from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group this is the cubes cover of wtg transform 2018 happy to welcome to the program the keynote speaker and first time on the program David singer who's the senior vice president and chief operating officer of storage at Dell EMC David great to see you great to see you Stu thanks for having me all right so I liked we talked a lot about transformation and boy there's a lot of transformations going on from the technology to the workforce you know security is top of my night 'm you know let's start there you know what is what is transformation mean in that with the customers that you're talking to these days transformation for our customers is delivering next generation business outcomes really ensuring that they could find a way to to remould their businesses for the digital economy and figure out how to drive tremendous amounts of value and they understand that it all starts with IT and being digital and so it's one of the key things that we hear from our customers as they as they engage with us and look to move forward yeah it's an interesting conversation because there's there's two things that have kind of struck me as a little bit funny lately number one is data is really important and to WoW intelligence is really going to transform all these environments and the reason I think you kind of agree with me we've been talking about these things for decades I mean you know you and I both started back at EMC back similar times when storing was really one of the main things you're doing but of course that data was very important in the eight years since I left EMC boy you know it's not like a storage isn't any less important but you know it's data and it's everywhere and it's distributed so we speak a little bit to you know the value of data to your customers and we'll keep going with that commerce date data is the next asset class you know and for our customers it should be their gold it's it's not how they just manage their business it's actually how they start making money we called ourselves a storage business and we probably did ourselves a disservice they want to engage and they want ensure their data safe and they want to figure out how to monetize it and monetizing it means retaining it moving it keeping it safe and then ensuring that you can inject it into the right applications and get the right the right knowledge and efficiency out of it and what we've seen in a storage industry over 18 years that the technologies keep changing applications have greater and greater demands there's more and more need to consume adjust and analyze this data and we need to keep up and we need to deliver more intelligent infrastructure and storage solutions that can move this data and help us help applications deliver tremendous performance let's talk about the company itself so when I think about Dell you know I think back you know even talk to my parents you know they know who Dell is they'd use Dell computers for many years over your shoulder this Fenway Park you know the club level is the Dell level you know you've got such a broad portfolio and your keynote you kind of put together this do you know comprehensive everything from Dell and Dell EMC and VMware and pivotal and everything but to you know the global companies or small companies what is you know what where does Dell sit in the picture I think I think the the merger has been a major transformation for the company itself we talk we evangelize transformations for other companies were undergoing one ourselves and the transformation we're undergoing is understanding what other companies needs and applying it to ourselves and drinking our own champagne and making it a reality the the brand Association is changing and customers are starting to realize that we can become the essential infrastructure provider and they could look to us to solve a holistic set of their needs as opposed to pinpoint so their needs and make it an easier journey themselves you spent a bunch of time talking about the operating model when we talk about cloud it's you know use the line actually we've used many times you know cloud is not a destination really is an operating model how does that impact the portfolio you know you're helping to put together really the long-term strategy so the first is the operating model is all about simplicity right we need to make infrastructure more simple for our customers and that means re-engaging and re-architecting our software stacks from the ground up to be more nimble more accessible via api's and other automation engines that that will really drive more value and allow IT professionals to spend more time partnering with the business to drive revenue as opposed to problem-solving and punching out bugs David that was what one of the knocks that competition of you know EMC back in the day always had was MC has a broad portfolio and leadership in many positions but simple was never the word to describe the the offerings how does del and LEM see from a storage perspective how will we be looking at that differently you know come a year or two from now and so I think that's a fair point it's a great point simplicity was probably not a great synonym for what we did but what we did was was accumulate a tremendous amount of intellectual property and assets that we've been able to mold and transform and adapt for the future well when the process of doing is making it simpler for customers to consume it and delivering and deploying it in simpler ways to make that to make it easier to choose and implement and what we're in the process doing is take the lessons of the past integrate the technology from the past and drive something that's going to be easier to understand and to drive value alright help connect the dots we're here at one of one of Dell's uh you know larger partners maybe not larger in size but you know very important partner when the Technology Group was a dell partner of the year for a couple of years what is that you know that simplification and you know change in the portfolio mean you know and how's the relationship changing with the channel so you know very fair the the channel community is extremely important to Dell and and we know that we've not made their lives very easy right they have they have sales engineers and sales sales professionals that are trying to deliver solutions and applications for customers and it's hard for them to choose which building blocks or which piece parts to build and by simplifying and putting together better better technologies and better intellectual properties that are easier for them to consume and understand make it easier for them to do their jobs and and our outcomes for their customers right when I focus a little bit on the customers you know what do you see some of the biggest challenges that they're facing in their business you know not not just from a storage standpoint but you know the business side sure well every business including our own is it's a balance of priorities right the customers know that they want to take their business forward they want to drive growth they want to drive profitability and there's so many different opportunities to go after and just how do you prioritize and and and trying to manage those discrete priorities and ideas and initiatives is is not easy and then implementing actions especially with an IT to go solve some of those problems is resource intensive right and so we need to do a better job of thinking about transformation and simplifying our structure to really really alright so you're an Operations guy you've you've got you know so some business background what one of the things I look at in my career is you know boy you know we've looked at the pace of change but you know technology is an enabler for you know how we change operations has been pretty amazing the last last 20 years of wondering if you have some ruminations on that as to you know what you've been seeing in your career and you know especially over the last you know five years or so yeah the the pace is confusing it really is you know at times we feel like we're moving at light speed and other times we feel like we're gonna crawl and I think the interesting aspect is it's it's a journey and every customer is approaching it differently there are some customers that are in the bleeding edge and looking for us to keep them on the bleeding edge and there are other customers that are that are more more steady in their operations and looking to take baby steps as they transform and it's been a really interesting challenge trying to solve and maximize outcomes for both those types of yeah absolutely I'd say it's usually it's it's dizzying and you need to be careful one of my favorite Ben Franklin lines is you know don't confuse activity with with progress because it's easy to chase the new shiny but you know what am I actually doing to drive the business and drive efficiency of what weird and can actually get any value out of the new shiny there are so many buzzwords that we have in our industry right now some of which customers consume can consume really easily and get a tremendous amount of value some that customers just are having a hard time understanding how they actually implement to get value yeah so you know what's the biggest threat for for businesses these days you talk about them going through transformation there there's everybody's concerned about you know - over the overuse term you're gonna be over eyes or Netflix or you know choose your point you know how do you balance I need to transform and move faster but you know I I don't want to be you know chasing my shadow yeah I think I think the person that had the perfect answer to that would be would be amazingly wealthy right now I think you know that's the dichotomy that we're trying to deal with and the industry has dealt with for a very very long time great point you know we talked about it's not always about chasing the technologies what's interesting you in the marketplace these days - I think that the pace of change in the pace of innovation has really kicked up it goes through cycles and right now the new technologies that are getting introduced by a lot of startup communities and and and and ourselves organically has been amazing and I love the innovative spirit that is coming back together as we formed Dell EMC and the new and the new company and the collaboration that we're seeing with the intellectual property across the family of companies delivers really exciting results right last thing I wanted to ask you really about the merger you know personally you've so you've been with you up from the EMC side of things you know there are many similarities and culture but some significant differences between these two cultures well you know what could you share you know so everything changes right I think we learned a long time ago at EMC and there's probably some acronym about change using the EMC letters you need to be able to adapt to change and both cultures we're very very much the same the businesses are very very interesting and I like to think of them and in a let ik metaphor right there are very different flywheels to the paces of the businesses we have we have a portion of our business that is a flier that spills really really fast and very and very transactional and we have another flywheel that is solution oriented and solution driven it drives a different speed and the miracle the mergers we've been able to figure out how to operate both those flywheel in the same ace David singer definitely the customer flywheels keep a lot of things going and the feedback from our users is one of the flywheels that keeps us going here at the cube so btran sure to check out all the content and as always you can reach us hitting us up on the website hit is up on social media and welcome your feedback so thank you so much for watching the Q

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back to The Cube here at WTG Transform 2018, I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program, a first time guest, Claude Lavigne, who's the director of product management and servers at Dell EMC. Claude, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right, so I had David Singer on this morning, who is from the EMC legacy side of things >> Yes. >> talking about storage, so you're from the legacy Dell side, if we will. You know we're working on servers. So tell us a little bit about your background and what you work on these days. >> So yes, so I'm doing planning for several powers. I've been on the server team for about 18 years. So, all the way from the beginning to now I'm #1 in the world, so it feels very, very good after 18 years. But yeah, that's why we do it. So I'm based in Austin with the product group over there and our role is to optimize and plan the best possible road map and portfolio of servers for rack towers and module. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember back, you go back 5-10 years ago >> Yes >> and some people were like: wait, Dell does servers? You know, aren't they, you know, here's a Dell laptop sitting in front of me, and it was like Dell's done a lot of servers. I mean, I remember when Dell's Blade server first came out. A lot of pieces, but you know, so get us at a high level. You know, what's Dell's position in the marketplace these days? >> I mean, #1, but also to me, at the profile level #1, but at the platform level, we have one rack, the rack, the R740, our mainstream rack. It's the #1 server sold in the world. So, we're #1 profile, even at the platform level, and the 740 is used across, it's kind of a bedrock, it's used for as a server, but also in all of the EMC solution. It's used for virtualization, VDI, so that platform is kind of the, it's doing very, very well these days. >> Yeah, it's one of those things: see, people sometimes forget that a server isn't just something that does the compute for, you know, when an operating system sits on it, there's servers in lots of devices. Every year when I go to Dell World, I would see that giant OEM rack, >> Yes. >> and it was servers, OEM storage, OEM, HCI of course all has servers inside of it. And it was one of those things when the acquisition was initially announced of EMC, it was like, well, look, EMC both in their products and bundled with their solutions really pushes a lot of servers >> Yes. >> that didn't get talked about, you know, in the discussion. >> So now it's great for us. We have the full portfolio. I mean, every day you're going to see new announcements. We're going to have the best VFC solution, the best VxRail. We have best in class, you know, performance, and all that, I mean, the big part I mean, it's the research of years and investments and the system management we have at the server level. Because we have a great automation and system management, we're able to kind of reimagine or create profile on our servers, so it can be a VDI server again, but the best VSUN server or the best VxRail server. And all that because we have a great system management engine called the iTrack 9 inside our servers. And that's years of engineering and6 development, but now finally, now you have the hardware on the system management. We get the reconnection from the customers, and I think that's what made us #1. I mean, we see a lot of acceptance in 14G, a lot of demand for our security and system management capabilities. So I think that's the overall solution that help us, I mean, get to the point. >> All right, so Claude actually as an industry the server business is doing pretty well. >> Yeah. >> Especially for the last few quarters. What's driving growth? You're working on the product strategy, you know, what are some of the interesting nuggets in the portfolio? >> All, I mean, so how much we have to call. So the, like I just mentioned, the one year and two year servers but there is a couple pockets on innovations, so that's what we did in the last few months. So, I mean, the first one is, you see different key or card architecture that something to be very interesting not on the AMD, so we're trying to balance the portfolio to really showcase each of the goodness of this architecture. So that's why we launched the full AMD portfolio not a long time ago. Then, the other one is in the full circuit. What's really interesting, something I've never seen in 15 years, more and more people are doing, not on the database, machine learning, AI on full server, they're requiring more chip use and all flash solution within the server to get the best possible performance. So that's what we did, we announced that a month ago at the award and now in the future, it's the, we're moving to kinetic architectures. So we had a preview at the award of our Annex platform that we're going to launch later this year. And that one is really going to take the IT infrastructure to the next level. So, it's designed for the next 10 years of, again, modular, flexible, kinetic architecture that not only can optimize the right balance between compute and storage, but future technology like all flash and in-memory compute with the right fabric. So that's what you're going to see from us. It's going from the traditional rack servers to this advanced, modular architecture for the big design for the next 10 years. >> Claude, maybe give us a little compare and contrast. How is the module architecture different from what we saw on traditional racks or even blade servers? >> Yeah, so the traditional blade servers, I mean the, we don't blade for, I don't know, 10-15 years. And in the past it was, compute and then outer storage will external to a send. It was very traditional, but now with scale out storage, #1, scale out storage and all this HCI solution, customers asking us have very flexible computer and storage architecture. So that's kind of the first step and most of the blade architecture today are out there. It's like storage and compute, but moving forward we're going to go way beyond that. It's, we're going to have blocks of memory and GPU and flash storage, you know, and different cares of, you know, architecture ahead of the traditional storage. And if you look at the modular architecture, nobody else can deal with that today. Annex is going to be the first platform that can handle all that. It's not going to happen in the next three months, but the chassis is designed to be ready for this architecture of the future. Because we have very unique design in the bag. You know, we're getting rid of the traditional midplane that we have in the past and our competition is still using today. So it's going to be much more open to future, flexible, connectivity in the back of the chassis. So, that's why they never asked us to be ready for these next 10 years of IT innovation. >> Alright, so, Claude we're here at the Winslow Technology user event. What kind of feedback are you hearing from Winslow and their customers and what kind of things are you talking to the channel about these days? >> I mean, we've been in this conference for the last few years and we still think it's a great, great poniverse and they are part of what we call the technical council back in Austin. So, they are CTO sits with us on the PG side to help us plan future warmups, so they are very, very close now. And that's what we're doing, I mean, this, we're trying to optimize the portfolio with these guys. But right now, it's mostly the trying to improve the server, I mean, around storage and compute. So what you're going to see us launching toward the end of the year on the storage side. We're going to have a, remember the #1 server mentioned the alt 740, #1 in the world. Again, talking to the Winslow team and their customers, that server is great, but not good enough, so you're going to see us later this year, based on that feedback launching a new, improved version that will still base, use the 740 base, but be even more optimized for HCI and this several story solution. And that's the perfect example of the feedback we're getting from the Winslow team that we're integrating into the roadmap. So yeah, we are here every year because, I mean these guys are very sharp, they are good. >> Claude, last thing I wanted to ask you is, you know, for a very long time when you thought about the server market, it was, let's watch the intel, the tick-tock, the roadmap. So every few months you could expect something happened. That was what drove the innovation. >> Yes. >> What's the cadence today and what's driving innovation going forward? >> I mean, the cadence is getting faster, so for serving planning it makes it a little bit difficult. Also, now you have again you have these two vendors. Before it's really the innovation and I think that's what made us #1 is beyond the server, beyond the two processors and the storage solution. It's how we manage, how we make sure we have the best security end-to-end. So, our system management, the way we can provision servers, make sure we can do the update in the most secure way. The premise, that's kind of what makes a difference for PowerEdge and I think that's why, I mean, it took years of investment from, you know, the pitching team but I think that's what is making a difference, and the differentiation right now. It's like, you know, our servers are not just like any other servers. They're much easier to, much more secure, much easier to manage, you know, through the entire life cycle. So, I think that's the key differentiation is how we manage the server, you know, so not just at the server level, but we have deployments of thousands of servers. So we have a new console called OpenManage Enterprise. We just launched that, I think that was, what, six months ago, and that's the latest and greatest of one too many managements of servers and it's free. I mean, it's, that's another good think about PowerEdge. You can get OpenImage Enterprise for free. >> Alright, well Claude Lavigne really appreciate the update on everything happening in the server world. Lots more coverage. Check out theCUBE.net for everything we're doing, as well as, we actually take some of the key analysis from the shows that we go to, put that in our podcast that's called theCUBE Insights. Find that on iTunes, GooglePlay, Spotify, your favorite podcast player. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno music)