>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Vegas! Lisa Martin with John Furrier. You're watching us on theCUBE live. The end of Day One of our three days of coverage of Dell Technologies World. Can you hear the music? The party's already getting started. We have more content to bring you. Please welcome a couple of guests from DXE Technology, Kevin Johnston, Chief Sales and Revenue Officer, Cloud and Platform Service. Kevin, it's great to have you. >> Thank you very much. Glad to be here. >> Our pleasure. We've got Graham Stringer, Managing Director of Workplace and Mobility for DXE Americas. >> Thank you. Good to be here as well. >> Yeah, you waited just in time for the concert, guys! >> We did. >> Just in time. Here we go. >> All right, so, Kevin, let's go ahead and start with you. Give our audience and understanding of DXE. What you guys do, who you are, all that good stuff. >> Yeah, okay. That's great. So DXE was formed two years ago as a result of the merger of legacy HP Enterprise Services Business and CSC. DXE was formed really for the purpose of helping our large enterprise clients accelerate their digital transformation. So we're about a $22 billion IT services company, really aligned with our partners helping our clients transform digitally. >> And you guys were on the cloud early, too. There's a lot of devops going on. >> Yep. >> You guys had your hands in all the clouds. >> We have. >> What's your take on, here at Dell Technologies World, Microsoft's partnering with VMware? >> Yeah, so we would share a lot of beliefs with Dell Technology and VMware in particular, in that multi-cloud is a real thing. And we see multi-cloud, especially for the large enterprise clients, really being an answer for quite some number of years to come. We also believe that a large percentage of application portfolios will migrate to cloud. Whether it's private clouds or public clouds, and that there's a lot of work to be done to transform those applications to really take advantage of cloud native features. >> So last year's theme of Dell Technologies World was Make It Real, 'It' being digital transformation, security transformation, IT transformation, and workforce workplace automation. Graham, I'd love to get your perspectives on workplace mobility and some of the things that were announced this morning with Unified Workspace, Workspace ONE, and recognizing, hey, for our customers to transform digitally successfully, we've got to make sure that their are people are successful, and their people are highly distributed. What are some of the things that you heard this morning that are exciting, aligning with some of the trends that you're seeing in the workplace? >> Well the big trend that we're seeing is the role that HR is now playing in digital transformation of the workplace. If you go back two, three, four years, it was very IT centric. Conversations were predominantly with the CIO. We're now seeing 30, 40% of organizations or more engaging at the HR level. We did a recent project with one of the big retailers in the industry and right out of the bat, this chief HR officer was engaged right from the get-go. They want to know that their employees are going to experience work very differently. So that's one of the big trends we're seeing emerging. >> When did this shift happen? When was this going on? Past year, two years? Because this is a shift. >> I would say the shift has definitely happened the last couple of years. Millennials are having a huge impact. You're getting quite the cross-pollination of a lot of different generations. Millennials are now having an enormous impact. If you look at outlets like Glassdoor, millennials want to know when they go to an organization can I bring my own device? Am I going to have a great workplace experience? And you can't stick with a very traditional, legacy way of delivering IT where everything was shift left and you got to a point where everybody hated each other. >> That's a problem for productivity. >> Yes, a very big problem for productivity, absolutely. >> Talk about some of the challenges that customers have overcome with digital transformation, as it starts to become less of a buzz word and actually more of a reality and strategic imperative that has some visibility at the unit economics and value. >> Yeah, I think every large enterprise client we talk to has a digital transformation agenda of some sort and at some varying place along the path to trying to adopt a new business model or adapt to a different business process, so the challenges that we see with these clients in general is how do we scale? So I have legacy IT that won't disappear overnight and I have all the possibilities of digitally enabling or bringing new digital technologies that enable these processes or models. So this is a challenge: how to enable digital at scale where traditional and digital have to live together for some period of time. >> And it's not just a tech challenge, it's culture, too. How far has tech come because you've mentioned containers with legacy? That has been a great message to IT is I can put a container around it and hold onto it for a little while longer, I don't have to kill it, and make the changes to cloud-native. >> For the tech guys, there's been a lot of fun things and containers probably is the bridge for legacy apps into cloud for sure. For the rest of the folks, for the normal people, the way work gets done and the way to rethink how to do work in the mix of IT or technology into business is just different. >> Graham's point is beautiful because the expectation of the employee or the worker whether they're in the firm or outside the firm, outside in or inside out, however they look at it, is the new experience they want. So the expectations are changing. What's the biggest thing, we saw some stats on stage about remote working, three places, two places, I mean, hell, I'm always on the road. What is some of the expectations that you're seeing? Obviously millennials and some of the older folks. >> They want to see IT delivered in the way they want to receive it. That's one of the biggest trends we're seeing. So for Millennials, my son's kind of in that age category, right, they love to text. To pick up a phone for a younger generation is a little bit foreign. You go and deal with baby boomers, they want to be dealt with in a much different manner. So you've got that whole change, and then you've got the whole notion now of work is changing; where do I work, the ability to basically work 24/7, wherever I want, however I want, using whatever device that I want. And that of course is now creating a whole new set of challenges for IT, particularly around security. >> But employee experience is absolutely fundamental to a business' success; their ability to delight costumers, their ability to deliver outcome, so it's really pretty core. Talk to us about those conversations that you're having with customers. Are they understanding how significant that employee experience is to bottom line business outcomes differentiation? >> Very much so. We're working right now with a large manufacturing firm and they're doing not just an inside out, but outside in, so they're actually coming to watch. It's part of a workplace strategy to look at it from the outside as well. In other words, how can our client take innovation to their suppliers, their customers, to demonstrate that they understand it? So that's extremely exciting when we see that they're not just focused on their own employees and the experience germane to them. >> One thing I might add is that maybe less so from a user experience per say, but the individuals as an employee. So the shift to digital and the skill shift that's required to go with that is really probably the most monumental change that all of us technology companies and the business part of our large enterprise clients is dealing with. Whether it's a skills gap or whether it's a culture gap, this idea of just simply waterfall to agile and the way to think about that or silo versus end-to-end as just simple ways to think differently about how to go faster. So the experience, how you recruit, whose going to make it, who can be trained, and then where you need to be able to source the new talent from as well. >> I totally agree with you. We do hundreds of shows a year, this is our tenth year doing theCUBE, that is the number one things that we hear over and over again from practitioners and customers and from people working. It's not the check, you can always get a check solution, it's the cultural and the skills gap. Both are huge problems. >> And this is part of the digital at scale point. So we'll hire something in the neighborhood of six to eight thousand digital skills people. We're just about to close on active position of Luxoft, an agile devops digital company. We'll bring another 13,000 in. But if you think about the normal large enterprise and what you need to do to be able to have the university networks and to be able to really source that scale in order to effect the transformations that business need to make to stay competitive. >> And the other point, the engagements have changed too. I'm sure you guys have seen your end but every IT or CIO we talk to says, "I outsourced everything decades ago and now I've got a couple guys running the show. Now I need to have a hundred x more people coding and building core competency." That's still going to need to engage people in the channel or our service providers but they need to build core talent in house. It's swinging back and they don't know what to do. (laughter) Is that why they call you guys? Is that how you guys get involved? >> We'll help train. We'll help clients think through what does an IT or business organization need to look like profile wise, skill wise, operating model wise, and in many cases it's I have my digital model but I still have my traditional model that needs to coexist with it and then here's where the opportunities are for people to develop career paths and progress. >> Kevin, talk about the sweet spot of your engagements that you're doing right now. Where's the heart of your business? Is it someone whose really hurting, needs an aspirin, they've got a headache, is it a problem? Is it an opportunity? Is it a growth issue? Where do you see the spectrum of your engagements? >> We kind of find clients in one of three spots normally. "Hey, I know I need to do something but I'm not sure what it is, can you help me figure out to get started?" So more design thinking, problem solving. We have other clients at the other end of the spectrum who are, "Hey, I've got this figured out. I need a partner to help me execute it's scale. And I know the model that I want to do, I know the business reason for doing it." And then we have a lot of folks that are in the middle, which is, "I've started, I've got a few hundred AWS accounts. I got private clouds sitting idle. Someone help me." Or, "I've got security issues, compliance issues." >> So they're in the middle of the journey and they just need a little reboot or a kickstart. >> They need help scaling. >> They ran out of gas. (laughter) >> And how are you working with Dell Technologies and their companies, Dell EMC, if they were to do that? >> The partnership with Dell Technologies, VMware, are really center to how we go to market. DXE is one of the top few partners largest in the ecosystem. The breadth of our portfolios are extremely complementary, whether it's things like device as a service or multi- and hybrid cloud, or pivotal and devops. So the breadth of the portfolios max up really well which makes it the impact potential for our clients even more important. Dell Technology broadly is really one of the few partners that we're shoulder-to-shoulder going with to the market as well. >> Awesome. Great stuff. What's the biggest learnings you guys can share with the audience that you gathered over your multiple engagements holistically across your client base? That's learnings, that could be a best practice, or just either some scar tissue or revelations or epiphanies. Share some experience here. >> I think one of the big learnings we're seeing is the shift now to very much business outcome driven decision making. If you go back to your point about the big ITO outsourcing days, that was all about just strictly driving cost out, and that's why you got to that point where everybody was left hating each other. Now it's about business outcomes. You've got the impact of Millennials, you've got organizations wanting to create a new and better experience for the employees and they're coming to us to say, "How do we accomplish that?" We've got an organization we're working with right now, they're trying to elevate themselves to be one of the top 50 best places to work for in the US. How do they arrive at that? For them, that's their barometer and so it's not about driving costs out, it's really achieving that overall experience and enhance a business outcome. >> So they're betting on productivity gains from morale and happy workers. >> Right. And also they're recognizing the downstream impact on their customers, productivity, the level of employee engagement, right? I mean those are the things that the organization knows that if they hit on those, I mean the sky's the limit. >> Right. Anything on your end? Learnings? >> Yeah, I would say the "don't understand the talent" challenge. The ability to pivot from here's the way we all know and are familiar with doing things to the new way. There will be a big talent challenge. The other thing is the operating model from an IT standpoint. Traditional IT operating model operates at a particular speed, cloud operates at a different speed. And the tools, the talents, the skills that go with that are just completely different. And then I think the last thing is just it seems maybe surprising, but compliance at scale and at speed. So security and regulatory compliance, we see that falling over all the time. >> Great practice you guys. I've been following you guys for many years, you've got a great organization, lots of smart people there we've interviewed many times. My final question is a tech question: what technologies do you guys like that you think is ready for prime time or almost ready for prime time worth having customer keep focusing on and which one's a little more over hyped and out of reach at the moment? >> I'll take a stab at that. If you look at today's Wall Street Journal, Deloitte talks to I believe the figure they quoted was roughly 25% of organizations are doing AI in some form already, PoC or at least are committing to it in terms of strategy. We're seeing that inside DXE as well. AI is now being incorporated into our workplace offerings. The potential for that is enormous, it's real. The technology in the last couple of years, particularly with cloud computing, has really enabled it. When you look at platforms like Watson, these are capabilities that just weren't there 10, 12, 15 years ago, and now the impact that it can have on the workplace, help lines, chats, chatbots, and so forth, is enormous and it's real. Five, 10 years ago it definitely was not in it's maturity. >> Okay, over hyped. >> What's over hyped? I don't know, what comes to mind for you? >> Or maybe I'll rephrase it differently: not yet ready for prime time, but looks good on the fairway but not yet known. . . >> I think for me through workplace, IoT has still got a ways to go. AI and analytics is definitely there. IoT I would say is a little bit behind. I'm sure that Kevin has cloud and platform thoughts. >> Yeah, I would say from an over hyped standpoint, we've seen a lot of companies, large enterprises, legacy application portfolios think they're going to refactor all their applications and cloud native everything. So it feels that people are now kind of getting past that point, but we still see that idea a lot. I think the opportunity that is really in front of us, and you kind of called out, containers. Legacy applications into cloud feel like a remaining frontier for the large enterprise. We think containers and the idea of autonomous, continue optimization, financial performance, is a way to make apps run in cloud financially and performance wise in a way that we don't see a lot of companies fully solving for that yet. >> Awesome. >> A lot of work to do, a lot of opportunity. Kevin, Graham, thank you so much for sharing some of your time and thoughts and insights with John and me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> Very good. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate it. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, and you've been watching theCUBE live from Vegas. Day One of our coverage of Dell Technologies World is now in the books. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell Technologies, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 from Las Vegas at the Sands Expo Center. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, this is day one of two sets of coverage for three days for theCUBE. There are at least 15,000 people here, we just came from a great keynote, Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger, Jeff Clarks, Sati Netella was here. John and I are pleased to welcome back to theCUBE one of our guests, we've got Doug Schmitt, president of Dell Technologies Services. Doug, welcome back. >> Well, thank you for having me. >> And you've brought a partner in crime, we have Alex Barretto, Senior Vice President of Dell Technologies Services, Strategic Planning, and Technology. Alex, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> So guys, I always love the keynotes. Michael always has- Michael and team always have great energy. Lot of cool announcements, all talking about digital transformation. But Doug, let's start with you, let's talk about the transformation of Dell Technologies Services. Give us an overview of your organization, and what you're doing for Dell Technologies Services. >> Yeah, well thank you for having us back. I know we were here last year talking a little bit about Dell Technologies, and wow, what an opening keynote this morning. And following up on that; look, service is key component, obviously. Helping our customers through their transformation. Our number one priority, it's really simple. It's literally about, for, and helping the customers. Whether it be specifically kind of, three areas: to sport, deployment, and their manning services. And helping them not only keep their data centers to the edge, running correctly. Making sure to help them through their transformations that they're going through, that we talked a lot about this morning. And then, what we do is we support our customers really with 60,000 people globally, about half of those are Dell Badge, the others, we leverage partners in various countries for. Look, it's about getting up every day and making sure everything runs correctly for them. And that's our job. >> Alex, talk about the strategy for services. Because one of the highlights in the keynote was Bank of America talking about how they got where they are today, and they go forward. It's not the same, things are changing, you guys have to change. What's changing in sevices? What's the strategy? Because it's a whole new ballgame. >> Yeah, great question. In fact, technology is- we have to ask ourselves of our own transformation. In fact, Doug and I spend quite a bit of time talking about a technology world map. Really, if you open the aperture of 'What is technology?', it's everything from data science, to our bots, to our software engineers, into the AI, engineers are developing both in-house as well as partnering with others. That is really the essence of what we're doing in services, and you see customers like Bank of America really adopting that. Because it's helpful in the value that customers get out of our technology. >> And the data was also important, they mentioned data. How are you guys using data in services? I'm sure you must be data-driven. I mean, the mandate up from high, Michael's like, "It's a data-driven world, it's clear as day." >> Absolutely, data is essential. In fact, if you look at the amount of data that's out there, and the growth of the data, it's just phenomenal. But the way I actually like to talk about data is the insights we get from data, right? Data is interesting, but the value that you get from data comes from the insights. So, we actually spent a lot of time developing models, and that's why we use a lot of data scientists, a lot of software engineers. Again, to develop models to generate value from the data. That value is what customers are looking for, and what we're focused on. >> In terms of value, one of the things that was also talked about this morning in the keynote is people and the workforce being massively distributed for any kind of business. 81% of the average worker, is outside of the traditional office, with over half of these people, I'm one of them, working in at least three different places every week. You've got customers that are highly distributed, as is your workforce. What can you talk to us, Alex, about the unified workspace announced on stage this morning? >> Fantastic new offering that we have, obviously you heard from Jeff onstage talking about that. And if you look at that, there are a couple elements that are interesting to me. First, you see all the pieces of Dell Technologies coming together to create greater value for the customer, and if you look at the value that's generated there, to your point, wherever you are as a customer, you're able to access your specific information, whatever the device. And so, if you think about your whole experience, device independent, as well as from a software standpoint, we can offer all in one. >> How, how is-- Sorry Doug, how is service integral to this, you know? >> Well that's-- yeah. What that's really about is so, you have workspace one, coming from VM, great offer and product. And then you have our services, which would be pro-deploy, are pro-support and in some cases, even the manning services, coming together with that to provide a wrapper around that. So, customers have that end-to-end experience with unified workspace, getting those four great service offerings together. Which really then brings it all together for the customer. So they have to do very little, quite frankly, to make that happen. >> One of the comments from Sati Netella was the whole new renaissance of IT needs infrastructure. You see the VX rail being bundled into data centers and service, the demo of the VM-ware cloud, where the just deploy a data center to the edge. I mean, this is just completely game-changing. How is that changing how you guys do the services? Because you guys, it was self-healing. There was a lot of stuff in the dashboard-- no one was deployed, it was all being done with software. How is this changing your mix of business, personnel, economics? >> Great question. You know, we talk about how we're helping customers transform Dell Technologies, well look, services is going through its own transformation as well. And I think that's what you're bringing up. And really, there's four pivots around that transformation we see inside of services that we have to do to stay up and make sure that we're cutting-edge for our customers. The first is around technology, Alex talked a little bit about that. But really, what that's about is the telemetry to help our customers. Data insights, it's not just the data. The second is around our systems that we're putting in place to leverage all that telemetry. You know, we're basically building a whole new CRM, bringing everything together. Our field capabilities, in terms of systems we're building out as well. So a massive transformation on the infrastructure inside just running this to support really. It's a $150 million install base. >> Can you share just stats or data on what's the most popular services you're deploying? And which ones are trending? Like, which ones are kind of, people kicking the tires on? Obviously, you've got the grooves swing on some of your key products. What's the hottest, services/products that you have? >> Well look, our Pro Support Plus is a very hot product for us, it literally provides end-to-end support for our customers, provides what we call a technical account manager, or service account manager with it. It gives you the insights then to really go help you. So it's not then about break/fix anymore. What it's about is proactive, predictive service, and then actually using that to go to the customer and say, "Hey, you know what? "Here's what we're seeing, here's how you can improve "your environment, not only prevent issues from happening, "but what are we doing to actually improve, "and carry that environment forward." And our customers love that. >> Any up and coming, trending products, services you see? Obviously, I can see yeah, there's probably going to be some new services there, but what are going to be the hot new techniques? >> I think seeing the same spot in ProManage which you'll see us carry forward here, and carrying it into the managing service is how do we continue to provide more of that end-to-end? Really, what you're seeing is a convergence of deployment, support, and managing service all really coming together. Our customers are really looking for more and more of that one-stop shop, but one offer across the board. So that's what we're seeing. >> But just to add to that, if you our ProSupport Suite, we have SupportAssist, which is our technology behind ProSupport. And the insights that we're generating; we have 55 million devices connected now. So you look at the connectivity, and the value customers are getting out of that, it's amazing. 20 Terabytes of data per day generated out of those devices. It's a lot of information coming in, customers see the value, they connect more, and again, back to your loop that you're talking about the data. >> Well, the security visibility too, just looking at the data, with all those devices now with Windows, and all the new multiple vendors. I mean, you've got all that data. >> That's right. But I think it's the insights, you know, we keep talking about that. Those insights are really helping us leverage that for the customer so they can see in front of them, and I think what we always say internally is "Look, customers aren't looking for a rear-view mirror. "They're looking through the windshield." The more we can use that insight, to help them see when and where they need to get through for their own transformation, is what it's all about. >> And talk to us about how both of you-- Doug, we'll start with you, how have customers been sort of symbiotic to the digital transformation of services in terms of knowing, "We've got to get predictive"? How are they helping you to evolve what you're delivering so that ultimately, services is part of this technology differentiation and product front that Dell Technologies has? >> Yeah, well, you know the history of Dell Technologies is really the core of our foundation. Culturally, for all 140,000 of us, is listening to the customer. And I think that culture has allowed us to adapt and stay close to not only what the customers are telling us, using the insights we're getting back, but knowing where the customers want to head. And it truly is a one-on-one listening to the customers, listening to where their issues are at, then using this technology and their solutions to solve their problems they're bringing up. But I got to tell you, there's not a big hammer that just- one answer for that. Literally, it's how are we helping consumers? How are we helping small, medium, business? Large? All of them have a variation of what's the same, and all of them have a variation of difference as well. >> Alex, how about strategy for a minute, the strategic landscape, how has Dell Technologies Services changed with the vendor landscape? Now you've got multiple vendors, it turns into multiple clouds, multiple clouds with open source software. You've got all kinds of new things emerging. How do you stay on top of it, what's the strategy, what's the long game look like for you guys? >> If I were to summarize in a nutshell, it's software. We're investing quite a bit in software, whether that is within our predictive capabilites, but as well as in deployment services, and Doug alluded to ProManage. So software is a pivotal, key component. So this is how we are approaching from a services standpoint. Whether you talk support, deploy, or manage services, the umbrella around that is really our capability to do the software component. So that's where we are placing our bets, we think that's where the future is. Whether it's SupportAssist, or our ProManager offering. It's all the backbone based on software development. >> And where is, we talked a lot about digital transformation and services, but the people, the people being essential to, we need the technology to do our jobs in any industry. What about skill, upleveling skills? It's great to have all the technology, but we need to have people to be trained, certified, professionals to be able to maximize the value of the services. Doug, go ahead and start, and then Alex, maybe from a strategic perspective, where is that people, cultural part of the services? >> Well, look it's huge. I don't think it's just for services, I hear our customers talk about it as well. And as Alex just mentioned, that software is driving more and more of it. You know, we use a lot of different acronyms and titles to kind of describe it, Digital Transformation, AI, BI. I mean there's all of this, but it is is all summarized in Digital Transformation. And the impact it has on our team members is vast. So look, open communication, yes, it is changing the way we do business, and quite frankly the world's doing business, the simple tasks are getting more and more automated through these insights, and they're going away. Making it easier for our customers means you're not getting as many break/fix calls, you're not getting these transactions. But what we're doing at the same time is we're upscaling the team, telling them where we need to be in the future, helping them with those skillsets, reset. The interesting thing is our team members are seeing the value of it, their jobs actually become more enriched because you're doing higher value things for our customers. But there is a transformation going on and-- >> And Doug, there's cultural changes as well, as we think about how we measure the business, some of the metrics that we look at, legacy metrics versus new metrics, they are different now. How we think about people development is different. So, I think it's a great question, 'cause the actual talent transformation, it's huge. There's short-term impact, and long-term impact. And if you don't plan that right, obviously you can't execute a strategy. >> How should your customers start rethinking about how they're leveraging the services? Because with unified workspace, data center as a service, and now multi-cloud, architecture is really important. Where the data sits, using real-time data you mentioned in software and data, so as they think about now, looking at not resetting, but taking services for their advantage. 'Cause they look at services, they want to be in the right position. It seems like architectures are more important now. Multi-cloud architecture. So, more technical people involved, the roles are changing. What should customers, how should they expect to be thinking about that? >> It's another great question. Well look, I'll let Alex follow up with his thoughts on this one. But I think this is really about us, the customers have to look as a true partnership. What we're really there trying to help them with every single day, is we talk about keeping the solutions in the system running to what they need, what they wanted. But we can also help by helping their staff free up time through the services we have, so they can stay focused on their transformation and provide the value that their teams and customers are looking for. That's really how we see that. So in other words, go into them and say, "Hey look, "we can take some of these tasks off, whether it be the deployment, unified workspace we talked about, you know, that was announced today. These are all about not only providing better technology for their team members and their customers, but then leveraging their time then to go spend it on their transformation. That's really it, quite frankly, simply put. >> Yeah, I would say it depends. Customers want to do a variety of things, so it depends on their business outcomes. So, at the end of the day, I would say, as you look at Dell Technologies, we have all the Lego blocks. You tell us what you're trying to achieve from a business standpoint, and we have the Lego blocks to make it happen. I think we're in a unique position to be able to deliver that valuable proposition to customers. So it's not a one size fits all. >> More data, more workloads, I've heard the term workload mentioned so many times in all my CUBE interviews, we all talk about workloads, but now with IOT and Edge, you're going to see a proliferation of more workloads, some small, some massive, and managing that workload is a huge challenge for organizations. This comes up as the number one issue. How does services play into that, how do you guys make that easier, and I love the operating model of simplicity, but when you guys take that realization into services, what do you guys bake out of that? What comes out of that? >> Yeah, I would say two things. First, the reason that workloads exists is that it's important for the business. So it's got to be up at times, it's got to be 100 percent. It's got to be up and running. We make sure that that happens. Second, if you look at the workloads, they're actually running critical pieces of the business. So we actually assure that we are providing additional value, beyond actually just running infrastructure, actually keeping value and how you should optimize that infrastructure so you can do more with less. >> Can you give, is there an example of a customer? John mentioned B of A was highlighted this morning, Draper was as well, I think some of the Trailblazer Winners were right before we started. A customer that comes to mind that really demonstrates the value that they're getting from Dell Technologies' suite of services? >> Well, look, I think there's a lot of those. But going back to maybe, we talked about the customers today in the keynote speeches that were happening. But look, there's a lot of small and medium businesses that are one, trying to stay with and ahead of technology. Lots of cases actually farther ahead in their transformation. I think I know of one that I recently had a conversation with, a doctor's office had four or five offices in a town here in the US. And they're staying ahead of that. They want us to "Look, we want to buy things that have "easy deployment, easy install/run. We also need you "to come in and help us tell us how to access "and leverage the technology we have better." Running it easier, staying ahead of that digital transformation, and providing really, their virtual CIO, with a technical account manager pulling all that together. You know, all from the storage, their server, their client products coming together; they don't view it as-- the customer's not coming to us and talking to us about individual products. It's not the discussion. What they're saying is "We need to purchase this, "we know we need this solution, we need to have you guys "come and pull it all together, we're looking "for our people to take care of the patients, "get the information that needs to the government, "and get paid, that's it. "And we need you to help us pull all that together." And we're doing that. >> Doug, my final question for you. Michael Dell always talks about this, within the hallway conversations, or on theCUBE. He says, "The best way to create valuable teams is to attract and retain the best talent." How are you guys attracting and retaining the talent, because the workforces are changing, the technology's changing. What are some of the hard problems? Because people love to solve hard problems. What's the pitch for people out there watching, that might want to work in the services group? What's the environment like? How do you attract great people? What kind of problems do they work on? Give a little taste. >> Well, first of all, you know, you have to love and want to take care of our customers, that's really exciting to me, and I know to the other 60,000 team members. That's why we get up for every day. There's an energy that comes from that. I mean, you're getting up and helping our customers whether they're hospitals, small, medium businesses, or consumers. Really being productive in their lives, whatever it may be. So there's an energy that comes from that, I think a lot of people enjoy doing that. It can't be more exciting than that, right? Second of all, career. Just so many aspects to this. You think about digital future technology, we have everything from being able to go out in the field and help our customers to remote, there's just so many different opportunities. And then we also have our employee resource group. So even participating beyond just work, we have the ability to join all of our different resources groups, whether it be Pride, or Veterans, or whatever they may be. People like and see value to just coming into work, but being able to take their passions that they have on the outside and bring it in as well. >> Real citizenship opportunities to bring and contribute back. >> Exactly right, giving back to our communities. very strong, very strong. You know I get an immense amount of pride in the things that I want to contribute to outside of work, and seeing and getting empowered by Dell to do those things. And then constant learning, constant, constant learning. >> I would also hint at a bit of competitive imagination. (Laughing) If you heard any barking during our interviews, speaking of things to do outside of work, we're next to Michael's Angel Paws, which is near and dear to Michael Dell's heart. That's the service dogs that are actually here for all of us to get our dog fixes on. So Doug, Alex, thank you so much for explaining to us the momentum, the excitement behind the digital transformation of Dell Technologies Services. >> Thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live at Dell Technologies World 2019. This is day one of two sets of CUBE coverage. Stick around, our next guest will join us shortly.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating ten years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld, 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Kay welcome back everyone, live CUBE coverage here at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, we're in Moscone North lobby, I'm John Furrier. My cohost Stu Miniman. We're here with two great guests, David Appel, Vice President C2 Space and Intelligence and Defense, Civil Solutions at Raytheon, and Gil Shneorson, who's the senior vice president general manager of VxRail, of Dell EMC, great to have Raytheon, anything with space Stu and I get jacked up for that. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah I appreciate it, thank you, I'm glad to be here. >> Gil, VxRail, got a customer here, impressive role out. Talk about the story. >> Well I think it starts with the fact that we have recently announced our support for Pivotal community services over VMware Cloud Foundation over VxRail which has actually the only Q-rated automated stacking industry that allows people to leverage containers and infrastructure as a service on one stack and we've been doing this for about three years now in a different way called Pivotal Ready Architecture and Raytheon has actually adopted that architecture to help their customer, the air force. And that's why we're here today together to talk about you know. >> Seriously modernization couldn't be a more important conversation in government solutions, you guys are a big provider, Raytheon, known for the tech chops, known for having good engineering. Talk about the solution, what you guys did, what's the use case, talk about the deployment. >> Yes with what's going on with the federal government for a while is the acquisition processes and what's taking sometimes years or decades to get software in the field is causing a lot of unmet requirements and needs of the ultimate user, the war fighters out in the field, to be met. So we've been on a journey for the last two years with Pivotal and Dell of how to help the air force, modernize the air force has gone under a transformation and a program called Kessel Run which is where we've deployed the Pivotal Ready Architecture to allow us to quickly deploy an infrastructure and allow us to focus on the end users and develop the capabilities that they need worldwide. And what took years and to now months and days so it's been a fantastic journey. >> Tell us what that means for the folks that might not know the pace of the procurement process. I mean some of this stuff is like 1995 procurement rules. I mean modernization these days is such an important part of it because the impact is significantly relevant. Share some color into the process. >> If you think about in the commercial world today where hundreds of applications be deployed overnight and updates on the what, hourly basis. In the government space it can literally take years to define a requirement, then you have to go through a budgeting cycle all the way up through congress and then you have to go through an acquisition cycle that could take a year to complete and so by the time you're actually fielding capability it is literally five years or more by the time the need was actually identified. And in that five years the technology probably changed which means your solution has probably changed from what's currently available. So shortening the cycles is what it's all about. >> And that's really about having the right product at the right time, not the old product five years ago. How fast things change, it's pretty important to have that nailed down. >> It's pretty amazing and you know I think you look at transformation and there's usually a trade off. What we have been working on and what we're announcing but really what we've been leaving over the last four years is a way to transform but stay close to your core. In other words transformation without trade offs. And so if you can get your VMware stack now running containers in a fully managed automated stack you don't have to change your skill set and you can do all of that and start innovating while staying very close to your core competency. You know you transform but you don't have to go too far and I think the story what Raytheon did is fairly amazing because they turned, you know, what did you tell me, a 50-year-old process, you know in like in less than half a year you turned automated systems that you know saves the US air force a lot of money. >> And lives too, are saved. I mean you're talking about people in the field, this is about people's lives too, I mean this is the money making. >> And it's been about transforming the culture of the way the DoD does software and the first example that Gil is mentioning was tanker planning which was the ability for the air force to refuel flight missions in the air, would typically take over eight hours to plan. And it was done by a white board. It was done manually. And in order to automate that and shrink the time, again that would have gone to that five year procurement cycle. We were able to deploy new applications using the Pivotal-ready architecture within 150 days and get those out worldwide to the field. That's done two things. It's from a financial perspective it's saving over $200,000 a day in just fuel costs from optimizing the tanker planning. But more importantly it's actually more efficient and protecting the safety of those flight crews. They're not in the air as long, they might not be in a hostile environment as long, so the security of the air force is even more important. >> As Pivotal always says they're outcome driven and that's pretty good outcome. I mean talk about the impact that you've had on everyone else around you because I'm sure there's some blockers in your way, people's feathers got ruffled, but then people see success they want to come copy it, right? So that's a pattern you see in a lot of government work. Hey there's a new way to do it, modern way. >> Yeah so our hindsight we're seeing it in two ways. One from a broader DoD perspective. The air force was out front here. They established this and from a DoD perspective what they're calling their Kessel Run initiative is really taking off. You're seeing other Kessel Run like programs being stood up like a program called Kobayashi Maru and Rogue Blue and a few others across DoD. So it's proliferating out across the DoD from a customer perspective, DoD customer perspective. From an industry perspective you know our competitors are quickly trying to catch up to us and they're trying to, you know, copy our playbook but we're continuing to innovate and continue on this journey so we're moving ahead with Pivotal and Dell. >> First of all David I think Pat Gelsinger must have been talking to your team because you're mashing up Star Wars and Star Trek with Kessel Run and Kobayashi there. But talk about mashing up, the stack that you're putting together, VxRail was really built around simplicity. It delivers that, that's what hyperconverged infrastructure does. You start talking about VCF and containers and PKS on that, Kubernetes nobody says is simple, but you know help us walk through, you know, how simple is it for you to leverage and deploy this. You've got organizational challenges and other things, so, you know, where is the solution, it sounds like you use the ready node, and where directionally is it headed? >> Yeah let me answer from this perspective. So we started this journey with Pivotal and the air force about two years ago. And at that time we started with a group of probably a dozen or less folks that actually even understood the technology or the products and the solutions that Dell and Pivotal bring forward. In those two years we're now up to over 100 people. Fully embracing the technology. It's creating an environment where it's easier for us to recruit and retain people because it's modern, it's not the old ways we used to do business. And we're finding that it's been very easy to deploy, very easy to train people up and very easy to operate. So from that perspective it's just been fantastic from not just the technology perspective but also the cultural transformation perspective. >> Yeah Gil I'd love you to comment on that because you know remember gosh when CI and HCI first rolled out you know the people that had those jobs were worried we were going to take their jobs away. Now when I hear your customer talking about, you know, it's easy to train them and even easier for me to recruit and retain, a powerful story. Are you hearing that across your customer base? >> Yeah I'll tell you what's a little different. In the past we have simplified things and we've made work somewhat go away but there was no alternative work. Today every developer, every IT person, they can't wait to go and be a dev ops person, right? So for IT when we come in and we say we're going to take this off your plate so you can free up your time, it really means something now, 'cause they know exactly what they want to do. They want to go and they want to be dev ops, they want to develop new apps, they want to move forward. And so it's very syngergistic in a way that we offload some of the burden from them and they actually do free up to do cooler stuff and then they like it. >> And they get to keep their traditional apps, with containers, gives them great capabilities. Not the throwaway. >> And that's a great point I think as I said before and it's really important to convey this, the transformation without trade offs is a big deal because they can keep the application. They can run the same environment. Right in our case they can do it you know at ease and in remote locations all over the world with less management. And at the same time they can innovate and manage those environments. And I think as long as we can keep that up we'll make a lot of people productive. >> Well I got to ask David the security question because one of the things that comes up all the time obviously Department of Defense, security's top of mind. Industrial IOT are now not just malware getting in for credit card information, you're talking about actual equipment, you're talking about flights in the air, hacking with physical things is a concern and it's a big IOT kind of conversation. You're in the middle of that, this is your world. What's your thoughts on the security? >> You know so we've obviously had to go through that in order to get authority to operate to push things into theater and one of the strongest benefits we've seen is the dev ops process and the platforms has all that security built in and all the testing as we're going through it. So the thousands of tests that are running as new threats are identified, the platform is updating with the latest patches or whatever it may be, so. >> John: On the automation stuff? >> On the automation side of it. So we're actually seeing a lot of the security, I don't want to call it risks go away, but our ability to mitigate them is being built into the software itself. So we haven't seen an issue yet where we haven't been able to get things authority to operate and push it out to the field, so. >> There's a high bar there too, obviously. >> It's a very high bar, very high bar, and that was part of the also the challenge of getting systems fielded in months and days versus years because of the ability to get that operations. >> Now this is a really big story I think. First of all Raytheon's a well-known brand, but, the modernization of getting stuff into theater and or into your production theater, military operations, that's a big deal, I mean, I think people don't really understand that aren't in government how fast this happens. I think that's a real testament to the solution, so I mean. >> Well the powerful thing to it is the national defense strategy is all about capability at the speed of relevance, and that's all about technology. Future wars aren't going to be decided by the size of your army or the size of your arsenal. It's going to be about how do you get data to decision makers faster and how do they can act faster. And that's where software and this infrastructure we're putting in place and putting capabilities in the hands of people that need it faster. That's what it's all about. >> And you know Secretary Matthis who was former Secretary of Defense said 48% of all the casualties are usually frontline war fighters. And that's where the technology edges so to speak. So again this is such a cutting edge topic, talk about it for days. How do you feel about this? This is pretty exciting. >> I'm just happy that every time I come into theCUBE, this is the second time I do it with a customer, you give me the opportunity to learn, you know, have a deeper relationship with one of my of probably now 7,000 customers. Which you know is really hard to keep up with these days and so you know we make technologies for people to use and when you see it in the field doing good it's a great thing. >> Well it's a transformation story. It's really a great transformation story. They have to, making a difference. >> Great, David, would love to hear, you know, what's on your ask for your partners that are deploying. Kind of give us a look forward roadmap that you can share. >> Yeah again I go back to everything we're about right now is speed and and getting capability faster. Currently in our marketplace right now we're fully embracing agile dev ops and everything it takes to deploy software from that perspective. Moving into things like artificial intelligence and machine learning and autonomy are the big things that are on our horizon from a technology perspective. And as our partners are in those areas and can help us bring more capability in that, that's going to help our end customer, the DoD, faster as well, so. >> What's the big takeaway from VMworld this year for you guys? What's the big observation? >> I'll be honest this is my first time at VMware. I'm amazed, I was at Dell Technology World a few months ago, I've really enjoyed it, I think it's a great event. And I'm just enjoying learning all the technologies so, it's, I've enjoyed the day. >> Gil what's your big takeaway? >> Well I'm part of the family. So I'm a little more familiar and even for me-- >> Whoever: You were briefed. >> No, no, even for me the rate of innovation that Vmworld puts out there is amazing. Right and you see how everything plugs together and you see how the vision keeps being, you know, completed, right, and we're in a good spot in the sense that we actually have what people need right now. And we do it better than everybody else. And you'd think that being number one in almost every category you'd be sitting there complacent and no, you know, we keep pushing the envelope, doing more innovating, more integrating more, so it's very exciting to see what's happening. >> Well great story here, Raytheon congratulations for your success I think it's super important to have a prepared military, certaintly, and saving lives and doing it in a modern way is kind of of a miracle these days in government, so congratulations. >> And I thank our partners for continuing to innovate 'cause that's helping us so. >> All right, great story, CUBE coverage here, Vmworld 2019, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. >> And, welcome back here on theCUBE, we're at the Moscone Center here at downtown San Francisco. Gorgeous day outside, by the way. Picture perfect day. Chamber of Commerce weather, but a lot of big news happening inside here for VMworld 2019, along with John Troyer. I'm John Walls, we're joined by Pierluca Chiodelli, who's the Vice President of Product Management at Dell EMC. And, Pierluca, good to see you, Sir. >> Thank you, it's awesome to be here. >> Great, thanks for being here. And Muneyb Minhazuddin, whose the VP of solutions product marketing at VMware. And Muneyb, I know you're right just hot off the presentation stage. >> Yes I am. >> Catch your breath, it's all going to be fine. How was your audience? I'm sure standing remotely. >> Yeah, it was thirteen hundred plus >> Excellent, yeah. Been a big week, already. >> Of course it has, yeah. >> For you and your team. So, first off, let me just, let's step back, talk about the vibe of the show, the theme of the show we saw Pat on the stage. >> Muneyb: Perfect. >> About an hour and a half this morning, just your thoughts about day one and the big announcements that VMware's been making. >> It's been a great week, and it's actually been a great approaching week. As you know, on Thursday we announced intent and acquire both Pivotal and Carbon Black for close to about $5,000,000,000. So, that's, kind of a big announcement by itself, and then how do you kind of bring in and keep day one where you're not too focused on those two, but get the narrative of VMworld across. And really, you know, where we have, you know, CUBE has been with us on this journey for a long time. >> Right. >> We've seen that data center shift into kind of two tangents. One is, you know, workloads into data center break out into public clouds. Second, rerouting into cloud native applications. And, if you've seen our strategy wall when that was kind of the key messages. Hey, we're embracing both the modern app development, the focus on Kubernetes and Tanzoo announcement, was all about to say, "VMware platforms ready "for the breakout of both tangents." First, Cloud Native, we've got Kubernetes, we're bringing it right into vSphere, so that everybody in the audience can support it. Second, the breadth of our cloud everywhere, right, so, we've gone from Amazon to IBM to Google to Ajour. So, it'll give you the infrastructure for your workloads to be your choice. Modernize or migrate. (chuckles) That was a key message for us to kind of land today. For a lot of our audience who are kind of stuck in that same piece of, "What am I doing with my workloads? "What is that platform I got to build on?" And, you know, the key foundational platform being VMware Cloud Foundation. Right, that was our strategy, and I think last year we called out VMware Cloud Foundation in Pat's keynote, because I wrote it 44 times. (laughs) (group laughter) We didn't do it that many times, this time. We only said that's the platform that lands in Amazon, GCP, Ajour, IBM, and 4,200, you know, cloud provider partners. That gives you really that public cloud extension. The second part being modern apps, Kubernetes is a new, kind of, modern app development platform, vSphere is embedded into that project pacific and the whole Tanzoo announcement, right? So, really, a powerful message, what do you think? Was that successfully landed? >> I think so. John, do you feel good about what you heard today? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think VCF is super interesting. I'm also kind of, so there was an announcement today also about the Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs for using VCF. So, VCF the layer, which is kind of the VMware stack with some extra magic in it, that can be in, can make a private hybrid cloud, you know, everywhere. So, talk to us a little bit about Dell Technologies Cloud. As I call it, "DTC." The, it's a lot, there's a lot of stuff in that as well, so, but we have two very complicated solutions stacks that are, we're talking about now, so. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Can you talk a little bit about the validated design and what came out of that? >> Absolutely, so before we go into the validated design, I think it's very important as Muneyb said. When we think about the Dell Technology Cloud, really, it's a component of the best (murmurs) technology from our storage, networking, and also compute, but we did the VMware VCS on top. So, we work very closely with VMware, and today we are announcing today the Cloud Validated Design. As we announce at the Dell Technology World in May, we said Dell Technology Cloud is this, now we want to tell to the people, how you can easily deploy this. What is make this tangible? So, what we are doing today is rapid time to value. We did design and pretested configuration, that we put in Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Design, as we said. The other important things as Muneyb said, right? It's... And, I heard this also from theCUBE. There was a debate with Stu and other people about, what is the Cloud? How I deploy the Cloud? When we think about Dell Technologies we speak with different peoples, and two set of peoples. One is the app, right? The Cloud app, all the app people that, they want to build have all the automation, DevOps operation and all these things. But, behind those people, there's still an infrastructure. So, we are speaking on both things. So, it's very important this paradigm is there, where you can have people that they can consume the technology, and understand how to build the infrastructure to be automated, and build that automation for the Cloud. So, that's what is the Dell Technologies Font Validation Design. Right. So, one of the biggest things here that we announced, is not only the Cloud Validation Design. It's the first one but also the ability to have compute, storage and network together, and also use it primary storage as a primary citizen of the VCF. So, we should talk about that later but that's-- >> Absolutely, and I think to catch onto that, you know, talking about the applications et cetera, you know, again, in the evolution of Cloud, and we've been on the journey for 10 years is, we've had, the first few years of the Cloud journey was, felt a little like a one way street, which was, kind of meant where people were shutting down data centers and going to all these public cloud providers, was always a one-way street. Now, VMware, and if you followed us closely, we had a service call VMware, you know VCHS, which is VMware Hybrid Cloud Service before the vCloud Air and then we came out with this solution, right? The idea was, we thought there's going to be movement back-and-forth but it wasn't the case. People were seriously shutting down and going one way. As we made all these partnerships of you know, Amazon, IBM, we started seeing, and you heard stories of IHS, Freddie Mac on stage where they take six weeks to move 100 applications one way into the Cloud, customers started asking us some questions, say, 'If it's so easy to go that way, is it also that easy to bring it back?' >> Come back! >> Right? And, that kind of lead to the whole kind of Dell partnership, Dell announcement within the Dell Cloud Foundation, you know, VMware Cloud Foundation, Dell Technologies Cloud Platform to say that, "Hey, it's actually..." There's a notion of not going from hardware-specific, you know, just high-tuned for workloads to commodity hardware in the Public Cloud. There's now a need for having common hardware platform on both on-PRAM, off-PRAM because there is a need for customers to take EC2 workloads or, you know, Ajour workloads and bring it on PRAM again. That was just a notion of how fast it is. I add that point because it is so critical to know that your hardware is performing in tuned, to perform for a high business critical applications. People forgot about them the first few phases of going to the Cloud, and now as they think about a hybrid, true hybrid Cloud nature, they want optimal performance in the software layer, in the hardware layer. You know, hence our announcement of Dell Technologies Cloud, Cloud Foundation, Validated Design. It's really supporting that customer notion. >> So, it's like this optimal, or maximized flexibility is what you're trying to give people. I mean, is that-- >> Pierluca: With the Cloud simplicity, that's really the key. >> But what drives that? I know that you have, you've, you know, whether you're on-PRAM or you're off-PRAM, you're going to decide what workload's going to go on what space on, so forth, but is some of that kind of hedging bets for future workloads because you can't predict where they're going to be done or where you want them done? Or is it just providing flexibility today, and let's not worry about tomorrow? You know, it just seems like there's a lot of runway here, if you will. >> Yeah, and I think there's no right or wrong answer. One of the big workshops I do with our customers is really kind of say have you figured out what's your three to five-year application strategy? Because again, in that first phase of that fast migration to the Public Cloud, people were just like CIOs I know, it's like, I have a cloud for strategy, what does that mean? I'm shutting down all data centers, I'm going to the Cloud. Right or wrong, and that's my Cloud First strategy. Now, what they've come to realize is not all workloads work effectively in the Cloud, right? So, they kind of like, hey, put an application strategy to say what are the most optimal applications that will get the benefit of Cloud? These are like, e-commerce retail. They have to have, you know, Black Friday, expanding elasticity. If you got no slow, mundane, you know backend processes doing batch processes of massive storage of in a bank ledger in the back end, they're not going to get that elasticity. I know what it is, I know how many, you know, batch processes I got to run. So, people are getting smarter about which ones get the benefit of, you know, modern app development, or Cloud elasticity, which ones don't really need to have that. So, we've seen best practice customers actually have a very good app strategy, three to five years, and then decide how much of my app strategy is gone to the right, you know, or gone to the left, right? It's pretty much to say, "I don't have to change." 60, 70% of my Eastern European customers, their banking ledgers are still on mainframes. They're not in a hurry to go to the Cloud, whereas, you know Fintech on the East Coast is going, "I'm going to the, I'm going to the Cloud", right? So, it's really that strategy that's, they should take the app strategy and decide what the infrastructure strategy is on the top shelf. >> I think from the storage business, we see that really clear, right? The app is definitely what is moving the things, right? It's not, people they're not thinking anymore because the transformation is in the way that you consume the infrastructure. They not thinking anymore about what I put there, but is about what app I need to run, how I build my app. So, it's the environment. And, I don't think personally I meet a lot of customer. There is not one right way or wrong way, it's an end, right? As you can see also in VCF we have Vsend, VxRail and primary storage. If you look at two years ago, we will be sitting here and say, you know, "It's only this, not the other things." When we, I been in governor conference, three years ago was like, it's all Cloud. It's reality is the world, the information technology world is always the same, where is a natural genius things. Because people, they need to have the trust, right? You cannot run your entire things on something that you don't know or you didn't prove. So, what we give here today with our technology is the flexibility. You can have a Cloud approach, but use the trusted PowerMax, for example, in conjunction with Vsend, in conjunction with the Unity. So, not all these is the proof that you can preserve your investment. But, is the proof that you can start to build those up. And, if you've seen what paths say today, then those app can live everywhere. So, you can go, you can move, it's much easier to move, and you can just trust what you're doing. >> And, you hit an important point on the move part, right? And, people are so easy, like, "Hey I moved a thousand applications in six weeks "to VMC and AWS." The fundamental notion where that was not possible before, was compute, network, storage. Like, we've been doing vSphere for a long time, you know that. And, it wasn't that easy because what used to happen is people thought, "Hey, a virtualized computer, I can move it." But, what did not happen as you moved that, was your databases, you know, your storage, rules didn't follow you into the Cloud. Your networking QOS and, you know, policies, and you know, priorities didn't follow you into the Cloud. So, that was kind of like, you know, you know, I'm an Australian, so it was a half-assed solution, right? (group laughing) So bear with my language, right. It was a half-assed solution, but really what needs to happen is your compute, your network, your storage has to all work together. And, that's where Cloud Foundation was powerful. And, what we're lighting with this Validated Designs is also that capability that your computer, or storage is one unit from a app. Once you package it and make it available in all the platforms, then that migration becomes six weeks, two weeks to move that. Because once you break it apart, it's a nightmare. There's not a lot of folks who have survived database migrations. (laughs) >> I mean maybe Pierluca, you can kind of sum us up here. This conversation's been a lot around evolution, right? And, there's also been an evolution of data center design and what to expect with that, you know, just buying things off the shelf and getting a Var and, you know, the VMAX, and we've been through this whole, and now, we've talked about VxRail, which can be part of this solution. But, can you talk, just, maybe, take us in, take us out with the, or into the future with the Dell Technologies Cloud as the idea of the Validated Design, the idea of this stack from Dell Technologies in storage et cetera, what can we expect in the near future? And, how much guidance will folks get? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, without breaking any NDA things, but this is only the first step. So, the Cloud Validated Design is just the first step where we said, 'Okay, we are tasked in this, "we putting this together." We are working very closely to also solve the entire things that VCF allow you to do first day deployment, allow you to expand the infrastructure, and allow you also to do life cycle management. For example, with the VxRail we already have the life cycle management part. We are working in way to do that also for our storage and other things. So, if you think about that then it becomes as you said, all the policy we put, like with Vworld, will be strategically in that sense, the policies can be carried over. So, then you can go to VMC, you can go to another place where the software and infrastructure can move back. So, because people can do this on PRAM, a replicate exactly but not only replicate the application, but replicate the (murmurs). What do you do on the QOS, all these key things that makes people running enterprise application, right? So that's, I think, it's very exciting moment. I think it's just the starting of this dream. >> Absolutely. >> Gentlemen, thanks for the time. >> Thank you. >> And you're all, you paint a pretty exciting future, don't ya? >> I hope so. >> So, I can't wait to look forward to even VMworld 2020? >> Wait 'til Barcelona, come on? (laughs) >> All right, well I'm not making that road trip, so unfortunately-- >> We going to more out there. >> But, Barcelona's going to be good. >> Yes, thank you for having us. >> No, I'm not the best guy, so, all right good. Hey, gentlemen, thank you for the time. >> Thank you >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it very much, great discussion. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Back with more from San Francisco right after this. (techno music)

(funky music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage it's "theCUBE" covering Vmworld 2019 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners >> John: Hey welcome back everyone its "theCUBE" live coverage here of VMworld 2019. We're in Moscone North in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our tenth year covering VMworlds. The last show that's still around since "theCUBE" started. EMC World's now a part of Dell Technology World so VMworld was our first show of "theCUBE" in 2010 and we're here with then the Senior Director now the CMO of VMware Robin Matlock. Great to have you. Thanks for coming. 10 years ago we were across the street at the South. The first ever "CUBE", now 10 years later, what a run. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Robin: Well how 'about the fact that this is number 11 VMworld for me so I think we're on, like, number 16 or so for VMworld so, yeah, we've driving been this ship for a while and it's still going strong. >> John: And, you know, when you came in the studio we did a little preview video and one of the things we talked about and you jumped on was this notion of resiliency around VMware. I want to get into that because the keynote this year I thought really used some of his primetime real estate to highlight Tech for Good and really some of the efforts around that so 1. Shareholder value, you guys have been doing great. Stock prices up. But in this era of, you know, corporate responsibility and accountability, this Tech for Good message is real. You guys have been doing it for a while. It's not new, it's not like you're doing it for fashion, it's the real deal and it was a big part of the keynote. >> Robin: It was. In fact, it was really a highlight for part of the keynote for me personally. I mean, I think when it's in our DNA, and that is consistent with our values, and we've been at that for some time. We have values that are all about, you know, customer and community and that's who we are. We also have very high aspirations that of course we have to be performant. We have to perform well as a business and deliver shareholder value but that isn't enough. You know, I do think that Pat leads this narrative that we as a company have to think about giving back more than we take. And it's not just PowerPoint slides, it's real. We empower our employees. I hope you enjoyed the story about Callum Eade swimming the English Channel all for a cause that he chose. He raised the money, he drove that and VMware just opens up those opportunities to allow our employees to do that so I think, we think it's a really important topic, we tried to give it a lot of air time, and give a way for the attendees to connect with it and see what they could take action against. >> John: And also, you guys are also voted one of the best places to work. Your campus in Palo Alto, beautiful and it is a great place to work. But this is the ethos, but it's still competitive and had Carl Eschenbach recently in our studios in Palo Alto and he made a comment he's like, "You know, I've been at VMware "for many, many years", now he's a VC at Sequoia Capital, and Carl said, "You know, everyone's been "trying to kill VMware. This is going to VMware, "that's going to kill virtuals." The resiliency just around the staying power of the product and technology leadership happens. This year it's containers, the attendees are excited by it, the numbers are up, 20,000 people here. Still evolution on the technology side, still great community. >> Robin: Yeah, I mean I think, you know resiliency is in the fabric of VMware but I think innovation is what is the secret sauce and we know in Silicon Valley you better innovate and keep moving forward or you're going to find yourself kind of, left out and, you know, Pat's been an incredible visionary. He's got a team of leaders that are very confident, strong technological disrupters. I mean some of the big acquisitions that we announced just last Thursday at earnings that we are educating folks here about, the intent to acquire Pivotal, the intent to acquire Carbon Black, you know, further that we'll either do it organically or we will acquire interesting combinations of companies to drive unique value to our customers. So I think there was a whole bunch of that today. >> Dave: We were talking in "theCUBE" earlier, Robin, about how now it's a post-virtual machine world and if we go back to 2009, which was my first VMworld as well, Paul Maritz at the time said we're building this software mainframe. Now, of course, you got promoted and I'm sure killed that mainframe from all marketing but (laughs) so well done but you kind of evolved the software-defined data center vision. But one of the takeaways for me from the keynote was this notion of any workload, any app , which was kind of the vision back then and now in a cloud which the cloud wasn't as prominent then. And so from a marketing standpoint you've really, the vision has been consistent but now with all these acquisitions you're making you're really embracing a much broader vision and your marketing message has to evolve as well. >> Robin: To support that, I think the fact that our vision has been incredibly consistent for many years now, I mean, that's Pat's leadership kind of setting that foundation for the company. My job as a marketer is to help find the way to articulate that in a way that's consumable and people understand. But what's happened over the years is we deliver on that vision 'cause, you know, a vision it's not all perfect, we don't have every piece of it or it's not all optimized. All of these moves year after year are just validating and supporting the delivery of that vision to our customers and I think the big moves this year are no different, whether it's Tanzu for Kubernetes, whether it's the Carbon Black acquisition idea, whether it's Pivotal, these are just steps along a journey that's going to deliver on our vision which is delivering any application on any cloud consumed by any device, all with security intrinsically built in the fabric. >> Dave: Well and the gauntlet that you lay down this year in talking to your practitioner audience was that technologists who master multi-cloud will own the next decade. Okay. That kind of says it all, right? And that is a strong message that you're sending to your buyers, to your practitioners so. >> Robin: Yeah, and I think the people that are right here at VMworld, these are the kinds of technologists that have that opportunity in front of them. That's why this whole notion of make your mark it's like, lean into this opportunity. Betting on VMware, building your career on virtualization has opened up many opportunities. It went from compute to storage to networking. It's now into multi-cloud. These are incredible opportunities and these technologists are the ones that can deliver this value for their enterprises. >> Dave: And there's diversity in the messages, you know, all the major cloud players say, "Well no. Just our cloud." You guys are pushing in a new direction. I mean that's what leaders are supposed to do, right? >> Robin: Our strategy has always been about choice, you know, we've really been advocates of letting customers choose the path that's right for them and we know in this cloud war that we're all a part of that customers they are choosing. Some are leaning into AWS, some are leaning into Azure, some are biased towards IBM. Our job is really to enable them to have a rich, powerful experience without friction, efficiently, and operate those workloads in any of those environments. >> John: Have you seen any demographic shift in your primary audience because obviously the operating side, even with Kubernetes, they love it, containers, a messaging channel that's in and of itself but still containers seems to be that next step function with Kubernetes that VM's brought to computing. But when you bring in the dev and the ops that's where it starts to get magical when the operating's got to meet up with the developers. That's been the theme. cloud-Native. All this enablement's coming in. Has there been a shift in demographics to your audience? >> Robin: Well it is an evolving journey, if you will, and yes but it's still, I think we have a long ways to go. We are largely still have an infrastructure audience here, there's a mobility crowd here, there's a cloud architect crowd here. The new audiences are going to be the platform architects that dev/ops community and we do have shifts in that but I would say that's part of the value as we bring Pivotal into the family, we can now merge these audiences and, I think, do a much formidable job at that. >> John: It's interesting, Telco will have them on later. 5G was a big part of the keynote as well >> Robin: Yeah. >> John: A new opportunity, a new affinity group there. >> Robin: Without a doubt, I mean, the whole Edge and Telco clouds are really opening up new entirely new markets. The Telco, the 5G, we do think that's going to be a very significant wave and is going to create new opportunity for new application types, new fundamental architectures that we can now merge between Telco and Enterprise so we think it's really a rich ground for innovation. >> John: You mentioned Pivotal, I think that's more of they were already in the fold, now they're officially in the fold with Dell Technologies but your other acquisitions, there's a lot of them. You got to kind of bring them into the fold so is there the marketing playbook do you have an off-site meeting and you just give them the playbook? How do you handle all the integrations? 'Cause that's always a big challenge. IT integration, messaging integration, again it helps if they're on the fault line of the value proposition but >> Yeah. >> John: What's your strategy to integrate all these companies? >> Robin: Well, you know, any time you're doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions you definitely have to think very strategically about integration and then sometimes you want to integrate fully, right away and sometimes you want to let an acquired company be stand-alone for a little while. Got to get used to the culture a bit-- >> John: Like Velocloud? >> Robin: Velocloud is kind of independent-- >> John: They've got their own building. >> Robin: within the networking team. AirWatch was held very independent for a couple of years. Some other ones are just tuck-ins. You just bring 'em right into the family, you just merge 'em in, it just depends on the size, the scope, the culture and the strategy. I think we take a very purposeful approach to M&A integration and we don't really have a one-size-fits-all strategy. Depends on the circumstances. >> Dave: So follow up on that because clearly there's an engineering culture here at VMware and take the Carbon Black example for instance you talked about how you guys have sort of pretested it with AppDefense but from your standpoint, how do you think about the architecture of the marketing and the messaging? I think you answered it in part. It was sometimes it makes sense to keep it separate sometimes but when you think about the vision do you look at it and say, "Okay this plugs nicely into the vision "and so here's what I'm going to do?" How integrated is it with the rest of the sort of decision-making process? >> Robin: Well, you know, I would take the position that all these acquisitions are plugging into the vision. They are that's why we're buying them because they are very aligned to our strategy and vision. Now I have the challenge as a marketer to deal with a lot of different brands that are coming into the family. I mean, how and when do I consolidate and kind of unite the brands and that is a journey that we're going to be on. We'll take some time to do that. You don't want to rush things in that regard. I think it's very important that the market sees one VMware, one vision and strategy, you know, if it's delivered in a product and it's through an acquisition as a different brand that's okay, we can work on that over time but as long as we're laying out one strategy and vision to the marketplace and just showing these are evidence of proof points of that journey. >> John: Yeah. I mean, you guys, you're pretty clear. Your strategy is to evaluate, understand where they are in the value chain of what you're trying to do. Unlike others like IBM which brings companies in quickly, makes them IBM, you guys are a little bit different, You'll play with whatever the market will give you. That's pretty much what I hear you're saying. >> Robin: Well for example, Carbon Black, experts in security, you know. I think we want to capitalize on that expertise. We want to protect that expertise. They've already been partnering with AppDefense now for some period of time rather than, you know, it's like which one is >> Right. >> Robin: consuming the other (laughing) so our strategy is let's combine AppDefense with Carbon Black and then start working with Patrick and Carbon Black to merge that into the-- >> Yeah. >> Dave: Organizationally, I think that's, at least what I read >> Yeah. >> Dave: was you can set up essentially a cloud security division, right, that Patrick is going to >> That Patrick is going to run. >> Dave: run, so >> That's right. >> John: Okay so VMworld 2019, what's the update here? Give us some factoids, some of the exciting things happening here. We're in the meadow, there's birds chirping here. This is Moscone North, nice build-out, always good build-outs here. Moscone, we're back in from Vegas but what's going on? Labs, activities-- >> Robin: We've got it >> Give the-- >> Robin: all, John >> Give us the highlights. >> Dave: Klingons >> That's right. >> Robin: First of all you've got two great days of keynotes, right, those are really important highlights. Tomorrow we're going to do some really interesting things, demo, technical, deep dive. Great guest celebrity speakers, right, We're going with the sports theme this year and elite athletes and what they're giving back to the world with Lindsey Vonn and Steve Young. But here for the program we have the Hands-On Labs are on fire. They broke records on Sunday so I know they've been really well-attended and consumed. We have over 600 break-outs, so many it's mind-boggling. We have 230 sponsors in the Solutions Exchange and that's probably a place where you can go not just to get the VMware stuff but get that good exposure and lay of the land of the entire ecosystem. And they're all showcasing their innovation. What's new, what's the latest. So I think those give people a really good quick snapshot in one week, you can pretty much get an overview of the entire industry. >> John: Are there any must-sees in your opinion? >> Robin: (breathing in) Oh-- >> John: Or that people are talking about? >> Robin: I think for sure you got to get into this Kubernetes stuff. If you don't come out of this week of VMworld with a good handle on what is Tanzu, what's Tanzu Mission Control, what are we doing with the Heptio acquisition, what is PKS evolution happening, I think you would be missing something if you don't really grok that. Project Pacific work, Kubernetes in vSphere, tightly integrated, so that's a must-do. I think there's a lot happening in the networking space, right. Pat was pretty bold up there about, you know, what is the opportunity relative to network virtualization and the time is now so I think you've really got to get into that from the data center to the Edge to the cloud. Network transformation's hot. And then of course I think the cloud and I think we're really clear on hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud and how to really think about those environments and how, if you're architecting cloud for your company, what you want to be thinking about, what are we doing across multi-cloud, and, you know, I think all that hybrid-cloud stuff, it's all there. >> Dave: As we move to this, you know, this post-VMworld, VMware world how do you-- >> Robin: Is there a post-VMware world? >> Dave: What role, post-virtual-- >> John: Oh look at that, there we go. (laughing) >> Robin: I don't think there's a post-VMware world. >> Dave: Post-VM. I mean virtual machines. >> Robin: Virtualization. >> John: Are you changing the name to container world? >> Robin: No. (laughing) >> Dave: Right, exactly. So what (laughing) yeah what specifically are you guys doing to sort of educate folks, I mean, obviously you've got a lot of Kubernetes sessions, et cetera but just in terms of helping people sort of transform their skill sets into infrastructures of code, being able to take advantage of Kubernetes, you know, we've seen some things in the industry at events like this where you know, guys learn how to program in Python or, you know, whatever it is >> Right. >> Dave: Are there specific plans to do that? Is that actually happening at the event or? >> Robin: Well that's part of what all this content is about, I mean, you know, 600 break-out sessions aren't about, you know, compute virtualization. You can find those but this is about all these different dimensions, right? Whether it's what is Kubernetes, fundamentals, how you think about that in what kind of environment you're running. And I think that's the spirit of what VMworld is about. It's about hands-on, it's about meet the experts, it's about sessions, it's about the ecosystem, it's about having that all at your disposal in one week. >> You forgot something. >> Oh did I? >> The parties. >> The party? >> Everyone >> Well that's not helping your technical-- >> Everyone >> Aptitude >> Everyone knows VMworld has great parties at night and that's where all the action, you guys work hard/play hard one of the ethos of VMware culture. >> Robin: That's right, that's right. Well, we do work hard/play hard because this is intense, right? These guys are trying to jam as much as they can into four days and so we got to let off a little steam and OneRepublic is on stage on Wednesday night. We're going to have a great time. But I do think it's on the back drop of them here they are just like sponges trying to absorb this information. >> John: My final question is, and you guys brought it up in the keynote, around the tech industry good, bad, and Pat says neutral, it's how you shape the technology. Really a call to action and a strategic imperative to be more proactive in accountability and driving change for good. So I got to ask you about the word trust. I've seen a lot of marketing around companies always try to market around trust. Now more than ever the trust, whether it's fake news, company responsibility to security, which is a big part of what you guys do. How do you see that a marketer and what's the conscience of VMware because trust is certainly a big part of what you guys do. Is that a marketing, going to be a marketing ethos? Is it built into everything? Just curious how you personally feel about the word trust. >> Robin: Yeah, well first of all, I think it's foundational to doing good, healthy business. I think you got to be very careful as a marketer to market trust. I think you need to demonstrate your trustworthiness. You need to be consistent. You need to be credible. You need to be there when the times are tough. You need to be, you know, not always asking for something in return and if you earn trust you don't really have to say it. I believe we can position our validity and our credibility proven, you know, having customers say that we're trustworthy, having customers articulate >> Yeah >> Robin: why they depend on us, I believe that's more effective for our customers and, at the end of the day, probably more authentic. >> John: Yeah, and I think people, yeah that tends to be the track record of people who say it maybe haven't earned it, right, earning it's the better marketing strategy-- Yeah, I think these 20,000 (laughing) people are saying it as they show up here with their time and energy and investment. And I think our customers, you heard from a lot of customers on stage today. Gap, Freddie Mac, Verizon, there'll be more tomorrow. You know, I think there's over 100 customers in these sessions here and they're here advocating because they trust VMware. >> John: Well they run their business on you guys. Dave had a survey hey did, just published it yesterday, the spend is not going down. I mean the cloud impacts your business, you're getting into the cloud so that's pretty obvious but just overall the business is healthy >> Oh very >> John: for VMware (laughing) >> Robin: Very healthy. And you know we do that by really trying to have a balanced approach. It is about shareholder value but it's about tech as a force for good, we're passionate about that and ultimately we put customers at the center of our thinking, of our decisions, of our behaviors, and I think that ultimately keeps rewarding us. >> John: Well, Robin, it's been great to work with you over the past 10 years. Continue on. I think you guys have earned the trust, certainly the proof is in the results, and, you know, it is what it is, and the community votes with their wallet on the product and their participation so congratulations. >> Robin: Well if that's an indicator, I think we're getting a pretty good report card. >> John: Thanks, yeah. (laughing) >> Thanks for inviting me. Love being here, guys. Take care. >> John: Alright, Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware here inside "theCUBE" for our 10th year but also as VMware goes to the next level step function with virtualization to containers, Kubernetes, big theme here, I'm John with Dave Vallente, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (funky music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back, live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas with Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, winding down three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We've got two senior executives from Dell Technologies here with us, Greg Bowen, Senior Vice President, CTO of Office of the CIO Dell Technologies and Garry Wiseman, Senior Vice President, office of the CIO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So, we had Howard on, we had the CFO Tom Sweet on, digital experience is a big part of it. On the news announcements, a lot of Cloud stuff, but also a lot of, you know, workplace, workforce, human resource kind of vibe around Client Edge, digital technologies, unified workspaces, all pointing to the benefits of what Cloud and data can do, ultimately at the end of the day, that's what drive great value in apps, but also, user experience. I mean, people are workin', they're mobile, this is one of the core themes of the show. You guys have a digital, Dell Digital Way kind of mission. What is that about, tell us about that, 'cause you're doing it in internally, you're not even dog footing, you're building it out in real time, rolling it out, take us through the digital, the Dell Digital Way. >> Yeah, so the Dell Digital Way. If you guys ever Google digital transformation, good luck. The first six or seven results are all paid. Someone's trying to sell you the story on digital transformation. We're out there and you know, we're doing it all ourselves. We go to market with the IT transformation, workforce transformation, security and application transformation. A lot of people are choosing to do those one or two at a time. We're trying to do it all at the same time. So we had to develop a way that will allow us to accelerate our path through that, and we call it the Dell Digital Way. It's really a people process and technology transformation that allows us to change our underlying culture, really the way we interact with the business. Start with the business and the User first, and then work backwards from that. So the people part, it's really taking things from big functional silos that have a lot of matrix overlays, and creating small balance teams that own their code. On process, it's taking very large programs that are just generating risk all the way up and breaking those down into small deliverables where you have very low risk. And then on the technology side, this is where we are drinking our own champagne. We're actually employing our reference architecture from VMware and Pivotal all the way through the DM, Dell EMC technologies in our own data centers, So we can operate as a multi Cloud environment as well. >> So it's not just an announcement from the top saying, okay, just go digital. We're hearing from some of the insiders in the hallways here at the conference, it's hardcore. It's training, agile training, and this is not just you know, talk, talk, talk. You guys are actually getting it done with the training. How important has that been? Because at the end of the day, everyone's has all these kind of, they talk the talk, but might not walk the walk. >> It's training and getting the people right. At the end of the day, we have to change 10,000 hearts and minds in order to transform. And that means you have to touch those people, and you have to actually train them to operate in the new world. If you don't do that, you can put all the technology you want into the environment, if they don't know how to use it, it does you no good. So we're starting with getting our people up skilled, getting them trained. We're taking program managers, putting them through full stack developer training. We've got our first 60 that are going to be graduating this summer. And then we're training the rest of them on the Pivotal Way. So that's really about starting with that customer and working backwards, user centered design. >> How do people get the, how do, how do companies get the people's side right? Because you know, we all kind of work the big companies, you guys are a lot bigger. Now that Dell Technologies, where head of the old world was oh, let's reorganize, it's not working. You reorganize as a matrix organization. You know what agile teams, a lot of kind of HR issues that if someone might be great on one team, not great on another, and so it's really about the attraction of talent, retaining talent, knowing when someone's a fit. Is this ad hoc? How you guys get that right? Because that seems to be a big part of it. Because you got to be agile. You don't be doing reorders after the fact Oh, we didn't post the numbers. We weren't successful. Let's reorder, which means failure. So how do you guys get that right? >> I think it's partly skills assessment going in, right? You actually know which people are right for which skills and there's really key, three key skills in this. There's a product manager, the product designer and engineering. And then there's a lot of people that come into the balanced team after the fact. So it's really understanding where your teams are today, and then getting and finding paths for them in the future. I don't know if you have any. >> Well, I also have to say, obviously, being a company that presents itself as one that's modern, from a development standpoint, our infrastructure a place where really the next generation of developer or product manager or designer wants to come and work because they can see how we're really, you know, operating in this, this digital age, is another key thing for us to make sure that as we, as we recruit folks, particularly as we look at college hires, you know, they're looking for those types of places to come to work. And so part of it's the workplace we'd make sure that we have a modern looking workspace, we have, you know, open seating areas, we have lots of collaboration spaces for people to get together in. And then, of course, with the technologies, we're very lucky to have such a rich set of technologies available within the company itself. So we have, you know, the Pivotal methodology we use, but we have Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which is a great way for people to go and build applications and run them in the Cloud. We actually have all of the the things from a security standpoint that help us make sure that our customer data is secure. And so we can give them that insight as we bring them in, if we're trying to recruit people like, you know, the college hires as well as other industry folks that we're trying to track, that we're in this, this big motion and we have scale. Right, that's the, that's the one big difference. >> South of the playbook then is the playbook to get this right as core team. Get that core fabric of the, whatever the objective is, product engineering, and then put tuning people through. And cross pollinating based upon what the situation might be. I need a little Cloud, I need a little bit of hyper convergence. So you kind of, it's kind of like a combined workout. It's kind of like sports. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I think you know, as Howard had mentioned previously, on some the other sessions, with such a large organization, there are people who are going to be, you know, really game for the change and really want to, you know, shift towards this new way of working. There are folks that are curious, and then there's a small percentage that may decide that this is not a journey they want to be a part of. And so it's really as we go through those, those motions of saying, here are the plans of where we want to go. Who are the people that are going to opt in? And who do we want to help you to move forward from a skills perspective? >> So a couple of challenges that I, that I see, I wonder if you could help us understand how you address, you've got the business, users, apps, and then the tech comes last. Okay, makes sense. But you've got, I'm sure there are a lot of similarities across, how big is Dallas? Like hundreds of thousands of people? Lot of similarities, but there's also some unique requirements. So how do you deal with that? You try to find the overlaps and say, Okay 60%, you know, nail it, and the others, you know, maybe we build snowflakes or maybe we just burned some bridges. How do you guys address those dissimilarities? >> So the good news is, the frameworks that we're building, and the decentralization of decision making allows you to address some of those dissimilarities. We've got applications that have built ground up Cloud native, they're a green field, they've started in the Cloud, they started on PCF. And they are perfectly, really prepared for this journey. We have other applications that have been sitting in the data center for decades, right? And, and everything in between. We found that we can create technology pipelines that can actually get all those applications to production the same way. So there's one thing out of the way, the building process of writing software and deploying it to production standardized. The next step is when you decentralize decision making and you get the product teams to own their code, you get better decisions. So it's about creating a framework that allows you to handle the variety of challenges and use cases that are thrown at you. >> Okay, so you're also a 35 year old company, you got, there's all this technical debt hanging around. How do you deal with that? Maybe you could give some examples of situations where you said, Okay, this part of the portfolio, we're going to leave alone, maybe some old cobalt mainframe. You're not that old, (laughing) Oracle database, and we're not going to touch that. But, but how do you deal with that technical debt challenge? >> Yeah. >> Well, you know, the way we've looked at it is really, where's the need for us to move fast? Because when you look at digital transformation, it's really about making sure that yes, we're customer centric, we have high quality, but also that we can move quickly with the new expected speeds of business. And so we've looked at it in the respect that a lot of the customer facing type of environment, so dell.com, or our b2b site for customers, or anything that's service facing, those are the ones that we want to make sure we focus on iterating quickly versus, you know, the order management system per se. So the order management system, you know, it's, it's an area that we're working on from a transformation standpoint, but it's not as critical to be able to move as quick there to keep up with customer features that they're expecting in this digital age. And so we we look at it from a portfolio standpoint, and again, from an outcome perspective, and where do we want to have an impact with the customers or the employees will feel most immediately? And so that's how we prioritize things in the question. >> Another question, John, I like to ask guys like you, you mentioned drinking your own champagne before, but, well, a lot of times, you know, the product guys are coming to you with, you know, things that are in beta perhaps, champagnes not quite ready yet. (laughing) >> That's want to be champagne, you know. >> So you, I'm sure, have a lot of people trying to hey, try this out, you guys are busy. You're trying to, you know, drive, you know, company value. What role do you play in that regard? In terms of beta testing? You know, do people love you, do they hate you? You like, you tell on them? How does that all work? >> We should be our first and best customer, and actually our hardest one. So, you know, we've actually taken some of the container technology and run it through its paces. And early revs of that just wasn't ready for us. But we did put it into a non production environment and started working on okay, how can we utilize this, for maybe non production workloads, some of the DevOps stuff, we're just needing, say, runners in a container to move code from point A to point B, so we can start flexing it, and exercising it and give feedback where, you know what, it's not going to really handle some of our production workloads. But here's what you need to do. So we want to be the first and hardest customer. >> Yeah, I was going to say it's not always a negative in that, yes, we might encounter issues. So we've we've adopted PCF, the Pivotal Cloud Foundry a lot over the last year and applications. And yes, we discovered things that either it couldn't do, or other issues with, and the fact that we have that close relationship with the product team, we can actually ask for new features that they will actually then go ahead and develop for us in order to support our business. >> I presume there's such a large portfolio, you have to be somewhat selective, right? You can't just take every new product, okay. And so how do you measure the value? What are the key metrics that you're trying to lever? >> Yeah, so when we went and did this, we built a business case, right? Because it's a sizable investment. And we look at adoption of behaviors. So are you adopting the methodology, the Agile pivotal methodology? Are you adopting test driven development, then how does that impact our key performance indicators? Are we reducing user incidents and production incidents? Are we getting stories from the business into production faster? Or is the velocity picking up? And then all of those outcomes lead to the business outcomes. Are we reducing our total spend? Are we becoming more technology focused, more development focused, then say program management focused, so we have a nice cascade of adoption of behaviors key performance indicator changes, and then actually business metric outcomes. >> You guys make it sound so easy. >> Right, Greg and Garry, thanks for spending the time. I know you guys have a hard stop. But I want to get you know, one last, a couple quick questions in. One of the things we're hearing is integration, that part of the whole Dell transformation, a lot of glue layer in the past, lot of SI like work being done in IT. How is that going for you guys? How is the heavy lifting of rolling out consistent infrastructure been? And what kind of experiences is that throwing off for you guys, for the end users? >> So I mean, I'd say, although I've only been at the company for the last couple years, you know, I'm a Dell Technologies employee, not necessarily from, from either business before, but from what I've observed, and from what I've seen so far, integration is actually going very well from a systems perspective for both the companies coming together at scale. We have a North Star. So we have a strategy to make sure that where we have multiple systems we want to end up with, with a single system. We're working towards that over the years. And likewise with the infrastructure. We have data centers that we're using, you know, now across different locations, from both the entities as they came together, that we're continuing to optimize and modernize using the latest Dell technology. So, from my perspective, as someone that came into the company a couple years ago, it's very impressive at how well-- >> That, that's where the efficiencies are going to be right there too, right? >> Yes, it's amazing the same of the same, the sales tools as we're integrating those, and making sure that we have tools where the salespeople can sell the whole portfolio across Dell Technologies is another great thing. >> IT guy told me one time, he says "we're in business when we're out of business". >> Correct. Meaning, you've got that heavy lifting out of the way and shifting to the higher value, you know, capabilities with AI, machine learning, do much more higher crafted things. You guys see it the same way. Not that you're out of business, but you know what I'm saying, when you're invisible, it's good, right? >> Our job is to enable the business ultimately, and if no one knows we're there, that's when it's actually working the best. >> Alright guys, thanks so much real quick, go down the line. What is the, take your IT hats off, take your CIO hats off, put your tech hat on, industry participant observer. What is the most important stories being told here at Dell technology? What's the big takeaway? What's the most important stories? >> Yeah, for me, I also own our AI capabilities and Dell digital. So for us, it's just that, that huge amount of data that's being created on a daily basis, and using technology to do something with it. And I think, you know, you have to be ready and prepared for that. So for me, that's one of the biggest takeaways. >> Garry. >> I would simply say that, you know, the dream, I'll be able to run workloads in, whether it's your own infrastructure, or multiple Clouds that are out there and manage it in a single place. That's one of my big takeaways now that we've, we've released that with the, the Dell Cloud. >> Operational seamlessness and then using data to have specialism in apps in every industry that's unique. Tailor is horizontally scalable, but vertically specialized, very, it's like a whole new world. >> Yeah, very exciting. >> Guys, Congratulations, exciting news. We've been talking about this for three years on theCUBE. A more seems like more. You can see some visibility out there, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Cube coverage here with Dave Vallante, I'm John Furrier. Stay with more day three coverage, two sets here in Las Vegas at Dell technology. We'll be right back.

(energetic music) >> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the ESPN of tech. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are here live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World, the 10th anniversary of theCUBE being here at this conference. We have two guests for this segment. We have Jeff Woolsey, the Principal Program Manager Windows Server/Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft. Welcome, Jeff. >> Thank you very much. >> And Bob Ward, the principal architect at Microsoft. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> It's a pleasure. Honor to be here on the 10th anniversary, by the way. >> Oh is that right? >> Well, it's a big milestone. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> I've never been to theCUBE. I didn't even know what it was. >> (laughs) >> Like what is this thing? >> So it is now been a couple of days since Tatiana Dellis stood up on that stage and talked about the partnership. Now that we're sort of a few days past that announcement, what are you hearing? What's the feedback you're getting from customers? Give us some flavor there. >> Well, I've been spending some time in the Microsoft booth and, in fact, I was just chatting with a bunch of the guys that have been talking with a lot of customers as well and we all came to the consensus that everyone's telling us the same thing. They're very excited to be able to use Azure, to be able to use VMware, to be able to use these in the Azure Cloud together. They feel like it's the best of both worlds. I already have my VMware, I'm using my Office 365, I'm interested in doing more and now they're both collocated and I can do everything I need together. >> Yeah it was pretty interesting for me 'cause VMware and Microsoft have had an interesting relationship. I mean, the number one application that always lived on a VM was Microsoft stuff. The operating system standpoint an everything, but especially in the end using computer space Microsoft and VM weren't necessarily on the same page to see both CEOs, also both CUBE alums, up there talking about that really had most of us sit up and take notice. Congratulations on the progress. >> For me, being in a SQL server space, it's a huge popular workload on VMware, as you know and virtualization so everybody's coming up to me saying when can I start running SQL server in this environment? So we're excited to kind of see the possibilities there. >> Customers, they live in a heterogeneous environment. Multicloud has only amplified that. It's like, I want to be able to choose my infrastructure, my Cloud, and my application of choice and know that my vendors are going to rally around me and make this easy to use. >> This is about meeting our customers where they are, giving them the ability to do everything they need to do, and make our customers just super productive. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, Jeff, there's some of the new specific give us the update as to the pieces of the puzzle and the various options that Microsoft has in this ecosystem. >> Well, a lot of these things are still coming to light and I would tell people definitely take a look at the blog. The blog really goes in in depth. But key part of this is, for customers that want to use their VMware, you get to provision your resources using, for example, the well known, well easy to use Azure Infrastructure and Azure Portal, but when it's time to actually do your VMs or configure your network, you get to use all of the same tools that you're using. So your vCenter, your vSphere, all of the things that a VMware administrator knows how to do, you continue to use those. So, it feels familiar. You don't feel like there's a massive change going on. And then when you want to hook this up to your Azure resources, we're making that super easy, as well, through integration in the portal. And you're going to see a lot more. I think really this is just the beginning of a long road map together. >> I want to ask you about SQL 19. I know that's your value, so-- >> That's what I do, I'm the SQL guy. >> Yeah, so tell us what's new. >> Well, you know, we launched SQL 19 last year at Ignite with our preview of SQL 19. And it'll be, by the way, it'll be generally available in the second half of this calendar year. We did something really radical with SQL 19. We did something called data virtualization polybase. Imagine as a SQL customer you connecting with SQL and then getting access to Oracle, MongoDB, Hadoop data sources, all sorts of different data in your environment, but you don't move the data. You just connect to SQL Server and get access to everything in your corporate environment now. We realize you're not just going to have SQL Server now in your environment. You're going to have everything. But we think SQL can become like your new data hub to put that together. And then we built something called big data clusters where we just deploy all that for you automatically. We even actually built a Hadoop cluster for you with SQL. It's kind of radical stuff for the normal database people, right? >> Bob, it's fascinating times. We know it used to be like you know I have one database and now when I talk to customers no, I have a dozen databases and my sources of data are everywhere and it's an opportunity of leveraging the data, but boy are there some challenges. How are customers getting their arms around this. >> I mean, it's really difficult. We have a lot of people that are SQL Server customers that realize they have those other data sources in their environment, but they have skills called TSQL, it's a programming language. And they don't want to lose it, they want to learn, like, 10 other languages, but they have to access that data source. Let me give you an example. You got Oracle in a Linux environment as your accounting system and you can't move it to SQL Server. No problem. Just use SQL with your TSQL language to query that data, get the results, and join it with your structured data in SQL Server itself. So that's a radical new thing for us to do and it's all coming in SQL 19. >> And what it helps-- what really helps break down is when you have all of these disparate sources and disparate databases, everything gets siloed. And one of the things I have to remind people is when I talk to people about their data center modernization and very often they'll talk about you know, I've had servers and data that's 20, 30, even, you know, decades old and they talk about it almost like it's like baggage it's luggage. I'm like, no, that's your company, that's your history. That data is all those customer interactions. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually take better advantage of it. With this new version of SQL, you can bring all of these together and then start to leverage things like ML and AI to actually better harvest and data mine that and rather than keeping those in disparate silos that you can't access. >> How ready would you say are your customers to take advantage of AI and ML and all the other-- >> It's interesting you say that because we actually launched the ability to run R and Python with SQL Server even two years ago. And so we've got a whole new class of customers, like data scientists now, that are working together with DBAs to start to put those workloads together with SQL Server so it's actually starting to come a really big deal for a lot of our community. >> Alright, so, Jeff, we had theCUBE at Microsoft Ignite last year, first time we'd done a Microsoft show. As you mentioned, our 10th year here, at what used to be EMC World. It was Interesting for me to dig in. There's so many different stack options, like we heard this week with Dell Technologies. Azure, I understood things a lot from the infrastructure side. I talked to a lot of your partners, talked to me about how many nodes and how many cores and all that stuff. But very clearly at the show, Azure Stack is an extension of Azure and therefore the applications that live on it, how I manage that, I should think Azure first, not infrastructure first. There's other solutions that extend the infrastructure side, things like WSSD I heard a lot about. But give us the update on Azure Stack, always interest in the Cloud, watching where that fits and some of the other adjacent pieces of the portfolio. >> So the Azure Stack is really becoming a rich portfolio now. So we launched with Azure Stack, which is, again, to give you that Cloud consistency. So you can literally write applications that you can run on premises, you can move to the Cloud. And you can do this without any code change. At the same time, a bunch of customers came to us and they said this is really awesome, but we have other environments where we just simply need to run traditional workloads. We want to run traditional VMs and containers and stuff like that. But we really want to make it easy to connect to the Cloud. And so what we have actually launched is Azure Stack HCI. It's been out about a month, month and a half. And, in fact, here at Dell EMC Dell Technology World here, we actually have Azure Stack HCI Solutions that are shipping, that are on the marketplace right now here are the show as well and I was just demoing one to someone who was blown away at just how easy it is with our admin center integration to actually manage the hyper converged cluster and very quickly and easily configure it to Azure so that I can replicate a virtual machine to Azure with one click. So I can back up to Azure in just a couple clicks. I can set up easy network connectivity in all of these things. And best yet, Dell just announced their integration for their servers into admin center here at Dell Technologies World. So there's a lot that we're doing together on premises as well. >> Okay, so if I understand right, is Dell is that one of their, what they call Ready Nodes, or something in the VxFlex family. >> Yes. >> That standpoint. The HCI market is something that when we wrote about it when it was first coming out, it made sense that, really, the operating system and hypervisor companies take a lead in that space. We saw VMware do it aggressively and Microsoft had a number of different offerings, but maybe explain why this offering today versus where we were five years ago with HCI. >> Well, one of the things that we've been seeing, so as people move to the Cloud and they start to modernize their applications and their portfolio, we see two things happen. Generally, there are some apps that people say hey, I'm obviously going to move that stuff to Azure. For example, Exchange. Office 365, Microsoft, you manage my mail for me. But then there are a bunch of apps that people say that are going to stay on Prem. So, for example, in the case of SQL, SQL is actually an example of one I see happening going in both places. Some people want to run SQL up in the Cloud, 'cause they want to take advantage of some of the services there. And then there are people who say I have SQL that is never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to the Cloud because of latency or for governance and compliance. So I want to run that on modern hardware that's super fast. So this new Dell Solutions that have Intel, Optane DC Persistent Memory have lots of cores. >> I'm excited about that stuff, man. >> Oh my gosh, yes. Optane Persistent Memory and lots of cores, lots of fast networking. So it's modern, but it's also secure. Because a lot of servers are still very old, five, seven, ten years old, those don't have things like TPM, Secure Boot, UEFI. And so you're running on a very insecure platform. So we want people to modernize on new hardware with a new OS and platform that's secure and take advantage of the latest and greatest and then make it easy to connect up to Azure for hybrid cloud. >> Persistent Memory's pretty exciting stuff. >> Yes. >> Actually, Dell EMC and Intel just published a paper using SQL Server to take advantage of that technology. SQL can be I/O bound application. You got to have data and storage, right? So now Dell EMC partnered together with SQL 19 to access Persistent Memory, bypass the I/O part of the kernel itself. And I think they achieved something like 170% faster performance versus even a fast NVNMe. It's a great example of just using a new technology, but putting the code in SQL to have that intelligence to figure out how fast can Persistent Memory be for your application. >> I want to ask about the cultural implications of the Dell Microsoft relationship partnership because, you know, these two companies are tech giants and really of the same generation. They're sort of the Gen Xers, in their 30s and 40s, they're not the startups, been around the block. So can you talk a little bit about what it's like to work so closely with Dell and sort of the similarities and maybe the differences. >> Sure. >> Well, first of all, we've been doing it for, like you said, we've been doing this for awhile. So it's not like we're strangers to this. And we've always had very close collaboration in a lot of different ways. Whether it was in the client, whether it's tablets, whether it's devices, whether it's servers, whether it's networking. Now, what we're doing is upping our cloud game. Essentially what we're doing is, we're saying there is an are here in Cloud where we can both work a lot closer together and take advantage of the work that we've done traditionally at the hardware level. Let's take that engineering investment and let's do that in the Cloud together to benefit our mutual customers. >> Well, SQL Server is just a primary application that people like to run on Dell servers. And I've been here for 26 years at Microsoft and I've seen a lot of folks run SQL Server on Dell, but lately I've been talking to Dell, it's not just about running SQL on hardware, it's about solutions. I was even having discussions yesterday about Dell about taking our ML and AI services with SQL and how could Dell even package ready solutions with their offerings using our software stack, but even addition, how would you bring machine learning and SQL and AI together with a whole Dell comp-- So it's not just about talking about the servers anymore as much, even though it's great, it's all about solutions and I'm starting to see that conversation happen a lot lately. >> And it's generally not a server conversation. That's one of the reasons why Azure Stack HCI is important. Because its customers-- customers don't come to me and say Jeff, I want to buy a server. No, I want to buy a solution. I want something that's pre configured, pre validated, pre certified. That's why when I talk about Azure Stack HCI, invariably, I'm going to get the question: Can I build my own? Yes, you can build your own. Do I recommend it? No, I would actually recommend you take a look at our Azure Stack HCI catalog. Like I said, we've got Dell EMC solutions here because not only is the hardware certified for Windows server, but then we go above and beyond, we actually run whole bunch of BurnInTests, a bunch of stress tests. We actually configure, tune, and tune these things for the best possible performance and security so it's ready to go. Dell EMC can ship it to you and you're up and running versus hey, I'm trying to configure make all this thing work and then test it for the next few months. No, you're able to consume Cloud very quickly, connect right up, and, boom, you got hybrid in the house. >> Exactly. >> Jeff and Bob, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Our pleasure. Thanks for having us. Enjoyed it, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more of theCUBEs live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, the land of Dell Technologies World 2019, I am Lisa Martin with John Furrier. we're here with about 15,000 of Dell Technologies customers not including, and partners, about 5,000 partners. We're welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Jason Mundy, Senior Director, Dell Technologies consulting, from Dell EMC. Jason, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to be back, thank you for having me. >> So, lots of news the last couple of days, here we are almost at the end of day two, but you know in Vegas, it's like a time warp, I feel like we just walked in this morning. So, everything talking about cloud, hybrid cloud, we have to have this hybrid cloud strategy. One of the things Jeff Clark talked about this morning and is the five imperatives, is that, not only do customers need to build powerful and modern infrastructures so they can harness the power of AI machine workloads for this tremendous and new amount of data that's being generated, but they've got to have hybrid cloud strategy for multi-cloud. But to customers, we talk to all the time, these terms multi-cloud is challenging to do. It's a fact of a by product of many things, right? M and A for example, different acquisitions. What are some of the consulting services and recommendations that you guys in consulting are offering to customers with, how do we manage successfully in this multi-cloud world? >> Yeah, certainly, so, the Dell Technologies cloud and the VMware cloud on Dell EMC was incredibly exciting news for us, you know, all the Dell Technologies, but also, hopefully our customers, I would think so, that's probably the biggest news that came out of here. And you know, the old adage, I hate to sound so cliche, but we talk about IT being about people, process, and technology, the technology is the easy part. It really is true, especially when it comes to services, and with Dell Technologies cloud, we just made that technology component so much easier for our customers to be able to consume that infrastructure and get up and running. But, the reality is, is to get to a true cloud operating model, there is a number of considerations, right? So first of all, we actually do need to have a strategy and a roadmap to be able to get there. And many customers already have that, many customers are you know, somewhat along the way, but many customers need our help, right? They need somebody to help guide them to that, and so we work with many customers to help them develop the actual strategy, we can build out a roadmap. And one of the most important things too, is building out a business case, right? Looking at what are the benefits to the business and the cost associated with it, because it is a significant investment and they're going to their executive teams, or the board of directors to look for that funding. So we help many customers do that, if they require it. Couple other factors too are, the applications and the workloads, 'cause of course, it really is all about your workloads and your applications. And then the actual operating model itself, where the people and the process are the hardest part, especially the people alright, because that involves change and we don't like change. And so, we do a lot of work to really help our customers, we'll meet them anywhere along the way in terms of where they are, along their strategy or where they might need help. >> What's the biggest percentage of customers mix of orientation or posture? Early adopters, you know, bleeding edge to, in the middle of their journey to just starting, how do you guys see the patterns shaping out, you know, one's that are, you know, doing R and D they're cloud native, they're transforming kind of bleeding edge and then you know, ones that are maybe run out of gas or maybe needs to change the tires a little bit or you know, someone leaves they need some help along the way, and then the early, people just starting to look at it, what percentage mix to you see? >> I think probably the majority of customers are smack dab in the middle. We deal mostly with you know, legacy types of customers. Not the digital natives, right? Who are starting from fresh and building cloud native applications. But legacy types of customers that are really trying to get there, and many of them have you know, certain parts of their IT operating in the cloud, they have multiple public clouds, they might have a private cloud, but very, actually, very few are probably in a true multi-cloud environment, because that involves you know, the inter connectivity, right, of all those different clouds, and then, as I said, the hard part is really building out that cloud operating model. And that requires a fundamental shift in how they organize, how they skill the different processes that they build. >> Jason, what does that mean to a customer when you say, cloud operating model? Do their eyes, you know, pop out of their head? Are they excited? What are they, how do they react to that? 'Cause they have all this existing IT, and maybe they have some shadow IT, they got some Amazon doing some stuff with analytics, who knows, but they kind of are here and they've got to get to there. When you say operating model, what does that mean? Common operating model? Coding? App development? What is that, how do you define the cloud operating model? >> Yeah so, it really involves everything. So customers will have their traditional IT organizations. Built around technology silos, they're really more focused on the technology and project basis, right? Executing IT projects behind the scenes to try to meet the needs of the business. A lot of our customers, most of them obviously are using VMware, so they're starting to get a flavor for what a cloud operating model is, but what is really means is, is to really shift the thinking of IT to be more of a product focused and service oriented organization, that is acting like a product management team where you are providing your product to the business which is IT as a service, and so you have to have different kinds of roles, right? It's less about the technology. That is still obviously important, but you need to have roles like relationship managers to work with the business. You need to have portfolio managers, you need to have folks who are managing capacity and developing those services. Very much like in a product organization that is creating a physical product and selling it to the market. >> So these roles, people, you talked about it, that why we talk about this all the time, people don't like change, change is hard, but it's essential, right? Cultural transformation is a driver of all the other transformations. So when your talking with customers, give us like these enterprise organizations that have been around for awhile like you mentioned and you've got all these different silos of data and people with different perspectives. Something like the news yesterday, Dell Technologies cloud, what has been the perception from some of those customers, in terms of, how is this really going to make things easy for us? I know there were some beta customers, what can you share with us about how maybe, Dell Technologies cloud or even the M word cloud on Dell EMC is going to help those fragmented organizations, even bring the cultures together to leverage that technology to drive that digital transformation? >> Yeah, certainly, so we've been working with customers for awhile, whether it's building out private clouds or building out hybrid clouds, you know, the technology part keeps getting easier, so I think they view this new development, this new platform as a way to really simplify the deployment implementation provisioning of the technology piece so they can focus on that harder part, and that's where they come to us and they'll look for help for, how do I need to design my organization? What types of new processes do I need to setup? And therefore, what kinds of roles and skills do I need to support that while I'm maintaining my legacy environment, my current environment, and I need to move my existing IT people over into that new model. So I think we can sort of eliminate some of the complexities with the technology significantly with this, and really focus on those harder elements. >> I've got to ask you a question, I was talking to Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on the other set, and one of the other things that Pat Gelsinger said that I thought was interesting was, when asked about his success at VMware, where those, these transition years was, he said, he turned headwinds into tailwinds. You know, flipped down the relationship with the cloud goes, to Amazon now they're in Azhur, Michael kind of talks about the same kind of thing, where you know, there's new thing coming to bare here at Dell Technology World this year. That's kind of simplifying whether it's partner execution or helping customers have that, I won't say single painted glass, but single cloud of glass if you will, with Dell cloud. This end to end operating model really is a strategic comparative and advantage for Dell. So, I got to ask you, what are you guys looking at, that when you look at the this show and say, okay, some things have been announced, how does that directly impact the consulting team, because I've can imagine that you're job is going to be accelerated with some of these new things. What are some of the highlights here at the show that you see as really going to pop for you and the consulting group? Because, you know, when you got data centers of service, that's in beta, but still, that's interesting, right? That's turnkey and you've got to VX rail and everything, I mean, seems to be like almost the bundling setup for you guys, what's your take on all this? >> Exactly, so I think, it makes things not only easier for our customers, it makes things easier for us in the sense that we can focus less on the technology integration piece and get to that harder part, the operating model. Helping the customers, you know, figure out what applications and workloads they need to move over and help them with that migration, and it's accelerating the need of customers to move to the cloud. A lot of the research that we saw presented this week demonstrated you know, the sense of urgency where customers, they want to move now, it's no longer, yeah we want to get there, we got to plan, we'll get there eventually. It's like, we need to do it now, how can you help us? So, we can then move to that harder part, so we will see increased demand, we will see increased need for our services and capabilities. >> You know, in the tech world, within Silicon Valley, you hear this term, the glue layer, which is tech terms for you've got to build software to kind of glue things together. This component goes with that components. Proxy servers, all kinds of weird stuff. And the integration message we are hearing here at Dell Technologies, is actually eliminating all this custom glue layer software, where you guys are now integrating it more fine tuned if you will, within the products. But yet they are still separate, you've got secure works, you can get RSA, you can get some things over here. You've got multiple puzzle pieces together there, with integration, how is that going to impact you guys? And of that integration strategy, which one do you think is going to be the most popular with customers? >> Well, there is certainly the need to integrate additional technologies in the customer's environment. They're going to have you know, CMDB's, you know, there's other technologies, you know, beyond Dell that we will help them integrate with if they need that. And then certainly, we'll work with our strategically aligned businesses with RSA's, secure works, parting with VMware to integrate those other technologies. So I think the again, it's about you know, it's sort of, it's like, it's the hierarchy of the level of value of work, the value we can provide back to the customer, so we sort of eliminate some of that you know, base line work, and we're focusing on that more value add. >> The VMware piece is nice to, you've got to like that VMware action there. >> Absolutely, so that's certainly a huge opportunity for us. >> So helping customers make these strategic decisions about their cloud, multi-cloud strategy, we think about the data that is, we hear lots of analogies, data is the new oil. Data is gold, Michael, I think yesterday said, data is inexhaustible, I always kind of think of it as a catalyst in a reaction that you can use multiple times at the same time, I mean it's one of those, it's capital for organizations. So when you're talking with customers that say, alright Jason, help us to understand, based on our types of data, where we should put it so we can get fast access to it, to glean those insights to be able to stay competitive. To identify a new revenue streams, new product streams. What are some of the consulting practices that you guys deliver to help them really look at the data as assets that really can drive business outcomes. >> Yeah, so we actually have some strong capabilities in the data analytics space. So, many of our customers, they understand this. They understand data capital. They understand that the value that they have, from their customer data to all of their product data, and they want to be able to unlock that. They want to be able to monetize it. So, we can help them understand, what data do you have? How do you make sense of it? How do you organize it? Let's build an analytics platform where you can start to look at use cases and build out a strategy to take advantage of those use cases and then start to capitalize on it, right? So we can help them with some of the data engineering. We can help them with some of the data science. We can help them build and implement the actual analytics platforms to take advantage of it. Of course, all built on our hybrid multi-cloud platforms. >> So you are a marketing guy, you must have some really killer customer examples that articulate that value beautifully. Share some of those with us. >> Well specific names, I'll put aside, but we've helped some customers with incredible fraud detection, right? We had one customer that was actually a power company and they had a number of people stealing power off the grid, but they couldn't really pinpoint it. It was a incredibly manual process, we actually helped them build the analytics platform, where they could look at and pinpoint where power was being stolen off the grid. And then they were able to predict where that was going to start happening, and they were able to crack down on it. And significantly reduce the incidents of that happening, and stop it. The savings were tremendous back to the business. >> What's your impression of the show this year? Thoughts on reaction to the news, the announcements. What's the most important story being told here? >> I think, you know, the evolution of the product lines you know, which we start today, some of the new product announcements is exciting, but I think we've really done a great job of connecting that back to the integration of all the technology across Dell Technologies, right? With the unified workspace announcement yesterday, and the Dell Technologies cloud, I think that is really, finally demonstrating, not finally, but really demonstrating in a concrete way, bringing to bare all the power of Dell Technologies, and when we start to put it together, you know, the incredible solutions that we were providing our customers. So we've gotten a lot of, we've seen a lot of buzz, with our customers in the services booth. We've had customers come over and ask us, you know, how do we take advantage of the cloud? Or can I understand, you know, even more about unified workspace and how it can help us? >> It could be a boom for you business? Some more build outs? >> Absolutely. >> More and more work to do. >> Absolutely, it's really going to, it's accelerating customer's demand for those solutions and of course, they're always going to need some level of services to go with that. >> We've heard that spirit of collaboration and integration throughout the last couple of days. Jason we thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE again. Talking about what you guys are doing in consulting and helping customers to really make the right strategic decisions to move their business forward, thank you so much for joining John and me. >> Thank you so much for having me, really enjoyed it. >> Our pleasure, for John Furrier, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live, wrapping up close our second day of two sets of CUBE coverage. As John says, it's a CUBE cannon of content, coming at you. From Las Vegas, we thank you for watching. (outro music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering DELL Technologies World 2019. Brought you by DELL Technologies, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Furrier, day two of theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019. We have been talking with lots of great folks the last couple of days, and we are pleased to welcome to theCUBE Erin Banks, Director of Product Marketing for DELL EMC. Erin it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here, thank you so much. >> So this is the second branded DELL Technologies World. The first one since DELL became a publicly traded company once again. But you have a storied past of all this experience with a lot of these brands. Give us a little bit of your background as you've made your way through all these companies, and left your mark. >> Yeah, I feel like I've hit just about every corporate conference that we have under DELL Technologies, 'cause I came in originally through RSA around 2006, and then that acquisition happened, and then I transitioned over to EMC. So then we started the whole EMC World before, RSA Conference, EMC World. Always continuing to support security. Always continuing to do that. Went to VMware, they're doing the support security. We had a Vspecials program, so we wanted to sell EMC products for VMware products. So we continue to do that. So I think there's VMware and then I came back, I left for a little bit and then I came back. So I always joke that I have four companies I think left, and I would've had like, I think I get an award for having worked at every seven of the companies. (Lisa laughs) >> At least a mug, right? >> Yeah, I should get something I think. >> You should. >> Yeah, I think so. A jacket. >> Alright, so what's your current role now? So you're working in what group? Where are you now? >> Yeah, so right now I'm focused on structure, storage, divisions. So that's going to be Isilon, ECS, ClarityNow and the project Nautilus, and we're focused from a marketing perspective. I'm the Director of Product Marketing for that group. >> Yeah, storage didn't get a lot of keynote coverage. Normally they do get a lot with the EMC, 'cause obviously there's a lot of things going on around Dell Technology World, but Michael Dell said, storage isn't stopping, 'cause you have more data coming in. So unstructured is a big part of it. >> It's huge. >> Whether it's social data, gestured, any kind of Data Exaust, IoT, data is data, right? And the unstructured is the large growing percentage of the overall data population. >> Yeah, I think somebody gave me a statistic that 80% of the data that's generated is unstructured data, right? And people need to keep it and they need to, in some situations like Thomas Driving Systems, they need to keep it for a very very long time. So, there's always that debate of all these years that I've been at these conferences, about how long you keep the data, and obviously archiving them and where are you moving them, giving the customers the options. We're still obviously talking about that, which is great, but now we just have more and more data. Now it's really, from an Isilon perspective, we're focused on the management, and also the real estate, right? Because there isn't just every amount of space that every data center can have. Customers are running out of data center space, and they're running out of people, right? And they're like, listen, I can't hire anymore people, I want to focus on the business, and that's what we support from an Isilon perspective, is focusing on the business. I mean we obviously focus from all of UDS, but our announcements today were a focus on Isilon. >> So large growth, okay, but with the habit of, okay, just store it, we'll get to it later, it's been a nice luxury with unstructured, because some of the technology allows you to store it. Some call it a data lake or data swamp, depending on how you look at it. Now that the focus is getting more out of the data, while still storing it, right? Just throw it into the pile or into the corpus or into the data lake or whatever storage it is. Getting the mechanism to get the data out, and making it relevant and valuable is a focus. What's going on there? What are some key trends that are happening that you guys are riding? >> Yeah, well we're talking a lot, we have a campaign around data capital, right? And obviously as we all know, data has a lot of value within organizations. I'd like to tell customers that data has more value than we do as the employees. Companies will get bought and they'll fire the people, because they just want the data. And we can't ignore that fact, right? What does it say about the businesses customers? What does it say about their likes or dislikes? What does it say about where the company needs to go? The only way you know, to be successful, I think, in the next three to five years is to understand your customers and what they need, right? We had a bank the other day that was like, well all of our customers are 50 years old, so we're not going to do applications, and we don't really care about our data, and you're like, but you have people that are coming up behind that are using applications, right? That want more of a service. It's no longer, I say to banks, you don't need to buy another bank, right? You need to provide a service to me. How do you get that value out of that data to understand who I am as a customer or what I like, where I travel, what do I do in my day to day life, and give me that service, so I continue to be a customer for you. That's essential. >> It is essential. We talk about customer experience a lot. It's absolutely essential, because whether we're consumers of banking services or retail or whatever it is, we have so much choice. >> Correct. >> And especially with social media, I talk about unstructured data, we have a voice and the opportunity to get that out there, and go in turn. So really evaluating that data and understanding, and making decisions on that data to deliver a personalized experience is table stakes. >> Yes, I mean, we talk about this all the time, about the markets that are not doing it. Like retail, right? They always talk about, everyone wants to go to Amazon and buy their clothes or now there's boxes that are coming to your door with all the clothes in it. So how does the real estate business stay essential to me as a buyer, we all need clothes, but what gets me back into the store, right? And we talk about the sensors, right? We talk about the data that is generated of just me walking around the stores. How long do I spend in front of an item, right? Can I have a coupon that's popped up on my phone, right? How do I get more from an experience. And I think these are the struggles that organizations are having. We were talking to a customer that's managing a sports arena and the biggest thing is, how do you get them back into the arena? How do you change their experience, because they're a Canadian company, they don't want to be standing outside in the cold, 'cause it's hockey season, everyone loves it. How do you get them in earlier, because now there's more security, right? We have this, I always call it the physics effect, right? You have one change, it ripples into everything else. So it's cold, the security lines are long, I'd rather be at home watching this. How do I get that experience? And these are the partnerships that are being created with companies like athletic companies, and sports arenas and sports teams and things like that to really change an experience that we have, and the only way you could do that is with data, right? The enormous amount of data that we have. We couldn't do that if we didn't have the data. >> So what do they just come up with a better solution, not standing outside and getting in quickly? >> Yes, so, yeah we talked about this, right? We did a great podcast about this, because they're now doing these programs where they'll bring you in earlier, right? So maybe they'll have dinner and of couple beers, right? And you can come in and kind of enjoy the arena when no game is going on, but you get in earlier out of the cold. They talked about buying retail from your seats, right? And they test it out. That wasn't successful. So it's a really good kind of option along those lines. People like to walk around and look, and they touch and feel the items, and look at all of their options. So these are great things that they were able to test. The digital signage has been a huge impact from an analytics perspective. Really being able to change it. The amount of growth that organizations have achieved from just digital signage has been enormous. So, they're really transforming their businesses in different aspects, and it's all really driven from the data. >> So what's going on with the products that you guys are doing? What's the value proposition for Isilon? Where's the focus for you now? >> Yeah, so, we're always continuing to just answer the questions that our customers are having. Which always comes down to the amount of data that we have, how to continue to manage that, and then how to manage it in this data center. So we had a release today, which were focused both from a software aspect as well as a hardware aspect and now our software of OneFS, so it's still the single file system, is not being able to scale out to 252 nodes. It was 144 before. Now it's 58 petabytes. And what I love most about that is, how you manage 58 petabytes is exactly how you manage a terabyte. I mean that's important to a customer, where they're saying, I could easily add storage within a minute, I don't have to worry about it, and I have the same amount of people managing the system. I just have to focus on the workloads, and I just have to focus on the applications. And then our customers are saying, again, we're running out of the real estate, how can you give us a more dense box, right? We need the performance of a hybrid, but we need the capacity of an archive systems, again, we need to be able to do more with less almost. So we introduced the H5600 this week or today. And really just being able to give our customers what they need to really continue to drive their business forward. I always say, it's always about the workloads, and the applications. I'm inspired by what our customers are doing. They're just doing these innovative tools, and work and everything, because no longer they're being constrained from an IT perspective, right? The technology is now doing the heavy lifting, and now we're able to really utilize the data for what it's worth and getting the most out of it. Which I just love that, right? I think that's important to businesses. >> Put today's announcements in the perspective of the Workforce. We've talked a lot about Workforce the last couple of days, about really enabling businesses to do so much with this distributed Workforces, but in terms of Workforce optimization, the density that you just talked about, what are some of the immediate impacts that customers are going to realize that's going to, besides productivity improvements? >> Yeah, again, I've had direct conversations with customers, it was like an autonomous driving system, and they were saying, listen, again, I don't have a head count, nobody wants to give me more head count. I can't keep doing this. What the business wants to do is, they want to get to market fast. Because if we can get to the market fast, then we can drive that business faster, and that's what we need. How can you help me? And that's what I love about, not only the unstructured data conversation, but the Isilon conversations that we're having is like, how can you help my business? Well okay, we understand that there's struggles. Again, no data center, don't have the head count, they'll give us developers, right? They want to drive in these other markets, right? And then were saying, great, we'll continue to drive this one file system capability, but give you this enormous growth, and really continue to drive that, right? >> If they get revenue, they can get head count. So this I back to >> Correct. >> the cloud model of, let's get some value out there quickly, time to value. >> Yeah, and then the question is, where is the optimal head count that you need? Is it to do with somebody just continuing to rack and stack. Or is it someone that's really going to get the value out of that data, continue to push that, to test the systems. Again, they want to get to the market first. How can we enable that? How can we really help them to do that? That's our goal. >> So talk about customers and their receptiveness for AI. We hear a lot about it all the time, but really looking at, we talked about the volume of data, we could talk about that for days and days, but really enabling customers to harness the power of AI machine learning to extract the insights. Where are those conversations going with customers as it relates to Isilon and some of the things today, but just in general, where's there appetite with respect to being ready to harness the power of AI? >> We ask this question a lot about where are we in the AI landscape, right? And some customers are really focused on that, but they have a completely different model than some of the companies that have been our traditional companies that we've been kind of like focused on. So it's kind of a between the both, right? I think a lot of it, in my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the culture, right? It's a completely different way of thinking about a business, and it's a completely different way of focusing on, not only your data, but like the data management. You know with the joke about a data swamp, cleaning the data, having a business focus that's driven specifically from data is a culture change. And not a lot of people are willing to have that culture change. New companies can do that, 'cause that's how they developed the company, right? But when you see some of the companies that we've all been a part of for all of these years, that's not that easy. So, in the little baby steps, which is why I love telling those customer stories, so I'll be like, listen, this is possible, this is not just fake, we're not just fairies floating around us, right? This is truth capablities-- >> It's real transformation, that's the theme. The developers are a key part of this. This is something that we've seen. Developers using data as part of their application. Making that addressable, making it fast access is one, that's awesome. The other interesting dynamic that I want to get your thoughts on, because you have a security background is securing data and also governance or also driving use cases in applications that might not have been foreseen. We're one year into GDPR, and I don't think really anything's changed, but, I don't want to go on that rant, but now you have other regulatory things that's saying, hey, you know what, we might have to deal with the data differently. So how is Isilon enabling that? Is it just another use case? >> Yeah, I mean it is absolutely just in another use case that we're just going to have to focus on from the aspect of what's the implication. What are their customers looking at? When we talk specifically about GDPR, that's fairly new, right? We're just trying to figure this out, and trying to look at those different kind of aspects. A lot of that was also the right to know, and right to remove, and saying, what do you know about me and how do you kind of manage that? So a lot of that is really focused on a data management aspect and it's not just from Isilon, but it's, how do you manage it, right? So the ClarityNow capabilities that we have, right? This product that we were able to acquire, that really will give you that great insight into your data, so you can make those decisions, it says, alright, well this is all of our information on Erin Banks, this is her likes, dislikes, whatever that information has, right? We're able to really manage that a lot better, and the data management is the really next important step of the data collection, the data processing. It's understanding what you have, because it all comes in, but it doesn't add value until you really know what you have and what you don't have. Because even from an analytics perspective, you might have to supplement that data from some other resource. Maybe you need to change the application, and get additional data. This is all really driven across that same kind of aspect. This is the same conversation, and we'll just continue to fuel that and have that, and enable them to do that. That's why I say, we want to inspire our customers to be like, wow, I didn't realize that I could do that with tech, right? And then start enabling them to be innovative, and that's what we're still continuing to do. >> What's one of your favorite stories of, we had talked about your tenure within the Dell Technologies family when we first started, but looking at today in 2019, every company is a tech company or has to be. If you look back over the last 10, 12 years, what's some of your favorite stories of how this company Dell Technologies has enabled, and it's companies, a surprising customer to become a tech company? >> Yeah, and I think the number one thing that I personally love, right? That keeps me here. That brought me back, right? Not only was it just 2006 and staying, but said, I want to go back to that, is because what I really feel is, our experience that we have across every market, right? The geographies, the struggles that customers are having, and what we're able to learn from them, and really help our customers excel. It's not just us selling products, right? It's not just selling services, it's not just selling software, right? It's us trying to get out there and saying, this is how other customers are using it, this is how they've been successful, this is where they've downfall, lets help you, right? As we're trying to bring companies further along on their business journey, and we're saying, we've worked with customers to do this, we'll continue to work with you to do that, and we can do it across all seven of these companies end-to-end. It's a very impactful capabilities across applications, security, which is incredibly important, right? IT and Workforce and all these individual transformations, and that's what I think is a passion, and the best part of what we do. >> Well Erin, thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE this afternoon, and walking us through some of these key things, helping customers of any industry really excel, and unlock the capital in their data. We appreciate your time. >> I appreciate yours, thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, here at the Sands Convention Center at Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost here is David Vellante. Two sets, five hosts, three days, wall to wall coverage. All of the action for Dell Technologies, all the component pieces. Happy to welcome back to the program Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who's the president of the server and infrastructure services at Dell EMC. Ashley, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Good to see you. >> Alright, so we actually had Sam Grocott on and we were talking about all the product lines. And he said he's the father of power going across the line. He did admit that the power line goes back to PowerEdge, which, of course, is your baby. >> That's right. >> Give us the update, lots of discussion at the keynote. Always change in your world, so give us the latest and greatest. >> Sure, we're about 25 years old now. So PowerEdge has lived on for quite a while. We've got to be over 30 million servers out there by now. So we had a really good Dell Technology World so far. More to come, but some of the lists, real quick, of announcements that we've had and we can talk a little bit more about them. In servers, we actually went a little bit early from Dell Technology World and lined up with Intel to launch Cascade Lake, bringing Optane into server class memory. I think the industry's been waiting for it. We're ready to deliver now. And so that was earlier this month. We've put quite a bit of advancements and enhancements in our open manage enterprise and in securing the platforms. We also this week talked about a PowerEdge that's not called a PowerEdge. So we call it the DSS 8440, and really a capstone product to our AI ML portfolio. So today we already support one, two, three, four accelerators per server. Now we can go up to 10. We can support the latest Nvidia B100 tensor core GPUs, and it's really a unique system within the industry. That's going to help customers scale their training loads further and further, faster performance, more mips, very, very intense box, but one that's going to be, I think, well received within the marketplace. >> Did you say bits? >> I said Mips. >> I like that term,. >> So actually, we've got a lot of pieces that your solutions fit, but you mentioned one item, that I wonder if you could just explain to our audience the importance of SEM, is something that how does that impact solutions, the applications. It's something that a lot of times get lost in the whole general storage discussion. So maybe explain the importance of SEM in the marketplace today. >> Sure. So it's a game changer, it really will be, but it'll have to go, in our mind, through the technology adoption curve that a game changer deserves. So it's been a long time coming. We've been working on it, the industry's been working on it. Intel has been working on it for more than a decade. And if you think through it, we see customers using it in two different ways. In memory mode, expanding the capacity within nodes to levels that you can't reach with DRAM today at almost DRAM-like levels and performance, is something that a lot of customers already have models for. They can think through TCO, they can think through their performance characteristics, and it really becomes something they can consider to enhance their portfolio today, at mode, a little bit different. As we think through software from the OS level: kernel, hypervisor, application, cache, log, database, all these levels, we're going to have software that has to catch up and allow this to be the game changer it is. But already, I'll tell you the demand for systems that we're providing customers to begin their evaluations, they proof of concepts, their software development has actually doubled what we thought it would be, and we were pretty ambitious. So I think the demand is there, and we're going to see that adoption curve when the software catches up. >> And any specific use cases you're seeing early on? >> Well like I said, memory mode, I think people can get their heads around already, is are they performance, or are they capacity bound by DRAM. Start to do the economics, does it make sense. At mode, caching for sure, putting log, changing kind of the structure of how you do logs, and database is really going to be the killer app when we get there. Across the different vendors already we've seen pretty significant increases in performance, and we're early still. But I think there's a few things that our customers want to get through, and we're trying to help them with. If you have persistence in the system, you have a new level of something you have to secure, and so we're spending a lot of time with our customers helping them develop technology methodologies to say wait a minute, information, I turned the machine off and there's still information besides the hard drive or the SSD. Also can I trust the data even though it's persistent? Or do I have to have storage services at that level that help me with things like replication or snapshot or archive. So we've got a long way to go, but we're really, we believe this is a game changer, and we're developing towards that. >> And cost-wise you're sayin' slightly more expensive than DRAM. >> Probably a little bit more than slightly. >> Yeah, okay, more expensive than DRAM, and relative to flash, obviously more expensive than flash, but much higher performance, right? >> Much higher performance, and so it's just a modeling exercise, but it'll reach levels we haven't had before. And then from a software developer point of view as you go forward, you can really think about scale out systems differently. If your application was bound by capacity of DRAM or memory, this changes it quite a bit. >> So you're talking about new programming model, essentially right, that's why it's going to take some time, but you would expect maybe uptake in financial services early on. Is that fair, Or not necessarily? Healthcare? >> All solid verticals. I think it's going to be where enhancement or performance can, you know, if you pay three, four, five x the cost, but you get three, four, or five x the capability, or even less, you have to think about it, but there's some applications where latency, where performance of the database are so sensitive, and such the bottleneck today, that it's well worth it. >> When you look at the innovation pie that's going on in servers, how much is architecture, hardware architecture, versus sort of software and management? Can you sort of, I know it's a sort of general question, but give us a sense. >> Sure, I think it's interesting, is we are investing as we go forward, I think into a brand new era. So I mentioned earlier we made it to 25 years old, what's going to happen over the next 25 years. So I think most of the architectures that we develop today are highly, highly optimized for bringing data into a processor, calculating, storing. And we have very balanced, efficient, high-performance systems for that today. What are we doing going forward? Well, we're not necessarily bringing the data, describing the rules, called software, and then getting the answers anymore, right? Now what we want to do in a lot of situations, we want to bring the data, which is the most valuable asset, we actually kind of know the answers already. We want it to calculate rules for us, and that's the output. That's a different architecture. That's a different way of computing, and that's why you're seeing these heterogeneous architectures starting to form, accelerators, a lot of technology going, and innovation, and venture capital, and talent going towards really building that new model going forward for the next two decades. >> Okay, actually we've had a lot about cloud this week. When I looked at many of the solutions underneath, I kept hearing the same answer. VxRail, VxRail, I've talked to some of the team, there is more than just VxRail and some of these solutions. Sammon looked at some of the other pieces, but VxRail has been a rocket ship for the last couple of years, and of course, you know, the servers underneath driving a lot of that. Can you talk about how that plays into your portfolio and some of the architectural discussion we were seeing. How does that bleed into the HCI and hyper cloud discussions? >> Sure, so if you think of the journey we're on, 10 years ago perhaps, maybe even more recently than that, customers really were making two different choices. As a matter of fact, you guys know as well. I was organized into two different organizations. One to deal with hyper-scale, and one to deal with enterprise capability, and customers can see that. They want to be able to operate in both domains, but even we were organized differently. And if you go maybe five years ago when people started talking about software defined and HCI we finally had a mechanism to say you can build scale out of architectures. We can automate this capability for you. You don't have to actually spend all your opexs, you administration, your talent, and your time, just keeping the infrastructure up and running. And so people broke out of IT by project by Gantt chart, and into flexible architectures, right. Next thing they said is but we still aren't really operating. We're operating in silos of very flexible architecture here in my data center, very flexible architecture in the colo, very flexible architecture in software defined or SAS or cloud. How do I bring it together? So we believe there's a consistency of platform and infrastructure that allows us to move to a consistency of operations. VxRail offers that today, because we uniquely can integrate with VMWare and V Cloud Foundation, to build where now we can take care of the automation, the lifecycle management of the hardware. VMWare together integrated now can take care of the lifecycle of the software stack, all the way up to the IAS layer or beyond, and now we have the ability to say you can look upwards, you can develop, you can build on that, and even more so, if you want to then stitch that together, and have that be the control plane, you can now build that out to other native public clouds, now you have the hybrid cloud. We can actually get there, we can actually organize around it, build it. I mean it's a breakthrough for our customers. And then add on that, some customers have come back to us and said, you have the expertise to do all this for us, can I just consume it? I don't actually need to control it. And in that case we can offer it as a service, and we previewed that as Project Dimension last year, and now the teams are really happy to bring it to fruition all the way to beta with customers today, and really give customers kind of that choice. >> So what's behind that? I mean you've got a team of people sort of monitoring everything, obviously a lot of automation. What's the customer conversation like? I mean it's the early days, but what do they want to know about, do they always just want to say hey you take care of it? Or do they want to peel the layers and say okay, I want to peek behind the curtain before I sign up for this. >> Yeah, so on the platform side, customers want to know how does the integration work. Really where do I have to spend time, energy? Can I really live at this IAS layer, can I live at the PAS layer with pivotal, can I live above that? How do my workflows get managed? And when you say, we're kind of in the environment and the methodologies you already use today with V Center and V Motion and PKS. Then I think you see a light bulb go off of okay, I can really lead the administration to the machines, and the automation. Then the customer who's interested in moving everything maybe to a consumption model, then they have the next question which is can I have consistency not only of infrastructure operation, but of consumption? And that's where as a service offering, really starts to highlight the fact that we can meet you on your journey wherever you are. Some customers aren't ready for that, some are just right there saying that's really the model I want to move to for digital transformation. >> Okay, you got roughly a 20 billion dollar business growing at almost 20 percent a year, so pretty good year last year. Give us the update on your business, why are you being so successful, and I got a follow up question on component, so the supply with. >> Okay sure. So we did have a pretty good year last year. We don't break out servers, but servers are networking as you said, but about 20 billion dollars growing at 28 percent. Why? Well I think we have one of the most capable portfolios of infrastructure. We're uniquely trying to make sure that we are operating within the Dell Technologies portfolio. And so most customers, Dave, have not come to us and said you know what I'd like to do, I'd like to have like 10 more of you guys come meet with me and talk to me about a portion of my business. They said why can't you come and provide all of my needs? But I don't want to compromise. I don't want to have one best of class, and then have to compromise across my other needs. So really building kind of number one all in one place, is that promise that you don't have to compromise. Really it's changed the dynamic with a lot of customers being able to say this is my essential IT infrastructure provider. They have what I need. So that's helped quite a bit. The nature of our business I think is that we are operating from the smallest customer, you need one, all the way up to customers who need a million servers, and we're able to operate in a consistent PowerEdge tenent across all of that space. Then the, I think, and you didn't mention it, but in hyper converged, we're seeing growth rates that kind of put the server business to shame, with we were 65 percent in Q4 in an industry that's growing 40 percent that's on fire. It's a new business model, it's still emerging, but customers, the demand for hyper converged continues to go forward, because that operating model, simplicity, elastic, scale out, automated, is extremely powerful. >> And component supply right now, component pricing, is a tail wind for you. For years it's been a head wind. Is that right, it's flipped? Or not so much >> Certainly, yeah certainly the last two years has been sort of an unprecedented rise in some of our commodities in terms of cost. We're seeing that be deflationary or stable at this point, so it's really changed a little bit of the dynamic of how customers were operating within their own budgets. So now I think we're more in what we're used to in the beginning 23 years as we go forward. >> So actually, last thing, you talked about you used to have kind of a hyper-scale business. Just give us the update. I saw a quote out there that Dell puts more gear out there in hyper-scale environments, than anyone. Can you just give us a little context as to what that means? >> Sure, you know as we go forward, I think we've seen others say that they don't operate in certain businesses, they don't want to be in tier one, and you won't hear that from us. I think where we can add value, and we have incredible assets in terms of engineering, modular data center capability, capability at the edge, real assets like software supply chain delivery, across the board. We want to be able to help customers build their infrastructures. And in the service provider community, I think we've already built up relationships, credibility, and technology, to help them compete. Our standard is if you do business with us, we want you to win in your segment. We want you to transform faster than your competition, and we think we can do that for people, and I think we continue to see quite a bit of success in the service provider's space. >> Well really appreciate the updates, and congratulations on all of the progress you've made Ashley. >> Thank you, great job thanks for having me guys. >> Alright, for Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman, gettin' towards the end of day two, three days wall to wall coverage. Thank you as always for watching The Cube.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, we've got Pat Gelsinger back on theCUBE. He stopped by yesterday, did a flyby after his keynote to kick off our intro section. He's back for the sit-down. >> (laughs) Welcome back. >> I can't get enough of you, Pat. >> CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger. >> Yeah, I love to photobomb you guys, so it was great. >> Anytime. I know you're super busy, business is going great. And you know, what a three years its been. I remember the keynote you gave at VMworld a few years ago. This was really on a time where, I would call it the seminal moment for you because you saw a vision, and we've talked privately and on theCUBE about, and you gave this speech of this is going to be the preferred future, and it was very visionary-oriented, but it ended up happening. That became the beginning of a run for VMware. And since then, you've been kind of chipping away and filling in all the tech pieces, the business model, and deals, with Amazon and now Azure and others. How are you feeling about it? What's the highlights? What's your perspective of where we are now? What's the notable accomplishments? >> Well you know, it's been just great. And you think about the run that we've been on where we, five years ago, we described a hybrid future. And you know, most people said, what are you, stupid? And you know, student body right to the public cloud. And now everybody is starting to understand the difficulty of replatforming, right? And says wow, this is really hard. I can spend millions and millions of dollars, in fact, one customer's estimate was that they were going to spend almost $1 billion replatforming all their applications to the cloud. And when they got them cloud-native, what do they have? The same apps. So imagine going to your board and saying I'm going to spend $1 billion just so I can be on the cloud, but give you no new business value. You've got to be kidding! And that's why this hybrid future, and as I like to joke, Andy, five years ago, Andy Jassy said if you're running your own data center, you're stupid. And Pat said if you're using Amazon, you're stupid. And now we're doing bro hugs on stage with each other. (laughter) >> And by the way, hybrid, you picked that trend that was right. Multi-cloud, though, came out of more a reality, less of an operating vision, 'cause hybrid cloud, you know, you saw the dots, connected those dots, but I think multi-cloud was much more of just a reality. When people started to realize that as I started doing stuff on premises, wow, I got native workloads on the cloud, and there are benefits for being in the cloud first for certain workloads. But then the multi-cloud thing comes up. >> And I think everybody has started to realize, and I really, as I would say, I think every CIO needs a three-cloud strategy. Making their private data centers into a proper operating private cloud. And some of this week's announcements, I'm sure we'll get back to those a little bit, to me are just a huge dimension. You know, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, you know, a huge accelerant of making your private data center op like a private cloud, right, at scale. Second, you need a primary public cloud partner. And I think most people should pick a primary. Not one, a primary, and then a secondary cloud, right, you know, as their partners. And then you have your range of SAS offerings. And I think that needs to be the core, right, of every IT, CIO's strategy for the future. And our objective is to create an environment between what we're doing with VMware Cloud Foundation, and now VMware Cloud on Dimension. What we're doing with Amazon, our preferred partner for the public cloud offering. What we announced this week with Azure, right? Our 4000 other cloud partners, including, you know, very successful relationship with IBM. And saying, okay, that's your infrastructure. And the bulk of your workloads should run on a VMware environment that we can operate across that, with the same tools, the same interfaces, the same security, the same management tools, and then use the other cloud services as they bring you business value. You're a fan of Tensorflow? Go for it, baby. Right? You know, and use it in your app. You love function as a service with Lambda, go for it. But the bulk of your workload should lay in here and use these where they have business value. >> And to follow up on the three legs of the cloud stool, the CIO's legs, number three is for what? Is it for risk mitigation, exit strategies, or more specific best-of-breed, horses-for-courses type of workloads. >> Yes, yes, and yes. To some degree, really it's saying, nobody wants to say, I'm only in one. Right? Nobody wants to lock in for it. Also you know, clearly, hey, you know, these are technologies that break. You get more resilience that way, right? You want to be able to manage your cost environments. There's clearly this view of okay, you know, if I can do one, two, and three, I can do N. 'Cause most people are also going to end up picking, oh, I'm in Hong Kong. Okay, I need a Hong Kong cloud, because my data can only go there. You know, I'm in Malaysia, oh, they require all data to be there. 'Cause a practicality, if you're a big enterprise company, it's not just going to be three. You're going to need to be four, five, and six as well, for regional. And then you're going to acquire somebody, they're using a different partner. It really says, build an operational environment that works that way. Give myself business flexibility. I have application flexibility, and if I've done that, I really can move to the other environments that my business requires. >> I think one of the reasons why you guys have been so successful, if I go back five or six years, I remember you laying out the market, the market segmentation, you're obviously close to customers. You're a very clear thinker. You've obviously looked at the market for multi-cloud. How do you describe that, how do you look at the TAM, how big is it? >> Well you know, if you think about cloud today, right, we're closing in on $100 billion of the public cloud. You add SAS to it, you know, you got almost another $100 billion at that level. And you know, the overall data center market is probably on the order of, you know, $1 trillion-ish. >> Give or take. (laughs) >> Yeah, on that order. And then you know, you throw the operations costs inside of it, you're probably looking at something that's, you know, on the order of $2 trillion as well. So this is a big market, right? You know, part of the excitement that people are seeing in this cloud environment, is that they can just go faster. And as I described in the keynote today, we want to enable every one of our customers to stop looking down and look up, right? Spend less time looking down at the infrastructure. We're going to operationalize it, we're going to automate it for you, we're going to take care of it so that every one of your engineers can become software engineers building app and business value. >> I want to ask you on that point, because one of the things, I was talkin' last night, the analyst said at the briefing or the reception was, having a debate with one of the strategists in Dell, and I'm like, look it, outcomes are great at the top of the stack. Looking up, you want outcomes. But during the OSI stack days, no one cared about outcomes. It was either token ring or Ethernet. Speed won, so certain things have to be speed-driven, world-class, and keep getting better. And so that's what we're seeing as an infrastructure requirement. Horizontal scalability, operational scale. So that's a speeds and feeds game. So the outcome there is faster (laughs), and simpler. Up the stack, data becomes a big part of that. That, more, is where we see outcome. Do you see it that way, Pat? Because you know, again, infrastructure is often, that's how they said it on stage. We want to have whole new-paved, new infrastructure for this generation, essentially a refresh of infrastructure. Okay. Well, what does it look like? It's got to be fast, got to be flexible, software-defined. Your thoughts? >> So you know, clearly, I mean, what we're trying to do is we build this common infrastructure layer. And build an environment that allows you to be fast, but also allows you to be in control and cost-effective. Because if you would say, oh, I just want to be fast, ah, that doesn't work, right? We still have limited budgets, and you know, people, someday there's a CFO day of reckoning. But you also have to realize, part of the hybrid cloud laws that I described this morning, you know, one of those is the laws of physics, right? Hey, my factory automation for robotics needs to be 40 milliseconds, period. And if I round-trip to the cloud at 150 milliseconds, guess what? (laughs) >> Latency. >> Right. You know, my image recognition for being able to detect my autonomous vehicle is less than 50 milliseconds. I can't round-trip to the cloud. It has to be fast, right, but we also need to be able to push more of this data, more of the inference of my machine learning and AI closer to the edge. That's why, you know, you heard Michael talk about, and Jeff talk about this explosion of data. Most of that data will be at the edge. Why? Because every camera, you know, every sensor will be developing it, and I'm not going to round-trip it to the cloud because of economics. I can't afford to take all that data to the cloud. It's not just the latency. >> Latency matters. >> Yeah. And so for that, so I can't take it to the cloud, I got to be able to compute locally. I got to be able to apply the inference of my AI models locally, but you know, I also then need to scale aspects of cloud as well. My third law, of course, was regulation, where you know, guess what? I was just with a major customer in Latin America, and they said they are repatriating 100% of their data and applications out of the public cloud, 'cause the new president, right, is assisting on data only in his country for all of their nationalized resources and assets. >> So that's driving the change. This brings up the multi-cloud kind of thing earlier. You guys got to play in all the ponds out there, in the industry. But let's talk about on-stage here at Dell Technologies World. You were on-stage with Michael Dell and Satya Nadella, and I was lookin' up there. I'm like, man, the generational knowledge of the three people on-stage, the history. >> (laughs) I think that just means I'm getting old. (laughs) >> Well I mean, you've seen it all. I mean, from Intel, to EMC, to VMware. Dave and I, Dave's a historian of tech, as he'll self-claims, but I'm up there, I was pretty blown away. You guys are leading the industry. What kind of moment was that for you, because now you've got Microsoft doing a deal with VMware. Who would've thought that would happen? >> Well, maybe two different aspects to it. You know, one is, I've known Satya for over 25 years. You know, he was sort of going through the Microsoft ranks, Windows NT, SQL, et cetera. (laughter) You know, at the same time I was. So we got to know each other. Almost 25 years since our first interactions. When Michael Dell first came to Intel to meet Andy Grove to get microprocessors so he could start his business, I was there. So I mean, these relationships are decades old. So in that view, it's sort of like, hey Satya, how's the wife, you know. (laughter) Hey Michael, how's Susan doing? Really, it-- >> But you haven't even gone anywhere, you're still in the industry. (laughs) >> Yeah. But then to be able, the announcement was really pretty special in the sense that I call it 20 years in the making. You know, not a year or two, 20 years in the making, 'cause VMware and Microsoft has essentially been at odds with each other for two decades. You know, at that level. And to be able to be on-stage and saying, that's right, we're cooperating on cloud, we're cooperating on client, and we're cooperating on futures, okay, that's a pretty big statement as well. And I think customers respond very positively to that. And you know, I'm-- >> It's been a bold move, and you also made a bold move with the cloud, too, Pat. I got to say, that was another good call. Partnering with Andy Jassy. Again, once, both idiots, I guess, calling each other clever, you know. (laughs) Hey, public cloud, at odds, partner. Boom. >> And I really think this idea, moving headwinds to tailwinds. And you know, the Amazon partnership with Andy, and as we say, it's our preferred cloud partner, VMware Cloud, our native US hub, VMware-offered service. You know, super committed to it. We're closing in on 2000 customers on that now. >> Clarify the Amazon relation. I saw some press articles that kind of missed, skewed a little bit. They kind of made it sound like the Azure deal was similar to the Amazon deal. So just explain the difference between the VMware deal with AWS and Andy Jassy, that relationship, and the other cloud ones. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, thank you. And what we're doing with Amazon is VMware is offering a cloud service that I operate for customers, that runs on Amazon. And that is a VMware-delivered service. They're our preferred partner. We're not bashful about that, that if we have the choice, that's the one to go to. It's going to be best. But what we've done now with Azure is we've made the VMware Cloud Foundation, the same underlying components, available with CloudSimple and Virtustream, they're partners, to have a VMware Cloud Foundation offering delivered by Microsoft as a first-party service. So VMware Cloud, VMware is delivering it. In the Azure for VMware services, that's being delivered and supported by Microsoft. >> And that's the same deal you did with IBM. >> It's very, the same-- >> Google and other ones. >> Yeah, the same as we've done with our 4000 other cloud partners, right? And obviously, Virtustream and CloudSimple are part of that 4000, and they're making the VMware Cloud Foundation available to Azure customers now. >> And what's the benefits to VMware's customers for those deals? >> Well, imagine that you're somebody in, Walmart was quoted in the press release, as an example. Walmart's a big VMware customer. Walmart is also a big Azure customer. So their ability to say, oh, I can have a hybrid environment makes a lot of sense for that kind of customer. So we really do see it as saying, you know-- >> Customer-driven, basically. >> Absolutely. And people said, which are you going to sell to us? Well in most cases, customers have already decided who their major cloud partners our. We're saying that VMware offering, even though we're first and best with Amazon, we're saying as they make their cloud choices, we'll have a valid VMware Cloud Foundation offering available. >> And best, I want to understand best. Best is, in part, anyway, because of the engineering you guys have done. When we interviewed Andy Jassy in November at re:Invent, he said you can't have a lot of these types of partnerships. And it's very deep integration. Is that why it's best? And what makes it best? >> Yeah, I call it first and best for two reasons. One is because we are engineering, we are co-engineering, the bits first get done on VMware Cloud, and then we make 'em available to the other partners. That's where we're doing the core engineering, the innovation. Andy has hundreds of engineers working on this. I have hundreds of engineers working on it. So it's first and best from an engineering sense. And, given it's my service and my offering, we're selling it aggressively in the marketplace, positioning it as part of the broader set of solutions and leveraging that, like you saw this week with the Dell EMC offering, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. It's leveraging all that first and best work to now bring it on-premise as well. So it really is both the engineering as as a go-to-market. >> I'm going to ask some CEO questions. (laughs) So Tom Sweet has said they're happy to have the Class V transaction behind them. I'm sure you're glad, too. Thank you. That was very generous of you. >> (laughs) >> You've been incredibly good at acquisitions. I mean, obviously Nicira, Heptio, CloudHealth, AirWatch, I mean, on and on. >> VeloCloud. >> VeloCloud. I mean, most acquisitions, frankly, don't live up to their objectives. I think that's not the case for VMware. So now you're, good news is you draw off a lot of cash, so you're building up that pot again. How do you see, going forward, use of that cash? R and D, M and A, maybe you could make some comments there to the extent you can? >> Yeah, and you know, we said the primary ways we use cash, stock buybacks and M and A. And that continues. We did the special one-time dividend, which helped Dell go public. Everybody's happy. The market's responded super positively on both the Dell side. They're up, what, 40% since they go public. VMware up almost 50% this year. Just tremendous. >> Tremendous, $80 billion value now, awesome. >> Yeah, just tremendous. And, right then, we said going forward, it's business as usual for us. We're going to continue to do stock buybacks. We're going to continue to do M and A's. As you've said, we're good at this acquisitions stuff. And part of that is, I call it, imagine you're a hot startup company. And you say, do I want to be part of VMware? And we try to answer these questions. Do we have vision alignment? >> (laughs) >> Second is, can we accelerate your vision? Because most startups, you know, I mean, you talk about unicorns and so on like that. But what really motivates them is their vision. And if they believe their vision is going to be accelerated as part of VMware, so they're on this and we're going to turn 'em to that, aw man, they get excited. Do we have a cultural fit? I mean, with every CEO of our acquisitions, and HR does, we really, are they going to fit our team? Because you know, cultural issues, you can't butt your heads day and night. Life's too short. >> Certainly VMware, you guys are (laughs) that culture's very hardcore. Work hard, play hard. (laughter) >> Yeah, and you know, it has to be this deep drive for technical innovation, right? The technical due diligence that we do with our startups. Right? It's sort of like, you know, this is like a PhD exam for these, I mean, they really got to know their stuff. >> Yeah, so people don't fit in the culture at VMware, and there-- >> And we've said no to a number of potential acquisitions over cultural issues as well, if they're just not going to fit. And hey, we're not going to be perfect, but the fact that we can bring these companies in, accelerate their vision, give 'em a culture that they're excited about. You know, we have maybe 90-ish% success rate. The industry average is below 50% >> Yeah, fantastic track record. I mean-- >> And that just gives us the ability to do organic and inorganic innovation, which to me is like, a potent recipe. >> And you got the radio conference coming up. What will your talk, theCUBE will be there. Pat, you've created great shareholder value. You turned those headwinds into tailwinds, and we were watchin' the whole time. It's been great to watch. And what's next? You have your VMware tattoo still on from VMworld? (laughter) Like you have a jail tattoo? >> No, I'll tell you >> Cute tattoo. >> a little inside, I'll tell you a little inside story. My wife, you know, after the VMworld keynote with the tattoo on, we were leavin' on vacation two weeks later. And all she said to me after the keynote was what's that tattoo thing, it better be gone by the time we leave for vacation. (laughter) It's like, there was no, honey, that was a great keynote today, it's like, that better be gone! (laughs) >> Nothin's better than watchin' that video and that CUBE sticker we had on your hand. Pat, great to see you, as always. Great commentary, great analysis. Congratulations on all the success with VMware. Again, the transformation's just getting started. We're seeing a lot more good things for you guys as well. >> Yeah, and you know, this has been a great week in some ways. I sort of joked this morning on-stage that, it almost felt like VMworld. We talked about VMware technologies and that Dell partnership accelerating so well. >> It's not AMCWorld, it's DellWorld now, it's a whole new vibe. >> (laughs) And you know, with that, you know, I just really believe in the superpowers that I talk about, we're just getting started. So we're going to be doing this a long time together. >> What's on your plate in front of you now? You got VMworld coming up in a few months. Priorities, objectives, what's on your plate? >> Well, I have to leave some of the secrets for what we're cookin' up for VMworld this year. But some of these steps clearly, in the developer container space, super important for us to really make some progress there. Obviously, we'll have some incremental cloud announcements as well. >> ContainerWare rhymes with VMware. (laughs) >> Yes, that's very good! We have an advertisement on that coming out, so a new ad. But it really is, I think, that topic area's one that, how can we really solve that for customers that really can deploy at scale containerized environments for an enterprise workload. So, excited about that area. And you know, maybe just a few deliverables from what we announced this week. >> Alright, take your CEO of VMware hat off, put your CUBE analyst hat on. What's the most important story here at Dell Technologies World, if you were a commentator? You can't say VMware 'cause that's biased, but you got to be objective. You can say VMware if an objective. What's the most important storyline here as a backdrop for Dell Technology Worlds, what's the real net net to customers? >> Well you know, I think, and I'll say, as exciting as the Microsoft announcements were, I think the most important thing was VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, on-prem. Because to me, you know, the fact, I go to CIOs, and I've done this probably five times since the keynote finished on Monday. And I say, how many of you have fully updated your hardware, your firmware, your operating systems, your networking stack, your compute stack, your management on the latest releases, all of them patched, upgraded appropriately for your environment? >> And they say, their eyes roll. (laughs) >> And the answer is none. Not some, none. I have customers that are askin' me to extend support for vSphere 4.5. It's like, what, that's been EOL'ed for a year and a half, what are you talking about, right?! But the reality is that most people go to the cloud, public cloud, not because it's more cost-effective or because it's better, it's because it's easier. So what we've really said is we can make easy in the private cloud and truly deliver that hybrid cloud experience. And I think the customers really experience the TCO benefits, the acceleration, the reductions in their operational environments, the personnel associated with it, the security benefits of being always patched, upgraded the most release. You know, now you're talkin' about attacking that other $1 trillion of operational costs that they're bearing in the personnel and so on. To me, that is like, so powerful if we really get that engine going. >> And the simplicity that comes out of that, is just-- >> You know, and again, the demo that we showed. That was the VMware Cloud on AWS being able to demonstrate, now, a complete picture into the on-premise environment. That's powerful. >> Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. I know he's got to go. Thanks for your generous time, I know you're really busy. Again, Pat Gelsinger. >> Love you guys, thank you. >> Thanks, Pat. >> Love you too. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, creating a lot of shareholder values, got a lot of tailwinds at their back. VMworld's coming up, theCUBE, of course, will be there with two sets. As usual, theCUBE cannons, two sets here, firing cannonballs of content here at Dell Technology World. I'm Jeff Furrier with Dave Vellante, stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music)

(digital music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Kay, welcome back everyone. Live Cube coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of Global Partner Marketing in Dell Technologies joining us. We just reminiscing about the old days of how computing was going on, cloud computing, Sun Microsystems to now, Dell Technologies is doing extremely well. Congratulations. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. It's a fantastic time. Thanks for being here and having me. >> And what a time to be in tech. Michael is on stage. This is just a pre-game show of what's coming. Kind of teasing out like best is yet to come. A lot of things are going on in tech. Certainly the business performance for Dell is strong but you guys have a huge partner ecosystem, huge global channel. That's changing and transforming. That's your wheelhouse. Tell us what's going on in the channel because you have partners that are making money with you. How's that going? What's happening? >> Thank you. Actually, we are thrilled with the momentum we've seen in the partner community and thanks to a lot of their engagement and support and solutions that they're developing around Dell Technologies. I mean our channel business has just hit fifty billion dollars in orders this year, growing faster than the market, growing faster than our competition and I honestly think it's an expression and a reflection of just the opportunity they see in the family of companies and just the assets of the technology that we have. >> One of the things that's happening with cloud and data is that these trends are kind of rising tides. There's no zero sum game anymore, this verses that, it's like a whole new shift. What are some of the trends going on that's impacting the channel specifically, that allows the partners to take advantage of the trends and either serve customers, have happy customers, and ultimately make more profit. Cash. >> Absolutely. You know, I kind of call it the art of the and. I think there Is a lot of traditional consumption that's still happening right now, while at the same time they're increasingly being asked by customers for as a service business model. So I think our partners are realizing that opportunity and meeting that demand right now. That's why you see the growth figures we have, frankly, in the channel in our traditional server and storage business, but also in our Dell Financial Services and really meeting these dynamic consumption model request as a cloud, as a service, manage services opportunities. We actually think some of the announcements we've made here this week, it's going to allow our partners to really enable and build services capabilities for their businesses that are highly lucrative, high margin service capabilities around these cloud offerings, these integrated solutions, really leaning in and leveraging their expertise across Dell, EMC, VMware and the rest of the family of businesses. >> Take a minute to explain some of the notable announcements here at Dell Technology World and what'll be the impact to the partners? >> Well, I think one of the most exciting things is we've been on an evolution as a company and we unveiled the new name of our partner program. We're now the Dell Technologies Partner Program. In many ways just simplifying the ability for the partners to lean in and realize the advantage of the offers, solutions, and capabilities of the family of companies. So all of the requirements for their tier attainment and tier status go unchanged. The strategically aligned businesses, such as VMware, will continue to have their own independent programs but the opportunity for the partners is it really empowers them to now be able to get access to these integrated offers, more access to the strategically aligned businesses, and go build out services that, as I said, that allow them to really bring those customer solutions at the level of expertise, either in a verticle or an industry, that their customers are struggling with their own transformations. >> How are they transforming, specifically? What are partners doing? I mean I always, you know we love selling boxes but if you're a box seller you just can't keep doing that. So you've got to change your business model. What are some of the things that they're doing? >> What I've seen, actually in the community, is I've seen certainly M & A. There's been some mergers and acquisitions where you'll see traditional integrators or solution providers investing and augmenting their capabilities with application development expertise. So they understand that not only do we have to modernize infrastructure, but it's about the work load. And we have to modernize the application. So, we've seen those kind of mergers happen. We've seen alliances form, where you have different partners that may not possess security capabilities, for example, they team and they partner. So I think the community in the ecosystem is evolving and they're leaning on their strengths and really trying to best position themselves to realize the opportunity. >> So you think about trends like converged infrastructure, hyperconverged, some of the stuff you guys announced. Ten years ago I remember when the modern CI first came on the scene. A lot of the channel partners didn't like that. They were like, no we want to screw the bolts in, we make money doing that. That has completely changed, hasn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think it's less about, how do I integrate the bag of parts and the piece parts of the infrastructure, and it's much more about the work load and the outcome. So, I think where partners are really savvy and where they're uniquely advantaged and positioned well to help customers is in those complex work loads, in those inventory and assessment services of which work load is best served in a public cloud, which is best served in a private cloud, and helping their customers navigate that journey. It's richer services but they have to monetize their Value-Ad in those type services than traditional system integration-type services. >> How to secure it, how to manage it... >> Absolutely. How to migrate it, how to modernize it. Absolutely. >> So those services used to be reserved for a unique qualification of partner. Highly technical solution architect. Now someone says, I need to multicloud architecture, if you go back a couple years in DevOps you'd be like, okay got to get a alpha geek and we got to lay out architecture, you know, usually a higher priced person, but kind of what we're seeing now is almost a democratization or an increase aperture of opportunity capture for partners because the tools and technologies are, I won't say totally turn-key, but they're composable so as you don't need to have an advanced computer scientist degree to be a solution architect. You can be more of a composer of solutions, not the tech lead. So this is a trend we're seeing. Do you agree with that and if so how's that increasing your capabilities? >> Well I do and I think, frankly, we at Dell Technologies are uniquely positioned and one of our aims is to simplify the access to that type technology. So when you look at the announcements around our Dell Technologies cloud platform and the integration with VMware, it really is to provide that seamless, simple, common management layer, operational and orchestration layer, to be able to migrate and move your work loads to public, on-premise so the skills in our partners are really leverageable, so their VMware expertise, it really is about the work load, less about the infrastructure and how to go standup a virtualized environment. >> Cheryl, talk about the impact it's had on your job because I can only imagine the complexity involved in soft dollar programs, incentive programs, compensation programs, how to get more training, skill gaps closed down, and now that's hard in and of itself so I'm sure there's a lot going on there that you're spending and working on but when you start overlaying, oh VMware's got a program, I got this program, it's like, are you wiring up a bunch of programs or is it just first... Take us through the stages of your evolution because you now have to be agile with how you market globally. >> Absolutely. And we're trying to be as thoughtful as possible with an outside in perspective to be fair. So across the family of companies we're actively engaged with my peers at VMware and Pivotal and we're really looking at, how do we take the investment that our partners are making into their capabilities and make that leverageable and protect that investment across the offers. So we, for example, are offering reciprocal recognition within the credentials, for like credentials so the VMware capabilities they earn with VMware we'll recognize in our Dell Tech cloud competency. We want to try and offer an easier path for them to engage across the companies and to be honest, incentives, capabilities, they're on their own evolution and we're trying to help just to ensure that we can externalize a lot of the training that we create internally for our people. How can we leverage the strategically aligned companies, jointly, for what we're doing in the program, so that it at least holistically can be common and make sense for the partners to engage. >> So training's important to you? >> Sure, absolutely. >> Partners now account for over half the revenue of the company. You've said that you're growing faster than the competition. That's something that we've heard a lot this week. (Cheryl laughs) A two-part question. One is, how is it that you guys, it's almost like you're being set up by a great coach to win and everybody seems to be growing faster than the competition. That's what we're hearing as a theme. So, how does that happen? Why is that? And then the second is, do you set targets for how much of your business you want to be through the channel, or is it just, let the business go as it may? >> Well, first of all, I would say we are really clear inside the company on what the strategy and vision is of the company and as we take that to market, both on the direct side and through the partner community, we try and listen to the partners and gain feedback from them on what they need to be most successful, but then again, we are really ruthless in aligning our strategies, our goals, our metrics, our measures, our rewards, to ensure that we can go deliver those results and the outcome and I think frankly, the success we've been seeing and enjoying is, I think it's resonating. Our partners are responding with the strategy and the enablement that we're bringing to market and it's combination of good strategy, good vision, relentless execution, and commitment. And we listen. Right? There's always more to do. We know we're not perfect. We have a lot of advisory capacities with our partner community, our distributors, our system integrators, for them to tell us how they can monetize and realize the maximum value out of what we're bringing to market and we adapt, we adapt, we adapt. >> Cheryl, final question for you. Over the past three years it's been an interesting journey. EMC comes in, you guys went public, got the VMware relationship clicking, you've got the things going on. So you got the end-to-end operational consistency as a big land grab. We see that as a big strategic opportunity for Dell, as well as specialism up to the top of the stack around vertical industries with data. Clean strategy, we've been saying that in The Cube for years. That's the killer form, you guys are doing it. But without learnings along the way, take us through personal observations that you've had inside Dell around just getting the ship tightened up to keep executing going. What's it been like? Share some stories. >> I'll have to say, a merger as large as we did and certainly as large as we are now, growing at the pace we are, is never easy, and I think we have an amazing culture in the company and I think it starts with Michael from the top down, and I think as we came together as teams and we started really decomposing and working on what we needed to strategize we quickly found ourselves very like-minded. Really like-minded. Very complimentary. So it allowed us to move faster. So I would say my learnings are you've got to be really authentic, you've got to have a lot of trust, you got to lean on the culture which is a bit of an intangible, and then there's all the obvious strategy and execution. But I would say one of the enjoyable learnings out of this has been, you have to just trust and we've been very like-minded. We've been very fortunate. Really good talent. Amazing talent. >> Now the plantation of brands has got some fruit coming off the tree, business performance is coming out, you're seeing some results. >> Yeah. Well, I think we're realizing the vision of the mutual R & D and I think we're so uniquely positioned for the level of R & D in innovation going forward, the expression of bringing those technologies together is now coming to market. You're really seeing the work of the joint innovation bear fruit. >> Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of the Global Partner Marketing in Dell Technologies, here in The Cube sharing her insight and observations and learnings over the past couple years and what's happening. They're doing great. This is The Cube bringing you all the content from Dell Technology World, three days of coverage, day two. We'll be right back with more after this short break. Stay with us. (digital music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE live from day one of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019. There's about 15,000 people here, about 4,000 of Dell Technologies' partners, lots of folks. We're pleased to welcome to theCUBE, a couple of guests. We've got Melanie De Vigan, VP of Digital Workplace Portfolio from Atos. Melanie, it's great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> And we have Justin Grimsley, Product Marketing from VMware. Justin, thank you for joining Stu and me as well. >> Yep, good to be here. >> So, workplace. One of the big themes from this morning's keynote, one of the themes that we've actually heard all day is, we talk about digital transformation, we talk about it at every event. It's essential. But, people are essential for digital transformation. And we have this workforce that has changed so much in the last few years. Some of the stats that were shown this morning, I think I remember seeing 81% of people now work outside of a traditional office. And about half the people, and I'm one of them, and I know Stu is too, work in at least three different places in a single week. So, in order to enable digital transformation to be real, it's got to start with the people. So Melanie, talk to us about transformation of the modern workplace, and what Atos is doing to facilitate that. >> Yeah, I think we've seen a big change in the market lately, where in the past successful organization would be focusing on employee productivity, but lately all of them realize the importance of employee engagement and employee experience. This morning, Pat mentioned the fact that ideally, engaged employees were going to drive success of the company. What is very striking is that if you compare that to the fact Gallup released a study last year saying that 87 percent of employees are not engaged. So you can see the huge gap, and how by focusing on this employee engagement, by transforming the employee experience, you are actually going to contribute to the business. And I think, really, when we talk about employee experience, we need to look at it from a wholistic point of view. So at Atos, we used to talk about "people, places, and platforms." "People" is all about the company culture, how people are engaged, what type of leadership in the company. It is about digital inclusion and accessibility. "Places," of course, is about from where you work. You mentioned the stat about mobility and from where people work. It's also about the building itself, and how the building is going to foster collaboration. And of course the "platform," it is about the IT, the technology that is going to enable all of that. What are the tools that you give to the end user, to the employee to be able to perform his jobs, so it starts with a device, it is about the collaboration solutions that are going to foster and help changing the mindset, changing the way people work. >> Alright. So, Justin, how does VMware tie into the picture that Melanie was painting there? >> Absolutely, I think this is why Atos, VMware, and Dell are such good partners, right? Our visions are so well-aligned to that employee experience that you guys were talking about. For us, the three major trends that we see are that users are no longer tied to the company network. They're not tethered to their cubicle with that Cat 5 cable. They're working shoulder-to-shoulder with their customers, or in the coffee shop, or at home. They're accessing all sorts of different types of applications now. It's not just legacy Windows apps, it's SaaS applications, it's virtual apps. And then the third trend is, they're using all sorts of different devices. And so, as companies are really looking to attract and retain talent, they want to enable employees to use the devices that they love, to be productive how they want to be productive. And so, many employees that we see now use two or three different devices. They might use their Dell laptop to be really productive and crank out work. They might use their iPhone or their Android device as well, and the applications that are available to them there. And so, we really see these three trends comin' together as a way for organizations to change how their employees work. And Atos and VMware and Dell are coming together to help enable that for our customers. >> So Justin, I don't know if it struck others, but for me, seeing Pat Gelsinger and Satya Nadella up on stage together was impressive, because Dell and Microsoft have a long, long relationship. VMware and Microsoft, it's an interesting relationship there, you know. End-user is something that we actually have seen Sanjay and his team with end-user computing growing out. But, can you comment on the news of the week, as well as the importance of bringing Microsoft into this discussion? >> Absolutely, you know, I think with everything that you said, the one thing I would say is that I think VMware compliments Microsoft very well. So, when we look at the end-user computing space, for years now, we've looked at how can we-- as Microsoft introduced Windows 10-- how can we bring that into the fold and extend a great experience on Windows 10. When you look at Office 365, I just did a session earlier and the number of hands that went up that are deploying Office 365, VMware has a great story around conditional access for those applications and providing a great experience. And so I think what we see now is this: customers are making different investments. Some customers are making investments in Microsoft 365, and others are making them in Workspace ONE, and so now, we can maximize those investments so they can get the most out of their end-point, and their end-user computing strategy. It's really a "one plus one equals three" scenario. And then we have services from companies like Atos, and Dell, and others that are coming around to help drive transformation across any of the devices that employees are using. Whether it is a Windows 10 PC, or whether it is a mobile device and accessing Office and other applications on it. So it was really powerful to see, I think, Satya, Pat, and Michael onstage this morning, coming together. >> Indeed, it was really, really impressive. I think just the fact that they were onstage were the most powerful message, for end-user computing at least. >> So Melanie, we look at this importance of employee engagement-- you mentioned, Justin, talent attraction and retention. What is Atos doing to actually-- there's got to be another-- maybe it's employee transform-- well, it's workplace transformation, really, right? But how are you kind of leading in that, to really drive business outcomes, like a business being able to generate more revenue, because "hey, we're enabling our workforce "and the way that they want to work." And as Justin said, with all the devices that they say, "let me use what I'm familiar with." >> Yeah, so one thing for us which is really key, is that, I mean, all this employee experience, it's a really nice story, but if we just talk about it, it remains a story, and we can't really do anything about it. I heard many people say this morning, "it's about the data." And this is what we're doing. What we're really looking at now is how do we make this employee experience tangible? So, it's all about moving toward a data-driven approach. So we are going to collect all the data. So again, we have this "people, places, and platforms," so we're going to collect the data from the devices. At Atos, we manage 4.5 million devices, so this is that much data matrix that we can collect to understand what's happening and what's going. It is the same with the feedback of the End-user, understanding how they work, like on a collaboration solution, understanding how people are working with each other, how they can change, so that at the end, we are going to be able to give some insight. We're going to be able to give some insight to the employee, so that again, he can understand what he can do differently. We're also going to give insight to the organization. It can be the IT department, it can be the HR department, it can be the facilities. It's all about bringing all of that together, so we give this wholistic vision and be able to drive the change, this is what we're targeting. >> Yeah, I love that. If you look at digital transformation, one of the most important things is, I need to have my business being driven by data, I have to have those feedback loops. What I'm curious is, what are some of those key measurements, how are you looking at these environments today when I have all this data, versus maybe how I would have done things in the past? >> Yeah, so, indeed, and this is where today, we are working away from this service-level agreement, the way we used to measure the IT services. People talk a lot about this watermelon effect, where it's all green outside, but red inside. So, all the KPI are green, meaning the server and infrastructure is working, but at the end, the end-user is not happy. So today, we are talking about experience-level agreements, so it's about defining metrics, which are really going to show how does the service perform, and what makes sense for the employee at the end. So more or less, we're moving away from the infrastructure, and we're getting closer to the business, taking measures that are really going to show what is going to impact the business. >> Just to build on that, I think what's one of the interesting things that we see now is that IT teams aren't just measured on cost. They're being measured more and more on employee experience. We're seeing companies do employee net promoter scores now. How can we elevate the employee experience from the day they start at the company, to the day they retire, right? And so, I think that's what Atos and others are really bringing together for their customers, and for our joint customers. >> And that's cultural impact at a business. Whether it's a business that's been around 35 years, as long as Dell has, or one that's maybe younger. That cultural change is hard. We talk about that at every event, with every company, because, especially for veteran employees, or more seasoned, who are used to certain ways of doing business, that company has to transform culturally as well, for their digital transformation to enable them to become the leaders that they want. So I'm hearing that one of the things that Atos is enabling is that cultural transformation. It's not just about having new KPIs and changing SLAs, it's driving change for entire business units to impact that whole company. >> Yeah, and to be able to do that-- So we still want to be data-driven, so we're going to get this KPI, but with KPIs, there is no "one size fits all." There is not one KPI that we're going to apply to all our customers. It is a war that we're doing with the customer to understand what is key for them. An example, which is a bit... I don't know if it's funny or interesting, is we have this customer for whom we have these tech bars, you know, the walk-in bar where an end-user can go and get coaching, support, help from a technician. And so, we had this customer where the tech bars were very successful, so there were more and more people going there. And because there were more and more people, they started queuing, and we said, "Okay, there's an issue. "we don't want people to be queuing." So we went into a discussion with the customer. At the beginning, everybody's idea was, "Okay, let's put more people behind the desk, "so they can help." And when we had this discussion with the customer, it turned out it was not a good solution, because it was a company with a very strong family culture, very centered about the relationship and the network, and these tech bars, they were meant to be a place where people can go and chat with each other, and share about what's going on. So, instead of putting more people behind the desk, we talked about adding coffee and cookies at the desk so people are willing to go. I mean, this is just an example, but it's just to say, it's not about measuring how long someone is going to wait at the desk, it's about understanding what is important for this customer, and then we can define with them the key matrix that we need to follow. >> That's excellent. And a tech bar, that's a bar I can get behind. (laughing) Melanie, Justin, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon, we appreciate your time and it's always exciting to hear how the employee experience is so pivotal and critical to digital transformation. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> Oh, our pleasure. We're Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching us live in Las Vegas. Day one of theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technology World's 2019. Thanks for watching. (electronic techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019 brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas with Dell Technology World 2019 and I'm John Furrier and my co-host Dave Vellante breaking down all the action, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We go all day, all night here at Dell's great event. We're here with the CMO of Dell Technology Allison Dew, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, it's nice to be here. >> Good to see you again, Allison. >> It's fun. >> What a show, action-packed as always. We got two sets, we call it the theCUBE content cannons. We're just firing off content, a lot of conversations, a lot of boxes being checked, but also growth, lookin' at the numbers. The business performance of Dell is strong. Leadership across all categories, large-scale, and an integrated approach with the products and the relationship with VMware paying off in big-time. Azure News, Microsoft integrating in, so a lot of great product leadership, business results, things are booming at Dell Technologies. >> They really are and you know, when you think about the journey for us in particular over the last three years since starting the EMC combination, and all of the things that are written about integrations, technology integrations of this scale and scope, and you look at what the teams together have successfully done, the business performance, the share growth across categories, and as of today, the true end-to-end solutions that we're announcing in partnership with VMware and Secureworks. And we tend to be a pretty humble culture, but I will say, I think it's a pretty impressive result, when you look at most integrations are focused on don't break anything, and not only did we not break anything, we've kept the trust of our customers, we've continued to grow the customer base, and now we're really focused on, how across the Dell Technologies family, primarily with VMware and Secureworks and Pivotal do we bring to life the solutions that solve our customers' biggest IT problems. Pretty amazing spot to be in. >> You know one of the luxuries of doing theCUBE for 10 years is that we've had conversations over 10 years and I remember many years ago when Michael was about to go private, we saw him in Austin, was a small Dell world back then, we had two conferences, and he was standing there alone. We approached him, Dave and I, and we had a long conversation with him, he was very approachable, and then when he talked about, when he did the private and then the acquisition at these points, everyone was pooh-poohing it at saying, it's a declining market, things are going, why would you want to do this? Obviously the scale benefits are showing, but the macroeconomic conditions of the marketplace, you couldn't be happier for. Public cloud drove a lot of application deployment, you have SAS businesses started, you have on-premise booming, refresh and infrastructure, a complete growth. >> Right. >> Yeah, there's actual growth there. >> Right. >> So the bet paid off. You as a marketer have to market this now, so what's your strategy because you have digital transformation as the kind of standard positioning posture, but as you have to market Dell Technology on the portfolio of capabilities, which is large, I can only imagine it's challenging. >> So let me actually back up, and to one of the points that you talked about, and then I'll answer your actual question. So I can't remember off the top of my head, but we very jokingly talk about, in the era since the PC was declared dead, we have sold billions of PCs right and it would be funnier if I could remember the number, but you know we used to joke around with Jeff Clark, ala Monty Python, I'm not dead yet. >> Yeah. >> And so you get this hype about what's happening in the industry, and the truth is it's actually a very different picture than some of that hype, and one of the reasons I think that's important is because obviously we've continued to take share on the PC business, we've continued to grow there, but we also believe that the hype sometimes applies to these other technology cycles as well. So if you go back a couple of years ago, it was everything was going to the public cloud. If you don't go to the public cloud you are a dinosaur. You don't know what you're doing. You're going to go out of business. The traditional infrastructure companies are going to go out of the business, and to be honest, that is also just nonsense, right. And so if you think about what's evolving, is we believe very firmly that we're going to see the continued growth of a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world and it's not one thing or the other. And in fact, when you look at all of the research around the economics of doing one or the other, it all becomes workload-dependent. So for some workloads you should go to the public cloud. For some workloads, you should have it on-prem and that conversation may not be as interesting a headline, but it's the truth. >> It's reality actually. >> It's the truth. >> Well it's also reality, the workloads are dictating what the architecture should be or the solutions. That's what you're saying is a reality. >> Exactly, and so that's why we're so excited about the announcements that we had this morning with VMware, with Microsoft. We're really talking about a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world, and across all of the solutions that we announced this morning. The key, continuity and what we're really focused on, sounds so hackneyed, is how do we make it simpler for our customers? How do you make it simpler to manage and deploy PCs? How do you make it simpler to manage and deploy your cloud environment, that's it. >> So let's talk about the show a little bit, let's see 15,000 attendees, 122 countries represented, 4,000 channel partners, 250 industry analysts and media folks, so pretty big numbers. You could see it in the hallways. It's not quiet. You're kind of doing a lot of this. >> It's actually sort of hard to pay attention to you guys with all the noise in the background. You must be used to it. I'm like a goldfish, like what's happening? >> Now the interesting thing to me is, and we were talking about you know, it's the transitions, consolidations, oh it's traditional infrastructure companies are dead, et cetera, et cetera. I'd observe that over the years the testament of today's leaders is they respond, they don't just sit back and say oh Unix is snake-oil. Do you remember that famous quote? Look at what Microsoft has done, but my point is Michael's keynote today, it wasn't about a bunch of products, it was about big visions, solving a lot of the world's problems, and really conveying that Dell is in a position to help these companies as a partner. I presume you had some input to that keynote, I just wonder. >> I hope so. (laughs) >> What the thinking was there? >> So there's a lot of conversation and it's, you don't have to go that far in the media to read everything about technology as a force of evil in the world. One of the things that you notice, Michael's keynote this morning and I'll come back to what we're doing about it again later this week, is we are putting a very firm stake in the ground that we believe that technology is overall a force for positive change in the world and we're having a conversation about that on Wednesday that I'll talk a little bit more about in a second. And there's a subtlety there, that I think sometimes again, may not be the most interesting headline but is true, which is technology in aggregate drives great progress in the world, however we as leaders, we as humans, also have a responsibility to drive the responsible use of technology and so you see some of the conversations that we're having later this week in the Guru sessions, for example, where Joy Bilal-Meany is talking about responsible use of AI and some of the inherent biases in AI. Those are the tough issues that leaders need to be tackling now. >> Yeah well and one of the other you know, you're right a trade press loves to pick up on it and pick at it but one of the things to talk about, of course, is jobs, automation affecting jobs, I know Erik Brynjolfsson is one of your speakers, he's been on theCUBE before, and the discussion we had was machines have always replaced humans. For the first time ever,now they're replacing humans in cognitive functions. So the the answer is not protect the past from the future it's educate people, find new ways to be creative. I mean, technology has always been-- >> That's right. >> Part of human good and human advancement. There's always a two-sided coin, but it's got to be managed. >> That's right, one of the conversations that I think gets lost is when we talk about, I am a Battlestar Galactica fan, the second one not the one from the 70s, so you know I always say jokingly-- >> Darn. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We're a little older. >> Did you watch the one from the 2,000s? >> Yes, of course. >> 2,000s are so good. You know the conversation about are the Cylons coming to get us? And is AI really the thing that's destroying what's happening for human populations? The reality is AI has been evolving for many years, so it's not actually new. What is new is the combination of AI and data and the compute power to make that real and I do think it requires a different conversation with societies, with employers about how do you continue to reeducate your employee base? What does that mean? And that is really meaty stuff that we need to be leaning into. On aside, you've got me thinking of this whole Battlestar Galactica. My mind's thinking Star Trek, Star Wars. I heard a rumor that you guys had so many unhappy employees because Game of Thrones was on yesterday. >> Yeah. >> That you actually rented a big screen? >> Yeah, we did. >> A lot of Game of Thrones fans? Are you in that mix? >> So yeah. >> No spoiler alerts. >> No, I won't say anything about what happened. But I'll tell you, so we have all of our employees who work at the show, have to get here on Saturday or Sunday at the very latest. And even me personally, we came to Las Vegas and I thought, well I can watch it in my hotel room and then my hotel room didn't have HBO and I thought I don't really want to watch it on my little HBO Go app that's about this big because we're all waiting for what's going to happen in episode three, and I won't tell you if you haven't seen it. >> It's a lot of battling. >> So exactly, so my team and I had this conversation about could we have a joint viewing of Game of Thrones and it's really my team who did all of the work, but it was super-fun and we had a party with a bunch of team, had a few beers and it was fun. >> That's a great culture. >> I just wanted to get that out there. I think, cool culture. Allison, you mentioned something about the press and stories for good and how people looking for headlines. You know we're not advertising, so we're not trying to chase the clickbait, it's about getting the story right and sometimes the boring story doesn't get the headlines. Or the page views, advertising. So we're in a world now where a lot of other people in the media, they're censoring posts, there was an incident on Forbes where I wrote a negative post about a company and they took it down, that was Oracle. A lot of journalists looking for stories just to put tech in a bad spot. >> Right. >> And there's a lot of tech for good, but a lot of people can't point to one thing saying that's an example for tech for good and there's some few out there missing children, exploited children, trafficking, all kinds of things, talk about that dynamic because this is changing how you market, how people consume. You have the role of open communities. >> Yep. >> Social networking. A lot of dynamics going on. How do you view all this? >> So first of all, I think so much of the conversation about tech for good or tech for bad actually indexes only on social media and media broadly, and perhaps that's because it's the media who are writing about that. And so there's sort of this loop that we get in and I do think there are real issues that we need to think about in terms of social media. You guys likely saw Kara Swisher had a an op-ed in the New York Times after the Sri Lankan bombings where she, long-term technology advocate, actually said after the Sri Lankan bombings when the government shut down all social media communications, I thought that was a good thing and so that probably actually did help with the immediate situation on the ground and yet is a very scary precedent, right? I'd like to to take the conversation and say what about media? Right, so there's a lot of work that we need to do in order to maintain media fairness and then there's a whole other conversation about technology that we're not talking about. Everything that we're doing in terms of medicine and indexing the human genome, and addressing deafness and Michael talked about that even this morning, there are these really big technology problems that were really leaning into, and yet we're either talking about Amazon drone delivery or what Facebook is doing. We need to talk about those, but let's talk about where technology is really struggling to address real problems. >> I just read an essay yesterday from Dana Boyd who wrote a great fascinating piece around extremism in social media. Media's being hijacked by these extreme groups and they're mixing up causation and correlation and conflating many things to just tell a story to support an initiatives, no curation. >> Right. >> And with social media everything's open so that just flies out there. And so that's a big problem. >> And then takes off, you know. >> So how do you deal with that as a CMO 'cause you're spending advertising dollars. You're trying to deploy capital. You now have a new open source kind of mindset around communities customers are shopping themselves now. >> Right, so this is going to sound possibly a little bit overly simplistic but what I am responsible for in my job is the reputation and brand of this company right. I think about other things in terms of how we think about media and everything but I want to make sure that we are spending our media dollars in a responsible way and yet also recognize that people can disagree with us and that's okay and be comfortable with, we can be both a media advertiser on a publication who might write a review where they don't like one of our products and I'm never going to be in the business of saying take down our media dollars because that sets a terrible precedent and frankly there are people who would say take down our media dollars so that's one thing that we're really focused on. And then the other is, we consistently year-over-year are recognized as one of the world's most ethical companies and I will tell you from the leadership with Michael across the board I believe that that is true. And we actually think about business in an ethical way and we behave in an ethical way and that's why frankly you're not reading those headlines about us which are a lot more problematic. >> It's a cultural thing you guys have. Michael's always been a direct-to-consumer. That's been a direct mail, back in the glory days, now-- >> We still do that actually. >> Cloud, SAS, he texts me all the time. Hey John, what's going on? So he's he's open. >> Yeah. >> He's also now with Cloud and SAS, it's a direct to consumer business. >> I love your positive attitude. You have a session tomorrow, Optimism and Happiness in the Digital Age, looking forward to that. I have a personal question. So you started out your career, I think, in East Asia studies, right? >> That's right, good memory. >> You speak multiple languages. >> Yeah. >> I think three languages? >> If you count English, three. >> Yes okay so you're trilingual. >> Trilingual, yeah. >> If you speak two, you're what? >> Bilingual. >> Speak one, you're what? >> Monolingual, American. (all laughing) American, I was like, I know this joke. >> I wonder how that affected sort of your career? >> Absolutely. >> In terms of getting into this business. >> I would first say that I was an incredibly naive undergraduate. I wanted to be an editor of a paper and I loved foreign languages. So I studied Japanese and French and that led me to going to Japan as a very naive 22 year old and I started working in this small Japanese ad agency. I was the only non-Japanese person in that company and of course I learned some functional things in terms of the art of advertising but what I actually learned was how to survive in an environment that was so different to mine. Even if you speak Japanese, it is a language of unsaid things and you have to constantly be figuring out what's actually happening here and so ironically that decision that I made at 18, very naively, to study Japanese is one of the things that sets the course of my life because I've always been, my entire career, in international jobs and I think if I ever had to come back to just being in an American job, I wouldn't know what to do with myself, I'd be so bored. And it's also one of the reasons when we talk about technology and education and AI and what are robots going to do, This is my personal opinion, somewhat controversial opinion which is of course we need to support STEM, of course I want to see more women in STEM. At the same time, I want to see us focus our children on critical thinking skills. How do you write well? How do you have an argument? How do you convince somebody? And that's because until I went to business school I was a liberal arts major born and bred and so that's not the pat answer that you expect from somebody in my job which is it's all about STEM. It's about STEM and more. >> Emotional quotient's a big thing we're seeing a lot. The whole self. That's a big part of the kids growing up being aware. >> Yeah. >> Socially emotional. Allison, thanks coming on theCUBE and sharing. >> My pleasure. >> Great insights here in theCUBE. We're here with the CMO, Allison Dew, with Dell Technologies. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more day one coverage after this short break. >> Awesome. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technology's World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are live at Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas with about 15,000 or so other people. There's about 4,000 of the Dell Technologies community of partners here as well. Day one as I mentioned, we're very pleased to welcome back one of our cube alumni, Karen Quintos, EVP and Chief Customer Officer from Dell Technologies, Karen, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. Always great to be with you all. >> So one of the things you walk down on stage this morning with Michael Dell and and the whole gang and you started to share a story that I'd love for you to share with our audience about this darling little girl, Phoebe from Manchester, England that has to do with this Dell Technologies partnership with Deloitte Detroit and 3D prosthetics. Can you share this story and what it meant about this partnership. >> Well we wanted to tell this story about Phoebe because we really wanted the audience to understand the innovation and all of what's done it with social good is really about the individual, You know, technology plays a key role but the face behind the technology and the innovation are people and you know, as you mention Phoebe is from Manchester, U.K. Her father wrote this blog about Phoebe's experience. Phoebe's aunt, Claire works for Deloitte. She had access to a lot of what they could do in terms of 3D printing and basically came to Dell and we were able to take it and scale it and accelerate it and speed it up with a engineer by the name of Seamus who saw what the precision workstation could do. So it was this small idea to help an amazing little girl like this that has now turned into this movement around how do we more rapidly, quickly scale 3D prosthetics so these children and adults can have a chance at a normal life so. >> What kind of prosthetics did you guys build for her? >> It's an arm, so the very first arm that we built for her when she was about five years old had the frozen Disney theme painted on it. I asked her father Keith what is the one that she's wearing now because she's now this like really super cool seven-year-old that goes to school and all of her classmates and friends around her see her as this rock star and the one that she has today is printed with unicorns and rainbows. So if you know anything about seven-year-old girls, it's all about unicorns and rainbows and she's done an amazing thing and she's inspired so many other people around the world, individuals, customers, partners like Deloitte and others that we're working with to really take this to a whole new level. >> Karen, I think back to Dell you know, if you think back a couple of decades ago you know, drove a lot of the some of the waves of technology change you know, think back to the PC, but in the early days it was you know supply chain and simple ordering in all these environments and when I've watched Dell move into the enterprise, a lot of that is, I need to be listening to my customer, I need to be much closer to them because it's not just ordering your SKU and having it faster and at a reasonable price but there's a lot more customization. Can you talk about how you're kind of putting that center, that customer in the center of the discussion and that feedback loops that you have with them, how that's changed in Dell. >> Yeah sure, so all of the basic fundamentals around you got to order, deliver, make the supply chain work to deliver for our customers still matters but it's gone beyond that to your point and probably the best way to talk about it is these six customer award winners that we recognized last night. I've gotten to know all six of those over the last year and while they are doing amazing things from a digital transformation using technology in the travel business, the automotive business, banking, financial services, insurance, kind of across the board, the thing that they say consistently is look, we didn't always have the answer in terms of what we needed but you came in, you listened, you rolled up your sleeves to try to figure out how you could design a solution that would meet the needs that we have and they said, that's why you're one of the most strategic partners that we have. Now you can do all those other things, right? You can supply chain ride and build and produce and all that but it's the design of a solution that helps us do the things that will allow us to be differentiated and you look at that list of six customers and brands that they represent, right, Carnival Cruise Lines, USAA, Bradesco, McLaren I mean, the list kind of goes on, they are the differentiators out there and we're really honored to be able to be working with them. >> So we're only a day one and it's only just after lunchtime but one of the things I think somatically that I heard this morning in the keynote with Michael and Pat and Jeff and Satya and yourself is, it's all about people. A couple interviews I did earlier today, same sort of thing, it's like we had the city of Las Vegas on. This is all driven by the people in for the people so that sense of community is really strong. I also noticed this year's theme of real transformation, parlays off last year's theme of make it real, it being digital transformation, IT, security, workforce transformation, what are some of the things that were like at Dell Technologies. Cloud this morning for example, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC that you guys specifically heard say from last year's attendees that are manifesting in some of the announcements today and some of the great things the 15 or so thousand people here are going to get to see and feel and touch at this year's event? >> Well, Lisa you nailed it. What you heard on stage today is what customers have been telling us over the last year. We unveiled about a month ago with a very small group of CIOs in Amia, our cloud strategy, our portfolio, the things that we're going to be able to do and one customer in particular immediately chimed in and said, we need you in the cloud and we need you in there now because you offer choice, you offer open, you offer simplicity, you offer integration and they're like, there's just too many choices and a lot of them are expensive. So what you heard on stage is absolutely a manifestation of what they told us. The other pieces, look, I think I think the industry and CIOs are very quickly realizing their workforce matters, making them happy and productive matters having them enabled that they can work flexibly wherever they want to really, really matters and you know, our Unified Workspace ONE solution is all about how we help them simplify, automate, streamline that experience with their workforce so their employees stick around. I mean, there's a war on talent and everybody's dealing with it and that experience is really, really important in particular to the gensies and the millennials. >> Karen, I love that point. Actually, I was really impressed this morning. In the press and analyst session this morning, there was a discussion of diversity and inclusion and the thing that I heard is, it's a business imperative, it's not, okay it's nice to do it or we should do it but no, this is actually critical to the business. Can you talk about what that means and what you hear from your customers and partners. >> Yes, yes, well, we're seeing it in spades and all of these technology jobs that are open, right. So look, all the research has shown that if you build a diverse team, you'll get to a more innovative solution and people generally get that but what they really get today is here in the U.S. alone, there's 1.1 million open technology jobs by the year 2024, half of them, half of them are going to be filled by the existing workforce. So there is this war in talent that is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and I think that's what really has given a wake-up call to corporations around why this matters. I think the other piece that we're starting to see, not just around diversity but in our other social impact priorities around the environment as well as how we use our technology for good, look, customers want to do business with a corporation that has a soul and they stand for something and they're doing something, not just a bunch of talking heads but where it's really turning into action and they're being transparent about the journeys and where they're at with it. So it matters now to the current generation, the next generation, it matters to business leaders, matters to the financial services community, which you start to see you know, some of the momentum around you know, the black stones and state street. So it's really exciting that we're part of it and we're leading the way in a lot of number of areas. >> And it's something to that we talked about a lot on theCUBE, diversity and inclusion from many different levels, one of them being the business imperative that you talked about, the workforce needing to compete for this talent, but also how much different products and technologies and apps and APS and things can be with just thought diversity in and of itself and I think it's refreshing to what Stu was saying, hey, we're hearing this is a business imperative but you're also seeing proof in the pudding. This isn't just, we've got an imperative and we're going to do things nominally, you're seeing the efforts manifest. One of the, Draper Labs who was one of the customer award winners. That video that was shown this morning struck probably everyone's heart with the campfire in Paradise California. >> Tragic. >> I grew up close to there and that was something that only maybe, I get goosebumps, six months ago, so massively devastating and we think you know, that was 2018 but seeing how Dell Technologies is enabling this laboratory to investigate the potential toxins coming from all of this chart debris and how they're working to understand the social impact to all of us as they rebuild, I just thought it was a really nice manifestation of a social impact but also the technology breadth and differentiation that Dell has enabling. >> That was also why this story today was so great about Phoebe, right because it's where you can connect the human spirit with technology and scale and have an even bigger impact and there's so much that technology can help with today. You know, that that story about Phoebe. From the time that her aunt from Deloitte identified, you know, what we could do, all the way to the time that Phoebe got her first arm was less than seven months, seven months and you think about you know, some of the other prototypes that were out there, times would take years to be able to do it. So I love that you know, connection of human need with the human spirit and connecting and inspiring and motivating so many children and adults around the world. >> And what what are some of the next, speaking of Phoebe and the Deloitte digital 3D prosthetics partnership, what are some of the other areas we're going to see this technology that this little five-year-old from Manchester spurned. >> Well, I'll give you another example. So we, there was an individual in India, actually an employee of ours that designed an application to help figure out how to deploy healthcare monitoring in some of the remote villages in India where they don't have access to basic things that we take for granted. Monitoring your blood pressure, right, checking your cholesterol level and he created this application that a year later now, we have given kind of the full range of the Dell portfolio technology suite. So it is you know our application plus Pivotal plus VMware plus Dell EMC combined with the partnering that we've done with Tata Trust and the State of India, we've now deployed this healthcare solution called Life Care Solution to nearly 37 million rural residents, citizens in India. >> Wow 37 million. >> 37 million, so a small idea, you take from a really passionate individual, a person, a human being and figure out how you can really leverage that across the full gamut of what Dell can do, I think the results are incredible. >> Awesome, you guys also have a Women in Technology Executive Summit that you're hosting later this week. Let's talk about that in conjunction of what we talked a minute ago about, it's a business imperative as Stu pointed out, there are tangible, measurable results, tell us about this. >> Well, I'm kind of done honestly with a lot of the negativity around, oh, we're not making any progress, oh, we need to be moving fast and if you look at the amount of effort, energy and focus that is going into this space by so many companies and the public sector, it's remarkable and I've met a number of these CIOs over the last year or two, so we basically said let's invite 20 of them, let's share our passion, have made progress, care about solving this across their organization. A lot of us are working on the same things so if we simply got in a room and figured out, are their power in numbers and if we worked collectively together, could we accelerate progress. So that's what it's all about. So we have about 15 or 20 CEOs, both men and women and we'll be spending you know, six or seven hours together and we want to walk away with one or two recommendations on some things that we could collaborate on and have a faster, bigger impact. >> And I heard that, you mentioned collaboration, that's one of the vibes I also got from the keynote this morning when you saw Michael up there with Pat and Jeff and Satya, the collaboration within Dell Technologies, I think even talking with Stu and some of the things that have come out and that I've read, it seems to be more symbiosis with VMware but even some the, like I said, we're only in, I wouldn't even say halfway through day one and that is the spirit around here. We talk about people influence, but this spirit of collaboration is very authentic here. You are the first chief customer officer for Dell, if you look back at your tenure in this role, could you have envisioned where you are now? >> No, because it was like the first ever chief customer officer at Dell and you know, it really gave me a unique opportunity to build something from scratch and you know, there's been a number of other competitors as well as other companies that have announced in the last year or so the need to have a chief customer officer, the need to figure out how, which is a big remit of mine across Dell Technologies, how do we how do we eliminate the silos and connect the seams because that's where the value is going to be unlocked for our customers. That's what you saw on stage today. You saw the value of that with Jeff, with Pat, with Satya, some you know, one of our most important partners out there. Our customers don't want point solutions, they want them to be integrated, they want it to be streamlined, they don't be automated, they want us to speed time to value, they want us to streamline a lot of the back-office kind of mundane things that they're like, I don't want my people spending their time anymore and doing that and that's where we see Dell Technologies being so much more differentiated from other choices in the market. >> Yep, I agree with you. Well Karen, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon, sharing some of the stories, look forward to hearing next year what comes out of this year's as Women in Tech Exec Summit. Thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you very much, thank you. >> with Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, live day one of Dell Technology World from Las Vegas, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)