>> 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)