>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell, EMC. >> John: Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is theCUBE live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017, our 8th year covering EMC World. Now, the first year covering Dell EMC World, I'm John Furrier, my co-host this week, Paul Gillin, on the blue set, two CUBES, two shot guns, double barrel shot gun of content. Our next guest, who's been on theCUBE every single year we've been in existence, since 2010, the Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies and Dell EMC, Jeremy Burton, formerly the CMO of EMC and again, 2010 was your first year with EMC, now. >> That's right. >> Look, I mean, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, yeah the makeup takes a bit longer, I got to cover up more wrinkles, but you know. >> You're running the show, you're on stage, your son is doing some gigs up there. Where are you now mentally, I mean, 2010, when we started our journey with theCUBE was the first at EMC World in Boston, you just joined the company. Now, here, look where you're at. I mean, do you have the pinch me moments? How the hell did this happen? Look how big we are. What's, how do you feel? >> Yeah, it's great. I mean, I almost have this belief in tech, you can never plan more than a couple years. I mean, so I kind of laugh a little bit at the five year strategy or whatever. And I'm think even personally, if you're looking out maybe more than a couple years in your career as to what you want to do, its... it can all change. It's like the start of a race. You can have all the best plans in the world, but you don't know what's going to happen when you get around the first corner, right? So, yeah, I knew last year, when Michael asked me to take on the CMO role, that the marketing team could make a difference. I'm a big believer about story and making sure that people understand what we're trying to do. It was, for me at least, it was a challenge, and a real interesting role to take on. >> Certainly a big challenge, you got the merger going on, obviously bigger role, bigger company, more portfolio product. You also have a product background you usually were doing a lot of the product stuff. What's been the impact from a customer standpoint as you've been rolling out the brand of Dell Technologies which I know is a holistic brand. But you now have a lot of brands to deal with in your portfolio. >> Yeah, well the good news is we're bigger, we have more budget, we can do a bigger brand campaign and the real goal here is; most people, when they think of Dell, they think of a PC. When they think of EMC they think of a storage array. Dell Technologies, if you look at the breadth of the company now, it really is incredible what we can do in an organization. So the brand campaign is really about redefining the company. What is Dell Technologies stand for? Well, it's about transforming your business, Transforming IT, your workforce and security. If we can get across over the next couple of years, the impact that we can have on an organization that's really where the win is. Underneath that obviously, we want to say, hey look, if you're on a digital project, Pivotal's going to be lead. It if's a software-defined data center, it's VMWear. So first and foremost, it's getting the big story of Dell Technologies, and redefining how people perceive the company. >> Well, Jeremy, so what's the message? We've been trying to read the tea leaves here, about what's the theme coming out of the show. What is the single most important message you want customers to take away? >> Number one, first and foremost, it's about, look, if every company is going to become a digital company, if you want to become a digital company, trust Dell Technologies for your journey. >> Everybody's saying that, though. I mean, that's HP's pitch now, too. So why did you adopt digital transformation as a theme, when it has become such a buzzword in the industry? Are you trying to find a nuance there? >> No, because the thing is, is that's where the world is going. And we could make up something that's ours, but the problem with that, I've never been one for saying, oh, we're just going to make up a new category. The category, people are going to become digital companies without a doubt, and I think our differentiation, and this is in the ad campaign, and you see it around the show, here, it's about making it real. At some point, you got to realize that transformation. if you're going to go build a cloud native app with HP, good luck, they don't have any software. >> I think you said on theCUBE last year, or the year before, I forget which year it was. These eight years are blurring in, and... theCUBE's on it's eight year. I think you quote said, "never fight fashion," was a phrase you always say, so I do believe that digital transformation's a little bit boring, but it's a reality. >> Well and for us, I feel like our differentiation, whether it be EMC or Dell, is we're a very practical company. And if we can't make it real, nobody can. Which is why the ad campaign only focused on customers. It was, hey if you want to look at GE, if you're going to look at Colombia Sports Wear, Chitale Dairy, we got about ten different customers, cause I think, to your point, right, it is noisy. How do you make it believable? You have a real customer saying, "I bet on Dell Technologies and they transformed my business." >> So we were talking on the intro about the transformation I know there's a lot of herding cats with the new merged companies, and you got to get every thing they want on stage, limited time on stage, not a lot of customers on stage, so I got to ask you, look it, the business transformation is Isilon Onefs, so digital transformation really means the businesses. How do you evolve from speeds and feeds culture, to real business transformation? Cause that's kind of what I hear you saying. >> That is, if you look internally at how the company's got to transform, it's exactly that. We created around the time we brought the companies together a small group sales team called Dell Technologies Select and these are folks that actually don't... carry any one brand. They carry Dell Technologies, and they're working with fifty of our biggest most transformative customers. So obviously the goal here is over time, you want that fifty to be two hundred, to be a thousand. Really, you're going to grow the DNA within that group, because the difficulty is that, some companies are doing digital transformation, some people are not even doing IT transformation, some companies are still trying to figure out the last big issue that they had. The market doesn't, it's not an on-off switch, you've got early adopters, you've got 'luggards, and everything in between, so Dell Technologies Select, was really geared towards engaging with transformative customers in a different way, across the entire portfolio, instead of; a storage, a service, a virtualization. >> Can you dig a little deeper on the sales model? Because you had the merge of two great sales organizations, one enterprise focused, is account focused, another is channel focused, >> SMB >> And direct SMB. How are you getting them to work together, or trying to merge those cultures, or are you trying to use each for what it does best? >> It's a great question, cause I think this is where many companies fall down when they merge or acquire even, right? So think of the Dell Technologies Select at the very top of the pyramid, they're the biggest, most transformative projects we're engaged on, and have a set of folks who work across the portfolio. Beneath that, we have an enterprise sales team. That, is predominantly made up from the EMC sales team, prior to the merger; relationship selling, big accounts, you know there's three thousand accounts there. Bill Scannell runs that sales team. Beneath that, you've got the commercial sales team, and Marius Haas, who was from Dell. Marius runs that. And so we're trying to preserve the higher end relationship selling that Bill Scannell and his team did. And the transactional sales team that Dell had, and then even beneath that in Jeff Clarke's organization, you've got consumer and small business. So what we've tried to do is, not complicated things. Leave each area to do what they were good at. And then to the key point we made earlier, build this very broad digital capability. Kind of new DNA; start small and grow big. >> You know, EMC has always had good partner relations, they were storage and you had some swim lanes, some stuff to partner program, and all the different stuff you were involved in. The branding was phenomenal when you took over on that. But now my observation on this show, just from watching it over the years, is a whole lift in alliance and marketing partners. Intel Dan Bryan on stage, obviously Dell and Intel make a lot of sense together. That history is there. But the alliances in Microsoft, Cisco, now a whole new set of industry alliances now, at the disposal. Has that changed your thinking a bit? And how do you look at that? Because now that's not just like a merging, that's like pre-existing and exploding. >> No, you always need partners, right? I think both Dell and EMC never believed they do it all themselves, right? And I think here we are, together, we're a much bigger company, but we still need partners. I mean Intel, we're Intel's biggest customer, right? So that makes up more relevant to them, but whereas in the past, maybe we were always thought as on the EMC side as enemy of Microsoft because of the VMWare. Now, Microsoft's an alliance partner. And it's nice that folks like Satya, he's taken over the company, and he's made it very clear that he wants to build an ecosystem, or rebuild and ecosystem. The big companies like Intel and Microsoft, I mean Cisco, we still do two billion dollars of Vblock, right? And as much as I think... we do kind of jousting between vendors at times, ultimately the customer decides who partners, and who competes. We often partner because the customer wants us to partner. >> One of the things I always like about interviewing you, Jeremy, you have your toe in the water of the future. I heard you mention VR, virtual reality, and all kinds of reality on stage; AR, VR. AI is certainly the hottest thing in the world. Deep learning and machine learning... is getting integrated into some of the products. But as a brand marketer, how are you looking at these new trends? Cause they are great opportunities, you have a great show on stage, you had great entertainment, informative, colorful, but now, soon, as a marketer, you have to start integrating some of these awesome tools, into the marketing mix. >> It's incredible right now, because... one of the things I love about the coming together of Dell EMC, and maybe this is not intuitively obvious, but a lot of the client products, a lot of the VR and gaming business that Dell has built over the years, I mean all the guys who come here, are either gamers or have got kids who are gamers. And so getting access to the Alienware team, they've got relationships with the Minecraft team, working with the folks that work on the AR and VR headsets. To me it should make events like this much more engaging. I'm a big believer that over time, these events have got to become- >> And by the way, all those new startups, are going to be running Dell servers, potentially, so a lot of this stuff is going on, your hands in it. >> Yeah, we got to make this experiential for folks. And a lot of the client technology has got that, it grabs you, right? I'm looking forward to exploring- I mean particularly augmented reality. To me, that's a technology, which is going to be massive in future. I think the way we want to present the company, is not as consumer and business, or client and data center, I think we've got to show folks the end to end. If you're doing a service request as a field service worker, and you've got your augmented reality headset on, you're going to get data for the service request from a back office system, you're going to get your knowledge from an Isilon system but it's going to be rendered in real time in front of you, as you do your work. I think the customer wants to see the solution. >> We were talking with Peter Burris in the previous segment about... are we going back to the future? The old IBM, one throat to choke, IBM was in every market, they dominated almost every market. But they had the full range of products you could get from them, from one sales rep. Are we going back to that type of model now? >> Yes and no. If you want a good indication of the future, look at the past, right? And so, infrastructure clearly is consolidating, right? What we believe, as infrastructure consolidates, it can support fewer players. So, you got to be the big player. So, in infrastructure market, we have a consolidation play, and we're very open about that. We're going to be more efficient, more economic Even if that market's flat, we're going to take more- >> But it's still huge numbers, by the way. >> It's a huge number, and then look, there's the new cloud native world. We've got to play with Pivotal there. Look at the myriad of devices you're going to see in IRT. The IRT ecosystem is not a single, vertical integrated stack. You've got sprinklers, you've got things that attach to cows, you've got... sensors on cars. I think when on part of the tech industry starts to consolidate, and you get this, maybe fewer vendors, another area opens up, and you get this incredible ecosystem. I'd say, IoT, machine intelligence, cloud native apps, that's like the next frontier, and those ecosystems are thriving, as the prior ecosystem consolidates. >> Great, awesome comment there, I think you just encapsulated- well done, the consolidation, that's a huge number, by the way. That's massive. >> It's hundreds of billions of dollars. In fact, IDC would track it and say it's about three. >> A hyper conversion that's going on right now. I mean two years ago, that was a thriving ecosystem, now it's all consolidated- >> It's consolidating, because the macro category- >> It seems to happen faster. >> Yeah, you've got to, I think in infrastructure... It's interesting, we don't necessarily in our business need to be the first mover, like we weren't the first mover to hyperconverge. But we can't be asleep at the wheel, number one, and we have to bring our distribution scale to bear. Once something goes to mainstream, as we proved in our flash, and now we're proving in hyperconverge, we has zero revenue for VxRail a year ago, today it's the market leader. That's... we weren't first to market with the product, but we've got distribution scale. The reason why a lot of these small companies are struggling is because they spend all of their VC money, or their profits, it's all spent on building a distribution channel. And so that's where Wall Street doesn't value them anymore. >> Scales and new competitive advantage, we've said on theCUBE, we continue to say that, certainly Amazon web service has proven that. Scale is the new differentiator, it's the barred to entry, great point there. I got to ask you about a point we were discussing, with Peter Burris, and we were kind of riffing on this, kind of, meaning to joke at at some of the vendors out there. Everyone's claiming to be number one, at everything. It's like, we're number one at this! We're number one. Markel's number one, Dell's number one, HP's number one. So the question is, what is the scoreboard? So the answer in our little opening was; customers. That is the ultimate scoreboard. >> Yeah. >> How are you guys going to continue to push, because there's been some wins with the combination. That's ultimately going to be the scoreboard. Forget the market share from whatever research firm. How are you getting new customers, are you retaining them, are they valuing your products and services? Your thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things there. And I think the history of Dell is pretty interesting, because the data shows that the best way for us to get into a new customer, believe it or not, is with a PC. And, it's our, probably lowest priced product, it's our, maybe the most frictionless sale. And the nice thing now is once we get in there with the PC, and maybe a low end server, there's a whole lot more value we can bring in behind it. Which is why a lot of our focus, is not just on product; it's distribution channel as well, because if that's working effectively, we can get that cross-sale going. We've already seen in the early days of the merger, customers who've got our storage, sometimes a great tactic is to go, ask the customer; "hey, can we have your server business?" And it's been amazing how many folks have come back and said, "okay," because we've got relationships. And so, adding for the next couple of years, that cross sale becomes absolutely critical for us. Because we get a new customer, but then we want to keep that customer. How do we keep them? We got to solve more of the problem. And that's called cross-sale. >> Jeremy, great to have you on theCUBE. I know you're super busy, I know you got Gwen Stefani's the entertainment tonight. Great attendance here at the show. Congratulations on the CMO role, of the huge organization that's Dell Technologies. Big brand challenge, a great opportunity for you personally. So my final question, as always on theCUBE, What are your priories for next year? When we come back, and look back... what are you trying to do this year? You've got a lot going on, give us the plan. >> I mean, I'll leave the Dell Technologies thing to Michael, he's probably talked about that already. But marketing specifically, look, 70% of the content on the internet is going to be video by 2020. So, as a marketer, we've got to get really great at producing really high quality video content. It's the way that marketing's going to be done. So the nice thing, the exciting thing for the marketing team is, hey, if you're great at doing PowerPoint or writing a white paper, you're going to be a media star in the future. But I'm a huge believer in the fact that we've got to get great at doing unique content, at scale, and that's how you cut through the noise and get people's attention, because the world is going to become more noisy, not less. So that's one of the big priorities, obviously there's a little bit of bedding in of this new marketing model, we only closed the deal back in September. We got to get the team- >> You got to big budget, that's for sure. >> Yeah but video, and storytelling, is huge. Up there, that's the biggest trend. >> And don't forget the gaming. You brought up the gaming. CGI is coming around the corner, we're going to have VR, AR... >> You're going to see a lot of that. >> Jeremy Burton, Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies. Dell EMC, here on theCUBE. Here at the first Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris will be back with more live coverage, stay with us. (techno music)