanks for coming back on. Hey Allison. >>Hey. Hi guys. It's so good to see you. I am just so delighted to be on the cube and so delighted to see you both live and in person. >>So three years ago was the last physical event. A lot of virtual, a lot of, probably some scar tissue to share there, but give us the quick highlights here. The, the show format what's new, what's different. >>So I think one of the things I talked to my team about a lot is we've learned so much over the past couple of years. It's really important as we go forward to carry the best of what we've learned over the last two years, combined with the best of in person experiences that I know we all missed. So things that really people wanna do in person training, connection, the birds of the feather sessions and taking the technology and communications skills that we've developed over the last two years and making the event better as well. So, you know, Dave and I were talking about how do you extend the reach of the event beyond just three days? How do you engage with the global audience? Not all of whom are back to traveling all of the time. And so we think the impact of this event is the biggest and best that it's ever been. And it's not about going back to 2019. It's about the best of the last couple of years and the human connection. I think we've all been missing. >>So I remember last time here, here, we, we asked, we're coming up to state with Ashton Kucher and I told you about my man crush. And now you bring a on Matthew, which was an amazing interview. I mean, I don't really, no, I mean, I love his work, but wow. What a thoughtful and intelligent individual, and you obviously did a great job, you know, carrying that interview. So tremendous. I mean, you, you know him, right? He's like in your >>He's, he's an Austin Guy. He's really committed it to Austin. He's really committed to the university of Texas. We've done a number of things with him together. So we do know him and still, that was probably the most in depth conversation that we'd ever had with him. And it was so much >>Fun. Let me wait. So, okay. So I gotta make you laugh. So at the, after you were done, you said, okay, let's open it up for audience questions. Now I was really intimidated even though I to get up in front of the audience and ask questions, but I didn't know what to ask him. And I figured there'd be a long line of people asking the question. >>There was not. >>So I saw that and I'm like, I don't know what to ask 'em. So I texted my wife and my daughter who love 'em. They're like, all right. All right. And so my wife texted me a question, but it was too late. The, the session had ended. So I'm gonna ask you her question and ask you what, how you think he would've responded and we can >>Refine it. Okay. I'll give it a whirl. Your >>Question was, he's a big proponent of showing up. Okay. I didn't know this. You could ask him about if the definition for him of showing up has changed over time and how does he stay motivated to always show up? And I was like, wow, what a great question. >>That is a great question. And I will tell you as the interviewer, I think lots of people were sort of intimidated. One, one woman even said, this is making me nervous, but here's my question. So as the interviewer, I was looking out at the sea of nobody asking questions, doing scrambling in my head, trying to come up with some more questions, cuz I had already asked all my questions. So I wish you'd been able to get to the stage, uh, get to the mic and ask that question. But here's what I think he would've said. Who knows? Maybe he'll send me a note if I get it wrong. I think he would've said something along the lines of, it's always about being intentional about what's happening in your life at that moment. <affirmative> and so, as he thought about some there's an example he uses in his book. >>I don't remember the name of the movie where he kind of very early in his career where he kind of just winged it and he got to the set and he realized because he was, he thought he was getting over rehearsed. And so he thought I need to go back to the natural moment. And he realized the script was in Spanish and he said, I need six minutes. How is he gonna memorize script in six minutes in Spanish? And I think that was just an interesting example of when he realized that there's a synchronicity between being your natural self and being intentional and being really thoughtful about where you are and what you're doing at that moment. So I think that that intentionality spans his career. It's the moment of interest inspection about where you are in your life and doing brave things like leaving behind a safe, but no longer fulfilling romantic comedy career. So that's what I think he would've said. And >>Bringing that to the moment is where he gets his inspiration. >>I think so. Yeah. >>Yeah. So he's very impressive guy. I didn't read the book yet. It's green light is >>Green lights. Green lights >>Is able the book. So >>I recommend it and I didn't listen to it. I read it. I'm a reader, but I've had many, many, many people tell me that they listen to it. He narrates the book himself. So I think there's some benefit there because you get it truly in his voice. >>Yeah. That's always fun. Yeah. >>Speaking of in the moment, this event has got two things going on in the format you mentioned, but also the content. It is right on point. And a lot of the execs came in Michael and the COOs were both on the cube, interesting poll position you guys have for this. Now you got the marketing angle going on here. How do you throttle this next? What's next? How does it evolve? You got the content, you got the new format, Dell tech world plus digital now combined. What's next? >>I think, I mean, so obviously we are clearly in an inflection point in the technology industry and we've talked a lot about separating the hype from the reality of the day to day of what our customers are doing in their businesses and the problems they're trying to solve. But if you look at what makes us really, uh, I think special and unique is if the, the last number of years we've continued to show up and deliver for our customer tumors, we were there with them over the course of the pandemic. We helped them get their remote workforce up and running and now we're helping them lean into their data center challenges. And I think, for example, the snowflake announcement from earlier this week, this ability to have the best of both worlds and to have your data on premises whilst also benefiting from Snowflake's capabilities. I think that's just a good example of the kind of thing you'll see us do more of, and this intentionality that we're trying to bring to an incredibly complex and fragmented world. So that's what we're doing from a business. And then from a marketing perspective, I think it's just about this stretchy steady drumbeat. It's no longer one moment in time. It is all the moments in time while it's also keeping people's attention. Yeah. Not boring them to death with four hour keynotes. It's >>It's interesting. You know, we, we've been watching you guys for a long time, as you know, and it's interesting. You have such a big story. Now you have the story at the industry positioning of where it is for growth. You also got product innovation, right? Balancing the, the product innovation, which is still evolving. You got edges exploding, the snowflake deal with the new product use cases. There's still the need for the, the nerds, right. So to speak. And then you got the industry leadership, which is happening. So you've got balancing that. How do you thread that needle? How do you tie it all together? How what's, how do you think about that? What's your thought >>Of the things I think is at its simplest. It's not just about what we do. It's also about who we are as a company and you have to do both, right. We have to talk about where we're innovating in our products and our solutions. And it's also really important for us to tell the world who we are and how we show up in the world. And if you think about it, another one of the announcements from this week that I'm really proud of are our solar hubs. And that's a build off of the, uh, solar learning labs working with 25 communities around the world, underserved in terms of access to technology. And so it's, you have to do both sometimes I think in the past we've been just talking about our products cuz we're engineers at heart. And we're proud of that and not talking enough about who we are. I think some companies talk too much about who they are and you're like, well, what do you do exactly? So, you know, the question always is how do you do that? And so there's a believability gap. What we're always striving for is that combination of what we do, who we are. >>So you know, that what we do is really important and there's obviously a lot of very difficult and contentious social issues. Yes. And, and kind of a of follow up there is, is, you know, what's your philosophy on how to handle those? It's presumably what you do, not what you, you say. I mean, you gotta say things as well, and they're gonna be more, you know, we're hearing about it, reading about it, others that are gonna be down the road, how what's your philosophy on how to handle those? >>The first thing is we try to be really thoughtful about what conversations or actually relevant to us. One of the things I watch many companies do is comment on anything, anything, and everything. They sort of run into the fray of the moment and they over comment. And frankly, then I think they don't stand for anything because they're constantly chasing a press cycle, which is pretty vicious and pretty short lived. So we don't think that that serves us. What we do is we look at almost every issue you can imagine. And ahead of time, ahead of time, have the conversation about where are we going to engage? What are the issues that we stand for? And we've got much more intentional, even on our ESG and CSR front, around taking our moonshot goals and making them more practical so that we can be really thoughtful and intentional. Because as you know, at the moment of time, when a crisis hits you, haven't done that work ahead of time. You're probably responding. And you can see that sometimes without naming any names, because everybody knows some of these players are without my even having to say it, someone responding or flip flopping it's cuz they haven't thought about it ahead of time. >>Yeah. And a lot of that comes from the top and the CEO won't stop on Twitter. But so that to me ties in. Yeah. So it ties into the concept of trust. Going back to some of the keynote messages that we heard from Michael you've earned trust in a lot of ways you were there during the pandemic, you know, your products work, et cetera, et cetera, but the way in which you act builds trust doesn't it. And that we've in, I think came across in, in the keynotes. Why such a big theme on trust? I mean you see apple with privacy, doing certain things really doubling down on trust. Can you talk about that? >>I mean, I think it's because it is core to who we are and if you look at the hype cycle around technology, the hype cycle, around companies who can have kind of a moment in the sun and then you find out actually that their business practices weren't very good or they weren't really delivering on the innovation that they were claiming. So they were probably overclaiming at times it has always been core to who we are. What I think we're doing now is just being much more intentional about how important it is to show up that way. That's why I come back to, it's not just what we do, it's who we are and that's why customers choose us. And you hear some of the customer case studies like U S a a like CVS that we use a lot at the moment in time where they needed help managing through the pandemic. We delivered with a consistency that not everybody could provide. And I think provides us the room and the space to really lean into this trust conversation. I >>Love, I love the high level flag. You guys are flying at ESG stores. You're getting in immersed in issues that you're solving for yourselves. So you can understand them and have good positions, but also on digital. Now you have other ways to drive the business. We just started a discord server week before for Dell tech world and already got 8,000 members. And the only thing they really care about about Dell tech world here is what's the monitors, where's the speeds and speeds. Right? They want the speeds and these they're gamers, right? So there's omnichannels everywhere. Right? You have, that's hard, right? So is it a top down? Let, let things fly. Is there intentionality around execution to drive business value? >>I think that, I mean, one of the things that I would say for the company and for its leadership for me personally, is we're generally pretty intentional about most things that we do. I always have an expression that I, I, I don't like to reward a Smith fireman. If the building is on fire, I'm gonna ask you, why is the building on fire? Not, you know, I'll say, are you okay? But then I'll say, why is the building on fire? So the reason I use that analogy is we are pretty intentional about most things that we do. And then you also have to re leave room for innovation because it is a completely different product experience to build an alien where than it is to build server. And yet there's certain standards around how we think about our commitment to environmental goals and sustainability that's consistent. Yeah. So that's the balance that we're always looking for, >>You know, in the isolation economy, we, we learned that we didn't know what was coming next. Yeah. And now in the post isolation economy, we, we learned, you referenced this. We're not going back to 29 team, a rinse and repeat of of 2019 is not gonna work. So I know it's early. You haven't really had much time to think about it, but what have you learned from this event? We were surprised by how many people showed up. What else? >>I was a little surprised by how many people showed up in the fi. And we got a lot of people show up in the final register in the final week or so. I mean, one of the things I think we knew this, but I think we had to learn it a little bit. The hard way. Yeah. Was maybe you don't need four days of two hour keynotes, you know, maybe, maybe people can't absorb that much information. And so I think we've gotten a lot tighter on our messaging and delivering of the keynotes and then allowing people, the space to engage in other that are really important to them, like their own training. They, a lot of people come to this, this event for their own professional development. We should be proud of that and celebrate it. And one of the expressions I use a lot is let's get our inner geek back and provide people the opportunity to do that. And even with our own employees, one of the things that we've seen is just how happy they are to see each our, so leave space for that. >>The face to face matters. It's really valuable in some say, it's the scarce resource now. Yeah. And the digitals augmentation, what have you learned as the standards are, ER, there's no standards they're emerging in real time. What what's popping out as go to, that's gonna evolve as de facto standard digital event kind of hybrid. I >>Think I, I think the short and easy answer is that hybrid Brit evolves as the standard. I don't think anybody sort of like the cloud. Um, I don't think anybody is questioning that you can have the best of both. I think, um, you know, if I taking it out of the realm of events, we are very committed to a hybrid work environment. Just as an example. And this conversation about many companies say you can have flexibility as long as you're here on Tuesday. Well, that's not actually flexibility. That's just pretend flexibility. And so being intentional about, you know, you obviously have to have the conversation with your leader, but we, we are saying, figure out what works for you and work that way. And the reason I went, I took it from events to that example is because that's just one of the many examples of how we're all trying to figure it out. And it's intentionality, it's honesty, it's trust, you know, maybe your job is something that needs to be in person. Great. Then go do it in person. Maybe it's not then don't but have the conversation. So that's, that's how the conversation is sort of >>Maybe it event native, which is the old model. Yeah. Yeah. Hybrid events is there multi-event Daves club super event, >>Multi, multi hybrid events. >><laugh> >>And there actually we do take this show on the road with the Dell tech forum. So it is multi hybrid event. >>By the way you mentioned the team, how excited the team was. I thought it was a great touch at the end of the, of day one keynote to bring all the team members out. That was a really powerful moment, >>You know, to be honest, I loved it when I saw it on paper, I thought this could either be great or so cheesy. I'll be like climbing under my tour and I loved it. And, but even that was a risk where I thought that's fine. Try it. And if it, if it doesn't work, like it's fine, >>Go bigger, go home if they >>Exactly. So I think you see us trying to lean into those moments a little bit more and be willing to take that risk and see what happens. >>Allison always great to have you on the cube. I love your insight. Love your perspective. Final question for you. What are you into these days? What are you watching personally in the industry or in, in your life as we evolve into this next chapter of the generational of the cultural shift? >>I mean the biggest thing that I'm really thinking about is this question of hybrid work and what does it mean to build connection with our employees, with our customers, with our partners, with our broader ecosystem, whilst also having the freedom and flexibility that the last two years have brought us. I mean, I think you guys know, I, I have an odd personal life. I kind little bit of a digital Noma myself and you know, I, in a let's >>Extend the segment, let's >>Go down and in years for past I would not, um, have been able to maintain my life and my job. And that's the power of technology. You just have to look for the downside, which is maybe people need more connection too. So that's an unanswered question. >>Yeah. I knew fabrics are more urging my minds. Very clear. Yeah. Allison, great to have you on again. Pleasure having, Thanks for having us here in the queue. We really >>Appreciate it. We always love having you at Dell tech world. And it's great to see you personally. Thanks >>Executive vice president CMO Dell technologies here in the queue. I'm John for Dave LAN. We'll be right back with more after this break.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del Tech World 2020 the virtual del tech world. Of course, the virtual queue with me is Alison Do. She's the CMO and a member of the executive leadership team at Dell Technologies. Hey there, Alison. Good to see you. >>Hi, David. Good to see you too. I'm gonna see you alive, but it's so good to see on the feed. >>Yeah, I miss you, too. You know, it's been it's been tough, but we're getting through it and, you know, it's a least with technology. We're able to meet this way and, you know, for us continue the cube for you to continue del Tech world, reaching out to your to your customers. But, you know, maybe we could start there. It's like I said the other day else into somebody. I feel like everybody I know in the technology industry has also become a covert expert in the last six months. But but, you know, it changed so much. But I'm interested in well, first of all, you're a great communicator. I have met many, many members of your team. They're really motivated group. How did you handle the pandemic? Your communications. Uh, did you increase that? Did you? Did you have to change anything? Or maybe not. Because like I say, you've always been a great communicator with a strong team. What was your first move? >>Eso There's obviously there's many audiences that we serve through communications, but in this instance, the two most important our customers and our team members. So I'll take the customers first. You have likely seen the spoof Real's Going Around the Internet of Here's How Not to Talk to Customers, Right? So you saw early in February and March in April, all of these communications that started with in these troubled times We are here to help you and, you know, we're already in a crisis every single day, all day long. I don't think people needed to be reminded that there was a crisis happening. So you've got this one end where it's over crisis mongering and the other side where it was just ignoring the crisis. And so what we did was we really looked at all of our communications a new So, for example, in our small business space, we were just about I mean days away from launching a campaign that was about celebrating the success of small businesses. It's a beautiful piece of creative. I love it, and we made the very tough decision to put that work on the shelf and not launch it. Why? Because it would have been incredibly tone deaf in a moment where small businesses were going out of business and under incredible struggle to have a campaign that was celebrating their success. It just wouldn't have worked. And what we did very quickly was a new piece of creative that had our own small business advisers, lower production values, them working from home and talking about how they were helping customers. But frankly, even that then has a shelf life, because ultimately you have to get back to your original story. So as we thought about our own communications, my own leadership team and I went through every single piece of creative toe. Look for what's appropriate now what's tone deaf, and that was a very heavy lift and something that we had to continue to do and I'm really proud of the work. We did pivot quickly, then on the employee side. If you'd asked me in January, was Team member Communications the most important thing I was doing? I would have said It's an important thing I'm doing and I care deeply about it, But it's not the most important thing I'm doing. Where there was a period from probably February to June where I would have said it became the most important thing that I was doing because we had 120,000 people pivot over a weekend toe. Working from home, you had all of the demands of home schooling, the chaos that stress whilst also were obviously trying to keep a business running. So this engagement with our employees and connecting the connecting with them through more informal means, like zoom meetings with Michael and his leadership team, where once upon a time we would have had a more high value production became a key piece of what we did. So it sounds so easy, but this increase of the frequency with our own employees, while also being really honest with ourselves about the tone of those communications, so that's what we did and continue to dio >>Well, you've done a good job and you struck a nice balance. I mean, you weren't did see some folks ambulance chasing and it was a real turn off. Or like you said, sometimes tone deaf. And we can all look back over history and see, you know, so many communications disasters like you say, people being tone deaf or ignoring something. It was sloughing it off, and then it really comes back to bite them. Sometimes security breaches air like that. So it seems like Dell has I don't know, there's a methodology. I don't know if you use data or it's just a lot of good good experience. How have you been able to sort of nail it? I guess I would say is it is. >>But there's some secret method that I'm cautiously optimistic. And the superstitious part of me is like, Don't say that, Okay, I'm not gonna would alright eso so that it's it's both it z experience, obviously. And then what? I What I talk a lot about is this intersection of data versus did data and creativity, and you spend a lot of time in marketing circles. Those two things can be sometimes pitched is competing with each other. Oh, it's all about the creativity, or it's all about the data. And I think that's a silly non argument. And it should be both things And this this time like this. This point that I make about ambulance chasing and not re traumatizing people every single day by talking about in these troubled times is actually from a piece of research that we did, if you believe it or not. In 2008 during the middle of the global financial crisis, when we started to research some of our creative, we found that some of the people who have seen our creative were actually less inclined to buy Dell and less positive about Dell. Why? Because we started with those really hackneyed lines of in these troubled times. And then we went on to talk about how we could take out I t costs and were targeted at I T makers, who basically we first played to their fear function and they said, and now we're going to put you out of a job, right? So there's this years of learning around where you get this sweet spot from a messaging perspective to talk about customer outcomes while also talking about what you do is a company, and keeping the institutional knowledge is knowledge of those lessons and building and refining over time. And so that's why I think we've been able to pivot as quickly as we have is because we've been data driven and had a creative voice for a very long time. The other piece that has helped us be fast is that we've spent the last 2.5 3 years working on bringing our own data, our own customer data internally after many, many years of having that with the third party agency. So all the work we had to do to retarget to re pivot based on which verticals were being successful in this time and which were not we were able to now due in a matter of hours, something that would have taken us weeks before. So there's places where it's about the voice of who we are as a brand, and that's a lot of that is creative judgment. And then there's places about institutional knowledge of the data, and then riel getting too real time data analysis where we're on the cusp of doing that. >>Yeah, so I like the way you phrase that it's not just looking at the data and going with some robotic fashion. It reminds me of, you know the book. Michael Lewis, Moneyball, the famous movie, You know, it's like for a while it was it was in baseball, like whoever had the best nerds they thought we were gonna win. But it really is a balance of art and science, and it seems like you're on this journey with your customers together. I mean, how much how much? I mean, I know there's a lot of interaction, but but it seems like you guys are all learning together and evolving together in that regard. >>Absolutely. David, One of the things that has been really interesting to watch is we have had a connected workplace program for 10 years, so we've had flexible work arrangements for a very long time, and one of the things that we have learned from that is a combination of three key factors. The technology, obviously, can you do it? The three culture, and then the process is right. So when you have a the ability to work from home doesn't mean you should work from home 22 out of 24 hours. And that's where culture comes in. And I frankly, that's where this moment of cumulative global stress is so important to realize as a leader and to bring out to the Open and to talk about it. I mean, Michael's talked a lot about this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. We've done a lot of things to support our employees. And so if you think about those three factors and what we've learned, one of the things that we found as we got into the pipe pandemic was on the technology side. Even customers who thought they had business continuity plans in place or thought that they had worked from home infrastructure in place found that they didn't really so there was actually a very quick move to help our customers get the technology that would enable them to keep their businesses running and then on the other two fronts around processes and culture and leadership. We've been ableto have smaller, more intimate conversations with our customers than we would have historically, because frankly, we can bring Michael, Jeff. Other parts of the leadership team me together to have a conversation and one of the benefits of the fact that those of us who've been road warriors for many, many, many years as I know you have a swell suddenly found yourself actually staying in one place. You have time to have that conversation so that we continue to obviously help our customers on the technology front, but also have been able to lean in in a different way on what we've learned over 10 years and what we've learned over this incredibly dramatic eight months, >>you know, and you guys actually have some work from Home Street cred? I think, Del, you're the percentage of folks that were working from home Pre Koven was higher than the norm, significantly higher than normal. Wasn't that long ago that there were a couple of really high profile companies that were mandating come into the office and clear that they were on the wrong side of history? I mean, that surprised me actually on. Do you know what also surprised me? I don't know. I'm just gonna say it is There were two companies run by women, and I would have thought there was more empathy there. Uh, but Dal has always had this culture of Yeah, we were, You know, we could work. We could be productive no matter where. Maybe that's because of the the heritage or your founders. Still still chairman and CEO. I don't know. >>You know those companies and obviously we know who they are. Even at the time, what I thought about them was You don't have a location problem. You have a culture problem and you have a productivity problem and you a trust problem with your employees. And so, yes, I think they are going to be proven to be on the wrong side of history. And I think in those instances they've been on the wrong side of history on many things, sadly, and I hope that will never be us. I don't wanna be mean about that, but but the truth of the matter is one of the other benefits of being more flexible about where and how you work is. It opens up access to different talent pools who may or may not want to live in Austin, Texas, as an example, and that gives you a different way to get a more diverse workforce to get a younger workforce. And I think lots of companies are starting to have that really ization. And, you know, as I said, we've been doing this for 10 years. Even with that context, this is a quantum leap in. Now we're all basically not 100% but mainly all working from home, and we're still learning. So there's an interesting, ongoing lifelong learning that I think is very, very court of the Dell culture. >>I want to ask you about the virtual events you had you had a choice to make. You could have done what many did and said, Okay, we're going to run the event as scheduled, and you would have got a covert Mulligan. I mean, we saw Cem some pretty bad productions, frankly, but that was okay because they had to move fast and they got it done. So in a way, you kind of put more pressure on your yourselves. Andi, I guess you know, we saw this with VM Ware. I guess Was, you know, just recently last >>few >>weeks. Yeah, and so but they kind of raise the bar had great, you know, action with John Legend. So that was really kind of interesting, but, you know, kind of what went into that decision? A Zeiss A. You put more pressure on yourself because now you But you also had compares what? Your thoughts on >>that. So there was a moment in about March where I felt like I was making a multimillion dollar decision every single day. And that was on a personal note, somewhat stressful to kind of wake up and think, What? What? Not just on the events front. But as I said on the creative front, What work that my team has been working on for the last two years? I am I going to destroy today was sort of. I mean, I'm kind of joking, but not entirely how that felt for me personally at the moment. And we had about we made the decision early on to cancel events. We also made the decision quite early on that when we call that, we said we're not going to do any in person events until the end of this calendar year. So I felt good about the definitiveness there. We had about a week where we were still planning to do the virtual world in May and what I did together with my head of communications and head of event is we really sat and looked at the trajectory in the United States, and we thought, this is not gonna be a great moment for the U. S. The week we were supposed to run in May, if you looked at the trajectory of diseases, you would have news be dominated by the fact that we had an increasing spike in number of cases and subsequent deaths. And we just thought that don't just gonna care about our launches. So we had to really, very quickly re pivot that and what I was trying to do was not turn my own organization. So make the decisions start to plan and move on. And at the same time, though, what that then meant is we still have to get product launches out the door. So we did nine virtual launches in nine weeks. That was a big learning learning her for my team. I feel really good about that, and hopefully it helps us. And what I think will be a hybrid future going forward. >>Yeah, so not to generalize, but I've been generalizing about the following. So I've been saying for a while now that a lot >>of the >>marketing people have always wanted to have a greater component of virtual. But, you know, sales guys love the belly. The belly closed the deals, you know? But so where do you land on that? How do you see? You know, the future of events we do, you expect to continue to have ah, strong virtual component. >>I think it's gonna be a hybrid. I think we will never go back to what we did before. I think the same time people do need that human connection. Honestly, I miss seeing the people that I work with face to face. I said at the beginning of this conversation, I would like to be having this discussion with you live and I hate Las Vegas. So I never thought I'd be that interested in, like, let's go to Las Vegas, you know, who knew? But but so I think you'll see a hybrid future going forward. And then we will figure out what those smaller, more direct personal relationship moments are that over the next couple of years you could do more safely and then also frankly give you the opportunity to have those conversations that are more meaningful. So I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. Obviously, we're gonna learn a lot this year with this event, and we're going to continue to build on it. But there's places in the world if you look at what we've done in China for many, many, many years, we have held on over abundance of digital events because of frankly, just the size of the population and the the geographic complexity. And so there are places that even early into this, we could say, Well, we've already done this in China. How do we take that and apply it to the rest of the world? So that's what we're working through now. That's actually really exciting, >>You know, when you look at startups, it's like two things matter the engineering and sales and that's all anything else is a waste of money in their minds when you and and all they talk about is Legion Legion Legion. You don't hear that from a company like Dell because you have so many other channels on ways Thio communicate with your customers and engage with your customers. But of course, legions important demand. Gen. Is important. Do you feel like virtual events can be a Z effective? Maybe it's a longer tail, but can they be as productive as the physical events? >>So one thing that I've always been a little bit cantankerous on within marketing circles is I refuse to talk about it in terms of Brand versus Li Jen, because I think that's a false argument. And the way I've talked about it with my own team is there are things that we do that yield short term business results, maybe even in corridor in half for a year. And there are things that we do that lead to long term business results. First one is demand, and the second one is more traditional brand. But we have to do both. We have to think about our legacy as a known primarily for many, many years as a PC maker. In order for us to be successful in the business businesses that we are in now, we love our PC heritage. I grew up in that business, but we also want to embrace the other parts of their business and educate people about the things that we do that they may not even know, right? So that's a little bit of context in terms of you got to do both. You got to tell your story. You've got to change perceptions and you got to drive demand in quarter. So the interesting things about digital events is we can actually reach more people than we ever could in an in person world. So I think that expands the pie for both the perceptions and long term and short term. And I hope what we are more able to do effectively because of that point that I made about our own internal marketing digital transformation is connect those opportunities to lead and pass them off to sales more effectively. We've done a lot of work on the plumbing on the back end of that for the last couple of years, and I feel really fortunate that we did that because I don't think we'd be able to do what we're doing now. If we hadn't invested there, >>Well, it's interesting. You're right. I mean, Del of course, renowned during the PC era and rode that wave. And then, of course, the AMC acquisition one of the most amazing transformations, if not the most amazing transformation in the history of the computer industry. But when you when you look to the future and of course, we're hearing this week about as a service and you new pricing models, just new mindsets I look at and I wonder if you could comment, I look at Dell's futures, you know, not really a product company. You're becoming a platform. Essentially, for for digital transformation is how I look atyou. Well, how do you see the brand message going forward? >>Absolutely. I think that one of the things that's really interesting about Dell is that we have proven our ability to constantly and consistently reinvent ourselves, and I won't go through the whole thing. But if you look at started as a direct to consumer company, then went into servers then and started to go into small business meeting business a little bit about when private acquired e. M. C. I mean, we are a company who is always moving forward and always thinking about what's next. Oftentimes, people don't even realize the breadth and depth of what we do and who we are now so as even with all of that context in place, the horizon that we're facing into now is, I believe, the most important transformation that we've done, which is, as you see, historical, I t models change and it becomes, yes, about customer choice. We know that many of our customers will continue to want to buy hardware the way they always have. But we also know that we're going to see a very significant change in consumption models. And the way we stay on top of our game going forward is we lean into that huge transformation. And that's what we're announcing this week with Project Apex, which is that commitment to the entire company's transformation around as a service. And that's super exciting for us. >>Well, I was saying Before, you're sort of in lockstep with your customers. Or maybe you could we could. We could close by talking a little bit about Dell's digital transformation and what you guys have going on internally, and maybe some of the cultural impacts that you've seen. >>So you, you you touched on it. It's so easy to make it about just the I t. Work, and in fact, you actually have to make it about the i t. The business process. Change in the culture change. So if you look at what we did with the AMC acquisition and the fact that you know that there's a lot of skepticism about that at the time, they're not gonna be able to absorb that. Keep the business running. And in fact, we have really shown huge strides forward in the business. One of the reasons we've been able to do that is because we've been so thoughtful about all of those things. The technology, the culture and the business process change, and you'll see us continue to do that. As I said in my own organization, just to use the data driven transformation of marketing. Historically, we would have hired a certain type of person who was more of a creative Brett bent. Well, now, increasingly, we're hiring quants who are going to come into a career in marketing, and they never would have seen themselves doing that a couple of years ago. And so my team has to think about okay, these don't look like our historical marketing profile. How do we hire them? How do we do performance evaluations for them. And how do we make sure that we're not putting the parameters of old on a very new type of talent? And so when we talk about diversity, it's not just age, gender, etcetera. It's also of skills. And that's where I think the future of digital transformation is so interesting. There has been so much hype on this topic, and I think now is when we're really starting to see those big leaps forward and peoples in companies. Riel transformation. That's the benefit of this cookie year we got here, Dave. >>Well, I think I do think the culture comes through, especially in conversations like this. I mean, you're obviously a very clear thinker and good communicator, but I think your executive team is in lockstep. It gets down, toe the middle management into the into the field and and, you know, congratulations on how far you've come. And, uh, and and also I'm really impressed that you guys have such a huge ambitions in so many ways. Changing society obviously focused on customers and building great companies. So, Alison, thanks so much for >>thank you, Dave. You virtually I'm very >>great to see it. Hopefully hopefully see Assumes. Hopefully next year we could be together. Until then, virtually you'll >>see virtual, >>huh? Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Keep it right there. Our coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019 brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas with Dell Technology World 2019 and I'm John Furrier and my co-host Dave Vellante breaking down all the action, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We go all day, all night here at Dell's great event. We're here with the CMO of Dell Technology Allison Dew, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, it's nice to be here. >> Good to see you again, Allison. >> It's fun. >> What a show, action-packed as always. We got two sets, we call it the theCUBE content cannons. We're just firing off content, a lot of conversations, a lot of boxes being checked, but also growth, lookin' at the numbers. The business performance of Dell is strong. Leadership across all categories, large-scale, and an integrated approach with the products and the relationship with VMware paying off in big-time. Azure News, Microsoft integrating in, so a lot of great product leadership, business results, things are booming at Dell Technologies. >> They really are and you know, when you think about the journey for us in particular over the last three years since starting the EMC combination, and all of the things that are written about integrations, technology integrations of this scale and scope, and you look at what the teams together have successfully done, the business performance, the share growth across categories, and as of today, the true end-to-end solutions that we're announcing in partnership with VMware and Secureworks. And we tend to be a pretty humble culture, but I will say, I think it's a pretty impressive result, when you look at most integrations are focused on don't break anything, and not only did we not break anything, we've kept the trust of our customers, we've continued to grow the customer base, and now we're really focused on, how across the Dell Technologies family, primarily with VMware and Secureworks and Pivotal do we bring to life the solutions that solve our customers' biggest IT problems. Pretty amazing spot to be in. >> You know one of the luxuries of doing theCUBE for 10 years is that we've had conversations over 10 years and I remember many years ago when Michael was about to go private, we saw him in Austin, was a small Dell world back then, we had two conferences, and he was standing there alone. We approached him, Dave and I, and we had a long conversation with him, he was very approachable, and then when he talked about, when he did the private and then the acquisition at these points, everyone was pooh-poohing it at saying, it's a declining market, things are going, why would you want to do this? Obviously the scale benefits are showing, but the macroeconomic conditions of the marketplace, you couldn't be happier for. Public cloud drove a lot of application deployment, you have SAS businesses started, you have on-premise booming, refresh and infrastructure, a complete growth. >> Right. >> Yeah, there's actual growth there. >> Right. >> So the bet paid off. You as a marketer have to market this now, so what's your strategy because you have digital transformation as the kind of standard positioning posture, but as you have to market Dell Technology on the portfolio of capabilities, which is large, I can only imagine it's challenging. >> So let me actually back up, and to one of the points that you talked about, and then I'll answer your actual question. So I can't remember off the top of my head, but we very jokingly talk about, in the era since the PC was declared dead, we have sold billions of PCs right and it would be funnier if I could remember the number, but you know we used to joke around with Jeff Clark, ala Monty Python, I'm not dead yet. >> Yeah. >> And so you get this hype about what's happening in the industry, and the truth is it's actually a very different picture than some of that hype, and one of the reasons I think that's important is because obviously we've continued to take share on the PC business, we've continued to grow there, but we also believe that the hype sometimes applies to these other technology cycles as well. So if you go back a couple of years ago, it was everything was going to the public cloud. If you don't go to the public cloud you are a dinosaur. You don't know what you're doing. You're going to go out of business. The traditional infrastructure companies are going to go out of the business, and to be honest, that is also just nonsense, right. And so if you think about what's evolving, is we believe very firmly that we're going to see the continued growth of a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world and it's not one thing or the other. And in fact, when you look at all of the research around the economics of doing one or the other, it all becomes workload-dependent. So for some workloads you should go to the public cloud. For some workloads, you should have it on-prem and that conversation may not be as interesting a headline, but it's the truth. >> It's reality actually. >> It's the truth. >> Well it's also reality, the workloads are dictating what the architecture should be or the solutions. That's what you're saying is a reality. >> Exactly, and so that's why we're so excited about the announcements that we had this morning with VMware, with Microsoft. We're really talking about a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world, and across all of the solutions that we announced this morning. The key, continuity and what we're really focused on, sounds so hackneyed, is how do we make it simpler for our customers? How do you make it simpler to manage and deploy PCs? How do you make it simpler to manage and deploy your cloud environment, that's it. >> So let's talk about the show a little bit, let's see 15,000 attendees, 122 countries represented, 4,000 channel partners, 250 industry analysts and media folks, so pretty big numbers. You could see it in the hallways. It's not quiet. You're kind of doing a lot of this. >> It's actually sort of hard to pay attention to you guys with all the noise in the background. You must be used to it. I'm like a goldfish, like what's happening? >> Now the interesting thing to me is, and we were talking about you know, it's the transitions, consolidations, oh it's traditional infrastructure companies are dead, et cetera, et cetera. I'd observe that over the years the testament of today's leaders is they respond, they don't just sit back and say oh Unix is snake-oil. Do you remember that famous quote? Look at what Microsoft has done, but my point is Michael's keynote today, it wasn't about a bunch of products, it was about big visions, solving a lot of the world's problems, and really conveying that Dell is in a position to help these companies as a partner. I presume you had some input to that keynote, I just wonder. >> I hope so. (laughs) >> What the thinking was there? >> So there's a lot of conversation and it's, you don't have to go that far in the media to read everything about technology as a force of evil in the world. One of the things that you notice, Michael's keynote this morning and I'll come back to what we're doing about it again later this week, is we are putting a very firm stake in the ground that we believe that technology is overall a force for positive change in the world and we're having a conversation about that on Wednesday that I'll talk a little bit more about in a second. And there's a subtlety there, that I think sometimes again, may not be the most interesting headline but is true, which is technology in aggregate drives great progress in the world, however we as leaders, we as humans, also have a responsibility to drive the responsible use of technology and so you see some of the conversations that we're having later this week in the Guru sessions, for example, where Joy Bilal-Meany is talking about responsible use of AI and some of the inherent biases in AI. Those are the tough issues that leaders need to be tackling now. >> Yeah well and one of the other you know, you're right a trade press loves to pick up on it and pick at it but one of the things to talk about, of course, is jobs, automation affecting jobs, I know Erik Brynjolfsson is one of your speakers, he's been on theCUBE before, and the discussion we had was machines have always replaced humans. For the first time ever,now they're replacing humans in cognitive functions. So the the answer is not protect the past from the future it's educate people, find new ways to be creative. I mean, technology has always been-- >> That's right. >> Part of human good and human advancement. There's always a two-sided coin, but it's got to be managed. >> That's right, one of the conversations that I think gets lost is when we talk about, I am a Battlestar Galactica fan, the second one not the one from the 70s, so you know I always say jokingly-- >> Darn. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We're a little older. >> Did you watch the one from the 2,000s? >> Yes, of course. >> 2,000s are so good. You know the conversation about are the Cylons coming to get us? And is AI really the thing that's destroying what's happening for human populations? The reality is AI has been evolving for many years, so it's not actually new. What is new is the combination of AI and data and the compute power to make that real and I do think it requires a different conversation with societies, with employers about how do you continue to reeducate your employee base? What does that mean? And that is really meaty stuff that we need to be leaning into. On aside, you've got me thinking of this whole Battlestar Galactica. My mind's thinking Star Trek, Star Wars. I heard a rumor that you guys had so many unhappy employees because Game of Thrones was on yesterday. >> Yeah. >> That you actually rented a big screen? >> Yeah, we did. >> A lot of Game of Thrones fans? Are you in that mix? >> So yeah. >> No spoiler alerts. >> No, I won't say anything about what happened. But I'll tell you, so we have all of our employees who work at the show, have to get here on Saturday or Sunday at the very latest. And even me personally, we came to Las Vegas and I thought, well I can watch it in my hotel room and then my hotel room didn't have HBO and I thought I don't really want to watch it on my little HBO Go app that's about this big because we're all waiting for what's going to happen in episode three, and I won't tell you if you haven't seen it. >> It's a lot of battling. >> So exactly, so my team and I had this conversation about could we have a joint viewing of Game of Thrones and it's really my team who did all of the work, but it was super-fun and we had a party with a bunch of team, had a few beers and it was fun. >> That's a great culture. >> I just wanted to get that out there. I think, cool culture. Allison, you mentioned something about the press and stories for good and how people looking for headlines. You know we're not advertising, so we're not trying to chase the clickbait, it's about getting the story right and sometimes the boring story doesn't get the headlines. Or the page views, advertising. So we're in a world now where a lot of other people in the media, they're censoring posts, there was an incident on Forbes where I wrote a negative post about a company and they took it down, that was Oracle. A lot of journalists looking for stories just to put tech in a bad spot. >> Right. >> And there's a lot of tech for good, but a lot of people can't point to one thing saying that's an example for tech for good and there's some few out there missing children, exploited children, trafficking, all kinds of things, talk about that dynamic because this is changing how you market, how people consume. You have the role of open communities. >> Yep. >> Social networking. A lot of dynamics going on. How do you view all this? >> So first of all, I think so much of the conversation about tech for good or tech for bad actually indexes only on social media and media broadly, and perhaps that's because it's the media who are writing about that. And so there's sort of this loop that we get in and I do think there are real issues that we need to think about in terms of social media. You guys likely saw Kara Swisher had a an op-ed in the New York Times after the Sri Lankan bombings where she, long-term technology advocate, actually said after the Sri Lankan bombings when the government shut down all social media communications, I thought that was a good thing and so that probably actually did help with the immediate situation on the ground and yet is a very scary precedent, right? I'd like to to take the conversation and say what about media? Right, so there's a lot of work that we need to do in order to maintain media fairness and then there's a whole other conversation about technology that we're not talking about. Everything that we're doing in terms of medicine and indexing the human genome, and addressing deafness and Michael talked about that even this morning, there are these really big technology problems that were really leaning into, and yet we're either talking about Amazon drone delivery or what Facebook is doing. We need to talk about those, but let's talk about where technology is really struggling to address real problems. >> I just read an essay yesterday from Dana Boyd who wrote a great fascinating piece around extremism in social media. Media's being hijacked by these extreme groups and they're mixing up causation and correlation and conflating many things to just tell a story to support an initiatives, no curation. >> Right. >> And with social media everything's open so that just flies out there. And so that's a big problem. >> And then takes off, you know. >> So how do you deal with that as a CMO 'cause you're spending advertising dollars. You're trying to deploy capital. You now have a new open source kind of mindset around communities customers are shopping themselves now. >> Right, so this is going to sound possibly a little bit overly simplistic but what I am responsible for in my job is the reputation and brand of this company right. I think about other things in terms of how we think about media and everything but I want to make sure that we are spending our media dollars in a responsible way and yet also recognize that people can disagree with us and that's okay and be comfortable with, we can be both a media advertiser on a publication who might write a review where they don't like one of our products and I'm never going to be in the business of saying take down our media dollars because that sets a terrible precedent and frankly there are people who would say take down our media dollars so that's one thing that we're really focused on. And then the other is, we consistently year-over-year are recognized as one of the world's most ethical companies and I will tell you from the leadership with Michael across the board I believe that that is true. And we actually think about business in an ethical way and we behave in an ethical way and that's why frankly you're not reading those headlines about us which are a lot more problematic. >> It's a cultural thing you guys have. Michael's always been a direct-to-consumer. That's been a direct mail, back in the glory days, now-- >> We still do that actually. >> Cloud, SAS, he texts me all the time. Hey John, what's going on? So he's he's open. >> Yeah. >> He's also now with Cloud and SAS, it's a direct to consumer business. >> I love your positive attitude. You have a session tomorrow, Optimism and Happiness in the Digital Age, looking forward to that. I have a personal question. So you started out your career, I think, in East Asia studies, right? >> That's right, good memory. >> You speak multiple languages. >> Yeah. >> I think three languages? >> If you count English, three. >> Yes okay so you're trilingual. >> Trilingual, yeah. >> If you speak two, you're what? >> Bilingual. >> Speak one, you're what? >> Monolingual, American. (all laughing) American, I was like, I know this joke. >> I wonder how that affected sort of your career? >> Absolutely. >> In terms of getting into this business. >> I would first say that I was an incredibly naive undergraduate. I wanted to be an editor of a paper and I loved foreign languages. So I studied Japanese and French and that led me to going to Japan as a very naive 22 year old and I started working in this small Japanese ad agency. I was the only non-Japanese person in that company and of course I learned some functional things in terms of the art of advertising but what I actually learned was how to survive in an environment that was so different to mine. Even if you speak Japanese, it is a language of unsaid things and you have to constantly be figuring out what's actually happening here and so ironically that decision that I made at 18, very naively, to study Japanese is one of the things that sets the course of my life because I've always been, my entire career, in international jobs and I think if I ever had to come back to just being in an American job, I wouldn't know what to do with myself, I'd be so bored. And it's also one of the reasons when we talk about technology and education and AI and what are robots going to do, This is my personal opinion, somewhat controversial opinion which is of course we need to support STEM, of course I want to see more women in STEM. At the same time, I want to see us focus our children on critical thinking skills. How do you write well? How do you have an argument? How do you convince somebody? And that's because until I went to business school I was a liberal arts major born and bred and so that's not the pat answer that you expect from somebody in my job which is it's all about STEM. It's about STEM and more. >> Emotional quotient's a big thing we're seeing a lot. The whole self. That's a big part of the kids growing up being aware. >> Yeah. >> Socially emotional. Allison, thanks coming on theCUBE and sharing. >> My pleasure. >> Great insights here in theCUBE. We're here with the CMO, Allison Dew, with Dell Technologies. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more day one coverage after this short break. >> Awesome. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and this is day three of our coverage of the inaugural Dell Technologies World. We're in the home stretch. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante joining you, with Alison Dew, the newly minted CMO of Dell. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, good to be here. >> So, you've been with Dell for a long time. >> 10 years >> You know the drill, you know the culture. But, 23 days as CMO? >> Yes >> Well congratulations. You were on stage today, awesome show. >> Thank you, I couldn't be more delighted. Great experience for me personally. Great show for our customers. >> Yeah, I'll bet. I mean, and you brought in some outside speakers this year, which has not been typical of this show, at least the legacy EMC world, and certainly Dell World did that. >> Stu: Dell World did, definitely. >> Alison: Dell World did do it more, you know. >> Yep, Bill Clinton, we saw some other amazing speakers. >> Elon Musk >> Elon Musk, I remember the year Elon came. >> So that's good, and you got to interview Ashton Kutcher >> Yeah >> Which was quite amazing. He's an unbelievable-- people don't know, he's an investor, he's kind of a geek. >> Alison: Yep >> Even though he's, you know >> An engineer by training? >> Right, so what'd you think of his discussion? >> I mean, I thought it was fantastic and, as you said, I think people don't quite realize how involved in technology he actually is. And also, how well and successful his businesses have been. And then, equally important, the work that he's doing with his foundation and the way he's using technology for really important human causes. I don't think he gets enough credit for that, so it was great to sit on stage and have that conversation. It was super fun. >> Yeah, cause we know him from That 70's Show. >> I know, I like That 70's Show. >> And he's a goofball, and he comes across He's a great actor, lot of fun. >> Yeah, there was one of the lines I actually really loved from the presentation. It's that he looks for companies that have counter-intuitive thesis because if you're doing something that everybody else is, then chances are somebody is going to catch you and everything else like that. You also had to talk about geeks. You know, John Rose and Ray O'Farrell, up there. Share a little bit about some commonalities you saw between these speakers, and some of the unconventional things they're doing. >> So, I completely agree. I love the point of talking, there's so much hype in the space. And that's why I think that line is so important. And so, the big commonality that we're really seeing and talking about this year in particular is we've been talking for years about data as the rocket fuel of the economy and of business transformation, and now we're really talking about data combined with those emerging technologies. So, things like AI, IOT, Blockchain, which are really taking that data and unlocking the business value because for years, there's been this hype about big data, but I don't think the reality has quite been there. And now as those technologies catch up, we're really starting to see some practical applications and use cases and that's why I thought, in particular, John Rose's section on AI and how we're seeing some of those really emerging practical applications was so interesting and fun and tied really well to Ashton's talk track. >> You know, that's a good point. I mean, I feel like we started covering the big data trend really early on. And I feel like big data was like the warm up. It's cheaper now to collect all this data. Now that we have all this data, we're going to apply machine intelligence to that data. We're going to scale it, with cloud economics and that's really what's going to drive value and innovation. What are your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. We talked this morning on the stage even about some of the companies, large and small, who are really doing that. I think one of the examples that's really interesting Wal-Mart using Blockchain technology to decrease the amount of time from seven days to mere seconds that it takes them to identify the source of food contamination. Really interesting things where, a couple of years ago even, frankly even 18, 20 months ago, that would have been a promise, but maybe not a reality. And so that's what I think is really exciting. Finally. >> It's something that's actually resonated with me this week. We've talked for my entire career, there's the journeys. And it was like, a lot of times it's the journey of the technology. A couple of years ago, digital transformation was "Okay, is it real? Isn't it?" Every customer I talk to, they understand making it real as you said in the keynote, where they're going. What kind of feedback are you getting from people at the show? >> So one of the things I talked about briefly on Monday, but I think is really important, is this promise and the hope and the optimism of digital transformation. And yet also, the fear behind it as well. Through some of the work that we've done in our own research for Realizing 2030, we're really seeing that about 50% of our respondents say they believe in the power of the human machine partnership, which means that 50% don't. And all of the data questions are really divided and polarizing like that. And as a lifelong researcher, that's really interesting to me because it says that there's something going on there. And yet, at the same time, we're seeing over 85% of the respondents that we talk to who say they're committed to becoming a software defined company in five years. So this idea of "I know what I want to do "I know what it means to transform an industry, "And yet, I'm still not really sure that's going to "do me or my business good. "I'm not really sure what that means for "myself or my employees, getting really practical. "Obviously about the technologies, "that's what we do, "but the examples of how people can do "that better from a business perspective." That's a lot of the customer conversation that I've had over this week. >> But you're an optimist. You believe the world would be a better place as a result of machines. >> Yes, I do and we do. Are you an optimist? >> I am, I think there's some obviously some challenges but there's no question. Stu and I talk about this all the time, on theCUBE, that machines have always replaced humans throughout history. For the first time now, it's on cognitive functions, but the gap is creativity and eduction. So I am an optimist if we invest in the right places and I think there's an opportunity for public policy to really get involved. Leadership from companies like yours and others, politicians, of course. >> Dave and I did an event a couple of years ago with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssono, you had Andy here. Cause it's really it's not just the technology, it's technology and people, and those have to go together. And Dave said, there's policy and there's so many different layers of this that have to go into it. >> And I think we're just starting to really enter into that. On that optimist versus the robots are coming to get us spectrum, obviously there are things that we have to look out for as leaders, as society, as businesses. And yet, even if you look at the example from this morning, where Ashton is talking about minimizing child sexual trafficking and using AI and machine learning to one, arrest many of the perpetrators of these crimes, as well as free thousands of children from sexual slavery. I mean, you hear those examples, and it's hard not to be an optimist. >> I want to ask you about your digital transformation and how that's being led inside of Dell, what it means to you. >> So, obviously, we are two huge companies that came together. So when we talk about digital transformation, and what that really means, have a very different way of operating and working with IT and being in a different business model, we know that really well. One of the things that's really interesting for me personally, as the CMO for 23 days, is one of the biggest line items in my budget is actually for our own marketing digital transformation. Obviously, Dell in particular, had many, many years starting in the consumer and small business, and then growing up to larger businesses, of direct marketing. And we have a great relationship with our customers, but we also have all of these legacy systems and processes and way that work is done and now as we come together with EMC and we start to build Dell Technologies, the idea of what a data driven marketing engine can be, that possibility is something that we're also working to build ourselves. And so, everything from "how do we build our "own data lake to actually bring all "of these sources of data together? "How do we clean up that data?" is something that I'm pretty deeply into myself. There's a lot of that work going on across the company, and then for me personally, as CMO. Big initiative. >> So it's customer experience as part of it, but it's also a new way to work. >> Exactly. And it sounds so trite in a way to say the technology is the easy part, but the really hard part begins when the technology is finished. And I really believe that because if I look at my own team and my own teams experience, there's so many places where they've been doing marketing one way for a very long time. And if you come in and you ask them to do something differently, that's actually a pretty hard thing to do. And the only way to unlock the power of the data and the power of the new technologies, is to actually change how work is done. And I know it's an analogy that's overused, but if you'd ask the taxi dispatch "Are you important to the taxi business?" they would have said "Yes, of course "I'm the most important person in this chain." That's how taxis get to customers. And then along comes Uber, and suddenly you don't need that. You have to really think differently about that and as a leader, that's exciting and also really hard. >> I don't know if you've ever heard Sanjay Poonen talk about change, he says there's three reactions to change. Either run from it, fight it, or you embrace it. That's it. And the third is the only way to go. >> It's the only way. >> How about messaging? I'm sensing different messaging. Much more around the business, maybe a little bit less on the products. Plenty of product stuff here, but the high level stuff. What's your philosophy on messaging? >> I used to say "I'm a person that "believes in shades of gray" and about seven years ago I had to stop saying that. (laughs) >> But the truth is, I am a person who believes in shades of gray and I almost always believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle. So you get in marketing into these debates about is it these thought leadership and high level conversations or is it about product messaging and selling what's on the truck? And the honest truth is, you have to do both. You have to set a vision, you have to build the brand, you have to talk about the business and where we're going from a business perspective. As we talk about things like 2030, that's a really lean into the future conversation. At the same time, we also want to sell you some PCs and some servers and some storage and some data protection, so we need to do that well, too. And frankly, we need to get better as a marketing machine, as a company, and as salespeople, in terms of talking to customers. The right conversation at the right time. Again, sounds like marketing 101, but it's actually quite hard to do. When do you want to have a connected cities conversation? When do you want to just talk about how to modernize your data center? >> It's true, we always talk about above the line and below the line. When you're talking above the line, you might be speaking one language and below the line, another language. You try to mix the two, it doesn't work. >> Right, exactly. >> You have to target the appropriate audience. >> The conversation one of the women on my team started talking about this and I thought it really made sense was macro-conversations, micro-conversations. So to get out of this advertising vernacular, and I grew up in the ad industry, sort of above the line, below the line, and those were always two departments who didn't even talk to each other and usually hated each other. Instead of above the line, below the line, what's the macro-conversation? How are we talking about Realizing 2030? How are we talking about digital transformation? And then what are some of those micro-conversations where I'm going to talk to you about what are the personas that you have in your work force? And lets talk about some in user compute technology together with something really simple, like a monitor, that's going to help them be more productive. Those things don't have to fight with each other, you just have to be honest about when you're doing each one. >> Target them in the right place. >> Alison, we're getting to the end of the show here. >> Yeah, I can talk a lot. >> First of all, New Media Row here gave us the biggest set. We've done this show for nine years, we're super excited. The therapy dogs next door-- >> I love the therapy dogs. >> Are really fun to see, but every once in a while, give a little bit of color in the background here. For people that didn't get to come and experience in person, I know the sessions are online, but give us some of the flavors and some of the fun things you've seen and what would we expect from you in the future? >> I think this is just one of the most fun shows. I mean, obviously it's important for us to set our vision, it's important for people to come into the hands on labs, and the training, and the breakouts, and to learn and to engage. But, you see things like the beanbags and sitting out there, the therapy dogs, and my team does want me to say that every year we get new beanbag covers so we don't recycle those. And then really experience the fun in the Solutions Expo and talking about the way that we're taking trash, plastic trash, out of oceans and making art with it, so we can talk about our sustainable supply chain in an interesting way. I think, I'm biased, but I think this is the best show in terms of actual education and vision, but also some fun. Hopefully you guys think so too. >> Well, Sting. >> And Walk the Moon. Do you guys know who Walk the Moon is? >> Yes. >> I don't. >> Me neither. (laughs) >> Come on and dance with me. >> Oh, okay. Alright, great. >> I'm a child of the 80's, what can I say? >> Alright, so 23 days on the job, what should we be watching from you, your team, and Dell? >> So, as we talked about in the very beginning, this is our first Dell Technologies World, so obviously, we have just gone through some of the biggest integration of large tech companies in the history. And we're really proud of how successful that integration has been, and yet we also still have so much work to do around telling that integrated story. Yes, Dell and Dell EMC, but also together with VM, we're a pivotal RSA Secureworks, and the extend is strategically aligned businesses. And so that's what you'll see us really lean into is "How do we tell "that story more effectively?" We're continuing to invest in the brand, so a lot of the work that you've seen with Jeffrey Wright and those TV spots we launched again in March, and just making sure that people understand what the Dell Technologies family actually is. >> So really a more integrated story. But something that Dell always tried to tell, but you didn't have the portfolio to tell it. Now you do, so that's got to be exciting for you. >> It is exciting, yeah. >> Great. Alison, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> My pleasure. Cheers, thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World in Vegas. We'll be right back.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Good morning. Welcome to day two of the cube at Dell technologies world live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with John farrier, Dave Nicholson guys, a lot of momentum yesterday. The vibe was amazing. We're think there's about 8,000 people here and spends yesterday a lot going on with multi-cloud with partners, with customers, John, we got Michael Dell coming on in just about 15, 20 minutes. >>Yep. The keynotes getting out, people are starting to come in. You can see them, uh, flowing through the hallway. Michael Dell will be on about 15 minutes and we're gonna ask him every year when they have the cube here, we're gonna have room with questions around digital transformation. Security is the hot thing. Obviously here, data and what's up with Dell. So we'll see what, what he is gonna say. >>We had some really good interviews yesterday. We, we had customers on, we had partners and the, the overall sentiment was people are very excited about, I mean, the momentum that Dell is coming off of from F Y 22 of first time hitting north of a, of a hundred billion or in the company's history, the partner ecosystem expanding what their acknowledgement multi-cloud is here. Yeah. The, the vibe was good. The, the partners are excited. Lot of opportunity. Yeah. >>I mean, I think the big thing story here this year is that, you know, VMware's not part of Dell technologies world, although there is some stuff kind of connecting together in terms of ownership, but it's still now on its own. So that's, that's a key, um, development that's happened since we were last here in person, but the digital transformation train continues to go down the tracks and it's getting better and better and better. And for, in terms of what is happening, but there's still more complexity at the edge. That's something that's important and security more than ever is important on a global stage. But also the cyber attacks are going up. Ransomware is, has essentially I'm so standard. Everyone needs a, a solution. So everyone's pivoting to endpoint protection, zero, zero trust. And, um, ransomware has been, you see the storage vendors go that way. So that's a big trend. Uh, a lot of people go in there and they need it too. Cuz ransomware is very dangerous. So, and then obviously cyber all over the world is, is a huge, so, you know, Dell plays a role in that. They have a lot of gear and, and I think the edge is developing nicely. >>Yeah. You talk about ransomware. I was reading some stats recently that there's one attack, every 11 seconds that organizations now it's not a matter of, are we gonna get hit it's when yeah. And I think I wrote a stat the other day that said 75% of organizations will be hit by at least one cyber attack by 2025, which is around the corner. So security is that board level, front and center conversation. Yeah. And we saw a lot of that with what they were announcing just yesterday alone. >>Yeah. And to me, the cybersecurity issue is just also a political one. Uh, the adversaries can play with open source and the threats are real. The threat vectors are increasing and there's no perimeter as everyone knows that in security and you start to see data being protected. So now you've got data protection is that's big for Dell. You know, they have a huge footprint of disaster recovery and data protection. And so that becomes a really key point for protecting the data in flight, uh, data. Engineering's a hot trend. So data as code has become huge. You're seeing that in, in all the digital applications, the role of data is becoming more and more. >>Absolutely. We talked a lot Dave about edge yesterday and especially, particularly in retail and a lot of the massive transformation and the pressure that retail is under, you know, us consumers, we bring this, we want the online experience in the connected store. And so they talked a lot about what they're doing with respect to edge at the retail yesterday and in financial services. Really interesting. What are some of your thoughts on the direction that Dell's going? >>So I've been, I've been taking a little bit of a different angle on this since I've been here prowling around looking under the covers to get an understanding of the advances in hardware that are driving the top line value per opposition. So here it's appropriate to talk about things like retail at the edge and the experience that that delivers to an end user customer Dell is still doing, however, the really hard work of optimizing systems on the back end, the stuff that a lot of people would say they don't care about. The idea is Dell makes sure that this development that happens so people at the edge don't have to care about it. So, so that's the thing that I find fascinating being a kind of an old school hardware guy myself, is that all these really cool things aren't getting talked about because we don't need to talk about them because Dell has it handled. So whether it's whether it's retail, uh, whether it's, uh, uh, advances insecurity, uh, they're all driven by highly optimized and tuned hardware. You mentioned partners, um, partnerships that Dell has behind the scenes are critical to all of that. >>I mean, I think the big thing about Dell too, is they have a co here. Um, they have Chuck Whitten, a co chief operating officer, uh, Jeff Clark, uh, Chuck Whitten's new, uh, came from BAE and you got two do Cocos. Right? Right. So you got a fledging company Dell's growing. And, and the big question is M and a right. Dave and I were talking about that last night with a bunch of folks in the, in the hallway about who does Dell buy? Do they need to buy anyone? Right? And again, uh, hardware is back. I mean, you look at what we talked about yesterday. And our wrap up day one was essentially, hardware's becoming more important. And even at Amazon reinvent, when we recovering that show role of Silicon plays a huge role. Now they run hardware in the cloud. So, um, we all know hardware, just servers, somewhere in the cloud there. So I think hardware is gonna be huge David, because, you know, edge needs more smaller, faster, cheaper Bob access to colo, uh, Equinox was on yesterday. Um, you're seeing like 5g edges deploying. So I think hardware is gonna matter. I think you'll see the home become much more device centric, smarter devices. So smart city, smart homes, hardware matters more than ever. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and from an acquisition perspective who, who knows maybe Dell would acquire VMware <laugh> crazier things have happened >>Or VMware could acquire Dell >>Or yeah. Crazier things have happened. >>They would argue that one. <laugh> >>So, so the hardware hardware's back back again. It makes me think of that M and M song slim, shady. You think we need to do some sort of parody on that <laugh> together, but what does that mean for, for the partner community? There are over 200,000 partners. We talk about Barun GSI data center, the hyperscalers, that partner. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, the partner story is I think more important than ever. And you seeing more ecosystems develop around companies that you wouldn't think have ecosystems that's because with cloud and now the cloud operating model, which is on-premise and edge, you can do piece parts of solutions and, and the glue layers, the abstraction layers in software at scale are now available. So it's easier for customers to buy point solutions or platforms and put them together. Bet it more than every the headless retail, as an example, uh, a trend that's happening. You're seeing, look at, look at, uh, in the, in the, uh, consumer market, ghost kitchens, ghost retail. So you're starting to see delivery. And so at the consumerization of it is happening. You're gonna see more and more customs applications that are taking advantage of stacks that are configured either on the fly or, you know, most multiple partners. So I think you're gonna see, you know, the big players like AWS, uh, uh, Microsoft, Dell have real big ecosystem players and that's gonna be a huge trend continuing. >>So today Michael Dell is coming on in just minutes. Chuck Whitten is also on Jeff Clark. What are some of the things that you really want to dig into with these guys, John? Well, >>The big thing I want to ask him is how they're stress, energy, and operations fit into how their customers are consuming. Uh, Dell's got a huge customer base. I wanna find out how their, how their solutions are being operationalized by the customers. And that's gonna be coming, poking at the cloud a little bit and see how real that's going. Apex has been very popular. The security story. I also wanna ask about the changing workforce because the it departments of the old those folks are aging out. So a new generation of it is coming together. And I think those folks want things easy, push button, easy button dashboards. They've never, maybe not even racked the server before. So completely different new generation. When I see how that impacts the, uh, how they make products, >>Good point. We saw some of that in, you know, this morning they were showing some of the gaming, um, opportunities, Dave and I were in there this morning and what they're doing for that, and the gamers are all very excited about that. But the connected home was something that they were talking about. >>Yeah. Yeah. Who knew you could make a, uh, you know, a track pad on a laptop, more exciting. <laugh> it's, I mean, it's brilliant, right? They, you know, controls for, uh, you know, for, uh, home video conferencing built in, um, it, it just shows that again, kind of at that hardware level where people think, ah, it doesn't matter. No, there's a lot of room for innovation there. And back to the discussion of around partners, um, much like the big cloud players depend upon systems integrators out in the marketplace in order to deliver these solutions to end user kind customers. The channel's gonna be incredibly important. And I know that Dell is putting a lot of effort behind that right now. That's pretty clear. Yep. >>Yeah. We've seen lot of that. So exciting stuff today. I mentioned the three guys, three only of the many folks that are coming on the show today. We've got Allison Dew tomorrow, some other happy hitters guys looking forward to great day two full coverage. Stay with us. We've got a lot of content coming at you from the cube live from the show floor of Dell technologies, world 2022 from the Venetian in Las Vegas, stick around Michael Dell will be up next with John and Dave.

>> Announcer: TheCUBE presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, day one, Dell Technologies World live from Las Vegas at the Venetian. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante and John Furrier. Guys let's talk, first of all, first time back in person since Dell Tech World 2019. Lots going on, lots of news today. I'm going to start with you, Dave, since you're closest to me. What are some of the things that have impressed you at this first in-person event in three years? >> Well, the first thing I want to say is, so John and I, we started theCUBE in 2010, John, right? In Boston, EMC World. Now of course, Dell owns EMC, so wow. It's good to be back here. Dell's built this beautiful set. I'd say the number one thing that's surprised me was how many people were here. Airport was packed, cab lines, the line at the Palazzo, the hotel, to get in was, you know, probably an hour long. And there's, I thought there'd be maybe 5,000 people here. I would say it's closer to eight. So the hall was packed today and everybody was pumped. Michael Dell was so happy to be up on stage. He talked, I dunno if you guys saw his keynote. He basically talked, obviously how great it is to be back, but he talked about their mission, building technologies that enable that better human condition. There was a big, you know, chewy words, right? And then they got into, you know, all the cool stuff they're doing so we can get into it. But they had CVS up on stage, they had USAA on stage. A big theme was trust. Which of course, if you're Dell, you know, you want people to trust you. I guess the other thing is this is the first live event they've had since the VMware spin. >> Right. >> So in 2019 they owned VMware. VMware's no longer a part of the income statement. Dell had a ton of debt back then. Now Dell's balance sheet looks actually better than VMware's because they restructured everything. And so it's a world without VMware where now with VMware their gross margins were in the 30-plus percent range. Now they're down to 20%. So we're now asking what's next for Dell? And they stood up on stage, we can talk about it some more, but a lot of multi-cloud, a lot of cyber resilience, obviously big themes around APEX, you know, hybrid work, John. So, well let's get into that. >> What are some of the key things that you heard today? >> Well, first of all, the customers on stage are always great. Dell's Technologies, 10 years for theCUBE and their history. I saw something back here, 25 years with celebrating precision, the history of Michael Dell's journey and the current Dell Technologies with EMC folded in and a little bit of VMware DNA still in there even though they're separated out. Just has a loyal set of customers. And you roam the hallways here, you see a lot of people know Dell, love Dell. Michael Dell himself was proud to talk before the event about he's number one, Dave, in PC market share. That's been his goal to beat HP for years. (laughing) And so he's got that done. But they're transforming their business cause they have to, the data center is now cloud. Cloud is now the distributed computing. Dell has all the piece parts today. We've covered this three years ago. Now it's turned into multi-cloud, which is multi-vendor, as a service is how the consumers consume, innovate with data, that's kind of the raw material. Future of work, and obviously the partners that they have. So I think Dell is going to continue to maintain the news of being the great in the front lines as a data-center-slash-enterprise, now cloud, Edge player. So, you know, I'm impressed with their constant reinvention of the company and the news hits all the cards: Snowflake partnership, cutting edge company in the cloud, partnership with Snowflake, APEX, their product that's innovating at the Edge, this new kind of product that's going to bring it together. Unifying, all those themes, Dave, are all hitting the marks. >> Chuck Whitten up on stage, obviously he was the multicloud, you know, conversation. And I think the vision that they they're laying out and Jeff Clarke talked about it as well, is a term that John and I coined. We can't remember who coined it, John or me, "supercloud." >> Yeah. (laughing) >> And they're talking about building an abstraction layer, building on top of the clouds, connecting on-prem to the clouds, across clouds, out to the Edge, hiding the underlying complexity, Dell managing all that. That's their vision. It's aspirational today but that really is supercloud. And it's more than multi-cloud. >> You coined the term supercloud. >> Did I? >> We riffed together. I called it sub-cloud. >> Oh, that's right. And then I said, no, it's got to float over. Super! Superman flies. (John laughs) Right, that's right. >> Sub-cloud, not really a good name. Nobody wants to be sub of anything. >> I think my kid gave it to me, John, actually. (laughing) >> Well if we do know that Michael Dell watches theCUBE, he's been on theCUBE many times. He watches theCUBE, clearly he's paying attention! >> Yeah, well I hope so. I mean, we write a lot about this and we talk to a lot of customers and talk to a lot of people. But let's talk about the announcements if we can. So... The APEX cyber recovery service, you know, ransomware recovery. They're now also running that on AWS and Azure. So that's big. We heard Presidio, they was super thrilled about that. So they're... The thing I'd say about that is, you know, Dell used to be really defensive about cloud. Now I think they're leaning in. They're saying, "Hey we're not going to spend, you know, Charles Fitzgerald, the snarky guy, does some good work on CAPEX. I mean, you look at how much the cloud guys are spending on CAPEX a year, $30, $40 billion. >> They can't compete. >> On cloud CAPEX. Dell doesn't want compete. >> John: You can't compete. >> Build on top of that, so that's a gift. So that's cool. You mentioned the Snowflake announcement. I thought that was big. What that is... It's very interesting, so Frank Slootman has always said, "We're not doing a half-way house, we're in the cloud." Okay, so square that circle for me. Now Snowflake's coming on-prem. Well, yeah, what they're doing is allowing customers to keep data in a Dell object store, ECS or other object stores. But use Snowflake. So non-native Snowflake data on-prem. So that expands Snowflake cloud. What it also does is give Dell a little sizzle, a little better partner and there's a path to cloud migration if that's where the customers want to go. >> Well, I mean, I would say that that's a dangerous game because we've seen that movie before, VMware and AWS. >> Yeah but that we've talked about this. Don't you think that was the right move for VMware? >> At the time, but if you don't nurture the relationship AWS will take all those customers, ultimately, from VMware. >> But that product's still doing very well. We'll see with NetApp is another one. NetApp on AWS. I forget what they call it, but yeah, file and AWS. So that was, go ahead. >> I was just going to say, what's the impact of Snowflake? Why do you think Snowflake chose Dell? >> Because Dell's a $101 billion company and they have a huge distribution channel and a lot of common customers. >> They own storage on the premise. >> Yep. And so Snowflake's looking for, you know, storage options on which they can, you know, bring data into their cloud. Snowflake wants the data to go from on-prem into the cloud. There's no question about that. >> And I would add another thing, is that Snowflake can't do what Dell Technologies does on-premises with storage and Dell can't do what Snowflake's doing. So I think it's a mutual short-term and medium-term benefit to say, "Hey you want to run on Snowflake? You need some services there? Great, but come back and use Dell." So that to me, I think that's a win-win for Snowflake. Just the dangerous game is, whoever can develop the higher-level services in the cloud will ultimately be the winner. >> But I think the thing I would say there is, as I said, Snowflake would love for the migration to occur, but they realize it's not always going to happen. And so why not partner with a company like Dell, you know, start that pipeline. And for Dell, hey, you know, why fight fashion, as Jeremy Burton would say. The other thing was Project Alpine, which is file, block and object across cloud. That's again setting up this supercloud. And then APEX. I mean, APEX is the discussion. We had a one-on-one session, a bunch of analysts with Jeff Woodrow who runs ISG. We were supposed to be talking about ISG, all we talked about is APEX. Then we had another session with APEX and all we talked about, of course, is APEX. So, they're still figuring that out, I would say, at this point. They don't quite have product market fit and I think they'd admit that, but they're working hard on scaling engineering, trying to figure out the channel model, the compensation. You know, taking their time even, but moving fast if you know what I mean. >> I mean, Dave, I think the big trend that's jumping out of me here is that, something that we've been covering, the headless cloud, meaning if you can do as a service, which is one of Dell's major points today, that to me, everyone is a PaaS layer. I think everyone that's building digital transformation apps has to be their own SaaS. So they either do that with somebody, a man in service, which fits beautifully into that trend, or do it own. Now e-commerce has this nailed down. Shopify or build your own on top of the cloud. So headless retail's a hot trend. You're going to start to see that come into the enterprise where the enterprise can have their cake and eat it too and take advantage of managed services where they don't have expertise. So those two things right there I think is going to drive a lot of growth for Dell. >> So essentially Lisa, what Dell is doing is saying, "Okay, the timing's good with the VMware spin." They say, "Now we're going to build our own cloud as a service, APEX." And they're starting with infrastructure as a service, you know, storage as a service. Obviously cyber recovery is a service. So you're going to get compute and storage and data protection. Eventually they'll move into other areas. And it's really important for them to do that to have their own cloud, but they've got to build up the ecosystem. Snowflake is a small example. My view, they need hundreds and hundreds of Snowflakes to fill the gaps, you know, move up the stack in middleware and database and DevOps. I mean, they should be partnering with HashiCorp. They should be partnering with all these companies that do DevOps stuff. They should be... I'd like to see them, frankly, partner with competitors to their data protection group. Why, you know, sounds crazy, but if you're going to build a cloud, look at AWS. They partner with everybody, right? And so that's what a true cloud experience looks like. You've got this huge menu. And so I think Dell's going to have to try to differentiate from HP. HPE was first, right, and they're all in. Dell's saying we're going to let the customers tell us where to go. And so they, I think one differentiation is their ecosystem, their ability to build that ecosystem. Yeah, but HP's got a good distribution channel too. Just not as big as Dell's. >> They all got the assets in it, but they're transforming. So I think at the end of the day, as Dell and even HPE transforms, they got to solve the customer problems and reduce the complexity. So again, the managed services piece with APEX is huge. I think having the building blocks for multi hybrid cloud at the Edge, just, you can't go wrong with that. If the customers can deploy it and consume it. >> What were some of the messages that you heard from, you mentioned CVS on stage, USAA on stage. Dell's always been very, very customer-focused. They've got some great brands. What did you hear from that customer's voice that shows you they're going in the right direction? >> Well first of all, the customers are longstanding customers of Dell Technologies, so that's one recognition of the ongoing partnerships. But they're also messaged up with Dell's messaging, right? They're telling the Dell story. And what I heard from the Dell story was moving fast and reducing complexity is their number one goal. They see the cloud option has to be there. Cloud native, Edge came up a little bit and the role of data. So I think all the new application development today that's relevant has a data as code kind of concept. Data engineering is the hottest skillset on the planet right now. And data engineering is not data science. So you start to see top-level CSOs and CIOs saying the new modern applications have to have data embedded in. It's just too hard. It's too hard to find that engineering team. So I heard the customer saying, we love the direction, we love the managed services. And by the way, we want to have that supply chain and cyber risk reduced. So yeah, big endorsement for Dell. >> You know, the biggest transformation in Dell, the two biggest transformations. One was the financials. You know, the income statement is totaled at a $101 billion company, growing at 17% a year. That's actually quite remarkable. But the flip side of that, the other big transformation was the customer. And with the acquisition of EMC but specifically VMware, it changed the whole conversation for Dell with customers. I think pre-2015, you wouldn't have had that type of narrative up on stage with customers. Cause it was, you know, compellant and it was equal logic and it was small businesses. Now you're talking about really deep strategic relationships that were enabled by that transformation. So my point is, to answer your question, it's going to be really interesting to see what happens post-VMware because when VMware came together with Dell, the industry didn't like it. The VMware ecosystem was like (growls) Dell. Okay, but customers loved it, right? And that's one of the things I heard on stage today. They didn't say, oh, well we love the VMware. But he mentioned VMware, the CTO from USAA. So Dell configured this commercial agreement with VMware, Michael Dell's the chairman of both companies. So that was part of the incentive. The other incentive is Dell is the number one distribution channel for VMware. So I think they now have that muscle memory in place where they've earned that trust. And I think that will continue on past the spin. It was actually quite brilliant the way they've orchestrated that. >> Yeah, Lisa, one more thing I want to add to that is that what I heard also was, you got the classic "here's how you be a leader in the modern era." It's a big leadership message. But then when you heard some of the notes, software-defined, multi-cloud with an emphasis on operations, Dave. So, okay, if you're a good leader, stay with Dell in operations. So you see strategy and operations kind of coming together around cloud. But big software defined multi-cloud data operational story. And I think those customers are kind of on that. You know, you got to maintain your operations. DevOps is operations, DevSecOps is operations. So big, like, don't get too greedy on the modern, shiny new toy, you know, in the cloud. >> Yeah, it's a safe bet, right? For infrastructure. I mean, HPE is a good bet too, but I mean Dell's got a way broader portfolio, bigger supply chain. It's got the end-to-end with the desktop, laptop, you know, the client side business, you know, a bigger services organization. And now the big challenge in my mind for Dell is okay, what's next? And I think they got to get into data management, obviously build up as a service, build up their cloud. They need software in their portfolio. I mean, you know, 20% gross margin company, it just, Wall Street's not as interested. You know, if they want to build more value, which they do, they've got to get more into software and I think you're going to see that. Again, I think you're going to see more M&A. I'd love to see more organic R&D instead of stock buybacks but I get why they have to do that. >> Well one of the things I'm looking at, Dave, in terms of what I think the future impact's going to be is the generational shift with the gen-Z and millennials running IT in the modern era. Not your old school rack-and-stack data center mentality. And then ultimately the scoreboard will determine, in my mind, the winner in their race is, where are the workloads running? Right? The workloads, and then also what's the application development scene look like? What do the apps look like? What are they building on? What's scaling them, what's running them? And the Edge is going to be a big part of that. So to me, operations, Edge, workloads and the development and then the workforce shift. >> And I do think Edge, I'm glad you brought up Edge. Edge is, you know, so fragmented but I think there's going to be a massive opportunity in Edge. There's going to be so much compute at the Edge. Dell talked about it, so much data. It's unclear to me right now how they go after that other than in pockets, like we heard from Gill. I believe they're going to do really well in retail. No question there. >> Yeah. >> But there's so much other industrial aisle IT- >> The telco space of towers, Edge. >> And Dell's, you know, Dell's server business, eh okay, it's got Intel and AMD inside, okay great. Their high margins come from storage, not from compute. Not the case with AWS. AWS had 35% operating margins last quarter. Oracle and Microsoft, that's the level that they're at. And I'd love to see Dell figure out a way to get paid more for their compute expertise. And that's going to take some R&D. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> Last question guys, as we wrap up our wrap of day one. Given everything that we've all been through the last couple of years, what is your overall summary of what Dell announced today? The vibe of the show? How well have they fared the last two years? >> Well, I mean, they had a remarkable last two years. In a large part thanks to the client business. I think today you're seeing, you know, them lift the veil on what's next. And I think their story is coherent. There's, again, financially, they're a much more sound company, much better balance sheet. Not the most attractive income statement from a margin standpoint and they got work to do there. But wow, as far as driving revenue, they know how to sell. >> Yeah, I mean to me, I think looking back to before the pandemic, when we were here on the stage last, we were talking end-to-end, Dell leadership. And I say the biggest thing is Dell's catching up fast, faster than I thought. And I think they got, they're skating to where the puck is going, Dave, and I'll tell you why. The end-to-end I thought wouldn't be a total flyer if the Edge got too dynamic, but the fact that the Edge is growing so fast, it's more complex, that's actually given Dell more time. So to me, what I see happening is Dell having that extra time to nail the Edge piece, cause if they get there, if they get there, then they'll have their core competency. And why do I say that? Cause hardware is back. Server god boxes are going to be back. You're going to see servers at the Edge. And look at the failure of Amazon's Outpost, okay? Amazon's Outpost was essentially hardware. That's Dell's business. So you talk about like compute as a cloud but they really didn't do well with deploying compute like Dell does with servers. EKS is kicking ass at the Edge. So serverless with hardware, I think, is going to be the killer solution at the Edge. A combination of cloud and Edge hardware. And the Edge looks more like a data center than the cloud looks like the data center, so- >> So you're saying hardware matters? >> HardwareMatters.com. >> I think that's what I heard. >> HardwareMatters.com, check out that site, coming soon. (all laughing) >> I think it matters more than ever, you know- >> Blockchain, silicon advances. >> I think reason hardware matters is cause it's barbelling. It's going from the box to the silicon and it's going, you know, upstream into software defined. >> Horizontally, scalability means good silicon at the Edge, under the cover, scaling all the stuff and machine learning and AI in the application. So we've said this on theCUBE now, what, five years now? >> Dave: Yeah, yep. >> Guys, we've got an action packed night tonight. Two days tomorrow and Wednesday. Michael Dell is on tomorrow. Chuck Whitten is on, Jeff Clarke, et cetera, et cetera. Caitlin Gordon is on Wednesday. >> All the heavy hitters are coming on. >> They're coming on, they're going to be... >> Dave: Allison Dew's coming on. >> Allison Dew's coming on. >> We're going to talk about the Matthew McConaughey interview, which was, I thought, fantastic. J.J. Davis is coming on. So we're going to have a great channel discussion, as well, with Cheryl Cook. >> That's right. >> A lot of the product people are coming on. We're going to be talking APEX, it's going to be good. With cyber recovery, the Storage Alchemist is coming on, John! (all laughing) >> Boy, I can't wait to see that one. >> Well stick around guys for our coverage all day tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and John Furrier coming to you live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. This is Dell Technologies World 2022. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow and the next day. (bouncy, upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, it's a beautiful day here in Las Vegas and this is theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome, fresh off the keynote stage and for the first time on our program Jeff Clark, who is the Vice-Chairman of Products and Operations at Dell Technologies. Jeff, great to see you Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu. Thanks for having me. >> All right, so first of all Jeff, you know, you'll be a CUBE alum when we finish this, so for our audience that's not familiar-- >> Jeff: Do I get a badge? >> I've got a sticker for you actually. >> A sticker will work. >> Absolutely. Tell us a little bit about your background, you've been at Dell for a number of years. You now own really kind of the client and ISG businesses. >> Jeff: Sure. >> Which is a huge chunk of Michael's business. Give us your background. >> I'm an electrical engineer, by training. I went to the University of Texas at San Antonio. Got my double E degree. Out of school went to work for Motorola. And I joined what was PC's Limited when that was the first private name of Dell in 1987. I've been here for 31 years. And I've done a variety of things all on the engineering and product side. I've had the fortunate opportunity, I started in the factory as a process/test/quality/reliability engineer, we were Jacks of many trades at that time. Went to product development in 1989 and have been in that side ever since. I've worked in every kind of product that we had at the core design roles. I got to start a business, one of the funnest things I've ever done. I started the Precision business in 1997 from ground zero, me and a few of our top engineers and building that into the business that it is today. Expanded responsibilities, had a stint of running our enterprise business back in 2002 through 2005. Actually got to work with EMC back then. Dave Donatelli and many others back in the day. And now I lead a combined products and operations organization that has our CSG PC peripheral portfolio and ISG portfolio, our infrastructure products, as well as the fundamental supply chain that runs the company. >> Yeah, so Jeff, you've done it all and you've seen Michael through well, an amazing journey. >> We've worked together for a long time and it's been a heck of a ride. And to be honest, I think the ride's not over and the ride in front of us I think is more exciting than the past 30 years. >> Yeah, as we always say, it's a good thing, nothing's changing. There's nothing new to get those that love technology excited about, right? >> If there's any constant in our industry, and certainly in our company, it is change. And thinking about what's unfolded in my three plus decades at this is amazing to where we are today. But again, the future, as Bob DeCrescenzo said today, wicked cool. >> Wicked cool, absolutely. When you get up to Boston a little bit more, you can get a Boston accent. Yeah, exactly. Jeff, if we look at the Dell Technologies family, client side of the business is about half, the ISG is another 37%, so you know, you own major, major chunk of what's going on inside. Maybe give us a little bit of how you look at this portfolio. Are there interactions between the client side and the enterprise side? You know, we've seen most of the other big tech players that had both, either shed or split or, you know, kept the HPs and the IBMs of the world, no longer have both of those together. >> Yeah, those are interesting thoughts. You know, for us, our customers are asking us to provide a more set of comprehensive solutions. They want more end to end. And I don't see how you provide an end to end solution if you don't have one of the ends. And as trite as that may sound, I think it's the core fabric of what we're doing and certainly the role I have now leading this organization of being able to cultivate and build, I think, the world's leading and innovative PC products and peripherals around them. Same thing on the infrastructure side, where we have the privilege of being a leader in a number of categories. And then beginning to bring them together in new and unique ways. I referenced in my keynote this morning about how new entrants to the workforce are pressuring conventional definitions of how we do work and we deploy technology. So we have leadership, products, and now you capture or able to tie that together with VMware Workspace ONE or an AirWatch or RSA class of products and you begin to modernize the experience. How could you not do that if you're not integrating the pieces? Or a VDI experience where you take a thin client, or VxRail infrastructure, and some VMware Horizon software and build out a solution set. That's what our customers are asking us to do. And I think we're in a very unique position. In fact, I know we are, 'cause no one else has all of what I just described. >> Jeff, there was a main theme you talked about in your keynote, that IT can drive and change business and it resonated from what I'm hearing with customers. But if you dial back a few years ago, it was IT wasn't getting it done, IT wasn't listening to the business, we had Stealth IT. Why are things different now? What's the role of IT going forward? And how does Dell fit into that big picture? >> You know, Michael touched on it in his opening yesterday about IT and business have become much much more closely integrated to compete in this modern world. And I suspect some of this goes back to we've always thought of IT as a cost center, OPEX. Yet, over the past decade, we've seen some fundamental disruption of business that has been fundamentally IT-led. New technology-led. New business models that have been fueled by new technology. I think that modernization, whether it's modernization of applications, taking advantage of information at your disposal and turning that into useful insights to make better business decisions, is a catalyst for a reframing, if you will, of what IT does. And the role of IT in a business, and a role that IT can help companies be more competitive, or at a minimum, help them not get disrupted by someone who's doing it, as well. So I think that's what's changing and I think you're seeing companies embrace that. And as soon as you do, you begin to I think challenge what have you invested in, where are you going, how am I taking advantage of some of the new trends that I outlined maybe this morning. And it gets I think a pretty interesting time in front of us. >> Yeah, you know, you actually went through immersive and collaborative computing, IOT, multi-clouded options, offer to find anything and AI and ML. So a lot of new things. One area I'd like to touch on, we heard some great side from Allison Dew earlier this week. It's great when we have the new tools and the new technology but sometimes we wonder how does adoption go and how does that impact productivity and people's engagement? And I'm curious how we help the enterprise and help the client side, not just do something new but be more productive and move their business forward. >> Look, if start with the client side, I think it's pretty easy to think about productivity. Particularly if you believe this boundary between work and the workplace is fundamentally changed and think about where people do work. You're actually getting a much more productive workforce by allowing people to work when the want to work, where they want to work. And that traditional boundary of eight to five, whatever it might be, physically in the office. You now have access to all 168 hours in a week and people want to work when they want to work. And we find that the work more, particularly if you put technology in their hand that makes them more productive and they have access to what they need to do their job. You cast that forward into the enterprise and I think, look, at some level IT is hard and we have a huge role in making it much easier. How to simplify. How to make it more automated so IT practitioners can actually migrate to how do I configure this LAN? How do I set up this server? And interesting things and still important things, but can migrate to how do I take this data and turn it into information that helps my business unit, my company win. That's where I think, again, I think this migrates, too and we play a huge role in helping that. >> Yeah, there's a theme that, another thing came up in the keynote, data really at the center of everything and not just talking about storage, but you had McClaren up on stage talking about that. How do you see the role of data changing? How do we capture for companies? How valued data is? >> A tie back to Michael's opening, he talked about data being, if you will, the rocket fuel for this rocket change and digitization of our world, the digital transformation that's underway. And between Michael, Pat, and myself, we all talked about that happening at the edge in a decentralized manner. I tried to build upon that and say you hadn't seen nothing yet, there's a whole lot more coming. Well, if believe that, you have to start preparing today, and anticipating that. And again, I think we play a role in helping companies do that. I think it requires a modern approach. It requires an approach to understand how that information is coming in to be able to do something with it. That's where we're focusing, as I mentioned. In fact, I think I specifically said it's sort of the heart of our vision for IT transformation. The data's the gold. In fact, Pat may have said that yesterday. Now, the challenge will be how do you take all of that data sort through it, figure out which pieces are most valuable and then get them to where they're supposed to go to make decisions. That's yet to be seen how we do that but I'm encouraged, given our track record in this industry. We'll find ways to do that. Engines like AI and machine or capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning are certainly a vast step forward of making sense of all that stuff. >> Yeah. Jeff, I wonder if you could bring us inside some of your customers. You know, where do you find some of the strategic discussions happening? I think back to early PC or server days, you know, who bought boxes versus now, it seems like more of a C level discussion for some of these large trends that you're seeing. What are some of the big changes that you're seeing in the customers and what are some of the biggest challenges that they're having today? >> I think you mentioned it. One of the things that I've seen in the customer interactions I've had in this new role and getting to see more and more each and every month. The conversations I have, or participate in, are seldom, if ever, about the speeds and feeds of this, the performance of that. It's about here's my business problem, how do you help me? How do you help me get this done? How do you provide me a set of solutions to get to where I want to go? By the way, if you have advice, recommendation to help us, they want to hear that. So they want to access our technical knowledge base across our organization. But again, I think this theme that I tried to say a couple of times this morning around outcomes, so it's an outcome-driven discussion. It's solutions. It's end to end. And how can you help me? Probably, I guess, I could generalize them to fit those four attributes. >> Great. Last thing, you talked about the modern data center. What's that mean for your customers? >> To me, it's all about putting at the disposal of our customers a set of technologies and infrastructure solutions and services that allows 'em to take advantage of that data. Allow them to have the data services they need and the underlying horsepower to do it in a fairly intelligent way. Hopefully automating a few of those tasks and giving them the agility and flexibility they need. >> Yeah. Jeff, wonder if you could speak to really, the engineering culture inside of Dell. Think back to before Dell made a lot of exhibitions, it's like, oh well Dell was a supply chain company, people would say. And then a number of acquisitions came through, you know, you lived with a lot of the engineers, you've got more engineers through the EMC merger. Sometimes people that don't understand, they're like oh, it's just all going to commodity stuff, software defined anything means that infrastructure doesn't matter. You know, where does the Dell engineering culture differentiate and position you in the market? >> You know, it might not surprise you, given my background, that certainly we are a supply chain company. We were doing hardcore engineering for a long time. I look at some of the advancements we made back in the day in leading the industry. I think we have a long distinguished track record of doing that. And now with the combination of the two companies, I look at this organization and the engineering capability we have, I like my hand, we like our hand. The trick is, is to getting our teams to innovate where we can differentiate, where we can help customers solve problems. And part of what I've been doing across this community of engineers, is doing that. Pivoting resources to the most important things. Pivoting resources to where we can differentiate. Pivoting resources where our innovation can actually distinguish, or shine against the competitive set. We've seen this in every category, PC, server, storage. And many of these cases, we start from the privileged position of being the leader. So think about when we get everything aligned to be able to innovate and differentiate, I like my hand. >> All right. Jeff, I want to give you the final word, coming away from Dell Technologies World this year. There's a lot of product announcements, people are going to learn a lot in the sessions, but what do you want people to come away with? Understanding the Dell portfolio and Dell as a company, as a partner? >> Well, if I could leave any parting statement, and make it very specific to the ISG portfolio, I talked about power, our power brand now being the brand of our future state ISG products, walk away with a commitment to build a power branded portfolio that is going to be innovative, differentiated in the marketplace, and something that helps our customers with. That's our commitment and that's what we'll deliver going forward. >> All right. Jeff Clark, thank you for sharing with us all the information, your update. Your first time on theCUBE, but I'm sure we'll have you on many times in the future. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> All right. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman and this is the inaugural Dell Technologies World and Pat Gelsinger's here, he's the- >> Hey, great to be with you today, >> Dave: the CEO of VMware, awesome to see you, >> Oh, thank you. >> Our number one guest of all time, this is our ninth Dell/EMC World and your 900th CUBE interview, But it never gets old Pat. It's really a pleasure to see you. >> Oh it's always fun to be with you guys. Thank you for the chance to spend some time on theCUBE, you've come a long way. >> So, thank you for noticing! So, you were the first, and people are recognizing this, to really sort of call the boom in the data center. We certainly have seen it with cloud, and we saw a little bit with data and big data, and now digital transformation, but well over a year ago, you said, we have tailwinds, it just feels right, so good call. >> Yeah, hey thank you, and you know clearly like the IDCs, Gartners, you know, they began last year, 2% to 3% growth, I said no, I think it's at least 2x that, and we ended of the year almost 6% growth in IT, and everybody's raised their forecast, and I think they're still a little bit conservative, and I think in this period, where technology is becoming more pervasive in everything, every business is becoming a tech business, every area of every business is becoming influenced by tech, and as a result, hey I think we're going to see a long run of tech strength and every company in tech is going to benefit and those that are well-positioned are going to benefit in a big way. >> Yeah, you see, you called it, "tech is breaking out of tech" >> Yep, yep absolutely, right, you know, we're no longer that little IT thing stuck in the back corner making sure your mail runs, it's now everything. You know, back office has become front office, right. You know, every aspect of data becomes mission-critical for the business. As some have called it, you know, data is the new oil, right, in the future. And it really is thrilling to see some of our customers, and Michael had a few on stage this morning doing really pretty cool things. >> Well VMware is on fire. I mean, it's only 10% of Dell's revenue, but it's half, it generates half of its operating cash flow. Obviously we love the software business, of course. Talk about your business, the core is doing really well, you got NSX crankin', vSAN cranking, the cloud now, there's Clarity in cloud, give us the overview of your business and give us the update. >> Sure, and as I say, you know, there's three reasons we're doing well. You know, one is our strategy is resonating with customers, and you know, when you got strategic resonance with customers, you're not in the purchasing department, you're in the business units, the CIO's office. So strategy is resonating well, across what we do for private cloud, what we're doing for public cloud, what we're doing for end user and workforce transformation, our security strategy, every aspect is resonating. You know, second, we're executing well. And I'll say, you know, your good strategy, you're executing it well, and you know, clearly the Dell momentum has helped us. We're ahead of schedules on the synergies that we've laid out, and that's been a powerful accelerant. It was like we're doing well, you know, and you put some turbochargers on, whoa, you know this is going, and then finally as we said, it's a good market, right. And well-positioned tech companies are benefiting from that. So across our product families, you know, NSX, vSAN, and HCI, you know, our cloud management is really performing, the end user computing, you know, all of these seeing, you know 30, 50, 100 percent growth rates. You know, my overall cloud business, you know, VMware is growing in the teens you know, my cloud business is growing in the 30s, and way ahead of the growth rate of the business, so pretty much everything that we've laid out is firing on all cylinders. >> Pat, I think most people understand some of the products of VMware. I think it's, you know, 20 years now, since server virtualization laws You've, you know great momentum with NSX with vSAN, wonder if you could talk a little bit about the digital platform though, you know how does VMware look, you know, for the next five to 10 years, fit into the Vision 2030 like Michael was talking about. >> Yeah, yeah, you know very much, you know, as I say, you know, our objective is to be the essential, ubiquitous, digital infrastructure, right. Where you know, this idea, you know, essential. You know we run this mission critical stuff and increasingly we're seeing businesses put their crown jewels running on VMware. You know, 'cause we ran a lot of the stuff of the past, we'd run your SharePoints, your Outlooks, and so on, but now, they're putting core banking on us, you know, core transactional platform. They just say, you are essential, ubiquitous, our strategy is to move all the way to the edge, and the IOT use cases, into the core networks of our service provider partners, You know, to as I say, build these four clouds, the private cloud, the public cloud, the telco cloud, and the NF or the IOT cloud. All of those on a common infrastructure, that enables applications to build on and leverage all of the above. So you know, we're increasingly ubiquitous, digital infrastructure, meaning that they can build their applications from the past as well as in the future on us. And as we're partnering with Pivotal with our PKS strategy, reaching more to the developer, right, and delivering that infrastructure for the next-generation apps, and of course the dirty secret is, is that almost all of the cool new apps are some ugly combination of new and old. And if we can give a common operational security management and automation environment that transcends their cool new container, and function as a service, but combine it, in a consistent operational and security environment with today's infrastructure, oh, that's like the big easy button for IT. Got it, we could take you to the future, without giving up the past. >> We hear from our, you know, CXOs, in our community, in our audience, they really, they want to get digital right. So my question to you is, what kind of conversations are you having with executives around getting digital right? >> Uh-huh, yeah, and lots of those things are, you know, like just with a big media company, was with a huge Bank, on the phone with a big consumer goods product last week. You know these interactions occurring, you know like you say they want to get it right. And with it we're seeing the conversation shift, because a lot of it used to be, you know best of breed. Oh that looks good, and I'll stitch it together with this, and maybe I'll put it that, and a lot of their bandwidth was being put to putting the pieces together, and we're saying no, right. What you going to do is have robust infrastructure. Increasingly rely on fewer, more strategic vendors. It's my job to put it together, so you can take your investments and put them into the applications and services that really differentiate your business. And this is becoming a sea change in how we work with customers and say, okay, yeah I can't stitch all these pieces together, I can't have a hundred security vendors, I must rely on fewer vendors, in much more strategic ways. And in that, obviously we're benefiting from that enormously and they're expecting us to step up like never before, to be a partner with them, and it really is a thrilling time for us. >> So that simplifies all the complexity on there, and at least in concept. Who's leading this charge? Do you discern any patterns of the guys that are getting it right, versus the guys that are maybe struggling, or maybe complacent, specifically in terms of leadership? >> Yeah, and it's super, super interesting, because I find leaders in every industry, right? You know, you find leaders and laggards in those, I had one customer not a lot, long say, "Hey is that virtualization stuff, can I really rely on it?" It's like, ding dong, you know, you're now the trailing edge of technology, but for every one of those trailers, we're seeing those front end customers, and you saw some of them on stage this morning. Where they're just really going and saying, boy we are now ready to ante in, in a big way. We're seeing that in car companies. We're seeing that in financial services companies. We're seeing that in supply chain companies. And some of those are now really seeing these startups now putting pressure on their business for the first time, and they say no, we got to innovate in a very aggressive way. And for that, you know, the Dell Technologies family, you know all of us coming together, you know with our, each skills and focus areas, but together being able to present that holistic solution that says, that's right, we can lead you on digital transformation, we could change your infrastructure, we can build-in security, we could transform your workplace, we could take you to the multi-cloud future, we got it. >> Pat, there was one of the things that caught my ear, Allison Dew, when she was talking about the Dell Technology Institute, said that, together you're going to become a force for good. I know that's something that's near and dear to your heart, >> Pat: Yeah. >> So, maybe, you talked about the tech, and the security and everything, what about the Dell families as a force for good out there? >> Yeah, and I've described this era, and I've said there's four superpowers. You know, technology superpowers that are bigger than any of us, right. And the four I described, you know, mobile. The ability to reach anyone, over half the planet is now connected. Cloud, the ability to scale as never before. AI, the ability to bring intelligence to everything, and IOT, the ability to bridge to the physical world everywhere. And those four are really reinforcing each other, right? They're accelerating each other, as Michael said, you know, "Today, the fastest day of your life. "Today, the slowest day of the rest of your life, "for tech evolution." And we see them just causing and accelerating each to go, as I mentioned in my talk this week at the Grow Awards in Silicon Valley, in 1986 I was making the 486, a great AI chip, right. It's like, what? 31 years ago? And now it's a success because the superpowers are coming together. The compute is now big enough, the data is now volumous enough, that we can do things never possible before. But with that, technology is neutral. The Gutenberg printing press did the Bible, you know, Luther's Bible, it also prints Playboy. It sort of doesn't care. Technology is neutral. And it's our job as a tech industry to shape technology for good. You know that's our obligation, and increasingly we need to be involved in, and shaping, legislations, policies, laws, to enable tech to be that force for good. >> Pat, you mentioned kind of the speed of change in the industry. You're a public company with you know, a lot of employees, how does, internally, how do you keep up with the pace of change, keep inspiring people, get them working on the next thing? You know, Michael talked about going private was one of the things that would help him restructure and get ready for that, so maybe discuss that dynamic. >> Well, you know and for us, you know, as a software company living in Silicon Valley, we feel it every day, right. I'll tell ya' you know, we see these startups, that are hovering around our people, and our buildings, and they got ideas, you know, so we're synthesizing those ideas. We have our own research effort, our advanced product efforts, we're engaging, you know, and thousands of customer interactions per day. And ultimately, it's my job to create a culture that enables my 8,000 software engineers to go for it every single day, right. Where they are just, you know, they love what we do as a company, they love who we are as a company, our values. And then find ways that we enable our teams to, what I say, innovate in everything. Not just in R and D, but how we sell our products, how we support our customers, you know, how we enable these new use cases. We have to innovate in everything, if we're going to keep pace with this industry, and to some degree, I think it's almost in the water in Silicon Valley, right. You know yeah, you got some crazy master's student coming out of Stanford, and he thinks he's going to start up a company to displace me. It's like, what are you talking about? But we feel that every day, and as we bring those people into our environment, creating that culture that allows everybody to innovate in everything, >> So it's hard to argue that things aren't getting faster, that speed, but speed is an interesting question. When you think about blockchains, and AI, and natural language processing, just digital in general, there's a lot of complexity in terms of adopting those things. So speed versus adoption. What do you see in terms of adoption? >> Yeah, you know in a lot of these things like, you know, you look at a technology like NSX, cool, breakthrough, you know we're five years old now, almost on NSX, right? Since we did the Nicira acquisition as a starting point, 4 1/2 years on NSX, and some of these things need to be sedimented, as I describe it, into the infrastructure. Hardened, you know when you've really proven all of the edge cases. You know, those things don't move every day. >> Dave: Right right, fossilized, Furrier word, >> Yeah, you know there is, you know similarly with vSAN. Boy, these edge use cases, data recovery, pounding on the periphery of failure cases, disk drives, failure modes on flash drives, some of those things need to be sedimented, but as you think about those layers, always it's you know, how do you sediment? How do you standardize? And then expose them as APIs and services to the next layer. And every layer as you go up the stack gets faster and faster right, so as somebody would consume the software-defined data center, they need to be able to do that pretty fast. You know, how can I make, you know VM, we just released 6.7. Which reduced by an order of magnitude the time to launch a VM. You know, increase the, by 20x the amount of V-Center bandwidth, just so I can go faster. Not that I needed to go faster for VMs, I needed to go faster that I can put containers in VMs, and they need much higher speed of operation. So to me, it's this constant standardization, sedimenting, integrating, and then building more and more agile surfaces, as you go higher in the stack, that allows people to build applications where literally they're pushing updates, and seeing their CICD pipeline allow new code releases every day. I'm not changing NSX every day, but I am changing my container environment for that new app literally every day, and the whole stack needs to support that. >> Cloud partnerships, we talked last year at Vmworld, about the clarity that the AWS deal brought, of course you have an arrangement with IBM, you're doing stuff with Kubernetes, so, just talk about your posture with the big cloud players, and how that has affected your business, and where you see it going. >> Yeah, you know, clearly the cloud strategy, the AWS partnership, as I said, more than anything else, when we announced that, people moved their views of VMware. Oh, I get it, VMware isn't part of my private cloud, or part of my past, they're the bridge to the future. And that has been sort of a game-changing perspective where we can truly enable this hybrid cloud experience. Where I could take you and take your existing data centers, I can move them into a range of public cloud partners, AWS, IBM, you know, and be able to operate seamlessly in a truly hybrid way. Oh your data center's getting a little hot, let's move a few workloads out. Oh, it's getting a little bit cool, let's move some workloads back. We can truly do that now, in a seamless, hybrid multi-cloud way, and customers, as they see that, it's not only the most cost-efficient, right, it also allows them to deal with unique business requirements, geo-requirements that they might have, oh, in Europe I have to be on a GDPR cloud in Germany. Okay, we support, we have a right, you know here's our portfolio. Other cases, it's like, oh, I really want to do take advantage of those proprietary services that some of the cloud vendors are doing, you know. You know, maybe in fact that new AI service is something that I could differentiate my business on, but the bulk of my workload, I want to have it on this hybrid platform that truly does give them more freedom and choice over time, while still meeting unique compliance, legal, security, issues, as they've come to know and love from VMware over time. >> So to clarify, is it, are you seeing it as use-case-specific, or is it people wanting to bring that cloud experience on-prem, or is it both? >> It is truly both, because what you've seen, is many people, and if we were talking four years ago, you would've been asking me questions, "oh, you know I just talked to Fred, "and he says everything is going to the cloud" right. And people tried that student body right to the cloud of their existing apps, and it was like, oh crap, right? You know, it's hard to re-platform, to refactor those applications, and when I got there, I got the same app, right. You know, it's like, wow that was a lot of investment to not get much return, right. Now, they look at it and they say, "Oh boy, you know, "I can build some new apps in cool new ways" right, with these cloud native services. I can now have this agile private hybrid cloud environment, and I truly can operationalize across that in a flexible way. And sometimes we have customers that are bringing workloads out of native cloud, and saying, oh that's become too big in my operation role. You know I have different governance requirements. I'm going to bring that one back. Other cases are saying, "Oh, I didn't want to move it to the VMware cloud on Amazon", or you know, IBM, the migration service is really powerful. I want to get out of the data center. Other cases, they look at their cost of capital, and the size and scale they're operating, and says, "Hey, I'm going to keep 80% on-premise forever, "but I never want to be locked in, "that I can't take advantage of that, "should there be a new service." It really is all of the above. And VMware, and our Dell relationship, and our key cloud partners, now 4,100 cloud partners strong, it's really stepping into that, in a pretty unique and powerful way. >> And the key is that operational impact, as Pat is saying. >> So Pat, just one of the challenges we've heard from users we talked to is, if this was supposed to get simpler, virtualizing it, you know, I kept all my old applications. Going the cloud, there's more SKUs of compute in the public cloud than there are, if I was to buy from Dell.com. You know, in management, you know we're making steps, but you know it's heterogeneous, it's always add, nothing ever dies, how do we help customers through this? >> Yeah, and I do think they're, you know we're definitely hearing that from customers. And they're looking to us to make these things simpler. And I think we've now, you know, laid the templates for a truly simpler world. Right, in the security domain, intrinsic security. Build many of the base security capabilities into the platform. Automation, automate across these multiple cloud environments, so you don't care about it, we're taking care of it against your policies. Being able to do that, you know, and have an increasingly autonomous infrastructure that truly is responding and operationalizing those environments, without you having to put personnel and specific investments, right at that fundamental operations level, because it's too big, it's too fast, you can't respond at the pace the business requires. So I feel really good, we have some key innovations, you'll see us announcing. Now, we're going to talk at VMworld right? >> Dave: Oh absolutely. >> Okay, >> I will 100% be there, >> I have some cool announcements in this area, by VMworld as well, specifically, in some of these management automation, we see some of that applying, some new AIML techniques, to be able to help with some of those workload management and policy management areas. So, some really cool things going on to help these problems specifically. >> We've seen, oh we saw blog recently, about you guys working on some blockchain stuff. I know it's early days there, but it's exciting new technology. >> Yeah, and the blockchain stuff is what I'm really, really pretty excited about. We have some algorithmic breakthroughs that right now, you know, blockchain on a log scale basically scales at you know log or super log, right. Which meaning, it's problematic right. Is you get lots of nodes, right, you know the time to resolve those, gets to be exponentially expensive, to be able to resolve. We've come up with some algorithmic breakthroughs that drop that to near linear. And when people look at that, they sort of say, wow, I can make my blockchain environments much larger, much more distributed as a result, so as a result of some of that work we'll be increasingly making blockchain as a primitive. We're not trying to deal with the application level, you know for insurance, for financial, but we can increasingly deliver a primitive infrastructure along with vSphere in the VMware environment, that says yeah, we've taken care of that base issue. We've guaranteed it from a vendor you trusted, and you might remember there was a couple of breaches, of some of the blockchain implementations, so yeah, we hope to take care of some of those hard problems for customers and bring some, a good breakthrough engineering, from VMware to that problem. >> Well, it's great to see companies like VMware and you know enterprise plays, IBM obviously involved, into bringing some credibility to that space, which everybody says "Crypto, oh", they don't walk they run, but there's real potential in the technology. I want to ask you about a Silicon Valley question. >> Pat: Okay. >> Any chance I get, so if I broadly define Silicon Valley, Let's include, you know, Seattle. And we generally don't do that, but that's okay, but I'm going to. >> We'll take this, we'll take 'em in okay. >> it's technology industry, but technology industry seems to have this dual disruption agenda. We've always sort of seen, tech companies own this horizontal stack, you know, and go attack, and cloud, and big data, and disruption, but it seems like, with digital, you're seeing them attack new industries. Whether it's healthcare, or groceries, or media. What do you make of that? Can Silicon Valley, broadly defined, pull off this dual disruption agenda? >> You know I really believe it can, right. In that, I'm, you know, being part of it. I'm a huge optimist on it. I don't think it will be exclusive to Silicon Valley, right. You know, there's a tech community in Boston, that's a bit more focused on healthcare, right. Obviously, the cloud guys coming out of Seattle. You know, Austin, and you know, Texas has increasing, Research Triangle, when you go around the world, you see more places because, you know, in that sense, one of my favorite, you know, cartoons, is a picture of a dog at a terminal. I'm sure it was a Dell terminal, but you know, and the caption reads right, "On the internet, "they don't know you're a dog." Right, you know the point being, hey, when you're on the net, it doesn't matter where you are, right. And it enables innovation, whether that's Afghanistan, whether that's Bangladesh, whether that's Myanmar, you know any of those places, become equal on the net, and it does open up that domain of innovation. So I view it much more as tech is disrupting everything. And that's my theme of, "tech is breaking out of tech". Clearly the hub of that, is Silicon Valley. Right you know, that's the center where you know, every third door is a new startup, as you walk down the street. It really is an incredible experience. But increasingly, you know, that innovative disruptive spirit is breaking out of Silicon Valley, to you know, literally across the world. The Chinese think they might be the number one. You know, Europeans, oh sort of a renaissance in France, you know that we haven't seen for many years, and so on. And I do believe that it will continue to be technology, in this horizontal way you know, but increasingly, and I think you know, Amazon has led the way on this. We're seeing boy, we can disrupt entire industries you know, leveraging that. You know, Tesla in automotive, and Airbnbs. All of these are changing industries in fundamental ways, and I do not see that slowing down at all. You know, I'm thrilled to see like, you know, health care, right. Boy, I have not seen this amount of disruptive technology startups in healthcare, healthcare one of the lowest percentage of spend on IT. Can you imagine that? Right, you know at that level, and boy, we're starting to see that pick up. So industry by industry I think we're just getting started. >> And that's an industry that is really ripe for disruption. >> Pat: Oh my gosh. >> So Pat, we're going to hear about some of this, this afternoon at your keynote, I presume? Maybe show us a little leg there, and we'll wrap. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dave: Alright, take it home. >> Hey, you know we're, today's keynote, obviously going to talk about the better together aspects, we'll update on vSAN and HCI and our strategy there, some of the cool things we're doing with Dell, and AirWatch Workspace ONE, and the client space. Yeah, we're going to talk about networking. I'm going to lay out our networking strategy, and we're going to give a teaser this afternoon of a broad set of networking announcements that we're doing this week. And hope to really lay out, what we think of, as the virtual cloud network of the future, and how the network is essential to that future. So, we're going to have a little bit of fun there, and you'll see me don the VR headset, right, and hey we're going to go into the virtual, virtual data center today, >> Virtualization inception. >> There we go. >> Well Pat, on a personal note, you've been a great friend of theCUBE, and we really appreciate that, and you've been an awesome guest, we saw you come from Intel with an amazing career, and we just see it going from there. So congratulations on all your personal success, your team success and continued. >> Love you guys, it's always great to be on theCUBE. You guys do a fabulous job, >> Dave: Thank you. >> For live tech coverage, and it really has been a lot of fun, and next year we're going to go party for your 10 year anniversary on theCUBE. >> Dave: That's right. Love it. >> Okay, cool, very good. >> Alright. >> Thank you, thanks so much. >> Good. Thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our wall-to-wall coverage of Dell Technologies World. 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