(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering, Boomi World, 2018. Brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the live Cube coverage here in Las Vegas, the Wynn Hotel for Dell Boomi World 18. So, exclusive coverage. We're here all day. Wall to wall coverage covering the impact of cloud native to application developers and owners and for businesses. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin here. We're here with Michael Dell. 13th time on the Cube. He's the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies. Continuing to defy logic. Growing leaps and bounds. Continuing to do more in the new era of IT and computing. Mike, great to see you. Thanks for coming. >> Great to be with you. Lisa, John, always fun. And here at Boomi World it's really exciting to see the ecosystem continue to grow. As people try to connect everything together Boomi is right there. Incredible business last quarter. Booking growth, 80%, 7500 customers. I still can't find a customer that doesn't need Boomi. The team continues to evolve what the capabilities. We've just had a great show here. 1000 customers showed up. Lot's of great customer stories about how they're integrating all their apps and data together. With the tsunami of data that is coming, it just gets more and more important and interesting and fun. >> You know, you mentioned on the key note stage with CEO Boomi, talking about some performance numbers that you always throw out, server growth. Continuing to grow, okay. The pundants were saying oh servers, that's cloud server-less. You still need compute, networking and storage but they do change with the cloud and SaaS has proven that business model of as a service is key. Boomi's got this little secret weapon around the unified platform that integrates a lot of these traditional components that is still going to be foundational but yet set up the next wave around AI, Edge, data tsunami that you mentioned. This is a key variable in the architectural shift. Can you talk about how you see that playing out? Because you got a couple big pieces on the chess board. VMWare, the continuous Dell Technologies portfolio kind of as the table stakes. This is kind of interesting new architecture. Explain how you see that. >> Pivotal, Dell EMC, VMWare. >> So a lot of pieces. >> Right. >> How does Boomi play into that? Because if it does be a glue layer if you will for lack of a better word, it can be very powerful. >> Yeah, so the challenge is when you go to Software as a Service, how do you connect the things together? Now, connecting 1 or 2 together is pretty straight forward. But when you start having 50 or 100 of these things, and then you've got on premise systems and now you want to have actions like an employee does something and based on their roll then something else happens, you have work flow. And then you get this, you go from a couple billion PCs to 5 billion smart phones to 100s of billions of connected things out there with this explosion in the edge. How you integrate and connect everything together with work flow and do it securely is super, super important. So we're seeing just an explosion of use cases. There was some great examples from a city digitizing and being able to detect leaks and when traffic lights aren't working. The used cases are pretty unlimited and Boomi and Pivitol play sort of at the top layer for us so the applications and integrating all the data and allowing customers to express their competitive advantage with software and data and AI and machine learning. And then of course we've got VM Ware to virtualize everything from the data center to the network and beyond. With NSX, what we're doing with NFE and software to fine win. And then of course we're the initial infrastructure company. Absolute number 1 in all aspects of the data center. And growing much faster than any of the competitors. >> And I want to also get your thoughts on VM Ware announced up to this morning, actually Barcelona time for VM Ware Europe, the acquisition of Heptio. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, Pat Kelson said in VM World, we're going in, we're going to make Kubernetes the dial tone. This is a key architectural component around orchestration. Containers certainly everyone knows, that's been standardized. People love containers. They're using them. As applications need to be more efficiently built out, out of the Boomi's value proposition, Kubernetes and these cloud native things are super important. What's your view on that? Great acquisitions, very young company? Not 34 billion dollars for a Red Hat like IBM bought but a small tuck in. How important is that trend for you? >> Well, think about what we've done with Pivitol and VM Ware together with the Pivitol container service and now adding Heptio with 2 of the 3 founders of the whole Kubernetes movement. We're going to be making Kubernetes just part of the dial tone of vSpheres. So for virtually all the customers out there, 600000 of them that use vSphere, it'll just be super easy to now have Kubernetes containers built into their vSphere environment. That's the vision. We've got a great team working on it across VM Ware and Pivitol and now the Heptio team. Adding to it. We're super pumped about all this. >> If your friend asked you at a party this weekend, hey Michael, why is Kubernetes important? What do you say to that? >> I guess it would depend on how much they know about this. >> They're a business owner responsible for application development. >> Yeah. >> They are owning to transform their organization. They realize clouds going to be a part of it. They here Kubernetes really popular, it's trending. But it's a technology. A lot of people are now getting this for the first time and seeing it as the early dopples have shown it. They try to want to know the impact and why it's important. Why is Kubernetes important as you start to get into this orchestration of apps and work loads across clouds. Why is it important? >> I think people don't want to get locked in to a particular place when it comes to their infrastructure. Kubernetes has clearly won the battle in terms of being able to be that abstraction layer. That's the simple thing that is super exciting. When it sort of went from cloud to hybrid cloud to multi cloud, people realized they wanted a 2 way street where they could move things back and forth. And now with the edge, they want to move it to the edge. With the distributed core. This explosion in data, this dat tsunami really requires a whole new set of tools in terms of the software infrastructure to be able to make it all work. >> So transformation is ... You're talking about Dell Technologies now. 34 years later you have 7 corporations under that. Done a lot to keep those brands, as they're very valuable. Dell Boomi as a business unit. Transformation is essential and Dell Boomi wants to be the transformation partner. It's also incredibly difficult. IT transformation. Digital, security, workforce. Dell Boomi works and Dell Technologies with a lot of large enterprise organizations that are still probably fairly not as well connected as they should be to find new value, new business dreams. How do you talk with customers, large enterprises that need to transform to stay competitive? Where do they start? And how dose the Dell transformation story in and of itself help those customers feel confident in what Dell Technologies can deliver? >> Right, well first thing I'd say is we actually work with customers of all sizes. We have an enormous business with small and medium and large customers. We're number 1 across the whole spectrum. We serve 99% of the Fortune 500. Since your question is about those types. They're looking at the digital transformation and figuring out this is really not an IT project. It's about technology becoming pervasive in everything that they're doing. From sells to marketing, to product creation to their whole fundamental strategy. So then it shows up in the office of the CEO and business line executives and they're having to reimagine. And so they look for a partner and Dell Technologies is very unique. 2 years and 2 months ago we put together all these companies and it's been fabulous. We've been growing double digits consistently and the response has been great because we can deliver a complete set of capabilities. Now you're right, change management, and how do I do it in my company, that's a big deal. So they're pulling on us to bring them more of a ... The don't want us to show up with a bunch of parts and drop em off. They want us to actually build them a solution that is specific to their needs. Help them implement it. In many cases, run it for them. So we do much of that ourselves with our own services organization. 60000 plus people in our services organization. And of course we have the best, all the great SIs out there that are helping customers implement and run and manage like I said, 99% of the Fortune 500. We're right there with them in this digital transformation. Of course we do the IT, the workforce, the PCs and of course security. Unbelievably important. Your whole brand trust is all based on that so we wrap the whole thing with security and no company has the breath that we have. I think we've kind of won the hearts and minds of the decision makers because of the capabilities that we have. Not that we take it for granted. We have to go earn that trust every single day. We have unbelievably talented people in our company. Over 20000 engineers. Scientists, PHDs. About 90% of them are software engineers. This is a very different company than it was 5 or 10 years ago. We're having a blast. It's a rocket ship, so. >> I had a chance to interview an IT leader and his name is Allen Bean. He's the global CTO and head of IT innovation at Proctor and Gamble. He brought the cloud to Coca-Cola. Has had a career all in IT going back to DHL in the 90s and 80s. So we were talking and I asked him, does IT matter. And Dave Alampi always brings up the book by Nick Carr. And we always talk about it. >> Love it. Such a fun topper, yeah. >> And so he says, quote, at that time some people thought it didn't matter, everyone was kind of complaining, but he says it does matter. It's a competitive advantage. And over the decades IT was outsourced. And now people are trying to bring that back in and make it a competitive advantage. This is now ... It's a mandate basically. So as people who have been kind of anemic with IT, they've got people running stuff but eventually outsource all the value. They got to bring that value in. Cloud is that opportunity. How do you respond to the leaders out there trying to figure this out. What are the keys to success around bringing back the competitive advantage and using the cloud for things that aren't core to the core competency but getting that core competency nailed down. What's your vision. >> Yeah, well, look, I mean, it's all about understanding what is your competitive differentiation and advantage as a business. And if you give that away to somebody else, you're going to be out of business in not too much time. Packers applications are great for things that aren't differentiated. But if you actually do something that's unique and valuable and special and you can't express that in software with your own data, you're going to have a problem, right? This is what companies are figuring out. This is what we're doing with Pivitol and Boomi allowing companies to build all this together. And look I think as it relates to cloud, customers have figured out it's multi cloud, right? It's a workload dependent discussion. Some workloads are great in the public cloud but in many cases, not so much, right? As we've modernized and automated the infrastructure we have customers that tell us hey our private cloud for our predictable workload, which is 90%, is 5, 6 times less expensive than AWS. We're building these converge, hyper converge, like the fast track to the automated modernized infrastructure. And look, you can decide. But we're seeing customers that want to move things back and forth and we're seeing a bit of a boomerang. Where customers have said oh everything you upload to the cloud, and no, not everything. >> And the digital transformation really is making IT a competitive advantage. So I had a long ranging interview. It's up on YouTube. I asked him a final question. I always said, okay, so you know, he's transforming Proctor and Gamble. I said okay, as you look ads and all those things what's the next mountain that you're going to climb? You're an IT pro, you said in the agenda. And I'll read you the quote. I want to get your reaction. He said, "I think we're looking forward. Latency is still an issue. We have to find ways to defeat latency and we're not going to do it through basic physics, we're going to have to change out business models, change our technology, distribution, change everything that we're doing. Consumers and customers are demanding instant access to enhanced information through AI and machine learning right at the point when they want it." So this is his next mountain. This is kind of what you were talking about on the stage here at the Dell Boomi event around the impact of AI and data. What's your reaction to that quote? >> Well to me this is all about the edge and 5G coming around the corner. And you look at all the big telcos. They're all piling in on 5G because it's 1000 times faster and 1000 times less latency. That's going to be a big turbo charge. The rocket ship. And it will just create an explosion in data and compute on the edge. And a lot of it's going to stay on the edge. Because you'll have these edge devices talking to each other. A whole new class of applications and capabilities because of that. That's super exciting. We're already seeing it with this build out of distributed core. And that's why we see so much growth in the data center business. >> So Michael, Dell Boomi, if you look at Boomi for a second, was named by the Gartner Magic Quadrant of 2018 as a leader in Ipads. Today they talked about ... >> Again, I think 6th or 7th year in a row. It's been there for quite some time. >> An established leader in an established market. But today they were talking about, hey we want to change the, we want to redefine the I in Ipads to intelligence. How is Dell Technologies and Boomi particularly starting to leverage terra bites and terra bites of customer meta data to make your systems smarter? To enable businesses to truly connect. Prim, edge devices as things continue to get more distributed and data becomes more critical? >> Yeah, so, the key to AI and all of its variance of machine learning, deep learning neural network is the data. The data is the fuel for the rocket ship of AI. And the challenge is, if you have your data spread out in 100 softwares of service providers and 3 public clouds and here and there and where's all your data? We don't really know. How do you fuel the rocket? It becomes a very difficult problem. This is the problem that we're beginning to address for our customers. We're going to have an event all about AI coming up I think next week. Where we're going to be talking much more about this. We got a number of offerings that we're rolling out. We've been helping customers for years build their data lakes and curate the data. And of course Pivitol and Boomi are essential to how you bring all of this together and make sense of it. Because if you just have all the data but you can't actually use it. If you're not already using AI and it's variance to improve your products and services, you're doing it wrong. We've identified over 450 projects just within Dell Technologies internally. As I mentioned on stage, we've sold about 700 million computers since I started in my dorm room. We have enormous telemetry data. Imagine, if you will, that something doesn't work exactly the way it's supposed to. Okay? What's the chance that has never happened before? >> Zero. >> The answers almost zero, right? Our job is to take all this data that we have, use all this intelligence and actually prevent it from happening. So we're building all kinds of intelligence and AI and preventative technology into all of our solutions from the data center to the desk top to the edge, to the multi cloud so that all these systems are just self healing and auto magically way more reliable. >> Auto magically, I like that. It just sounds like what you're saying is Dell Technologies articulating it's value and it's differentiation because you're using that data. >> You have to. >> To identify insight, to take action immediately. >> And to your point about the big companies, they have an advantage but it's a bit of a time value expiring advantage. They have the data that the new entrance don't have. >> Right. >> But they have to activate it quickly with this new computer science or else they'll be dinosaurs, right? Nobody wants to be a dinosaur. >> Michael, what's the business drivers, and you talk to customers all the time, that they're seeing and that matter most to them. Is it agility, is it transform the customer employee experience, compliant security? How would you view the pattern around the most important business driver for your customers that are trying to put the business transformation together with digital. Could you comment just anecdotally what you see? >> I think every customer is a little bit different in their journey. Some customers, security is number 1. Because of the kind of business that they're in and it just has to be that way. For other customers it's how do I increase my speed to the solution. It used to be we need a new feature. We'll get it in a year or 2. How about never. Does never work for you? That's kind of the old IT. Now with agile development you've got, what we're doing with Pivotol cloud foundry, you've got companies implementing, these are giant companies. Biggest companies in the world. They're implementing new things like in 2 or 3 weeks. It's amazing how fast. Speed and as a chief executive, that's what you crave. How can I take this new requirement that I heard from the customer and turn it into a feature that I can go offer very, very quickly? That's what you want to be able to do. It's what we used to be able to do when we were little tiny cubs. How do you do it with 200000 people? >> I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you popularized early on in your career, the direct business model, you also had the just in time manufacturing kind of ethos of build it, build to order, really streamline efficiency. So I want to kind of take the leap to now a new generation with cloud native where you have workflows and efficiencies. You have integration. So in a way the customers are now going direct to their customers and wanting to compose and build solutions. As you said on stage, these are going to be new problems that not yet have been identified. New solutions. So that customers have to be what you did. They got to build their own. So they got to build their own, they got to have the suppliers, they got to have the code. How do you see customers being successful if they want to take that efficiency approach? Kind of be 5 nines if you will in this new modern era. Because this is the challenge that they have. They have to build their own. They need suppliers. They need you guys. How do you see the customers being successful in that scenario? >> Yeah, I think what they're trying to do is shrink the time from when at that point of customer interaction, they can use the data to make the service and the product better and if it's like this lengthy value chain with all these different intermediaries and it takes weeks or months or never, that's just way too slow. They want it to be like instantaneous. How do they create that direct relationship with their customers? I only had 1000 dollars when I started so we couldn't really afford much so each dollar you invest very carefully. We just kind of out of necessity came up with some ideas that ... >> You were efficient because you had to be. >> We didn't have any choice, right? >> So when we talk about integration, we talk about it's the foundation of digital transformation, we've talked about IT, security, workforce. One of the things that you mentioned earlier that I'd like to get your perspective on, a different view of transformation is cultural. An enterprise organization as you mentioned has a huge advantage of a tremendous wealth of data. With that amount of data and the need for speed as you just talked about, where, in your opinion, and your experience, is cultural transformation as an enabler of an enterprise to really be able to react that quickly to develop new products, new revenue strengths? >> Yeah, I think it's a big challenge. And a lot of customers struggle with change management. You never want a good crisis go to waste. We sort of grew up in the business where it was change or die, quick or dead. If you don't do it you're gone, right? This was just the way our business, this was just how we had to compete. It's what we grew up in. And I think what's happened is more and more businesses are that way now. It requires the business leaders to say hey friends, we've got a real challenge here and we've got to move faster. It is change or die, it's quick or dead, I think for all businesses because this is the fastest time ever but it's the slowest time relative to the future. It's just going to get faster and faster. If companies ... The only way you get good at change is to do it more frequently. And so if you've never changed anything for 80 years in your company and all the sudden you start trying to change, it's really hard. You just have to start. >> How do you inspire say employees at Dell Technologies who've been with you for a very long time to be able to be open and agile themselves to help facilitate this transformation? >> I believe we built it into our culture that they understand that change is good as opposed to change is bad. If you fear something well then it's bad, right? We precondition people to say okay we're going to change something. Not to say every time we change something it works perfectly. We make mistakes, we learn, we trial and error. That's all fine. Fail fast. But you need a culture where you can embrace change. No question about it. I think a lot of companies that didn't really have that are figuring that out and either by crisis or by leadership or by some combination they're then forced into it. For me, it's what we grew up in. Because hey it's a tough world out there. >> Mike, I want to ask you a final question. Thanks for coming on and spending the time with us. Great interview here. Good length. Recently in the news with a lot of commentary from us as well as the industry around IBM buying Red Hat. I made a comment around the innovation piece of this and I want to get your thoughts on that because when you bought EMC, it was a merger of equals. You integrated that and the growth that you've been successful since then, I want to get your perspective. I want you to take a minute to explain to folks watching, when you did the merger equal with EMC, what happened? You've been successful integrating the organization. What innovative things have you done since the EMC merger of equals? Take a minute to explain, again, there's a lot of moving pieces on the table. You got VM Wares, you got Pivitol, you got Boomi. A lot of moving parts in your plan. You've been successful with the numbers. Financial performance shows it. Take a minute to explain what happened, where's the innovation coming out of Dell Technologies? >> So in hind sight, it looks pretty obvious, right? You take the leader and servers and the leader in storage and you say hey infrastructure hardware goes together. And by the way, if you have the leader of infrastructure software, VM Wares, you put that all together. Wow, that'd be really great. And turns out it was. It was actually much better than we thought. And so customers have really bought into that and then with Pivitol and Boomi and Rsave, Virtustream, Secureworks etc., we have such a complete set of capabilities that customers have said, hey, why do I want to buy from 20 smaller less capable companies and integrate it myself versus you guys will just do all this for me. If they were buying from 2 or 3 or 4 parts of Dell Technologies they'll say, well, why don't we just take the others, right? We been picking up huge amounts of share across the whole business. I'm talking about like 10s of billions of dollars of growth here. There's clearly a consolidation going on in the kind of existing parts of the industry but we've also got massive investments in the new cloud native parts and software defined, and security. It's been a real blessing to be able to pull all of these teams together. We had this relationship with EMC going back from 2001. We were very early supporters of VM Ware. We had a theory of victory and it's played out very well. The teams have really gelled enormously well and the customers have continued to give us their trust. >> I think, first of all servers, storage, networking is never going away. It's the holy trinity of anything in computing. Just looks different and consumes differently. But I think people underestimate the execution innovation that you guys have done. You didn't skip a beat. VM Ware didn't skip a beat. So things have happened, so that was a challenge of the integration. >> Not everybody predicted that it was going to go that way. It's actually gone much better than even we had planned. The revenue synergies have been much larger. >> Well congratulations and thanks for taking the time on the Cube. Michael Dell is here inside the Cube here at Boomi World 18. Dell Boomi World. It's the part of Dell Technologies. We think of them being the power engine for data processing, data growth, powering AI, integrating all the application workloads. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin. Stay tuned for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music) >> Since the dawn of the cloud, the Cube has been there. Connected.

kind of amazing inspire when I step back and look at what our customers are doing with our technology and you know we have hundreds of technical sessions here where we get in-depth you know as we've always done that historically you know he MC worlds but we're also taking a broader view and saying hey you know what's what's this really all about what's the impact on the world that the most creative of people from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein Ben Franklin but Steve Jobs and Ada Lovelace whoever they may be all love of the humanities and the science they stand at that intersection of sort of liberal arts technology and that's so important in today's this country is a very special country to immigrants if you work hard and if you're willing to apply yourself and I'm a product of that hard work and now as an Indian American now living in California so I feel very fortunate for all that both the country and people who invested in me over the last many decades have helped me see the human progress is indeed possible through technology and this is the best showcase possible and when you can enable human progress which cuts across boundaries of nationality any other kind I think we are the winning streak service dog training program is built to have dogs help veterans in assimilation and help them with daily activities and post-traumatic stress all sorts of different things and they're different those are therapy dogs so those are dogs that will go everywhere with someone and really take care of them it's a beautiful beautiful donation and experience for the veterans to be able to have that [Music]

welcome to Las Vegas everybody watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage my name is Dave Boehne on time student Leena man he with my co-host Keith Townsend I'm Lisa Meredith John Sawyer coverage of Dell technologies world 2018 thanks so much for having us here and thanks for joining us on the Q how great to be here thank you guys for all the great coverage you always do a wonderful job [Music] loads of people here 14,000 in attendance 6500 partners analysts press you name it it's here talking about all things transformation we have this incredible platform that's been built over the last thirty years but now there are all these new enabling technologies that are going to take it much further as super powers are coming together the compute is now big enough the data is now volume is enough that we can do things never possible before obviously a very good couple of years since the Dell EMC merger it's really helped us there companies have come together right and and the and the offerings have come together together in a much more integrated fashion one of the most funny shows I mean obviously it's important for us to set our vision but you see things like the bean bags and sitting out there as a therapy job they're working so to be able to take a break and just spend some time breathing with some animals really really good and it didn't really experience the fun in the solutions Expo I'm a car guy so you know and talking about the way that we're taking plastic trash out of ocean and making art with it topped off as a great DX rail customer we have gold control try to beat the AI and TVs for a goal and it's a very cool demos vector right behind me we have our partner lounge we're hosting over 800 one-on-one meetings bdellium see executives or the partner executives so it's a combination of technical training networking executive meetings obviously product launches and announcements that we're bringing to market the opportunity to really cultivate it work globally in our global partner summit so it's a pretty active week the power of all of our capabilities we're powering up the modern data center the magnitude shift and what this portfolio can now do for our customers it's mind-boggling we've been talking for years about data as the rocket fuel of the economy and a business transformation and now we're really talking about data combined with those emerging technologies so things like AI IOT blockchain which are really taking that data and unlocking the business value data is the precious metal ISTE it's the crucial asset the whole world is gonna be wired everything is gonna have sensors outside of data center environments that's where all the data is gonna be produced and that's where decisions are going to be made and be all kinds of data if you've got structured data unstructured data and now it's important that we actually get all the disparate data into a format that can now be executed upon the business strategy really is the IT strategy and for that to happen we really have to bring our IT talent up the stack into where it's really enabling the business and that's usually at that application layer makes it more agile removes cost reduces complexity makes the planet more green we think we've got a long way to go in just building a private cloud making the data center if you like a cloud that's part number one freightin number two extending to the hybrid cloud the benefit of the fact that it is hosted in the cloud means that customers don't have anything to deploy and just like your smartphone you get all of the latest upgrades with no effort at all seamless process to scale quickly when you have new hotels coming online for example from a storage administrator perspective you can focus on much more strategic initiatives you don't have to do the day-to-day management you have to worry about what data sending where you don't to worry about how much of the different media types you've put into that array you just deploy it and it manages itself you can focus on more tasks this is the realest first step of actually trying to be truly autonomous storage it took so much time to do it before that I'd have to run my guys ragged for you know two or three weeks I'm like all right stay up overnight make sure at all companies that means value to customers that's money that they're saving directly there's a portfolio effect where customers look across everything that we're doing you say you know I don't really want to deal with 25 little companies but I wouldn't have a bigger relationship with Dell technologies and of course the dirty secret is is that almost all of the cool new apps are some ugly combination of new and old you don't want to have to have some other interface to go to it just has to be a natural extension of what your day-to-day job is you'll get this dashboard kind of help score across the entire environment then you'll see the red yellow green type markings on what to next the isolation piece of the solution is really where the value comes in you can use that for analysis of that data in that cleanroom to be able to detect early on problems that may be happening in your production environment the alternative one one product for everything we've always chosen not to go that path give them the flexibility to change whether it is nvme drives or any kind of SSD drives GPUs FPGAs the relevance of what we are doing has never been greater if they can sustain a degree of focus that allows them to pay down their debt do the financial engineering and Tom Suites our study I want you to take economics out of your decision about whether you want to go to the cloud or not because we can offer that capacity and capability depends a lot around the customer environment what kind of skill sets do they have are they willing to you know help you know go through some of that do-it-yourself type of process obviously Dell UMC services is there to help them you can't have mission-critical all this consolidations without data protection if they're smart enough to figure out where your backups are you're left with no protection so we really needed to isolate and put off network all that critical data we have built into power max the capabilities to do a direct backup from power max to a data domain and that gets you that second protection copy also on a protection storage it's no longer just about protecting the data but also about compliance and visibility it's about governance of the data it's really about management making it available so those are trends in which I think this this industry is not basically evolved over time in comes the Dell technologies world and you see this amazing dizzying array of new things and you're like wow that sounds great how do I do it right train them enable them package it for them I know the guys offer you where you can go in and so classroom kind of sympathy for today and see it in action before you actually purchase and use it we want them to engage in the hundreds of technical sessions that we have but still come away with I wish I could have gone to some more right and and so we we have all those online and and you know for us this is also big ears we're listening and we're learning we're hearing from our customers no I'm a little maybe a little smaller than some of your others but you still treat me like I'm the head you still listen to me I bring you ideas you say this fits so it's very very exciting to have a partner that does that with you do all of your reference Falls see it for yourself I mean I think quite a number of reference calls if people are in the same boat I was you know I'll scream share with them if they want to see our numbers I'll show them this is the opportunity for all of us embrace whether it's in the cube or through the sessions learn adjust because everybody's modernizing everybody needs to transform this is a great opportunity for them to do that with their skill set in their knowledge in the industry if everything you did work perfectly you're not trying enough stuff you need a change agent need a champion most likely at the senior level that's gonna really ride through this journey first three months didn't make a whole lot of progress I was just yelling like a madman to say Weiss it's not getting done and then you have to go back into I have to hire the right people so let's talk a few thing I made changes to the leadership team need more role models you need to get rid of and totally eliminate the harassment and the bullying and the you know old boys kind of club you got to create places where women in and minorities feel like they can be themselves culture plays a huge huge huge role there's just a wealth of enormously talented people now in our company ultimately creating a shared vision and an inspiring vision for what we want to do in the future you either embrace it okay you either stand on the sidelines or you leave the most creative of people from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein Ben Franklin but Steve Jobs all love of the humanities and the science they stand at that intersection of sort of liberal arts technology you've got to interview Ashton Kutcher yeah which was quite amazing he's an unbelievable people don't maybe don't know no he's an investor he's kind of a geek Yeah right even though he's engineer my training please know that when you bring together a diverse group of individuals Jules always get to better answer for your customer you do place your bets on dell technology that's the right partner for you it's gonna it's gonna move you and your company Michael's got the right vision of where this is going he's got the right technology to do it and we've got great team members to help you get there simple predictable profitable right right keep it it's really that simple we need a few more thousand salespeople so if you're if you're really talented you know how to sell stuff you know it come come come join us at Dell technologies work where I earn more salespeople the future as Bob Dickinson said today we can cool all right everybody that's it from Dell technologies world I love you guys it's always great to be on the cube you guys do a fabulous job they go for a live tech coverage and it really has been a lot of fun we appreciate you and your team being here the next year we're gonna go party for your 10 year anniversary the cube love it we want to thank you for watching the cube again Lisa Martin with John Turner I'm Stu Mittleman this is Keith Townsend thanks for watching everybody we'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering Dell technologies world 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners welcome back to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world I'm Lisa Martin we're in Vegas I'm with Keith Townsend and we have a couple of guests here joining us as we wrap up day - we've got Chad Dunn a cube alumni VP of Product Management at Dell EMC and Matt Harris senior director of product marketing at VMware welcome so guys lots of news coming out today saw in the press release Dell EMC now is the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure announcements 2vx rail VX rack sddc what's new obviously there's a lot new I mean really happy with with the market share and the and the traction that we're getting with both of the products in the VMware hyper-converged portfolio VX rail VX rack at CDC on VX rail we added new capabilities like 25 gig Ethernet nvme drives new security capabilities new graphical processing unit high density memory on the VX rack side we're now on Dell 14 G servers in fact that hardware is basically VX rail inside VX rack SD DC so you can sort of start to see how these things come together as we move forward in the roadmap and we also announced a VMware validated design on VX rail and again we're starting to sort of merge the divisions of these two products so they become consumption models of the same technology so met helped paint a picture for what this means for VMware and typical vmware vsphere we abstracted away the hardware so the hardware doing no longer matters right yeah well that's a great analogy actually so I'm a longtime vmware employee and one of the things that's Jean about vSphere is it really brought together more than one component for the underlying virtualization infrastructure so what cloud formations really doing it's like the next iteration of East here it's bringing together the storage compute network and management layers that make up our entire sddc solution and delivering that as a automated and and a two operated system the customers get the maximum value out of that and when we partner up with somebody like Dell I was able to bring unique value on their hardware platforms that's cognizant of all of those capabilities and Clapp foundation we're able to really get a lot of traction in the marketplace and hardware always matters we're literally nothing without it first Dell technologies world in the name change an indicator alone of the incorporation of the EMC Federation companies what we'll say power does that are you hearing from the customers and the partners that are here in terms of the strengthening of what that means for Dell EMC and VMware well I think the the obvious thing that everybody sees is the power of the portfolio that we now have ya know me as a product owner of a hyperconvergence platform I was doing that job at EMC and I didn't have a server there are a lot - OH - MS do to get servers to build our product but now you know I've got the best x86 portfolio in the market yeah right here under the same roof and now I have product managers who work for me are now in Round Rock or integrated with those teams so having the power both internally and npower for our customers to tap into all the things across the portfolio VMware pivotal RSA secure works virtuous dream I mean it's a really amazing IT portfolio and the great thing about coming to a show like this is I've seen a lot of the same faces of people I've known for years I've been here 11 years and I'm seeing a lot of new faces and getting them reenergized about the technology so Matt let's execute a similar question pre-merger one of the things that on the customer side you know I had an EMC rep rep I had a vmworld rep generally speaking never suck we've never met together can you talk about the cultural change if any with the relationship with dale emc versus the previous emc where the pro folio was limited to mainly storage products yeah well so the reality is vmware has always had a great relationship with obviously emc where i owned us but also with dell I mean if I think about my years in the field with customers Dell was the easiest partner for us to go to market with together they had a great sales organization and great products that customers loved it was always the easiest to walk into a customer account with the Dell Rob that's only gotten easier and because my product that I'm responsible for Clapp foundation is one that lands very specifically on unique capabilities from Dells solutions that just makes that conversation more meaningful it's a great story between us and VMware because we're actually able to to leverage some of the IP that we created for VX rail and now bring that into our cloud foundation instantiation which is VX RAC sddc so you don't think our group and we're pretty proud of the fact that we probably collaborate more closely with vmware in more places than anybody else in WMC we've had a long-standing collaboration on VX rail and now with cloud foundation it gets even better and what's the business value that you're seeing from VCS in the customer service in light of this strong new collaboration that's that's a great question so you know you know virtualization is great but what really customers are looking for is something that's adapting to the new realities of the way datacenters actually exist today it's not just private and public cloud the dimensions of the datacenter expanding all over the place edge systems are important as public and private cloud and what the value proposition we're seeing is having a ubiquitous consistent and transparent underlying infrastructure that can exist across all of those streamlets operations it adds agility to organizations to actually be able to deploy workload consistently across all of those different platforms and and you know if you combine it with something that we're doing together with Dell then all of those customers are benefiting across multiple parts of what they consider their data center I'm a great example this is the kind of work they were doing around IOT with Dell and that's another possible profile of workload that could live on top of class foundation now you've got multiple business value points traversing both of our solutions so I can take the extra lvx rack instead of setting up a POC of open source software to find data centers I'm sure customers have tried that and attempted it talk about that conversation when they come back either through the Dell channel or back to VMware and say you know what we tried this this is where it was good and this is why we're having this second set of conversations where are the pain points that VCF but on top of vehicle rack it's all well start from the bottom up and think about the things that we worry about so that you as the customer don't have to there are between nine and twelve different programmable firmware devices inside of PowerEdge server do you really want to track all those and make sure they match up with all your VMware drivers no of course not right you want something that's automated that lives in the system that knows how to upgrade those drivers out upgrade that firmware connect it to the right bits in in the VMware stack and make sure that you're always in a known good state and you're gonna get peak performance so we want to take those things that nobody really wants to do and let us do them for you when people tried to do it themselves they quickly find out that we were doing a lot of stuff that we didn't always talk about that made their lives easier so that's not on the hardware side on the software side yeah so I will tell you that there's no way to really deploy applications across multiple points of presence hybrid cloud for example is not doable unless you can really remove make the infrastructure invisible in a way and that's what this collaboration is really done and that's a critical pain point that you know customers have always derived benefit from NSX the Santa Ana VCR but to have these things all integrated into one product with the cloud foundation that was a game-changer for bringing these solutions together for lifecycle management day to operations as I mentioned that's unique capability there that is differentiated than just doing a ad hoc deployment of any of these technologies so the theme of the event make it real if you look at a financial services institution for example together what are you making a reality for them as it relates to IT transformation or digital transformation what is that reality that you're helping them achieve yeah well so one thing I'll say is that the reality of any workload across multiple clouds delivered to any user to any mobile device or desktop device that's a real capability that we're delivering for example Clapp foundation can instantiate through this concept called workload domain both traditional infrastructures of service applications and VDI the virtual desktops so this is real work that we're doing with real customers today together yeah just not with 1:00 this morning and they're now migrating about 500 virtual machines per week on to their VX rack sddc infrastructure and I believe they just crossed the 5500 VM mark and there'll be 8,000 VMs when they complete the project so that's real and and from the business outcomes perspective what does it allow that customer to achieve that then allows them to you know transition from where they are today which is about 60 percent virtualized to 95 percent virtualized when they when they reach the end of this journey and because we offload a lot of the tasks around managing the hardware managing the software on all of those lifecycle things and the automation that comes from the cloud management platform you can start to redeploy some of those resources to things that differentiate the business right instead of worrying about all the you know the bits and pieces that are in your infrastructure so what's next what was one on the horizon for the relationship what our customers asking for 200 meetings this week I'm sure there's been requests from customers tons of requests they want to see more automated lifecycle management they want to see vx rail releases in VMware releases get closer together in time they want us to be simultaneously shipping which is something that we're working on they want latest and greatest everybody wants to talk about nvme you know now we have nvme faster connectivity for the devices so you know the platform roadmap will continue but I think what Matt and I what we talk about quite frequently you can start to see us foreshadowing this strategy as we have the x-ray oh and we have the X rack sddc and we have cloud foundation doesn't need to be - right how do these come together is this consumption model it's just a different consumption model for the same technology so we're looking to see what synergies can we bring across those two products - to build a better portfolio for the VMware I've converged use case and I would say for our part we look to continue this partnership and I love what Chad was saying about the idea of you know VX rail and in VX rack having you know the same underlying components and how can we bring those things together I'll also say that looking out into the future I mentioned multiple workload profiles data analytics IOT NFV in addition to traditional high as it would be very interesting for us to work together to see how can we move up the stack for from an automated perspective can we automate the applique underlying application infrastructure in a way that will make customers more agile and that's something we could definitely look to try to do together in the future well guys thanks so much for stopping by talking about what's new how you're enabling cuz to really facilitate the IT transformation enabling that digital transformation and delivering a differentiated way of doing that to be here thank you we want to thank you for watching the queue we are live at day two or finishing day two I should say of Delft technologies world in Las Vegas I'm Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend thanks for watching we'll see you tomorrow

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, SilconANGLE's premier live streaming show where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise we are live day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, welcoming back a CUBE alumni, Gil Shneorson Senior Vice President of VxRail and GM at Dell EMC. Hey Gil. >> Thank you for having me back. >> Well we're excited to talk to you. So looking at some of the announcements that came out today where Dell EMC says they're the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure, and you've said that's happened really quickly. Tell us a little bit about that leadership. >> I think we found a way to take a systems approach to what is otherwise a software-defined world. So we found a way to get all of the economical benefits of hyper-converged driven by software, at the same time own the responsibility for those systems to be up and running and life cycle managed, taking away more of the responsibility then customers would have to do it on their own and I think that recipe has led us to a leadership position very, very quickly. >> So, you know we talked earlier today, can you expand upon some of that responsibility alleviating from customers, specifically around SLAs, around IO when you software-define or software-deliver storage, kind of the operating model changes. Can you expand upon that? >> Yeah, that's a very good point. So look at software-defined storage technology, for example. We happen to work with VSAN, which is the leading software-defined technology, but when customers choose to deploy software-defined solutions on their own, they're doing something that they haven't been doing in many, many years, which is take on the responsibility for up timing. It used to be that storage vendors, you know held responsibility for storage up time, for IOPs, for performance. So I think what we're doing is we found the balance. We've been getting a lot of benefits of hyper-converged and software defined, but at the same time own the responsibility from an operations standpoint to make it more like a traditional architecture and what they know. And that combination is very, very important. So for example, the ability to look at the entire system from software to driver to firmware, and always deliver a known good package because something that customers would have to do on their own, and they're all capable of doing it, but if they could choose not to do it why not offload it to somebody like us that does it for them. And so while there are two deployment models, we have a very massive growth in the systems approach, model (music drowns out voice) and I think people hand off things that they could do but they choose not to because they can focus on other things in the IT shop. For example, digital transformation and really the path to the multicloud by adding more and more layers on top of infrastructure that they can trust. >> Speaking of multicloud, I was in Jeff Clarke's opening session this morning. He was talking about, he gave a stat, I think it was 50 plus to 56% of users surveyed are using more than one cloud. So one of the things I also saw in the press release about the advancements of VxRail and VxRack, giving customers a clear path to adopt VMWare-based multiclouds. What is that clear path? How was that differentiated? So let's remember that both of those products, VxRail and VxRack SDDC are products that are built on the VMWare stack. They're optimized for VMWare users. They're not agnostic to anything. They're really VMWare on VMWare with automation and hardware and packaging that we do as a system. By delivering that robust infrastructure in one of the announcements that we made was that we created the VMWare validated design to add the rest of the VMWare stack and create an infrastructure as a service environment. That inherently comes with the ability to offload workloads to VMWare's service provider, cloud service provider, including Amazon and Google and the likes, but really a very vast network. So you take an infrastructure that's based on VMWare and harden is designing the system, you add on top of it to a prescriptive VVD exactly how to add the layered toppings like VRealize Automation, and through that inherently you get the entire VMWare value proposition going from a local solution to multicloud. And so the announcement was that validated design, which is very important, and then the announcement also included all sorts of hardware innovations or small evolutions like NVMe drives and 25 gigabyte ethernet, and higher memory CPUs. All of those are just to make sure that the infrastructure itself is ready to support that software stack that ultimately leads them to a full IO solution and offloading to the multicloud that are available to them. >> So big announcement or big set of education last year at VM World was the VCF. VMWare Cloud Foundation. It is the foundation of VMWare's infrastructure cloud play. Can you help talk through the importance in how VCF differentiates VMWare, VxRail, VxRack from competitors. >> So VCF is a software bundle. It's also an orchestrator that allows customers to manage multiple VMWare clusters within context. It's called a workload domain, and they can manage those clusters, and they can deploy them, they can life cycle management, they can microsegment them with NSX, and they can move workloads between them and to the cloud. VxRack SDDC is a system that basically lays down the VCF bits on a system premanufactured, and that's how we benefit from VCF as a differentiator. What we've done in addition we've announced 14G servers to be supported in that architecture. And we've also extended it to a, for example, a dial home on a system level. A lot of serviceability features, a physical view of the service as part of the graphic user interface. So not only does VCF differentiate VMWare by having the ability to finally leverage the entire stack, our value add is in taking that in the physical to virtual integration, if you will, life cycle management, and serviceability around servicing all of the system, which makes it a very robust infrastructure. So today customers have two choices. They can buy VxRack with VCF on top of it, or they can get to the same outcome with VxRail following a VVD prescriptive. And so what we do is we let them choose. If they're not ready for an NSX deployment they'd start with one, if they are they'll start with the other. Either way the outcome is going to be a full (music drowns out voice) from VMWare that can offload to multicloud. We just give them choices of how to get there. >> So want to kind of play off the value add for a second. We're at this event, the event theme Make It Real, making digital transformation real is a mandatory for businesses, right? They have the opportunity to take and apply data to multiple cases, use cases, within their organization to deliver differentiation. So you talked about a lot of the value out of the choices that you're giving customers from an IT perspective, what are some of the business, when you're sitting there with customers, what are some of the business outcomes they're looking for this technology to help them deliver? >> So that's a good question. So two levels of an answer. One is that by getting an automated infrastructure, IT itself can free up cycle to actually implement the (mumbles). It also frees up time for those organizations who are embarking on native cloud application development. For example, to deploy pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of (mumbles) Which is another prescriptive reference cycle actually that we have out there. And allow them to innovate. What I'm most interested in when I visit customers is what workloads are running on HCI. And I ask them and they say, is it testive, is it mission critical? And I'm happy to see that by now HCI, and specifically our products, have become mission critical, data centered, so all the way from the core to the edge running, banking applications a scale, running trading applications scale, running manufacturing application scale, running ports all over the world. I mean there's one customer that runs ports with automated trucks where the AI that runs those trucks is running on a VxRail. I mean, it's very, very exciting to see how our technology has been adopted into mainstream, into mainstream application compute. I think that's very exciting. And IT can enable more of those applications run and develop more because they have to do less in managing the physical infrastructure across multi companies. >> So Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President of Products over at VMWare brought in his customer from Celtic yesterday, and he validated that. They went all in from a legacy three tier architecture on Dell SE, they were Dell customer before, went with the Xrack, sorry VxRail, mission critical applications out the gate. So I'm seeing a shift. Last year around this time we were doing education and saying, you know, what is HCI versus a traditional architecture? Are you seeing that same thing at the show, as a shift that customers are no longer asking oh what is VxRail or VxRack, but that very thing is how can we accelerate digital transformation using VxRail or VxRack? >> Yeah, we have a very large percentage of the meetings, in fact almost 200 meetings that were requested to review the technology with us initial. That's a lot, that shows a lot of interest. There are a few customers that still don't know, and we've met some of those at the show. There are a few customers who are still contemplating whether HCI is right for them. And by the way, to those customers we say, don't rush into it, you have choices. If that's what you used to, what the economics were for you, there is no reason to rush into HCI. It's just depending on if you're going to get a better outcome than what you have today. But a very common question from customers is okay, then why do I need traditional storage? And for somebody from my vantage point, let's say there's a lot of bare-metal computing out there that requires traditional. But we think that traditional storage becomes more specialized, you know specific DR use cases, very large ratios between compute and storage and requires shared storage, but the HCI type of technology is definitely, and we see it with market growth, right? The market is growing at 60 to 70%. We're growing over 150% and taking share in this growing market, but we're still very, very small if you compare it to the whole IT tam. So there's a lot of way to go. Partly is that we still need to work on the last mile, being sure that our products are more mature, that we figure out how to operate them in a real life environment. So there's work to do, but the economical benefits are so strong that customers are making the choice more and more and more, and they trust us to know how to close the gaps that we still have. And it's a very collaborative effort between our and our customers. We listen, we respond very quickly, and so we can keep the machine going. >> It sounds like a momentum that we talked about with you I think at VM World back in eight or so months ago continues. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, sharing what's new with VxRack, VxRail, and how customers can be successful there. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks, Gil. >> Thank you for having me again. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live in a concert at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. You are live here on the CUBE as we're wrapping up our coverage here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We are in The Sands. We're live in Las Vegas for 14,000 plus attendees. Four thousand I think at the business partners summit. Really well attended, the solutions expos floor still crowded, and some really neat stuff inside there. Along with John Troyer, I'm John Walls, and we're joined by Doug Schmitt, who's the president of the global services at Dell EMC. Doug, thanks for joining it, we appreciate it. >> Well, thanks for having me, John. >> Yeah, let's talk about global services, alright? First off, I mean, big waterfront, right? That's pretty broad. Tell us about how you segment the responsibilities and what all that means. >> Well yeah, so the overall services family really has four groups in it. It has a consulting team, as you imagine, has an education services team, we have Virtustream, for cloud, helps manage the cloud for our customers. And then my team and I have responsibility for support, deployment services, installations, and also manage services. Good size team, in the sense of helping our customers, around 60,000 direct and indirect team members in 180 countries. >> So, say, 100 plus, right, almost 200 countries. We had somebody on from the global side yesterday and we just barely nicked into this a little bit, but I was interested what you think about it, on a global basis, at least we tend to think of the US, right, and I mean, it's US-centric. But you've got to deal with, you know, EU compliance and different kinds of governance, and of course different work cultures, different government, different governance, what have you. So, complicated, right? I mean, this is not easy stuff, to be able to bring the product to a different culture, different mindset, right? >> Well, that's, yes. I mean, what you're asking is yes, the complexity is there, which is that it really, but that's the value we bring to our customers. One is, believe it or not, the size and the scope helps us build better products. The feedback from our customers across multiple channels, whether it be through the data we get back through PhoneHome and AI helps us build better products globally, as well as help our customers. The calls we get in, social media, we're able to really aggregate that, take all that data and that information, build better products, and custom build the solutions for the regions or the countries that we're in. So there's, yes, the complexity has some minuses, but it has actually more pluses in helping us build better services, solutions, and products for our customers. >> Could you give me an idea of something you picked up from somewhere else, that turned out to be useful, across the board, or just maybe something that you hadn't thought of, whether it was some response of a customer in a different work environment, that you could apply across the board? Does anything come to mind like that? >> Well yeah, I think you look at things like WeChat in China, things like that that are occurring and how they're using both the social media, texting and all of these things about doing business and wanting services, and so that helps us build better social media platform, to listen to our customers. We take those learnings and then apply them globally very, very quickly. Those would just be one example, but you can pick that up across the product and the solution side as well. >> Doug, a couple of things you've said have already kind of sparked my imagination. I mean, support used to be, file a ticket, and if you don't have a ticket, don't bug us, right? And it was very reactive. And already you've talked about a lot of things that are proactive, both the PhoneHome capabilities and other data collection and proactive capabilities. Can you talk a little bit about how your team, you need to be digitally transformed, your customers are, you've got to be more proactive. We can't just be sitting, we can't say, have you filed a ticket, well then I can't talk to you. >> No, that's correct. No, that wouldn't work today. You know, that's exactly right. The customers' feedback to us, and we hear this resoundingly, loud and clear, is look, it's got to be proactive, it's got to be predictive, and it's got to be remote. And it's all about being fast, accurate, and keeping that up time in those environments running. So to your point, what we've really done is, we use that data to predict when a hard drive's going to fail, so if you're a customer, whether it's a server, and by the way, we've taken that technology and put it into the consumer products as well. So hey, we get ahold of the customer and let them know that something's going to fail before it fails, and that's the proactive predictive. And we're really getting that, quite frankly, from the data we're getting back on that PhoneHome, using that big data to then triangulate and build better products, better services. The other thing, though, that we've done, and we continue to do, is, not every customer on that proactive side wants to be contacted the same way. I'll use my family as an example. My daughter wants to be texted. You know, she's got to use text. My wife likes email, and my parents, by the way, still want to be called, because they want it to be explained, what's going on. And so we have to also build in the omnichannel with that predictive and that proactive capability. >> There's been an evolution in the acceptance of talking back to the vendor, you know, machines talking to machines, on prem, over the years. Are most people now at the phase where they don't consider that a security risk, or a privacy, people who didn't understand it in the early days were very careful, everybody's still very careful about what goes through their firewall, but are we at a place now where that's just part of normal? >> I think it's becoming more widely accepted. I wouldn't want to say that everybody's there yet. >> Troyer: Perhaps not the three letter agencies and a few others, things like that. >> That is correct. I mean, you know, look, it depends on the environment. By the way, and that's the key, is using that information to customize the services for those environments, right? And a little bit of, that's a good point, because that's how you want to contact or how much you can do. But we can tailor that for the customers' needs, and using that information to make sure we do that. >> Seems like there may also be a staffing, I'm interested in your staffing, because digital transformation, let's make it real, the entire industry has a interesting competency issue, in that we've got to be all main, we've got to all be current, there may be new sets of skills coming up, we certainly expect on the IT side of the house, your customers to become more skilled at new technologies. But you're in support, the support and installation side, how are you looking at training your people and upskilling your people to be able to deliver that kind of proactive support? >> Well, that's a great question. And I'll take it from two points, actually. One is, as the machine learning and the AI helps us solve what I call low complexity issues right now, moving up the stack every day, to do more complex issues, then what you find is that when customers do contact us, or we do need to reach out to them, it's usually a complex situation, right? And so we spend a tremendous amount of resources continually upskilling our talent in the remote support, deployment, as well as installation, so that they're able to handle that. So spend a lot of time with our education services team, to make sure that we're out in front of all the new technologies and the capabilities. You've heard a lot about remote and virtual learning, where we're on the cutting edge of that as well, that helps us stay abreast and up to date as well. But yes, it is going to take additional time and resources to stay ahead of that curve. We're there, but we want to make sure we stay there. >> And was that something that, I won't say you coax people on or bring them along, but help them understand that if we're on the cutting edge, you've got to be on the leading edge of the cutting edge, right? You've got to be the leader in this, right? In your workforce. I mean, how do you, I guess they're motivated, professionally motivated, right? But you do have to bring, it's culture, and you've got to create a different kind of culture, don't you? >> Well, no, you're right on that. But I think, culturally, what we've always, always had at Dell Technologies, is listening to the customer. And all 60,000 get to hear every day from our customers multiple times, so that in and of itself helps us. We're listening, we hear what the customers want, what we need to be doing to help them. That pushes us to want to stay up on that. Look, you can't be in the services industry, as you well know, without having that natural desire to want to learn, to want to help your customer, and so, look, we have to have the resources and the capabilties inside that education, but culturally, that's been built in, because we listen to the customers. >> And how different is it from the customer perspective than maybe five years ago, 10 years ago, in terms of expectation, in terms of what you, the kind of support they expect to get from you? Has that been altered as you give 'em new tools, you make 'em faster, you make 'em smarter, you make them more agile, but they also, are they turning to you for different things, or a different level of service now? >> Oh, yes, absolutely. And I think that starts with, if you look five years ago, the service was really, I'll call in when I have a problem. First, the expectation is, I want you to call us, before we have an issue, and let us know what we need to do to prevent it, and the second one is, if I do have to contact you, via multiple omnichannels, then I got to have the best and the brightest now, inside the organization. So routing and getting all of those to the right resources at the right time, right? As you're saying, the technical capabilities, the complex environments, the customers want to get to the right person quickly and accurately now, the very first time they get ahold of us. >> Yeah, so Doug, you mentioned, Dell Technologies, right? This is the first Dell Technologies World. It's no longer, I went to a few EMC Worlds, I think I was on the first CUBE back in 2010, at EMC World. That was mostly storage folks, right? Now, you've got storage folks, you've got server folks, you've got VMware here as a big presence, Pivotal was doing things. Systems are more complicated now, so it may be a two-part question, how is the show going for ya? And also, this implication that Dell Technologies is a stack, and there's a lot of IT people now that have to cover more of the stack, and how does that affect your job in terms of complicated cross-rack systems that are pinging back home and need help? That's about three questions in one. >> I think there's a few in there, right? Well, first of all, I think that when talking to the customers, and being here at Dell Technologies World, what we're hearing is actually confirmation on the proactive, predictive, remote support, and also getting to the correct talent very quickly, as you've mentioned, and the education and capabilities of the team. So that's good, because they're validating that. But more specifically to your question about, how does that translate into the real world, to how we're delivering? Well, first of all, with that information coming back and being remote, we can get it to the correct people very quickly. So, yes, it would be far more complex five years ago if we didn't have that technology, wasn't there for us. Now we know we who we need to get it to and who the best person is to solve the problem. And that's really what we're using, and transform to, is that technology helps us get it to the right place at the right time to solve the customer's issue. >> And where do you see yourselves going? As technology evolves, right, demands change, expectations change, global services is going to change. Can you make any kind of, give me a crystal ball prediction here about, this is where we're going to have to be in two or three years out, in terms of meeting that custom demand and wherever they are and whenever they want it. >> Well, yes. Well, look, we talk about transformation and making it real here at Dell Technology World, but we're living that every day as well, right? So we're helping our customers with it, and look, the transformation doesn't just, it's not just something we talk about externally. We're doing that internally, as you're saying, to stay ahead of the market, helping our customers with the transformation. And so as we look forward to that, from a services perspective, what we realize is look, that complexity and the speed is going to pick up. We know that we have to continue to use that big data, as Michael said, is the fuel, we know that's the fuel to provide better service, better products. We want no daylight between services, our engineering and product teams, and sales. And we're using that information to make sure we build better products, that we provide better solutions and better services, faster, to our customers, and we're also using that information and giving it to the sales teams so they can go out into our customers' environments and help them with their transformation. >> And what's the challenge for you in making all that happen? Everybody's got a nut to crack, right? Everybody says okay, this is, so for you, if there's a next hurdle or next barrier for you to get over to be able to deliver on that, what would that be? >> Well, we're using the data today that we have, which is very rich, and we're transforming that into solutions for our customers, but look, that data is, we're getting more of it every day, making sure that we don't obsess about the data, that it doesn't control us, that we're using it, right? I mean, that's part of this, is you definitely want it to be the fuel, but you got to aim it the right way. And I think that's the key, is making sure that we get that pointed in the right direction. >> As you're doing this kind of thing, I'm kind of curious about hiring, right? What kinds of roles are you looking for, to bring in, that can do that? 'Cause that's very sophisticated, data scientist perhaps, that's pulling in people from engineering, you must be able to, are you able to pull on from the rest of the organization like that, or who are you looking for? >> Yes, I've talked about real time questions, right? We could be talking about that one for hours. The answer is yes, and that is a good point. If you look at services now, compared to five years ago, it's hiring data scientists, it's hiring the analytics and the deep analytics folks that can help program. I mean, all of this comes together, right? And so we're working very closely with the schools globally to pull those scientists in, and that's a big hiring competency that we've been focused on for the last four years, and we're going to continue that, we see that continuing down the road. >> Well Doug, thank you for the time. We appreciate you telling the global services story. Great show. And we wish you continued great success, and I assume it's been a really, really good week for you, too, right? >> It has been an outstanding week, so thank you. >> Walls: Excellent, you bet. >> Appreciate having me. >> Joining us from Dell Technologies World 2018, you are watching us live from Las Vegas on the CUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: 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 theCube's live coverage of the Inaugural Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas. Getting to the end of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage from two sets I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host John Troyer, and for those of you that haven't attended one of these shows, sometimes like "Oh, you're going to Vegas, this is some boondoggle," but I'm really happy, I've got a customer, one of the Dell EMC employees, here. A lot of stuff goes on. There's learning, there's lotsa meetings, there's, you know, you come here, you kind of, you know, get as much out of it as you can. So, first, Stephen Herzig, who's the Director of Enterprise Systems at the University of Arkansas, >> Correct, yes. >> Stu: You had a busy week so far. >> I have. >> Thank you for joining us >> You bet. >> Stu: Also, Andrew McDaniel, who's the Senior Director of Ready Solutions for VDI with Dell EMC, thank you for joining us-- >> Thanks guys >> Alright, so, Stephen, first of all, give us a little bit about your background and University of Arkansas, I think most people know the Razorbacks-- >> Stephen: That's right, the Razorbacks! >> Talk about your org and your role there. >> Yeah, I'm Director of Enterprise Systems, as you mentioned. We're an R1 University, we have about 27,000 students, about 5,000 faculty and staff in the university. And, so my organization is responsible for maintaining, as I said, all the enterprise systems, essentially everything in the data center on the floor to support all the educational activities. Now there is some distributed or commonly known as shadow IT organizations throughout the university and we work quite closely with them, too. >> Okay, you stamp out all that shadow IT stuff and pull it all back in, right? >> Stephen: (laughs) No, no! No, absolutely not. >> We'll get a, Andrew, before we get into more about the university, tell us a little bit about your role and your org, inside Dell EMC. >> So my organization basically develops the end-to-end VDI solutions that Dell EMC sell globally. So, we work with partners such as VMware and Citrix, to put together the industry leading solutions for VDI. Tested, validated, engineered, to give real good confidence in the solution the customer's going to buy. >> Okay, John and I spent many years looking at these, you know, memes in the industry, all that, you know, but uh, Stephen, before we get into the VDI piece, give us, what are some of the challenges that you're facing in the University? We've had, you know, from an IT standpoint, we know the technology requirements are more than ever. While tuitions go up, budgets are always a challenge. So, when you're talking to your peers, what are the things you're all commiserating about or, you know, working at. >> Yeah, like any IT organization, it's a challenge to do more with less. We're constantly being required to support more systems, more technology, and technology is becoming more and more an integral part of the educational process. We also have students coming from very diverse backgrounds, and so the kinds of computing devices that they're able to bring to the university with them, some can afford high-end, some not, and so, it's a challenge for us to deliver that, the applications to them, no matter what kind of device they happen to bring. >> Alright, so, sounds like VDI is something that fits there-- >> Yes >> Before we get into the actual solution, tell us, what was the struggle you were facing, what led to that, what was there, was there a mandate? How did you get to the solution that you were-- >> Well, really, we were struggling with those challenges We're a very small IT team, and as those things grew, we knew we had to find a way to reduce the number of resources that we're supporting, all the end points, all the machines in the labs, all the machines on faculty and staff desks, and again, like I said, the students bring their own devices, which we had to support as well. >> Alright, so, you ended up choosing a Dell Solution, maybe give us a little bit about that, that process and walk us through the project some. >> Yeah, we really needed a solution. We could not go out and assemble pieces, parts, from a lot of different vendors, and we needed a solution that was tailored to our needs, that fit, VDI is complex by its nature, but some vendors made it really complex. So, we had to find one that was right for our environment, for what we were trying to achieve, and of course, at the right price point. Higher education, we're not flush with cash. >> That's always been really hard, I think that's been the hard thing about VDI, right? It's always been kind of complicated and hard to do, at least back in the day, and then when you did it, half the things didn't work, and the things that didn't work were really weird, and the user was very confused. "This application works, but this one doesn't." And, "where's my cursor?" and "Everything went wonky all of a sudden and I can't login at 9am." I mean, I'm kind of curious, what is necessary maybe, from eye-level in a modern VDI solution stack, that makes it easy? You know, is it the hypervisor, the end clients? >> I think, John, you know we've seen such great advances in the software side of it, right? So, if you look at Horizon, as a broker, VMware Horizon, the advances that they've made in things like protocols, right, so Blast Extreme, for example, one of the big challenges that we've always had, is things like Link or Skype, in a VDI environment. It was, it made a disaster for many customers, right? So, that has been solved by VMware and the advances that they did, above and beyond what was capable in PC over IP. So, that's one of the things. From a hardware perspective, you know, one of the challenges we frequently had in VDI, was poor user experience, right? And it was typically because the graphics requirement for the application could not be delivered by the CPU alone, right, so GPUs, Nvidia, K1, K2's, then it went to the M10, M60's, and moving forward into the P4 and P40's, they've really helped us to improve that user experience, and it's starting to get to a point where GPUs are a standard delivery within any VDI employment. So, you get really good experience moving forward. And as you know, if you can't deliver a good user experience, the project is dead before it even starts. Alright, so that's a big challenge. >> Stephen, do you have any commentary on some of the challenges that we faced before? What was your experience like? >> Yeah, it, that's exactly right. We made the decision early on to include GPU in every session that we served up. And we weren't quite sure, 'cause it is an additional expense, but it was one of the best decisions that we've made. It really does make all the difference. >> Was there something specific from the application or user-base, and how they were using it, that led you to that? >> Well, we are all Windows 10, and Windows 10 just looks better, it runs better, the video, scrolling through a Word document, the text, some are very nuanced, but it makes a big difference in the user experience. And of course, we have higher-end users using CAD programs, things like that, you know, in the School of Engineering, they needed the GPU for what they were doing. >> Andrew, wondering if you could give us, little bit of an update on the stack, So, I think back to, on the EMC side, I watched everything from the Flash on the converge side. On the Dell side, there was the Wyse acquisition of course, EMC and VM were coming together, so, a long journey, but even the first year we did theCube, you know, Dell had some big customers doing large scale, cost-effective VDI, because, had that, you know, to give some of the marketing terms I've heard here, it's end to end, but you add the devices all the way through. So, bring us up to 2018. >> Yeah, so, I guess, you know, one of the challenges that Stephen spoke about is the, previously, the hassle of having to go and buy each of the individual components from multiple different vendors. So, you're buying your storage from one vendor, compute from another, GPUs from another, hypervisor from another, broker from another, and so on. So, it gets very complicated to manage all of that. And so, we had lots of customers who had run into scenarios where, say a BIAS firmware and a driver revision were not compatible, and so we'd run into those kinds of problems that we were talking about earlier on, right? So, I think, you know, bringing all of that together, in Dell Technologies, we can now deliver every single aspect of what you need for a VDI deployment. So, we created a bundle called VDI Complete. It uses vSAN ReadyNodes or VxRail, right? So, hyper-converged, massive from a VDI perspective, and I'll come back to that in a second. It pairs then, Horizon Advanced or Horizon Enterprise, with those base platforms, and the Dell Wyse Thin clients. So, every aspect, true end to end, is delivered by Dell Technologies, and there's simply no other vendor in the market who can do that. So, what that basically does is it gives the customer confidence that everything that has been tested can be owned, from a support perspective, by Dell Technologies. Alright, so, if you've got a problem, we're not going to hand you off to another company to go solve that issue, or lay blame with somebody else. It's fully our stack, and as a result, we take full responsibility for it. And that's one of the benefits that we have with customers like University of Arkansas. >> And that was important to us. That single point of contact for support was really important to us. >> Stephen, I wonder if you could talk about, from an operational standpoint, you said, you've got a small team. One of the challenges, at least years ago, was like "Oh, wait! I have the guy that walked around "and did the desktops, now I centralized it, "who owns it, you know, how do we sort through this? "You know, we've got a full stack there. "Simplicity's one of the big messages of HCI," but what was the reality for your team and the roles, how did you change? >> Well one of the first areas, or actually, the first area that we implemented VDI in was in the labs. Hundreds of end points across the campus. And, before VDI, you would walk into the lab, and a certain percentage of the machines would always be down. They needed updating, there was a virus, somebody spilled a coffee on the machine, you know, that kind of thing. After VDI, when you walked into the lab, 100% of the end points were always up, and there was no noise in the lab, except when somebody printed. So, the maintenance required, the resources for my team, and these distributed IT teams was reduced drastically. As a matter of fact, some of the distributed teams had 50% of their resources reduced. That could then go and do more high-value projects and deliver high-value services to their colleges. >> From the student and faculty perspective, it sounds like the uptake has been good, and the satisfaction level high. I mean, user experience is everything with VDI, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, the students came, we installed during spring break, and they came back from spring break, went into the labs with these beautiful new 27-inch monitors, sat down, logged on, and it looked almost the same as before. Which was exactly what we were after. We wanted that same high-quality experience in VDI that they had with a laptop or a desktop. >> The monitors are an important thing to consider, right, 'cause a lot of customers will think about the data center side of VDI, right, so, get lots of compute, good, high-performing storage, good network, and then they put a really poorly designed thin client or an old desktop PC, or something like that, on the end, and wonder why they're not getting good performance, right? So, we just launched yesterday the Dell Wyse 5070. It's the first thin client in the market that can have six monitors attached to it, four of those can be 4K, and two 2K, right? So, it's immense from a display perspective, and this is what our customers are demanding. Especially in financial services, for example, or in automotive design, you know, in CAD labs, for example, you need three or four really good, high-quality screens attached. >> Well, I'm saying, I'll date myself, I wish I had that when I was playing Doom when I was in college in the labs. >> That too! >> That does bring into question, your upgrade and scenarios, moving on to the future, right? You used to have all those janky old PC's that you'd kind of, maybe they'd slide out the back door, maybe they'd get recycled, or whatever, but now it's a different refreshed cycle, and maybe even different use cases. >> Yeah, the lifespan of the endpoints is much longer with the VDI solution. >> John: It's got to be good, yeah. I was curious, you mentioned the converged infrastructure, too, Andrew. I mean, how does that play into it? (muffled) >> Yeah, so I mean, you know, traditionally, a SAN infrastructure was used in VDI, alright? So, for us, that would have been Equallogic Compellent, historically. Now, we're seeing that VDI market almost totally transition to hyperconverged. Alright, so vSAN has really revolutionized VDI, okay? I'd say, you know, a good 30, 35% of all VxRail and vSan deployments that we do, are in the VDI space. So, it's really, and I would say about 90, 95% of our VDI deployments are on hyperconverged rather than a traditional SAN infrastructure. That's really where VDI has moved now. 'Cause it gives customers the ability to scale on demand. Instead of having to go and buy another half-million dollar storage rate, add another thousand users, you can simply add in a couple of more compute nodes with the storage built in. For us, hybrid works very well. So, a hybrid-disc configuration is working very well in most VDI deployments. Some customers require all flash, it depends on the applications and the other kind of performance that they want to get from it. But for a majority of customers, hyperconverged with the hybrid configuration works brilliantly. >> So, Stephen, I want to give you the final word. Sounds like everything went really well, but one of the things we always like to understand, when you're talking with your peers, they said "Hey, what did you learn? "What would you do a little different, "either internally, or configuration-wise, or roll-out," What would you tell your peers? >> Well, when we implemented VDI it was just before VDI Complete came out. So, the work that's done in the VDI Complete solution, we didn't have. So, as we look to the future, and we want to expand, and grow our environment, VDI Complete will be a huge help. Had we had that, it only took us about four months to stand it up, which, considering what we accomplished, was very short time, but, if we had had VDI Complete, that time would've been much more compressed. So, looking to the future, we're looking to expand using VDI Complete. >> Just to, Andrew, maybe you can tie the knot on this bow for us, is sounds like this could, if I've got VDI, I don't have to start brand new, it can fit with existing environments, how does that all work? >> Absolutely, I mean we've got lots of customers who've already done Citrix or VMware deployments, right? Ideally, you want to connect with one broker. So you want to stick with one broker. But, we can bring in a hyperconverged VDI solution into your existing user estate, and merge into that. So, that's pretty common. >> Alright, well, Andrew and Stephen, thank you so much for sharing the story. Really great to always get the customer stories. We're getting towards the end of three days of live coverage here at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, at Dell Technologies World 2018. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCube. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at Dell Technologies World. It's the inaugural Dell Technologies World. You're watchin' The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vallante, and I'm really excited to have Sanjay Poonen on, COO of VMWare, long-time Cube alum. Great to see you, my friend. >> Always great, Dave. >> Thanks again so much for makin' time. I know you're in and out, but things are good. We had Pat on, on Monday. You guys made the call early on. You said to the industry, you know, I think the industry handed us and maybe the forecasts are a little bit conservative. We're seeing great demand. We love our business right now, and it's comin' true. Data centers booming, VMWare's kickin' butt. It's goin' great. >> You know it's been obviously a very good couple of years, since the Dell EMC merger. It's really helped us, and you know, when we think about our partnerships, we put this in a very special place. In the last two years, partnerships like Dell and AWS have been very instrumental, built on top of the partnerships we've had for many years. And our core principles at VMWare have not changed. We're really focused on software defining the data center. Why? Because it makes you more agile, removes costs, reduces complexity, makes the planet more green. We think we've got a long way to go in just building that private cloud, making the data center feel like a cloud. That's priority number one. Priority number two, extending tno the hybrid cloud. Last time we talked was at AWS Reinvent. That's very important. We're doing a bit of work there at AWS and many other clouds. And user computing, making sure that every one of these type of devices are secure and managed, whether it's Apple devices, Google, or Microsoft. Those three priorities have still stayed the same, and now Dell's comin' to give us a lot more of that sort of draft, to help us do that inside the Dell EMC customer base, too. >> Yeah, I mean you guys are doin' it again, the whole, NSX obviously is booming. >> Sanjay: Big launch this week. >> You know, it's funny, the whole software-defined networking thing. Everybody flocked to it. VCs flocked to it. You guys changed the game with that Nycera acquisition. I mean, could you imagine, I guess you did imagine what it was going to become, I mean it's really taken off in a big way. >> Bold move. I got to give credit to the, I mean I wasn't at the company at the time, but I got to tell you, when I saw that I was stunned. Paying 1.2 billion for a company that didn't have much revenue. But here we are. We talked about it in our earnings call being a 1.4 billion one rate business. 4,500 hundred customers. We were zero customers five years ago when we did the acquisition, and what we really defined is that the future of networking is going to be software-defined, clearly, and it's much the same way a Tesla is transforming the automotive industry, right? What's the value of a Tesla? It's not just the hardware, but the software that's changing the way in which you drive, park, all of the mapping, all of that stuff. We believe the same way the networking industry's going to go through mighty revolution. We think the data center gets more efficeint and driven through software. The path into the into the public cloud, and the path to the branch, and that's what we as we launched our virtual cloud networking. It's extremely differentiated in the industry. We're the only ones really pioneering that, and we think it's extremely visionary. And we're excited to take our customers on this journey. It was a big launch for us this week, and we think NSX is just getting started. 4500 customers is about 1% of our roughly 500,000 customers Every single one of them should be looking at NSX. Big opportunity ahead of us. >> Huge. And the cloud play, we talked about this at VM World last summer. The clarity now that your customers have. They can now make bets for a couple of cycles anyway, really having confidence in your cloud strategy. You've seen that, I'm sure, in your customer base. >> We have, and you know, it started off by telling the world that the 4,000 service providers that have built their stack on VMWare, VMWare Cloud Providers, VCPP, are all going to be very special to us as they build out their clouds, often in many specialized country that have country-specific cloud requirements. But the we're going to take the public clouds and systematically start working them. IBM cloud was the first, When they acquired software we had a strong relationship with them, announced two or three years ago. And then I think the world was shocked. It was almost, as I've described on the media, a Berlin Wall moment, when AWS and VMWare came together because it sort of felt like the United States and Soviet German in 1987, okay? And you know, here we have these two companies, really workin'. That's worked out very well for us, and then we've done systematic other things with Azure, Google, and so on and so forth, and we'll see how the public cloud plays out, but we think that that hybrid cloud bridge. We're going to be probably the only company who can really play a very pivotal role in the world moving from private cloud to public cloud and there's going to be balance on both sides of that divide. >> So you really essentially are trying to become the infrastructure for the digital world now, aren't you? Talk about that a little bit. You're seeing new workloads, obviously AI's all the buzz. You guys are doing some work in blockchains. It's going to take a while for all that to pick up, but really it's the ability and containers is the other thing. Everybody thought, oh containers, that's the end of VMs, and Pat at the time said, no no no, you guys don't understand. Let me explain it. He sort of laid it out. You seem to be embracing that, again embracing change. >> I got to tell you, that one for me because I'll tell you when I first joined the company four and a half years ago, I was at SAP. I asked Pat two questions. I said the public cloud's going to, I mean, probably take out VMWare, aren't you concerned with Amazon. Here we are taking that headwind and making a tailwind. The second was like, everyone's talking about Docker. Aren't containers going to just destroy VMs? And that one wasn't as clear to us at the time, but we were patient. And what happened we started to notice in the last few years. We began to notice on GitHub tremendous amount of activity around Kubernetes, and here comes Google almost taking the top off of a lot of you know parts of Docker Two, Docker Swarm, Enterprise, Docker still remains a very good container format, but the orchestration layers become a Google-based project called Kubernetes. And I think our waiting allowed us and pivotal to embrace Google in the partnership that we announced last year. And we plan to become the de facto enterprise container platform. If VMs became the VM in VMWare and we have 500,000 customers, tens of millions of VMs, you'd think we could multiply those VMs by some number to get number of containers. VMWare has its rightful place, a birthright, to become the de facto enterprise container platform. We're just getting started, both between us and Pivotal, the Kubernetes investment, Big deal. And we're going to do it in partnership with companies like Google. >> I want to ask you about Pivotal. When Joe Tucci was the swansong in the MC world, he came out with an analyst meeting and we asked them, if you had a mulligan, you know, what would you do over again. He said, you know, we're going to answer it this way. He said, I wished I had done more to bring together the family, you know, the federation. We laid that vision out, and I probably, he said, personally I probably could've done more. I feel like Michael has taken this on. I almost feel like Joe, when he laughs at Michael. My one piece of advice is do a better job than I did with that integration. And it seems like Michael's takin' that on as an outsider. What can you tell us about the relationship between all the companies, particularly Pivotal. >> Yeah, you know Joe's a very special man, as our chairman, and Joe and Pat are the reasons I joined VMWare, and so I have tremendous respect for them. And he stayed on as an advisor to Mike O'Dell. And I think Mike O'Dell just took a lot of those things and improved on it. I wouldn't say that anything was dramatically bad, but you know he tightened up much of the places where we could work together. One material change was having the Dell EMC reps carry quota, for example VMWare. They're incetivized. That has been a huge difference to allow us to have our sales forces completely align together. Big big huge difference. I mean, sales people care about our product when they're compensated, carry quota on it, and drive it. The second aspect was in many of these places where Dell and VMWare or VMWare and Pivotal were needed to just take obstacles out of the way, and I don't think Pivotal would've been really successful if it had stayed in VMWare four or five years ago. So Paul Mertz leaving, the genius of that whole move, which Joe orchesthrated, and allowing them to flourish. Okay, here they have four or five years, they've gone public. They have a tremendous amount of traction. Then last year, we began to see that Kubernetes Coming back allowed us to get closer to them, okay? We didn't need to do that necessarily by saying that Pivotal needs to be part of VMWare. We just needed to build a joint engineering effort around Kubernetes And make that enormously successful. So you get the best of both worlds. We're an investor, obviously, in Pivotal. We're proud of their success in the public markets. We benefit some from that sort of idea process, but at the same time we want to make sure this Kubernetes Effort and the broader app platform, our cloud foundry, is enormously successful, and every one of our customers who have VMs starts looking containers. >> Well, I always said Pivotal was formed with a bunch of misfit toys that just didn't seem to fit into VMWare. >> Sanjay: It's come a long way. >> And you took that, but it was smart because you took it and said, here it is. Let's start figuring that out. Who better to do that than Paul? And it's really come together and obviously a very successful. >> Yeah, Rob, Scott, Bill, Yara, many of that team there. They're passionate about developers, okay? We understand the infratstructure role very well, but when you can get dev and ops together, in a way they collaborate, so we're excited about it. And we have a key part for us, we have a very simple mission: to make the container platform just very secure. What's the differenetiation between us and other companies trying to build container platforms? NSX? So our contribution into that is to take Kubernetes Watch for some of the management capabilities, and then add NSX to it, highly differentiate it. And now all of a sudden customers say, this is the reason why I mean, 'cause every container brings a place where the port could be insecure. NSX makes that secture, and we think that that's another key part to what's made NSX the launch this week extremely sepcial is that its story relates to cloud and containers. Those two Cs, I would say, cloud and containers. We've taken what were headwinds to us, VMWare over the last four or five years, and made them tailwinds. And for us that's been a tremendous learnnig lesson, not just I would say in our own technology road map, but in leadership and management. That's important for us as business leaders, too. >> Dave: And I got to give some love to my friends in the Vsin world, Yen Bing and those guys. Obviously Vsin doin' very well. Give us the update there. I mean, you're doin', he's doin' exactly what you said: we're going to do to networking and storage what we did to compute. >> I mean, again you know, when we start things off. If you'll remember, three or four years ago, we were confusing EMC and VMWare, Evo, Rails, some of those things. We just had to clean that up. And as Dell EMC came together and VMWare, we said, listen. We're going to do software-defined storage really well because it has a very close synergy point to the Kubernetes I mean, we know a lot about storage because it's very closely connected to Compute. And if we could do that better than anybody else, and in the meantime all these startups were doing reasonably well, Simplicity, Nutanics, Pivotry, so on and so forth. I mean there's no reason if we don't have our act together we could build the best software-defined storage and then engineer a system together with Dell that has the software, and that's what VX rails has become. So a few false stubs of the toe when we started off, you know three or four years ago, but we've come a long way. Pat talked about over 10,000 customers at the revenue run rate that we announced last year, and a 600 million run rate at the end of Q4. We believe we are, for just the software piece, we are the de facto leader, and we have to continue to make customers happy and to drive, you know, this as the future of hyper converge infrastructure because converged had its place. And now the coming together of Compute Storage, over time networking with a layer of management, that's the future of the data center. >> Yeah, I was watching. THere's some good, interesting maneuvering goin' on in the marketplace. A lot of fun for a company like ours to watch. I want to talk about leadership. There's a great, you got to go to Sanjay's LinkedIn profile. There's an awesome video on there. It's like a mini TED talk that some of your folks mashed up and put out there. It's only about eight minutes. But I want to touch on some of the things that I learned from that video. Your background, I mean I knew you came from India. You came over at 18 years old, right? >> Sanjay: I was very fortunate. I grew up in a poor home in India, and I came here only because I got a scholarship to go to Dartmouth College. And I think I might have been one of the few brown-skinned guys in Hanover, New Hampshire. I mean, you've been there, you know there's not much Indian goin' on here. (laughter) But I'm very forutnate. And this country is a very special country to immigrants, if you work hard and if you're willing to apply yourself. I'm a product of that hard work. And now as an Indian American living in California. So I feel very fortunate for all that both the country and people who invested in me over the last many decades have helped me become who I am. >> So you were on a scholarship to Dartmouth. >> Yes, that's right. >> As a student in India. So obviously an accomplished student in India, and you said, you know, I got bullied a little bit. I had the glasses, right? Somebody once told me, Dave, don't peak in high school. It's good advice, right? So it was funny to hear you tell that story because I see you as such a charismatic, dynamic leader. I can't picture you as, you know, a little kid getting bullied. >> We were always geeks at one point in time, but one of the things my mother and dad always taught me, especially my mom, who had a tremendous influence on my life and is my hero, is, listen, don't worry what people say about you, okay? Your home is always going to feel a safety and a fortress to us, and I appreciate the fact that irrespective of what happened on the playground, if I was bullied, at home I knew it was secure. And I seek to have that same attitude twoards my children and everybody I consider my extended family, people at work, and so on and so forth. But once you've done that, you don't build your identity just to what people say about you. You're going to build your identity over what's done over a long period of time, okay? With, of course, if everybody in the world hates you, that's a tough place. That's happened to a few people in the world. I wasn't in that state at all. And as I came to this country, just got tougher because I was a minority in a place. But many of those lessons I learned as a young boy helped me as an 18 year old, as I came here, and I'm very thankful for that. >> And you came here with no money, alright? >> A scholarship. >> Right. >> Maybe 50 bucks in the pocket. >> You had 50 bucks and an opportunity, and made the most of it. And then obviously you did very well at Dartmouth. You graduated from Harvard, right? >> I did my MBA at Harvard. >> MBA at Harvard, probably met some interesting people there. >> Andy Jackson being one of them. >> I know he's a friend of yours. >> Sam Berg, who's the head of the client business, was also a classmate of mine at HBS. The '97 class of HBS had some accomplished people: Chris Kapensky is running McDonald's. She's President of US. So I'm very fortunate to have some good classmates there. >> So what did you do? Did you go right to Harvard from? >> No, I spent four years working at Apple. And then went back to do my business school. >> And then what'd you do after that? >> I came back to Silicon Valley at a startup. I was one of the founding product managers at AlphaBlocks. Then went to Informatica. And bulk of my time was at SAP, and most of my life was in the analytics, big data business. What we called big data at the time. >> And that's when we first met it. >> Analytics at BI, and then when Joe and Pat called me for this, the end-user computing role at VMWare four and a half years ago. That's when I came to VMWare. >> And that was a huge coup for VMWare. We knew you from SAP, and that business was struggling. You always give credit to your team, of course. Awesome. Which is what a good leader does. The other thing I wanted to touch on before we break is, you talked about leadership and how importatn it is to embrace cahnge. You said you have three choices when change hits you. What are those three choices? >> You either embrace it, okay? You either stand on the sidelines or you leave. And that's typically what happens in any kind of change, whether it's change in work, change in fafmilies, change in other kinds of religious settings, I mean it's a time-old prinicple. And you want to let the people who are not on board with it leave if they want to leave. The people who are staying in the middle and not yet convinced, you'll hope they'll do. But they cannot yet throw the grenades, 'cause then they're just going to be. And you want to take that nucleus of people who are with you in the change to help you get the people who sit on the sidelines in. And to me when I joined VMWare, the end-user computing team had the highest attrition, okay, and the lowest satisfaction. And I found the same thing. There were popel who were leaving in droves. Some people sittin' on the sidelines, but a core group of people I loved that were willing to really work with me, 'cause I didn't really know a lot about it. The smarter people were in the team and some people that we hired in. We had to take that group and become the chagne agents, and when that happens it's a beautiful thing because from within starts to form this thing that's the phoenix rising out of the ashes. And the company, and then these people who are sidelineers start to get involved. New people want to join. Now everybody wants to be part of the end-user computing team at VMWare because we're a winner, but it wasn't that way four and a half years ago. Same thing in cloud. How are we going to transform this cloud business to be one where, VCloudAir. We're being made fun of, like how are you ever going to compete with Amazon. We had to go through our own catharsis. We divested that business, but out of that pain point came a fundamental change. Some people left. Some people stayed, but I'm just grateful through all of this that we learned a tremendous amount. I think change is the most definitive thing that happens to every company, and you have to embrace it. If you embrace chance, it's going to make you a much stronger leader. I'll tell you, the Mandarin word, okay, for crisis is two symbols: one that shows disaster and one that shows opportunity. I choose the opportunity side. >> Dave: You choose? Right? Yeah! >> And eveyrone makes that choice, right? And if you make the right path, it could be a beautiful learning experience. >> Sanjay, words to live by. Definitely check out that video on Sanjay's profile. >> It's on LinkedIn. >> Really fabulous always to sit down and talk to you. >> Always a pleasure, Dave. Congratulations to all your success. >> Dave: Thank you! I really appreaciate your support. >> Thank you. >> Alright, everybody that's it from Dell Technologies World 2018. You can hear the music behind us. Next week, big week. We've got Red Hat Summit. I'll be at Service Now Knowledge. We got a couple of other shows and tons of shows coming up. I don't know, you were at Vmon last year. I don't know if you're going to be there this year, maybe maybe not, we'll see. >> Well we got a big one coming up at VM World. We'll see you there. >> We got big one coming up, VM World, at the end of August through early September, which is back at Mosconi this year? >> It's back at Las Vegas still. One more thing and then it's going back to Mosconi after the construction's over. >> So go to theCUBE.net, check out all the shows. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. (digital music)

>> Narrator: 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. I'm Lisa Martin and you might notice some different kind of guests on the program right now. We are live in Las Vegas, day three of Dell Technologies World. We've had lots of great conversations with technologists from many, many companies. But, one of the cool things that's here, if you've heard any dogs barking in the background during any of our segments, there is Michael's Angel Paws actually right next to our set. And this is the second year that they have been with Dell, last year Dell EMC World, now Dell Technologies World. I'm excited to be joined by Alicia Halloran. >> Hi. >> Hi Alicia. >> Hi. >> And we're also joined by Odie and Gracie who are both certified therapy dogs. >> Yes, through Michael's Angel Paws. >> Through Michael's Angel Paws. So this was, I was telling Alicia before we went live that I, when I got to the set Monday morning, I assumed that this area, Michael's Angel Paws, was for attendees of the event who have service dogs. And when I heard, no it's actually part of the event to give people that are here, walking around all day, learning lots of things about technology, just a little bit of respite, I thought that was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. >> Exactly. >> In all the trade shows that I have done. This is your second year participating. >> Yeah, this is the second year that we've done this and it is the most fun event to do because there is so much technology, there's so much going on here and it's so wonderful to have people come by and be able to squeeze our dogs and feel like they're home and think about and talk about their dogs because they're not getting an opportunity to do that at the conference they're working. So, to be able to take a break and just spend some time breathing with some animals, really really good. >> Oh, and I can tell you it does wonders. So, talk to us about therapy dogs. They're both certified. >> Alicia: Right. >> What are the different programs that they go through? >> Well, they start out in obedience, learning how to be dogs and good well-behaved dogs and they pass the Canine Good Citizenship test, and then afterwards, they go through two different levels of therapy dog training. And a lot of that, is based on distraction, being able to be in huge groups of people, big crowds, and maintain their composure, not walk off of tables, and that they can withstand being with people as much. So you kind of figure out if your dog is good enough for it, if they want to do it, and that's really important, they have to want to do it because it is a lot of attention and these guys just love it. >> I'm amazed at how calm they are. >> Yes. >> So this is actually something that's near and dear to Michael Dell's heart. >> Alicia: Yes, yes >> The chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies. Tell us a little bit about his contributions. >> Yeah, he made a generous donation that will provide three scholarships for Michael's Angel Paws for veterans. And what that will do is, it will take three dogs through our therapy dog training program, excuse me, Service Dog Training program and the Service Dog Training program is built to have dogs help veterans in assimilation. And help them with daily activities and Post-traumatic Stress, all sorts of different things. And they're different, those are therapy dogs, so those are dogs that will go everywhere with someone and really take care of them. It's a beautiful, beautiful donation and experience for the veterans to be able to have that. >> Absolutely. That's fantastic. Well, it's been really neat to see how people are reacting to seeing a pen full of dogs. >> Yes, yes. >> In the middle of, you talked about some requirements for them. There have been very loud noises here >> Alicia: Oh yeah. >> Lisa: Every evening, it's basically being in a concert, loads of people. >> Right, yes. >> And it's, I've been very impressed with how calm they are and how people are reacting. You're providing a really nice service and it's really cool to know that this is something that is very near and dear to Michael Dell's heart and Dell Technologies. >> Yeah, that's so wonderful. Yeah, it's so wonderful to be invited to this. It's such an incredible experience and I think it provides a comfort to everybody here. >> Lisa: I agree. >> So, it's very generous. >> I'm sure I'm going to get the sniff test when I get home at 11 o'clock tonight from my dog. >> Oh, yes! >> But we want to thank you, Alicia, for stopping by! >> Yes, it was my pleasure. >> Sharing with us about the program >> Absolutely, it was my pleasure. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> I'm Lisa Martin, otherwise known as Zara's mom. You're watching theCUBE, live from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you buy Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE's Media Production of theCUBE, live here from Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming Walter Isaacson to our program. Author, podcaster, I read every biography that you publish. I listen to every podcast, so thank you. So, Walter, this is a conference of geeks, you know? And I say that lovingly, 14 thousand people. They love technology; they love ideas. You have the chance to study and research some of the, you know, most brilliant minds, that we've had the last couple hundred years. Where do you get your inspiration from? >> You know, I love the fact that the most creative of people, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Einstein, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, Ada Lovelace, whomever they may be, all love the humanities and the science. They stand at that intersection of sort of liberal acts technology, and that's so important in today's world. We can have enormous amounts of data, and the question is, how do you connect humans to it? How do you add the human factor? And so, that's where I get my inspiration, from people who stand at that interaction of humanities and technology. >> Yeah, one of my favorite books of yours is the Innovators. You talked about history, and there's things that we've been looking at or trying. When you talk about forecasting or predicting something, sometimes we have great ideas, but if I take us, you know, decades or longer to get there, any kind of, you know, big inspirations? What do you say to people that work in the tech world, just how they should think about things like that? >> Well, first of all, things happen sometimes slower than you expect, until that inflection point, when they happen faster than you expect. >> It's like going broke, you know? It happens really slow, and then it happens fast. >> I guess we shouldn't say that in Vegas, here where we are for this conference, but I think that the main thing to do is to be one of those people that has an intuitive feel for how humans are going to find a product or service to be transformative to them. And, you know, we didn't know we needed a thousand songs in our pocket till the iPod came along. You know, likewise, we didn't know we needed transistors until somebody invented the transistor radio, and we could take it along with us. So, what turns us on? What makes us human? >> Yeah, so many things out there. You've been not only writing; you're doing podcasts now. What do you think of kind of the state of content? People say sometimes nobody reads anymore. You do hard research, a team of people. What's your thoughts about content these days? >> Well, I think the business model for journalism and production of content has been decimated at times, partly because it's all ad-driven in terms of journalism and, you know, video, and we need to get back to a time when people valued content and are willing to have a direct relationship with the content provider. About 80% of the revenue now for, say, reported or journalistic content does either the Google, Facebook, Instagram, some aggregator, so I think we have to look at the next way of finding micro-payment subscription models that work in addition to the advertising-driven model. >> Yeah, there's so many people sometimes, they look at all of this change, and they get kind of pessimistic. You know, we're going to have the AI apocalypse, or the robots are going to take over. Shows like here we're, that technology is, I say, by definition, are positive about technology. When I read your writings, you seem to have a very positive outcome. >> Oh, I'm definitely optimistic about where technology takes us. You know, I write in the Innovators, begin with Ada Lovelace, who was Lord Byron's daughter. Her father was a lud eyed, you know, defended the followers of Ned Lot, who was smashing the looms of England, thinking that technology would put people out of work. But Ada was somebody who said, "I get it. The punch card's telling those looms how to do patterns could make a calculating machine be able to do numbers, as well as words, as well as pictures." She envisioned the computer, and the notion of technology increases the number of people in the textile industry in England in the 19th century. And the computer has led to so many more jobs than its destroyed, so I think technology will always augment human creativity, not destroy it. >> So, last thing I wanted to ask you, Walter, is, we're here at Dell Technologies World. 34 years ago, Michael Dell started this. And he's a special individual. We've had the opportunity to talk to him, get to know him. I've told people that, you know, inside the company, if you reach out to him, he actually will respond. He seems very special in today's day in age. You've got background with Michael. Tell me, how do you-? >> I think it practically begins with his parents, his late mother and his father, you know, his father's still alive. Care a lot about education; care a lot about creativity. Deeply humane in the sense that they love all of society, human civil discourse, and that's why there's a humanity I see that Michael Dell is able to embed in his products, whether it's a Dell laptop I always use or the new servers, and Dell EMC, which enables people across platforms to say, "How do we collaborate; how do we be creative?" >> All right, well, Walter, I just say thank you so much. A pleasure having you on the program. And you've been watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. Always check out thecube.net for all of our broadcasts, and we also, like Walter, have a podcast. Check it out on iTunes. >> Walter: Thank you, Stu. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> Host: 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 theCUBE. We are live, day three of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin, back hosting with Dave Velante and we're very excited to welcome back to theCUBE Karen Quintos, Chief Customer Officer at Dell EMC. Hey, welcome back. >> Thank you, thank you. It's great to be here with you both. >> Dave: Good to see you again. >> So, we saw you on stage on Monday, recognizing innovators and trailblazers. I always love, as a marketer, when customers are recognized for their achievements because the voice of the customer is the best brand validation that you can get. Talk to us about the customer awards program and highlight a few of the winners that were on stage. >> Well, first of all, I agree with you, Lisa, that the best way to talk about your products and your solutions is to do it through the eyes of the customer, so being able to honor eight of our super most inspiring customers on stage was great. We had hundreds of submissions from our sales teams working with our customers. We really wanted to bring the transformation stories to life. The stories that we were able to tell and the evolution that these customers have done in their industry and their business, was remarkable, so, you think about Ford and the autonomous car. You think about J and J and the work they're doing around securing their customer data. You think about Volvo and Zenuity, and the opportunities that they have had with technology and then some of my favorite, Arrowfarms, >> Love that. >> Teleconnected farm, and they're using technology in Newark, New Jersey, to transform the way that farming is done, conserving our natural resources, using 95% less water, and being able to do it, and, this, the IOT of farming, they're just all super rich and really really great stories. >> And then, you got, I have to ask you to say it, to pronounce, I loved your pronunciation of, Unidad, come on, help me. >> I know it was the first one, right? >> Dave: Unidad de Conocimiento. (laughing) >> Yes, yeah, you got it right, you got it right. >> Okay. >> They're a great story, too, right, I mean, here's an organization in Colombia that is a consolidation of different industries that are providing these services across Colombia and Latin America. They've absolutely figured out how to take a country like Columbia out of the perils of what has happened there with the drug cartel, really thrive on economic prosperity and they're absolutely kicking butt when it comes to the services that they're providing to all of their, their customers, so it's... >> And the state bank of India, was that the other one? >> State bank of India. >> They really had a global representation, it's awesome. >> Well, we looked hard for that. We looked hard for the global representation. We also looked really really hard and gave extra points to companies that had a purpose and a soul, so what they were doing, either with the technology or with the services that they're providing to their end customers, what's that, that purpose side? And, you know, you saw that in a number of these really awesome organizations. >> I'm going to ask you, so I'm going to ask a leadership question. When we first met, I think it was at Dell World. It might have been 2012, I think you were CMO of Dell at the time, so you, like a lot of leaders, you chair hop, that's kind of what you do. So you've now, playing it up. >> But 18 years at Dell, so, you know. >> Right, but, right, so, you take your best leaders and you say, alright, go fix this problem, go fix this problem, go, go inspire some people to do that, so, you've been, and also it's the, is it the chief customer office that you started? >> I did. Well, actually, Michael started it. >> A year and a half ago? >> Right. >> Well, what's that all about? How's the progress going? Give us the update there. >> Well, you know, I have to tell you, I give a ton of credit to Michael because he saw an opportunity in something that was quite new and quite novel, and now you look a year and a half later at what some of our competitors and others are doing. You know, Microsoft just named somebody that sits at their executive leadership team meeting, recognizing that customer relationships are the ultimate prize. Our ability to deliver a great customer experience is going to be the, is the next battleground, and, we've been leading in that area now for a year and a half, so, I'm the first chief customer officer ever at Dell Technologies, and our mission is really to make sure that we continue to push the needle, and drive an even better end to end customer experience. We're doing a lot around taking our top, most important customers, and there's a couple of thousand of them at Dell. I'm not talking about five or six, I'm talking about like thousands of customers that have consistently honored us with their business over the years so how do we put high touch, high loyalty kind of programs in place? The customer awards were a great way to recognize some of those top customers and put them on the stage and tell their story, and the piece that gets me even more excited is what we're doing around our customer data, so, how do we unleash the power of our customer data? How do we integrate it? How do we automate it? How do we put real time predictive analytics? By looking at a customer end to end and being able to figure out if that account is going to go red, because they've had a combination of things, go figure out what are the sources of value for them and unleash those, so, we're living in this AI big data world and living it realtime with, under the remit of the chief customer office. >> And if I heard you correctly, at the leadership team, you're kind of the voice of the customer? >> I am, I am. There's a lot of voices for the customer. >> Well, yeah, because the head, the head of sales are going to be doing that and. >> But they all come with their own bias, right? Or their own lens, right, so, we're actually, my team is a very very strong partner to our heads of sales, because sometimes heads of sales, I mean, they see these things clearly the same way that we do, but sometimes the voice around, well, this isn't working, we need to get better at this, our customers want us to go faster here, tends to get lost in, you know, business performance and close rates and all of that, and we have this unique ability to look at this end to end, and help to really advocate on behalf of customers and really do the right thing for them at the end of the day. >> Independent of the transaction metrics, is what you're saying. >> Yes. >> And it's different perspective, right? We talked about the voice of the customer being an objective brand validation, and you come from a different perspective. One of the things that, we had your CIO on earlier today, Bask, and he said, "We drink our own champagne." And then we had Ravi Pentaconti and he says, we eat our own dog food, we're right next to the therapy dogs. So I like that, but from what you're saying, you're using customer data to help make Dell Technologies differentiated, be able to revolutionize the customer experience, listening to those customers is key. Can you tell us a little bit more about how some of that data is being applied to revolutionize that experience? >> Sure, so, some of it's basic, some of it can be pretty transformational, so, and by the way Baz Guyer has been a significant partner with me on this journey, because he understands it. Listen, Dell's the only technology company out there today that has the rich, direct data that we have, combined with rich channel partner data. So, we have all of it, right? And some of our competitors do everything through the channel, a few of them do everything all direct, we do both. So, we have a huge advantage when it comes to that. We can look at the amalgamation of all of the listening posts that we have for our customers. We have a booth here, where we've brought in hundreds, thousands of customers, and we've asked them a series of questions. We have voice of the field surveys that we do with our sales team, we do NPS surveys, this survey, all of that. We can bring all of that together using big data and insights and we can prioritize the big things that matter. So one of the things that I see a lot of my peers at other companies get caught up in, is they're chasing 15 or 20 things. You know, at any given moment, we're chasing 3 to 5. And we want to move the needle on those 3 to 5 and then we want to get, capture and address the next ones. So that's what I would call kind of the basic, fundamental pieces. What I think is exciting, is, we can now take a view of a customer, a complete view of that customer, we know what they bought, we know who they bought it from, we know the number of escalations they've had, we know what their delivery performance has been, we know how many times they've changed the AE on the account we know what their corporate responsibility priorities are, and we can look at that in totality, and we can put an outreach kind of program in place for them, or, we can look at it and go, this one is about to go south, and we need to put our best people to go call on the account and help the account executive, who in a lot of ways sees this also, and help to figure out how to turn it around. >> So, and you can do that across the integrated company today? >> We have piloted across the integrated set of companies, and in the Q3 period of time, working closely with Baz, we're going to automate this and turn it into like an Amber Alert, early warning type of system, so that we can help the AE and our customers before things happen. And the other piece that we can do, is we know, we know the ten levers of customer value. And, you know, for the most part we do those generally well. But in some cases, some of the reasons that our customers come back to us is because we've discovered things at their account that they didn't even know was happening. So we're, we've got this power of big data sitting right in front of us with Chief Customer Office that can really, really light it up. >> Well the other thing you said is the account teams know when there's a problem, but the executive teams, they have limited resources. So you don't know where to prioritize. >> Right, and some of our AE's have more than one account. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> So, you know, some of them are handling 20 accounts. So where this thing becomes really interesting is as you think about scaling it, down through the organization, not just at the top ones. The top accounts, they're one to, one-to-one kind of engagement, and those types of things. It gets really interesting when you start to get below that and you start to really use it in a more scaleable way. >> Plus, as you go more channel, right, and you go more to edge, you get all these complexities beyond just product portfolio. You're dealing with that stuff, but then the channel complexities, and then the new markets that are emerging, particularly in edge, and the channels that that's going to precipitate. >> Right, right. >> To me, this is even more important. >> So 18 months into this new role that Michael Dell created, lots of accomplishments, it sounds like you're really leveraging it to partner with customers to help, not just them, but also your internal teams, be able to identify where there needs to be escalations. What are some of the things that you're opening up with respect to diversity and inclusion, because that's also under your purview? >> That's right, that's right Lisa. What I think is really interesting is how much our sales teams now is coming to my team, to use some of these other platforms to open doors and have conversations with CIOS that they could not get before. So I'll give you a perfect case in point. The sales leader in the U.K. came to me and said, "I have a particular account in London, "I haven't really been able to make any progress, "the CIO is a woman, their head of infrastructure is a woman "you're going to be there in London, would you send her a note "and let's have a conversation around some of the things "that we have some mutual interest in." Technology being one, as well as getting more women involved in to technology. So we had this conversation, an hour in, she said, you know, if Dell would host a session with other female CIOs in the U.K area, I will open up my Rolodex and we will get other women to come. Two months later, we did it, in London in January. I was there, Michael was there, our heads of sales were there, we had about 15 or 20 of these super impressive women in the public sector, the private sector, higher education universities, big brands, we just did a similar one here at Dell Technologies World. We just hosted, as a matter of fact yesterday, 20 women, we actually had a couple of men that were there, too, all just coming together talking about areas that we deeply care about. How do we get more women and minorities interested in these technology fields. >> And here we are in 2018, this is still such an issue, and it's something that's still surprising when we get to see females on stage in keynotes, like yourself, like Allison Doo who was just chatting with you, Dave, and Stu. It's still, we're actually kind of going, hey, we're starting from a deficit whereas 20 30 years ago we were kind of going up. What are some of the things that you hear from your male peers in terms of the importance of showing multiple generations of girls and women you do belong here, if this is something that you're interested in, do not be afraid. >> Yeah, what I find remarkable in these conversations is there's clearly a number of key themes that are emerging. One of the biggest ones is, this is an economic imperative. You think about, there's going to be 1.1 million jobs in the computer science technology field over the next ten years. 45% of those jobs are going to be filled by U.S. college grads. It's a gap 55%. Women that are graduating in the area of computer science and technology is down, significantly, from like 30% down to like 18% right now. You are simply not going to have enough of what has been the traditional workforce in order to fill these jobs. So, that's one, and that's one that we at Dell care about a lot. Second piece that we care about, is, we just know that when you bring together a diverse group of individuals, always get to a better answer for your customers, you do. Research has proven it, we can prove it, we can see it, all of that. And then the third piece is, I just think women bring unique skills in a collaborative global context that can really bust through some of the big, complex, thorny opportunities that corporations are working through. >> So, ladies, let me jump in here, if I may. So there's two sides to this coin is, one is yes, we've got to get young women excited, but the other is you've got to promote women to leadership positions. Obviously Dell does a good job of that, clearly IBM gets high marks for that, I mean one of the sad things about seeing Meg Whitman go was that you had a dynamic woman leader. Maybe not the greatest speaker in the world, but one-on-one, super strong, and I think an inspiration to a lot of young women. And I think our industry clearly, Silicon Valley, Boston, just not doing enough. Particularly in smaller companies, larger companies I think do a better job, so your thoughts on that? >> My thought on that is it's a hard problem, but at its very basic, it's actually quite simple. And these are the things that we're doing at Dell, it takes commitment from the top, and at all levels of the company to make change, drive the accountability, set goals. To your point, go place some bets on the younger generation up-and-coming diverse talent, put them in roles, and then surround them with a support system that they need to be successful. And, we've done that, you know, Michael has done that, he did it with me. When, six or seven years ago, he called me and said how'd ya like to be Dell's next Chief Marketing Officer? And then you know, called me 18 months ago and said, how'd ya like to be Dell's first Chief Customer Officer. You need people that see things in that talent and you need that commitment. You need a culture that supports that. You need more role models. You need to get rid of and totally eliminate the harassment and the bullying and the old boys kind of club. You've got to create places where women and minorities feel like they can be themselves. Culture plays a huge, huge, huge role. And then, you know, communities play a huge role. So we have a very, very growing and thriving employee resource group set of networks. We have 14 of them across Dell and Dell EMC. And they're just a safe haven for where people of color, women, LGBT, veterans, disabilities can come and just be themselves, and be with others that they feel safe with. So, some level, it's not that hard. It really does take the commitment and the wherewithal and the sense of urgency that says we've got to fix it, and we have to fix it now. >> I feel like 2017 was a milestone year, I'd love to know what your thoughts are. You had that incident in the tech industry, with that poor misguided soul from Google who decided to write this Jerry Maguire memo and just brought a lot of attention to the issue, and then the #MeToo movement, so I feel like 2018 is a more optimistic year, but still, a lot of that stuff that you were talking about goes on, and it needs to be exposed. Again, I think the #MeToo movement brings that out and a lot of people are thinking uh-oh, wow. This really has to stop. Your thoughts, do you agree with that, or do you just think, no Dave, we're still way too far away. >> I think what #MeToo has done is opened a lot of eyes around how pervasive all of this is. I know, in the case of Dell, we have a zero tolerance zero tolerance policy when it comes to all of that. What was so shocking to us is how pervasive it still was in either other companies or other industries. To me, what is encouraging now, is the conversation is going beyond harassment, to aggression and bullying and culture and some of the things that have happened over the years, and by the way, it happens across all genders. There's articles that are being written now about women that are bullying and have bullied, so. This is something that all corporations need to be setting the tone around what are the right behaviors and those types of things, and we've been doing that now, for years. The other piece that I feel very strongly about, is, if men retreat from this conversation, that is a huge problem, a huge problem. Leaders like you have to be part of it. They have to be part of, this has to change. I want to be part of the solution. I have daughters, or wives, or nieces or whatever it is that I know that they have just as much capability as boys and men do, and my job is to help them. So I love it, I love the way that men and women are both coming together and engaging in this conversation. And we are seeing progress. I think everybody wants it to be faster, but we are seeing progress. Hey, yesterday at this CIO round table that we have, one of my favorite quotes, we got into this whole conversation around, well what is the next generation feeling? And one of the women that was there said, "hey, my daughter told me three weeks ago, "you know mom, she goes, I really think, "to me it's really simple. "I want to be a mom and I want to be a CEO." It's that simple. >> Wow, I love that. So in the last few seconds or so, Karen, you've made a tremendous amount of progress impact as the Chief Customer Officer in 18 months. What are you looking forward to accomplishing the rest of 2018? >> Well I think the thing that gets me really energized, too is how we're applying our technology in the area of corporate responsibility and innovation. So, you know, you saw our plastic bottle demo that we had here, that fish moves from one event to another, we got really serious around how do we play a really key role in stopping the plastics from entering the ocean? So there's 86 million metric tons of plastic that is in the ocean today. By the year 2050, there will be more pieces of plastic in the ocean than there are fish. You have to stop the plastic from entering the ocean, which is a pilot project that we did about a year ago, and we recently announced an expansion of that called next wave, where we have our customers that are partnering with us to figure out how do we scale that? So, General Motors, Herman Miller, are just a couple of examples. And then, at CES this year, we announced an effort that we're doing around how do you extract gold out of motherboards, and using that, and recycling that back into our motherboards and using it in jewelry manufacturing. So we partnered with a jewelry manufacturer out of the West Coast, Nikki Reed. She is creating this jewelry, these rings, through recycled gold, and it's 99% more environmentally friendly. So, I love the fact that we can use our technology to innovate, change the world, use, reuse the stuff that we're putting into the economy. So, scaling these is a big, big priority for me in 2018. >> Dave: Awesome. >> Wow, momentum is the only word I can think of to describe what you've achieved, what you're doing so far. Karen, thank you so much for stopping by and chatting with Dave and me, and congratulations on what you've accomplished, and we look forward to talking to you next year. >> Thanks, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE we are live, finishing up day three at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, I am Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Sands, we are live here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV, along with John Troyer with whom I've yet to be teamed up this week. Good to see you John. >> Nice to be here John. >> I'm John Walls and we're joined by Chhandomay Mandal who is a Director of Marketing at Dell EMC. Chhandomay, good to see you sir. >> Happy to be here. >> Nice to have you back on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> I know it's been a busy week for you, a great week from what I've heard from many. So first off, before we jump in, we're talking a lot about storage here. But first, your overview, what you've heard the vibe of the show and and kind of what your takeaway is going to be when you head home. >> So, this has been a great show. We have announced a lot of new products and I have been doing a lot of breakout sessions and customer meetings. And the customers are excited in terms of the depth of portfolio we have to offer, how we are helping them in their digital transformation journey along with the IT transformation that is fueling this digital transformation. For me personally, the takeaway is the product announcements we made in terms of the high-end storage, I cover high end storage marketing. Both Dell EMC PowerMax, are brand new, entry level design product line that we announced yesterday as well as the new enhancements we have done for XtremIO X2. This has been, like an exciting week. Happy to meet like an great number of customers both in meetings as well as in breakout sessions. So overall, I feel great, we accomplished a lot of things and I look forward seeing these customers taking their next steps in their digital transformation journey and happy to be part of their transformation. >> So, we had Caitlin Gordon on yesterday and she couldn't stop smiling about the announcement. When she started going through all the performance metrics 10 million IOPS, she's like, 2X, we're just blowing people away right now, and she's going on and on. So, Chhand run through some of that for us and tell us about about the product a little bit and what you think is revolutionary about it. >> Dell EMC PowerMax is our flagship property in the high end storage. If I were to characterize it in three words, it is fast, it is smart and it is efficient. As far as fast goes, it can deliver, as Caitlin said, up to ten million IOPS, 150 gigabytes per second throughput with very minimal latency, less than 300 microseconds. This is all backed by the end-to-end NVMe design that we have done, so this NVMe enabled architecture take away the limitations that we used to see from SAS, not only that, it is not just NVMe but also the storage class memory drive that is the next generation. It is this area, users both SEM and NVMe, so that's the first part. The next part is it's smart. It has an built in machine learning engine that actually analyzes 40 million data, in real time and makes 60 billion decisions per day to optimize data placements and making sure we are delivering the service levels for all different applications. And the last part is efficiency. We have introduced inline deduplication with hardware assisted feature. So now it has both compression and deduplication, giving a lot of capacity settings to our customers while not impacting the performance at all. >> You know Chhandomay, I was actually just speaking with Sean Wedige from Rackspace talking about that. The thing that impressed him the most, we actually skipped over the NVMe and we skipped over a lot of the parts inside of it, because that's the some of the performance that they needed for their service provider workload. But they're, one of the highest things that they valued out of it was the operational efficiency. In fact, I was sitting with some of the team yesterday talking to them and with a couple of storage admins and they they were swapping war stories about like, step 143 of 300 and trying to, as you had all the knobs and the scripts and the CLI and that's gone. A lot of that is gone. And whether you call it AI or or the machine, or deep learning, but the operational efficiencies that have now, in this next generation, of now called PowerMax, right, that seemed to be impressive, one of them one of the bigger things that impressed him. I don't want to say he wasn't impressed about the performance numbers. So, as you talk to customers this week has that really hit home? >> Absolutely, the operational efficiency, the effects reductions are like key to the customers enabling their IT transformation. Leading to this digital transformation. Now, how does this play into all the machine learning and AI techniques that this platform is built upon? So if you take a look at the workloads that the customers are running today, it's still enterprise workloads. 80% of it is like how traditional workloads, like SAP, Oracle, all of these. But then, there is the modern applications that are built on real-time data analysis. It feeds into the data, it analyzes it to make better decisions for the customers. Taking proactive actions. Delivering and using those data analysis as their computing advantage. But that is today only like say 20% of the work. Now, it is predicted that over the next three years to five years, that ratio is going to flip. So, it will be 20% of the traditional workloads and 80% is this modern applications like data generated from IoT, AI, all those things. Now how does PowerMax help in this scenario, so here comes that built in machine learning engine. It actually learns from the patterns in the data. So today it can analyze the data and do this optimize placement between storage class memory and NVMe SSDs based on those 80/20 rule. But then, as the workloads are getting adopted this is also learning from these patterns in data and adapting itself running these algorithms to make sure, even in future, when the workload percentage changes it is changing its algorithms and providing the same level of service. And not just data placement, this is service level agreements so our PowerMax customer can say for this application I need this much of latency. So, all these AI and machine learning techniques are being applied there. So as they are changing this service level directions it is adapting and making sure, whatever application requires whatever response times we are able to deliver it. And that's a huge operational benefit because the administrators do not need to tune and fiddle, figure out, how to get there. It is automatic, it is built-in, thanks to the built-in AI engine here. >> Chhandomay, there's now a generation of storage admins that now, needs to up level their jobs, right. Because that they used to have a real, it was tedious, talking to them. I'm actually kind of curious also, the rest of how this the portfolio fits together. In the sense of if you look at the industry, maybe a few years back, you almost would have kind of over fitted on on hyper-converged and you would have thought well, maybe one size does fit all and well that's the future. But it turns out, in the meantime, Dell EMC had this portfolio and there was a high, the high end that's been there all along and in fitting for appropriate workloads right. So, I'm just kind of curious Chhandomay, take this over to someone maybe XtremIO or what as you talk to the customers, when they talk to you, what apps and workloads do you then talk to them about? >> You bring up a very good and pertinent question which our customers ask us all the time. In this example let's take both our high-end products, we have Dell EMC PowerMax, we have Dell EMC XtremIO X2. Both are all flash arrays as great characteristics. Which is applicable where, right? So the first thing I want to say for all the customers that are running ultimate mission critical workloads where they need RPOs and RTOs, pretty much like instant, it cannot go down at any point in time and I'm not talking about just the like storage but also all the applications that is running. So SRDF, our remote replication technology within the PowerMax product that is the gold standard in the industry, delivering like six-nines availability for many many years. So, couple that with massive workload consolidation. For example, you are a big hospital. You are running your epic medical data records systems, it's not just like epic databases, but also your VDI desktops, your other virtual workloads. All you can consolidate in a very small footprint with our PowerMax platform. The third thing is, it's now end-to-end NVMe design. Right now, we are using dual ported NVMe SSDs. So customers who need that level of very high performance in like less than 300 microsecond latency with all this like real-time apps and business applications together. So that's the customer segment who finds our PowerMax as the appropriate platform. Now, XtremIO also a purpose-built, all flash array design from ground up for the flash media. So, what's the benefit there? Now here, again, what we are doing with XtremIO, we are offering this enterprise capabilities at the mid-range price. We actually introduced a new XtremIO X-Brick model to bring down the cost. It is 55% lower entry point than it used to be in the previous generation. We are going to sell that mid-market customers with enterprise capabilities with this new XtremIO X-Brick model. The way XtremIOs are always in memory, metadata centric architecture works out, it can deliver very high performance, consistently low latency, but also, it has integrated copy data management built in. What does it play? Think of a database where like for every database there are, say, five to 10 copies for disk and dev, backup, reporting, all of those things. Now, wherever you have massive amount of copies, XtremIO is a very good platform because you can actually bring those copies and run workloads on the copies themselves. You get enormous consolidation and capacity footprint in that type of situations. The last thing is workloads that has very high data reduction ratios. Think of it, virtual desktops or VDI. So here you have like thousands of users, running their desktops in a data center and but inherently like all the bases are the same. So here is like a lot of data reduction capabilities that come into picture and XtremIO's always in-memory, metadata centric architecture and this in line, all the time de-dup and compression helps in great amount of capacity savings with the data reduction technologies. For the workloads, where it is critical to have data reduction and it's the data itself lends to data capacity servings that's why it's the best in class. So, that's kind of like, give you a perspective of how these products complement each other. >> I know it's been a great week for you, a busy week for you. >> Absolutely. >> Breakout sessions, two CUBE interviews, client meetings, what have you, take a break. >> It's been a great show, it was a pleasure here talking to you. >> Thanks for joining us again and sharing the PowerMax story, it's a good one and I'm sure it's going to give you a lot of success down the road at Dell EMC. Back with more, you are watching Dell Technologies World 2018 coverage, live on theCUBE from Las Vegas. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World, 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (techno music playing) >> Welcome back to theCUBE, day three in Vegas. Dell Technologies World, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. Welcoming some distinguished CUBE alumni back to our set here at Dell Technologies World, and back to theCUBE. We've got Sean Wedige, CTO of Enterprise Solutions at Rackspace, and Scott Delandy, Technical Director at Dell EMC. Hey, guys. >> Hey. >> Hey. >> Good afternoon. >> Thanks so much for coming back and talking with us about what you guys are up to lately. So, Rackspace. Sean, you guys have been a longtime Dell EMC partner. >> Sean: We have been. >> We are interested to learn about what you guys are doing from a service provider's perspective with the new PowerMax. What are some of the unique requirements that you are looking to bring into your environment versus just traditional enterprise? >> Sure, so we have been a longtime user of Dell and EMC technologies, going way back into the early 2000s, almost to the inception of our company. And we've always relied on them for availability for high performance to be able to support our customers, specifically, now, we're looking at the PowerMax release, and the capabilities it brings to us, and Dell EMC has really taken service provider needs into account, so they've created additional capabilities around monitoring, around visualization, around role-based access, that allows us to extend features out to our customers. Things like easier migration tools, things like incredible performance, that allows us to not have to micromanage workloads, and so it's a extremely powerful platform that we're looking to put to work for a hundred thousand plus customers. >> Yeah, and I think some of the things that Rackspace has as far as use-cases are very much things that influenced a lot of the functionality in the new features that went into the product, and I'll give you a couple of examples. So, one of the things that we introduced is the ability to do provisioning of storage based on service levels. So what that means is, I can figure out what I want my performance to be for a specific workload, with folks getting higher performance, using more resources, and having a premium associated with that, but also being able to provide good performance at economical cost points. So I now have a range of options that we can now provide through the service providers. But what's cool about the technology is, years ago in order to do that, you had to really be able to understand the underlying technology, so that you could go ahead and you could tune the knobs and the buttons and the levers to make sure that, if gold was supposed to be this, it would give you gold, and if you had platinum it was supposed to do this, but those things were very manual in terms of how they were set up. The new system, basically, is more about what is the result that you're trying to achieve from a performance perspective? And then we use all of the automation, the machine learning, the predictive analytics, to figure out, okay, where do I place and move that data based on the policy that's assigned for it to make sure I'm in compliance with that service level. So again, a lot of those things are specifically done to help service providers meet a wide range of requirements for the users and use-cases that they have for their customers. >> And our engineers are very excited not to have to spin so many knobs and stare at the blinking dots, and those are the types of things that keep 'em up at night, "how am I guaranteeing the service levels "and the performance that my customers need?" So the A.I. capability, the ability to do tiering on the fly, that we don't have to manage that, allows us to really focus on higher-value activities for our customers. >> Yeah, I was interested in your experience, and one of the marquee features on this new release is the labeled A.I., and that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and in drilling down yesterday there was a lot of really interesting stuff about its learning capabilities and the fact that it would look back farther and infer, it knows about certain things like Oracle files, it knows how to treat them and it'll learn more, there'll be more roles and it'll figure some stuff out itself, so I don't actually care whether it's called A.I. or not, at the end of the day, does it lower your operational costs and make you more efficient, right? And it sounds like that's been your experience. It makes us more efficient, but more so, it makes us more effective in delivering to customers. So if we're doing VNX, or wherever the platform might be in our PowerMax, and we're putting hundreds to thousands of workloads underway, we have to make sure there's not contention between customers, right? Every one of those customers are relying on us, and they may have different workload cycles. We have certain customers for whom their busiest seasons are the weekends, the holidays, and they will have different cycles than customers that are traditional income, or some digital marketing companies, so this allows us not to have to worry about tuning individually, that the system can adjunct and take care of that and ensure that we're meeting those service levels that we've provided for our customers. So, absolutely, a huge step forward. >> And one of the other things, again, around service providers is you've got the performance, you've got the management, you've got the system, but then the other key driver for some of the new features is around the security of the platform. Because now you're moving into a world of multi tenancy. You've got different organizations that are now sharing a resource. So number one, you want to make sure that everybody gets the performance and the predictability, and that's where the machine learning and analytics comes into play, but then you also want to be able to provide the individual users access to be able to do certain things, to view certain things, but make sure that they're only able to access the pieces of storage that they should only be accessing. So by adding additional controls around role-based security, and in building that into the system, and allowing you to control who has access to what specific functions within the system, who can see what, all these different roles makes it a lot easier for Sean to be able to take the rich reporting that they can now provide, and to be able to share that up with their users and make sure that they're doing it in a very secure way. >> On that security, Brian. Sorry Sean, I'm just curious, security transformation, IT transformation, digital transformation, all themes of this make-it-real event that we're at, We talk with customers that say "Data isn't valuable unless we can actually glean "and extract and act on insights from it "to be able to deliver better customer experiences, "and different chain of products to market." On the differentiation front, what is, for Rackspace's perspective, what is this partnership and use of PowerMax going to be able to deliver for you? Not revealing secret sauce, but how is this differentiating where you're able to offer your customers? >> I think we should talk about how Rackspace differentiates themselves from other players in the market. >> Yes. >> I think that's a key part of the solution. >> Was just going to go there. So Rackspace has a long history of being a managed service provider to customers, and traditionally it's been the managed hosting space, everything was dedicated. And increasingly through our acquisitions of the last couple of years, our portfolio has broadened. Everything from collocation to private clouds, to public cloud capabilities to hybrid solutions, and an increased focus on application security, ERP, digital applications, and so our customers are coming to us with this wide range of platforms and going, "I'm struggling with this transformation, "How do I do this, What's the right form-factor? "How do I look at my applications?" So increasingly, Rackspace has built out capabilities around a professional services arm, to help customers navigate that transformation. Is this a really legacy application that should go on one of our collocation facilities? Is this a high-secure, really highly governed, heavy compliance-requirement that should go under private cloud, or should we look at a public cloud systems? And increasingly, customers are saying, "I am needing to stay in the private cloud", the customer you're talking to, "because of security, "because I need to be able to guarantee performance, "because I need to have visibility "and configurability of my solution." So this gives us all of those. It gives us the ability to have a secure, single tenant or multi tenant environment. It gives us the ability to have that high-performance. It gives the ability to federate out that visibility to give customers a cloud-like control, a cloud-like visibility, or I'd say even beyond cloud-like visibility, despite going through a service provider and not being able to put their hands on the infrastructure themselves. >> Yeah, I would even extend that, because again, you've got the technology side, but then the other thing I think that people really appreciate in partnering with Rackspace is the amount of expertise that they bring to the table. Expertise, not just in the technology side, but understanding different industries, and different customer environments, and what are the best practices, and how do we set things up and make sure that we're not just meeting expectations, but we're exceeding what those users expect to see from an IT perspective. I know that that's a big part of why people go to Rackspace. >> And Dell EMC is making the infrastructure easier for us as we move up the stack. We, like our customers, don't want to spend a lot of time in the hardware tier and the infrastructure tier. I'm seeing some real iCharts out here around all the different technologies; containerization, various types of databases, big data. Just absolute iCharts that on some of these very large screens you still can't read right. So the technologies that are on top that are really driving value are becoming more complex. That's where we want to focus our time and energy, and let the infrastructure play a larger role in self-managing. >> That's actually a really interesting segue maybe into the bigger industry for a second. I think if the industry goes in hype cycles, in the public conversation anyway, and if you would have just picked up some magazines or whatever, do they still print magazines? Some websites a year or two ago, you'd think that hyper-converged architectures were going to eat the world, one size was going to fit all, and in the cloud and on prep. In the meantime, in the background for many people, but front of mind, they're chugging along. There's a huge portfolio at Dell. A new Dell EMC never stepped back from saying "We have a portfolio." And one of those tiers is this VMAX, and now the next generation, this PowerMax. I don't know, Scott, can you talk a little bit about to the needs of those customers and applications that have always been there, and how you're addressing them? >> I will tell you this, the thing that we're all clearly seeing is that IT is becoming consumerized. From a user perspective, they just expect things to work. They expect everything to be like a mobile device, and it's just that simple, and if I need an app, I download the app, and it gets on there, and if I need to replace it, everything just all magically happens. The analogy is when they look at IT from a user perspective, They see the duck on the pond, and the duck is just kind of moving along slowly. What they don't see are the things that folks like Sean and Rackspace are doing where underneath that, you've got these feet that are just mad pedaling away to keep the duck moving forward. Now, I think that that's the thing that's changed, is we want to make sure that we are delivering the technology in the way users want to be able to consume that, but there's still a lot of heavy lifting, there's still a lot of complexity, there's still a lot of core infrastructure that happens underneath that, but the consumer doesn't want to be exposed to that. Matter of fact, most consumers aren't even aware That that's happening under the covers. It's in the cloud, it just works! >> You talked about the iCharts, here, everywhere, because there is so much complexity as more and more technologies need to be integrated. How does Rackspace help demystify some of that, and make things more simple for your customers in any industry, especially as data privacy and security are household terms now, and everybody being really wrapped around that, how do you help make it less complex? >> Dell EMC, we have a massive portfolio. And so everything they have got, everything VMware has got, everything that Microsoft has got, we support all of that plus networking infrastructure, plus security, it is a very broad capability to be able to help customers meet their needs. And what we're seeing is, we're seeing customers coming to us and going, "I just don't have the capability "to rationalize all this, I need help." We're also seeing customers that are pivoting the other way, that have gone, "I went to public cloud buying into the economics "and that everything was going to be great. "What I'm finding out is that I can just shift back "to private cloud, it gets some better economics, "depending upon workload, "depending upon whether it's always on, "the performance requirements, security." So we're seeing a lot of changes. There's no one-size-fits-all, it's not everybody's going public cloud, like was the big mantra two, three years ago. So what Rackspace has done is a few things. I mentioned earlier, we've grown through acquisition. We've expanded our footprint into new services around collocation into Asia-Pacific region, into state and federal government capabilities that came through an acquisition of Datapipe. We've moved into more the application management space through the acquisition of TriCore. Customers struggling with "How do I run ERP? "I've got to consolidate my data centers "from 25 data centers, I want to get down to three. "I need to move everything to a managed service provider, "but you have to be able to help me with these "mission critical applications, "it's no longer enough just to be "at the infrastructure tier." And so wrapping around all this, we've created a very large professional services capability, because going to a customer and saying, "What do you want?" "What can we sell you?" Is not the right way. Going to the customer these days, You're having to say "What is your business paying? "What can we help you with, "and how can we supplement your teams "and provide the expertise to be "able to get you there?" In areas like data center consolidation, cloud transformation, Dev bombs enabled, and big data capabilities. >> Last question guys, in the last 30 seconds or so, early tester of PowerMax, longtime Dell EMC partner, as we've talked about, what are your expectations as this thing rolls out? >> We have very high expectations for it. We always have high expectations of next generation. Last year we were here talking about unity for some of our mid tier customers now looking to PowerMax looking for a real high-end enterprise-type customers. Our expectation is that's going to simplify our management. It's going to empower our internal users and our customers more. And then we haven't even talked about the efficiencies that's going to bring in the data center in terms of the smaller amounts of space and power and cooling that are needed for something of this scale. So for us, data center is a very large operating expense. So the more we can put in a smaller space, the better off it is for a second on with it. >> Awesome. Well guys, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE again, sharing what's going on with Rackspace, the continuation of the Dell EMC partnership. We appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, thank you. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, again, we're live, day three of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin for John Troyer. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (techno music playing)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: 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 theCUBE, day three in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World. I am Lisa Martin with John Troyer. We have been here for three days, there's over 14,000 people here, 30,000 plus more engaging with video content livestream on demand. We're excited to welcome back to theCUBE, not just back to theCUBE, but back today for a second appearance, he's so in demand, Ravi Pendekanti, Senior Vice President, Servers and Systems Product Management and Marketing at Dell EMC, welcome back! >> Thank you, Lisa, great to be here. >> So, you have so much energy for day three, but so much excitement, lots of announcements. >> Ravi: Yes. >> The theme of this event, "Make It Real," is provocative. We've heard a lot of >> Yes it is. >> Lisa: Interpretations about what that means for different customers and different industries who are looking to take advantage of emerging technologies: AI, machine learning, deep learning, IoT, to make digital transformation real. What's going on in the world of AI and machine learning? >> Lisa, a lot. Now, having said that, I don't think there's a single industry in the, in any part of the world today that we talk to that's not interested in AI, machine learning, for that matter, deep learning. Why is that so? Just think about the fact that each one of us today is probably creating and generating two and a half times more data than a year ago. It's huge. I mean, when I started out, people used to think megabytes is huge, then it went to terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and now I think very soon we're going to talk about zettabytes, right? I'll leave it to you guys to talk about the number of zeros, but setting that aside, data by itself again, the second they went, so of much of data is being created, data in my view has absolutely no value until you create information out of it. >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> And that's where I think companies are becoming more aware of the fact that you need to start getting some information out of it, wherein starts the whole engine, first of all about going about collecting all of the data. And we have all kinds of data. We have got structured data, unstructured data, and now it's important that we actually get all of the disparate data into a format that can now be executed upon. So that's first and foremost what customers are trying to figure out. And then from there comes all the elements that the data analytics part, and then you can go into the machine learning and deep learning. So that's the way people are looking at it, and you made an interesting comment, Lisa, which is making it real. This is where people are looking at things beyond the buzzwords, right? It's sufficed to say AI is not a new term. I recall as a kid, we used to talk about AI. But now is when businesses are depending on it to ensure they have the competitive edge. >> So, Ravi, you know the pendulum swings, right, and ten years ago, >> It does. >> John: Software is eating the world and the cloud is coming, and at one point it looked like a future of undifferentiated x86 compute somewhere. It turns out, hardware actually matters, and as our application and data needs have grown, the hardware matters. >> It does. >> John: And so, part of your portfolio is the PowerEdge set of PowerEdge servers. I mean, how are you approaching that of making the needs of this new generation of software, this massive data parallelism and throughput real? >> Great question, John. It's interesting, yes, the pendulum keeps swinging, right? And the beauty is, as... It's my only hope that, as the pendulum swings, we're actually learning, too, and we're not making the same thing, the same mistakes. Thankfully, we are not. Now, when people talk about cloud, guess what? To your point, it has to run on something, software has to run on something. So, obviously the hardware. Now, to keep up with the changing tide and the needs, some of the recent things we have done, as an example, with our R840 launch yesterday, you know, NVMe is the talk of the town, too, talking about some of the new technologies. And customers want us to go out and provide a better way and a faster way for them to get access to the data in a much more faster way closer to the compute, so that's where the NVMe drives come in. We have got 24 NVMe drives on R840 today, which is two times more than the closest competitor. More into the R940xa; xa stands for extreme acceleration. Again, we have never had an xa product, this is the first of its kind that we are bringing out, and the beauty of this is, we wanted to makes sure there is a one to one relationship between the GPU and the CPU. So, for every CPU you have a GPU. It's a one to one relationship. If you look at the R940 we introduced earlier, it had, just to give the context to your question, John, it had, it could support four CPUs but only two GPUs. So if we are, think of it this way, if we are doubling the number of GPUs, and that's not it, we are actually enabling our customers to add up to eight FPGAs if they want. Nobody else does it, and this goes back to, I think Lisa, I think when we start to talk about FPGAs, too, and therein comes the issue, wherein customers don't have the flexibility in most of the cases in a lot of products out there. We have decided that flexibility has to be given to our customers because the changing, workload's changing, technologies, and even most customers today, they go in thinking that that's all they need, but sooner or later they realize that they need more than what they planned for. So our goal is to ensure that there is enough of scalability and headroom to enable that to happen. So that's how we, as PowerEdge Team, are building servers today, which actually enables us to provide our customers with an ability to have a headroom and at the same time give them the flexibility to change, whether it is NVMe drives or any kind of SSD drive, GPUs, FPGAs, so there's all the flexibility built into it along with ease of management. >> A couple things that you mention that I think are really important is that data doesn't have any value unless you're able to extract insights from it. >> Ravi: Yeah. >> Companies that are transforming digitally well are able to combine and recombine the same data using it as catalysts across many different applications within a business, that agility is key, that speed is key. >> Ravi: Yes. >> How are you, what are some of the things that you're hearing from the 14,000 plus people that I'm sure are all lined up to want to talk to you this week about what, for example, PowerEdge is going to enable them to do? You talked about flexibility, you talked about speed, what are some of the real applications that you're hearing feedback-wise from some of these new features that you've announced? >> Oh, great, so I think, again, an excellent question in terms of how the customers are reacting to and what are we doing. So now, talking about AI machine learning, think of it this way, right, the permutations and combinations are way too many. And the reason I say that is, keeping the hardware aside, when you talk about frameworks that are available today for most of the AI or machine learnings applications, people talk about TensorFlow, people talk about Caffe2, people talk about CNTK, I mean, there's a whole plethora of frameworks. And then there are different neural network methodologies, right? You hear of DNN, deep neural network, right? And then you hear of things called RNN, there is something called CNN, my point is, there is so many permutations and combinations in the mix that what our customers have come back and told us, going back to where we were earlier, talking about the flexibility in the architecture that we are providing, where we provide seamless scalability on any of the vectors, that they actually love that we are giving them the flexibility because when there are so many software options with frameworks and every other methodology, we wanted to make sure that we also provided the flexibility and the scalability. And our scalability comes in, whether it is the I/O connectability, we talked about PowerEdge MX that's going to be coming up soon that was a preview, but that's where we talked about something called the kinetic infrastructure, which essentially enables our customers to go out and run multiple workloads on the same modular infrastructure. Never happened before, right? Or, you know, the seamless way we do it now is a lot better than anything else. Likewise, to go back into the R940xa. We have the ability to go out and support hard drives, SSDs, FPGAs, GPUs, so the feedback has been that our customers are really excited about the fact that we're giving them the flexibility and agility to go out and match to the needs of their different workloads and the different options they have. So, they love it. >> Ravi, I was talking to some of your team yesterday and I was really impressed as they talked about the product development cycle. They said that we start with the customers and we start with applications. >> Ravi: Yes. >> And then we figure out what technologies are now appropriate to build in what combinations. They don't just start from let's throw the newest thing in because we can. As you talk to CIOs and enterprise architects, it used to be if you just do a server refresh and just check the box and push the button, now you've got to look at cloud readiness and what I keep on prim and what I keep off prim and what's going to fit my applications. What are you hearing from customers and how are you trying to educate them on how to approach their next refresh, well, I think even refresh is probably a bad frame, their next set of applications that they're going to have to build in this digital transformation? >> You know, John, this is actually no different, I mean let's step aside from the compute world for a minute, let's pick up an automobile industry, right? If you get into the automobile industry, a family might say they need a sedan, or a family of five or six with young kids might say they want a minivan, right? And maybe now the kids are grown up or you're still in your 20s or 30s and some of the folks would love to have a sports car, like the McLaren that up >> I'll take that one! >> Ravi: On the stage with Jeff; I know, I would love that too, right? (Lisa laughing) So my point is, when people are trying to decide on what is it they really want to buy, they actually know what they're looking for, right? A family of four doesn't go in and say, "I need a two-seat car," for example. It's a similar thing here, as people start looking at the workload first, they come in and start looking at mapping, "Hey, this is the kind of workload we have now," now let's start looking at what infrastructure can we provide behind it? You know, even if you look at our, something that we have announced in the past, but the 740xd. So, we have a 740 version and 740xd version; xd there stands for extreme density. So, if customers want a 2-CPU box, a 2-U box, a server, but they want more storage, then they have xd version. But they decide that storage is not really crucial, they just need the compute, then we provide the 740 on its own, the R740. So my point being that, accentuating the point you raised, is it's always nice to look at the application, look at what its needs are, whether it's memory, whether it's storage, whether it's the GPUs, the CPUs, and then look at how it transposes itself over the next few years because you really don't want to acquire something and then really decide later that you've run out of room. It's like buying a home and then you know you're going to have your kids or you're going to raise a family, you don't probably want to start off with a single bedroom and you know you're going to have a family in a couple of years. My point again being that, that is where the planning becomes absolutely important. So we are planning, and the planning phase is crucial because once you have that right, you now can rest at ease for the next few years and as we do that, one of the other fundamental design principles of PowerEdge is that we want to really support the platforms for multiple generations. Case in point, when we came out with our PowerEdge m1000e, we said that we will guarantee support for three generations of processors. We actually are up to the fifth generation as we speak right now. And our customers love it, because nobody really wants to go ahead and buy more servers every few years if they can go back with their investment they have made and ensure that there is room to grow. So, to your point, absolutely the right spot to start is start looking at the workload, start looking, once you have pegged it, then start looking at really at growing and what your needs could be. And then start connecting the dots and I think you would be coming out with the better outcome for the long run. >> We had the opportunity to talk, John and I just an hour or two ago, with the CIO, with Bask Iyer, and one of the things that was interesting is we talked to him about how the role of the CIO is changing to be really part of corporate strategy, >> Ravi: Yeah. >> And business strategy; as you talk with customers about building this infrastructure, to set them up for the flexibility and the agility that they need, allowing them to make the right decisions for what they need but also scale it over time, how much are you seeing the boots on the street that you're talking to have to sell this up the stack as this is fundamental to transforming IT, which is fundamental to transforming our business into a digital business? >> Very, very true. By the way, Bask is a great friend and a collaborator, we certainly look to, as the saying goes, "Eat your own dog food." So we work with Bask and team very closely because, as a CIO for a large corporation himself, we learn a lot; there's nothing better than trying to walk in the shoes of our customers so, going back to the comment you made, Lisa, is most of the, by the way, most of the customers today, the CIOs, who are now becoming not cost centers, they're becoming profit centers >> Profit centers, >> Lisa: That's what Michael Dell said on Monday. >> Absolutely, and he's absolutely right, Michael is absolutely right because most of the organizations we speak to today on an average, I would think that the number of CIOs we talk to has probably been dialed up, because we see the kind of questions that they're being asked of, right, to the point that we're making earlier, they're not looking at making point purchases for something that will satisfy them for the next 12 months or 18 months. They're looking at the next horizon, they're looking at a long-term strategy, and then they're looking back at the ROI. So what is it I'm able to go back in and provide to my customers internally, whether it is in terms of the number of users or the performance, whatever the SLAs, the Service Level Agreements may be internally, that's what they're looking for. So, towards that end, the whole concept of ROI and TCO, the total cost of ownership and the return of investment nowadays is probably a much bigger talking point that we need to support with the right factoids. I think that's becoming crucial, and the CIOs are getting more engaged in the discussions than ever in the past, and so it's just not about feeds and speeds, which I guess anyone can look at spec sheets, not as exciting, but at things beyond that that I think are getting more crucial. >> Well, Bask said, "Drinking your own champagne, eating your own dog food." I like champagne and dogs, although I'll go with both. >> I, why not. I just... >> We've got the therapy dogs next door. >> Therapy dogs, exactly. >> Lisa: Isn't that fantastic? >> They're great, they're great. >> So, last question in the last 30 seconds or so, biggest event, 14,000 as I said, expected live over the last three days, and tens of thousands more engaging, any one thing really stand out to you at this inaugural Dell Technologies World? >> The most important thing that has stuck for me is that human progress is indeed possible through technology. And this is the best showcase possible, and when you can enable human progress, which cuts across boundaries of nationality, and boundaries of any other kind, I think we are in the winning streak. >> Well said. Ravi, thanks so much for coming back today, couple times in hanging out with us on theCUBE and sharing some of the insights that you're seeing and that you're enabling your customers to achieve. >> Thank you, Lisa; thank you, John, it's been awesome. It's always wonderful being with you guys, so thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE again. Lisa Martin with John Troyer live, day three of Dell Technologies World. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (upbeat 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. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and this is day three of our coverage of the inaugural Dell Technologies World. We're in the home stretch. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante joining you, with Alison Dew, the newly minted CMO of Dell. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, good to be here. >> So, you've been with Dell for a long time. >> 10 years >> You know the drill, you know the culture. But, 23 days as CMO? >> Yes >> Well congratulations. You were on stage today, awesome show. >> Thank you, I couldn't be more delighted. Great experience for me personally. Great show for our customers. >> Yeah, I'll bet. I mean, and you brought in some outside speakers this year, which has not been typical of this show, at least the legacy EMC world, and certainly Dell World did that. >> Stu: Dell World did, definitely. >> Alison: Dell World did do it more, you know. >> Yep, Bill Clinton, we saw some other amazing speakers. >> Elon Musk >> Elon Musk, I remember the year Elon came. >> So that's good, and you got to interview Ashton Kutcher >> Yeah >> Which was quite amazing. He's an unbelievable-- people don't know, he's an investor, he's kind of a geek. >> Alison: Yep >> Even though he's, you know >> An engineer by training? >> Right, so what'd you think of his discussion? >> I mean, I thought it was fantastic and, as you said, I think people don't quite realize how involved in technology he actually is. And also, how well and successful his businesses have been. And then, equally important, the work that he's doing with his foundation and the way he's using technology for really important human causes. I don't think he gets enough credit for that, so it was great to sit on stage and have that conversation. It was super fun. >> Yeah, cause we know him from That 70's Show. >> I know, I like That 70's Show. >> And he's a goofball, and he comes across He's a great actor, lot of fun. >> Yeah, there was one of the lines I actually really loved from the presentation. It's that he looks for companies that have counter-intuitive thesis because if you're doing something that everybody else is, then chances are somebody is going to catch you and everything else like that. You also had to talk about geeks. You know, John Rose and Ray O'Farrell, up there. Share a little bit about some commonalities you saw between these speakers, and some of the unconventional things they're doing. >> So, I completely agree. I love the point of talking, there's so much hype in the space. And that's why I think that line is so important. And so, the big commonality that we're really seeing and talking about this year in particular is we've been talking for years about data as the rocket fuel of the economy and of business transformation, and now we're really talking about data combined with those emerging technologies. So, things like AI, IOT, Blockchain, which are really taking that data and unlocking the business value because for years, there's been this hype about big data, but I don't think the reality has quite been there. And now as those technologies catch up, we're really starting to see some practical applications and use cases and that's why I thought, in particular, John Rose's section on AI and how we're seeing some of those really emerging practical applications was so interesting and fun and tied really well to Ashton's talk track. >> You know, that's a good point. I mean, I feel like we started covering the big data trend really early on. And I feel like big data was like the warm up. It's cheaper now to collect all this data. Now that we have all this data, we're going to apply machine intelligence to that data. We're going to scale it, with cloud economics and that's really what's going to drive value and innovation. What are your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. We talked this morning on the stage even about some of the companies, large and small, who are really doing that. I think one of the examples that's really interesting Wal-Mart using Blockchain technology to decrease the amount of time from seven days to mere seconds that it takes them to identify the source of food contamination. Really interesting things where, a couple of years ago even, frankly even 18, 20 months ago, that would have been a promise, but maybe not a reality. And so that's what I think is really exciting. Finally. >> It's something that's actually resonated with me this week. We've talked for my entire career, there's the journeys. And it was like, a lot of times it's the journey of the technology. A couple of years ago, digital transformation was "Okay, is it real? Isn't it?" Every customer I talk to, they understand making it real as you said in the keynote, where they're going. What kind of feedback are you getting from people at the show? >> So one of the things I talked about briefly on Monday, but I think is really important, is this promise and the hope and the optimism of digital transformation. And yet also, the fear behind it as well. Through some of the work that we've done in our own research for Realizing 2030, we're really seeing that about 50% of our respondents say they believe in the power of the human machine partnership, which means that 50% don't. And all of the data questions are really divided and polarizing like that. And as a lifelong researcher, that's really interesting to me because it says that there's something going on there. And yet, at the same time, we're seeing over 85% of the respondents that we talk to who say they're committed to becoming a software defined company in five years. So this idea of "I know what I want to do "I know what it means to transform an industry, "And yet, I'm still not really sure that's going to "do me or my business good. "I'm not really sure what that means for "myself or my employees, getting really practical. "Obviously about the technologies, "that's what we do, "but the examples of how people can do "that better from a business perspective." That's a lot of the customer conversation that I've had over this week. >> But you're an optimist. You believe the world would be a better place as a result of machines. >> Yes, I do and we do. Are you an optimist? >> I am, I think there's some obviously some challenges but there's no question. Stu and I talk about this all the time, on theCUBE, that machines have always replaced humans throughout history. For the first time now, it's on cognitive functions, but the gap is creativity and eduction. So I am an optimist if we invest in the right places and I think there's an opportunity for public policy to really get involved. Leadership from companies like yours and others, politicians, of course. >> Dave and I did an event a couple of years ago with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssono, you had Andy here. Cause it's really it's not just the technology, it's technology and people, and those have to go together. And Dave said, there's policy and there's so many different layers of this that have to go into it. >> And I think we're just starting to really enter into that. On that optimist versus the robots are coming to get us spectrum, obviously there are things that we have to look out for as leaders, as society, as businesses. And yet, even if you look at the example from this morning, where Ashton is talking about minimizing child sexual trafficking and using AI and machine learning to one, arrest many of the perpetrators of these crimes, as well as free thousands of children from sexual slavery. I mean, you hear those examples, and it's hard not to be an optimist. >> I want to ask you about your digital transformation and how that's being led inside of Dell, what it means to you. >> So, obviously, we are two huge companies that came together. So when we talk about digital transformation, and what that really means, have a very different way of operating and working with IT and being in a different business model, we know that really well. One of the things that's really interesting for me personally, as the CMO for 23 days, is one of the biggest line items in my budget is actually for our own marketing digital transformation. Obviously, Dell in particular, had many, many years starting in the consumer and small business, and then growing up to larger businesses, of direct marketing. And we have a great relationship with our customers, but we also have all of these legacy systems and processes and way that work is done and now as we come together with EMC and we start to build Dell Technologies, the idea of what a data driven marketing engine can be, that possibility is something that we're also working to build ourselves. And so, everything from "how do we build our "own data lake to actually bring all "of these sources of data together? "How do we clean up that data?" is something that I'm pretty deeply into myself. There's a lot of that work going on across the company, and then for me personally, as CMO. Big initiative. >> So it's customer experience as part of it, but it's also a new way to work. >> Exactly. And it sounds so trite in a way to say the technology is the easy part, but the really hard part begins when the technology is finished. And I really believe that because if I look at my own team and my own teams experience, there's so many places where they've been doing marketing one way for a very long time. And if you come in and you ask them to do something differently, that's actually a pretty hard thing to do. And the only way to unlock the power of the data and the power of the new technologies, is to actually change how work is done. And I know it's an analogy that's overused, but if you'd ask the taxi dispatch "Are you important to the taxi business?" they would have said "Yes, of course "I'm the most important person in this chain." That's how taxis get to customers. And then along comes Uber, and suddenly you don't need that. You have to really think differently about that and as a leader, that's exciting and also really hard. >> I don't know if you've ever heard Sanjay Poonen talk about change, he says there's three reactions to change. Either run from it, fight it, or you embrace it. That's it. And the third is the only way to go. >> It's the only way. >> How about messaging? I'm sensing different messaging. Much more around the business, maybe a little bit less on the products. Plenty of product stuff here, but the high level stuff. What's your philosophy on messaging? >> I used to say "I'm a person that "believes in shades of gray" and about seven years ago I had to stop saying that. (laughs) >> But the truth is, I am a person who believes in shades of gray and I almost always believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle. So you get in marketing into these debates about is it these thought leadership and high level conversations or is it about product messaging and selling what's on the truck? And the honest truth is, you have to do both. You have to set a vision, you have to build the brand, you have to talk about the business and where we're going from a business perspective. As we talk about things like 2030, that's a really lean into the future conversation. At the same time, we also want to sell you some PCs and some servers and some storage and some data protection, so we need to do that well, too. And frankly, we need to get better as a marketing machine, as a company, and as salespeople, in terms of talking to customers. The right conversation at the right time. Again, sounds like marketing 101, but it's actually quite hard to do. When do you want to have a connected cities conversation? When do you want to just talk about how to modernize your data center? >> It's true, we always talk about above the line and below the line. When you're talking above the line, you might be speaking one language and below the line, another language. You try to mix the two, it doesn't work. >> Right, exactly. >> You have to target the appropriate audience. >> The conversation one of the women on my team started talking about this and I thought it really made sense was macro-conversations, micro-conversations. So to get out of this advertising vernacular, and I grew up in the ad industry, sort of above the line, below the line, and those were always two departments who didn't even talk to each other and usually hated each other. Instead of above the line, below the line, what's the macro-conversation? How are we talking about Realizing 2030? How are we talking about digital transformation? And then what are some of those micro-conversations where I'm going to talk to you about what are the personas that you have in your work force? And lets talk about some in user compute technology together with something really simple, like a monitor, that's going to help them be more productive. Those things don't have to fight with each other, you just have to be honest about when you're doing each one. >> Target them in the right place. >> Alison, we're getting to the end of the show here. >> Yeah, I can talk a lot. >> First of all, New Media Row here gave us the biggest set. We've done this show for nine years, we're super excited. The therapy dogs next door-- >> I love the therapy dogs. >> Are really fun to see, but every once in a while, give a little bit of color in the background here. For people that didn't get to come and experience in person, I know the sessions are online, but give us some of the flavors and some of the fun things you've seen and what would we expect from you in the future? >> I think this is just one of the most fun shows. I mean, obviously it's important for us to set our vision, it's important for people to come into the hands on labs, and the training, and the breakouts, and to learn and to engage. But, you see things like the beanbags and sitting out there, the therapy dogs, and my team does want me to say that every year we get new beanbag covers so we don't recycle those. And then really experience the fun in the Solutions Expo and talking about the way that we're taking trash, plastic trash, out of oceans and making art with it, so we can talk about our sustainable supply chain in an interesting way. I think, I'm biased, but I think this is the best show in terms of actual education and vision, but also some fun. Hopefully you guys think so too. >> Well, Sting. >> And Walk the Moon. Do you guys know who Walk the Moon is? >> Yes. >> I don't. >> Me neither. (laughs) >> Come on and dance with me. >> Oh, okay. Alright, great. >> I'm a child of the 80's, what can I say? >> Alright, so 23 days on the job, what should we be watching from you, your team, and Dell? >> So, as we talked about in the very beginning, this is our first Dell Technologies World, so obviously, we have just gone through some of the biggest integration of large tech companies in the history. And we're really proud of how successful that integration has been, and yet we also still have so much work to do around telling that integrated story. Yes, Dell and Dell EMC, but also together with VM, we're a pivotal RSA Secureworks, and the extend is strategically aligned businesses. And so that's what you'll see us really lean into is "How do we tell "that story more effectively?" We're continuing to invest in the brand, so a lot of the work that you've seen with Jeffrey Wright and those TV spots we launched again in March, and just making sure that people understand what the Dell Technologies family actually is. >> So really a more integrated story. But something that Dell always tried to tell, but you didn't have the portfolio to tell it. Now you do, so that's got to be exciting for you. >> It is exciting, yeah. >> Great. Alison, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> My pleasure. Cheers, thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World in Vegas. We'll be right back.

>> 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 to Las Vegas, as thCUBE continues our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018. So glad to have you along here for our Day Three coverage. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. It's now a pleasure to welcome David Comroe with us. David is the Senior Director of Client Technology Services at the Wharton School of Business, at the University of Pennsylvania. David, thanks for being with us. >> No problem. Glad to be here. >> Thank for sharing your time with us. First off let's just talk about, about the scope of your work. Again, you take care of all the obviously IT needs for the largest business school faculty in the world. Right? No pressure on you there. But talk about day to day, those responsibilities. >> As you mentioned my title is Senior Director for Client Technology Services. I'm essentially responsible for providing the support and services to four very distinct user groups that we happen to have at a university. That's of course our wonderful faculty, our staff that make everything happen, our incredible students, and of course our alumni group, which is about 100,000 people strong at this point. Just Wharton alums that are again, very important. Give back to the school. Provide mentorship and job opportunities for our graduates. Again very distinct needs for each of those four groups. We provide a high quality, and all the buzzwords. You know, secure, safe, efficient, highly available services to these groups. That's kind of what I do all day. >> One of the cool things, I love acronyms. Not that this industry doesn't have a few, as you know Stu. But WHOOPPEE. I absolutely love making whoopie. But not what you might think. But walk us through that and what it stands for, and what you did in it. It really was groundbreaking. >> You're putting me on the spot with this one. So WHOOPPEE is the Wharton, let's see if I can get this, Online Ordinal Peer Performance Evaluation Engine. One of our incredible faculty, Pete Fader, came up with this idea. It's no secret that grading is kind of bad. Faculty grading students. There's all kinds of challenges. >> It's tedious. >> Well it's tedious. There's inherit biases when you're, the larger the class. And when you have to grade 80 papers, or 100 papers or 200 papers. It's really hard to keep consistency across when your grading paper one through paper 100 through paper 200. Plus when you start divvying up the work between TA's and different faculty teaching the same class. Again fraught with bias. A number of people, again Pet Fader's idea, to come up with basically an algorithm that helps the grading process. And basically what happens is, is students are grading themselves. What we'll do is we'll give them five papers or five projects to grade. And they don't actually grade. All they have to do is rank it. You know, this is the best one. This is number one. This is the worst one. This is number five. And then there's this magic behind the scenes that that runs in our local infrastructure, in our cloud infrastructure. That basically runs an algorithm. And that algorithm is the secret sauce that some of our statistical geniuses at the Wharton school, of which we have many, came up with. And it has all kinds of cool features. You can say, well this batch of five papers might be harder. I might have the five best papers in the class. That's not fair. They still have to rank one the worst. You know, five. You can't say these two are the best. And this one's third. You actually, the students have to read the paper, and just rank it. I like this one the best. I like second, third, fourth, fifth. The algorithm takes into account difficulty of batches of papers. You could literally have the five best or the five worst papers in the class. And that's still going to provide meaningful data to the algorithm. So when you have 50, 100, 500 batches of five. They all start to figure it out. And the algorithm will actually figure out what the best paper is in the class. And what the maybe again at the Wharton. But not so great, greatest paper in the class. >> But not the worst. Just not so great. Again cause our students are brilliant. It basically goes on the fact that if you do a quality paper. If the algorithm says you're the best. Your weight means more than someone who might not have done such a good job on the paper. And you're considered a better grader. And it's weighted towards the better graders. There's all kinds of really cool stuff in there that we think is going to change... Get rid of some of that bias that I spoke about before. And help provide. And the data we've seen is, frankly the students like doing it. They don't like the additional work involved with it. We're seeing some empirical evidence, and some in person interviews. That they're learning more. They're reading five other student's papers. They're getting five other perspectives. They're saying, hey I didn't think about that. Or even, hey they're all wrong here. My paper was much better than theirs. But again that doesn't necessarily matter when we start running the ranks. And we're getting much better, much better grading, which is hard to quantify, but the folks that are on the academic team that are doing that, have some really great data. With the data. Yup, mm-hm. >> David, one of the themes we keep hearing in this show is about transformation. Is change happening? You're talking about IT, how it's working with the business more and more. Bring us inside university life in general and specifically. You work with one of the ancient eight. How does cutting edge technology fit in with - >> That's really interesting. I do have a couple thoughts on that. My boss has a picture in his office, of a Penn classroom from I think it's like 1908 or 1910. And there's literally a bunch of students sitting around. There's a faculty member standing up. And there's a candle-powered projector, which I didn't know is a thing but it's in the picture, projecting an image onto the wall. From over 100 years ago. What's different about our classrooms today? Everything's the same, except the projector's now in LED. Or a L3D projector. We still got people sitting around the room, standing up. I think what we're seeing now in probably the previous ten years from now and to the next ten years is education's probably going to change more in those 20 years than it has in 2,000 years since Socrates was standing around with a stone tablet or whatever they were doing. Things like globalization, online courses, the MOOC space, where Wharton is huge in the MOOC space. Wharton online programs. Where students can take, not even students, anybody! If you're in China or Africa or South America. You can take an introduction to Wharton, introduction to marketing class from a Wharton professor for free. I mean we're a business school. We sell some of that content as well. But you can get verified certificates. We're seeing a lot of stuff change. The students today expect more. We can get into, we won't though, we can get into the whole millennial issue and short attention span and all that kind of stuff. Students today expect their faculty to be technology savvy. They expect content to be online. They expect to use devices. The expect to use... We got tablets, and laptops and phones. They want to be able to consume this content on multiple devices. We're seeing significant transformations in education. Which is, hasn't necessarily changed much in 2,000 years. Or even 200 years, right? So there's that. Speaking specifically about Wharton, one of the things I really thought is interesting, is I've been there 13 years now. When I first started working there, I'm going to make some generalizations here, a lot of our student wanted to go work in iBanking. They wanted to go work for the big banks. They wanted to go work for Goldman Sachs and things like that. In the last five, seven, ten years ago. They wanted to create their own company. Start up their own company. Be entrepreneurial. Have their app. Have their their big idea. Start the next whatever dot com. And be successful that way. Now in the last two or three, four years. We're seeing a lot of our students analytics. We're putting analytics with everything. Companies, businesses, organizations, no matter what you are, we have huge amounts of data available. How can we make meaningful decisions based on that data? Our dean. I guess I can't call him our new dean. He's been there three or four years at this point. Really wants to position Wharton as the analytics school. Every company in the world is trying to hire these kinds of people. There just frankly aren't enough of them out there. The thing we're trying to teach our students is, or one of the many things, is how to analyze data. How to make meaningful decisions based on that data. And of course when you have more data, you need more storage. You need more infrastructure. You need more processing. All the stuff that you know, Dell and Nutanix are providing us, with their hyper convergence infrastructure. Their cloud offerings. Whether private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud. All that kind of stuff is... Positioning us as the analytics school requires a significant amount of technology on the backend. And again working with our trusted partners like Dell and Nutanix we can provide that seamlessly in the backend. They don't necessarily know, is it in our data center? Is it in the cloud? And they don't care. They shouldn't care. But as they're collecting huge amounts of data, running these reports, and creating it, and going back to creating these algorithms that do incredible things. And these secret sauces. We need the infrastructure to run that kind of stuff. That's I think one of the greatest things that Wharton Computing provides the Wharton School of Business, and their business, which is creating and disseminating knowledge. >> David, I think you've encapsulated something that I've been hearing from lot's of users over the last year or so. The vendors sometimes, it's private, it's hybrid, it's public. From the user standpoint it's like, no well we have a cloud strategy that we're working on. Can you bring us inside a little bit? How did you get to where you are today? How do you choose who you're partnering with? What leads to some of those decisions? >> I love the word partner. I hate the word vendor. One of the great things about working at Wharton is, is we get to have these awesome partners. I want someone... When we're going to make an IT spend, we want someone who cares about our business. We don't want somebody who just, will come in, give you a dog and pony show, write us a check. And when you want more stuff call us. We want folks that are going to provide the support. You know, pre-sales during installation. Post-sales when they're coming out with new features. We want them to be invested in what we do. I can truly say that Nutanix is a fantastic partner of ours. Dell-Nutanix are great partners. Dell is a great partner of Wharton and Penn as well. That's what we really look for, is someone who is willing to invest their time, their smart people. Tell us about the new features and functionality that are coming out. Call on us and say, hey how are thing going? It's not just the little things. But those little things really mean a lot to us as we're picking an IT partner. Because when you're working for the best business school in the world. Having the best students, the brightest faculty, the best, hardest working staff. We want to provide them a very, very high quality IT support. We need high quality partners. And not just vendors who care about the transaction. That's really the bottom line for us. When we're choosing our partners. >> When you were talking about analytics, and Wharton being the school of data analytics. What are your measuring sticks? In terms of what are you looking at? You're talking about four very separate groups of constituencies. What are you doing to evaluate your performance? And what's critical? >> I think it all comes down to, what do our business units think about us? We're a service organization. Almost all IT shops are. If the business units aren't successful, they don't need an IT department. If we're not providing them high quality IT services, we're not going to get the best faculty. We're not going to get the brightest students. We're not going to get the alumni engagement. They want to be wowed by their IT support. That's a big part of my job, is providing that quality of support. Helping train. Technology breaks, right? How do you deal with the problem? Nobody runs at rock solid 100% infrastructure. Murphy's Law always comes into play. Problems always happen. How do you deal with the cracks in the armor as they come off? I think that's what our business units want. I think we're fortunate that we're computing. Our team, our staff, our CIO. My colleagues, my peers, my team. Our team, right? They're very well thought of, hopefully, by our clients. And that's how we're measured is by their success. We want to help them, empower them to do their job at the highest level. We are playing in pretty rare air, when it comes to the faculty, staff, students and alumni, that we attract to Penn and Wharton. We want to keep doing that. One of the things I love best, and I tell our wonderful faculty when we meet with them, is don't tell me we did a great job. Here's what I want you to tell me. I want you to say, three years ago I was at, I'm not going to name drop schools, but I was at this school and I asked them to do this thing, that you said, sure, no problem to. And they couldn't do it, wouldn't do it, didn't have the ability, the infrastructure in place to do that. But you guys with a smile on your face just made it happen. Stuff like WHOOPPEE. Stuff like the analytics stuff. All the, tying it back to why we're here today, is our partners and our technology partners that help us provide scalable, flexible solutions. That's how we're measured. >> Higher learning. >> Higher learning, absolutely. >> David, thanks for being with us. >> No problem, it was great. >> David Comroe from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. Back with more live coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. Right after this break. You're watching theCUBE.