>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's a big show, the 10th year that theCUBE is at this show. I'm Rebecca Knight, this is my cohost Stu Miniman. We've got two sets, and joining us now is Matt Liebowitz. He is the global lead multicloud infrastructure at Dell Technologies, thank you for returning to theCUBE. >> Yeah, like I was saying before we came on, I've been a fan of the show for years so it's great to actually be on it for once. >> Well, welcome. >> Well, for twice. (Rebecca laughing) We're going to talk about the stresses of cloud sprawl right now. And there're so many different possibilities, solutions. It's a multicloud world. How do you even make sense of it all, and how do you help customers make sense of it? >> Well, I think the first thing that we typically do is just try to get customers to understand what they have. You know, they've got workloads in private cloud, they've got workloads in public cloud, and we try to do an analysis, figure out what's where, what's the best fit, what cloud is most appropriate for each application, and then just build a plan to build that infrastructure and get them where they need to be. >> Matt, I love that, and I want to hear what you're seeing from customers, 'cause when we look at it, and we hear what's described is really, when we talk about HyperCloud, and when we talk about multicloud it's, I have a bunch of pieces and it wasn't necessarily a key strategy. The customer was just like oh, I'm doing cloud stuff all over the place, and in many ways we've got the silos that we've spent the decade or so trying to get rid of even more. So how do we help get their arms around it? There're so many different layers of the solution, to make this innovative and a wholesome solution rather than just, oh my Gosh, I've got the things all over here and I'm spinning plates, as a company. >> Right, I think you said it. The most common thing we see from customers when they say, I'm doing multicloud, is they're actually using more than one cloud, but that's really multicloud. You really need to tie it together with a cloud management platform, something that can bring all the pieces together that's API enabled, that's you know, they can programmatically access resources. So when customers tell us they've got multicloud, but they're really consuming something in Azure and something in AWS, they've just like you said Stu, just created more IT silos, and so we're trying to get away from that. They can use all those clouds but wrap it together on that common control plane, so you can understand your estate and actually manage it and consume it. >> So it sounds as though customers, I mean we're sort of painting this picture of customers really, really at a loose end here. I mean, how would you describe the customer mindset today? I mean, obviously some customers have a strategy and know exactly where they're going, but the vast majority really don't. >> I think most customers are responding, and the needs of the business are changing. They need need to respond more quickly, and so they just consume cloud resources as they can. And that often leads, like you said Stu, due to the sprawl. And so again, like we try to just wrap it together. Do an analysis, figure out what's out there, and help them not only understand where the application should live, but wrap an operating model around it so they can start consuming it properly. Understand what they're going to advertise in their service catalogs. So Matt, one of the reasons I loved him to talk to into consulting people, is you're not trying to push a product. It's like, certain ones it's like okay, management's really important, but we understand as an industry we're never going to get to that mythical single pane of glass. So is there a framework, is there maturity model? How are you measuring where they are, and how to move them gently along? I guess the journey is what we've said to kind of a holistic solution of that. >> Yeah I mean there's tons of, we take what analysts do. We also have our own studies and indexes all the way starting from what we kind of digital laggards all the way to the digital leaders. And what we found is actually most of the customers are either laggards or they're just starting out. Maybe they've made some loose investments, but they haven't walked the path that far. And so it's like you said earlier, there's stuff kind of everywhere. Customers don't often know where to start, but I think they're responding to the needs of the business. I don't think it's anything that they're doing that's wrong, but it's a little bit of the Wild West for sure. >> So what best practices have emerged when you're talking about the digital leader versus the digital laggards? You said they've made some investments. They have an idea of where they want to be. What're some of the other things that you've seen that really separates them from the pack? >> Yeah well, so I'm going to be a consultant just like you said, and it's all about business value and business outcome. The customers are the most successful. Have a business reason for what they're trying to do. They're not going to public cloud because Gartner said they should. They're doing it because they know they're going to get an outcome. They're going to be able to go into new markets or operate faster, deploy applications faster, things like that. And those are the ones that are further down the line, that I would say the ones that are the laggards are the ones that are just sort of peaking under the covers of what they should do. They're just starting out, they've got some workloads in multiple clouds and they need to get a handle on it, but they're just starting. >> All right, so in the keynote this morning there's a lot of talk about cloud. VMware is at the center of the strategy there, but partnering with a lot of different players out there, of course AWS wasn't talked on the stage much this morning, but we know how important that is in the VMware environment. And Microsoft was up on today. How do these new announcements fit into the discussions that you'll be having with customers? >> You know I think, customers need in a lot of ways, I hate to say it, but also an easy button for cloud. If they, often when they try to build it themselves, they bring the components together themselves, it's really difficult to do that integration work. And like you said Stu, I'm in consulting so we're all about the outcome. But this product is Dell Technology's cloud, I think is going to help accelerate for us in consulting so that they can quickly get to a state where they have a functional cloud they can start consuming. And then we can help them with the day two, to actually drive business value, consumption of the cloud and that sort of thing. But yeah I mean, I think VMware's doing a great job of reading the landscape and understanding that people are consuming AWS, they're consuming Azure. And VMware owns the data center, I think that's crystal clear. So they need to work with what the customers are using today, and I think they're doing a really nice job of that. >> I'm curious as a consultant how you are helping companies really implement these new things, because as we know, digital transformation doesn't really have anything to do with the technology. It's really about getting employees onboard and customers onboard, and thinking differently about how they get their jobs done. So how are you helping your customers think through these things? >> Yep, so we have a framework on how we approach these for multicloud and for lots of other things, where we use a methodology that we call kind of as is to be, where we kind of determine their current state, project where they're going to be in the future, build a roadmap that's actually actionable. But then I think what differentiates the methodology is we tie it to a business case. We tie it to an outcome and a financial outcome, so that executives and IT leaders can see that this is not just another IT project. They're going to get true value out of it. We build a roadmap pretty quick in three to six weeks. That's actually actionable, we build consensus, and that's how we get started. >> All right, Matt are you doing some sessions here at the show this week? >> I did one bright and early at 8:30 this morning. >> All right, love to hear about it, especially any good questions from customers. >> Yeah, so my sessions are on migrating workloads to modern data centers. So I think the way I started that was just hey, let's define the modern data center. And I said kind of, quick show of hands, who thinks your modern data center ends with the four walls of your infrastructure? And thankfully not many people raised their hands, because the modern data center is composed of your on-premise's resources, whether that's private or hybrid, but also public. So I think a lot of the questions that I've got is just how do I get there? How do I convince IT leaders to buy into this? And that's, like I said, we use our methodology to build consensus and help them get there. >> I'm curious, when you talk about the modernization, what's the role of data in there? >> Say it one more time. >> Data, how does that fit into the cloud strategy overall? >> Well, a data's another service. One of the things we've started to look at, is we talk about infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, is big data as a service, as an application that you can build into your cloud and then automatic it and orchestrate it just like anything else. So when customers or end users need to consume a data lake or something like that, they can do so using the same tools that's in frameworks that they do for other resources. >> When you're thinking about the challenges that customers face today and sort of looking ahead in terms of what you see are the future challenges, what is it that keeps you up at night? >> Ah, future, you know, cloud sprawl. The way we started this keeps me up at night because when every, and I talked to customer this morning actually, who was talking about their yearly Azure or yearly AWS spend, and the numbers were staggering and they're getting higher and higher. And at this point it's not shadow IT, this is IT leadership saying we want to drive more and more to the cloud, and they think it's quick and it's easy, and you can take your credit card and do it. But a lot of IT is not prepared to operate as a kind of OpEx instead of CapEx, and so this is a big change for him. And that's what keeps me, that's what gets me worried, is that in consulting when we come in really late to that conversation, and they're already consuming millions and millions of dollars a year in AWS or Azure services. It can be hard to right that ship. It can be hard to say okay, that's fine, you've made that investment, but let's look at what makes sense to run on premises. Let's look at what makes sense to run in different kinds of clouds and do it at an application level. >> All right, what other things at the show this week? You've been to the show for a number of years. What's exciting you, what're some of the conversations you're already hearing? So as cloud person for me, where I focus on multicloud, the announcements today were really exciting, specifically I'm kind of interested in your opinions too on the Dell EMC cloud, or the VMware cloud on Dell EMC. I think giving customers the option to consume cloud in a way that is just like public cloud, but using the same tool sets and frameworks they've been using for years, I think is compelling. You know, Virtustream has proved that that works, that that model works. And so I'm excited about that, although I'm kind of interested in your opinion, what others have said on that. >> Yeah so actually, if you listen to the keynote analysis we did this morning I'll do, but I'll frame it back as a question for you to get your thing. >> Well done. (Matt and Rebecca laughing) >> It's our show, you're not allowed to ask us questions. Chad tried to do that once. But so when the VMware and AWS partnership happened, the question we all had as industry watchers was oh my gosh, what does that mean for Dell? I feel today really started to answer that. I'm curious how you position it with customers. I'm sure you must be getting the question from customers being like, on the Dell EMC side, hey VMware and Amazon, where do you guys fit in this whole puzzle? >> Yeah, well it's funny. Someone made a comment today that the keynote today sort of answered the question of who won the Hypervisor awards? They're over, at this point I think we've conceded VMware has won that battle. And so when you think about VMware partnering with something like Amazon, to me and to Microsoft too form the announcement today, it makes perfect sense because customers that have large investments in on-premise's VMware deployments, it's a lot of work to convert that to something like a public cloud in Amazon or in Azure. So to be able to consume public cloud using AWS services on the network so it's operating at LAN speeds, but doing it with the same tools I think is compelling. So to customers that say, does this compete with you? Does this compete with Dell? I say no, this is part of the story. Multicloud is all about bringing pieces together in a common framework that we can consume all together, so. Now that doesn't concern me at all, but well done reflecting it back to me. >> (laughs) That's his specialty. >> He's been doing this a long time. >> Yeah, this is not his first rodeo. Matt Liebowitz, thank you so much for coming on the theCUBE. It was great having you. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, first Stu Miniman. We will have so much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell's World Technologies coming up just after this. (relaxing music)

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

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