>> TheCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day three. From the show floor of Dell Technologies World 2022. We've been here with about seven to 8,000 people. It's been outstanding since Monday night, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, and we have two of the ladies from Dell digital with us, excited to welcome Jaynene Hapanowicz and Betsy Davis, leaders in Dell digital, which is Dell's IT organization. Ladies, thanks for joining Dave and me. >> Thanks for having us. Great to be here. >> Jaynene, let's start with you. We've heard a lot this week about the need for IT leaders to think very meaningfully on how to leave a lasting legacy. How in today's dynamic environment do IT leaders do that? >> Yeah. Well look, let's start with IT leaders have a pretty tough job. You're trying to stabilize an environment. You're trying to take care of anomalies, security incidents. Like that's the blocking and tackling, except you also have to transform your organization at the same time. And I think it's really important that you build a strategy that enables you to do both those things. So you have to do, you have to do the blocking and tackling or you don't get a seat at the table, but the other things that you have to prioritize are things like building the business relationships, putting your customer at the center of what you do, and building great teams that trust you and you trust them to develop capabilities that you need for the future. And your strategy has to support both of those things. >> We've heard a lot about trust this week, specifically from Mr. Dell himself, Betsy you've spoken in the past about the need for IT and the business to collaborate. There has to be trust there. How do you advise folks to accomplish that true collaboration? >> Yeah, it's look, trust is so important and it's funny because last time we were here live at a CUBE session, we were talking about the product model, which is how we do things in Dell Digital now. And it's all focused on jointly with the business, agreeing on human-centered outcomes, starting small, iterating and together you deliver extraordinary things. And so over the last few years, building collaboration through that product model has done tremendous things. I would say what we're learning more about more recently is how to extend that. Especially when you're taking multiple legacy regional tools and globalizing them, how do you extend it to policies and processes? But what we're finding that's interesting is, the same principles apply, agree on outcomes. What are you going for? And then work through it together. You don't assign it to one side or the other. It's truly a collaboration exercise. >> You know, I want to comment. So Dell has a culture, obviously. Founder led company, chairman's name is on the name of the company, Say:Do ratio, trust, et cetera. It seems like Dell Digital has its own little culture going on. And the reason I say that is, when Jen felt was up on stage yesterday, I heard a lot of yelling, screaming, hooping, people were standing up. That didn't seem like a typical IT department thing. You know, that was pretty cool. So what's the Dell Digital culture like, is it just an extension? Is it? What's it like? >> Yeah, yeah. Well, I think our leader who we admire very much, which you saw yesterday has built a great leadership team and a culture that her leaders trust each other and that cascades down. And I think our employees, like all of our folks, they love working in Dell Digital, and they love working at Dell digital because we empower them to do their jobs. We let them work where they need to work, and we have, I think, great leadership at every level to really help people propel the company forward. We have a single mission and that mission is to make Dell better. >> I like the, thank you for that. I like the way Betsy, you were talking about the, I called the product mindset. >> Yep. >> As opposed to commonly in IT, there's a project mindset. Ah, I got another project to do. >> Yeah. >> Explain the difference. >> So a project is, some people might say waterfall, it's a very old school way of doing things where you say, okay, business give me requirements. They take six months, They come up with a list of requirements. Your IT team goes off and deliver in those requirements. And two years later you come back together and go, oh, that's not what we were looking for, and it's delayed by now. So product model is really focused on, hey, let's do short sprints. Let's agree the outcome, let's attempt to deliver it, but if we deliver it and then find out, oh, that's actually not what we were looking for, then you just iterate and you haven't wasted two and a half years. And it's also quite frankly, as a leader, it's a lot more fun to lead teams in that environment, because you're constantly getting wins and they're getting that constant reinforcement of look at the impact you're making for the business. Which is a great motivator for all of us at Dell Digital. >> Quick follow up if I may, is the enabler there a mindset or is it technology? Why are you able to do that? >> It's both. So part of what makes that possible, is our modern environment. Jaynene has done an incredible job, really building a modern toolkit for our developers that makes it easier to collaborate and move quickly and iterate. But so much of it is that product model mindset of, okay, what outcomes are we delivering? What's the smallest unit of work we can break that into and let's just go and iterate. >> And you put the user in the center, like it's so much easier to develop what a customer needs, if the customer is at the center of what you're trying to do, and you iterate from there. That wasn't the way that it has historically worked. >> So how do you advise it leaders to become transformational like this rather than traditional? Because I imagine those traditional ones, those businesses may not survive the changing times that we're living in, but being transformational that's a challenging mindset, especially for organizations that are legacy or history, have been there a while. Can you advise? >> I mean, you have to fire on all cylinders, that old people process and technology is actually still true. Building a great culture and building a culture of trust, super important, but you got to pull your folks along with you on a journey. You have to have leadership that buys into doing both transformation and running the business. You have to, your technology has to support what you're trying to do. You can't expect great outcomes from things that are 20 years old, You're not going to get it. And your processes, they have to be adjusted to reflect a cloud operating model. A lot of companies even struggle with that, because they're using processes from a decade ago, and they need to update those policies to reflect what it is to operate like a cloud, in a cloud. And how have you guys accelerated this culture and this mindset during the last couple of years where things just went crazy overnight? What was that acceleration like? 'Cause we talked about digital transformation acceleration with your customers, but you guys have had to transform too. >> Yeah, and you know, I look at it from a leadership angle. I think these last couple years have really given us an opportunity to take what we took in the product model of human-centered experiences for our customers and business partner, and really focus on, hey, we need to be human centered leaders. So in some ways that was easier to do with Dell because we were always very flexible on where people work, when they work, et cetera. But I think we've had the opportunity these last couple years to demonstrate, hey, it really is about our people first, we set our people up for success. We help them take care of their immediate needs, whether those be personal or work and everything else works out. And I think companies that keep that in the forefront and always approach things from a human center perspective, whether that's leadership or experiences in the product model, always come out ahead. >> How are you faring in the talent war? My specific question is, if I were younger and a perspective employee, how would you recruit me in terms of how you would nurture my career? What's my future look like? What would you tell me? >> Yeah, I, well, first of all, let's start with the talent war. That, I mean, look, it's real. Our folks are getting recruited like crazy too. Except I think there is a cultural aspect that really causes folks to pause. I also think enabling people to work where they want to work or where they need to work, it's both, that has helped us in our recruitment because the advantage of people do not want to go back to the office. Like, I don't know, I'm speaking for like probably myself and everybody I talk to. I just don't think people want to go back to the office, but we're benefiting from that, because we are actually drawing in talent from companies that are sending folks back to the office. And we gave our employees remotely great tools to be able to work from home. And that has all been a win for us in terms of retaining our staff and drawing in new talent. And I think the other thing and it's a very important point that you raise, is that the future is working in modern tool sets. And one of the things that we did and Jen spoke about yesterday, was around developers want to develop and you've got to give them the tools that they need to perform their jobs as quickly as possible, because digital transformation is ultimately about creating applications that drive business value. >> I think I'm the only one that probably here that wants to go back to the office. If I do one more Zoom call from home, I might go puke. >> I go to the office, but I'm like 15 minutes away, so. >> Oh, I'm about 30 seconds away to really look at my commute. Let's talk about from that cultural perspective and the great resignation, all the things that are going on. You talked about folks getting recruited, that flexibility of meeting your, as you said Jaynene meeting the employees where they are is the same culture that Dell has about meeting its customers where they are. And that's really kind of the foundation of a lot of the announcements that we've heard over the last few days, is really that flexibility to be able to deliver what a great customer experience and a great employee experience. I think to me, they're inextricably linked. >> So I totally agree. >> So this notion of work remotely, et cetera, great. Most people, like you said right now are saying I'm not going back. And I think some kind of hybrid is probably going to be the norm. >> Agree. >> That's cool. But we have a tendency to work longer laps times from home. And so there's that even weekends, it's like everybody's always on we should never get emails on Saturday, now I'm like, I got to look, of course spend an hour or two hour, whatever it is. So how do you balance that with folks? What do you tell people in your organization? >> Yeah, I mean, we're very focused on our employees having quality of life, now we're in IT. Like, let's be real. We have always worked weekends. But I think what we're really really being very thoughtful about, is that balance for our employees that we're not creating more stress in their lives. Like we want them to have a great quality experience. A lot of that happens with the technology that we have built under the covers, because that has allowed our developers to work less weekends and has allowed our folks to release independently, which is kind of in the world of IT, that's the utopia, you want to get to let folks work independently. And that has actually freed up the time for developers to have to work as if we all work together, and now they can work independently. And that has actually helped with quality of life. So it's, it is still though a combination of all those things. It is also having leadership team that values that. And I think that's what we have. >> What's cool about this conversation. We're talking about IT, we haven't even, we haven't talked tech. Now are you guys techies? >> Yeah. >> You are? >> Yeah. >> Okay. So one of the things, I was in one of these private analyst meetings, a handful of analysts with (indistinct) and I was asking her about the cloud migration, that's a lot of CIOs top priority. It's obviously, her response essentially was, yeah, well, we are modernizing our infrastructure, That's essentially our cloud. We've got our own cloud. I wonder if you could like double click on that a little bit. 'Cause security number one for most IT organizations, cloud number two, she translated that into, way I interpret that data is modernization. I wonder if you could give us your perspective on that. >> I think the first thing as you map out, hey, what do we want our modern environment to be? And you make those technology decisions, just like with our people, we need to design optionality in and make sure that we stay as flexible and nimble as we can. The same is true for our technology environment. So that's why you see whether we're talking about what we offer to our customers or how we're modernizing our environment. We want to make sure we've got flexibility and optionality because what we do all know is we don't know what the future will bring. >> How did you guys get into tech? When did you fall in love with technology? >> How many years ago? >> No, like, like what was, was there something in your life that like appealed to you or? >> It's actually really funny story. My father was a mainframe programmer, so. >> Okay, So he was doing COBOL. >> I swear I wanted nothing to do with it. And then I found myself in those shoes. >> Yeah. Horrible. >> Yeah, horrible. >> It's in your DNA. >> I think so. I think so. >> Okay. So you just, when things started to get more modern. >> I just thought it was interesting. Like I'm almost 30 years in. Like I just thought it was really interesting. >> That's awesome. >> And I still think it is. >> How about you Betsy? >> I actually started on the business side, so I worked with IT through my 20 years at Dell. And when they started shifting to the product model, I was a business partner and I saw these incredible outcomes we were delivering to. And I'm like, oh, look at that cool technology. We were doing like optical character recognition to automate it. It was just, it was super cool. And you know, I'd known Jen for a long time and she said, well, why don't you come over to Dell Digital? And I did, it's been, it been a blast but I started as a business partner. >> But you, then you bring that understanding of the business the outcomes focused to the IT side. And that's probably why you guys make it sound like it's so simple to facilitate the IT business collaboration that so many businesses struggle with >> The magic is to make it simple. >> I agree. >> Yeah totally. >> It's not easy. >> No, it's not easy, but it's possible. >> Well, and that's what drives adoption. >> How have in our final minute or so here, how have the customers, we know what 15,000 customers globally, great customers on stage. We've had some customers on the show this week. How have they been influential in terms of the modernization of Dell Digital in especially the last two years, any interesting stories of customer influence you can share. >> In terms of our modernization efforts? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I mean, look, we share all the time with customers on best practices in IT. And I would really say we have also moved an organization and solved many of the problems, the very problems our customers are trying to address through much of what we've developed within IT. And I think customers are very interested in learning from us and helping them on their own transformation journey. >> Excellent, ladies thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about really what's under the covers of Dell Digital, but it's really about people, process and technologies and collaboration. >> That's right. >> Great use case (indistinct). We appreciate your time. >> We appreciate it back. >> Thanks for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCube's coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from the show floor in Las Vegas. Stick around and be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> I'm Dave Nicholson and welcome to Dell Technologies World 2022. I'm delighted to be joined by Tony Bishop. Tony is senior vice president, enterprise strategy at Digital Realty. Tony, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. Happy to be here. >> So Tony, tell me about your role at Digital Realty and give us a little background on Digital Realty and what you do. >> Absolutely, so my job is to figure out how to make our product and experience relevant for enterprises and partners alike. Digital Realty is probably one of the best kept secrets in the industry. It's the largest provider of multi-tenant data center capacity in the world, over 300 data centers, 50 submetros, 26 countries, six continents. So it's a substantial provider of data center infrastructure capacity to hyperscale clouds to the largest enterprise in the world and everywhere in between. >> So what's the connection with Dell? What are you guys doing with Dell? >> I think it's going to be a marriage made in heaven in terms of the partnership. You think of Dell as the largest leading provider of critical IT infrastructure for companies around the world. They bring expertise in building the most relevant performant efficient infrastructure, combine that with the largest most relevant full spectrum capability provider of data center capacity. And together you create this integrated pre-engineered kind of experience where infrastructure can be delivered on demand, secure and compliant, performant and efficient and really unlock the opportunity that's trapped in the world around data. >> So speaking of data, you have a unique view at Digital Realty because you're seeing things in aggregate, in a way that maybe a single client wouldn't be seeing them. What are some of the trends and important things we need to be aware of as we move forward from a data center, from an IT perspective, frankly. >> Yeah, it's an excellent question. The good part of the vantage point is we see emerging trends as they start to unfold 'cause you have the most unique diverse set of customers coming together and coming together, almost organized like in a community effect because you have them connecting and attaching to each other's infrastructure sharing data. And what we've seen is in explosion in data being created, data being processed, aggregated, stored, and then being enriched. And it's really around that, what we call the data creation life cycle, where what we're seeing is that data then needs to be shared across many different devices, applications, systems, companies, users, and that ends up creating this new type of workflow driven world that's very intelligent and is going to cause a radical explosion in all our eyes of needing more infrastructure and more infrastructure faster and more infrastructure as a service. >> Yeah, when you talk about data and you talk about all of these connectivity points and communication points, talk about how some of those are explained to us. Some of these are outside of your facilities and some of them are within your facilities. In this virtualized abstracted world we live in it's easy to think that everything lives in our endpoint mobile device but talk about how that gravity associated with data affects things moving forward. >> Absolutely, glad you brought up about the mobile device because I think it's probably the easiest thing to attach to, to think about how the mobile device has radically liberated and transformed end users and in versions of mobile devices, even being sensors, not just people on a mobile phone proliferating everywhere. So that proliferation of these endpoints that are accessing and coming over different networks mobile networks, wifi networks, corporate networks, all end up generating data that then needs to be brought together and processed. And what we found is that we've found a study that we've been spending multiple years and multiple millions of dollars building into an index in a tool called the Data Gravity Index where we've been able to quantify not only this data creation life cycle, but how big and how fast and how it creates a gravitational effect because as more data gets shared with more applications, it becomes very localized. And so we've now measured and predicted for 700 mentors around the world where that data gravity effect is occurring and it's affecting every industry, every enterprise, and it's going to fundamentally change how infrastructure needs to be architected because it needs to become data centric. It used to be connectivity centric but with these mobile phones and endpoints going everywhere you have to create a meeting place. And it has to be a meeting place where the data comes together and then systems and services are brought and user traffic comes in and out of. >> So in other words, despite your prowess in this space you guys have yet to solve the speed of light issue and the cost of bandwidth moving between sites. So is it fair to say that in an ideal world you could have dozens of actually different customers, separate entities that are physically living in data center locations that are built and posted and run by Digital Realty, communicating with one another. So when these services are communicating instead of communicating over a hundred miles or a thousand miles, it's like one side of the chicken wire fence to the other, not that you use chicken wire in your data center but you get the point, is that fair. >> It is, it's like the mall analogy, right? You're building these data malls and everybody's bringing their relevant infrastructure and then using private secure connections between each other and then enabling the ability for data to be exchanged, enriched and new business be conducted. So no, physics hasn't been solved, Dave, just to add to that. And what we're finding is it's not just physics. One of the other things that we're continuing to see and hear from customers and that we continue to study as a trend is regulations, compliance and security are becoming as big a factors as physics is. So it's not just physics and cost which I agree with what you're saying but there's also these other dimensions that's in effect in placement, connectivity in the management of data and infrastructure, basically, in all major metros around the world where companies do business and providers support them, or customers come to meet them both physically and digitally. It's an interesting trend, right? I think a number of the industrians call it a digital twin where there's a virtual version and of a digital version and a physical version and that's probably the best way to think of us, is that secure meeting place where each can have their own secure infrastructure of what's being digitized but actually being placed physically. >> Yeah, that's interesting. When you look at this from the Dell, Digital Realty partnership perspective we know here at theCUBE that Dell is trying to make consumption of what they build, very, very simple for end user customers. Removing the complexity of the underlying hardware. There's a saying that the hardware doesn't matter anymore. You hear things referred to as serverless or no code, low code, those sort of abstract away from the reality of what's going on under the covers. But APEX, as an example from Dell allows things to be consumed as operational expense, dramatically simplifying the process of consuming that hardware. Now, if you go down to almost the concrete layer where Digital Realty starts up, you're looking at things like density and square footage and power consumption, right? >> Yep. >> So tell me, you mentioned infrastructure. Tell me about the kind of optimization from a hardware standpoint that you expect to see from Dell. >> Yeah, in the data center, the subset of an industry, they call it digital or mission critical infrastructure, the space, the power, the secure housing, how do you create physical isolation? How do you deal with cooling and containment? How do you deal with different physical loads? 'Cause some of the more dense computers likely working with Dell and some of the various semiconductors that Dell takes and wraps into intelligent compute and storage blocks, the specialized processing for our use cases like artificial intelligence and machine learning, they run very fast, they generate a lot of heat and they consume a lot of power. So that means you have to be very smart about the critical infrastructure and the type of server infrastructure storage coming together where the heat can be quickly removed. The power is obviously distributed to it, so it can run as constant and as fast as possible to unlock insights and processing. And then you also need to be able to deal with things like, hey, the cabling between the server and the storage has to be that when you're running parallel calculations that there's an equal distance between the cabling. Well, if I don't think about how I'm physically bringing the server storage and all of that together and then having space that can accommodate and ensure the equal cabling in the layout, oh and then handle these very heavy physical computers. So that physical load into the floor, it becomes very problematic. So it's hidden, most people don't understand that engineering but that's the partnership that why we're excited about with Dell is you're bringing all that critical expertise of supporting all those various types of use cases of infrastructure combinations and then combining the engineering understanding of how do I build for the right performance, the right density, the right TCO and also do it where physical layout of having things in proximity and in a contiguous space can then be the way to unlock processing of data and connecting to others. >> Yeah, so from an end user perspective, I don't need to care about any of what you just said. All I heard was wawawawawa (chuckles). I will consume my APEX delivered Dell by the drink, as a service, as OPEX, however I want to consume it. But I can rest assured that Digital Realty and Dell are actually taking care of those meaningful things that are happening under the hood. Maybe I'm revealing my long term knuckle dragging hardware guy credentials when I just get that little mentioning. >> (indistinct) you got it, performance secure compliant and I don't need to worry about it. The two of you're taking care of it and you're taking care of it for me. And every major mentor around the world delivered in the experience it needs to be delivered in. >> So from the Digital Realty point of view, what are the things that not necessarily keep you up at night worrying, but sort of wake you up in the morning early with a sense of renewed opportunity when it comes to the data center space, a lot of people would think, well we're in the era of cloud, no one's building any data centers except for monster cloud players. But that's definitely not the case, is it? There's a demand for what you folks are building and delivering. So first, what's the opportunity look like and then what are the constraints that are out there? Is it dirt, is it power? What are the constraints you face? >> We have probably all the above, is the shortest answer, right? So we're not wawawa, right Dave? But what we are is the opportunity is huge because it's not one platform, there's many platforms there isn't one business that exists today that doesn't use many applications, doesn't consume many different services both internally and externally, and doesn't generate a ton of data that they may not even know where it is. So that's the exciting part. And that continues to force a requirement that says I need to be able to connect to all those clouds which you can do at our platform but I also need to be able to put infrastructure or the storage of data next to it and in between it. So it's like an integration approach that says if I think physical first think physical that's within logical proximity to where I have employees, customers, partners, I have business presence. That's what drives us, and in our industry continues to grow both. And we see it in our own business. It's a double digit growth rate for both commercial oriented enterprises and service providers in the telco cloud, or content kind of space. So it's kind of like a best of both worlds. I think that's what gets us excited. If I should take a second part of the question, what ends up boring is like all of us, it is a physical world, physical world start with, do we have enough power? Is it durable, sustainable and secure? Is it available? Do we have the right connectivity options. Keeping things available is a full-time job, making it so that you can accommodate local nuances when you start going in different regions and countries and metros there's a lot of regional policy compliance or market specific needs that have to be factored in. But you're still trying to deliver that consistent physical availability and experience. So it's a good problem to have but it's a critical infrastructure problem that I would put in the same kind of bucket as power companies, energy companies, telecommunication companies, because it's a meeting place for all of that. >> So you've been in this business, not just at Digital Realty but you you've been in this part of the IT world for a while. >> Yeah. >> How has the persona of a customer for a Digital Realty changed over time? Have we seen the kind of consolidation that people would expect in this space in terms of fewer but larger customers coming in and seeking floor space? >> Well, I think it's been the opposite of what probably people predict. And I pause there intentionally being very candid and open. And it's probably why that using data as the proxy to understand, is that it's a many to many world that's only getting bigger, not smaller. As much as companies consolidate, there's more that appear. Innovation is driving new businesses and new industries or the digitization of old industries which is then creating a whole multiplier effect. So what we're seeing is we're actually seeing a rapid uptake in the enterprise side of our business which is why I'm here in driving that. That really was much more nominal five years ago for being the provider of the space and capabilities for telcos and large hyperscalers continues to go because it's not like a once and done, it's I need to do this in many places. I need to continue to bring as there's a push towards the edge, I need to be able to create meeting places for all of it. And so to us, we're seeing a constant growth in more companies becoming customers on the enterprise side more enterprises deploying in more places solving more use cases. And more service providers figuring out new ways to monetize by bringing their infrastructure and making an accessibility to be connected to on our platform. >> So if I'm here hearing you right, you're saying that people who believe that we are maybe a few years away from everything being in a single cloud are completely off base. >> Mmh hmm. >> That is not the direction that we're heading, from your view, right? >> We love our cloud customers, they're going to continue to grow. But it's not all going to one cloud. I think what you would see is, that you would see where a great way to assess that and break it down is enterprise IT, Gartner's Forecast 4.2, four and a half trillion a year in spend, less than a third of that's hitting public cloud. So there's a long tail first of all, it's not going to one cloud of people. There's like seven or eight major players and then you go, okay, well, what do I do if it's not in seven or eight major players? Well, then I need to put it next to it. Oh, that's why we'll go to a Digital Realty. >> Makes a lot of sense. Tony Bishop, Digital Realty. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Have a great Dell Technologies World. For me, Dave Nicholson, stay tuned more live coverage from Dell Technologies World 2022 as we resume in just a moment. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the Q. Come to you from our Palo Alto studio with our ongoing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. The digital experience Let's jump into a really excited to have our next guest CIA Sam Bird, the president of the Client Solutions Group for Dell. Sam, where you joining us from today? >>Hey, I am joining you live from Austin, Texas. Jeff looks beautiful. All weather? Yeah, its's turning really nice. Uh, nice time to be here in Austin, right? So, >>Sam, let's jump into it. I mean, you, you cover, you know, kind of the heart of what Dell started with which was which was PCs. And, you know, it's funny. A couple days ago, Michael tweeted because he likes to tweet, which is fun. An article that said that the PC officially died today. It's a reference back to an article I had to look at the January 26 2010. Officially, the PC officially died today. >>That >>is so bizarre, and that is not in fact, not true, you guys. We're seeing unprecedented demand, so I wonder if it is You Look back at that. And I'm sure you saw Michaels tweet. What kind of goes through your head? Because we're in a very different space than we were 10 years ago. >>Yeah, I think the world's changed a lot, Jeff from 10 years ago. I got to say, uh, the PC died 10 years ago. It feels pretty good being being dead for 10 years. So I think we actually saw a, you know, still alive and very vibrant. PC. So you think about everything that's happened with Cove it We have seen the PC and people using technology to stay connected, whether it's, you know, working in their business, learning from home, staying connected with other family members. So we'd like to talk about it Is the renaissance of the PC. It kind of this rebirth reemergence of this really good friend that you had has become really core toe how we're getting stuff done in the world today, and we've stayed bullish about the opportunity around the PC. Michaels had that view from, you know, when he started this company, and we've since expanded to many other areas beyond selling PCs. But we continue to be really committed to the value of that technology in people's hands, >>right? So just in defense of the of the article, it was written on the launch of the iPad right, which was a new a new form factor. And, you know, we've seen this proliferation of form factors both within PCs and mobile phones, and you know, the sizes of screens getting bigger and the size of green getting smaller and surface all kinds of different things. So I wonder if you could share, you know, kind of your perspective in, you know, kind of the opportunity that opens up when people are looking for different types of form factors. And then, more importantly, I think now it's horses for courses. So when I'm sitting at my desk, you know, I haven't a big giant XPS with all the ram and GPU and stuff Aiken stuff into it. If I'm going to the airport with a long flight, I want something small and light and easy to carry and what's interesting, I think, with cloud it enables you now to basically have the form factor that you need where you need it for the types of work that you're trying to get done. >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You know, if you if you take that 10 years ago, article to today we have had an enormous amount of innovation in the industry that's made the device is exciting and appealing for how people wanna want to operate. So, you know, we've seen Jeff a shift towards more mobile form factors with cove in. So, um, a commercial space that used to be maybe half desktops, half notebooks is now in the 70% range. More mobile form factors which reflects how people want to use them. You know, they're sitting at home, they need that device to be portable. They wanna go between rooms and home. That's the other thing that we found in some of our, you know, research and work on the spaces. You know, people might want to sit at the kitchen table in the morning in the afternoon. Maybe they're outside. They might have their kids do in school from home and have to be around them part of the day, so they still need a mobile kind of form factor, but it's plugged in. I want full power to run my applications. And, like you said, we will get back to a world with travel and people being mobile. And then you need to dial in the right form factor that has maybe a smaller screen, more portable device. So one of the things that's kept this business vibrant, you know, for the past 10 years and right now is a bigger screen experience is really, really valuable. A keyboard and multiple ways of in putting into devices are valuable, so there's core. Things are great. And then we've got systems that are set up for how people want to use them. You know, we still have designers sitting at home using big desktop workstations because the most powerful thing there times really valuable. There's a right system for how you want to use technology, and I think that that's attendant, you know, an approach we take in our business, and that's what we see in the industry. I think that's what's helped keep it very vibrant and alive. >>I love it, I love it. It is truly that work from anywhere and anywhere as you just defined, could be a whole bunch of things, and it doesn't even mean just at home or just at the coffee shop. That's really interesting. Is you even change locations where you're working within within the home. That really supports that. So, >>you >>know, Cove, it hits light switch moment. Everybody's gotta work from home. So huge, huge pressure there. And now, as you said, you know, we're seven months into it. Still gonna be going on for a little bit while a little while before people go back. Huge, huge boost to your guys business. I'm curious if you can share some thoughts in terms of, you know, now, I I need to kind of project a little bit of that office back to the work from anywhere situation. And, you know, you guys are that you're kind of that edge device that ultimately connects back to the mother ship. >>Yeah, I think it's and that's where we've seen people realized. It's a really valuable device that helps keep them, you know, productive and connected. Um, we have seen it's very interesting of it used to be, you know, pre co vid for Most people work with the location, you know, Post Cove. It it's something you do, and suddenly it's very location agnostic, and we see the world operating that way in the future Jeff of these devices at the edge or need gonna be working in a world where sometimes it makes sense to be in an office. Maybe there's collaboration, other things you need to dio. But we're going to see people working from home working from a coffee shop, working from, you know, anywhere in the world, and we're gonna need to stay connected. In that way, it's enabling a great set of talent. It's enabling people to be where they want, you know, get done what they need to do in their personal lives and then be contributing in a great way, thio to a business. So I think technology plays a huge role in going and getting that done. And to me, the world doesn't just return back to a you know, pre cove in space. But we're now in this. We've learned we can operate in this kind of multi modality world where technology can help keep us connected, collaborating, getting stuff done in some cases more productive than ever before, and it's kind of unleashed this new wave of thinking. I think we will continue to see great creativity on stuff we're putting in our devices to enable that, you know, software applications approaches that are gonna enable that that will really take us forward as we look at the future. >>You know, I'm just curious if you could share, uh, you know, kind of Ah, general breakdown by kind of form factor. What do you see between kind of, you know, I don't know if you split high end desktops and low on desktops and then, you know, kind of laptops and Chromebooks, what's kind of the high level kind of breakdown, and how's that? Is it change significantly over the last several years? And you you just mentioned a boost. You know, during the time of Cove in >>Yeah, we've seen a shift towards notebooks. Now you know much Is the article you you pulled up from 10 years ago? I think the death, the death of the desktop has also been much exaggerated. So we're Maurin, a mode of 70% of the systems that were selling our notebooks 70 to 80% range. It's a little higher, and consumer Andi, that's, you know, 20 points up in the commercial space. So we're seeing, you know, people have valued that kind of portability of systems. You know that, said is we talk through some of the ways people use it. There are great uses for desktops, for people are in the same place where I need ultimate ultimate power and then a z your home. We've seen a little more shift Teoh a suddenly you know, portability. That was really valuable because you had Salesforce's engineers on the road all the time. And I really wanted something that, you know, lasted had great battery life and was really easy to carry around. Suddenly we're in a world plugged in at home like we look at our devices, we've gone. Now more than half of our laptops are basically on is we have intelligence built into our systems. That tunes how battery management is done. Empower Management's done. More than half those systems are now in a mode of all, basically, always on a C. So people are, you know, plugged in all the time. They would like a little more powerful system. So whether they're running, zoom or teams or some other app. Multitasking. It's like there's a, you know, different requirements there. I think that changes Azzawi go forward and we get back to, you know, the notebook. It's like the ultimate design people want is a great big screen. That's super light, and the battery lasts forever. And I'm like that keeps our engineers and designers working every day because that's a really hard, complex thing to solve. And, you know, we're we continue to work and and and push that next forward. Now it's a little more biased to power. Sitting on a desk. We will be back in a world where it's gonna be, Yeah, I want power to sit on the desk, be on a video conference, get work done. But I also need to be able to take that on the road with >>Yeah, I just think, you know, because of the proliferation of online applications, right? And you know so much of our work day no pun intended, you know, is done in all these different cloud based applications, whether its sales force or slack or asana or whether we're, you know, working in in, uh, social media applications or even are you know kind of cloud enabled local applications. You know, a lot of times I find you don't have to carry your device right. E can lead the one device of one location, one of the other. I know it's almost like you pick up exactly where you were when you log back into chrome or you log back into whatever your browser is. If you've got it all configured, you know you don't even need to carry. A lot of times I find it's it's it's really nice. And if I have to check a message on the phone, No, it's a very different way of working, and, uh, I think it's really pretty slick. I do want to get into productivity, which you've talked about a lot. You know, I've always said the best productivity investment anybody could make is a second screen on the desktop. I mean, it's so much more productive to have a second screen the third screen. You go to places like Wall Street and the NASDAQ floor, where time matters and productivity matters, their screens all over the place and you guys are doing a ton of fun stuff with screens. Big giant curve things, and you made an interesting observation in other interviews that now people are consuming their entertainment content via those screens, whether it's an over the top service with Netflix or or whatever. So this this kind of shift to, you know, kind of mawr content consumption as this blend between kind of what you do in your personal life and what you do in your work life, both in terms of time and content, you know, continue to mix so lot of exciting stuff happening in big, beautiful screens. >>Yeah, totally agree, Jeff. And we see you know we've looked at productivity and see boosts with a bigger screen around your system. Same thing with exactly as you describe putting two screens around the system or go to a trading floor and their screens everywhere because it's about the you know, it's about the content that you can consume and the, um, you know, the work that you go get done, and it's a lot more efficient to be able to have multiple screens. Whether it's looking at a presentation and doing a call, you know, a video call for work on on one screen or either side of Ah, screen. And we're seeing people build out that, you know, their home office, their work office. I think that's to me. The, you know, the exciting piece of you think about how technology is arming people to get their job done. Like you can't imagine if you had all the technology taken away from you. You're like, Okay, what am I gonna What am I go do? Like if the internet goes down, I don't quite know how to get go. Be productive here. You know, I go try to find someone who has a landline phone on the block and call someone up. Andi have actually have a discussion, but, like, I'm not gonna build out a work, you know, a workspace. I've gotta build out a home space companies that are pretty progressive, the ones that are investing Maurin technology for their employees. We're seeing them be ah, lot more successful in this covert air, which equals go get on the right tools the screen around the system, You know, the extra devices. So it's like, Hey, my postures. Great. I can actually go get work done. And I'm in a nice space. Same thing back in the office. We've built stuff. We're building low blue light technology into our commercial PCs. We put that on our high end consumer PC. So you know, now you can walk into your home office early in the morning. You can goto late at night. It will have you all tune so your body is ready to go to sleep. You know, you don't even have toe. I don't have to talk to your family at all during the day. You could just work all the time from your home office. But I think little pieces like that are going. How do we put technology in this world where it's, like, very easy toe walk in and out of your you know, your office and being tuned on. But, hey, I need to go to sleep or I need to be chilling out after that and get the right technology and capabilities that let people be successful. So I think it's pretty exciting. Everything we've been able to dio, >>right? So I want to shift gears a little bit. Um, talk about user interface. What? One of the reason of this article that we keep referencing 10 years ago was the launch of the iPad, right? And in the launch pad or the iPad didn't have, Ah, traditional keyboard. Um, but I think people found out that not having a traditional keyboard, depending on the type of your work you're doing is a little bit of an inhibitor to your productivity. But it really begs the question as we enter this new world of different types of interaction with these devices and the increased use of voice, whether it's with Siri or or Okay, Google, um, >>we've >>had, you know, regulations on the A d a. In terms of access to websites and this and that. Aziz, you kind of look into the future of of human interaction with these devices as you get more and more horsepower toe work with on the GPU and the CPU and you know, can free up more. Resource is to this type of activity. I know you can't share anything too far down the road. But what? How do you see kind of the future evolving to get beyond this quality keyboard that was designed to slow people down because types were, too. I'm still waiting for the more efficient keyboard option to be to be available. But what's the future of human interaction with these things? To take the the degree of efficiency up another level? >>Hey, Jeff, we will do a custom keyboard for you. So you get me your you get me your high speed layout, we'll get you get you one of those. Um, you know, we do see it is pretty remarkable how long the keyboards been around and we still see it's It's also remarkable to me how powerful that is as a input device for, you know, for some tasks in the world. So what we see is it's not gonna be what replaces the keyboard. And there's one way of going and doing things. But all this compute the sensors that capability on the systems are just gonna allow people to operate the way that they want to operate. So you look at a PC today. It still has this great keyboard. It still has a laptop form factor that has, you know, been there for It's probably 25 years or so. It's actually pretty nice because it fits on your lap. It balances really well on the coffee table. Um, it's, you know, We've looked at so many different form factors, and it actually is a stayed around for a good reason because it it's pretty pretty functional. You know, you take on top of that, though we've built touch in tow, all our systems and screen. So a capability that's available to many of our customers and I go people are just starting. In the beginning, it was like Okay, Hey, how do I take this PC with touch on the screen and then you go? I don't want to do everything with touch, but gosh, it's like how maney you now touch it. If it's something's not touch, you know you have little marks on the screen. I went thio, I went. Thio was looking and working with someone here in a design, a design firm, and, uh, they had a product that was non touch, and it's like I reached in touch the screen to try to make it bigger because my eyes were not quite as good and they were like, Oh yeah, that's not a touch that's not a touch system and everyone touches the screen so it's like that becomes normal voice is going to become normal we have capability on the PC. Like you said, there's a bunch of voice ecosystems. Not everything is easiest to go do invoice. There are some things where you go ahead. I just want to go touch that, you know, gesture in the same way we look at intelligence on the system of also going There are things I wanna have just happen because I always I always do that and I shouldn't have to do voice. I shouldn't have to do gesture, touch everything else like, Hey, maybe I start the morning and I always pull up my calendar. Why doesn't that happen? Or I like to listen to her, You know, a song in the evening as I'm typing away on email on getting things buttoned up for the day. It's like your system can anticipate some of those things and it will just do that for you. So I think I think you're exactly right. We're going to see multiple ways of interacting with technology, and it needs to be natural and easy for us and then let the user pick pick the way that they want to go and do things right. >>Well, you just touched on a whole, you jumped ahead to questions on my list of things I want to talk about. And really, that's the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence, not in a generic way. That's an app that sits inside of the PC, but but in terms of using that intelligence as you just described based on my work flow based on my habit based on the applications I use based on you know what, you can observe and learn about me. Or maybe it SSM dictate down from from the corporate set up. You know how that PC operates for me? Because I think that's it is a really interesting thing, right? Everyone uses their machine differently, and whether they use, you know, shortcuts or not, How many tabs do they have open? You know, the the variability. You must have crazy studies on this in terms of the way people actually operate. These things is so, so high, so huge opportunity to, you know, again kind of remove the the get the signal from the noise and help people decide what they should do. Prioritize what they should do and add a layer of of simplicity to you. know it is a complex amount of notifications firing at me all day long. >>Yeah, I think that's a huge. You know, you talked about the potential you have in a world where more APS that we use our cloud cloud based of going How do I augment the capability in this client device at the edge To be intelligent and helped me go do mawr versus just being, you know, really dumb and serving up this other other content. And I think everything you describe is opportunity that we see We started Jeff about five years ago and have been very aggressive and putting intelligence and machine learning into the systems we started on our work stations, where there is an obvious application of, like, how do I tune a system to get the most performance out of an application? And we saw settings configurations making them different helped tune these very specific, you know, cad engineering programs that developers were running their times really valuable. They want the most performance. We used to have to have people sit down and we go. Okay, let's go run this application. Under this workload, we can put a table together. Here's a bunch of recommendations. We started going well, Hey, how do we have that happened? Automat like, let's try different settings. Figure out what works. The machines should should self tune itself then and figure out what's right and get based on exactly what I'm running. And people can be running different combinations so suddenly got a lot smarter than our great engineer sitting in the lab and figuring out those tables. And then, you know, from that time then we brought it to I think, what's just tip of the iceberg Now, where we start looking at, uh, performance across all our systems? What applications of my running go set things up so that it works? We talked a little bit about batteries and power management. Hey, how am I using this system if I am a really mobile person? Always, you know, taking my battery down to really low levels, hopping on a plane, I need to be quickly charged, like the system can figure out. Hey, I really need to tune things. Not for when, when you go through all the mechanics of a battery, it's like I am willing to sacrifice some on the longevity of the battery to enable really fast charging of that system because Jeffs always on the go Jeff runs his battery down. I need to make sure when he plugs in, he has maximum juice. Hey, here's Sam who's in a work from home mode, always plugged in. It's not great on any battery in the world to always be at, you know, maximum maximum charge every single minute of the day. And Sam has not unplugged his system in the past. You know, five days. Hey, we can run that at 95% and he will have a long life to that battery and be really happy with the system. And he's never gonna run out of power. You can start doing in that space. You can start doing it around sound and the environment that people are in, how we get smart. And I think there's an enormous amount you could do on top of that, like you described just how people have used the systems and it can sound a little eerie, but like it's what we you know, the machine suddenly knows how I'm going to go do stuff, but I'm like I would like that it to be anticipating what I'm doing, and then it starts taking that mundane stuff that we have to do that just eats up time and, you know, goes and gets that done for us. So we could be focused on the creative and the really pushing the boundaries, thinking >>I love it because it always goes back to kind of what do you optimizing for right? And there isn't necessarily one answer to that question, and there's a lot of factors that go into that in terms of the timing. As you said, the person their behavior you know happen to GPS is I'm at an airport. Probably need to plug in for you in the airplane. It's a good stuff. I want to. I want to shift gears a little bit, Sam, to talk about operating systems, Um, and and you know, chromebooks air out now. And you know, it was kind of this breakthrough to go beyond kind of Windows based systems. I think there's a lot of people that you know hope at >>some point >>will be, you know, have the option to run Lennox based systems. But it's just, you know, with a cloud based world and a multi, you know, kind of device interaction with all those different applications, whether it's it's my phone or my my desktop or my laptop or my my chromebook or my whatever. Um, Aziz, you start to think about kind of operating systems and opening up, you know, kind of a new level of innovation with because the expectation now for for like, a chromebook is that it's almost 100% Web based APS, right? That there's really not a lot of need for anything local. Maybe a quick download, a picture too attached to to an email or something. How do you kind of look at the future and kind of operating systems for PC? Specifically? >>Yeah. Well, I think is You describe Jeff, the applications and what you're doing on the system has become increasingly important over time, and it will only become more important as we go go forward. So, you know, from that point of view window, we dio work with windows. We do work with Google and chrome. I mean, Windows 10 is a really good based operating system. Chrome has a lot of nice capability in that operating system, you know, Obviously Apple, a competitor, has a different approach in that space. But I think we have a really good set of offerings that we can put on our our systems. And then we're focused on tuning that experience on top of the operating system. I I think it's still too complicated to go and put a, you know, get a new PC into a work or home environment, retire the old PC and manage that system. And what we look at is independent of that operating system. People want to go get their stuff done. We need to make that great. They wanna get their device, they want to turn it on and they want to go use it. And we want to build a world where, like, as I'm getting a new device, my device should know me well enough to go. Hey, Sam, this is this is the right time to get a device. This is the right kind of device that you should get based on what you're going and doing. Hey, I'm going to just keep you up to date. I am going to you think about any issues with the system. We still have too many things that flow through a traditional Hey, there's an I T. Help desk and then they figure that out and then I go toe level two or level three if they can't sort that out. Hey, how do we put that stuff to your point, Jeff before around intelligence, How do we automate those processes? So we're thinking through You know what needs to happen on that system, keeping it up to date and fixing and remediating that system. So I think there's a huge potential regardless of what operating system is beneath it, and we have very good choices there to go. We've got to make that experience the one that's great for the users and that that's where we're really focusing our, you know, our time and our energy, Right? >>So let me shift gears again a little bit and full disclosure I've bought, and I don't know how many XPS towers in a row. I think I'm on my third or fourth in a row. I love >>it. I >>mean, I'm a desktop. I like to just pack those things full of as much horsepower and GPU and CPU and memory as I possibly can because to me again, Back to an investment and productivity. I don't wanna be waiting for slow machines. I just to me it's a couple 100 bucks for this upgrade. That upgrade, it seems brain dead to me that people don't do that. But in terms of when you get these things now and it comes in the mail, it's basically a >>box and a machine, and >>you think back to the old days right when there was books and warranty cards and, you know, a whole plethora of stuff that kind of fell out of that box. I know you know. That's That's probably a leading indicator on the consumer side, about some of your efforts around sustainability and and being efficient and obviously taking advantage of things like the cloud in terms of activating these machines in this and that. But I wonder if you can share a little bit on what you guys have been doing about sustainability, because I know it's important. You know, there's a big focus around, you know, kind of environmental trash on old electron ICS, which is a riel, a real problem that people are dressing. So I wonder if you can. You know. Take a minute, Thio, to share your guys efforts in this area. >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Jeff. It is. It is really important. And we see, you know, arming the world with technology so people can do better. Things really matters, but I love doing stuff outside, like I want the environment to be great. And we need to do that in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. So a couple of places we, you know, pushed really aggressively. You touched on the packaging. So whether that's taking, um, content out of boxes, that doesn't that doesn't need to be there. We've made very aggressive commitments with a series of 2030 goals that we're marching towards is a company where we said, you know, 100% of our packaging will be from sustainable or recyclable sources. So we've already moved aggressively in that space. When you look at what ocean bound plastic we're putting in our boxes, how we think about the materials that were picking, you know, cardboard, and using that in ways that go through the you know, the mail and can be shipped effectively. So we have maximum content there that can be recycled. We've we've committed that we will take back a system for every system that we ship. So getting and building this circular economy for electron ICS, we think is is very important. So we take the stuff that we've got out there and we put that back into a recycle process where you know your old PC can become part of your new cutting edge technology PC and we've led the industry and doing that in plastics were taking plastics from cases and plastics from systems, getting that back into new systems. We've done that with precious metals from the from the, uh, PCB lay board designs inside the systems. We've done that with rare earth metals and magnets, and we think there's opportunity to go farther in that space and then the 3rd 3rd kind of thing that we've committed Jeff is by by 2030 to have half the content of our new systems, be from recycled or renewable content. And we do a good job today of having the content in the systems be recyclable. It's almost over 90% by weight, but what we want to do and the work we need to go do is go get that recycled content going into a cutting edge technology that we're putting out there, and it's not. That's not a simple problem of going. People want things a structurally strong as possible, a super thin as performance as possible. And then we need to you, you know, we gotta use, um, basically waste that comes through and gets turned into new products. So we have our engineers are material science people working on how we make that riel. And we set some aggressive goals with, you know, Michael and the company that will be leadership and that we don't quite exactly know how to get there, but put us on the right kind of edge of pushing and doing the things that we need. Thio. We can have great technology and, you know, be responsible in the way that, as you said, is very important. >>It's great, and it's good to write it down, right? If you don't write it down, then it's just it just disappears into the into the ether. So, Sam, I really enjoyed getting to catch up. I want to give you the final word with a little bit. Look to the path and a little bit look to the future, right? A lot of conversation about Moore's law, and we got to the end of Moore's law and blah, blah, blah. And and I think that, you know, there's obviously technology behind that, and there's some real conversations. But to me, the more interesting topic around Moore's law is really the idea of Moore's law and this continual advancement of technology that's better, faster, cheaper. You've been doing this for 20 years at Del. You've seen tons of, you know, kind of Moore's law impacts and operating in this world where, you know, compute, compute storage and networking just is on this exponential scale on whether you want to talk about GP use or whatever again to me, it's not about the number, of course, and the transistor. It's about the transition in the core. It's about really the concept of this working in a world where you know you're gonna have a lot more. Where is power work with How do you How do you kind of reflect on, you know, the stuff that you're shipping today versus what you were shipping five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago and then, more importantly, is you look forward. Um, you know what is what are you excited about? What gets you up in the morning? What puts a big smile on your face? Still come to work after 20 years of Dell? >>Yeah. You know, Jeff, it's a great question because the industry has changed so much over the last 10 20 years. So it's sometimes a fun thing. Toe. Look back at some of the products that we put out before. That seemed amazing at that point in time and you stack them against what we're doing now and then it could bring you down to Earth a little bit. So you see, the, uh, you see just the exponential improvements that we're able to make around the design of the product, the capability of the products. And I see that continuing the thing that gives me, you know, huge thought around this the device and the PC and the role is gonna play at the edge. We just did some research and we were looking at Millennials and Gen Z and looking around the world, and that is a huge and growing part of the population. It will be the the users of technology in the future with the world we're in today, 45% of them. So almost half of them said they would take their dollars and they want a premium, high end PC experience, and they would prioritize that versus other things they spend money on to go and have a great PC as a personal tool. Do you think about that translating to in a work environment they're gonna expect those same kind of great tools? And then to the question you asked, You know, I see a huge opportunity to continue to push forward the value and the way people use these devices, whether it's the intelligence we talked about. That to me is really exciting around building a machine that knows me and does things for me and how I want to use it, our ability to build immersive experiences so that you know, whether I'm gaming after work, collaborating with co workers like how do I put it so that we're together and it's a good Aziz that in person experience, we're gonna be able to do that with technology. You talked in a great questions around. Hey, the ways people interact with the systems, it will become natural. It will become whatever way they want to go and do that. And I think we can do that in a world where, yes, you can walk between all kinds of different devices. There will not be one device to end all. You'll be in a small screen device. You're gonna use a monitor. You're going to use a PC device. There will be technology across the home. But toe have that have that link together in the role that PC is gonna play in. That to me, is exciting. And we continue to, you know, invest aggressively. Michael saw that when he started the company. We continue to believe in the power of technology, and we're gonna figure out and drive those breakthroughs that will make the, you know, products exciting. And I love doing that every day of seeing the innovation we can put together and how that makes a difference for people. To me, that's really an exciting thing. >>Well, Sam, thank you. Thank you for the update. Again, the rumors of the PCs demise were greatly overstated. 10 years and glad to see that you're just kicking tail and doing exciting things. So thanks for for sharing your insight and your experience with us. >>Hey, thanks a lot for having me, Jeff. Great to talk to you. >>Absolutely. All right. He's Sam. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020 The Digital Experience. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world, digital experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE coverage of Dell Technologies world digital experience. Happy to welcome to the program. First we have a first time guest Akanksha Mehrotra, she's the Vice President of Marketing with Dell Technologies. Joining us one of our CUBE alumni, Caitlin Gordon, she's the Vice President of Product Marketing, also with Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back, Akanksha welcome to the program. >> Thank you Stu, happy to be here. >> Alright, so one of the big models we've been talking about for the last few years is a change in how customers acquire things, big thing we've talked about, for many years, this shift from CAPEX to OPEX. How cloud is impacting everything Jeff Clarke in the keynote was talking about, it's the Dell Technologies on demand, DTOD, I guess is the, four letter acronym we use Akansha help us understand a little bit from your standpoint, what is it? Why is it important to your customers? >> Yeah, so Stu, as soon as you as you heard, as part of the keynote, from from Jeff and others earlier today, we've been working really hard to bring the benefits of on demand IT to our customers, in private cloud, public cloud and edge. And certainly this year, especially, we've seen a lot of interest in this, COVID have catalyzed customer interest in flexible consumption in as a service. As we talk with our customers and partners, we hear this almost daily, it's required a level of agility that candidly traditional CAPEX based models simply haven't been able to provide, I mean, imagine taking your workforce remote over the weekend, and the stress that puts on your infrastructure. And so I think that's kind of forced IT to consider some of these alternatives. Another factor has also been, companies have been wanting to preserve capital, right, and avoid large cash outlays and having this type of flexibility and being able to pay for infrastructure, as you're using it, it gives them a way to do that. So I mean, those are some of the customer drivers that we've seen. Last year at Dell Tech Summit, around the this time last year, actually, in November timeframe, we introduced Dell Technologies on demand as our umbrella program for a flexible consumption and as a service solutions. And really what it what it seeks to do is make it easier for customers to get the simplicity and flexibility of cloud, along with the performance and security of on-premises infrastructure. So it's giving them a range of consumption models that include both payment option as well as services that they can apply on any one of the products in our portfolio from end user devices to core data center infrastructure to hybrid cloud solutions. And we've announced that last year, one of the things that you heard about today, and that we're announcing over this event is that we're continually looking to make it easier and simpler for our customers with various turnkey offerings and simpler offerings for them, given the interest that we've seen. >> Yeah, I want to key off of, you mentioned the impact of COVID-19. And for your customers, it's something we've definitely seen that the promise of cloud always has been to be highly flexible, we can scale up, we can scale down. We know that some services out there aren't always as flexible as we might hope. There's certain SaaS solutions, where you're signing up for a multi year offering and even for the cloud, I might lock in some savings by buying something in bulk. So help us understand, what are the benefits that your customer sees, the savings that they get and is this truly cloud flexible, which means I can burst up and scale as I need. And I can it reached the point, oh, hey, I need half the capacity for the next six months. Can I do that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Stu we actually commissioned IBC to talk to a few of our customers. So let me maybe share some of the benefits that they saw in broad terms, and then I can maybe share a specific example of what a particular customer saw. So we had IDC talk to several of the customers using Dell Technologies on demand models, various GIOS, and various sort of sizes. And what they found was that on average, they saw about a 23%, lower cost of storage operations per year, which is great, right? Lower cost of operations is always great. IT is always looking for those efficiencies, especially, in the current environment, but that's not all. I think that's just sort of part of the story. What they also shared with us is that, these types of models were able to help them become much more agile in how they work and change how they work. And what they found was that they saw 54% fewer incidents of downtime and they were 92% faster in their ability to deploy storage capacity, because they had that capacity in their data center available ready for that spike when their business saw it. ` So those are just some of the broad examples of what our customers have seen. Another specific example that I would would share with you is a large multinational institution, financial services company, we've been working with them for years to service their, enterprise scale, private cloud. And then more recently, they had us also, manage their storage as a service managed utility. And they've seen phenomenal results, they've been able to get 50% more compute power at 8%, lower cost, and 90% faster or reduce time and provisioning data. It's all about the yes, it's about the cost savings but really, it's about the agility that the business gets, right. And as you started out, right, with COVID, they really needed that agility and that flexibility and having these models available, ready to spike, ready to go down, right, have been able to provide that. >> Yeah, I think another thing we've seen is, people rush to cloud because it promised that agility, and we've had those conversations before is, there's a reality of what that means, which it might not be the resiliency you're looking for, it also might not actually be as simple as he thought it might be. And we're seeing some of that come back on-prem, whether you need resiliency or performance or security, or you don't want to be really locked into a specific public cloud but you still want to have that agility in the benefits of really running your data center in a service oriented model. And that trend has been picking up over the past couple years. And as we've already said a couple times today, we've seen that accelerate, but also, we starting to see more customers ask for it. It's not just the big and more strategic and the aggressive customers that are looking for this more and more customers are kind of seeing that this is the end game and that's kind of leads into where we're going, which is, how do we make this more accessible to others? >> Well, Caitlin, you're using one of one of my punch lines that I've used for a number of years now if remember, when we thought that cloud was inexpensive and easy to use, it's not. And if we look at what customers are doing, it's a hybrid model. They're deploying in multiple environments, we're seeing the public cloud look more like the enterprise, the enterprise look more like, the public cloud. So these offerings have, OPEX flexibility and the like, make a whole lot of sense. So you've said that, you've seen a lot of growth, especially this year, any metrics you can give us on, adoption, love the one customer example, in the financial space, anything else to kind of paint the picture as to, how prevalent this is becoming. >> Yeah, maybe I'll get started. So, we've seen nearly 50%, year over year growth in the customer base or our most recent quarter, and it's growing, we've seen over 500% increase, year on year in signed contracts, customer demand in these types of models has caused us to expand our offerings to into countries like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India, and China. I mean, we already offered about 50 plus countries and along with our partner, network and even more, so, I mean, those are just some of the data points around business traction. In the models that we have another proof point that I could point you to is that, in April, we include, we announced a payment flexibility program, which gave our customers a number of promotions and options to extend this flexibility into, across our portfolio and into other parts of our businesses. And just recently, about a month ago, we extended that, and we've seen really good traction in that as well. So I think overall, like you said there's aspects about public cloud that customers really like, and they tell us, hey, I want to be able to pay as I go, I want to be able to extend and contract the infrastructure as I'm using it. I want a simple management experience. But then as Caitlin said, they realize that Oh, but I don't want to, pay for the refactoring and then the egress and the ingress charges and some of my workloads are better off on premises for performance, locality, security, compliance reasons, right. And therein lies the promise of as a service for on-prem infrastructure, 'cause really, I keep looking for the best of both worlds. And this gives you that right you can use the consumption models to grow and shrink as you needed, you can us the payment models to only pay for what you're using and along with our partner network, you can have in the location that you want so you can sort of have your cake and eat it too. >> Yeah, and I would just add on to that is that more and more of the conversation is both about how can I consume that more as a service and pay for just what I'm using? But also, how can I spend less time maybe zero time and energy actually managing that infrastructure? And how can I then allocate the time energy resources into running my business and investing in more strategic things? So becomes both an important financial conversation but even more so a conversation about how IT can empower the business, which really just changes what we're able to do for customers. So it's an exciting kind of transition to see this really evolve into really not talking about products anymore, and helping our customers have all their business. >> Well, Caitlin, that's a really interesting point, I want you to talk to us a little bit about the Dell Tech storage as a service, how does that fit, we were just talking about don't want to talk about products, we want to talk about really moving to that full OPEX model so help connect the dots for us. >> Yeah, so we're really excited about this, this will be coming in the first half of next year, as you probably heard earlier today. And what we're doing here is we've really taken what we already have had in market. And we've really upped that to the next level, we've accelerated the simplicity of what we offer here. And think of the experience is all starting in a single console, where you just pick up four things, what's the type of storage you want, what's the performance you want, how much and for how long, that's it. And then now we're counting the time from then to when it's in your data center in days, not months, not weeks, but in days and we're able to get you up and going. And it's your data center of your choice, whether that's on-prem in your own data center, or at a colo facility, we bring that equipment in, we get that deployed, we manage it for you, you operate it, and you simply pay for what you use. So you're really in a quick time to value you're in a very simple model and you're not really responsible for managing infrastructure that's really on us. And that moves you into being in a true OPEX model and it also enables you to accelerate what you're able to leverage that whether it's Blob Storage, file storage, you can get up and running quickly and let us worry about how to manage the infrastructure and we give you the ability to operate what you need to. >> Caitlin, maybe if you could give us a little bit of color as to what happens behind the scenes to make that work. As it sounds wonderful, you've had the program around for a year, these aren't trivial things that you're talking about all the logistics, the management the the gear, and making sure that the physical and the power and everything is all set. So help us understand the engineering, the development, and what this means from kind of a services and go to market that make a solution like this work. >> Yeah, and a lot of ways we're having to change our entire business to help our customers change there's, it goes from top to bottom, and you'll get to hear a lot more about it when we're actually available next year. But when you think about it, we have a lot of the DNA, we have a lot of the experience, we have the technology, but we almost have to completely flip the script on ourselves of how we deliver it, who our customer is, what our then end user customer needs from us, and what the role of things like our global services organization is what the role of our global sales organization is and how do we accelerate providing outcomes to our customers and get the rest out of their way. And the fact that I haven't mentioned a product name, but by the way, we actually have industry leading products and pretty much every category. So of course, on the back end, all of this is going to be powered by our industry leading storage solutions, like power store will be in your data center but at the same time, we will actually have worked to really masked that you don't even need to know that nor do you need to really operate much beyond what you need to really run your business. And that's really it's been an interesting work for us to just flip how we think about everything and you'll hear a whole lot more about it next year as we really bring this out into market but it's been really fun and a big learning for everyone. >> Excellent well yeah, something something power is underneath there well Caitlin. All right why don't you both give us the final takeaway for the Dell Tech on demand account. Start with you in just give us the final takeaway. >> Yeah, so I think look, I back to kind of what we were talking about, we've actually been offering these types of solutions to our customers for a really long time. Through Dell financial services, we've been offering payment flexibility for over 23 years, over 15 years and manage utility. So the customer example that I gave you is a customer who's running storage as a service and has been for many years, I think, building on that experience, listening to our customers feedback over that time period and over, of course, this past year, we're looking to apply all of that, to make it even more simpler for them to consume our infrastructure in the near future. And so, storage as a service is going to be a really exciting proof point of that, the momentum stats and some of the other things that I shared with you today and that you're going to hear about over the next couple of days or another proof point of it. But we're excited about this, and looking forward to continuing the dialogue with our customers with our partners and (mumbles) >> Then I would I'll kind of play off of one of your words there which is is all about simplicity for us is how do we take what we've been able to do for a lot of our customers accelerate that and simplify it to a point where we can offer that for all of our customers. And we're really looking to accelerate this first with storage and then get all of our offerings really into this model, because it's really about getting our customers out of managing infrastructure and give them the time, energy, resources to manage their business and simplicity is paramount to making sure that happens. >> Caitlin and Akanksha, thank you so much for giving us the updates. Congratulations to all the progress and definitely looking forward to hearing more beginning of next year. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thank you Stu >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman this is Dell Technology world digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you as always for watching theCUBE (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program one of SUSE's partners, we have Marc O'Regan, he is the CTO of EMEA for Dell Technologies. Marc, it is great to see you, we all wish, I know when I talked to Melissa Di Donato and the team, everybody was really looking forward to coming to Ireland, but at least we're talking to you in Ireland so thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, thanks very much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. You know, really looking forward to getting you guys here, unfortunately it wasn't a beaver, once we're all safe and well, great to talk. >> Yeah, absolutely, that's the important thing. Everybody is safe, we've had theCUBE a couple of times in Dublin. I'd actually, you know, circled this one on my calendar 'cause I wanted to get back the Emerald Isle but, Marc, let's talk first, you know, the Dell and SUSE relationship you know, disclaimer, you know, I've got a little bit of background on this. You know, I was the product manager for Linux at a company known as EMC back before Dell bought them, many moons ago, so I know that, you know, Dell and the Dell EMC relationship with SUSE go back a couple of decades, but, you know, bring us into, you know, what your teams are working together and we'll go from there. >> Yeah, sure, Stu, so, quite correct, nearly a two decade long relationship with SUSE and one that we hold very dear to our heart. I think what both organizations have in common is their thirst and will to innovate and we've been doing that with SUSE for 16, 17 years, right back to, you know, SUSE Enterprise Linux sitting on, you know, PowerEdge architecture way, way back in the day into you know, some of the developments and collaborations that we, that we worked through with the SUSE teams. I remember back 2013, 2014 doing a pretty cool program with our then Fluid Cache technology. So, when you look at, you know, OLTP kind of environments, what you want to kind of get away from is the, you know, the read-write, commits and latency that are inherent in those types of environments. So, as you start to build and get more users hitting the, hitting the ecosystem, you need to be able to respond and SUSE has been absolutely, you know, instrumental to helping us build an architecture then with our Fluid Cache technology back in the day, and the SUSE technology sitting around and under that and then of course, in more recent times, really extending that innovation aspiration, I guess, has been absolutely a pleasure to, to watch and to be involved with, see it mature so some of the cool platforms that we're developing with SUSE together it's a, it's pretty neat so I'm, you know, one of those being-- >> So, Marc, yeah, well, you know, bring us up to speed, you know, right in the early days, it was, you know, Linux on the SUSE side, it was, you know, servers and storage from the Dell side, you know, today it's, you know, microservice architectures, cloud native solutions. So, you know, bring us up to speed as to some of the important technologies and obviously, you know, both companies have matured and grown and have a much broader portfolio other than they would have years ago. >> Yeah, for sure, absolutely. So, I mean, what's exciting is when you look at some of the architectures that we are building together, we're building reference architectures. So we're taking this work that we're doing together and we're building edge architectures that are suitable for small, medium, and you know, and large environments. And the common thread that pulls those three architectures together is that they are all enterprise grade architectures. And the architectures are used as frameworks. We don't always expect our customers to use them, you know, by the letter of the law, but they are a framework and, by which they can look to roll out scalable storage solutions. For example, like the Ceph, the SUSE Enterprise Storage solution that we collaborate with and have built such a reference architecture for. So this is, you know, it's built on Ceph architecture under the hood, but, you know, both ourselves and SUSE have brought a level of innovation, you know, into an arena, where you need cost, and you need low latency, and you need those types of things that we spoke about, I guess a moment ago, and into, you know, this new cloud native ecosystem that you just spoke to a few moments ago. So on the cloud native side, we're also heavily collaborating, and near co-engineering with SUSE on their CaaS technologies. So here it's really interesting to look at organizations like SAP and what we're doing with data hub and SAP, it's all part of the intelligent enterprise for SAP. This is where SUSE and Dell Tech together really get, you know, into looking at how we can extract information out of data, different data repositories. You know, you may have Oracle you may have, you know, you may have HDFS, you may have Excel and you're trying to extract data and information from that data, from those different siloed environments and the CaaS technology brings its, you know, its micro, capability to the forum in that regard, our hardware architecture is the perfect fit to, to bring that scalar platform, cloud native platform into the ecosystem. >> So, you know, Marc, you've got the CTO hat on for the European theater there. When we, we've been talking to SUSE, when they talk about their innovation, obviously, the community and open-source is a big piece of what they're doing. You were just walking through some of the cloud native pieces, give us what you're seeing when it comes to, you know, how is Dell helping drive innovation, you know, and how does that connects with what you're doing with partners like SUSE. >> Yeah, well, you know, innovation is massively, massively important. So there's a number of different factors that, you know, make up a very good innovation framework or a good innovation program. And at Dell Tech we happen to have what we believe to be an extraordinarily good innovation framework. And we have a lot of R&D budget assigned to helping innovate and we get the chance to go out and work with SUSE and other partners as well. What SUSE and Dell Tech do really, really well together is bring other partners and other technologies into the mix. And, you know, this allows us to innovate, co-innovate together as part of that framework that I just mentioned. So on the Dell Tech framework, we'll obviously, you know, take technologies, you know, we'll take them, perhaps into the office of the CTO, look at new, you know, emerging tech and look at, you know, more traditional tech, for example, and we will blend those together. And, you know, as part of the process and the innovation process, we generally take a view on some of the partners that we actually want to get involved in that process. And SUSE is very much one of those partners, as a matter of fact, right now, we're doing a couple of things with SUSE, one in the labs in Walldorf in Germany, where we're looking at high availability solution that we're trying to develop and optimize there right now at this point in time. And another good example that I can think of at the moment is looking at how customers are migrating off, you know, older, more traditional platforms, they need to look at the cloud native world, they need look at how they can, platform for success in this cloud native world. And we're looking at how we can get smarter, I guess about migrating them from that, you know, extraordinarily stealthy world that they had been in the past but that needs to get from that stealthy world into an even stealthier scalable world that is, that is cloud native world. >> Yeah, Marc, you talk about customers going through these transformations, I wonder if you can help connect the dots for us as to how these types of solutions fit into customers overall cloud strategies. So, you know, obviously, you know, Dell has broad portfolio, a lot of different pieces that are on the cloud, you know, I know there's a long partnership between Dell and SUSE and like SAP solutions, we've been looking at how those modernize so, you know, where does cloud fit in and we'd love any of kind of the European insights that you can give on that overall cloud discussion. >> Yeah, sure, so, again, ourselves and SUSE go back on, in history, you know, on the cloud platforming side, I mean, we've collaborated on developing a cloud platform in the past as well. So we had an OpenStack platform that we both collaborated on and you know, it was very successful for both of us. Where I'm seeing a lot of the requirement in this multicloud world that we're kind of living in right now, is the ability to be able to build a performant scalable platform that is going to be able to respond in the cloud native ecosystem. And that is going to be able to traverse workloads from on-prem to off-prem and from different cloud platforms with different underlying dependencies there. And that's really the whole aspiration, I guess, of this open cloud ecosystem. How do we get workloads to traverse across, across those types of domain. And the other is bringing the kind of, you know, performance that's expected out of these new workloads that are starting to emerge in the cloud native spaces. And as we start to look to data and extract information from data, we are also looking to do so in an extraordinary, accurate and in an extraordinary performant way and having the right kind of architecture underneath that is absolutely, absolutely essential. So I mentioned, you know, SAP's data hub a little earlier on, that's a really, really good example. As is, a matter of fact, SAP's Leonardo framework so, you know, my background is HPC, right? So, I will always look to how we can possibly architect to get the compute engineering as close to the data sources as possible as we can. And that means having to, in some way get out of these monolithic stacks that we've been used to over the last, you know, for a number of decades into a more horizontally scaled out kind of architecture. That means landing the right architecture into those environments, being able to respond, you know, in a meaningful way that's going to ultimately drive value to users and for the users and for the providers of the services, who are building these type of, these type of ecosystems. Again, you know, as I said, you know, data hub, and some of the work that Dell Tech are doing with the CaaS platform is absolutely, you know, perfectly positioned to address those types of, those types of problems and those types of challenges. On the other side, as I mentioned, the, you know, the story solutions that we're doing with SUSE are really taking off as well. So I was involved in a number of years ago in the Ceph program on the Irish government network and, so these would have been very big. And one of the earliest to be honest, Ceph firm I was involved with probably around five, six years ago, perhaps. And the overlying architecture, funnily enough, was, as you probably have guessed by now was SUSE Enterprise. And here we are today building, you know, entire, entire Ceph scale out storage solutions with SUSE. So yeah, what we're seeing is an open ecosystem, a scalable ecosystem and a performant ecosystem that needs to be able to respond and that's what the partnership with SUSE is actually bringing. >> So, Marc, I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you is, you know, we're all dealing with the, the ripple effects of what are happening with the COVID-19 global pandemic. >> Sure. >> You know, I know I've seen online lots that Dell is doing, I'm wondering what is the impact that, you know, you're seeing and anything specific regarding, you know, how this impact partnerships and how, you know, tech communities come together in these challenging times? >> Yeah, that's a great question to end on, Stu. And I think it's times like we're living through at the moment when we see, you know, the real potential of, I guess of human and machine collaboration when you think of the industry we're in, when you think of some of the problems that we're trying to solve. Here we are, a global pandemic, we have a problem that's distributed by its very nature, and I'm trying to find patterns, I guess, I'm trying to model, you know, for the treatment of, you know, COVID-19 is something that's very, very close to our heart. So we're doing a lot on the technology side where we're looking to, as I said, model for treatment but also use distributed analytical architectures to collaborate with partners in order to be able to, you know, contribute to the effort of finding treatments for COVID-19. On the commercial side of things then Dell Tech are doing a huge amount so, you know, we're, for instance, we're designing a, we're designing a financial model or framework, if you will, where our customers and our partners have, you know, can take our infrastructure and our partners infrastructure and those collaborations that we spoke about today. And they can land them into their ecosystem with pretty much zero percent finance. And so it's kind of a, it's an opportunity where, you know, we're taking the technology and we're taking the capability to land that technology into these ecosystems at a very, very low cost, but also give organizations the breadth and opportunity to consume those technologies without having to worry about, you know, ultimately paying up front they can start to look at the financial model that will suit them and that will, that will, that will, hopefully, accelerate their time, their time to market, trying to solve some of these problem that we've been speaking about. >> Well, Marc, thank you so much for the updates. Definitely good to hear about the technology pieces as well as some of these impacts that will have a more global impact. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, my pleasure. Thank you, take care and stay safe. >> Thanks, same to you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more covered from SUSECON Digital '20. Thank you, for always, for watching theCUBE. 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>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Boomi World 2018. Brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Good evening, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, live from Las Vegas at Boomi World '18. Been here all day talking with Dell Technology CEO, Michael Dell, to Dell Boomi execs, customers. We're joined by a couple of gentlemen now, one is a customer of Dell Boomi, that's Peter de Lange, from Digital Angel, the CEO and co-founder, welcome, and Mike Veldhuis, co-founder of Nalta, which is their transformation partner. Guys, thanks so much for joining me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> You're welcome. >> You're welcome. >> So, I first saw you this morning on stage, saw you accepting your award. This was Dell Boomi's first time honoring and recognizing customers so congratulations on being the winner of the Emerging Technology Award, but let's start by just giving our viewers an idea of, we'll start Mike, with you, Nalta, as a Boomi partner. >> Yup. >> Tell us a little bit about Nalta. What do you guys do, what makes you unique, where are you based? >> Well, first of all, we are from Holland. You know, so, for us it's great to be in Vegas, great to be in the U.S. and tell our story over here. We started in the Netherlands, in 2000. We're not a very big company compared to many large U.S. companies. We're a team of 60 people, and we started as an infrastructure company in 2000, already a Dell partner and we had a software department as well as software company and what's so cool about I.O.T. and the stuff we build nowadays is that we combine those two disciplines integrate I.T. platforms like we did for Digital Angel. >> So let's talk about Digital Angel. Thank you, Mike. First of all, I love the name, there's a lot of significance to that. We talked about award winner for Dell Boomi. Tell us a little bit about Digital Angel. What was the genesis of creating it not so long ago? >> Well, um, first thing was, if you're looking at what's happening in healthcare, one thing that's really important is getting qualified caregivers, because there's a big shortage on that. Next to that, if you look at the development of the baby boomers, the older or the seniors are, the group is growing, and on the other hand, the caregivers are less available. So how can we match that? So we need new technology. The first question was, or the main question, can we connect smart healthcare products to the internet? And maybe with those products we can help the healthcare sector. >> Give me an example of some of those products that you're talking about. >> The first product we have connected to our platform is a smart mattress. >> A smart mattress? >> Yeah, it's embedded with light sensors and it measures, for example, the way a person lies on a mattress, but it also measures the heartbeats, breathing rates, all those data variables. >> Wow. That's pretty cool, smart mattress. So, you had this idea, really kind of nothing in the Netherlands, or even here in the U.S. at the time, but healthcare is one of those industries that obviously, we're talking about life or death situations. There are so many devices that are not connected, and people can lose their lives as a result. So, walk us through this concept of a smart mattress and how you're working with manufacturers to build that and then we'll get to how you're working on transforming with Nalta. >> Yeah, no problem. Well, starting off from the question, can we connect, yes we can. Next of the factors is we need a platform to land all the data in. We need customers like manufacturers because they must produce products that are able to generate data. So the first one was the mattress, the next one is a bed, a wheelchair, so we already have several products live within approx situation. That's where we got off, yeah. >> So Mike, talk to us about when you first started engaging with Digital Angel. A presumably unique opportunity to really transform an industry, save lives, talk to us a little bit about when you guys got together to really take this idea and really help it grow and help transform an industry. >> First of all, for us, it's wonderful to work on such a huge case. Like you said, you're potentially saving lives and I.T., sometimes, is so I.T.-ish. You're talking about technology, tools, applications, technicians, engineers, it's all in that I.T. level, and that's perfectly fine. They're solving problems and challenges. But, talking about a business case or business itself is so energizing because you can actually tap into a customer's needs and help them find solutions for the challenges they have. And in this case, we are talking about I.O.T., internet of things, which is a little vague. Digital transformation is even vaguer. >> Right. >> So when Digital Angel approached us with this, on first sight, very simple need, we want to connect a mattress or a device to a platform to present the data and the insights of this device to the end customer in favor of the patient, it's our job to start questions, questioning, and listen and put it on paper, write user stories, get a clear picture of what the actual need is. Then from that, we build our first project and our first product, and eventually the first platform. That became the Digital Angel platform itself. >> And you've done this in a very short period of time. >> True. >> Uh, yeah. I think the, >> Eight months? >> No, no, no. It was faster. The first version was within seven months. >> Wow. Seven months. >> Yeah, and that's the beauty of if you can cooperate with people with knowledge like Nalta in a partnership, but also the availability of components like Dell Boomi. >> Yeah. >> So you can fasten up the process to create new things and that's really important to get much further and get things done. >> So let's unpack that a little bit more. Dell Boomi's platform as kind of a fueler, maybe some power to your platform? >> Mhmm. >> Talk to us about the integration, how you're using it specifically and what some of the new things that they announced this week, how does that excite you about being able to grow your business? >> Well, the thing is, and that's what Mike explained, is listen to the needs. So, we have needs as a company, Digital Angel, next to the fact that patients also have needs. How can we translate that into technology? So, the question we asked Mike, or Nalta, we must have a platform that is able to be completely flexible, so that's the basic, it must be able to do the analytics, if necessary. There's a long list of things we have to have within the platform and then, it's Nalta who is answering that question. >> Yeah, we translate it into a Boomi solution. And I think what's innovative, we just came out of a breakout session and one of the questions we got we were telling the Digital Angel Story and our story, how we work with customers, where does Boomi fit in? Does it come at last, what is the reason you put Boomi into the solution, just for moving data from point A to point B? The answer to that is that we have Boomi at the core of the design itself, so we start with Boomi, it's not an afterthought, it's not that we have a solution an application and now all of a sudden we have to tie it into a different ecosystem. We start with Boomi, and that's very powerful because we have all the time and flexibility to choose the best of great solutions around this Boomi solution, and that's what we've done. >> So, looking at this unique opportunity, to be able to transform average, everyday hospital products into smart devices that can actually influence the pace of care, the treatment of care, innovation. That's pretty remarkable. I'd love to understand, Peter, from your perspective, what are some of the actual results that you're starting to see maybe in the Netherlands. >> Yeah. >> You mentioned, I think before we went live that you're starting to come over here. Give us some of those tangible nuggets that you're like, this is why we're doing this, this is why we're helping these organizations connect. >> By having the platform and connecting all of those products, you have to know several things. When you are visiting healthcare institutes, one of the things is, we are using networks on 165 apps already, so we need another one. We already use I.T. related products, so, I'm busy with a patient and I have to scribe from one app to the other to get my information, but the thing I see is single information, because I can see the blood-pressure or the heartbeat or something like that. So if it's possible, can we combine that? So in the back end we can combine all the data of the different products and it enables us not only in the background, but also on the front end to have one user interface, so we don't need all the 165 apps. So we are creating time. >> Creating time? >> Yeah. >> Interesting. >> That's really interesting, and with that time, as a caregiver, because we know there's a shortage on caregivers, the right care at the right moment, to the right person can be given, and that's one of the goals we have and can already see as a result. We can also calculate saving, but the most important thing for us as the company, we want to improve the quality of life and not so much talk about savings. One of them is, the first digital product we've created, based on the data, saves 6000 dollars a year, for one digital product, for one patient. So that's in numbers. That's results. That's real, real results. >> I've never heard anybody talk about a business outcome as creating time. (laughter) >> But, in healthcare, we've talked about that a number of times, it's essential. So, last question, Peter, for you. You've mentioned expanding to the U.S., because of the things I find shocking in 2018 almost 2019 is you have a loved one who is in the hospital and there are so many people that come in to do rounds and they all have devices and nothing is connected. How are you going to help us in the U.S. to resolve that problem with Digital Angel? >> I can answer that with another example. One of the things was, if we are able to see how a person lies on his bed, and the care institute has a protocol, and the protocol says, you have to turn these patients each and every three hours, what we did know in total 30 to 50 percent of the people turn around themselves during the night. So you don't have to turn them. >> Interesting. >> Even if you turn them, the chance of example, pressure sores, is much higher. >> Really? >> Yeah. 30 to 50 percent. >> Wow. All of this by evaluating data. Well, gentlemen, I wish we had more time it's such an interesting use-case. Peter, congratulations on the award, Mike you as well. >> Thank you very much >> Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking to us about how you guys are helping to transform an industry. >> Thank you very much, for the opportunity >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around John Ferger and I will be back with our show wrap in just a short minute. (upbeat music)

>> "theCube" presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone, Welcome back to "theCube's" continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the show floor in Las Vegas. We have been here since Monday evening. About seven to 8,000 folks here. It's been a fantastically well-attended event that Dell has done. Lots of talk about announcements, including APEX. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante are going to unpack more of APEX with our next two Cube alumni who are returning, Akanksha Mehrotra, VP of APEX product marketing joins us, and Chad Dunn, VP of product management APEX. Guys, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> It is really great to be back. >> So just in case there's anybody out there that's been under a rock since Monday, APEX has now been what GA for a year, celebrating a momentous year and some big news. Akanksha, walk us through that and then talk about some of the feedback that you've gotten on what you guys announced just two days ago. >> Yeah. So it's been an exciting week like you said. APEX just for sort of background is our portfolio of as-a-service solutions, we introduced it a year ago. We have now 10 plus services in our portfolio. We added our very first full stack managed service for cyber recovery this week. The feedback from customers over the past year and then the conversations we've had, you know, over the course of this week has been phenomenal. If I had to really summarize it, I would say the pain point that we're looking to solve, helping organizations manage data across disparate and fragmented environments across a variety of clouds, you know, on-premises, in a co-lo, on the far edge, at a hyperscale or in the telco edge is resonating. This is a pain point... This is very real pain point for them. And our goal in our vision to create a consistent and a secure experience across all of these different, you know, silos of data, if you will. It's something that they really want more of from us. >> Chad, talk a little bit about the influence of the customer in the last couple of years. Well, in the last year, in terms of releasing the cyber recovery solution on APEX, we have seen the threat landscape massively change. >> It increases every day. >> It increases every day, ransomware is no longer a... Is it going to happen too? It's a matter of when? >> Yes. >> Talk to us about the influence of the customer of this being the first full stack solution on APEX. >> Sure, like I don't think there's a boardroom in the world where this isn't being discussed as just such a high risk environment for cyber techs. It's damaging to lose your data. It's damaging to your reputation, it's financially damaging. So it's incredibly important into our customers. And we're finding that, you know, many of them don't necessarily have all the expertise to be able to defend against it themselves. And so that's where an as-a-service solution, like the one that we're offering really makes sense to them, right? They're much more apt to consume as-a-service when the competency doesn't necessarily already exist in their IT organizations. So we've been doing this for a few years as a solution with managed services. And in fact, we've deployed over 2000 of these, and making that a standardized offering with T-shirt sizing, subscription basis, really seems to be a winner. And every customer I've talked to has been absolutely over the moon with it. >> All right, so we have Chad in product management, Akanksha, you're in product marketing. So you knew going into this, that it was going to be different. So I'm interested in kind of what your learnings were, that internal transformation, which is ongoing now, I understand that, but how did it change how you manage, you know, deploy the life cycle of the product and communicate that. >> I'll get us started and I'm sure Chad will add on. So, you know, to your point, when we started this journey internally before we started it externally, we knew this was going to be a multi-year transformation for us. And a multi-year transformation that affects every part of the company, how we build products, how we market products, how we bring them to market, how we sell them, et cetera. And so we made a very conscious effort to kind of secure that buy-in early on. And it starts Michael on down. This is a strategic priority for him as I'm sure both of you know. And each function has kind of established, you know, areas where they know they need to transform and a north star goal for where they want to get to. So I'll speak for marketing as a place that's, you know, close to my heart. One, we know as we get into this space, we're going to be talking to different types of folks and having conversations with different types of personas within an account than we have had before. Using cyber recovery solution as an example, yes, we want to talk to, you know, IT administrators and CIO who we've been talking to. But as Chad said, this is something that CISOs care about. This is something that security teams care about. That those are a different set of personas for us to market to, to communicate with, whose pain points we need to understand better. So that's an example of a change. Another one is moving from a... I mean, events like this are great, and we certainly love to be back in person, but in as-a-service model, you want to have much more frequent communication with your intended audiences. So we've moved to more of an always on-marketing motion leveraging our blog, leveraging other vehicles. And that's that has also been a transformation for us. >> On the marketing side, I'm curious, sorry, Dave. Chad, you brought up one of the big things that is a huge challenge for any organization and any industry with respect to the cybersecurity in that threat landscape is brand reputation. >> Yeah. >> Are you having more conversations at the CMO level? I'm just curious if they're involved in this. We got to make sure that we don't have... We're not the next one on the news because customers will churn like crazy. Is that at all part of the conversation than persona change? >> It is certainly part of it. But, you know, we don't want to be motivated by fear, right? We want to be motivated by preparation and securing the business and growing the business. So, you know, it is a sea level discussion to, you know, understand how we need to protect our critical data. But it's really from a lens of, you know, how do we grow and we grow more quickly? And you know, if you look at APEX overall, yes, we've made a lot of internal changes to get where we are and we're going to continue to make those. And I'll talk through some examples. But this is also a journey for our customers, right? The change to, you know, consuming by the drip, consuming APEX, consuming as-a-service, you could take two companies with identical size and an identical vertical, and they're going to have different priorities about how they want to consume this infrastructure and these services. So we're on that journey with them just as we have to transform ourselves internally, from the way that we do accounting, from the way that we do sales compensation, from the way that we actually build product. And in fact, we just changed up the model by which we're, you know, developing product in APEX today. So I'm about 90 days into my role in APEX. I came from the HCI business. And I'm here with my engineering leader who was also in the HCI business. So we were able to be fortunate enough to work in an organization that went from zero to 4 billion in pretty quickly. So, Hey, let's see if we can apply some of that learning to this. But it's an incredible partnership inside of Dell with people like Dell Digital and our transformation office. Because we've done things roughly the same way for about 30 years. And this is all very new to us. So it's pretty amazing journey. >> I'm interested in what's different. You weren't first to market. The public cloud guys might say, "Eh, it's not cloud." >> No. >> Okay, so how are you different than public cloud and how are you different from your traditional on-prem competitors? >> Again, I'll get us started and chime in. I would say... I'll take your first example. I want to go back to kind of what our customers... Where they want help from us and what are they're asking us for. As I said, the debate is over. They have told us pretty definitively, and our data and your data shows it, that they will and the data will continue to grow in all these different fragmented silos. What they want is an experience that orchestrated across all of these different environments, by a vendor that they trust, right? And that's what we are committed to delivering to them. That's our north star, that's where we're going. I would argue that any one of the hyperscalers don't have incentives to kind of make that same experience happen across all those different environments. A vendor like Dell, who has been trusted by many years... You know, for many years from our customer, who doesn't have a single dog in the race, but is looking to partner with folks across the entire ecosystem, is looking to innovate with our software, our services, and our infrastructure is best positioned to help them orchestrate across. >> Yeah. Well, you know, if you're wondering what's different, you really have to look at what the value proposition is for public clouds versus keeping data on-prem or keeping it in a place where it's accessible to multiple clouds. You know, I think if you haven't been under a rock here at the show, you know it is all about multi-cloud, and you know that we're, you know, absolutely embracing it from, you know, Project Alpine where we're putting storage endpoints in public cloud, to what we're doing with APEX and our data storage services and the move of our customers into co-locations where the data can be accessible to multiple clouds. I think that getting the commerce capabilities in place that we've done over the course of the last year is a great first step. But look for us to double down on the day two management and operations, using that platform that we've created for APEX. And that's going to allow us to create more velocity and bring more solutions into the fold more quickly, and then provide more day two management optimization operation of the solutions by our customers. >> Okay. Sorry. So definitely agree with the public cloud. And I got to trust them to do my multi-cloud or what I call super-cloud. What about your traditional competitors? Is it the normal sort of what we'd expect for the Dell differentiators portfolio, supply chain, et cetera, or are there APEX specific differentiators? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so there are absolutely the Dell differentiators of the breadth of our sales force through both our direct sales teams as well as our partners, our secure supply chain, our services team, and the expertise that they've built, which we're obviously bringing to bear with this market and this offer. Those are kind of the Dell wide advantages that we bring to bear with this. But specifically for APEX against the traditional on-prem competitors, I would say the simplicity with which we are bringing our offers to market is a differentiator for us. And it's one that our customers in the past year have retreated back to us. So the commerce experience that Chad was just talking about, we have made very conscious efforts to simplify and abstract the way that complexity from our customers, so that they are picking very easy to understand outcomes that they care about. And then not really worry about the peace parts, whether it's the hardware, the software, or the services that help make that service level outcome happen. I would argue, you know, some of the other competitors, traditional competitors that we have haven't done that. And it's more of a... You know, that complexity is still there. And what we hear from our customers is, I want the simplicity and agility that public cloud provides. That's something that hyperscalers did get right. And we're bringing that experience to our infrastructure. >> Yeah. Like I think the other way that we'll differentiate ourselves is going to be by the breadth of the solutions, right? So we've got a tremendous amount of IP in solutions like cyber recovery, right? This wasn't a new thing for us. This is something we've been doing for a few years as there's tremendous consulting capabilities, services capabilities, the underlying products of course. Well, there's a pipeline of solutions lined up behind that. So as we move into high performance computer as-a-service, MLOps as-a-service, we can draw on those solutions that we've offered, but in a very custom way in the past now at a high velocity manner in the console. >> Well, the high velocity these days is critical. As we've seen the last two years, things have changed so dramatically for customers in every industry that needed to pivot with speed and accelerate their transformation. >> And the transparency. Right? So going back to his example, having that price transparency. You can go to our website and look at the pricing, pick in the two or three very simple options and see it right there and order it through the console. In a matter of minutes versus, you know, wait for two weeks to get the code and then wait for a month to get the hardware, and then wait for the services team to show up. So what we are hearing... I mean, we have truly been able to take deployments that used to take several months to a matter of days. And so that's how the simplicity kind of, you know, pays off not only in that initial deployment, but over the course of the subscription, the day two operations that Chad was just talking about and the innovation and the work that we're doing to simplify their lives in that process, allow them to focus in other areas. >> Oh, absolutely. That time to value, time to market has never been more critical. And the ability, to your point, Akanksha, to allow folks to be able to focus more on the strategic initiatives that will actually help move the business for... Add value, move the business forward and allow it to be competitive and differentiate itself is critical for everybody in every industry. Chad, I wanted to kind of pivot on multi-cloud for a second. You talked about that. And we had Chuck Whit on yesterday. He was talking about, you know, multi-cloud. A lot of organizations, many, many, many in multi-cloud by default. But what Dell wants to do is change that, multi-cloud by design. Is APEX going to be a facilitator of multi-cloud by design? Talk to us about that for customers. >> We absolutely will be. So if you look at what made customers multi-cloud by default, it's them going for the services that exist in the cloud and looking for best of breed services. Whether it's machine learning, speech recognition, database, they're going to those best of breed players. And so the value proposition for us is since you're in those clouds, you want access to your data and you want it centrally, so you can see it, leverage it, use it from any of those clouds, but you may have other reasons for keeping your data or even your compute on-prem or in a co-location. It could be data sovereignty, it could be policy compliance, it could be data gravity. So we want to make the concept of having your workloads or your data anywhere, very seamless for our customers, right? So it's really embracing the concept of multi-cloud and making it easier. >> The cyber recovery solution is really interesting to me. I was talking to one of the partners here and they said, "Dave, this was a really good show for us." And they probably had a quasi competitive solution. I don't really know. But like a lot of customers and, you know, got a lot of leads out of it. So it's the hot topic and that's what they said. This is cyber, everybody wants cyber. So how did that solution come together? Because I know you... You really... You've always been security conscious. But I never really full cracked the security solution. And now here it is in APEX, it's like, boom, out of the box or out of the service. How'd that come about? >> It really started back in 2014, specifically. It's funny when you can point to an event where, you know, something started like this. So there was a fairly high profile ransomware attack in 2014. And that caused us to look at the assets that we had from our data protection portfolio, from a software and storage perspective and say, "Hey, we can put something together that can really address this, right? Through novel use of existing technology." So we built out reference architectures. We built out the consulting service on how you protect your data. We partnered and built software to be able to secure the data in an air gaped imutable vault and offer the services to be able to manage that, monitor that, restore the data when needed. So we did that in a very custom way for years. In fact, as I said, over 2,000 systems deployed this way. So having a vehicle like APEX that has the as-a-service capability built in, the subscription capability built in, the ease and velocity of purchasing and operating was really a natural fit. So you know, we expect this is going to be a very high volume solution for us. >> Great. Awesome. >> Akanksha, can you talk a little bit about the partner ecosystem involved here in APEX? You know, when I think about ransomware in data protection, I think organizations need to be able to protect apps, users, data platforms. But we think of how data is so spread out, customers want that single pane of glass to be able to manage all that and know that that data is protected. Talk to us about how you're working with partners. I know the partner ecosystem at Dell's huge. How are you working with partners and how can they build upon APEX? >> Yeah So our partners are a very important part of our ecosystem. They help expand our reach. They also help complement our capabilities. You know, for example, in specific verticals. They may have services or expertise in a particular area. For the APEX portfolio, we actually offer a wide variety of ways for partners to engage with us. Starting out, they could refer our solutions and refer, you know, some of our services, if they want to take more of an advisory role in some capacity. They could resell our services with additional services included. In this scenario, for example, they would leverage our console, include some of their services in there and then offer it to their end customers. They could host APEX offers in their own data center or in a co-lo data center and build their practice on top of it. A lot of our partners and customers, we've got kind of joint customer partners that for example, have built a healthcare practice on top of an APEX solution, where they've added their services or built their business on top of it. And then finally, there's of course, technology and ISV partners, right? And that is where we might leverage, you know, some of their technology, built it to be part of a service or a solution that we're doing and join the go-to market. So I think the answer is lots of ways for partners to engage with APEX. And we absolutely are engaging with them in a wide variety of ways. And I think cyber recovery is no different. >> Well, there must be not a dull moment with what you guys have going on with APEX. Thank you for taking some time to talk to us about that. Sounds like the momentous year that you've had is going to continue. And it sounds like you've gotten great feedback from the customers and the partner so far. Thank you for joining "theCube" and telling us what's going on. And we can't wait to hear more next year. I'm sure there will be lots more next year. >> Yes indeed. >> Absolutely. Thank you very much. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching "theCube's" coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes wall to wall coverage of Dell Technologies World, The digital experience 2020. The Virtual Cube is coming at you. I'm Dave Volonte. And with me or two Great guest, my colleague and longtime business friend Howard Elias. He's the chief customer officer and president of services and digital Adele. And also joining me is Sri Raj, aka Sri Can't him Nene, who is the managing director of digital insights at Cargo, which is one of the world's largest privately held companies in the top maker and distributor of agricultural products and the things that we eat every day. Gentlemen, thanks so much for your time and coming on the Cube. Great to see you. >>Great to see you, Dave. And three. Great to see you again as well. >>Good to be with you both. So >>I wanna Howard, I wanna talk about start by talking about digital transformation. I'm gonna make it laugh. So I was talking to a customer every day or the other day, and we all talk about, you know, digital transformation. And I said, What's digital transformation to you? He said, Dave, my S a P system was 15 years old and I have to upgrade. It was like, Okay, there's eso There's a spectrum, as you know, but what do you seeing as digital transformation? What does that mean to your customers? >>Well, what we're seeing is a glimpse of the future. And first of all, Dave, Great to be with you again, uh, free and all of you out there hope everybody's safe. And, well, thanks for joining us, Adele Technologies World today. But digital transformation from our customers perspectives the technology enablement of experiences with customers, partners and employees, a swells automating processes to deliver value to the all key stakeholders. And we've just seen a glimpse of the future. Customers are accelerating their adoption of technology. We see this through necessity, right when everybody had to pivot from or toe work from home, especially those professional workers and for the most part, whether companies plan forward or not, we all embraced and learned new ways of being productive remotely, and that was all enabled by technology. But we've seen it in every walk of life. It's really an acceleration of trends that were already underway, whether it was the remote experience for professional employees, whether it's e commerce experience, whether it's telemedicine, distance learning. All of these things have been available for a while, but we've seen them be embraced and accelerated tremendously due to what we've seen over the last six months in all industries. And free will talk about what's happening specifically in the agricultural industry, and what we've seen is customers that have made investments over the years have been ableto move even faster in their specific industries. We've just on a survey of about 4600 customers around the world, and 80% have accelerated their investments in digital technology to improve the experience of their employees of their customers and of their partners. >>Yes, so So thank you for that, Howard. Three. I mean, a lot of people might think of cargo. There's physical business, but it's anything but. I mean, you've got such a huge data component to your business, but I wonder what you would add. I mean, we're maybe talk a little bit. I mean, it's such amazingly, you know, rich and deep company. But maybe talk about your digital transformation journey and at least in your sphere of the world where you're at. >>Yeah, thanks, David. You know, Howard's absolutely right. What? What Cove it has done is just accelerated the need for technology on farm and with our customers. And and certainly in the last few months, we've seen that accelerate tremendously, right? A t end of the day. Agriculture has been a technology first, um, industry for for hundreds of years, and and so we're seeing that take fold in the form of digital adoption, the use of analytics, the use of really unique sensor technologies like cameras and computer vision. Um, sound I liken it to the senses that we all have every day that we used to make decisions. Well, we're now seeing that adopted with our with our customers. And so it's a really interesting time, and I think an opportunity for for the industry to really move forward. >>I mean, in terms of the three in terms of the pandemic, you know, we we talked to a lot of customers. Howard just mentioned a survey. You certainly saw the pivot in tow work from home you know, increase in laptop momentum. And in Dell's business, we saw that you're seeing identity access, management, cloud security and point security. Even even VD I These were big tail winds early on. What did the pandemic due to your business and just in terms of your your priorities did you have to obviously shift to those things to support work from home? What happened to your digital transformation was was anything put on hold and is restarting. Can you just Yeah, I don't know what you could tell us about that, but anything you could describe and add some color to that narrative would be really helpful to our audience. >>Certainly. Yeah. You know, I think overnight we had, ah, workforce that went from being in the office toe working from home and and that just accelerated the need for for collaboration tools. Things like like teams and and Skype and Zoom have just taken off right? But also technologies that allow for virtual engagement, like white boarding and brainstorming sessions that we used to do in the office with customers and suppliers. We're now having to do in a virtual setting. So so that has just transformed how we do business on the customer. And, you know, technologies like computer vision and and sound really transform the need to to leverage labor differently. Right? One of the biggest challenges that the cove it has has placed is how labor interacts with animals and and with food production. And we've just seen a significant adoption of technology to help alleviate some of those stresses. >>Now you guys probably have seen the tongue in cheek cartoons, the covert wrecking ball, you know, the guys in the audience or the building saying digital transformation. Not on my watch in the cove, it comes in. I've often joked, uh, I guess we have to have a sense of humor in these times, but But if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We'll cove. It kind of broke everything. And Howard, when you think about digital transformation, yes, was going on before co vid. But But there are a lot of industries that hadn't been disrupted. I think about health care. I think about financial services. I think about defense. I mean, the list goes on unlike publishing, for instance, which got totally disrupted by the Internet. But now it seems like If you're not a digital business, you're out of business. Eso Are you seeing like virtually every industry adopting digital? Or are you seeing any trends that are different by industry? What are you seeing out there >>were absolutely seeing every company in every industry adopted in their own way, thinking through their business models. I mean, even think about what's happened in your local town. How technology is able enabled restaurants to dio, you know, uh, take out and delivery through digital tools, your local dry cleaner, your your local butcher and your baker. I mean, everybody's having toe be creative and reinvent. It's not just the, you know, large professional industrial financial services companies who are also reinventing. But I go back to what I said before what we're seeing. These trends were already underway. They've just been put into hyperspeed what folks were thinking about doing in two or three years we're doing into two or three months. The pivot toe work from home worldwide happened in two or three weeks, and it's not the crisis we planned for, but we're always preparing for the future. The groundwork was laid, and now it's just been accelerated. We're seeing it everywhere, including inside Adele. You know, I think about all the processes and the way we serve our employees, our customers and partners we've accelerated were adopting the product model within our own Del digital organization, for example, that's been accelerated. The move to multi cloud on having a cloud operating model no matter where the infrastructure has been accelerated. And you know, everything we've talked about on the client experience. Security models, networking model software, defined models, every every industry, every company has had to embrace this >>so sorry. I mean, I'm fascinated by your business. I mean again, I think a lot of people think of it as a real physical business. But there's so much data. You're the head of digital insights, which is You've got data running through your your entire operations. There's other things. There's there's double take words I see in your your background like aqua culture. So So how are you re imagining the future of your industry? >>That's Ah, that's a fascinating question, Dave. You know, think, Imagine this. You could listen to a shrimp eat and then turn that into unique insights about the feeding patterns on behaviors of shrimp, right? Who would have imagined 10 years ago that we would have technology that enabled us to do things like that? Right? And so, from aquaculture thio the dairy industry to, you know, grain origination. We're leveraging digital and data to really help our customers and producers make better, more informed decisions where in in the past it was really experience that allowed them toe be good farmers and and good stewards of our planet. Now we're using technology, so it's really an opportunity toe harness, the power of digital for our industry. >>Well, you know, and it's critical because we have people to feed and actually it's working. I mean, the yields that air coming out of the industry or are amazing. I know there's a lot of discussion now, but hey, you know, we're actually getting a lot of food to people. And now there's a discussion around nutrition that's that's front and center, and I presume technology and data fit in there as well. Three. I wonder if you could comment. >>Yeah, you know, by 2050 day there will be nearly 10 billion people on this planet. And to feed that growing population, we're gonna need 70% more protein on DSO. As you think about the impacts that that that growing population has on the planet. There's also, you know, nutrition. But think about sustainability. How do we how do we grow this food and get it from the place that it's produced to the place where it's consumed in a way that's a resource efficient and effective? So there's nutrition in just the middle class in Asia, you know, having a higher propensity to spend and dealing with that challenge on one end of the spectrum and then on the other end of the spectrum, being ableto really deal with with sustainability. >>I would have watched your career over the decades, and you've had so many roles, and I always used to joke with you. They give you the hardest problems if you want. If you want to get stuff done, you give it to the busiest guy. It was always Howard, you know, help us with with our own transformations. Help us do the integrations, whether it was m and a or the course, the largest in just >>industry I love a good challenge is you know, >>I do know and so I want to get. Get the update on Dell's own transformation. I've been talking to a number of your executives this week, and it looks like you know, you guys air, drinking your own champagne, dog food and whatever you wanna call it. But but bring us up to date on what you guys are doing internally. >>We are, and we're no different than any of our customers. And having Thio focus on our digital transformation agenda, I mentioned earlier the adoption of our product model, you know, moving from a project based Dell Digital and I T Organization to one that's a product model. So these are balanced teams with a product manager, a designer and developers working closely with the business and the function in an agile manner and the C I. C. D pipeline manner. And all of this again has been accelerated. We have our own del digital cloud, which is our hybrid cloud that we leverage internally. We're software defining everything, and it's really paying dividends because what we've seen literally in the last 6 to 8 months is higher levels of security, higher levels of availability, higher levels of resiliency. We've been able to handle all of the increased transactions on our e commerce engines, all at higher quality and lower costs. Now we the groundwork for this with Jen Felch in the team over the last couple of years, but again, by necessity, had to accelerate. And we've done that. And we're even moving faster now on data pipelines and really understanding all of our key processes and understanding the work flows and the data flows, working with machine learning and artificial intelligence again, exactly the way Cargill and other of our customers are doing in their businesses. I know you're talking or have talked to Doug Schmidt. You know, we've digitized and automated thousands of processes and our services organization Theobald bility on a remote basis to service our customers were we've invented new and innovative ways the service our customers remotely versus going on site, not just in break fix, deployment, remote change, management, manage services, consulting. It's just, you know, great to see all this wonderful innovation come together serving our customers. >>Thank you for that, Howard. And you, you said something that triggered me in a good way. Data pipelines. I use that term a lot. And three I wonder if you could talk about this because you're You guys have been around since the 18 hundreds, I think the largest privately held company in United States, I think, right, and probably close to one of the largest in the world. And so >>you >>got a lot of data and a lot of different places. So a huge challenge for you is okay. How do you manage those data pipelines? Those data, the data lifecycle, And I would think the company the size of cargo to the extent that you can reduce the end to end time it takes to go from raw data to insights E. That's gonna be telephone numbers for for your business and your bottom line that you can then reinvest and get back to customers, etcetera and be competitive. I wonder if you could talk about >>you >>know, that whole concept of the data pipeline And how are you using data and and some of the challenges of compressing that end to end cycle time and Leighton >>see, to >>get to insights >>that day. You know, Carlos, 155 year old company and and at our core were a supply chain company. Right? Um, you know, taking food from where it's produced, getting it through the manufacturing process, toe customers. And so at the end of the day, I I joked that not only are we have physical supply chain company, but we're also a data supply chain company. So the data value chain right is really about taking all the different inputs in data that we have in turning that into unique insights. And I don't think there's ah company on the planet in the food space that has the ability to connect those dots in the way that we dio. And so our ability to create unique, actionable insights for our customers is going to be really powerful, especially in the in the coming years. >>So talk about let's talk about Dell a little bit. I always ask, uh, technology leaders how your vendors doing for you? How did they help you through the pandemic? How would you grade del uh, in terms of its support through the pandemic? >>Dell has been absolutely fantastic, right? I mean, I think it is really need to have partners like Dell helping us achieve our mission for our customers. And I know they feel that way about us as their customers. So it's really wonderful. Toe have the type of collaboration and partnership that we do. >>Alright, Howard, Same question for you. How would you grade Del Onda? How you guys have done through the through the pandemic with regard to supporting your customers. I mean, you're you're never one toe overhype, uh, in my experience with you. But give us the your take. >>Why would grade del by what our customers say? And we do it both through direct conversations as well as the data and telemetry we get and the data and telemetry we have in terms of our NPS r R C sat scores or service level objectives that were delivering all have remained in profile. The team has really risen to the occasion. Been super creative, passionate, full of grit. We heard Alison and Angela talk about that the Dell Technologies world this morning, and our team is embodied that spirit and that great to be able to deliver. But in the conversations we're having with customers three and his peers, uh, you know, look, it's it's been a challenging time, but as you know, Dell has always focused on delivering value for the long term. We're not in it for the short term, and that has served us well. That philosophy Theobald active. We have with working with customers, eyes always about what's in the best interests of our customers in the long term. Because if we do that, it will ultimately be in the best interest of Dell. >>Well, it's It's been amazing to just watch. I mean, it's just ironic that we got hit with this at the beginning of this decade. It's gonna It's obviously gonna define. You know what we do going forward. I think we've all talked about it. It's funny. Everybody in our business and the technology business. We've become covert experts in some way, shape or form overnight. But we've talked a lot about the the things that we see as as permanent, and I think that >>you >>know you clearly the your two companies are examples of agility leaning into technology. And, as you said, Howard here for the long term, 155 years old, I think story said so well, here's to another 155 years. Gentlemen, thanks so much for coming to Cuba. Awesome guests. >>Thanks. Day. Appreciate it. >>Thank you for watching everybody. Our continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. You're watching the Cube?

>> Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back, live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas with Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, winding down three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We've got two senior executives from Dell Technologies here with us, Greg Bowen, Senior Vice President, CTO of Office of the CIO Dell Technologies and Garry Wiseman, Senior Vice President, office of the CIO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So, we had Howard on, we had the CFO Tom Sweet on, digital experience is a big part of it. On the news announcements, a lot of Cloud stuff, but also a lot of, you know, workplace, workforce, human resource kind of vibe around Client Edge, digital technologies, unified workspaces, all pointing to the benefits of what Cloud and data can do, ultimately at the end of the day, that's what drive great value in apps, but also, user experience. I mean, people are workin', they're mobile, this is one of the core themes of the show. You guys have a digital, Dell Digital Way kind of mission. What is that about, tell us about that, 'cause you're doing it in internally, you're not even dog footing, you're building it out in real time, rolling it out, take us through the digital, the Dell Digital Way. >> Yeah, so the Dell Digital Way. If you guys ever Google digital transformation, good luck. The first six or seven results are all paid. Someone's trying to sell you the story on digital transformation. We're out there and you know, we're doing it all ourselves. We go to market with the IT transformation, workforce transformation, security and application transformation. A lot of people are choosing to do those one or two at a time. We're trying to do it all at the same time. So we had to develop a way that will allow us to accelerate our path through that, and we call it the Dell Digital Way. It's really a people process and technology transformation that allows us to change our underlying culture, really the way we interact with the business. Start with the business and the User first, and then work backwards from that. So the people part, it's really taking things from big functional silos that have a lot of matrix overlays, and creating small balance teams that own their code. On process, it's taking very large programs that are just generating risk all the way up and breaking those down into small deliverables where you have very low risk. And then on the technology side, this is where we are drinking our own champagne. We're actually employing our reference architecture from VMware and Pivotal all the way through the DM, Dell EMC technologies in our own data centers, So we can operate as a multi Cloud environment as well. >> So it's not just an announcement from the top saying, okay, just go digital. We're hearing from some of the insiders in the hallways here at the conference, it's hardcore. It's training, agile training, and this is not just you know, talk, talk, talk. You guys are actually getting it done with the training. How important has that been? Because at the end of the day, everyone's has all these kind of, they talk the talk, but might not walk the walk. >> It's training and getting the people right. At the end of the day, we have to change 10,000 hearts and minds in order to transform. And that means you have to touch those people, and you have to actually train them to operate in the new world. If you don't do that, you can put all the technology you want into the environment, if they don't know how to use it, it does you no good. So we're starting with getting our people up skilled, getting them trained. We're taking program managers, putting them through full stack developer training. We've got our first 60 that are going to be graduating this summer. And then we're training the rest of them on the Pivotal Way. So that's really about starting with that customer and working backwards, user centered design. >> How do people get the, how do, how do companies get the people's side right? Because you know, we all kind of work the big companies, you guys are a lot bigger. Now that Dell Technologies, where head of the old world was oh, let's reorganize, it's not working. You reorganize as a matrix organization. You know what agile teams, a lot of kind of HR issues that if someone might be great on one team, not great on another, and so it's really about the attraction of talent, retaining talent, knowing when someone's a fit. Is this ad hoc? How you guys get that right? Because that seems to be a big part of it. Because you got to be agile. You don't be doing reorders after the fact Oh, we didn't post the numbers. We weren't successful. Let's reorder, which means failure. So how do you guys get that right? >> I think it's partly skills assessment going in, right? You actually know which people are right for which skills and there's really key, three key skills in this. There's a product manager, the product designer and engineering. And then there's a lot of people that come into the balanced team after the fact. So it's really understanding where your teams are today, and then getting and finding paths for them in the future. I don't know if you have any. >> Well, I also have to say, obviously, being a company that presents itself as one that's modern, from a development standpoint, our infrastructure a place where really the next generation of developer or product manager or designer wants to come and work because they can see how we're really, you know, operating in this, this digital age, is another key thing for us to make sure that as we, as we recruit folks, particularly as we look at college hires, you know, they're looking for those types of places to come to work. And so part of it's the workplace we'd make sure that we have a modern looking workspace, we have, you know, open seating areas, we have lots of collaboration spaces for people to get together in. And then, of course, with the technologies, we're very lucky to have such a rich set of technologies available within the company itself. So we have, you know, the Pivotal methodology we use, but we have Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which is a great way for people to go and build applications and run them in the Cloud. We actually have all of the the things from a security standpoint that help us make sure that our customer data is secure. And so we can give them that insight as we bring them in, if we're trying to recruit people like, you know, the college hires as well as other industry folks that we're trying to track, that we're in this, this big motion and we have scale. Right, that's the, that's the one big difference. >> South of the playbook then is the playbook to get this right as core team. Get that core fabric of the, whatever the objective is, product engineering, and then put tuning people through. And cross pollinating based upon what the situation might be. I need a little Cloud, I need a little bit of hyper convergence. So you kind of, it's kind of like a combined workout. It's kind of like sports. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I think you know, as Howard had mentioned previously, on some the other sessions, with such a large organization, there are people who are going to be, you know, really game for the change and really want to, you know, shift towards this new way of working. There are folks that are curious, and then there's a small percentage that may decide that this is not a journey they want to be a part of. And so it's really as we go through those, those motions of saying, here are the plans of where we want to go. Who are the people that are going to opt in? And who do we want to help you to move forward from a skills perspective? >> So a couple of challenges that I, that I see, I wonder if you could help us understand how you address, you've got the business, users, apps, and then the tech comes last. Okay, makes sense. But you've got, I'm sure there are a lot of similarities across, how big is Dallas? Like hundreds of thousands of people? Lot of similarities, but there's also some unique requirements. So how do you deal with that? You try to find the overlaps and say, Okay 60%, you know, nail it, and the others, you know, maybe we build snowflakes or maybe we just burned some bridges. How do you guys address those dissimilarities? >> So the good news is, the frameworks that we're building, and the decentralization of decision making allows you to address some of those dissimilarities. We've got applications that have built ground up Cloud native, they're a green field, they've started in the Cloud, they started on PCF. And they are perfectly, really prepared for this journey. We have other applications that have been sitting in the data center for decades, right? And, and everything in between. We found that we can create technology pipelines that can actually get all those applications to production the same way. So there's one thing out of the way, the building process of writing software and deploying it to production standardized. The next step is when you decentralize decision making and you get the product teams to own their code, you get better decisions. So it's about creating a framework that allows you to handle the variety of challenges and use cases that are thrown at you. >> Okay, so you're also a 35 year old company, you got, there's all this technical debt hanging around. How do you deal with that? Maybe you could give some examples of situations where you said, Okay, this part of the portfolio, we're going to leave alone, maybe some old cobalt mainframe. You're not that old, (laughing) Oracle database, and we're not going to touch that. But, but how do you deal with that technical debt challenge? >> Yeah. >> Well, you know, the way we've looked at it is really, where's the need for us to move fast? Because when you look at digital transformation, it's really about making sure that yes, we're customer centric, we have high quality, but also that we can move quickly with the new expected speeds of business. And so we've looked at it in the respect that a lot of the customer facing type of environment, so dell.com, or our b2b site for customers, or anything that's service facing, those are the ones that we want to make sure we focus on iterating quickly versus, you know, the order management system per se. So the order management system, you know, it's, it's an area that we're working on from a transformation standpoint, but it's not as critical to be able to move as quick there to keep up with customer features that they're expecting in this digital age. And so we we look at it from a portfolio standpoint, and again, from an outcome perspective, and where do we want to have an impact with the customers or the employees will feel most immediately? And so that's how we prioritize things in the question. >> Another question, John, I like to ask guys like you, you mentioned drinking your own champagne before, but, well, a lot of times, you know, the product guys are coming to you with, you know, things that are in beta perhaps, champagnes not quite ready yet. (laughing) >> That's want to be champagne, you know. >> So you, I'm sure, have a lot of people trying to hey, try this out, you guys are busy. You're trying to, you know, drive, you know, company value. What role do you play in that regard? In terms of beta testing? You know, do people love you, do they hate you? You like, you tell on them? How does that all work? >> We should be our first and best customer, and actually our hardest one. So, you know, we've actually taken some of the container technology and run it through its paces. And early revs of that just wasn't ready for us. But we did put it into a non production environment and started working on okay, how can we utilize this, for maybe non production workloads, some of the DevOps stuff, we're just needing, say, runners in a container to move code from point A to point B, so we can start flexing it, and exercising it and give feedback where, you know what, it's not going to really handle some of our production workloads. But here's what you need to do. So we want to be the first and hardest customer. >> Yeah, I was going to say it's not always a negative in that, yes, we might encounter issues. So we've we've adopted PCF, the Pivotal Cloud Foundry a lot over the last year and applications. And yes, we discovered things that either it couldn't do, or other issues with, and the fact that we have that close relationship with the product team, we can actually ask for new features that they will actually then go ahead and develop for us in order to support our business. >> I presume there's such a large portfolio, you have to be somewhat selective, right? You can't just take every new product, okay. And so how do you measure the value? What are the key metrics that you're trying to lever? >> Yeah, so when we went and did this, we built a business case, right? Because it's a sizable investment. And we look at adoption of behaviors. So are you adopting the methodology, the Agile pivotal methodology? Are you adopting test driven development, then how does that impact our key performance indicators? Are we reducing user incidents and production incidents? Are we getting stories from the business into production faster? Or is the velocity picking up? And then all of those outcomes lead to the business outcomes. Are we reducing our total spend? Are we becoming more technology focused, more development focused, then say program management focused, so we have a nice cascade of adoption of behaviors key performance indicator changes, and then actually business metric outcomes. >> You guys make it sound so easy. >> Right, Greg and Garry, thanks for spending the time. I know you guys have a hard stop. But I want to get you know, one last, a couple quick questions in. One of the things we're hearing is integration, that part of the whole Dell transformation, a lot of glue layer in the past, lot of SI like work being done in IT. How is that going for you guys? How is the heavy lifting of rolling out consistent infrastructure been? And what kind of experiences is that throwing off for you guys, for the end users? >> So I mean, I'd say, although I've only been at the company for the last couple years, you know, I'm a Dell Technologies employee, not necessarily from, from either business before, but from what I've observed, and from what I've seen so far, integration is actually going very well from a systems perspective for both the companies coming together at scale. We have a North Star. So we have a strategy to make sure that where we have multiple systems we want to end up with, with a single system. We're working towards that over the years. And likewise with the infrastructure. We have data centers that we're using, you know, now across different locations, from both the entities as they came together, that we're continuing to optimize and modernize using the latest Dell technology. So, from my perspective, as someone that came into the company a couple years ago, it's very impressive at how well-- >> That, that's where the efficiencies are going to be right there too, right? >> Yes, it's amazing the same of the same, the sales tools as we're integrating those, and making sure that we have tools where the salespeople can sell the whole portfolio across Dell Technologies is another great thing. >> IT guy told me one time, he says "we're in business when we're out of business". >> Correct. Meaning, you've got that heavy lifting out of the way and shifting to the higher value, you know, capabilities with AI, machine learning, do much more higher crafted things. You guys see it the same way. Not that you're out of business, but you know what I'm saying, when you're invisible, it's good, right? >> Our job is to enable the business ultimately, and if no one knows we're there, that's when it's actually working the best. >> Alright guys, thanks so much real quick, go down the line. What is the, take your IT hats off, take your CIO hats off, put your tech hat on, industry participant observer. What is the most important stories being told here at Dell technology? What's the big takeaway? What's the most important stories? >> Yeah, for me, I also own our AI capabilities and Dell digital. So for us, it's just that, that huge amount of data that's being created on a daily basis, and using technology to do something with it. And I think, you know, you have to be ready and prepared for that. So for me, that's one of the biggest takeaways. >> Garry. >> I would simply say that, you know, the dream, I'll be able to run workloads in, whether it's your own infrastructure, or multiple Clouds that are out there and manage it in a single place. That's one of my big takeaways now that we've, we've released that with the, the Dell Cloud. >> Operational seamlessness and then using data to have specialism in apps in every industry that's unique. Tailor is horizontally scalable, but vertically specialized, very, it's like a whole new world. >> Yeah, very exciting. >> Guys, Congratulations, exciting news. We've been talking about this for three years on theCUBE. A more seems like more. You can see some visibility out there, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Cube coverage here with Dave Vallante, I'm John Furrier. Stay with more day three coverage, two sets here in Las Vegas at Dell technology. We'll be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin joined by John Troyer, and we're excited to welcome back to theCUBE, distinguished alumni Bask Iyer, the CIO of Dell Technologies and VMware. Bask it's great to have you here. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> So we were joking before we went on that we're right next to the therapy dog area, so always nice to have a technology conversation populated with dogs barking. >> No I like the dogs better if you want to talk about dogs or guitar, I would rather prefer that over >> Oh I could talk about that all day. So talk to us about, you are the CIO of Dell Technologies and VMware, first Dell Technologies World, 14,000 attendees >> Right. >> In person. >> Yep. >> 6,500 technology and solutions partners here, another expected 30,000+ people engaging with the livestream, the on-demand videos. Big, big focus this week. Love to get your perspective on the role of the CIO, the role that you have now, you know you a few years ago, it was truly all about technology, now it's really about your involvement in the corporate strategy. Talk to us about the vision that you're setting, with Michael Dell, with your peers in IT and other stakeholders at Dell Technologies. >> Okay. No it's a great event I love this. A lot of these are colleagues, other CIOs. So they know, they want to know really do you use it inside Dell. A lot more credibility when you talk real stories about how you use it in Dell. The first thing is when I started this career there was no such title as CIO. That itself is pretty new. We were just the geeks who kind of ran everything. And then you became head of IT. So it was very strongly technical, and then they said you needed leadership and business skills, the pendulum swung one way to all business and leadership skills and no technology, and then came back to we should need both of that. And then you have business and general management, so every year the job changes. What I'm finding though, which is good and bad, is nothing goes away. You still need to know the technology, you still need to know the business skills, soft skills, still need to be a general manager. What is now is a lot more on the strategy. So the importance of strategy though is you never talk strategy if your operations is not good. Right nobody cares. But if your operations is somewhat good, you better not talk about operations. So I tell people don't keep on saying your trains are running on time. It has to run on time, if it doesn't, if it runs recently on time, talk about strategy. So now it's an important job to do that, and your question about in a technology company, I am the customer. I'm probably one of the very few people who actually signed a purchase order within Dell Tech to buy Dell or EMC or VMware. So they're interested in the customer's perspective. So you're the internal voice of the customer. We are also using all the tech that we make, and we need to give feedback to the developers and the R&D folks. So we call it drink our own champagne, but not our own Kool-Aid, you know what I mean. >> I like that. >> So sometimes you get carried away by the marketing things that we do. The challenge though is you working with Michael Dell, you're working with Pat Gelsinger and everybody else, and thousands of engineering fellows and so on, who know IT, who've invented a lot of things in IT. So you cannot really keep up with them. You know you need to know enough to hold your own, but if you try to compete with them, that is not a good thing. So luckily for me I was a good B student, I'm comfortable with A students around me. So you have you to be comfortable that you're not the smartest one in the room, but you're still contributing. That's the change you have. It is surreal to go in front of a Pat or Michael or other people and talk about digital transformation. And they're making eye contact they want to know how, what do you mean by digital transformation? How do you do it internally? What's your plan? So every once in a while you pinch yourself and say I can't believe this is happening. But it does happen. >> So Bask, I mean digital transformation is a theme of the show, right? >> Yeah. >> Make it real. As you talk with other CIOS, do they feel like they have a seat at that table? Are they the driver, are they the implementer? You start to hear more about a Chief Digital Officer, is that, does the CIO became the CDO, are they different? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah I'm very strong on the fact there's a again if the CIO focus only on operations and cost, then people say your trains are running on time lets get somebody clever to do the innovation and digital. You don't want to leave that, that is the cream of the crop. So I think if you're a good CIO, you want to be the Chief Digital Officer for the company. You don't want to have two CFOs, one for Wall Street and one for doing the real work. You don't want to have two salesperson, one for putting the numbers and one actually selling. So you need to have one technology person. Some companies may be so complex that you may consider that. I started as a chief Digital Officer in Hunnewell, ended up as the CIO for Hunnewell for example, but you need to have people who are very collaborative, those two have to work very closely together. It's very difficult to find one person who's collaborative and nonpolitical to be a leader of an IT organization. To find two and working as a team is complicated. So that's what I want. So I'm not a big supporter of that although I could see why it would happen, if you will. Okay. >> Lisa: So drinking your own champagne I like that by the way, you are in this role, it's interesting that you say you still kind of feel like you're pinching yourself when you're talking to a Michael Dell or a Pat Gelsinger, but you're up there having to implement digital transformation within Dell Technologies and all the companies underneath. >> Sure. >> That's a pretty big seat at the table. How are you sort of embodying the theme of this event and making digital transformation real for Dell Technologies? >> So I go very practical and I give, yesterday I talked to my fellow CIOs on the mistakes I've made. Right I came as the VMware CIO, we've already done this journey in a couple of years ahead of time. So wouldn't it be a cut and paste? Given the hybrid cloud, given the best end user environment possible and you're done. You already have that start. But I made the same mistake every CIO makes, we preach this but we don't follow it. It's not just the technology, it's people, process, culture, and technology, and I jumped on the technology, and I'm kicking myself to say, first three months didn't make a whole lot of progress. I was just yelling like a madman to say why is it not getting done. And then you have to go back into I have to hire the right people. So lets talk a few things. I made changes to the leadership team. Certain people were not comfortable in the pace of change. We did it respectfully but we had to have people who can actually lead the change. That was first. Then we called something about putting T back in IT. Which a long time in IT what we have done is we've outsourced, off shored, treated IT as a commodity and then we have program managers and leaders. Every magazine asked us to do that. Well, guess what we've been wrong. I think I've been wrong, doing that. You do need technologies right now. You cannot do digital transformation without understanding the technology. So we have to staff internally, we have to get good folks. Still manage the cost right, that doesn't go away, but you have to do the right thing. So IT, first get the right people, the process for it, what it dawned on me is we are talking about Agile and DevOps and continuous development. Those are all IT, geeky terMs. Those are not business terms. Those are not business terms even in Dell technology. Because there are manufacturing folks and HR folks and finance folks and so on. So I looked at fast experience of somebody like Hunnewell or GE. Remember they adopted Lean Six Sigma some kind of process to transform their company. And even me who's an IT geek had to go through a green-belt certification or a black-belt certification. And I revolted I said why would I do that, I'm an engineer why would I go through this stupid course, but it was required otherwise you don't get promoted. So now you need a prescriptive process to change the culture. So digital transformation needed that. Luckily for us we took the pivotal way, which we have within our company. We made it the Dell Digital way, since you still have to write it in your own language if you will. That is the process we use, we train our folks and our customers, our clients as I call them, customer is the person who buys the products from us, client is all the colleagues. So finance folks have to know what Dell Digital way is. You cannot do requirements the old way, and throw it over the wall and expect me to develop. You have to get into the room, With me and draw it on the wall and be able to design it together. So that's been a good change. And the culture changes with us because initially people are thinking, this guy's coming from Silicon Valley, he's not going to stay here, he's going to do all these things, he's going to get either fired or leave. So people try to run out the clock a little bit. So it takes a little bit of time to work on the culture and say innovation is not only demanded from you, but you have to keep the trains running on time. You have to chew gum and walk at the same time. So that's the process we go through. >> I love what you just described Bask because both in terms of culture and in technology, that actually makes for an interesting set of IT careers, right. That turns IT into a very interesting career again. >> Right. >> Many of my colleagues are IT pros, do you have any advice for somebody who is maybe in the start, the middle of their career, maybe specializing in something but they have I think this dream at the end of the tunnel, maybe the CIO is where they want to be. What do you see, how do I prep to be a CIO now, to be a CIO in say ten years? >> I'd tell him are you crazy? (laughs) Do you know what you're getting into? But here's what there's some truth to it. Getting a job is really easy I think. Doing the job is very difficult. So I tell 'em, get prepared for the job. Also, you should have some passion for technology. If you're a sportswriter, I mean I'm into sports, so you can give me all the magazines you want, I can see all the videos, I can watch 'em all day long. I can retire just watching sports all day long, or playing occasionally. You have to have the passion in technology because things keep coming at you. So we think Blockchain is cool by the time it get off the seed it's going to be something else. You have to be interested and passionate to keep up with that, right. So first thing is can you keep up with the change. Are you actually interested in it? Michael Dell sends you a text in the middle of the night, I don't think he expects me to react but I do. Because he's reading something and he's hearing something from the customers. You need to be interested in learning. So I said you have to be a lifelong learner, passionate on technology, and also learn the ropes because I always felt when I was younger I wasn't given the opportunities at the right time. I felt like am I going to die before I become a vice president or a CIO or whatever? It felt to me that it took a little longer than I wanted it to but thank god because once you got the job you were prepared for it. So that's one of the things I tell people is get prepared. Get into learning. Also the job changes all the time so I can't really write a book on it. You have to almost be like a chameleon in a sense. You got to learn so the last few years was technology, then it was business, then it was soft skills, transformation, ERP implementation, now it's business strategy, it's not going to stop. Technology is going to keep coming as a wave. So be ready for adapting and adopting to the changes if you will, right. >> I'm glad that you brought up people because it's not just systems and processes, none of this comes to fruition, companies don't transform IT, transform digitally, deliver more differentiated products without the people. We had some folks on earlier I think day one with Dell EMC Education Services, we've talked to the Channel folks about the things that they're enabling and one of the things that I think is really important that you brought up is all the things you said, I made all these mistakes. But those are opportunities not just for you to learn and grow, but also for you to share with the people that look at you and say I want to be Bask Iyer on stage. >> Yeah. >> You know in a few years because it's really all about being brave enough to say you know what I didn't know this, or I made a mistake, actually maybe it wasn't a mistake, maybe if I didn't go this path I wouldn't have learned and gotten more solidification under my feet to be able to be up there and get a text from a Michael Dell [Bask] That's right. >> In the middle of the night. >> That's right. >> So your advice to the next generation I think is key but I also really respect identification of hey all the things that maybe I did them wrong and encouraging more people as they want to grow their careers to not be afraid to go I don't know this. This this is an opportunity for me to learn. >> Yeah you cannot be the I wish I was the smartest room in Dell Technology, you know that is not possible. You're not even talking about the senior managers you have to talk to the fellows and engineers we have who I just nod and pretend like I know what they're talking about, it's just amazing. So you need a little bit of the humility I think to learn what you want to learn. But have the confidence right. You cannot have nothing and come and work here because I always tell people working in a tech company versus being a CIO of a regular company and I've done both, it's like getting to a batting cage and all of a sudden the balls are coming at 150 miles an hour. You better be prepared to face it. So you have to figure out can I face a ball at 40 miles or 60 miles or 150 miles. So you need to prepare yourself to get there. But having said that though, we are all learning. We are all growing, we all make mistakes. In fact I learn a lot from my millennial kids. They seem to know more about this than I do. I learn a lot and I do something called reverse mentoring in Silicon Valley, which is all the people from LinkedIn, Google, they want to learn from me because they think I'm the greatest CIO whatever, and I want to learn from them. I ended up at the end of the session learning a lot more from them and I feel actually guilty that the mentoring session has gone the other way but, that's what keeps it's interesting is the minute you feel like you know everything or you've done it, very risky in a technology profession, especially in a CIO profession. >> Lisa: So wrapping up the show here, talk to us about some of the things, and in the spirit of learning, what are some of the things that you've heard from customers about, whether it's the new product announcements or new partnerships or just the new areas that Dell Technologies is going in, what has the feedback been like? >> People love the fact that they saw Pat onstage and talk about VMware and Dell working together. People want to see the independence of VMware as well, and they want Dell and VMware working together. They want to see both. They want to make sure that there is the fierce independence that VMware is known for, and the fact that they're working together. That was good to hear because if you do one or the other people get freaked out. The fact that the best private cloud in the world is getting hooked up to the best public clouds in the world, that's a good message for people because they don't want to be locked into a cloud discussion or other kind of stuff. So you want to have the freedom to do that. A lot of people are now expressing interest in IOT and other kind of places and why the edge is important again. What tends to happen in my profession is we talk about IOT last year, this year we talk about AI and ML, guarantee next year's going to be something else. The technology sweet spot takes three, four, five years to hit. So if you just chasing the next wave because you want to be cool and fun you're missing out on opportunity to leverage this. So lot of buzz around the whole world is going to be wired, everything's going to have sensors, the amount of data that comes in and how to manage it and secure it. A lot of CIOs are saying we should get on top of that. Before it's done to us. Lot of buzz on that. I freaked out. I, like any other geek, went to the show to see the cool techs that everybody has. I went to the Dell booths to see the latest laptops because sometimes they don't show us the latest things >> (laughs) >> they keep it for the show. And then Michael Dell is in the booth. He didn't think it was funny but I thought Michael Dell in a Dell booth in Dell World, that's like you want to go buy a Mustang and you find Mr. Ford in the dealership. So I thought it was hilarious and I was shocked and he was just amused to say why do you think that is so funny. But it's nice to have a founder who's like an icon in the industry. Is he listening? Let me stop. (laughs) >> (laughs) He is a big fan of theCUBE. >> Thank you, then I'm not going to say anything nice about him. >> So, last question You talked about last year was IOT, now it's AI and ML, next year's going to be something else, are the people that are chasing those trends the ones that need the therapy dogs the most? (laughs) >> Yeah I think so because you know we have no time for anything these days, we are chasing the next shiny object. When AI and IOT come together, this is going to be fascinating for me. I worked on industry controls and so on, but if every wall could talk, and every object could talk to you what it would be telling you? And humans cannot comprehend it, because the wall is going to tell you so many things. So and so walked by, so and so sat here, whatever. You need artificial intelligence to filter it and say, you know Eric Clapton was here because that's the only thing maybe you want to know. I don't want to know about anything else. That requires AI to process and say this is what Bask would be interested in. And the rest of it doesn't really matter. So this combination I think is very powerful and I'm pretty excited about what if everything, what if dogs could talk, what if walls could talk, What if thermostat could talk >> Oh I'm waiting for that. >> So it's going to happen in our lifetime, pretty soon. >> Lisa: Well Bask thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights of how you're leading the charge as the CIO, right up there with Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger and all those big cheeses, but also how you're bringing the technology to the people and really like you said drinking the champagne. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> We want to thank you for your time. >> Thank you for the time. >> And we thank you for watching theCUBE, we are live day three of Dell Technologies World, right next to the dog therapy center if you need a little break, come say hi and stop by and see some dogs. I'm Lisa Martin for John Troyer, stick around we'll be right back after a short break. (techno music)