live from New York City it's the cube covering Lenovo transform 2.0 brought to you by Lenovo cubes live coverage of vote transform here in New York City I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host stu minimun so Stu this is the second ever Lenovo transform event and yet it's the third time the cube has been at a Lenovo explain to me what's going on here first first of all I mean Rebecca set the stage here we're at basketball city in New York City right on the water it feels like you know we just hit intermission time everybody got let out after after the keynotes of a good energy yes absolutely yes two years ago we were actually at a Lenovo show and the Enterprise Group is a small piece of it so ashton kutcher was there showing off the cool new note moto foam that has like the snap-on things that now they have like a 5g upgradable version of that so there is still the consumer group I saw some really cool gaming headsets that I might know myself but our focus today really talked about the enterprise the data center group is the ones that bring us in and we're gonna have a bunch of their guests on but you know Lenovo obviously company been around for a long time even though I know some people like wait who's Lenovo and they like wait look at the laptop their company gave them oh that's all I know is it every day right absolutely and they drive a lot of the things behind the scenes just cuz that's the IT business you know I still most people I talk to they're like what do you do I'm like it's computer stuff you know you don't understand so the big news of the day obviously is the net up Lenovo partnership to global powerhouse is coming together I want to unpack that with you but but first of all let's just talk about where Lenovo is at this moment in time this is a company that is really turning the corner and and we're starting to see a lot of positive growth explain tell our viewers where we are get our computers up to speed so so absolutely really good point we're gonna get to that that NetApp which is the big news of the day but to set the stage if you think over a decade ago when Lenovo acquired the PC division out of IBM ThinkPad brand people knew everything like that couple of years they went down and then they grew it become the number one PC manufacturer worldwide well they picked up the server division last year we were talking about 25 years of these x86 servers in the history and everything like that well history seems to be repeating yourself lenovo hopes it all repeats itself because they had about two years of well revenue to crime a little bit where do they focus and now they're starting to see growth you know some good growth and you know I think if it's you know year-over-year that the fastest growing you know vendor in the space you know large global presence so a lot of excitement there on all of the pieces from Lenovo hyper scale I'd love to talk about we're gonna have some segments here you know the storage piece as those solutions go together things like hyper-converged were there their large growth with new panics so a lot of things happening Lenovo and starting to see the fruits of the big Motorola Mobility and x86 server acquisitions really starting to hit on all cylinders ok so now so we and we are going to talk about all of those things later on the show I've got a lot of great guests coming but but but Lenovo NetApp so we're having Kurtz Kagan and Brett Anderson of net upcoming on the show right up after this what do you make of the deal and is it is it going to be the game changer that these two executives are predicting so when you look at Lenovo and say ok you know they didn't form you know a server group when they they bought the server division it's a datacenter group and if you have the data center let's not forget they actually have some nice networking pieces which what's the old the BNT pieces but when they talked about really their global scale you know the whole data center piece and mobility go together you've got to have storage and lenovo has a bunch of storage pieces they have a lot of partnerships we mentioned lenovo companies like pivot three scale computing are helping them but you know you bring that up and up is the largest independent storage company today now last numbers i saw friends at IDC we're putting out the numbers that you know net up is number two overall Dell and its various pieces of course Dell EMC from the EMC acquisition is number one but you know net up is there a broad portfolio getting in there with the all flash or a markets and this will be joint development ten products and two families but net offers very strong position in the all flashier a market and if you look at what storage is today there's really servers inside and this is servers there so this is not just wrapping these together you know and go to market but you know they are going to do joint development they're gonna work on innovation together they've got a joint venture in China because while Lenovo is global it is their positioning in China that will help them I remember if I saw right just you know they announced it today they start shipping tomorrow like overnight they will be the number three player in China and they have you know goal to drive them to be a force number one there and that's the story you hit with Lenovo they've got growth they've got a good usually at least top three position in many pieces of the market and through partnerships to requisitions that you know they are they are helping to themselves to broaden their portfolio move up the stack on some of these and deliver these solutions to help as they Kirk said it you know they're helping solve some of humanity's biggest challenges we're gonna talk about like supercomputers and the like that do some of those really cool things well I want to get back to what you chose to the strategy of the company in terms of the relationships because that really has been lenovo's their operating model is is are these collaborations these partnerships and they have them with with the big companies that everyone sort of the Amazon the Google the Microsoft and then they also have them with a lot of small smaller players is that in this fast-moving fast changing IT environment is that smart yeah absolutely they have to no single vendor can do it all usually we had a you know a decade or so where it was like well let's vertically integrate and put it all together then people thought well maybe it's just gonna be commoditized I mean come on Intel's the big sponsor here you know arm and arm of course that's probably you know the number one partner that lenovo has everybody's partnering with Intel everybody's parking with Nvidia VMware and Microsoft are the same you and I are going to be at Microsoft ignite in two weeks we're gonna be talking to a Lenovo executive they're one of the four biggest sponsors at that show working on as your staff working on the solutions I was at VMworld a couple of weeks ago Lenovo at a big booth they're talking about first that they have with VMware visa and moving in that market so of course Dell has a very strong relationship to VMware but Lenovo partners across a lot of these environments and to speak to how do you differentiate the story I really like is there's you know this is a multi-faceted market so yes there's the enterprise there's traditional markets that Lenovo from server early well there's new changing markets like Pike hyper-converged but as I mentioned like the hyper scale their strategy there is what they call odium Plus which means they do some customization but it massive scale these are tens or hundreds thousand plus servers that they will build for a vendor in a specific environment and it's not just off-the-shelf Intel that they do for that and there are some players in the server market that have just left not specifically HPE pretty sure that they're not touching that market it is relatively low margin it is very hard to get there you need that global scale so lenovo differentiating how they compete against the you know Dell Dell AMC and HP ease of the world as well as the ODMs out there kind of a generic brands so that they're making good progress and the partnerships absolutely are going to help them get there I'm glad we not only have a couple of partners we have you know one of the supercomputer customers on to really talk about some of those cool use cases you mentioned this idea of how Lenovo competes and the the theme that we keep hearing from all of the Lenovo executives is this relentless focus on the customer and really trying to comport itself as this brand that can be trusted that is ethical that is responsible is is that enough is that enough to just to just be to win your heart customers hearts and minds or do you need to be a little more so so so look it if there's one thing that you want to stick and start on focusing on the customer is a great place you're not gonna lose customers because they love you and you support them that's great when you talk about trust the storage world that's what we buy buy on trust and risk is what the storage and networking people buy so that's a great thing but it's not enough and I'm excited Rebekah we've got a whole bunch of interviews be able to dig in got the net up one kicking off and then some of the other pieces to really help us answer that question as to right start with the customer and everything leads from there so they're gonna be a great show thank you so much always a pleasure co-hosting with you alright excited for 6:00 with us at the cube we will have more from Lenovo transform here in New York City in just a few minutes

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to theCUBE We continue our coverage here live. We are in the Sands at Dell Technologies World 2018. Big show, 14,000 plus they're expecting here. 4,000 just in the business partners summit alone. So a very impressive turnout here in day one, as I said, of three days of coverage on theCUBE. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Lee Caswell who's a VP of Products at VMWare. Lee, good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here, yes. >> John: Every year we get together like this, right? >> Well, you know, there's always something new to talk about, right? >> John: Absolutely, and we're also joined by Chris Stanley here, who's the IT Manager at the Celtic Manor Resorts in Newport, Wales. Chris, the first person from Wales I think I've ever met, as a matter of fact. >> Chris: (laughs) A privilege; thank you. >> For me it is, but thank you for being here. We appreciate the time. So we're talking about your migration, and, really, it wasn't a migration, it was like your head-first dive into the hyper-converged environment. You didn't tiptoe around it, you didn't wade into the water, You guys just dove right in. >> Chris: We're fearless, yes. >> What was the driver of that decision to be so fearless? >> Chris: As an organization, we've grown very quickly the last few years, and we've got significant growth in new hotels and a new conference center coming on board. And we're bursting at the seams in our existing environment, so we needed a platform that we could grow into this new environment very quickly and with predictive costs as best as we could. >> And so, Lee, walking them through this, >> Yeah, >> I mean, there's no convincing to be done here, but you do have to inspire some confidence, right? So somebody who's making a pretty bold move like this how did you approach that, and what did you do as far as assigning? >> Lee: You know, our partnership with Dell EMC is just a great testament here, right? I mean, you've taken the latest of 14G servers, for example, as part of VxRail. So you've got the best in hardware combined with VMWare underlying VCN software packaged up together, right, in a single point of support in a way that really makes us able to drop in and get started. Right, when you think about this, this is also interesting, in that here's a customer you know, in this case, you were using converged infrastructure in the past. >> It really is. Yeah. >> That's very common, right? So people who are looking for the advantage of like, how did I get the operational efficiencies? And now what you find is hyper-converge changes the operational model, and so it's around speed and agility, right? More than cost, right? And so, together, that's kind of the, our partnership is so powerful for customers looking to go and basically drive that kind of efficiency. >> Chris: Definitely, yeah. >> Keith: So, Chris, talk to us about that decision process. In typical organizations, this is Wired U, You're on theCUBE and it's so special. It's easy to talk about use cases on the edge VDI, specific, non-mission critical applications. But when it comes to stuff that runs the business, if it's down, the CIO, the CFO is at someone's desk asking when it's going to be back up. How did this discussion start? Was it from the bottom up, or was it from the top down? Exactly which teams said, "You know what? We need more agility, HCI, go!" >> Chris: Definitely from a bottom up perspective, but supported from top down when we came for it. We could see it in our environment, in our growing environment. We're a 24 hour business in a resort hotel, and we have little downtime Or, sorry, little time to do any upgrades, etc. So resilience within that environment was key to us for our uptime, so failing over with VMWare we use, with the VxWare we get now DRS and the Enterprise version which it comes with which we hadn't in our converged. So there is that automation of balancing your workloads, not having someone there watching it all the time so that has freed up a lot of time for my guys. Going forward there will be a lot more free time as well so we've got more time to concentrate on the guests and how we can make their experience better. >> So the story behind Converged systems, you know you have SAP, Oracle, BASSP, all these mission critical apps mission critical runs on CI and then everything else to run on, even from a vendor support, you know you talk to all the major software vendors, they say you all CI is the best opportunity. How did that conversation go with vendors when you said you know what, we're going to run mission critical on, I'm assuming vSAN? >> Lee: This is on vSAN in VxRail. >> vSAN, you know, we can't see your TR1 software providers and you know what, we're all vSAN, global size and scope, global? >> What, as an environment? >> Yes. >> It's a global environment really of over four hotels at the moment but growing into a bigger environment. We're going for an international conference center so kind of this sort of size, not quite as big as this but we're definitely not support from the hyper converged. And all our core systems are written on it, yes. Big Oracle databases, SQL, and our exchange service and there was a split between two clusters now in VxRail so we can, we can fail over to a node in VxRail, we can fail over to a cluster as well so as an SLE for up time we're business critical and the guys at the top of Celtic Manor have seen how that is for business you know. If we're not serving people or taking money then we're giving money back in a case for disruption. >> All right so you've been into this for a little bit less than a year now, correct? >> Correct, yes. >> I know Lee's sitting right next to you but let's just for a moment. I'm sure there has been at least a troubling moment of that transition or at least a hiccup somewhere that you had to settle, you had a problem, right? Something came up, if someone's watching this, thinking I wonder what they got hit with and how they handled it, how did you work around that, how did you adapt that, what would that be? What was the, maybe the one little hiccup right now that you've successfully- >> With deployment? >> Yeah. >> Nothing much but when we were migrating from a Converged infrastructure to a hyperconverged we added on the SANs to the hyperconverged so we could see them migrate over. A couple of servers didn't take too well to that one being motioned over. Nothing of the critical ones thankfully. But they, it was either a Windows update or once they restarted, it was only two of the servers but, we used the recover point then within VxRail and literally go back five, 10 minutes, which we did and up and running again, switched over, and we were you know, back up and running, but it was we had the decision there of, how long do we troubleshoot it for or do we just, that was our first instance of using recover point so we hadn't done it in a live environment so it was kind of, okay and pretty much out but it worked and it filled us with a lot of confidence now that we could do, we have that resilience going forward in an environment. >> Well let's talk about day two. >> I was just going to comment Ray, that this is part of the partnership that's so powerful for us right, is, you know I think VMWare learn that supporting storage systems, as we know, it's a little different than just computing. You know this, right, I mean, you know the idea of like, hey listen, a purple screen isn't the worst that can happen, 'cause you can reboot, right? It's really about, like, my data. And so when you start thinking about that, the ability for us to partner with Dell AMC who understands what it means to be supporting in a datacentric world, like that element, right is so powerful for us, right, because we've got a partner here who really understands the ability and that's part of the powerful concept of VxRail. >> So we had Tom Burns earlier and we were talking about VI and the importance of CI and there's still a great, I think, desire and temptation, and valid that CI gets you on the ground, running quickly, complex systems, easily deployed relative to traditional architectures. Talk to me about the practical of HCI, Day 2 Operations, CI, relatively easy to deploy but you still have some traditional operations concerns. What specifically did you guys see as the advantage Day two once you went to ACI? What's saving you all this time? >> Purely I think the time saver is the management of the system or the lack of management that we now need to do. There's, you've got one pane of glass to see everything which is very nice, you haven't got something separate for your SANs, your SX hosts, your networking and that support that you have, you know, there's one of them to call. You're not fighting between different entities saying it's your fault, it's your fault, there you go, sort it, so again that has freed up a lot of time, you know not knowing who to call or where to call but, you know, having one person who's going to sort it out and take ahold of that and fix it for you. And the remote support then, which is very good you know, you've got someone else monitoring your systems if you enable it, so you've got Dell support there and they can potentially see something before you do so I kind of gained another IT person for in this solution which is very nice. >> Yeah, we kind of joke you know, that a lot of people talk about hyperconvergence as if it's about us, but hyperconvergence is about you. When you think about it, right, it's about hyperconverging the IT staff. If you can hyperconverge the staff, right, that's when hyperconvergence does well, when we have one team, it's a converged team and people are like, hey listen, I'm going to go to a VMcentric management model. Now I can go and debug things right from a single console which is V center. That model works really fast, right? And where Converged still does a good job, right, is where I've got storage scaling at big scale but separate from compute separate. Hyperconvergence is about, it's about the organizational environment right? >> Very much so, bringing it all together, yeah. And it's simplistic in VMWare being so tightly integrated with VxRail was our main call against the other vendors, as a big call to, while they, you know, it's the best chef with the best ingredients, let's use that, not a dessert chef with the best ingredients >> Yeah, we have 500,000 customers who are familiar with V Center, right, and if you know V Center you know V SAN, you know VxRail, right? >> You can get simplistic again, so you already know it. >> Yeah, right. >> Well we could talk about this til we're blue in the face. I think we need to go see it in operation, don't you Keith? >> We'll set you up with some golf >> Now we're talking, be careful Chris, what you offer. Lee, Chris, good to see you guys. Thanks for being with us, we appreciate you sharing the story. Thank you very much. Back with more, here from Dell Technologies World we are live on theCUBE in Las Vegas.

>> Voiceover: Live from San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube covering DataWorks Summit 2017. Brought to you by: Hortonworks. >> Hey, welcome back to The Cube. We are live on day one of the DataWorks Summit in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Peter Burris. Not only is this day one of the DataWorks Summit, this is the day after the Golden State Warriors won the NBA Championship. Please welcome our next guess, the CTO of Dell AMC, Bill Shmarzo. And Cube alumni, clearly sporting the pride. >> Did they win? I don't even remember. I just was-- >> Are we breaking news? (laughter) Bill, it's great to have you back on The Cube. >> The Division III All-American from-- >> Cole College. >> 1947? >> Oh, yeah, yeah, about then. They still had the peach baskets. You make a basket, you have to climb up this ladder and pull it out. >> They're going rogue on me. >> It really slowed the game down a lot. (laughter) >> All right so-- And before we started they were analyzing the game, it was actually really interesting. But, kick things off, Bill, as the volume and the variety and the velocity of data are changing, organizations know there's a tremendous amount of transformational value in this data. How is Dell AMC helping enterprises extract and maximize that as the economic value of data's changing? >> So, the thing that we find is most relevant is most of our customers don't give a hoot about the three V's of big data. Especially on the business side. We like to jokingly say they care of the four M's of big data, make me more money. So, when you think about digital transformation and how it might take an organization from where they are today to sort of imbed digital capabilities around data and analytics, it's really about, "How do I make more money?" What processes can I eliminate or reduce? How do I improve my ability to market and reach customers? How do I, ya know-- All the things that are designed to drive value from a value perspective. Let's go back to, ya know, Tom Peters kind of thinking, right? I guess Michael Porter, right? His value creation processes. So, we find that when we have a conversation around the business and what the business is trying to accomplish that provides the framework around which to have this digital transformation conversation. >> So, well, Bill, it's interesting. The volume, velocity, variety; three V's, really say something about the value of the infrastructure. So, you have to have infrastructure in place where you can get more volume, it can move faster, and you can handle more variety. But, fundamentally, it is still a statement about the underlying value of the infrastructure and the tooling associated with the data. >> True, but one of the things that changes is not all data is of equal value. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> Right? So, what data, what technologies-- Do I need to have Spark? Well, I don't know, what are you trying to do, right? Do I need to have Kafka or Ioda, right? Do I need to have these things? Well, if I don't know what I'm trying to do, then I don't have a way to value the data and I don't have a way to figure out and prioritize my investment and infrastructure. >> But, that's what I want to come to. So, increasingly, what business executives, at least the ones who we're talking to all the time, are make me more money. >> Right. >> But, it really is, what is the value of my data? And, how do I start pricing data and how do I start thinking about investing so that today's data can be valuable tomorrow? Or the data that's not going to be valuable tomorrow, I can find some other way to not spend money on it, etc. >> Right. >> That's different from the variety, velocity, volume statement which is all about the infrastructure-- >> Amen. >> --and what an IT guy might be worried about. So, I've done a lot of work on data value, you've done a lot of work in data value. We've coincided a couple times. Let's pick that notion up of, ya know, digital transformation is all about what you do with your data. So, what are you seeing in your clients as they start thinking this through? >> Well, I think one of the first times it was sort of an "aha" moment to me was when I had a conversation with you about Adam Smith. The difference between value in exchange versus value in use. A lot of people when they think about monetization, how do I monetize my data, are thinking about value in exchange. What is my data worth to somebody else? Well, most people's data isn't worth anything to anybody else. And the way that you can really drive value is not data in exchange or value in exchange, but it's value in use. How am I using that data to make better decisions regarding customer acquisition and customer retention and predictive maintenance and quality of care and all the other oodles of decisions organizations are making? The evaluation of that data comes from putting it into use to make better decisions. If I know then what decision I'm trying to make, now I have a process not only in deciding what data's most valuable but, you said earlier, what data is not important but may have liability issues with it, right? Do I keep a data set around that might be valuable but if it falls into the wrong hands through cyber security sort of things, do I actually open myself up to all kinds of liabilities? And so, organizations are rushing from this EVD conversation, not only from a data evaluation perspective but also from a risk perspective. Cause you've got to balance those two aspects. >> But, this is not a pure-- This is not really doing an accounting in a traditional accounting sense. We're not doing double entry book keeping with data. What we're really talking about is understand how your business used its data. Number one today, understand how you think you want your business to be able to use data to become a more digital corporation and understand how you go from point "a" to point "b". >> Correct, yes. And, in fact, the underlying premise behind driving economic value of data, you know people say data is the new oil. Well, that's a BS statement because it really misses the point. The point is, imagine if you had a barrel of oil; a single barrel of oil that can be used across an infinite number of vehicles and it never depleted. That's what data is, right? >> Explain that. You're right but explain it. >> So, what it means is that data-- You can use data across an endless number of use cases. If you go out and get-- >> Peter: At the same time. >> At the same time. You pay for it once, you put it in the data lake once, and then I can use it for customer acquisition and retention and upsell and cross-sell and fraud and all these other use cases, right? So, it never wears out. It never depletes. So, I can use it. And what organizations struggle with, if you look at data from an accounting perspective, accounting tends to value assets based on what you paid for it. >> Peter: And how you can apply them uniquely to a particular activity. A machine can be applied to this activity and it's either that activity or that activity. A building can be applied to that activity or that activity. A person's time to that activity or that activity. >> It has a transactional limitation. >> Peter: Exactly, it's an oar. >> Yeah, so what happens now is instead of looking at it from an accounting perspective, let's look at it from an economics and a data science perspective. That is, what can I do with the data? What can I do as far as using the data to predict what's likely to happen? To prescribe actions and to uncover new monetization opportunities. So, the entire approach of looking at it from an accounting perspective, we just completed that research at the University of San Francisco. Where we looked at, how do you determine economic value of data? And we realized that using an accounting approach grossly undervalued the data's worth. So, instead of using an accounting, we started with an economics perspective. The multiplier effect, marginal perpetuity to consume, all that kind of stuff that we all forgot about once we got out of college really applies here because now I can use that same data over and over again. And if I apply data science to it to really try to predict, prescribe, and monetize; all of a sudden economic value of your data just explodes. >> Precisely because of your connecting a source of data, which has a particular utilization, to another source of data that has a particular utilization and you can combine them, create new utilizations that might in and of itself be even more valuable than either of the original cases. >> They genetically mutate. >> That's exactly right. So, think about-- I think it's right. So, congratulations, we agree. Thank you very much. >> Which is rare. >> So, now let's talk about this notion of as we move forward with data value, how does an organization have to start translating some of these new ways of thinking about the value of data into investments in data so that you have the data where you want it, when you want it, and in the form that you need it. >> That's the heart of why you do this, right? If I know what the value of my data is, then I can make decisions regarding what data am I going to try to protect, enhance? What data am I going to get rid of and put on cold storage, for example? And so we came up with a methodology for how we tie the value of data back to use cases. Everything we do is use case based so if you're trying to increase same-store sales at a Chipotle, one of my favorite places; if you're trying to increase it by 7.1 percent, that's worth about 191 million dollars. And the use cases that support that like increasing local even marketing or increasing new product introduction effectiveness, increasing customer cross-sale or upsell. If you start breaking those use cases down, you can start tying financial value to those use cases. And if I know what data sets, what three, five, seven data sets are required to help solve that problem, I now have a basis against which I can start attaching value to data. And as I look across at a number of use cases, now the valued data starts to increment. It grows exponentially; not exponentially but it does increment, right? And it gets more and more-- >> It's non-linear, it's super linear. >> Yeah, and what's also interesting-- >> Increasing returns. >> From an ROI perspective, what you're going to find that as you go down these use cases, the financial value of that use case may not be really high. But, when the denominator of your ROI calculation starts approaching zero because I'm reusing data at zero cost, I can reuse data at zero cost. When the denominator starts going to zero ya know what happens to your ROI? In infinity, it explodes. >> Last question, Bill. You mentioned The University of San Francisco and you've been there a while teaching business students how to embrace analytics. One of the things that was talked about this morning in the keynote was Hortonworks dedication to the open-source community from the beginning. And they kind of talked about there, with kids in college these days, they have access to this open-source software that's free. I'd just love to get, kind of the last word, your take on what are you seeing in university life today where these business students are understanding more about analytics? Do you see them as kind of, helping to build the next generation of data scientists since that's really kind of the next leg of the digital transformation? >> So, the premise we have in our class is we probably can't turn business people into data scientists. In fact, we don't think that's valuable. What we want to do is teach them how to think like a data scientist. What happens, if we can get the business stakeholders to understand what's possible with data and analytics and then you couple them with a data scientist that knows how to do it, we see exponential impact. We just did a client project around customer attrition. The industry benchmark in customer attrition is it was published, I won't name the company, but they had a 24 percent identification rate. We had a 59 percent. We two X'd the number. Not because our data scientists are smarter or our tools are smarter but because our approach was to leverage and teach the business people how to think like a data scientist and they were able to identify variables and metrics they want to test. And when our data scientists tested them they said, "Oh my gosh, that's a very highly predicted variable." >> And trust what they said. >> And trust what they said, right. So, how do you build trust? On the data science side, you fail. You test, you fail, you test, you fail, you're never going to understand 100 percent accuracy. But have you failed enough times that you feel comfortable and confident that the model is good enough? >> Well, what a great spirit of innovation that you're helping to bring there. Your keynote, we should mention, is tomorrow. >> That's right. >> So, you can, if you're watching the livestream or you're in person, you can see Bill's keynote. Bill Shmarzo, CTO of Dell AMC, thank you for joining Peter and I. Great to have you on the show. A show where you can talk about the Warriors and Chipotle in one show. I've never seen it done, this is groundbreaking. Fantastic. >> Psycho donuts too. >> And psycho donuts and now I'm hungry. (laughter) Thank you for watching this segment. Again, we are live on day one of the DataWorks Summit in San Francisco for Bill Shmarzo and Peter Burris, my co-host. I am Lisa Martin. Stick around, we will be right back. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Along with cohost Keith Townsend. We are joined by Todd Pavone, he's the COO of Dell AMC. Thanks so much for joining. >> Well all my kids call me dad, whatever. >> Rebecca: We can call you anything you want. >> Dad's good, yeah. >> Daddio alright. >> So Todd, the theme of this conference is about providing companies with the tools that they need to realize their digital futures. Lay it all out for me. What do you see as sort of the biggest problems that you're trying to solve. >> Sure, that's a good question. If you're a CIO today, I think there's lots of them in this show these past few days. They have lots of challenges, right. If you're CIO today, your budgets are flat or decreasing. Your users are asking to do more faster. The evolution of change is at a crazy pace. You look at your operating budget, the mast majority is spent on maintenance. So as a CIO you have to do something different. You have to transform. If you think about that, IT has changed so much in the last 10 years. IT is actually the differentiator if the business will succeed or fail. Years ago, I've been doing this a long time, years ago it was just a support function. It is now the differentiation if you'll succeed or fail. So if you think about that scenario of a CIO, they have to change. They have to transform. They have to modernize their data center. So everything we've been doing for the last several years is helping the CIOs and data centers transform. Transform so they can simplify the complex. So they can deliver faster. They can have better service levels with the users. So their staff can actually work on strategic initiatives, not on the things that just are keeping the lights on. So they can help their business transform and differentiate. And that's what's it's all about. Is helping them transform. >> So what are you seeing out there right now that is making you confident about the landscape. >> So for us, in CPSD, the BU we've been in, we started this about seven or eight years ago. What we see is results. It's all about delivering results. We're seeing customers improve their time to delivery by 4x. Customers cutting their total cost of ownership by 50%. Customers able to provision new services to the end users at a 5x rate. Measurable, tangible results. The metric I care most about in our business is repeat customers. About 70% of our customers are repeat. Meaning they're deploying the technology and solution and they're seeing the benefits. They're saying this is how we want to run data center of the future. What's really cool is, we're helping them change their businesses and be more successful long-term. That's the best part of what we're doing. >> So let's talk about overall market. Where is Dell in this market? How big is the market? And where's Dell in this market? >> Dell technology, you're talking about hundreds of billions dollars market. It's an enormous market. From a Dell technology perspective, it's all about how do we help transform the data center. How do we provide the essential infrastructure for the data center. If you start to peel that back and you look at the market that our business unit is in, Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, we're focused on the hybrid cloud solutions engineering systems all the way down to our Blueprints solutions. You're talking about a 20, 30 billion dollar market, depending on how you look at it. It's big and growing. Fortunately, our space is one of the fastest growing markets in the industry. Customers are deploying converge and hyper-converge at a rapid pace. And thankfully we're the ones helping drive that that change. >> So what are the big value props coming from a technology perspective. You talked about hybrid cloud. You talked about the actual systems, what are the value props for Dell's converge systems versus competitors. >> So if you think about the top x we talk about this build to buy continuum. So what we want to be able to do is have a continuum of offerings, depending on where the customer's maturity is, they can leverage wherever we are in their transformation. At the tip of the pyramid is our hybrid cloud solution. So this where companies may want to deploy a turn key hybrid cloud. From application all the way to infrastructure and within a very short period of time have a fully enabled running cloud that they could offer to their end user customers. Value for that is time to market. We have customers deploying a full hybrid cloud in days. If they had to build themselves, it would take months and many months. So speed is a huge part of that value proposition. Obviously leveraging of VMware technology in that solution is key to what we're doing. Leveraging Pivotal for our native hybrid cloud solutions is very differentiated. Those are two technologies that are in the Dell technology portfolios, VMware and Pivotal that we can take advantage of. In the engineered systems landscape, I hit on this before, but it's all about speed to deliver. We know if customers were to build things out themselves, it would take them 140 to 150 days. We know we can do it in 45 days. So think about that, it's a three to four times x improvement in delivery. We know it requires less people to manage. We know we can save 50%-60% total cost of ownership by deploying these engineer systems versus managing themselves. Those are big numbers. Those are numbers where you can actually take those dollars and reinvest in other things. It comes back to what I said upfront, it's all about solving those pain-points for the customers. Simplifying the complex, allowing them to go work on that are really strategic to their business. I used an example yesterday of Blockbuster. My three boys and I would go down to Blockbuster every Friday night, we'll rent movies. Blockbuster is not here anymore. >> Rebecca: Nope. >> What happened? I can tell you, their IT organization was supporting their point of sale systems in their stores. They weren't thinking of new ways to distribute content. Why? Because they had no time. We want companies to be able to have the time to work on strategic things that are important to them. We want to enable them to do that. >> So that's a great example of being short sightedness. And the dangers of being short sightedness at time of profound transformational change. What is your call to arms to customers, what's your advice? >> Customers have to, it's hard to change. It's easy- >> Rebecca: And you resist it. It is. >> You have people that have been doing things for a long time, it's hard to change. It's not just about technology change, it is about changing process, changing the way people work. You have to have the intestinal fortitude to go do it. People when they see change, they kind of want to run from it. You have to embrace it, adopt it. Because if you don't, you may not be positioned in the long-term. First thing, for us, we need change agents. We need customers to have change agents that are willing to put push back, willing to try to do something different. Willing to innovate, I'm willing to break some glass. And when they do that, at the end of the day, we know they're going to be better off for it. But again, it's hard to do. That's probably the first thing we ask them, be willing to accept some major changes in what they do and how they do it. >> So this seems like this would be something that's contagious. Once a customer embraces that change, talk us through that next level of conversation and the future conversation. >> Typically there needs to be an event. Something to trigger them to go change. Could be data center consolidation, it could be a new application rollout. It could be a strategic initiative by the executive team. So most of our customers will start with maybe one or two applications. And they'll say, let's go see how this works. Let's go test how this works. Especially if they're big. If they're a large enterprise, they're not going to do a global change for everything. They're going to say, let's start with a subset. Once they see the subset work, then they start rolling more and more applications into this new way of running their data center. When we talk about with our customers, I like to use autonomous driving as an example. To me, we see a data center someday where basically, things will happen autonomically. You'll set a business policy, workload will dynamically base upon that policy. We're requiring humans not to get involved. It's kind of the same thing, back to my analogy of Tesla. You get into Tesla, the car actually starts to drive itself. How is it doing that? It's doing real-time data analytics, it's understanding all its environmentals, it's making decisions. Why can't the data center get to the same place? Because if you can do that, think all the savings you can now reinvest in the things that are real important to the business. So we try to set a strategy and vision that customers understand and appreciate. And then we try to give them the building blocks of how they're going to get there. >> Just as we'll remember the days when we used to drive to the supermarket, we'll remember the days when we had to run the data center. >> Exactly. That's the hope. That's the hope and dreams of what we're trying to do. >> Next year's conference. >> Next year's conference. >> I'm all in. I'm all in. >> We got more. We got more. Thanks so much Todd. >> Todd: Thank you guys. >> I appreciate it. >> This is great. >> Great to have you on the show. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Keith Townsend. We will be back with more after this. (Lively techno music)