>> theCUBE presents Dell technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, from the show floor, the Venetian in lively Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We're having a little reunion with our guests that we haven't seen in a couple years. Please welcome back to theCUBE, Doug Schmitt, President of Dell Technologies and Services. Alex Barretto joins us as well, the Senior Vice President at Emerging Services and Technology. Guys, it's great to see you in 3D. >> I know great to be back. >> Yes. >> Its Awesome to be back. >> Isn't it great? >> And fantastic. >> It is. >> We were talking about how we have to get our sea legs back about, even just interacting with in life. >> That's exactly right. Being able to see everybody be back in person at these events. And it's great to see everybody it's like coming back to family. >> It is, it's been a reunion since Sunday. One of the, obviously the last two years have been quite challenging for everybody, for customers. Dell is coming off it's best year ever in FY22, over 100 billion in revenues, 17% growth year over year, astounding growth. The voice of the customer is always strong here at Dell technologies. But Doug, talk to us about some of the things that have been going on services perspective and how you really stepped in to help customers across industries succeed in the dynamic times we've been living in. >> Well. Yeah, thank you, and you're right. Coming off a very great, great year. And I think as you can see behind us and in the room here just great solutions for our customers. And that's what it's about, delivering the outcomes. And service is a huge piece of that, of making sure we bring all that together, deliver the outcomes our customers are looking for. If you look at the overall services organization just to take a step back just a little bit, we are a team around over 60,000 folks in 170 countries. And look, it's about this life cycle of services we provide. Everything from consulting to deployment to our support, manage services, security, education services, residency services, all the way to asset sustainability and recovery. So we can get all of the material back in and recycle it. So we have a great suite of services, and it's bringing all that together for the customer again to deliver with the products and the solutions and the software, the outcomes they're looking for. You asked a little bit about just to kind of double click that, about what our customers really saying, kind of what they're hearing, what we're hearing. I think there's three things. When I think about what they're looking for, one is the trusted advisor. You heard this during Michael's keynotes speech, that is key. They're navigating through the digital transformation, hybrid cloud, all of these things. Determining what they need to do to deliver their outcomes. And Dell can bring that trusted advisor status to them. So we can consult with them professional services, help bring that. The second thing is really around that life cycle services I talked about, all those different services that we bring. We allow our customers clearly the choice to say what pieces of the services do they need. Now we think we can bring everything together into a managed solution for them, but if there's certain pieces that they need to just, double click on, we can help with that. And then look, the third item that I'm hearing and that we can bring and that we have for them is flexible consumption. They can choose the way they want to consume the technology. You consume it by usage. You can consume by month, by quarter, or if you want the stability of long term contracts one, two, three years we'll do that. So really it's about trusted advisor and choice to help them deliver their outcomes. >> So a lot changed during the isolation economy. You guys obviously had to support new initiatives. First of all, budgets got squeezed in 2020. Then boom back, so they sort of slingshot it, real focus on obviously client solutions, remote work, endpoint security, identity access, VDI. Now in the post isolation economy, it's like, okay, some of the stuff at HQ you maybe needs to be updated, maybe we're rethinking the network. So, what are you hearing from customers? Where are they in their digital transformations, Alex? You know, what's hot. >> Yeah, so we actually recently created an emerging services group. And the reason for that is exactly what you're alluding today. So we actually talked in that group everything in this emerging. So APEX, telco, edge, data management, all the things our customers are asking for and we are convening new solutions, new services to meet their needs, and all that is housing in one unit, and we're thinking about the product management, the technology that goes with it, and we're working partnership with our customers to actually build and develop solutions that they're looking for. >> Yeah, there was no as a service really. I mean, you could do it with financial machinations before, now it's becoming much more mainstream. I mean, I know it's not a hundred percent of your business and maybe never will be. >> Yeah. >> But that's a whole new mindset. What else is changing in the business that you guys see? >> Well, yeah, I think there's, I think that's what comes back to what we saw, first of all we listen to the customers, follow what their needs are, and you're right. As far as the, as a service, I think it's back to that choice. If they want to purchase or consume as flexible or as needed, we'll do that. They want the contracts, the standard CapEx model, we'll do that as well. Look, there's three things. Professional services is really changing as well. We're seeing the needs again for going in and being able to deliver the services to customers, but also manage that in a lot of cases, they're asking us to take the workloads from them so that they can go and change their transformation, and their digitalization is one of the things that we're clearly hearing. And I know you're hearing the second one, security. I mean that is top of mind for everyone. And I, we have launched a lot of services around this. Some of those like MDR or Managed Detection Response our cyber vault, as well as our APEX cyber recovery services as well that we've announced here. So security's number two. And then the third one is this sustainability, again very important for us and our customers, is we have a 2030 goal around this as I'm sure or you've heard, but more importantly, that's something I know my team and I and everyone at Dell, that's a great personal feeling too. When you're getting up and you're doing something that you know, is right, really just doing it to help the customers as well is just an extra added benefit. So those would be the three things professional services changing, doing more and more of the manage take workloads off, two is the security, and the third is the sustainability clearly. >> We talked with JJ Davis yesterday, and we're talking a lot about ESG and how a tremendous percentage of RFPs come in wanting to know what is Dell technologies doing from an environmental, social, governance perspective. That it's really your customers wanting to work with companies like Dell who have a focused clear agenda on ESG. One thing that I'm curious when you talk about the increase in advantage services, the great resignation. We've all, that's been happening now for a couple years. It's probably going to persist for a while. Customers suddenly, labor shortages and the supply chain issues. How have you helped organizations deal with some of the challenges that they're going through from a labor perspective is that why one of the reasons the managed services is we're seeing an increase there. >> Yeah. I'm sure that can be and I wouldn't doubt that, you mean in terms of our customer is wanting more and more the managed and the professional. Yeah, I think that is a piece of it, but I also think part of that is that speed matters and customers are looking for the additional assistance to take things off, that they may have traditionally done so that they can, they can really get this transformation, this hybrid cloud, getting things moving very, very quickly. There's just so much to be done in terms of data management and bringing information to their end user customers. And they want to spend more time doing that. And so I'm hearing that more, but you are right. There's absolutely, there's absolutely the times where we have a residency service, we, and that has been growing very, very fast. And that tends to be why they ask for it, is because people have either left or are leaving >> Alex, Doug really kind of alluded to an area that I want to probe a little bit. And it's that's, I was talking to Jen Felch recently she's going to be on soon. And the, you mentioned security, Doug, as the top initiative clearly. And the distance between number two is widening, but number two is cloud migration. Now I asked Jen about that, because internally Dell has its own cloud. And I said, how do you interpret that? Or how do you, what's your second priority? She goes, well, I would translate that into modernization. So we're essentially building our own cloud is how I interpreted it. So my question to you is, are you seeing that with customers, how closely do you work with your own IT to take those learnings to your customers? And what does modernization actually mean to your customers? >> Yeah, that's a great question. It's actually the essence of why we're here. Talking to our customers and showcasing what we do within services, what we do within IT. Jen and I talk very often about her roadmap, our roadmap, and we want to showcase that to our customers because it's a proof point, it's a proof point of how they can do the transformation on their own. Do we have a whole slue of products from a services standpoint that are tied with what Jen is doing as well? And that's what we bring to market. So whether that's on APEX, that we announced right here two days ago, the cyber recovery services available now, that's working very closely with our IT counterparts. And we have a whole slue of roadmap with high performance computing, to be announced soon and machine learning operations, all that is to meet the customer needs, and what they're asking for. And if you look at the emergence of needs from a customer standpoint, it goes in a multitude of uses. We have telco customers, they have very specific needs and we're looking to meet those needs. We have the traditional customers, which may be going at a slower speed in their adoption of the cloud, we're there to help them. And we're all about to hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is a hundred percent of our strategy. So whether you want to go cloud based, whether you want to be OnPrem or you want to be hybrid, we're there to solve your needs. >> What's the partner story in terms of delivering services, we know that the Dell technologies' partner ecosystem is massive. We know how important partners are to the growth. I think I saw 59 billion in revenue came through the channel last year alone. How do you enable partners to deliver some of those key services that you talked about? >> To leverage the partners for the, on the broader ecosystem for that? >> Yes. >> Yes, well, you're right. We do have a very large partner network and we're very flexible on that. Again, it sounds like we are flexible in everything and we are by the way, for our customers and our partners, 'cause look it is about delivering first of all, how our customers want their service. I do like this idea and we talk about modernization, transformation, digitalization all these things are kind of the same thing about going in and looking about how we're improving the overall infrastructure and these outcomes. And to that end, we work with the customer on what they're looking for. And then we'll either do a couple things with working with the partners. Either we take prime and we'll take that and take the pieces that they can deliver and we can deliver together. But again, it's with the customer in mind of how they want to do that, working with the customer. We do have code delivery services as well. And look, we're very open with our partners about if they want to be prime and then leverage those same lifecycle services we have. What this is about is about getting this transformation and this technology and these so into the hands of the customers in the best way possible. >> So, I could white label as a partner. Could I white label your services? >> We don't have the white label. >> Okay. >> We do have co-delivery. >> Okay. So that's what I could do. I can say, okay, I'm bringing this value. Dell's bringing that value. You're visible to the customer. >> That's correct. >> Which is I presume a benefit to the customer. >> Correct, correct. >> The trust that you've built up. >> Now that gets, just the white label you would say like our ProSeries, ProSupport, ProDeploy, ProManage, all of those things. Isn't a white label, but at the same time our customers especially in the professional service side of it could be the prime, which would be the same thing as a label. >> How are client? This is kind of interesting thought I had the other day. How are client services changing? Do you see the point where, I mean, maybe you're doing it already. It's just a full manage all my client devices and just take that away from me, and Dell you take care of that and I'll pay you a monthly fee. >> Well, yeah, we are seeing that. And one of the things that they like the best about is doing that management, is bringing kind of the AI and the BI to it that we can with our support assist and all of the data that we give back, we're actually able to help manage those environments much better. And in terms of an end to end, keep things updated, upgraded, manage it. But more importantly, what we see when we do have those client managed services end to end, the customers are actually coming back and asking us to help improve their operational performance. And, and what I mean by that is, all of a sudden you'll see things where the trouble tickets are coming in 'cause we're seeing that. And we're actually going back in with that information to help alleviate or improve their operational processes, so that they're able to function and spend more time on their business outcomes >> And reduce that complexity, sorry, Dave. >> No worries. How about the tip of the spear, the consulting piece? What are you seeing there? Are we going through and as we modernize, are we going through another wave of application rationalization, people trying to figure out their digital transformation, what to double down on? What to retire? What to sun set? What's that like? >> Yeah, I think it's similar to the managed service conversation we just had. It's really pivoting to technology. Even in the services space, it was all about our physical footprint. Five, six years ago, our physical capabilities, the number of people, depots et cetera that we had, right now, our customers and even internally what we're pivoting towards is technology. They want to know how are you going to do is solve our problems, whether it's consulting or managed services using technology. Precisely to the point that Doug was making, because they want insights, value add from the services we provide, not just consult for me, not just manage my service, but provide me value added service on top of that so that I can actually differentiate my services, my solutions and that's where we're building, that's what delivering really leveraging technology. You look at the number of software engineers we have, data scientists, the algorithms we're building now inside services. It's really become a technology hub, whereas it used to be a physical hub. >> I'm just going to, oh, I'm sorry please. >> No, go ahead. >> Follow up. >> Where it's really headed is, if you look at this it's going to become this outcome based services. When I talk about outcome based services, it's not managing just the IT infrastructure, that you have to do, you have to modernize and transform. However you want to say that to customers. But in addition to that, they're looking for us to take that information and help change their business models as well, with the data and the and the insights we're getting back. >> Their operating model. >> Absolutely. >> But changing that in the last couple years and pivoting over and over again, to survive and to thrive, talk to us, Alex about the emerging services and how you've maybe a particular customer example of how you've helped an organization radically transform in the last two years to be competitive and to be thriving in this new economy in which we're living. >> Yeah. I think a great example is Dish. If you look at Dish, they're actually launching one of the first Open RAN networks. Leveraging the power of 5G. And we're working very closely with them on the services and solutions to enable them to deliver that service to their customers. And that's a new area for us, a new area for them. So we're actually working together in innovating and coming up with solutions and bringing those to the market. It's a great example. >> Lot of collaboration guys, thank you so much for joining us. Great to see you back in person again after couple years, probably three. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thanks guys. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin here, you're watching theCUBE's live from Dell Technologies World 2022. Stick around. Be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Dell tech world 2022. This is the cube alive. My name is Dave Volante. We're here with our wall to wall coverage. This is day two. We actually started last night. Uh, the, the cube after dark John furry is here. Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson. We're gonna talk about apex. The business value of apex flex on demand. Darren fedora is here. He's the senior vice president of Dell financial services, and we're joined by a customer and a partner Jud Barron is R and D infrastructure architect at Silicon labs. And Steve end is the regional VP of copy center comp computer center. I say that like I'm from Boston guys. Welcome to the queue. >>Thank you, >>Darren, take us through what's going on with, with apex, you got custom solutions, you know, people are gonna ask, is this just a financial gimick? What is this? >>No gimmicks, no gimmicks, Dave. So I think when we think about technology, historically customers purchased, they bought and they owned and they may have financed it and paid over time, but it was really an ownership model, especially in infrastructure and apex is about subscription. So think about Dell apex, as you can either buy, or you can subscribe to your technology and under apex subscription, we have options for custom based solutions or an outcome base. And I know today we're gonna talk about flex on demand and, and custom based solutions. So it's a high level pay for what you use when you use it with a high level of choice and flexibility. All >>Right, Steve, I'm gonna ask you to play little >>Co-host all right. I like >>This. Okay. So add some color color commentary, Jud, tell us a little bit about, uh, Silicon labs. I'm really interested in what your requirements were, your challenges and kinda why you landed on, on apex. Sure. >>Uh, Silicon labs is a semiconductor company were headquartered in Austin, 10 Xs, uh, just under a billion dollars a year right now. And, uh, at any ed shop or, uh, that, that people who are doing electronic design automation, that's not just in the semiconductor industry, but we have these HPC farms who are running, you know, millions of jobs a day. And the, a balance that you have to strike when you're doing capacity planning in one of these environments is we have these things called tape outs, and that's where we're finishing a project and there's a much higher volume of jobs that we have to run and you have to decide, do we buy for peak or do we, you know, come under that some amount and say, oh, we're gonna buy 80% of what we think >>As an over, over, over under, right. Do we over buy for peak normally, right, correct. Right >>Hard. One is geo Overy the under buy. It's always a hard decision. >>There's a tradeoff. Right? And, and so the, the challenge there is that you'll end up kind of linking the time and potentially miss a tape out window. And there's costs associated with that because you work with the Foundry and you kind of schedule based off that tape out when you're gonna deliver the photo mask to them. So anyway, the point is we in the past using a traditional like camp X, we're gonna buy a bunch of servers. We, we tend to undershoot whatever our peaks are. Cause we may have a peak every couple of months during, you know, these tape outs. Uh, but you know, sometimes tape outs, slip. And so one slips two months, another one comes in a little bit early and now you have multiple tape outs in the same months. And what was gonna be a, a small, uh, difference in from peak to what you actually purchased ends up being a big peak. And, uh, the thing that was interesting to us about flex on demand is the ability to have a commit rate that, you know, the customer can work with Dell financial services to figure out is that 80% is at 60% whatever. And they give us additional servers that we pay just when we're using them. Now I'm somewhat oversimplifying the process. Um, but we're, we gotta talk about that, >>But, but the point is, if I understand it correctly, that infrastructure was dominoing the, the time to tape out in a negative way, and you you've been able to address that more cost effectively. >>It, it can, it, it has on occasion. And so this, this basically gives us a way to lever to pull, to say, well, we can spend some additional OPEX this month and open up this additional capacity. So it's not like bursting to the cloud. Exactly. Uh, because I mean, you have to have the equipment in your data center already for you to be able to use it. But, um, it's under a traditional acquisition model. It's, it's just not a, a, a thing that was available to us before and looking at leasing or other types of, uh, you know, financing was wasn't really attractive previously, but the flex on demand model, when we first heard about it, we're like, that's very interesting. Tell me more. And we ended up using it in, in Austin, and then we built a whole data center in Asia and did the whole thing on flex on demand and >>Got it. Okay, Steve, uh, talk a little bit about your role what's going on at, at computer center and you know, why apex give us the background? Yeah. >>Um, computer center is a, one of the largest global VAs on the planet, right? Um, we, we have a lot of global and international reach, but at the end of the day, it's about one on one customer of relationships. Um, talking to them, understanding what their challenges are. And we've had a multiyear relationship with Jud. I've known you for a long time. And, and, um, typically that relationship, or initially that relationship was about collaborating, working hand in hand, kind of figure out what the solutions were that best fit their environment to solve their issues they need. And it was typically a procurement, a, a purchase based relationship and, and it worked well for a long time, but it, when Jud posed the challenge to us about kind of more pay as you go, uh, uh, subscription based modeling for, for how he want to do acquire in the future. >>Um, we just, we huddle with the Dell team collectively, um, and, and talked about what we could offer and how we could solve the problem. Uh, apex is a really nice brand today, but this was two and a half years ago, Uhhuh. Okay. So it was a little, we were a little early on on putting it together. I feel good that we were able to, to put that type of solution together for Jud and it's, and it's working today, working wonderful today. And it was good for it's good for the whenever it's good for the customer, the manufacturer and the partner altogether. It's a wonderful solution. >>So you took a little risk, but it worked out and you helped. >>Yeah, that was probably the infancy as we were growing our, as a service, think of this, you know, there's a, a lot of big words out there, Dave, right? As a service utility cloud, it doesn't matter what it is super cloud it's super cloud. It doesn't really matter. Super. This is really Jud was talking about a really important element, which is around flexibility choice. There's uncertainty oftentimes in a, in an environment, but they want to control. They still want have a level of control and leveraging partnerships, being able to deliver flexibility and choice. Don't worry about the words. Don't worry about cloud utility as a service we end up solving the customer need, right? And when we talk about flex on demand, I'll give you a little bit deeper into flex on demand. So when we think about flex on demand, it really is about understanding the customer needs and our capability and Jed reference this, determining what a baseline is. So if you think about your own utility bill, right, you, you go home and even if you're on vacation for a month, I'm sure you went on vacation for a month right. Month at a time. If I ever. >>Yeah, >>I know, but if you leave you your utility bill, even if you don't turn on a light, you still get a utility bill, it's your baseline. So we, we determine a baseline with our customers, with computer center, to understand in your environment, you're gonna use this minimum amount and that becomes your baseline. And that baseline can go as low as 25%. And up to 80% in a environment, it usually is typically in this 70, 80%. And then we determine what is gonna be optimal based on that 25 or above we charge based on the usage on a day to day basis, average by a month. And if you go up one month during your peak, you get charged at that peak. If you then a couple months are lower, then you're gonna pay only for the usage. And so for a customer that's growing has variability or seasonality. >>Um, this is a great model cuz they can still control their environment either within their own domain or um, in a colo. They also have the capability to pick anything within the Dell ISG catalog, any product, configure it to meet their environment, be able to work with a trusted partner like computer center. That it's a solution based on a partner relationship and delivers choice and flexibility on the catalog of anything Dell sells within your control of how you can configure it. So it gives this ability to say, instead of buying and instead of paying a predictable payment, a I E a financing I'm gonna pay for use. Yeah. If I turn on my light switch more or if it's during the summer in Texas where I am the ACS a lot higher. So your utilities go up and if you are a much lower because you're on vacation in Hawaii, maybe you've been in vacation in Hawaii for a month, you're gonna have a much lower and you're gonna hit your baseline. Right. So it gives flexibility choice and it gives the control back to the customer. >>Okay. So the whole ISD portfolio. So you're like the tip of the spear for future apex, right? >>We, we, we absolutely are the tip and that's why, you know, Steve referenced a couple years ago as we were still in our infancy, growing, listening to our customers, listening to our partners, we've evolved to become a more robust program, um, 35 countries today. So we can cover 35 countries over the globe, all ISG you products that are sold with a high level of flexibility and it, and it's Jud and feedback over time that we've continued to evolve this program. Mm-hmm >>So Jud you, if I understood correctly, the business impact to you was gonna better predict predictability. You didn't have to over buy or undery and take all that risk. Is that right? You maybe could quantify. Did you ever quantify that? What can you tell us about the, the business impact? Yeah, >>Sure. So, I mean, traditionally we will, uh, base our capacity demands on, uh, complex calculation that effectively just boils down to number of engineers, like head count, uh, and you know, kind of personas within that. And we figure out, okay, well how many compute do we need? And then we say, okay, well how many tape outs are we doing? And when are those tape outs gonna land? And try to figure out which months are gonna be the hot months and the design teams have to kind of vary their tape out schedules so that they don't pile up all into like July or something. And then there's not enough compute capacity. So with, with something like flex on and where I can turn additional capacity on in our HBC farm, it, you know, we just go in and make some changes to the LSF configuration and say, Hey, you know, now you've got these extra nodes available. >>We don't really have to worry about that as much. Uh, in fact, last year we, we ended up with one month where for us, it was unusual. We had five tape outs, uh, at all land within two weeks of one and a other. And they all finished, which in previous years before we had deployed that that would not have been the outcome things we would've had multiple, uh, tape outs delayed. And you know, that that's a seven figure impact for each one of those commits that we miss with the foundries. So it it's a big deal. >>Yeah. That's real dollars. And >>It is. And you know what else, this, as, as Joe's going through this, we all know their supply chain chain constraints, right? And this solves a lot of supply constraints because Joe, if you would be purchasing today, you'd be buying, you're looking at had, and you're actually having to purchase today where if you go into an apex flex on demand, you don't have that full commitment of having to purchase, but you can get ahead of the supply chain. So you can be looking six months in advance, you can be doing capacity planning and I'm Jed. I'm sure you're doing that leveraging. Like what's my future and not be worried about, I have this huge burden upfront. >>Yeah. And I mean, we have two levers right now. One is we have this extra capacity there. I can, you know, pick up the phone and, and call our Dell rep and say, Hey, I'm gonna modify my commit rate. And so now that's, you know, the new baseline I can use all day every day. Uh, and, and, you know, we still have some burstability and then separately, we can say, we want to expand the contract or, or, or, you know, basically acquire more hardware for additional burst or additional commit. Both of those things are, are options. We only had the, we had to go buy it and we need to know when we have to have it available. So you kind of back into this ordering schedule for, uh, you know, like a traditional CapEx purchase. >>So Steve, obviously Silicon labs is, is leaning again. Are you seeing any other patterns in your customer base, uh, where this is being applied? What can you share >>With us there? Yeah, it's it, I believe this is a fairly horizontal solution. Any customer can really utilize it. I mean, traditionally people would buy for two and three years worth of capacity and slowly consume it over time, but you paid up front. Right. That's how it, that's kind of how it worked. Cause I didn't want to go back to the well year after year after year. Right. So, um, you know, and I, and I think, I think if anything, the, the, the cloud, the hyperscalers has, uh, taught the world, some things taught the industry. Some things, you know, in a, in a perfect world customers like to consume and pay for what they use, you know, and in the increments that they use it as much as possible as closely aligned to that as they could get. And what I see, what I see in this, you know, cuz I, I kind of put solu in my role, I'm putting solutions and customers and bringing those together other right. And, and complimenting that with services of our own. Right. But, but what I see over time that, that almost all the manufacturers and Dells does a wonderful job, but almost all the manufacturers will be delivering technology on a subscription basis. So the more I learn, the more I know, the more I understand about how to deliver those and provide those to customers is better off we are >>Because it aligns with business value. And that's what you're seeing Jud correct. >>Steve made an interesting comment in there. Uh, you know, he was talking about the cloud and for us, there's always pressure to say, Hey, you know, can we burst in the cloud? And for Edda workloads, every time we look at this, it's a data problem. It, it, it's not a computing problem for us. EA workloads tend to generate a lot of data and you know, there's a, there are a lot of tools, uh, you know, there's just a bunch of stuff that you have to have available to run those jobs. And so you have to look at that very carefully. The company that I work for Silicon labs has been around for a long time and we have a lot of development effort. That's been put into automating and simplifying things for our design engineering and trying to, you know, manipulate that and make it to where we can burst just certain jobs out to the cloud efficiently and cost effectively. Hasn't really resonated for us. But the flex on demand thing gave a us the ability to kind of achieve some of that burst ability. I mean, not to the same level of scale of course, but you know, we, we can do that at, you know, our own speed in our own data centers with our own data. And we don't have to worry about trying to, you know, peel an onion and put something new together, make it cloud friendly. It's >>Substantially similar. We gotta go. But to Aaron bring us home. >>Yeah. Hey, I think when we think about Dell, it's about listening to our customers and our partners. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, which we continue to do. We continue to evolve our products and, and apex is around choice and flexibility in delivering to customers an option to pay for what they use. It's a great solution. Appreciate the time guys. >>Great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. All right. Thank you. Good luck. All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave VoLTE for the cube. We've been back with more wall to wall coverage. John furry, you'll be back Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. You're watching the queue >>And.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to welcome back Caitlin Gordon, vice president of product management at Dell Technologies. Caitlin is great to see you again though virtually. >> This is good to see you as well, Lisa. >> Tony Frank is here as well, global client executive at Equinix. Tony, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. Good to be here. >> We're going to be talking about some news. Caitlin, let's go back. You and I, before we started filming, we're trying to remember when did we last see each other of course it was virtual, but just refresh the audience's memories with respect to the catalyst for Dell to go into this as a service offering. >> Yeah, I think we're all losing track of the virtual months here. (all laughs) Go back in time a little bit. Yeah, exactly right. The first actual APEX offers really came to market in the spring in May with our APEX Data Storage Services. And at that time we actually had preannounced, but we're going to talk more about here today with our partnership with Equinix. But if we take a step back, why did Dell talk about this as a project and is now really investing for the future, it really connects to a lot of the conversations you guys have here in theCUBE, right? What's happening in IT. What's happening with our customers is that they're looking for outcomes. Yes, they're predominantly, still buying products today, but they're really starting to look for outcomes. They want to be buying those outcomes. They want to have something that is an operating expense for them. Something that we can take, we as the technology, the infrastructure experts can take on, the management can take on the ownership of that equipment and really enable them to focus on their business. So really consumption-based, usage-based infrastructure, all being elastic resources that Dell owns and manages, but customers can still operate. And of course, one of the first offers was APEX Data Storage Services. >> Talk to me a little bit Caitlin about outcomes. I just want to understand what Dell actually is focusing on for its customers, where outcomes are concerned. >> Yeah, and it's interesting as a company, it's a pretty big transformation for us. We have always been a product led company, but it's not really about the product. So when I talk about APEX Data Storage Services, you're not going to hear me mention a product name or anything 'cause what it's about, it's about offering our customers what they're actually looking for, which is in the case of storage, they're looking for, I want either block or file storage. I want a certain tier. So it was at a higher performance. I want a certain capacity of it. And I want to commit for some period of time. That's it. Those are the questions we ask. There's no product names and sizing, and it's really, really simple. And that's what we're talking about. It's really the beginning of really trying to deliver customers an outcome versus a product. >> Got it. APEX Data Storage Services, this is Dell's efforts to supply managed file and block storage of services. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about some of the things, how does it enable the fast time to value as little as 14 days for your customers? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of really important things we're doing here. We're not just taking the products we had and kind of packaging it up in a new financial model. There's a lot of parts to this. It all centers around the APEX console. So the APEX console is where you start, begin really ongoing manage and experience these outcomes from Dell Technologies. And it starts with selecting the service you want. So if you select that you want APEX Data Store and Services, you've pick your type, you pick your tier, pick your time period, and you pick your size, right? And then you're off to the races. And we will be able to, what we're committing to do is delivering that in this view and as little as 14 days, time to value. And for us, one of the benefits of being able to do this as Dell, we have always really thrived in our supply chain and the ability to have that predictability and being able to deliver things as a service, including storage is really something it's just an extension of what we've been able to do there. And our partnerships with Equinix actually is going to enable us to even look at that further and see what we can do to really bring value to our customers as quickly as possible. >> That speed, that time to value is even more important as we've lived through the last tumultuous 18 months. Let's break into the news now. You guys pre-announced some the partnership with Equinix, but talk to me about with respect to APEX Data Storage Services, what's being announced? Caitlin, let's start with you and then Tony will bring you into the conversation. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, we first released the APEX Data Storage Services in the spring, and we're already enhancing that today. Couple of exciting things. So geographic expansion, so expanding out into additional regions across Europe and Asia who are expanding our support. So we talked about the fact that it's block and it's file. Well, actually on our file capability here in our file outcome, we now will have the ability to support an S3 protocol. So you can do that app development and run your operations all off the same platform. So that's an exciting new expansion there. We're also enabling partners sell-through. Our partners are really, really important, whether they're resell partners or technology partners like Equinix. Partner sell-through is another important piece. And of course, most important for our conversation today is the exciting new announcement of the fact that we are going to offer APEX Data Storage Services available on Equinix facilities all integrated into the APEX console. The fifth question is now, where do you want your APEX Data Storage Services? You can select a Dell provided facility and you get the choice to select the different cities of Equinix locations. And we're going to provide that single bill and experience through Dell, but on the backend, we've worked with Tony and team for months to get this, to be a very streamlined experience for our customers. >> Tony talk to us about this from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're very excited. Caitlin, thank you very much and Lisa, thank you. Very excited to be part of what Dell is doing with APEX and enable enterprise customers to deliver, to get delivered to them at Equinix facilities storage as a service, in addition to additional Equinix capabilities, really enabling agile enterprises to distribute their infrastructure across the world, leveraging Dell product, Dell management, and to get access to partners, to their other footprints, to cloud service providers, et cetera, all within the footprint of Equinix. >> So Caitlin, APEX Data Storage Service in secure colo facilities in conjunction with Equinix, talk to me about what the reception has been from from Dell customers. >> Yeah, it's been really fun. I mean, first of all, when we thought about data center providers are a critical part of us being able to deliver that outcome to customers. And when we looked at the ecosystem of partners it was very clear who we were going to be partnering with. Equinix was really the best partner for us. We all already had been working together in many different ways and matters taking this partnership to the next level and what we've already seen actually all the way since earlier this year, we've had many, many customers coming to us either first step first, it was separately, but now it's actually jointly to say, I'm having a challenge and here's my challenge. And most of these conversations start in one way. I'm getting out of the data center business. And the nice thing for us is that between our two companies, we can solve that, right? We have the combination of the right infrastructure. And with our partnership with Equinix, you partner that with the data center services, you can actually give that full outcome to a customer and we were solving those separately and now we're solving those together. >> The spokes wanting to get out of the data center. If we think about in the last year and a half, how inaccessible the data centers were, Tony, I want to get your perspective on the colo market. And as we look at IT today, the acceleration of it and digital and cloud adoption and getting out of the data centers that we've seen in the last 18 months, help me understand why the colo market is really key today for the future of IT. >> Absolutely Lisa. So focusing on outcomes as Caitlin outlined earlier is a really important part of really how IT has managed this pandemic and thinking about how do we solve for this vast distributed set of employees that we used to have aggregated in a single building or multiple buildings, but really spearheaded in a couple locations. And all of a sudden everything became out in rural America, out rural Europe, out everywhere, employees were spread out and they needed a way for as an IT team to bring together the network, the security and the ability to be very agile and focus on an outcome as opposed to, how am I going to get this next piece of equipment, this next storage device, this next compute system in my data center and add the cooling and the power and all the things that they have to think about. And really it was an outcome. How do I give my employees the best experience possible, my partners that access they need to my systems and the various ways that we interact together? So the colo market as a whole has been really changed dramatically through the whole pandemic. And if you didn't know Zoom two years ago, it's your best friend now, or it's your least favorite way to do business. But the only way we have to do business in the world that we're living in today. >> A lifeline, and here we are zooming with each other right now. Let's talk about, Tony I want to stick with you. Let's talk about this partnership between Dell and Equinix. Why is this such a compelling partnership? Talk to me about that from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're so excited to be able to be partnered with the number one pro leader and provider of infrastructure and infrastructure services. We have really been a niche provider for the last 15 years. We're a 21, 22 year old company, and we focused on developing ecosystems. And those were at first the internet. We brought the telecom providers together to make the internet work. And then on top of that started enabling things like digital trading, also enabling all sorts of ad exchanges so that you see the banner ads that apply to you when you go to a website. And so we were well known within those ecosystems that we worked within, but getting out to the enterprise has been a big challenge. And Dell brings us those relationships. They bring that expertise, that trusted advisor kind of role. And so being able to extend our sales team and really leverage what Dell has done across small, medium, large, and very large enterprise is a real win for us. And it allows us to achieve a scale that we wouldn't have been able to achieve by ourselves without breaking the bank, trying to hire people and trying to get them familiar with those customers. And so Dell brings us into that. We're able to complete what I call the three legged stool, the compute, the storage, and now the networking aspects can be dealt with in a single conversation around an outcome. And APEX gives us a chance to really be agilely available as Dell's customers define that for themselves and to deploy the infrastructure where they need it and to achieve those outcomes that they're trying to get to. >> So some ostensible value that Equinix is getting by the Dell partnership, He said, pulling us into the enterprise, facilitating that scale. Caitlin, talk to me about this from Dell's lens. What makes this partnership so compelling for Dell and the future of it as a service? >> I'm laughing as Tony's talking through that 'cause it tees it up perfectly. From Dell's perspective, when we looked at data center providers, one of the challenges for us is we're a global IT provider. So we had to partner with someone who understood what it meant to operate and manage data centers at a global scale and locations all over the world. There were very short list to choose from. Once you look at it from that lens, but more importantly, and what Tony, you already hit on, the networking, the interconnects that we have in our partnership with Equinix are incredibly valuable. 'Cause ultimately, although customers start going to a colo facility because they want out of the data center business, they don't want to be managing racks and power and cooling and all of that, oftentimes what actually the value they find once they get there and why they stay and grow is those interconnects, the ability to connect to other tenants in these facilities and the ability to connect into the hyperscalers and the richness of those interconnects with Equinix was truly unmatched. And that's why it's been such an important partnership for us. >> Tony, what's been some feedback from the Equinix customer base. >> Well, it's really funny. I spent half of my time trying to figure out with my team, how we're going to solve for storage as a service, the next geography, the next product. But the other half of the time is spent who on the team is the right person to go pair up with the Dell team and get the Dell team brought into a discussion. And it's going by directionally right now, the volume is picking up. The velocity is picking up and it really seems to be like a snowball, just going down the hill, it's just picking up speed. And with every interaction we're gaining trust with each other, we're gaining competence in what the message is and how to solve for it. And we're working out the various ways, in a predictive way, what are most people asking for? But the wonderful thing is there's custom availability to figure out a solution for just about any problem that the IT or infrastructure focus teams in the enterprise are looking to solve for. >> Tony, sticking with you for a final question or two, in terms of the last few months, or have you seen any industries in particular that are really readily adopting this? We've seen so much change across industries in the last 18 months. I'm just curious if you're seeing any industries that are particularly taking advantage of this capability in this partnership. >> Yeah, I would point to highly regulated industries thinking about financial, thinking about governments, and it's not just a U.S. situation. This is a global situation and data sovereignty where that matters to a particular customer is really important that they keep that data in the geography that it needs to stay in is defined by the different governments around the world. You see the financial industry has been a first mover towards electronic trading and really disrupted thankfully prior to the pandemic, the way trading was done because in-person trading wasn't going to happen anymore. And so in the highly regulated world, the healthcare, the financials. Those folks are definitely looking for a solution that has certifications across the board to help them say to their auditors we've got this covered. That's something we're able to bring to the table for Dell. And then it also helps that the first movers sort of towards a digital infrastructure were insurance companies and others that saw the value of leveraging partnerships and bringing together things as quickly and fast as they could without deploying huge global networks to try and make it all happen. They can instead virtually meet in the same room, leveraging our software defined network called Equinix Fabric. It's been a real win for the regulated industries certainly. >> Got it, thanks for that Tony. Caitlin, last question for you. This is Dell managed so single bill from Dell, where can the viewers go to learn more information about this new partnership? >> Delltechnologies.com/apex, you'll learn more about all things, APEX, really the APEX consoles, the experience. So you can learn more about it there. And then of course, your friendly neighborhood, Dell EMC rep, and or channel partner. Now that we've got that partner enablement as well. >> Delltechnologies.com/apex. Caitlin and Tony, thank you so much for joining us today sharing the exciting news about what's new with Dell and Equinix, and what's in it for your customers and your partners. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks Lisa. >> Thank you Lisa. >> For Caitlin Gordon and Tony Frank, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching theCUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies, world 2020. The digital experience. I am Lisa Martin and I got two returning guests from Dell technologies during any back on the cube today, we've got Doug Schmidt, president of Dell technology services. Doug, welcome back to the virtual cube. >>Well, thank you. Thank you for having, uh, Alex and I back again, >>And Alex is here, Alex. Beretto SPP at the planning and technology for Dell technologies. Alex, welcome, >>Happy to be here. >>So there's a lot has happened since we last got to sit together about 18 months ago and Dell technologies world 2019, I think back right, the big bag, um, pre pandemic, but we could actually be not socially sense. Talk to us, talk about what's going on with Dell technology services. You gave us a great update then what's going on now and now you guys have 60,000 services and it folks you're working delivering services in 170 countries. Give us an update. >>Well, yeah, so look, it's really about, uh, Dell technology services, enabling our customers to effectively adopt and leverage and sustain their it investment bottom line, helping our customers get the most out of what they're looking for out of their it solutions and making sure we deliver that for them. And as you stated, the size of the organization, I had the privilege of leading that team of 60,000 direct and partners in 170 countries. We provide that service and over 55 languages and really we cover services from the edge to the core. So everything in between, and it's an end to end service, meaning we can help with consulting a deployment managed services, education services, right down to the support side of it. And that really gives us a lot of flexibility to help our customers deliver what they need. And it's really about helping them navigate the digital journey, right? Uh, it really is helping them pivot to the new business model we're seeing out there. Uh, especially today, considering as we said, last time we were sitting down together. Now we're doing this virtually, everyone's going through this transformation in addition to moving more to the edge and hybrid cloud. So it's, it's a, it's as important as ever for services to be there for our customers. That's what we're doing every single day. >>And we'll unpack a bit more. Some of the things that you've been doing since 2020 has started and made all these changes, but Alex, let's go to you for a little bit services, strategy services, technology what's going on there >>Really do you think about our physical footprint, quite a few countries as you pointed out. And if you look, we have everything from consumer all the way to the large enterprise. So we're fully perspective. And then if you look from our digital beach, we have massive digital reach, which is really quite unmatched. And actually that's where the technology piece really comes to shine. You think about it. We have 200 million assets in the field today. Those assets are generating 22 terabytes of data per day. That's a massive set of AI engines to generate customer insight. Last year alone, we were able to predict 3.7 million issues before they occurred and then take proactive action on those issues. And that's just one example, but we're really messy in our software engineering capabilities. Building tools enable our customers to drive their own actual digital transformation to do we do this across the entire services life cycle. So everything from consulting to deployment to support, to manage services. >>Excellent. Thanks for that, Alex. So Doug now let's kind of dig into, what's been going on in the year of 2020, the year of what's next lot of changes and big challenges for customers in every industry, you know, seven months ago, trying to figure out how do we survive in this mode, the massive shift to work from home to remote devices everywhere. Talk to us about how Dell technologies has responded and helped your customers to survive and get to that thrive state in this crazy time. >>Yeah, well, no, you're right. And it was a, it was something that happened very, very quickly obviously to all of us globally. Um, and these events in 2020, it really brought us even closer to our customers. We've always listened very closely, made sure we were in tune with that. Uh, obviously when all of this shit, uh, we were there for them, um, and we had to rapidly challenge and change, uh, how we delivered our service in this dynamic environment. We were able to do that. We have an incredible team that obviously went to imagine that with 60,000 folks, uh, changing our service offerings, so where we may have gone, uh, on site or customer, we then set up a Depot, uh, so that we were able to do that safely. We were able to get our PPE equipment out to the field service agents that needed to be in a data center and make sure we were following all the protocols. >>Uh, we leverage our five integrated global command centers. These are strategic hubs. We have around the world to really monitor and help, uh, and track all of this. So we were able to do that. That was, that had been digitized years before. So we were able to, to do all that safely, uh, really this was about going in then and helping our customers mitigate the impacts that they may have had helped them through that, whether it was through deployments, being virtual, getting them the systems that they needed and just helping them through their critical, uh, environment and changes. >>What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers? Because, you know, we talked about this massive pivot for everyone and the breadth of services that you cover from consulting to managed services to education. What were some of the things that were really, um, the highest need that you saw from customers, especially when this first happened? >>Well, when it first happened, it was clearly the working remote, right. And helping everybody do that and doing it virtually making sure that, uh, like I talked about, uh, making sure they have the systems, making sure connections for okay. If the centers were able to handle all of that and doing all that in a fashion, in a safe way for our team members and our customers team members that was first and foremost priority was the safety of everyone. Uh, once we had gotten through that, I'm going to say, you know, look no gauge exact. Uh, but I would say starting beginning of summer, you know, maybe may what we started seeing then is the people really actually pivoting even more into their transformation. So they weren't doing their digital transformations. Our customers were, and they were really looking for strategic guidance and on their planning. >>And so we set up where our consultants were delivering a half day accelerator workshops virtually to help them solve their it challenges that they may have had. We also, uh, help them understand what we add in, in the space of unified workspace as a complete solution that helps them deploy, support, manage all of their end user devices so that they can achieve full productivity in this new environment. And they were asking for it to be simple, how do we simplify a lot of this and how do they simplify that via our managed services capabilities? And so we were working through that again, setting up these virtual workshops and having them understand what those capabilities were and how we could help them through that. And then look, they were also as, you know, um, financing, financing options. How can we do this as a service, all these different methods that we were helping with as well. It was, it was really a great, uh, in the sense of us stepping up to help our customers. And we were there for him. >>And we talked about the digital transformation guys last year at Dell technologies world, that Dell technologies was undergoing. Let's talk to us about what is going on with that digital transformation that Dell has undergone and how technology services or other services technology is helping to play a role in that, especially in the last six, seven months. >>Yeah, it's amazing. We actually do this every day for our customers, but as you pointed out, we're actually undergoing fast with everything that's happening with our customers. Some of the insights that we learn in house, if you look at services, we invested quite heavily on software engineering, the number of software engineers that we have now with inside the services, visit units at an all time high. If you look at the number of data, scientists and PhDs that we have brought in, again, all time high, it really focused on developing our AI engines that we use both internally and externally driving digital transformation. A couple of examples of that. If you look at something called PCI, which is an proactive, uh, the proactive case intelligence, it actually looks at, uh, the entire services journey that our customer has. And we're able to detect and put information in front of agents at the right time, the right information then actually enables them to deliver a better customer experience. >>We've actually seen through the implementation of PCI, a 10% reduction to the time that we spent engaging with customers in at the same time and improvement in seaside, the tune of approximately 130 basis points. So we're on a productivity improvement, which helps us internally as well as obviously benefit for the customers. Another thing we're doing is actually digitizing our entire services processes. That means everything from consulting to the point of support. So we have a digital variant of what processes should look like. And then real time we're able to actually measure our active processes versus what they should be. And when we detect anomalies, we're able to correct those real time. That again gives us efficiencies internally, but more importantly enables us to deliver a better customer experience. >>And that customer experience is critical, not just for Dell technologies to deliver to its customers, but for your customers to deliver to their customers. You talked about improving the customer experience and some of the impact there, Alex, you think about in the last, in the year of 2020, how we suddenly went from this expectation that we can order anything on Amazon. And it shows up tomorrow to having things be delayed, that we were not anticipating. Talk to me about the transformation you guys are on. We, and we've heard a lot of, um, Dell folks talk about the acceleration in the digital transformation that your customers are undergoing. But if you, if you could walk us through from a strategic vision perspective, you've got the digitization going of the services. We know that a good amount of remote workforce will stay that way for quite some time, but give us a vision into the year 2021. >>Yeah, let's, let's talk about the future because T to your point, look, we have AI today and we plan to continue log any besting AI. We're going to continue to develop new software applications that have our customers to drive that transformation. But if you look forward to exciting areas, so let me, let me name three specifically. There are very interesting. The first is as a service, we actually taken our complete services portfolio and positioning all of it to be available as a service. That's what customers are looking for a very simple way to consume by in consumer service services. And we're doing that transformation and taking everything in transitioning to be available as a service second five G we're fully embracing that so that we can have and deliver cloud services, our solutions in a very simple and easy way and gets denied. >>And Doug wrap us up here with the vision overall from Dell technology services, the demand coming in from customers globally, all of the changing demands and this uncertainty in which we're living in, what does the future of the next year or so look like from Dell technologies services level? >>Well, yeah, as you, as we've talked about like the demand for exceptional customer and employee experiences through all of this is really driving these business model disruptions across the board. And look, we understand customers, uh, need to thrive during all this, and it's rapidly evolving and changing. So we're building our portfolio, uh, quickly to stay ahead of that. Uh, you know, being able to listen to customers and build those services out. So we're doing that as we mentioned earlier, uh, both Alex and I we've talked about the disruption. We're seeing with five G the edge cloud as a service, and this is driving a massive change in the industry, right? And therefore you have, uh, having all the services to help our customers manage through that. And it's really about this convergence, we're seeing capabilities that we provide the lines between, like I call these traditional silos inside support, uh, consulting, managed services, all of that, to being blurred, our customers are really looking for an outcome. >>They're looking for flexibility and some things to be simple. We're helping them achieve that. And like I talked about earlier, our customers want outcomes and they really want to select Dell, uh, for the comprehensive portfolio that we have. That could be everything from PC as a service storage, as a service right into hybrid cloud. So, you know, moving forward, uh, we work very closely, obviously integrated with our product teams, uh, hand in hand. We see that blurring as well. The product is a service. The service is a product. We think Dell technologies is in the ideal position to pull all this together. And we have a clear vision with a world class team are really to help our customers through their transformation, deliver the outcomes. >>Doug, Alex, thank you so much. It's nice to see you again, albeit virtually maybe someday soon, we'll get to be sitting down on a cube desk together again. I hope look forward to it. Thank you. Thank you for and Alex burrito. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world. The virtual edition. Thanks for watching.

>> 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)

>> theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Happy afternoon. Welcome back to theCUBE. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vallante. We are on day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World live from Las Vegas with about 7,000- 8,000 people here. It's been a great two and a half days. Lots of people are still here. We're going to be talking more about Dell Services. I got a couple of guys from Dell Technologies joining us next. Please welcome Patrick Mooney, Senior Vice President of Services Product Management at Dell and Satish Iyer, Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. Good evening. Great to be here to you. >> Happy to be here. >> So isn't it great to be back in person? >> So great. >> Those hallway conversations you just can't replicate it for video conferencing, right? >> Yeah. >> Priceless. >> It is priceless, I agree. Patrick, let's start with you. Talk to us about from a customer's perspective. What are some of the key services they've been looking for the last couple of years particularly, and how has Dell changed its strategic direction to deliver? >> Great question. Customers want outcomes and services are at the heart of outcomes. So when we look at customers transforming we're continually transforming and modernizing what we do and everything we're doing is centered around making it easy to buy, easy to consume and just centered around the customer. >> What are people looking for these days, Satish? I mean, what's the top three or four priorities. And we know cyber's up there. The cloud. One is when customers are consuming cloud, now there is more and more what we call as customers are looking for full stack solutions. So they start with giving me the best infrastructure on the platforms. Now they're saying, "I'm going to use those infrastructure to drive X, Y, and Z. "Now Mr. Dell, can you come and gimme those tags? "So I don't need to worry about anything "and I can actually consume it in the cloud like way." That's been massive for us. >> So, how do you guys respond to that? I mean, things in our little business things change so fast. And we can, but we're little. We can move fast. Customers are saying, okay, pandemic forced match to digital and now we got to figure it out. And now we got to modernize our HQ. How are you able to keep up? How are you changing your strategy as your customers pull you in different directions? What's going on inside the organization to enable that? >> Yeah. I think the key is that we meet customers where they are and help them plot out where they want to be. And then bring them along that journey. And we've really spent a lot of time developing four practices to help get there. One's around data and applications another around multi-cloud, another around workforce and another around security and resiliency. And no matter where they want to be, whether they want to do it themselves. They want us to help them do it or they want us to do it for them, we're there for them and we'll help them get where they want to be. >> Do you have like formal customer councils or how do you actually, especially the last couple years staying engaged with those customers? >> Absolutely. We're always talking to customers. It is critical to the model and we got a lot of ideas and customers have a lot of ideas and we want to vet those and talk through them. So no matter what point we're at in our product development cycle, we're always talking with customers, "Hey, do we hear you right? "Is this the value you're looking for?" And as we're developing it, can you help us test it? And so on. And we do that through regular conversations, field testing, customer insight councils, and it just feels so great to be having face to face conversations again as well. >> What is- >> Oh, go ahead. >> I was going to say, what are some of the things that you've heard face to face this week in terms of the direction, what Dell Services is delivering? >> Well, one big one for sure is that remote workforce is here to stay. And in our workforce pillar we spent a lot of time around how do we make it easy for customers to manage a remote workforce? It's a big challenge. So we've recently we announced here at Dell World, Lifecycle Hub Services where we it's a managed service where we're helping customers manage their entire device lifecycle around their PC. So imagine this you have a new hire joint or somebody leaves, how do you get 'em that PC? Have it ready? Let Dell take care of all the logistics, we'll we'll store it. We'll configure it. We'll send it to 'em we'll take the old machines back, we'll kit it for 'em anything that's needed and fully integrated it from the customer system into our system. So it's all automated. >> Okay. And all the patching, et cetera, >> Everything. Okay. So you got four pillars, data and apps multi-cloud, workforce and resiliency. What you just described, the automation, does IP and what's the IP portfolio look like? How does it map into those four pillars? >> Sure, you want to take that? >> Sure, so obviously when you look at growth areas and services, it's absolutely important for us to develop sustainable IP. If you look at one of the areas where we have invested and we are growing is cloud managed services platform. So Dell is unique in terms of managing our customer services. We actually do full lifecycle management of the customers. So we invested quite a bit of, I would say time and energy and engineering efforts to basically solve problems in engineered way. So the customer cloud managed services platform allows us to actually bring both, you talked about apex before to our other colleagues. So it allows us to both bring apex services to our customers and also allows us to bring non apex services in terms of fully managed to our customers. >> So multi-cloud must be a rich opportunity's probably almost infinite. There's a lot of gaps there for IP development. What are you seeing and hearing from customer with regard to those gaps? >> So one of the key areas when you talk about multi-cloud is we talk to customers about is the solution things we talked about. So we launched, we announced three solutions one we already launched. And the two of them will be announced is customers want that end-to-end outcome, right? 'Cause they are saying, well we are currently where we started today. We announced cyber security as a service. As you guys know, within the current geopolitical climate, cyber attacks are common, ransomware is common. So, and this is something which we are doing today to customers. What customers want is the simplicity of offering. They're like, you can help us with cyber security when something happens I have an insurance policy, so I can actually go I know where my data sets are. I can record from it, but can you streamline it for me? I don't want all the headaches. Can you make sure that it's easily consumable and Dell can take care of everything for me. And we are also investing on other LED solutions like machine learning, high performance compute. And we are also looking at vertical areas. So our customers, especially in telco, Edge and enterprise applications. So we are looking at those as a full stack offerings so that we can actually educate and take our customers on the journey on our MacCloud platforms. >> I going to talk about Dell Services as a facilitator of multi-cloud Chuck Whitton was on stage, He was here yesterday talking about multi-cloud is here by default. Well, Dell wants to change that to multi-cloud by design. How can Dell Services be a facilitator of that transformation that customers in telco or whatever industry have going from, We've got it by default to now it's actually by design, facilitating that? >> Yeah. I'll jump in and let you take it, we have a a robust consulting practice which can help you come in and understand where you're at and where you want to be and design that future. So that it's not, as you said by default, it's absolutely multi-cloud by design. Anything you want to add? >> Yeah. I mean, look again Dell has been doing multi-cloud for a long time. We just didn't call it multi-cloud. I would probably say 2014, 2015, Dell's been there. We know our customers have a choice. We want to operationalize. We want to help our customers run workloads wherever they want to run. Now, we have a term for it. We have a dedicated way of talking about it. And again, more automation more IP development, more software. And again, taking a lot of the people part away from services and driving more innovation, more IPs where we are going to be able to differentiate. >> So you're a large and pretty sophisticated services organization. We've talked about some of your IP. You now bring that to your customers. What are some of the adoption barriers that they have? How are you addressing those, in terms of taking your IP and your ideas? And you probably say, "Hey, we got this, you can apply this". What are they not ready for? That you sort of advise them, okay you got to do, these are some maybe, some out scope things that you haven't talked about or thought about. >> Yeah. I mean, I'll take one. And I know Patrick will probably touch on, I would say two big ones. I can think about the one is data. One is on security, right? I'll give you the data use case. So data has gravity, right? When customers think about, multi-cloud think about solution, think about these services. It's not easy to take petabytes and terabytes of data and shift all over the place. It's very, very expensive. So a lot of their cloud strategy really hinges on where the data is, and how they're going to optimize those data for the outcomes they want to decide. And that's something a lot of our customers initially don't think about it as we actually go and talk to them about this specific use case and application that actually becomes forefront of the discussion. >> Yeah. On the security front, customers are just overwhelmed with the number of options in a very fragmented, extremely important space. So we've tried to make that very easy for them with our managed detection and response services, bringing the best of the industry and Dell Services together to give them a one stop shop managed service, let us watch for you so that you can run your business. And when we detect something, we'll advise you and help you respond. >> What's the tooling like there. I mean, you have, do you have your preferred tooling? Are the customers saying, well we got to use this vendor or that vendor, how do you manage all that complex? >> Of course we have our preferred tooling and we partner greatly with secure works to do it as well as some other company, but that said what's important to us with the service is that a customer meets specific, they're green in five different categories. And if they're green in those categories, then we're good to help them. And if they don't know how to do that, then we'll come in and do a security assessment to help them get there. And just taking what's very complicated and making it easy. >> On the security front. We've been talking about the cyber skills gap, massive skills gap that's been around for years. How is Dell Services facilitator of organizations being able to close that gap? >> Sure. In a few ways, one, we can just do it for you, right? Two, if you want to do it yourself, we can supplement you with security residents to help you manage through the complexity and cross train while as part of your staff. And then three, we have our Dell Education Services where we can come in and train you as well. So lots of different options on how you want to do it. >> Yeah. >> No matter what you choose, we're here for you. (panelists laughing) >> That people option's important. I mean, people being the biggest threat factor that there is, right. >> Absolutely. >> For sure. >> That's probably one of the hardest ones to augment. >> Yeah. I mean, that's the reason why when you look at cyber security customers, want somebody else to manage it because you don't want the same folks making the same mistake on an insurance policy. So they're like Dell, you manage it for me. So I don't have the same actor is doing same things. So I have somebody managing my data but somebody managing my record option. So in case something goes wrong I know it's a different handset different people who are much more relaxed when things go back >> That's always nice to have somebody that's relaxed in a crisis. >> Absolutely. And I think I'll take that in my personal life too. Guys thank you for joining Dave and me talking about what's new with Dell Services the modernization that you're undergoing and how your customers are really helping to evolve this strategy. We appreciate your insight. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you so much for your time. Great seeing you. >> Right. Likewise for Dave Vallante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. This is day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from Las Vegas, stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (bright music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live, this is the Cube coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. I got to get used to that, I'm used to saying EMC World, but this is Dell EMC World, the first year officially as the Dell EMC World, a continuation of our eight years of live coverage, proud coverage with the cube and I'm joined with Paul Gillan, my co-host this week for three wall-to-wall coverage days and our next guest has been on every year that Cube has been in existence, Howard Elias is the president of Dell Services and IT, a good friend of the Cube and senior executive at Dell Technologies and Dell EMC. Howard, great to see you. >> Hey, great to be back. >> You've seen every corner of EMC over the years, you have so much experience and you've been really the captain in holding the wheel on the transaction at close eight months ago, in September of the Dell Technologies, now Dell EMC company, really smooth considering what could've gone wrong, you kind of stayed away from all the icebergs, but yet it feels good. I haven't heard any real horror stories at all, I heard all positive things, the story is great, I just tweeted pretty much my take on the story. Win, consolidate to pre-existing traditional IT, and then have a growth strategy around cloud-native, convert infrastructure, good story. Okay, how is it going? >> You know what, and thank you for that. First of all, great to be with both of you and it's just going great. And I do want to make sure I co-captain the integration together with my great friend and colleague, Rory Read. But really we had the great benefit of Joe and Michael kind of setting the stage. We've talked before on the Cube about the industrial logic of the deal, but frankly, the team has come together in a phenomenal way. We are aligned, we are operating as one company. You've heard Michael and David both talk about better together today, we'll hear more about that from Jeff and Pat and others over the next couple of days. And look, for all of the things that could've gone wrong in a very large combination like this, they went right instead. And the best proof of that is our customers. Our customers are buying more from us, the conversations are richer, they are more strategic, they are more in-depth and they're rooting for us and we're rooting for them. >> Dave and I would sometimes be critical of the EMC, but you guys never really had a bad strategy, you never really stayed out, you never went outside your swim lane with respect to services and what you do. Pure storage, get the arrays, get the software to find a data-center in there, but now with the acquisition, I got to ask, the question is, the portfolio of deliverables that you guys now have and Michael kind of strutting on stage, kind of proud of his new families, he says, the brotherhood or however he puts it, you've got a lot more at your disposal, more in your bag if you will, for services. Especially VMware and NSX doing extremely well. We're going to have Pat as guest here tomorrow. Not a lot of pressure yet to have that cloud story completely baked, multi-cloud is a nice placeholder, but you have a lot more. Talk about where that new growth is coming from in the services. >> Well, specifically on cloud I would say, by the way, and we talk about this a lot, cloud is not a place of computing, it's a style of computing, it's the new way all computing is done and I would say we're a great leader in providing all of that capability in a hybrid fashion, a multi-cloud world. Look, much more on that later, but you said it, we've always believed that where we've been, technology and IT is a means to an end and we're now all about helping our customers with the broadest portfolio in the industry, across those four main transformations, digital, IT, workplace, and security. It's really the story about helping a customer become more digital, become more agile, become more flexible and really in addition to those systems of record that they've been working on for a number of years and we've been helping them, it's really those systems of engagements and the systems of insight that really give that end-to-end view in this new world. >> Howard, I want to ask you, I want to go back to the acquisition briefly because I'm a Massachusets guy as are you-- >> Yes. >> You went through, you were digital during the Compaq acquisition, Compaq or the HP acquisition, both deals that I think we could say generously did not go very well. >> Howard: Yeah. >> What did you learn from that experience that you brought to this integration? >> I'll tell you, and this is really one of the things about what went right. A lot of it is based on experience, you know, what you learn to do right is learning what not to do wrong the next time, and I was engaged in some of those, certainly didn't lead those, but I was engaged with them. But look, we had a lot of things going for us. Joe and Michael completely aligned, business colleagues, respectful friendship over a number of years. Dell and EMC had a strong partnership for a better round of a decade, so we already learned how to work well together. And in the cultures, we understood the way each-other worked. The industrial logic of the deal, the complementary technology portfolio, complementary market and customer segments, the ability to now have scale in a world where scale matters, where customers are looking to drive out cost, efficiency and agility. And look, what Rory and I did is we applied all of those lessons learned. We picked our best people, pulled them out and put them full time on the job. We had rigorous cadence, regular face-to-face meetings with Michael and Joe all the way throughout, kept everybody informed and it's just come together extremely well. >> All right, how about the services you were doing, first talk about the hard news you're announcing at the show and then specifically talk about the digital transformation. Not to put a damper on your messaging, but we're kind of bored with digital transforming, we want to get some meat on the bone. And I like the quote on stage, digital transformation is about IT transformation, I think that's where your bullseye is. So, hard news and then where's the meat on the bone with respect to the IT transformation that's part of that digital transfer? >> Well, first of all, hopefully you won't get too tired 'cause digital transformation is the mantra for a long time to come. We're in the early days, and by the way, to us, digital transformation is really business transformation. It's becoming more software-defined, it's becoming closer to your customers, it's understanding your customers' needs many times before they even know they need it and that's that whole real-time insight analytic AI, machine-learning, all of that is going to be happening. So, we're on that mission big time. And in terms of services, we've described a three-phase journey that will take a couple of years. Phase one, we talked about collaboration where the teams were coming together, learning each other, systems, processes, tools being different, so collaborate, operate as one in front of the customer. We're in phase two right now, integration. We're starting to bring, we have already brought the teams together, but for example, at this show we're announcing bringing all of our services under the marketing umbrella of pro-support and pro-deploy. There are still different systems and tools and entitlement, but we're going to start to bring together that integration where ultimately, systems processing tools come together and that gets to the third phase of unification. And so it's a journey. But throughout that journey we are protecting the value we deliver our customers. Those customers that are used to the service that they get today, the way it's delivered, the people that are delivering it, we are not changing that as we bring our customers along the journey. >> You mentioned a number of times, analytics and the importance of understanding the customer better. Dell EMC does not really have a play in that area, there is no software component that addresses that market, is that a market that you think you would like to address directly or would you do that through partners? >> We actually do that today both directly and through partners, really Pivotal being a key part of the overall Dell Technologies portfolio, we actually have a big data, digital transformation practice as part of our consulting. If you think about our consulting organization where we help in IT transformation, digital transformation, workforce transformation, we work with our customers and partners on security as well. Pivotal is the key part, but we also work with many others and in fact, one of the offerings we're announcing here at the show today is an IOT assessment service. So, something to really work again from base infrastructure because you think about edge, to core, to cloud, how to make sure you aggregate the data, do the real-time analytics as opposed to the edge, and then trend data more and the core and long-time archival in the cloud. >> At that point, I want to ask you about the cloud strategy because everyone in the press, what's your cloud strategy, what's your cloud... I think you guys have a good play. I think the cloud strategy, multi-cloud is legit and hybrid cloud is real, a 100% real. Multi-cloud is still not ready for prime time for a lot of other reasons, but you guys are doing something in the cloud, with disaster recovery and some storage stuff. Take us through the sequence, because you said, it's early innings, I would agree. What are the sequence or the order of operations in terms of the kinds of services that go to the cloud first? >> Well, in terms of what application are services? >> You guys are working with customer zone, what are the customers doing with respect to, what are they going to the cloud for, first with respect to Dell, Dell EMC? >> Again, it gets back to, cloud is not a place. We're not moving things to a cloud, we're actually, all applications, all workloads, all services and processes are becoming cloud-enabled. Whether that's helping the customer in their data center, with the private cloud, a hybrid cloud hosted by a partner or on public cloud and you said it. We actually, with our services organization, we'll actually sit down with the customer, we'll look at their entire application and workload portfolio. We run it through filters of economics, service level, security and performance and from there we build a roadmap with the customer. Which types of workloads make sense in your own private cloud, which do you want to host in a virtue-stream cloud or a partner's cloud or which do you want to do in the public cloud? How about data protection? Do you want to protect the data in the cloud, to the cloud, from the cloud? All of those are conversations we take our customers through and we have many, many, many, not just dozens now, hundreds of examples where we are working with customers on implementing their hybrid cloud strategy. >> Paul, before you go, I've got a question, but I got a question from the crowd, the crowd is watching, thank you for sending the questions on crowdchat.net/dellemcworld. Can they deliver integrated services for on Prime? Reasons people go to the cloud. So, one of the reasons is integration end-to-end. How are you guys delivering some of those integrated services on Prime? Because that's where it started. >> It is starting there and we actually do both, operational services, residency-based services, but also manage services. Again, both directly and with partners based on where we've got capabilities and skills and geography and verticals. We work with our customers to deliver again that continuum. Many customers have the skills to do it themselves, most customers do not. And they want us to augment their skills, again, whether it's operational-residency services or a full-fledged manage service for cloud. >> As the head of services, I want to ask you about the, kind of the odd timing, you came on in September, in November, Dell sold off large part of its services business, business and former Perot systems to AT&T, what was the thinking there? Should we think of that part of the services business as being completely different from that which you-- >> Extremely different. And I Know we get some questions on this, so thanks for asking, it is great to clarify it. The Dell Services Organization, the old former Perot business that Dell had acquired was really more outsourcing, IT outsourcing, some BPO, some APO. Work that we really did not want to continue doing in the new company going forward. Our services are closer to the technology, technology-enablement services, to help the adoption and consumption of our technology and we really work with a broad ecosystem of partners to deliver the more outsourced services, APO and BPO. So, it's very clean from that set, we actually did not divest any of our technology services at all, and in fact, we're investing more. >> That's consistent with what HP did with Point Next, similar kind of, they had the EDS kind of thing, completely orthogonal to your operations, is what you're saying? >> Right and we've got such a phenomenal partner ecosystem that do this very well, each and every day, and all kinds of customer verticals and all kinds of geographies, they really have scale and we do this together with them. >> Okay, tough question, I'll put you on the spot, Howard, but I know you can handle it, if you could go back and get a mulligan from last year at the integration, what mulligan would you take, what would you tweak and change with the integration? >> You know, I'll tell you, I'm actually asked that question a lot and I'm not sure I would change anything. Look, let's face it, did everything go perfect? Nothing ever does. Are there some things that we go bump in the night occasionally? But all the big stuff, if I focus on the major stuff, right, in terms of the company structure, the operating model, the organizational structure of the company, the alignment of the goal to market, the alignment of the services, the product roadmaps and the portfolio, all of that went about as well as it could be expected. >> Talk about the momentum, VMware, I was just commenting in my opening, has a bigger market cap than actually HPE, just on the standalone basis. VMware is central in your services, you mentioned clouds, the great cloud play, recent deal with Amazon Web Services, how are you guys looking forward now? And if you could add some color to the conversations you're having with customers? So, you get a lot of things at your disposal, I'm trying to understand the top areas that customers are engaging you guys are, with respect to the VMware and this cloud-native shift in NSX. >> Actually, the big conversations are exactly that, in three dimensions. One is working with both Pivotal and VMware on the paths and layers, right, so they want to see that platform in place, they want to see the agility, the flexibility, the cloud-native essentials that are necessary to develop and deploy these new applications. By the way, also refactoring existing applications that they're deciding to keep into a more cloud-native world. Second is automation. How do I automate the IT infrastructure? Yeah, I'll modernize it, I'll go all flash, I'll go scalable, but how do I pull the labor cost out and be able to take that labor into more creative, innovative areas of my company, but I want to automate IT. And then, third is to make sure that the cost-effectiveness and the resiliency of that infrastructure is top-notch and world-class. Those are the conversations. The CIOs today, their job is getting more and more tough, they need to pull cost out, they have to have agility and flexibility. Oh, by the way, the systems can never go down and I want that new IOT thing, I want that new data analytic thing, I want that new machine-learning thing, so give me that agility and flexibility and creativity going forward. And those are the conversations we're having every day. >> Howard, as a guy who sort of oversaw this consolidation of these two companies, you have a chance to do something I think no two big companies have ever done before which is successfully merge. We were thinking earlier about, is there a precedent for a merger of this size that actually worked out and we couldn't think of one. >> Howard: Certainly not in IT. >> Not in IT, right, exactly. What makes you think this one will be different, other than the fact you're running it? >> I'm running services and IT now, I help put the playbook together. Look, the senior leadership team is now running it. And that's why we're going to continue to win, because of our relentless focus on customers, we all spend a tremendous amount of time understanding what our customers are doing, what more they want us to do, the feedback from our customers. We spend almost as much time with our partners as well. But this leadership team is on the mission. And it's about creating the essential infrastructure company for the next great era of IT, the industrial revolution where we know that companies need to transform in all those dimensions we talk about. And our leadership team, and we're just actually going through our next, we call Tell Dell Survey, where we also get feedback from our team members, from our employees and our measurements are clear. We measure ourself on customer MPS, our team-member employee MPS, our relative market share performance, are we gaining share or are we not and then all of that will deliver the financials that we all look for. And we are all aligned on that. >> Howard, you also oversee the Dell IT program, this is proven IT program. What is that about? I heard some buzz about that. >> Yeah, so this started several years ago where a lot of customers would say, "So, you want me to buy..." (sound cuts out) So we actually (sound cuts out). Things that work. (sound cuts out) >> Cooking up in... (sound cuts out) >> They have to. Witness richness of our portfolio because (sound cuts out). >> Howard, thank you for coming. Consecutive year, it's been a great journey for all. In fact, I remember the (sound cuts out). A 160 billion dollar market that's true private cloud, so you guys remember one in that as well, Dell EMC, great to see you and congratulations on a very successful transaction and hope to see more updates along the way. >> You got it, great to see you, thank you very much. >> All right, this is the Cube live coverage from Dell EMC World 2017, I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillan, we'll be right back with more coverage, stay with us.