(ubeat techno music) >> Presenter: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Dell Technologies World. We're here at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, John Troyer. John, good to be working with you. >> John: Ah, great to be here. >> Charlie Haney is here, he's the Senior Vice President of Dell EMC Consulting. Charlie, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> So let's see, Michael Dell the other day on theCUBE just yesterday said, look, let me make it clear, we're not trying to replace Accenture. >> Charlie: Right, that's right. >> So what are you trying to do? >> Well, look. We talk a lot about these four transformation pillars throughout the entire week around digital, IT, workforce and security transformation. And our customers are struggling with how to go through that process. And I think we have a unique opportunity to bring the technologies, whether it be hardware, software solutions across Dell Technologies together to go help them through that. And so I think it's important for Dell Technologies to have a set of consulting capabilities that has experience around those technologies and the integration of those technologies and help customers through that transformation journey while consuming our technology. And so that's where we're kind of focused. >> And is it the right inference that your real expertise is on that sort of architectural infrastructure, architectural layer, or do you seep into sort of more nitty-gritty business process type of stuff? >> No, it really probably is closer to the technology. I mean, we partner with many of the larger SIs as well to bring in a lot of their deep business expertise. We are absolutely strongest in our Dell Technologies, no one would hire us to go be an expert on someone else's technology. But if they're going to go do an Azure stack solution built on our hyper-converged platform, who better to go do it? If they're going to go do an SDDC solution with our VxRack kind of solution, embedding VMware and doing automation and orchestration, who better to go do that because those are technologies across Dell Technologies, and we have deep expertise and capabilities to go help them with that. >> So how does that generally work? I mean, you say you've partnered with some of the big guys. A lot of those times, those big guys are at the board level doing some huge transformation. And then what, do you get brought in to do that architecture layer, or does the reverse happen where you're sort of knocking on their door? How does that all shake out? >> I mean, it always depends on the customer, right? I mean, it's not uncommon for us to have a large customer who's investing substantially in an SI and/or within Dell EMC or Dell Technologies products and technologies. And so those large investments from those customers, they expect us to partner and work together to solve their problem. So oftentimes the customer expects us to partner, expects us to work and leverage the capabilities. There's a very large project that we have around data center modernization that actually Deloitte is leading the PMO and we're leading a series of technology work streams within that, and so we're working together to go solve that customer problem. >> Yeah, and they're integrating a lot of different vendors' technology as well. >> Well, Charlie, I'd love to kind of drill down on those work streams, boots on the ground kind of competencies. 10, 20 years ago, we were there and there was a lot more of people who were just shifting boxes in the channel and let's move equipment. It's much richer now, our theme this week, right, was digital transformation, making it real. It's a much heavier load, a much deeper conversation. Can you talk a little bit about those work streams and kind of the competencies that you expect your people to bring to the table and how you're working with the client organization? >> Yeah absolutely. So you've already talked to Howard, I think, right? >> John: Yeah. >> So within Howard's organization, he has a very large services organization that focuses on specific product implementation and support services, right? So 60,000 members strong with partners. And then there's the consulting team that actually augments and extends that. So the consulting team that I represent, we complement that. So when we talk digital transformation, we're talking about helping customers understand what is it to go build a cloud native application? What are the 12 factors of a cloud native application? How am I going to switch my processes to a DevOps agile process? How am I going to leverage a Dell technology platform such as PCF and Pivotal Cloud Foundry from our sister company, to go transform how I build cloud native applications? And so we have a set of capabilities in that space that would go help customers through that journey, partnering with Pivotal. >> How big is your organization right now? >> Several thousand. >> I'm kind of curious, what kind of folks are you looking for to join it? Like yeah, that's a wide range of expertise. You're looking for senior IT leaders, folks that have been doing it before? >> Yeah, usually they're practitioners that have been doing it for a number of years, although something like digital and cloud foundry, those are brand new technologies, right? So you're going to get a mixture of people that have been doing software development for a number of years, and make sure to have people that have maybe born up just recently, really growing with the industry around these new technologies. When you get into IT transformation, you're going to get some of the more hardcore data center, data center consolidation expertise mixed in with business resiliency. And then we're extending that with our private cloud and public cloud or multi cloud sort of services to federate, integrate and then move workloads across those. So as you go from digital into the data center and IT transformation, that mindset usually is a little bit different in the type of individual. >> Are you finding initiatives within your customers, you saw a couple of digital IT workforce and security. Are you finding that they're generally bespoke projects, or is a big mega project, and these are somewhat interrelated or kind of a hybrid? >> Usually, I mean, it is a hybrid. I mean, like workforce transformations sometimes is something that's unique, I would say. So someone's looking at, you know, what is my workforce, how am I going to enable my workforce, how am I going to make them more productive? You usually start out with personas and understanding their workforce, trying to align the right technologies whether it be physical or virtual with the right tools like communication and collaboration to enable them. You start to talk about digital, and it is a hybrid because it's hard to do digital transformation without having the right infrastructure underneath it and going through some level of IT transformation. And so for that, it actually starts to meld together. In fact, a lot of customers, when we talk to them around IT transformation, we talk about, thinking about your application model and helping transform that, your infrastructure transformation, as well as your people and process transformation. And those are things that you shouldn't do sequentially one after another, because you're not going to get business benefit and value until you've actually achieved that. So we actually recommend doing three of those things in sequence with one another, but then maybe chunking it up through MVP so you do it in an iterative fashion but you're hitting your people and process, your application and your infrastructure. And so that starts to then to support things like your digital transformation as you enable the technology that then is going to go right in the cloud native application. >> Let's go through a simple example, take IT transformation, something we've all sort of discussed and somewhat familiar with. You really can't do that and modernize your IT infrastructure without understanding your application portfolio. You can't really understand your application portfolio without understanding the impact on the business and the business process, right? So how far into that do you go? Where do you sort of leave off and some of your partners come in? Or could you do, maybe it's a lightweight business process touch point. How do you handle that? >> Yeah, so we're not redesigning the business process but what we're doing is, if we're looking at say application transformation within the context of IT transformation where many customers don't even know what applications they have, let's be honest. They talk about as CMDB, and oftentimes we look at their CMDB and we go inventory their environment and they're night and day different. >> They have 10 CMDBs. >> Right! So we start out usually with an application portfolio discussion around what are your key applications, what do you have, what are the dependencies around those, and then what is the right disposition as we think about those applications? Are we going to archive it, are we going to retire it? Can we consolidate it, move it? If we're going to move it, sometimes it gets into a cloud suitability study, because where should it get moved to? Are we going to modernize it? Would it benefit from being modernized with a PCF kind of platform? And that will drive those application portfolio decisions. When you get into the cloud suitability, then you're getting into the infrastructure. And am I going to do an on-prem off-prem and things of that nature as well. >> And then that example, you obviously want to understand what business processes get affected, but that's where you stop. If they have to do a business retransformation, then that's something that got to, that's a bigger fish to fry, right? >> That's correct, or we're usually partnering with someone else that's focusing on that level. >> How about security? Who are you working with there? Is it largely the CSO? Or is it still the CSOs and an IT problem, or is the scope wider these days? >> It is wider. I mean, obviously you're working with those individuals but it's so embedded in everything that you have to do today. It's not an afterthought. I mean, if you're building a private cloud within a data center, you've got to be thinking about the security inherent within that. If you're doing business resiliency, one of our biggest business resiliency offers and capabilities is around cyber recovery, which is an air-gap solution to actually have an off-premise copy with an air gap in between it because of cyber recovery issues. So everything we do has a slice of security embedded within it. >> Another question on digital. Oh sorry, John, go ahead please. >> Oh, I was just thinking about, a lot of this is discovery. There's an element of discovery to all this, right, as you go through transformation. What's going to work, what's not, unexpected problems, oh not anticipated problems. How much does this need to be driven from the c-suite from a predetermined conclusion, and how much is their discovery in the ground with the people below the c-suite and then reporting back up for support in the direction of the business? >> Yeah, we have found that it's difficult to undergo any transformation without a ton of executive and senior executive support to go through that. Anything that starts up really from the bottoms up at some point doesn't get the right level of governance and financial support to actually go through it, especially if you're thinking about doing, as I mentioned, around people, process and organizational change, as well as application and infrastructure, you could do any one of those maybe individually, but to do all of those sequentially you need a lot of strong support. And so that's really what we're trying to educate, based on our experience. >> So let's unpack that a little bit because my similar question is who's leading the digital charge? Obviously you're saying it's going to have top-down leadership, but that's a lot of Cs. (chuckles) >> Charlie: Yeah. >> Do you start with the chief digital officer? Where's the chief data officer, if one exists? Where does the CIO fit? Who's leading this? >> I mean, usually if you're focused on a digital transformation, usually it's coming to IT through the business, right? We're working with a large insurance company who's actually building a series of online banking applications using cloud native application development processes. We're teaching them DevOps, we're doing PCF, but all of that came through the business. The business says, this is what we're going to go do to actually go change how we deliver insurance in their case. >> So it's a general manager or a P&L manager or the COO? >> In this case, it was the business owner of that business unit within this insurance company driving into IT, and IT is obviously enabling them to go do that. We are working with a large gold mining company who's focused on IT transformation. They've grown through the years but they haven't actually modernized their infrastructure and they're starting to think about well, what should I be thinking in terms of cloud on-prem and off-prem? And so we went through an entire advisory set of services to help them understand, based on what your needs and requirements are, based on what you have, where you should go, what is the right multi-cloud kind of strategy for you and what is the roadmap to go do that in a realistic sense of terms? And then what would be the financial and investment to go through that process? And that was required because they had to go to their actual board to go get the investment dollars to justify that. >> So when you guys engage with customers, how does it start? What's the catalyst? I mean, as you said off-camera, you guys are talking way more about problems than you are about products. So what are some of the problems that you're hearing? We talked about at a high level digital, IT transformation, et cetera, but how does that conversation start and where does it lead? >> There's two ways that it starts, one is a customer has invested a ton in Dell products, Dell EMC products or technologies, and we find that while they're investing in all this infrastructure because they're modernizing their data center and they're going to go through some level of transformation; and then we actually strap on consulting and work our way up into well, what is the problem, why are you acquiring all this and have you thought about the following things around automation and people and process to wrap around the product installation that you're going through to actually get that value. The other is, like in the mining example, that customer actually was not a Dell EMC consumer, believe it or not. They were an underpinned account and they're like okay, we know we need to go do something, we know that Dell EMC and Dell Technologies has a suite of technologies that we should be considering. Help us understand what you've done for other customers. And it's because of that conversation that now it's leading into a complete set of product and technology opportunities. So those are the two ways, they work hand-in-hand. >> Interesting, so you're either tip of the spear where you're competing with somebody else, or you're basically brought in as part of a big deal where you're really not competing with anybody in that case, right? >> That's right, and we're just expanding and helping them hopefully realize their vision or their value sooner. >> Dave: All right, all right. Charlie, hey, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. John, thanks for hanging out with us. All right, keep it right there. But we'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Dell Technologies World, the inaugural Dell Technologies World, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and it's ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back as we continue our coverage here on theCube, of Dell Technologies 2018. Big show going on here in Las Vegas, we're at the Sands right now, 14,000 people strong in attendance. This is day two of three of live coverage right here on theCube. Along with Keith Townsend, I am John Walls and we're now joined by Matt Liebowitz who is the Global Lead of Multi-Cloud Infrastructure at Dell EMC Consulting. Matt, thank you for joining us here on theCube. >> Happy to be here. Long time listener, first time caller. (laughter) >> John: Alright. You're on the phone, Matt go. (laughter) And Vijay Kanchi, who is the Global Innovation Lead of IT Transformation at Dell EMC. First time listener as well, Vijay? >> Yes, absolutely, and delighted to be here, thank you. >> John: Or long time listener, first time caller. >> Matt: Got to get that terminology right. >> John: Matt in New Jersey you're on, go. Let's talk New Jersey Devils. Let's talk first off about the way your two units intertwine. Just so we set the table here a little bit and understand how the two of you and the people with whom you work, how you interact at Dell. >> Matt: It'd maybe make sense if you start Vijay, and then I'll... >> Yes, so we're part of Dell EMC's consulting organization, and within that consulting organization, Matt and I work together to focus on IT transformation programs. So we design and develop services for our consulting services organization, to go deliver IT transformation programs. >> John: Okay. So, digital transformation you know, thrown around quite a bit these days. >> Vijay: Yeah When you look at it from the macro picture, from an organizational standpoint, from their perspective. What does that mean, if you will, how do you get organizations to buy-in? Because I'm sure the IT professionals with whom you work, they're in large part, they're there, I would guess. But they've got to bring along an entire organization with them, and that's a tall task, Matt. >> Matt: Yeah, there's no doubt that when it comes to Cloud, and especially Multicloud, Like you said, the whole organization needs to come along for the ride. It's not something that IT can do in a vacuum, and we've seen when they try to do it in a vacuum, they're often unsuccessful. So get those stakeholders involved, outside of IT, executive level, bring them in, show them, share with them your KPI's for success. Show them what success looks like, and then bring them along for the ride. That's ultimately how you get success with Cloud. >> Keith: So let's talk progression. What are the most successful projects, at least what is the data points you see out of the most successful projects when the C-Suite says you know what, we're going to do digital transformation, IT go execute. What are the critical points of information IT needs to collect, so that they can come to Dell EMC Consulting to help execute on that strategy? >> Matt: Well it's a long list. How much time do we have? (laughter) You know again, I think success criteria, what success looks like is really important. Because I think what you said is what often happens. You know IT leaders or leaders of the organization say we need to transform, we need to change our business to adapt. >> Keith: Yeah, what is transformation, what does that even mean? >> Right. That's up to the business to define what the next stage looks like. And so that could be anything from just being able to operate like a Public Cloud, provision quickly, iterate quickly on new software and new development tools. Or it could be a major transformation of the whole business, where they're entering a new market and they need to operate a little differently. >> Keith: So what... >> Vijay: Just to add to what Matt just said, you know from a digital transformation perspective, it's all about getting velocity of application, functionality out to customers, users, and stakeholders. When a C-Suite leadership comes and says we need to go transform all our business, then they really look to IT as a significant player to enable that. And one of the biggest issues that you have in driving capability to market fast, is being able to go build infrastructure or environment pretty quickly. Most IT organizations are, you know, dealing with technical debt that's been around for at least 25, 30 years. It starts with, you know, Legacy critical systems that are potentially Mainframe, Client Server, all the way through, you know, digital platforms that they've built up. And so in order to be able to go make that work, I think the one key important thing that we always talk about is, you need to go get automation of your code delivery process, and then you need to go in and build infrastructure and environment so that you don't have as much queue time versus run time. Cause ITs have historically been in the request-response business. I'm sure in your world as well, if you need a fix to your computer, the first thing you have to do, call up or send a request that goes to somewhere, somebody is sitting behind the queue and they're processing it. And so the whole objective to make digital transformation, is to be able to reduce and eliminate the queue time eventually, and enable the run time. So that's kind of the first thing, from an operational perspective, and then from an outcomes perspective, it's about sitting down and bringing a cross-functional team of folks from Marketing, Business units, IT, Security and Compliance, and bringing them together to figure out what sort of outcomes they're looking to achieve, what does that journey look like timing-wise, from an outcomes perspective, and then work to bring everybody together to establish a shared purpose, and a shared objective. So those are some of the key things that we find that almost every single time you engage with customers, you've got to have those conversations first in order to be able to go dig under the covers to figure out where the issues are, and then start to unclog the jams where they exist. (coughing) In the plumbing of IT. (laughter) >> This is part of that people transformation Michael talked about on stage today, yesterday, and then was brought up again on stage today. Having that conversation, for someone who's usually head down, maintaining AIX, maintaining new infrastructure for a digital, we're not equipped to normally have that conversation. Where are you seeing the gaps in skill, and how do organizations close that gap so they can even come to you guys and say, you know what, we can see clearly we need to automate our CICD process, help us through that, which is where you guys excel. >> So go ahead Matt. >> Well I think that it's a challenge because sometimes they don't even know what they don't know. >> Keith: Yeah, don't know what we don't know. >> Right. And so they'll come to us and give us a request like that. We need to modernize our infrastructure, we need to automate, and deliver IT as a service. They don't really know what that means. And so they're going to need to re-skill some of their folks. And I think that's operationally very scary for individuals who work in IT. But the reality is, and you know we see this over and over again, if you want to attract the best and the brightest in IT, you need to be working with the latest technology. And so folks shouldn't be afraid of that change. They should embrace it because ultimately it's going to drive their career forward, and when they're working on the latest and the greatest, they're going to deliver value for the business instead of just keeping the lights on. >> John: And that's kind of the challenge. So it is, I just figured this out, right, (laughter) and all of a sudden, that cycle exponentially, I mean capabilities increase, your skill set is lagging, and now you've got to play catch-up as an IT professional. >> Keith: I just learned how to spell Kubernetes yesterday. (laughter) >> If you could teach me, that'd be great. >> Capital K. (laughter) >> I mean it's true though. I've been working with virtualization for a long time, and it's funny to see the progression back in 2001, 2002, where everyone just thought this thing is crazy, nobody's going to do this. You know, we get to the point where we're having conversations around virtualization-first policies, and now we're talking about Cloud-first policies. So technology and the pace of change waits for nobody. And so we have to help organizations be ready to adopt that change. >> John: What is it right now? What's the big leap you think that on the client's side, that their teams have to make? >> Vijay: So there's probably three areas that I see that they have to make some changes. So from a business perspective in IT, they need to trust IT and integrate their needs and requirements into a process where, businesses really often times don't know what specifically they want from IT. They know and they have some vision of what they want to achieve. And so they need to go sit with, in a collaborative way, that the IT teams and often times the security teams, the CISO teams, to build together, I'll call it a cross-functional team, that can really come together to tease out, and brainstorm their way through to figure out what are the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. What is the strategy, and what do they need to look like in three years from now, and then work their way back. So that's one piece, this cultural shift in how IT engages with business. The second part is around how do organizations get better? We've been hearing about the DevOps changes that drive, but DevOps is as much a tools and technologies conversation as it is a cultural shift to get the people that were authors and critics, coders and operations folks, problem creators versus problem managers and maintainers. So those roles have been very cantankerous for the last 20 years, because the operations folks are responsible in driving for stability, reliability, and availability. Whereas coders are focused on driving new innovation. So fundamentally different objectives. So in order to make that shift, you need to go in and create another environment and culture of shared pain and shared objectives and shared rewards. So that's another key chain. And then from a skills perspective, what we're finding is that, when we get to the technology and infrastructure part, the folks who used to be storage, administrators, network administrators, computer administrators, et cetera, they now have to go broader, not as much deep in silos, and they need to look at convergence, for example, infrastructure. They need to be thinking about stitching that together with security and DevOps and Cloud SecOps. And so those are the key differences. From an administrator perspective, you need to go in and take your existing skills, and expand to be more broader, versus silo. There are some new skills that are needed to enable all this. I kind of look at the third part being the new skills are, you need folks that never did this type of stuff before to go start doing Cloud Administrative, Multi-Cloud Management and Operations. You need to be able to go do what Google calls Sight Reliability Engineering, and what Cloud Foundry calls Platform Operations and Platform Engineering. So those are... >> Keith: So, even before we get there, >> Yeah, yeah >> From a brefa capability for the Dell organization, consulting organization, the requirements and demand on the organization has changed. It went from, you know I help design, install, and operationalize a VMAX and VMR infrastructure to help me enable a DevOps practice, which is two completely different sets of skill. From a practical perspective, >> Vijay: Absolutely two years ago you look at Comcast's DevOps team, that whole team is now at Wal-Mart. >> Vijay: Yep. >> How do you guys create and nurture the skill set needed to even deliver the capability from a services side? >> Well I mean, that's a great question because we have to transform too. >> Right. >> Because we have to transform and meet the needs of our customers. That's primarily the responsibility of the consulting organization, to stay on top of technology, and move into those new areas of skill. You know if you look back just a couple of years ago and you saw the kind of work that our consulting organization was doing, you know a lot of things like helping customers migrate Exchange Servers and SQL Servers, we don't do a lot of that anymore. We're helping them design and create a transformation roadmap for Multicloud. So it's really important for us to keep our folks as skilled and looking six, 12, 18 months in advance, so that we don't have the problem you just described, where our entire team moves from, you know, one organization to another, our customers need something from us and we can't deliver it. That's a high importance for us. >> Viajy: And from a consulting organization perspective, as Matt said, we are having to reinvent ourself probably at least two or three times in the last five years. That's because of the pace of change in the marketplace. And so we have a shared responsibility to help drive some of our thinking around this transformation, internally ourself. One is to be able to go figure out what other types of services we need to go build, to deliver transformational programs to our customers. So define the what. And that's primarily my responsibility. And then I work very closely with Matt to figure out, what are the skills we have in our organization today, what are the next new skills that we need to go build, and then what are the skills that we have today that we can extend to support these new things that we see coming. Such as taking infrastructure administration and management, to providing and transforming that into providing it in the context of micro services, for example. Or infrastructure as code, storage as code, security as code, et cetera. So those are some of the things that we try to make. And then from a business perspective, we are trying to build-out skills to look at what types of organizational changes do we need to make. What other types of transformational programs and transformational metrics that you need to track, so if you have an 18 month transformation program, or a nine month transformation program, that you're not going to go wait for 18 months to see if you've achieved your outcomes. We've identified KPI's for the transformation program, where you look every 90 days to say are you achieving that. So we have two teams. We have a team of what we call Discipline Leads, folks like Matt, who are championing and evangelizing our organization to say here are the things that you guys need to change to, and find training enablement, to go drive that globally around the world as part of our consulting organization. And then there are going to be skills that we don't have that we go and acquire in the marketplace. But to your point, it's not like they're sitting around waiting to be plucked off the marketplace. (laughter) So you know, part of it is finding the right people who have a little bit of the aptitude that can make the pivot, and then learn fast. So it's a little bit of everything, and it's as much an art as it is to science, to cope with that. >> Matt: It's funny too again, if you look back at our organization just a few years ago, we didn't have a focus on Public Cloud, and now we've got folks that are trained and certified and some of the best in the world at Public Cloud technologies, because we have to change and we have to transform just like our customers. >> John: You know we talk about being nimble and agility. >> Oh yeah. >> You do too, right? >> Yeah. >> You have to walk that walk as well. >> I'm less nimble the older and older I get. (laughter) >> Aren't we all, Matt? Aren't well all? >> Organizationally you're absolutely right. >> Well listen gentlemen, thanks for being here. We appreciate the time. No longer first-time callers. >> That's right. >> Alright. >> We'll be back soon. >> You're now Cube veterans. Thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for the time. >> Back with more here from Las Vegas. You're watching theCube coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. (techno music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Keith Townsend. We are joined by Kevin Roche. He is the president of Dell EMC consulting services. >> Thank you. Nice to be here. Thank you. >> It's great, you're a veteran, so we're happy to have you. Talk a little bit about what's new with the services consulting business, particularly since the merger. >> If you don't mind, I'll put some context around this. As we brought Dell and EMC together, the services piece became a really critical part for our customers' journey as you think about the transformation they're going through, the consumption of our technology. We have right now, today, Dell EMC services is about 30 thousand people globally today. We're augmented with another 30 thousand partners across the globe. We're able to deliver services directly in about 160 countries and our ability to look at the entire portfolio from consulting to design, to deployment of technology, and then the ongoing support of that and then the managed services piece of that. We feel we're in an interesting position to be able to help our customers through any parts of the transformation they're going through and those conversations have been really relevant to them. I think they've really appreciated that. A coming together of Dell, EMC and the role services plays has really been fascinating. We're excited about that role. You heard it earlier today with Michael and David Goulden at the keynotes, they really emphasized the importance of services and bringing this technology and helping our customers through their transformations. We're excited about playing that role and helping them through that process. >> What's on your customers' mind as they begin to realize this digital transformation? What are you hearing from them? >> It's interesting. I've been fortunate this morning to have had three customer meetings today. Last night we had a great customer appreciation event. The one thing that I'm finding, if we go out and say, "Here's the story," I don't think we are doing the right service. I think what you really have to get to is that you have to first listen to customers because they're at various stages of that journey. Where they are in their digital transformation. Some more mature companies are further along, others are just starting this journey. If we come out and say, "Here's the cloud story," you could offend people who are further along in their journey or you could just be talking over people who haven't started. I think the most important thing that we're finding is making sure that we're listening to our customers. It's the most important thing we can do within the services team. A big part of that is listening to where they are and what we're finding is, we just did a study, and we found that of the companies who identified themselves, less than 5% are identifying themselves as mature in that digital transformation. Which means that there's still a long way through a process that they have to get through on their digital transformation. We're pretty excited about the role that we can play in helping them with that. We feel right now what we're hearing from customers is, the opportunity is there to help them. They are looking for answers. They are looking for best practices. They are looking for, What are others in our industry doing so that I can help apply that to my executive team to convince them to take the journey, to make the investment of the transformation we have to go through. It's really kind of fun to listen to them. It's exciting that they want this right now. You know that they have to do something. It's exciting that we can play a role in that. >> Kevin, let's talk a little bit about the transformation inside of Dell EMC. EMC was a very respected, but very big, professional services even before the merger, with a lot of products, the cover and the storage, hybrid cloud, just a lot of services. Combine that with Dell. The workforce has to be overwhelmed by the sheer depth of services offered by the new Dell EMC. How has that transformation occurred and how's it going inside? >> I appreciate you asking, because I think that's one of the things we've been able to share with our customers. Is the transformation we just went through. From the combination of Dell and EMC coming together. You're right, there's a little bit of history from both companies. One of the things that we've wanted to do is preserve the value that we've created to those customers in the different segments, where Dell has been great on the server and client side of things. You can't lose that intimacy and the relationship that they had with those customers. It's really an important piece. You certainly couldn't change the model that EMC has traditionally had, of the large enterprise customers. We wanted to make sure that intimacy and that relationship with those customers are really important. So we've been blending the best-of as we brought the teams together. If you look at the leadership team and the people we've put in leadership roles, and as we looked at bringing the portfolio together, it's been a bit of best-of-breed, if you will as we've landed now the Dell EMC team. Our team members across the globe, there has been a little bit of now assuring of, What does this mean? and the complexity of this large transformation. We've asked them to do one thing for us. Focus on delivering services to our customers. The rest will fall into place. Just stay focused on our customers and all of the indications seem like we're moving in the right direction and our team members across the globe have certainly done that. I think that was a big guiding principle to ask our team members, "Stay focused. Don't let the noise distract you from the execution and the service we have to have with our customers." >> A lot of weapons, a lot of tools in the toolbelt before pulse merger. What are the folks in the field, the consultants, what are they most excited about when they are talking about visible transformation? >> There's a couple of things that we're really excited about part of this. The first starts with the market. We talked a little bit earlier, customers in the market are asking for help in their transformation. It's no longer, "Hey we think you should transform." Now it's customers in the market asking for help of some sort. We're excited about that. The first thing is, when the market drags you into things, you get excited about that, as opposed to trying to push something. The second, most of our consulting team are pretty excited with now having the identity of being the place to go to help in the transformation. We think that that's a very important role that we're going to play. We're aligned very well with our core sales teams. We're going in now with one campaign that's consistent across the whole company. IT transformation, digital transformation, workforce transformation and security transformation. That not only talks about it from a product portfolio, but all the way through in the consulting side. We know that there's a role that we can play to help our customers. They were actually pretty excited about the alignment piece, and the demand that's coming from the marketplace in this. >> Can you talk a little bit about the learning that you're discovering and you mentioned best practices. What has emerged and is there a template for, This is how it happens in healthcare. This is how it goes in financial services. >> It's interesting that you bring that up, actually. Some of the customers earlier today, one in healthcare, a couple in financial institutions. They were asking that question a little bit. Without sharing obviously the confidentiality of our customers, we are able to aggregate what's happening in those industries. Those two industries in particular, especially the more proven companies, their ability to move quickly through that transformation is probably going to take a little bit longer. They have to deal with confidentiality and financial and legal requirements in their industry that they have to make sure they preserve that value, that trust that they have with their customers. For them to move too quickly through that transformation could jeopardize their value proposition in the marketplace. I think you're seeing those industries and some of the traditional customers taking an appropriate pace. That pace and sharing of best practices could start with modernization of the infrastructure. It could start with, I want to change my operating model within how I operate IT. It could be my endpoint. I want to make them more trusted, more valuable, et cetera. It could start the transformation from a workforce standpoint. We're pretty excited about where that's going and the ability to share that with our customers. I think what we're seeing is not one template is perfect, but when you think about the transformation in three areas: IT infrastructure, the operating model of IT and then what you want to do with your applications, I think those things become really critical. You think about the projects that are probably pretty consistent across every single industry today. >> You mentioned that most companies really get this. That they are on board. But there have to be some that are resisting. What's your advice for those, even on a workforce level, that are being curmudgeonly or resisting because it's new? >> It's a great question. We would be saying, "A successful project looks like this." First you have to have executive-level sponsorship. You need somebody at the executive level in the company, whether that's the CFO, CIO, somebody who takes sponsorship for this transformation. That basically can shepherd through bouncy times through that. One of the things that we would say for a company who might be a little bit reluctant, Who is that sponsor? Who is that person who is going to help shepherd the transformational message at the executive level with the company? The second piece: allow participation of the business. It's not an IT project anymore. This is a project that's a shared project. It's the business and IT coming together and being able to share that experience and trade-offs of priorities of what's important and not. Build the project governance in place to allow you to be successful in these projects. We think those things, helping some of those customers that might be a little bit reluctant, those are the things you need to put in place. Then what we've been suggesting for some companies who might be a little bit reluctant, take a piece of this. Find a pilot. >> Experiment. >> Find a proof point. Give yourself a chance to validate some of your assumptions, some of your guiding principles, to be able to demonstrate to your executive sponsor, If we make these changes, this is the value that you can get. Those, I call them assessments or pilots or small-sample areas, have seemed to resonate really well with some of those customers that might be a little bit reluctant to begin that journey. >> Can we talk about the inverse? The customers that might be a little bit too excited. DevOps the world and what's that conversation? That education conversation. What has that been like? >> That's actually probably the harder one, right? Where they probably want to go at a pace that might be a little bit challenging and risky for them. How do we make sure that that risk has been balanced appropriate? What we want to do is again, share some of those best practices in those environments and say, Here's three other companies in your industry. Here's how fast they went. Here's what they have tackled. We never want to slow down a customer. If they want to take the risk, our job is to make sure we expose the risk so that they can make the best decisions. This has to be a customer decision. Our job, I think, is advise and present the risk and the opportunity associated with the speed or the pace that they want to go. I think that's the most important thing that we can do. >> Kevin, thanks so much. This has been great. >> It's been fun. Thank you very much for the time. We really appreciate it. We're pretty excited about the role we can play within Dell EMC services to help our customers through this transformation. Enjoy the rest of the week. >> Thanks, you too. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for my host Keith Townsend. We'll be back with more at Dell EMC World after this. (techno music)