>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with Dave Vellante, co-hostman Dave. Great keynote, day one of three days. Great event. We got two more days of coverage. Our next guest is Jeff Clarke, vice chairman of Dell Technologies, Master of Ceremonies on the stage with Michael Dell. Great to see you again, CUBE alumni, welcome back. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, you're pretty busy. I know you're super scheduled up, so thanks for spending the time to come on. >> My pleasure, looking forward to it. >> So, break down what's going on here, because a slew of announcements, some game-changing announcements. Some new partnerships with Microsoft, in the end-user area, pretty positive, once competing with VMware, now tied in. Dell Technologies under the coverage with a full portfolio of services, massive macroeconomic tailwind around people refreshing their infrastructure for the Cloud. You guys are in good position. >> Oh, I think we are. Thanks for having us. To me, the biggest takeaway from this morning's keynote is the level of integration and alignment across Dell Technologies and all of its assets. We built upon that and gave two very specific examples. Pat and I talked about, on the PC side, trying to address the needs of this new digital native workforce that's coming in to bear with no boundaries of how they want to work, where they want to work, and how to modernize the PC experience. And we introduced Dell Technologies Unified Workspace. And then the second announcement, which we're really excited about, is the alignment of our company around the Dell Technologies Cloud. And the fact that we announced a component of a platform, where VCF is integrated onto our VxRail products, and you can deploy that on-prem as a solution today. And then we talked about building on VMware's announcement late last year around Project Dimension, bringing Project Dimension into a reality, a data center as a service of the VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, Data Center as a service, backed by Dell Technologies. And then we expanded upon that with Azure Services on VMware. So, pretty busy morning for us. >> Yeah, Project Dimension, I want to ask you real quick about. I always said that that's a fantasy kind of project, because it was so radical, and early on, when you think about it, but it makes so much sense when you think, as a service, with software service, why wouldn't you want to have theCUBE as a service? Data Center? And everything is becoming a service, and that's now clear. But it's hard to do. That is an interesting product. I think that's certainly an edge product. You guys see that, clearly. But what's going to be the impact to customers? Because this is now kind of easier to manage when you think about deploying a data center. >> There's a couple things that I think are underway. One is, workloads are migrating back to on-prem. And those workloads come out of a public cloud, so the cloud operating model is something customers are familiar with. Now with our Data Center as a service product, we have a cloud-operating model that drives consistency and, ultimately, provides an operational hub from the edge to the private cloud reaching out to the public cloud. Then you can get that as a specific product, build out your own, or this managed service, as you just referred to, and we think that's a pretty compelling proposition to help customers, particularly in smaller deployments, whether it's on the edge, remote location, remote office. And it's a service fully backed by us, single price. And we think it has a huge advantage in the marketplace to help customers deal with fewer vendors or manufacturers to get a single solution from one, from the hardware to the software to the service and the support. >> So you talk about alignment across Dell Technologies. You were clear in the analysts' discussion today as to what your primary go-to-market is with regard to VMware on Dell. That was clear. And appreciate the concise, clarity answer. You also talked about barriers to integrating that you've removed. In some respects, you do a lot of things, and one of them is you're a fixer. What were some of those barriers, and what does that hold for the future in terms of momentum? >> I think the first barrier that I encountered when I began leading the ISG team, we fundamentally weren't aligned with VMware. We had a strategy, they had a strategy, and while we worked both for Dell Technologies, we saw the world differently. And Pat and I recognized that early on, and our working together, and we've began to wrestle with that. Quite honestly, Michael and I expected us to get that result, and we subsequently did. So now we have an alignment. We have the same strategy that we're deploying with the same common vision: how to make IT easier and simpler in this data era that we're in today. And then we built a technical framework of where we're going to collaborate. And quite honestly, we had to teach our teams how to collaborate, and what collaborate meant. It wasn't you met once a month and each went off in their corner, then came back and said, look what I did, look what I did, and maybe we had two different answers. We forced an operating cadence and mechanism where Pat and I get with the team on regularly scheduled meetings, essentially every other week, and drive technical collaboration across five key domains that we care about. That we think are most valuable to our customers. And we're leading by example and breaking down every barrier from go-to-market, to operational, to technical, who tests what, how do you define what the requirements are, what customers are retargeting, and align the teams along those vectors. >> One follow-up, if I may. I think we got tight on time, but I want to ask you about the client business. I want to get you on record on this. Very important part of your business, it's almost half of the business revenue. It's a lower margin business, but it's critical that you hold serve in the client business, because it absorbs a lot of corporate overhead. I wonder if you could talk about the importance of the client business to Dell Technologies and it enabling your ability to do all these other things that you want to do. >> Well, you talked about the financial components of why the PC business or client business is important to us. But let's not forget, customers want an end-to-end solution and one end of that solution is what's on the edge of the network, and the PC is still the primary productivity machine in business. I don't see that changing. So the ability to start from there, and then migrate across our stack to the core to the cloud, as you've heard us talk about that, is a difference-maker, a differentiator from us over every one of our competitors today, who may have this component, this component, or this component, we're in a unique position to bring that together. Then we can bring differentiated value by linking the seven assets of Dell Technologies together in a highly integrated way. We talked this morning about SecureWorks, Workspace ONE from VMware, RPCs, and then our total service offering around ProSupport and ProDeploy that stitches that together in a very differentiated way. That's what customers want, and we're able to do that. And that has components of the entire enterprise, per se. >> Jeff, I want to get your thoughts on the customer situation. Obviously, one of the keynote customers was Bank of America. I like how the CTO, how she said this. "It's not how we got here, it's how we go forward." This is really the digital transformation reality. The rules have changed a bit. Certainly, there's some tech that's coming to the table, that's going to be good for customers. But as you look at the trends, and it's pretty clear what we're seeing, you've got developers, and you've got operators. If you compartmentalize the different roles within the corporation, that seems to be the big ones within IT and operations. And then the workloads are the result of the developers that have to run on the operations. So, it seems that you guys have a clear view that you want to make that infrastructure be operationally consistent. That was one of the messages. >> Spot on. >> How are customers talking to you about this? Because, one anecdotal thing is Google, for instance, has their own cloud for their own search and everything else. They have SREs, Site Reliability Engineers, which kind of validates this notion that operations is highly critical with developers for those now multitude of workloads. Because Edge is going to spawn a huge amount of applications, we think. More workloads, small and big. So, existing workloads, new workloads are coming. How do you guys see the operation piece? 'Cause I think this is a real key point. >> Well, I think in simple terms, customers are asking us to help them drive out complexity in their operations, help simplify it so they can actually invest more in the types of technologies, the application, the development of things that differentiate their business. So, if you believe that to be the basis, which we do, then driving out complexity, having a consistent level of automation, a consistent operational model, a hub to be able to move workloads across any of those environments, we think is a real advantage, and it will lower their cost. They will have consistent infrastructure, a consistent software management stack, management or orchestration and automation, we think that's exactly what they're asking for. And the reality is, we just announced the ability to do it. >> And if you have the developers, you get revenue on top of it, so cost savings and revenue. Out of the customer conversations, could you stack rank the pattern of issues that come up that they're concerned about, that they're solving? Opportunities that are challenges today, opportunities tomorrow, what are some of the areas that are popping up to the top of these conversations? >> Cloud strategy. Security. How to do DevOps. Edge. And how to deal with all of this data. >> We've got a question from the crowd. Ask Jeff about sustainable innovation in Dell's work in transforming electronic waste into jewelry. I didn't know about that. And ocean plastic in the laptop packaging. That I did know about. I think the question came from somebody who works from you maybe. >> Maybe so. >> That's a good question. I didn't know, you're making jewelry? >> We've been on the forefront of what we call the circular economy, where you reuse materials that you introduced in the marketplace in new forms. Whether that's wheat straw, the byproduct of harvesting wheat and turning that into packaging. We announced at CES 15 months ago, recycling printed circuit boards, extracting the gold, and creating and providing that gold, in this case to a jeweler who made jewelry out of recycled printed circuit boards. Our commitment to use recycled plastics and to take all these plastic bottles and do something with the material, we have a high percentage of our products today that are built on recycled plastics. We have many examples, wonderful choices of PCs in front of you, has carbon fiber in it. The carbon fiber in the product is actually a waste out of the automotive industry that we reused to build out this product. So, we have a long tradition, and something that's very important to us, of building sustainable products, recycling materials, to be able to do that across our entire portfolio. >> Jeff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I know you're tight on schedule. We appreciate the time. Final question, I'll give you the final word. What's the most important story here at Dell Technologies World this week in your opinion? >> Dell Technologies has a breadth of unique hardware, software, and services capability unlike anybody else across our seven strategically-aligned businesses that will help, ultimately, make customers' lives easier, simpler, and reduce complexity in their environments. >> And the numbers are showing its financial performance is looking good. Congratulations. >> Thanks, thanks for having me. >> Jeff Clarke, vice chairman of Dell Technologies, here inside theCUBE breaking it down, sharing his insight and commentary on the announcements and the event here at Dell Technologies. Stay with us for more live coverage. Day one of three days of two CUBE sets here on the ground floor of Dell Tech World. We'll be right back. (upbeat techno music)