>> From the theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Well, it looks like hybrid cloud is finally here. We've seen a decade of posturing, marchitecture, slideware and narrow examples of hybrid cloud, but there's little question that the definition of cloud is expanding to include on-premises workloads in hybrid models. Now depending on which numbers you choose to represent IT spending, public cloud only accounts for actually less than 5% of the total pie. So the big question is, how will this now evolve? Customers want control, they want governance, they want security, flexibility and a feature-rich set of services to build their digital businesses. It's unlikely that they can buy all that, so they're going to have to build it with partners, specifically vendors, SI's, consultancies and their own developers. The tug of war to win the new cloud day has finally started in earnest between the hyperscalers and the largest enterprise tech companies in the world. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll walk you through how we see the battle for hybrid cloud, how we got here, where we are and where it's headed. First, I want to go back to 2009, in a blog post by a man named Chuck Hollis. Chuck Hollis, at the time, was a CTO and marketing guru inside of EMC who, remember, owned VMware. Chuck was kind of this hybrid, multi-tool player, pun intended. EMC at the time had a big stake, a lot at stake, as the ascendancy of AWS was threatening the historical models, which had defined enterprise IT. Now around that time, NIST published its first draft of a cloud computing definition which, as I recall, included language, something to the effect of accessing remote services over the public network, i.e., public IP networks. Now, NIST has essentially or since evolved that definition, but the original draft was very favorable to the public cloud. And the vendor community, the traditional vendor community, said hang on, we're in this game too. So that was 2009 when Chuck Hollis published this slide. He termed it Private Cloud, a term which he saw buried inside of a Gartner research post or research note that was not really fleshed out and defined. The idea was pretty compelling. The definition of cloud centered on control, where you, as the customer, had on-prem workloads that could span public and on-prem clouds, if you will, with federated security and a data plan that spanned the states. Essentially, you had an internal and an external cloud with a single point of control. This is basically what the hybrid cloud vision has become. An abstraction layer that spans on-prem and public clouds and we can extend that across clouds and out to the edge, where a customer has a single point of control and federated governance and security. Now we know this is still aspirational, but we're now seeing vendor offerings that put forth this promise and a roadmap to get there from different points of view, that we're going to talk about today. The NIST definition now reads cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, e.g., network server storage, applications and services, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. So there you have it, that is inclusive of on-prem, but it took the industry a decade plus to actually get where we are today. And they did so by essentially going to school with the public cloud offerings. Now in 2018, AWS announced Outposts and that was another wake up call to the on-prem community. Externally, they pointed to the validation that hybrid cloud was real. Hey, AWS is doing it so clearly they've capitulated, but most on-prem vendors at the time didn't have a coherent offering for hybrid, but the point is the on-prem vendors responded as they saw AWS moving past the demilitarized zone into enemy lines. And here's what the competitive landscape of hybrid offerings looks like today. All three US-based hyperscalers have an offering or multiple offerings in various forms, Outposts from Amazon and other services that they offer, Google Anthos and Azure Arc, they're all so prominent, but the real action today is coming from the on-prem vendors. Every major company has an offering. Now most of these stemmed from services-led and finance-led initiatives, but they're evolving to true Azure Service models. HPE GreenLake is prominent and the company's CEO, Antonio Neri, is putting the whole company behind Azure Service. HPE claims to be the first, it uses that in its marketing, with such an Azure Service offering, but actually Oracle was their first with Cloud@Customer. You know, possibly Microsoft could make a claim to being early as well, but it really doesn't matter. Let's see, Dell has responded with Apex and is going hard after this opportunity. Cisco has Cisco Plus and Lenovo has TruScale. IBM also has a long services and finance-led history and has announced pockets of Azure Service in areas like storage. And Pure Storage is an example that we chose of a segment player, of course within storage, that has a strong Azure Service offering, and there are others like that. So the landscape is getting very busy. And so, let's break this down a bit. AWS is bringing its programmable infrastructure model and its own hardware to what it calls the edge. And it looks at on-prem data centers as just another edge node. So that's how they're de-positioning the on-prem crowd, but the fact is, when you really look at what Outposts can do today, it's limited, but AWS will move quickly so expect a continued rapid evolution of their model and the services that are supported on Outposts. Azure gets its hardware from partners and has relationships with virtually everyone that matters. Anthos is, as well, a software layer and Google created Kubernetes as the great equalizer in cloud. And it was a nice open source gift to the industry and has obviously taken off. So the cloud guys have the advantage of owning a cloud. The pure on-prem players, they don't, but the on-prem crowd has rich stacks, much richer and more mature in a lot of areas, as it relates to supporting on-premises workloads and much more so than the cloud players, but they don't have mature cloud stacks. They're kind of just getting started with things like subscription billing and API-based microservices offerings. They got to figure out Salesforce compensation and just the overall Azure service mentality versus the historical product box mentality, and that takes time. And they're each coming at this from their respective different points of view and points of strength. HPE is doing a very good job of marketing and go-to market. It probably has the cleanest model, enabled by the company's split from HP, but it has some gaps that it's needed to fill and it's doing so through acquisitions. Ezmeral, for example, is it's new data play. It just bought Zerto to facilitate backup as a service. And it's expanded partnerships to fill gaps in the portfolio. Some partnerships, which they couldn't do before because it created conflicts inside of HPE or HP. Dell is all about the portfolio, the breadth of the portfolio, the go-to-market prowess and its supply chain advantage. It's very serious about Azure Service with Apex and it's driving hard to win that day. Cisco comes at this from a huge portfolio and of course, a point of strength and networking, which maybe is a bit tougher to offer as a service, but Cisco has a large and fast growing subscription business in collaborations, security and other areas, so it's cloud-like in that regard. And Oracle, of course, has the huge advantage of an extremely rich functional stack and it owns a cloud, which has dramatically improved in the past few years, but Oracle is narrow to the red stack, at least today. Oracle, if it wanted to, we think, could dominate the database cloud, it could be the database cloud, especially if it decided to open its cloud to competitive database offerings and run them in the Oracle cloud. Hmm. Wonder if Oracle will ever move in that direction. Now a big part of this shift is the appeal of OPEX versus CAPEX. Let's take a look at some ETR data that digs a bit deeper into this topic. This data is from an August ETR drill down, asking CIOs and IT buyers how their budgets are split between OPEX and CAPEX. The mid point of the yellow line shows where we are today, 57% OPEX, expecting to grow to 63% one year from now. That's not a huge difference, there's not a huge difference when you drill into global 2000, which kind of surprised me. I thought global 2000 would be heavier CAPEX, but they seem to be accelerating the shift to OPEX slightly faster than the overall base, but not really in a meaningful way. So I didn't really discern big differences there. Now, when you dig further into industries and look at subscription versus consumption models for OPEX, you see about 60/40 favoring subscription models, with most industry slowly moving toward consumption or usage based models over time. There are a couple of outliers, but generally speaking, that's the trend. What's perhaps more interesting is when you drill into subscription versus usage based models by product area, and that's what this chart shows. It shows by tech segment, the percent subscription, that's the blue, versus consumption or usage based, that's the gray bars, yellow being indifferent or maybe it's I don't know. What stands out are two areas that are more usage heavy, consumption heavy. That's database, data warehousing, and IS. So database is surely weighted by companies like Snowflake and offerings like Redshift and other cloud databases from Azure and Google and other managed services, but the IS piece, while not surprising, is, we think, relevant because most of the legacy vendor Azure Service offerings are borrowing from a SaaS-oriented subscription model with a hardware twist. In other words, as a customer, you're committing to a term and a minimum spend over the life of that term. You're locked in for a year or three years, whatever it is, to account for the hardware and headroom the vendor has to install because they want to allow you to increase your usage. So that's the usage based model. See, you're then paying by the drink for that consumption above that minimum threshold. So it's a hybrid subscription consumption model, which is actually quite interesting. And we've been saying, what would really be cool is if one of the on-prem penguins on the iceberg would actually jump in and offer a true consumption model right out of the box, as a disruptive move to the industry and to the cloud players, and take that risk. And I think that might happen once they feel comfortable with the financial model and they have nailed the product market fit, but right now, the model is what it is. And even AWS without post requires a threshold and a minimum commitment. So we'd love to see someone take that chance and offer true cloud consumption pricing to facilitate more experimentation and lower risk for the customer entry points. Now let's take a look at some of these players and see what kind of spending momentum they have. This is our popular XY chart-view that plots net score or spending velocity on the x-axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data set on the... Oh, sorry, net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and pervasiveness or market share on the x-axis. Now this is cut by cloud computing vendors, as defined by the customers responding. There were nearly 1500 respondents in the ETR survey, so a couple of points here. Note the red line is the elevated line. In other words, anything above that is considered really robust momentum. And no surprise, Azure, AWS and Google are above that line. Azure and AWS always battle it out for top share of voice in the x-axis in this survey. Now this, remember, is the July survey, but ETR, they gave me a sneak peek at the October results that they're going to be releasing in the coming week and Dell cloud and VMware cloud, which is VCF and maybe some other components, not VMware cloud and AWS, that's a separate beast, but those two are moving up in the y-axis. So they're demonstrating spending momentum. IBM is moving down and Oracle is at a respectable 20% on the y-axis. Now, interestingly, HPE and Lenovo don't show up in the cloud taxonomy, in that cloud cut, and neither does Cisco. I believe I'm correct in that this is an open-ended question, i.e., who are your cloud suppliers? So the customers are not resonating with that messaging yet, but I'm going to double check on that. Now to widen the aperture a bit, we said let's do a cut of the on-prem and cloud players within cloud accounts, so we can include HPE and Cisco and see how they're doing inside of cloud accounts. So that's what this chart does. It's a filter on 975 customers who identify themselves as cloud accounts. So here we were able to add in Cisco and HPE. Now, Lenovo still doesn't show up on the data. It shows up in laptops and desktops, but not as prominent in the enterprise, not prominent at all, but HPE Ezmeral did show up and it's moving forward in the October survey, again, part of the sneak peek. Ezmeral is HPE's data platform that they've introduced, combining the assets of MapR, BlueData and some other organic development. Now, as you can see, HPE and Cisco, they show up on the chart, as I said, and you can see the rope in the tug of war is starting to get a little bit more taut. The cloud guys have momentum and big account presence, but the on-prem folks also have big footprints, rich stacks and many have strong services arms, and a lot of customer affinity. So let's wrap with some comments about how this will shake out and what's some of the markers we can watch. Now, the first thing I'll say is we're starting to hear the right language come out of the vendor community. The idea that they're investing in a layer to abstract the underlying complexity of the clouds and on-prem infrastructure and turning the world into, essentially, a programmable interface to resources. The question is, what about giving access through that layer to underlying primitives in the public cloud? VMware has been very clear on this. They will facilitate that access. I believe Red Hat as well. So watch to the degree in which the large on-prem players are enabling that access for developers. We believe this is the right direction overall, but it's also very hard and it's going to require lots of resources and R & D. I would say at this point that each company has its respective strengths and weaknesses. I see HPE mostly focused today on making its on-prem offerings work like a cloud, whereas some of the others, VMware, Dell and Cisco, are stressing to a greater degree, in my view, enabling multi-cloud and edge connections, cross connections. Not that HPE isn't open to that when you ask them about it, but its marketing is more on-prem leaning, in my opinion. Now all of the traditional vendors, in my view, are still defensive about the cloud, although I would say much less so each day. Increasingly, they look at the public cloud as an opportunity to build value on top of that abstraction layer, if you will. As I said earlier, these on-prem guys, they all have ways to go. They're in the early stages of figuring out what a cloud operating model looks like, how it works, what services to offer, how to pay sellers and partners, but the public cloud vendors, they're miles ahead in that regard, but at the same time, they're navigating into on-prem territory. And they're very immature, in most cases. So how do they service all this stuff? How do they establish partnerships and so forth? And how do they build stacks on prem that are as rich as they are in the cloud? And what's their motivation to do that? Are they getting pulled, digging their heels in? Or are they really serious about it? Now, in some respects, Oracle is in the best position here in terms of hybrid maturity, but again, it's narrowly focused on the Red Stack. I would say the same for Pure Storage, more mature as a service, but narrowly focused, of course, on storage. Let's talk marketplace and ecosystems. One of the hallmarks of public clouds is optionality of tooling. Just all you do is go to the AWS Marketplace and you'll see what I mean. It's got this endless bevy of choices. It's got one of everything in there and you can buy directly from your AWS Console. So watch how the hybrid cloud plays out in terms of partner inclusion and ease of doing business, that's another sign of maturity. Let's talk developers and edge. This is by far the most important and biggest hole in the hybrid portfolios, outside the public cloud players. If you're going to build infrastructure as code, who do you expect to code it? How are the on-prem players cultivating developer communities? IBM paid 34 billion to buy its way in. Actually, in today's valuation terms, you might say that's looking like a good play, but still, that cash outlay is equal to one third of IBM's revenue. So big, big bet on OpenShift, but IBM's infrastructure strategy is fragmented and its cloud business, as IBM reports in its financial statements, is a services-heavy, kitchen sink set of offerings. It's very confusing. So they got to still do some clean up there, but they're serious about the architectural battle for hybrid cloud, as Arvind Krishna calls it. Now VMware, by cobbling together the misfit developer toys of the remnants from the EMC Federation, including Pivotal, is trying to get there. You know, but when you talk to customers, they're still not all in on VMware's developer affinity. Now Cisco has DevNet, but that's basically CCIE's and other trained networking engineers learning to code in languages like Python. It's not necessarily true devs, although they're upskilling. It's a start and they're investing, Cisco, that is, investing in the community, leveraging their champions, and I would say Dell could do the same with, for example, the numerous EMC storage admins that are out there. Now Oracle bought Sun to get Java, and that's a large community of developers, but even so, when you compare AWS and Microsoft ecosystems to the others, it's not even close in terms of developer affinity. So lots of work to be done there. One other point is Pure's acquisition of Portworx, again, while narrowly focused, is a good move and instructive of the changes going on in infrastructure. Now how does this all relate to the edge? Well, I'm not going to talk much about that today, but suffice to say, developers, in our view, will win the edge. And right now, they're coding in the cloud. Now they're often coding in the cloud and moving work on prem, wrapping them in containers, but watch how sticky that model is for the respective players. The other thing to watch is cadence of offerings. Another hallmark of cloud is a rapid expansion of features. The public cloud players don't appear to be slowing down and the on-prem folks seem to be accelerating. I've been watching HPE and GreenLake and their cadence of offerings, and watch how quickly the newbies of Azure Service can add functionality, I have no doubt Dell is going to be right there as well, as is Cisco and others. Also pay attention to financial metrics, watch how Azure Service impacts the income statements and how the companies deal with that because as you shift to deferred revenue models, it's going to hurt profitability. And I'm not worried about that at all because it won't hurt cashflow, or at least it shouldn't. As long as the companies communicate to Wall Street and they're transparent, i.e., they don't shift reporting definitions every year and a half or two years, but watch for metrics around retention and churn, RPO or Remaining Performance Obligations, billing versus bookings, increased average contract values, cohort selling, the impact on both gross margin and operating margin. These are the things you watch with SaaS companies and essentially, these big hardware players are becoming Azure Service slash SaaS companies. These are going to be the key indicators of success and the proof in the pudding of the transition to Azure Service. It should be positive for these companies, assuming they get the product market fit right, and can create a flywheel effect with their respective ecosystems and partner channels. Now I'm sure you can think of other important factors to watch, but I'm going to leave it here for now. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and please subscribe, check out ETR's website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me, email david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante. You can comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, everybody, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (soft music)

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

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Townsend and we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Varun Chhabra, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Dell EMC Storage and Data Protection. Hi Varun. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> Oh, our pleasure. So, the theme of first Dell Technologies World, huge 14,000 people. >> Absolutely. >> 5,000 plus partners here (audio dropping) make it real. What does that mean? What are you helping customers make real as it relates to all these different, transformational initiatives. Digital, IT, workforce, security. >> I'm a product marketer by trade, so we throw around a lot of buzz words, right. We've been guilty of that. But one of the things that I've observed over the last year or so is, every customer that we speak to, they're really thinking about digital transformation. And, you know, it could have different words but really what it means is, the economy is getting increasingly digitized. When you have something getting increasingly digitized it leaves a digital marker. Every activity leaves a digital marker. In other words, that's basically data. What is data but a digital marker? It's just fascinating, the customers that we talk to, they're very aware that there's because of all this activity that they're able to track and draw insights out of, if they don't do that, their competitors might do it. You could have up starts coming up and disrupting a particular business model. In the media, we often hear a lot about, you know, Netflix, Tesla and of course those are great examples, but we see this in every industry. Whether it's genomics, health care, in media and entertainment, it's happening everywhere, whether it's companies reinventing themselves, trying to disrupt their own business models to stay relevant or new startups coming in and trying to say how can we do this differently. >> So let's talk about the impact of digital transformation on storage and data protection. What data is, the new oil, all the buzz words we want to throw onto that. You, as a marketer, you have to translate into what that means from a technology perspective. For the boots on the ground what does digital transformation mean to people concerned with storage and data? >> Absolutely, it basically means, it means data. What is underpinning, a lot of times we talk to customers, they'll say, oh, I have big data initiatives, because they're trying to to make digital transformation real, you need to pull our insights from the data. So, it's big data, IoT, you know pick your buzz word. ML, AI, but if you take a step back all of these initiatives, they are basically dependent on data. You can't run an ML or AI algorithm without data. People talk about neural networks, neural networks are networks of data. What we find with customers is that they know that they have a lot of data, but they run into a lot of challenges with them. So there's really three big challenges. One is, how do we, you know, you could have data sitting in one system, you could have data sitting in another system, it's in silos. If you have data locked in silos you can't correlate them, we can't correlate them you really can't run analytics. The magic of insights comes out when you're correlating disparate data. That's one problem. Now, if you have everything in one single unified data Lake let's say you don't have silos, then there's this the the volume of data that's growing. It's incredible, it's not uncommon for our customers to tell us that they're seeing 30, 40, 50% year-over-year growth in their data. I mean, if you think about it, you're talking exponential growth iin a few years. So, how do you harness all that growth? How do you keep it on your systems of record without going bankrupt? Because it, often, it is a question of just managing all that data growth. Now, let's say that's challenge number two, let's say you've done that as well and you need to be able to draw insights out of it. Just because you have data sitting somewhere doesn't mean that you're going to be able to pull out analytics, doesn't mean that your processes and systems are really organized with it. All of this is really what we help try to do with customers. We have products like Isilon and ECS that are at the forefront of unstructured data. Which is really, 80% of the data today is unstructured, we help create unified data lakes for our customers so they don't have data sitting in silos. Then, these platforms are scalable platforms, so they scale very cost-effectively. Then they all support analytics natively. So you can run a big data analysis on the storage platform itself. >> You mentioned insights, and that's actionable insights another marketing buzz word there. But it's imperative for an organization to be able to have a foundation to be able to act on those insights. You talk about, you know, people say data, more buzz words, the new oil, really kind of think of it, a former biologist, as a. (audio dropping) Companies that do it well, that transform well, are able to apply data to different, multiple use cases at the same time yes, combine it, recombine it. But then, they also need to have this agile infrastructure to be able to take advantage of that, be able to adapt their software. Use things like sensors and smart devices, that are telling them how the customers are interacting the products and services and deliver something that's differentiated. So, as Dell EMC is doing that yourselves, is there any (audio dropping) that pops to mind because this is a great hallmark of digital transformation. >> Yeah, and to just talk about, extend what you said, we actually are starting to call data a capital asset. It's not very different from the other things that you have on your balance sheet. There just isn't a scientific method or an agreed-upon method we really value it yet. But I am sure that ten years from now or maybe earlier, just like we have stock exchanges, you could probably have data exchanges, where you have data be traded, it's monetized, it's valued. A classic example of what you said is we had a customer come in that owns a sports franchise, a very popular sports franchise in the United States. They also own their own arenas. They have Bluetooth sensors, 80 Bluetooth sensors, sitting all over their stadium. They have loyalty apps for their customers. When they come in, they open the app up, you know, with permissions, it connects to the Bluetooth sensors and now, to your point about the data, unlocking or catalyzing different the sheer number of things that can be done with that data to help improve experience, both for the viewer but also for the businesses that support, the restaurants that are in there, the vendors that are in the arena as well it's just mind boggling. For example, you can now, these people can now track when someone's walking. Whether they're walking towards, let's say, a barbecue joint a vendor in the arena. As they're standing there, first, they could actually know if they're standing or they're just walking by. If they're standing they have digital signage close to these places, but they can serve up ads and say hey, here's a discount. Because you're probably looking at the barbecue joint and thinking well, do you want to eat this or maybe I should do, am I in the mood for ribs today, and then presto, you get an ad next to you saying, hey we have a two-for-one or something. That's great from a commerce perspective. But then also for like the restroom lines. If you know that a lot of people are congregated in one restroom, you can actually say, hey, direct people towards other areas. Then beer kegs, like if we could have sensors under their beer kegs that are tracking when a beer keg is almost empty. All right, you're going to send a signal to the kitchen, they're going to roll out a beer keg before it gets over. Think about how that reduces wait times while you're replacing beer kegs. It's all one set of data, enabling so many different things for just improving experience. >> Wherever this place is, let's go. (panel laughing) >> Yeah, it sounds like a cool place. So let's kind of blow out or a section of your title that's deceptive, I think, in a sense. (audio dropping) To protect that access. But data protection has now become, I think, a catch-all for much more than just data protection. These products backing data protection are all not just about protecting data but adding mobility to data. Can you talk about the need to be able to take data and move it from where it's ingested to where it can be further crunched from a machine learning perspective? >> Yes, that's a great point. We talk about data originating in different sources, the edge, the core, or the cloud and really that mobility is super critical. If you just expand out a little bit more and just think about the Dell Technologies portfolio, we have data that's being generated on the edge, with sensors and devices. With the advent of the edge computing, you're beginning to see a lot more new computing models. So now, you have this notion of the fog, so you have many data centers that are collecting data. You could be running some real-time analytics on there. High level, real-time analytics to make decisions about let's say you're in a factory, you could have a fog data center in a factory or you could call it the edge as well, basically detecting defects in a particular spare part. And then you have real-time analytics going on there. But then all of that data also gets pushed into a central data center where you're running machine learning algorithms and you're training your real-time analytics systems to be that much more effective, to be that much more accurate. In these situations, like every point, single point decimal makes a huge difference in a company's bottom or top line. Yes, I think data mobility from the edge to the core, to the cloud or the fog, whatever you want to call it, is very, very critical. Different use cases in different areas are driving the that mobility. >> I'd love to understand what some of the differentiators are. What, we're at Dell Technologies, we're at the first one, indicative of the absorption of the EMC Federation companies within Dell. What differentiates what you're delivering and hoping customers achieve from your competition? >> Yeah, I mean, my specific areas of expertise are basically Isilon, ECS, our file storage platform an object storage platform. There are three things that differentiate us. We are really focused on creating eliminating silos. So, unifying everything in one data lake. Whether it's in the edge, the core, or the cloud, we want to provide a common, some data lake experience for our apps and for our users. The second thing is, we're we're hyper focused on providing cost-effective scaling mechanisms. So, if you scale, you're going to be able to handle that data in a much more cost-effective manner than if you have a product that does not scale out for example. The third thing that we do is that's really different is that we support inline analytics on the storage platform itself. If you think about a large model, a large part of the model for analytics array is directed at storage and I think that's going to continue have a large place to play. But shared storage is becoming increasingly viable option for running analytics, without having to move it somewhere, running the analytics on it and moving it back. Just more efficient, you just basically run analytics on it. It's really those three things that we think differentiate us from our competition. >> We can't have a conversation about storage and data without talking about cloud. You talk about the cloud strategy that integrates with your product portfolio. >> Absolutely, you know, as Michael said in the keynote yesterday, a cloud is not a destination, it's a model. Really, what we find is, every customer has their own cloud roadmap. So as a vendor it doesn't behoove us to say, we have this one-size-fits-all solution for you. It's really incumbent upon us to really meet the customer where they are. So whether it's with Isilon or with ECS, we have a host of different consumption models. You could run it as an appliance from us, or (audio dropping). You could run, for example, ECS is a software-defined platform, so if you're running, if you want to be really agile and you want to have servers that are running, you know, industry standard servers versus proprietary hardware, we can do that as well. Then, as we start thinking about the public cloud, we just announced, actually Michael announced yesterday that we're now offering Isilon with Google cloud. So, you could actually run Isilon systems, co-located with your Google compute clusters. All the wealth of the analytics capabilities that Google has, and then the compute capabilities that they have, you now don't have to compromise in terms of your file storage platform. You can actually run enterprise ready, scalable file system co-located with the Google cluster as well. That's a new model that we're looking at with customers. Because customers are telling us they love our products, on-premises there is a place for that, but they also want to be able to, if they're making bets on some of the big cloud providers, they want to be able to consume our products and take advantage of the features that they have on-premises, in the cloud as well. We're we're definitely trying to meet customers where they are in the cloud. >> And last question as we wrap up here, 5,000 channel partners, technology partners that are here, what are you hearing from the channel as often times the channel partners are at the forefront of talking with customers about a digital transformation strategy. What's some of the feedback from the channel been? >> The first thing that I noticed as a product marketer our partners always keep us honest, and the minute they hear a buzz word, you see their face frown. But I will tell you that in my meetings this year, anytime I talk about digital transformation they are looking at us with rapt attention. Because they are validating to us that their customers, just like ours, our customers together, this is top of mind for them. The other thing that I'm hearing from partners a lot is this notion that data actually has value, that it's an asset that customers are starting to value. It's honestly a great time to be in the tech space. Great time to be in the storage space because we're able to show customers how we can help transform their business. Five or six years ago to be able to say that about a storage platform, was probably marketing speak. But it's real right now. >> Varun, thanks so much for stopping by, sharing what's new and as we've talked about, digital transformation isn't a buzz word, it's not a nice to have, it's a mandatory. So, thanks for your time and your clarifying things, it was very, very informative. Thanks for dealing with this loud music show that's going on here. We want to thank you for continuing to watch theCUBE. I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend live from Dell Technologies World 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Los Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018 (relaxed music) brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (relaxed music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. We are live on day two at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost the one and only @Stu, Stu Miniman. We are here in Vegas with about 14,000 attendees, the biggest event ever. Not just 14,000 people here but about 35,000 also engaging with the video experiences, live streaming, and the on-demand. Also going on here is a big event with partners. We're excited to welcome back to theCUBE Cheryl Cook, Senior Vice President of Global Channel Marketing from Dell EMC. Hi, Cheryl! >> Hi, thanks for havin' me! Welcome back! >> Yeah. So 6,500 partners. >> Absolutely. >> Wow, that's up from last year! >> We have record attendants. We just are really, really excited about the engagement and how we're resonating with our partners, so we just had a fantastic kick-off to our Global Partner Summit yesterday. >> So some big news regarding the Channel. One of the things I'd like to start with is the name of the event this year. The first time it's Dell Technologies World. Last year was Dell EMC World. >> Absolutely. Kind of indicative of the EMC Federation companies being absorbed into Dell, companies with their own channel programs. Talk to us about what you announce regarding the Dell Technologies Advantage framework. What is the framework, and how does it make it easier for channel partners to sell Dell products of- >> Well, thank you. You know, as you said, we've really elevated this event to the Dell Technologies World, and many of our partners today already participate in VMware's program or in Dell EMC's program, and really what we're doing with the Advantage is we're taking a lot of the messaging, the story, a lot of the marketing collateral that we candidly educated our internal employees on so that we can best differentiate and articulate to our customers the value and the power of all these strategically aligned businesses. So for the Partner community, we're bringing IT transformational campaigns to them, we're bringing a lot of the messaging and the story on how to enable and share with their team members and their customers, and we're also working on enablement and really driving more cross-functional, inclusive competencies and trainings to really enable them and their team members to be more effective. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Cheryl, maybe you could explain to us some of those, the training and the cross-competencies and things like that. You know, I'm sure there's people on the Dell Channel side that need to be educated on other products and vice versa, and there's new products all the time, new changing. You know, Jeff Clark walk-through, you know interesting things with like AI and IoT that are coming in the future. So maybe bring us inside some of that training. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we're very mindful of trying to develop either reference architectures or some of our curriculum around training that would include, you know, vSphere from VMware for example along with the Dell EMC infrastructure or even on our client initiatives a Windows 10 refresh effort that includes AirWatch from VMware. So really looking at the outcome-based opportunity that we know we have to engage in those conversations with our customers so that we can stitch together the training and the availability, and we want to on a future state develop these training so our partners wouldn't have to take them multiple times. It would be credited and eligible in both, VMware's program as well as Dell EMC. So we're really striving to give commonality and be efficient with speed, time to market, and really leveraging all the capabilities across the strategic landline businesses. >> What about some of the feedback that you've gotten from, you know, legacy EMC partners, Dell partners, in terms of how to make this complimentary. Was that, being that the partners are on the front lines talking with customers about all their transformation needs, how have the partners really helped to create this new framework? >> Well, you know, we're always listening, and we host a number of advisory boards, and we listen to our partners, and we've heard very, very common: "We love the product marketing, "but we want you to give us solution marketing. "Can you help enable us "in the outcome-based conversation and dialogue?" One of the things we announced this week is an IT transformation marketing campaign which we're going to put in market with Dell EMC. It's available simultaneously for the partners that essentially really does map together all the technologies and componentry across the strategic landline businesses to the business outcomes that they're talkin' to their customers about. We also launched an IoT Competency for the first time this week which again is really driving at some of those emerging technologies you heard Jeff talk about like AI and getting to machine learning and analytics to really help them engage and be more competent and effective in those technologies. >> Yeah. Cheryl, how's the Channel doing? You know, there's been (Cheryl laughs) so much change going on. I remember back when, you know, converged infrastructure first launched. It was like, "Oh, we need to create data center practices "because they were server or storage people." When Cloud rolled out, it was like, "Well, we're workin' with Microsoft. "How do we figure this out?" How is the Channel transforming? How do they look at their business? How do they look at where they add value? >> Absolutely, and I'll tell ya, Stu, I've been in this business a long time, and I don't know a more exciting time when it's moving faster, and that's also true in the partner ecosystem, in the partner community. So we're still going to transact a lot of business the traditional way that we do now, but increasingly I'm hearin' from the partners they're looking at forming new alliances, they're looking at acquisitions, they're buying new skills and capabilities. We really want to help chart that map for them on kind of where the vision is heading and how we can help align with them. So if it's possible, we want to try and help align new alliances and introductions for them with other partners, or as I said continue to bring solutions, reference architectures, to market that can help them enable around it. >> Can you tell us a little bit about what was announced regarding the Dell EMC Ready Stack for Channel Partners and reference architectures? >> So that's a great example of where we're going to always continue to work to bring engineered systems together like a VxRail or a VxBlock. But the Dell EMC Ready Stack is really a certified and tested reference architecture for those partners in those instances where they want to go build it. So we'll tell them, "Here's all the buildin' materials and all the capabilities. "It'll be a completely inclusive Dell Technology stack," but it's a way to give them confidence, mitigate risk, and they can build it and integrate it rather than buying a system that's been pre engineered. >> Cheryl, how has the Dell Technologies World experience different for the Channel partners? You know, one of the feedbacks I always get is, I was like aw, well, I mean everybody from Dell is really busy, and there's certain things you can tell the customers, but the Channel people it's like, "Well, tell us more about the future. "Give us some of that NDA stuff." How do you manage that and, you know, maybe give us a little bit of flavor of what the week is like for them that are attending. >> Well, you've certainly seen the scale of this event, so we call our Global Partner Summit an event inside an event, but we have everything from technical training, where the partners are able to take their exams and certifications. We certainly have Heroes exposition and Heroes going for the Pre-Sales technical community, and we also have an Executive Briefing Center where we're hosting. Right behind me, we have our partner lounge. We're hosting over 800 one-on-one meetings in that partner lounge where the partners get to meet either with customers. They've certainly brought a lot of customers here. They get to meet with Dell EMC executives or the partner executives, and it's really around collaborating, networking. In many ways it accelerates sales opportunities here, so it's a combination of technical training, networking, executive meetings, obviously product launches and announcements that we're bringing to market, the opportunity to really cultivate and work globally in our Global Partner Summit. So it's a pretty active week, but we have everybody rather busy. >> Talk to us about some of the ways that you are incentivizing and rewarding partners for their loyalty. >> Yeah, well thanks for asking. One of the things we announced this week actually is a My Rewards program, and think of this as a way to accelerate incentives to our partners, sales reps and their Pre-Sale SE community. So it's a platform that's going to allow them to redeem points, so you earn these points. You can either get cash cards, gifts, trips, and it really does go directly to their sales reps and their SEs. So we've launched a really comprehensive loyalty program around our storage offerings. This is an excellent sales tool that our partners can leverage with their customers, but it comes with it a host of incentives and rewards for competitive take-out and displacement, growth of new business and new logos. I mean, our partner community in the last year brought 54,000 new customers to Dell EMC, many of those if they're targeting these competitive takeouts, they're eligible for those incentives, and it's a win-win. >> Cheryl, how is the competitive landscape out there? You know, it's always a balance between, "Well, I want to incent you for loyalty, "but it's a diverse market, "and there's a partner you might grow with "that might end up being more competitive "somewhere down the road." How do ya balance that? How do you work through some of those issues in the field? >> Well, you know, we're very focused on tryin' to earn their business and earn the opportunity in the marketplace. We're incredibly fortunate right now that we've been experiencing double-digit growth. Many of our partners would tell us that they're growing faster with us than others, and to be completely honest, when you look at the categories we compete in, we enjoy market leadership positions whether it's in our servers or in storage or all-flash or hyper-converged. So when you really bring that together, it's an opportunity, candidly, for our partners. We're going to have to earn it every day. We recognize and know that they're business people and they work with other companies, but we're just trying to make sure that we bring simple, predictable, and profitable opportunities in both technology and platforms but also in our program and engagement. >> So the transformation theme has been really predominately woven throughout yesterday and today as well, digital transformation, IT transformation, security and workforce transformation. And in fact, Jeff talked about that during his keynote this morning. What are some of the expectations as the partners being on the front lines with customers, and customers are now looking at leaders like Dell Technologies to say, "How do we start utilizing emerging new technologies?" You mentioned IoT, campaign. How are you, what are your expectations for the Channel to be able to help customers build infrastructures that allow them to take advantage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, to really be able to then transform their businesses to be competitive? >> You know, I am impressed every day when I meet with our partner community. In many ways they're leading the charge. So the natural engagement of some of these leading edge and emerging new technologies, our partners are doing amazingly innovative work on embedding their intellectual property around these. But for our part, what we want to do is certainly make sure that they're aware of use cases. Here's business outcomes, many of which were kind of shown in the keynote, in the big stage earlier this morning, and we'll just drive competencies, we'll give them demo gear, we'll put them in labs in our Executive Briefing Centers. We actively encourage our partners to take advantage of our Solution Centers and our Executive Briefing Centers. It's a fantastic way for them to come into a sandbox and really immerse themselves in the technology and do proof-of-concepts with their customers. So we're going to continue to be focused on doing market research for them. Must of the marketing material that we're bringing out on these transformational campaigns, the partners can benefit and leverage the research that we've done with companies like ESG and IDC and Forbes to really substantiate and build assessments and use cases for business outcomes with their customers. >> Yeah. Cheryl, we've watched since the acquisition, Dell has been very, you know, focused on, "How do we merge these companies? "How do we put this Channel program together?" Would you say are we at kind of a 1.5 version of that now? How when you would talk to the channel, how much more change did they expect kind of throughout the year? And there's always feedback and learning, of course, but (mumbles). >> Well, we're moving fast, but we're also genuinely committed to predictability and consistency with our partners. So one piece of pretty honest feedback we receive is don't change it all the time, right? Don't change it frequently. And we couldn't be more delighted with the success we've had in our inaugural year. I mean, when you just look at the fact that we unified and brought the program together, the success we're both enjoying, it's not completely broken. So we want to make sure that we can make refinements, we can adapt and be responsive to some of these new technologies and new transformations without really being disruptive and have wholesale change. So you'll see us really listen and continue to take feedback from our partners, but frankly, we feel like we're winning right now, and we want to continue to just try and earn it and keep goin' fast. >> The word that comes to mind in summary is symbiosis. >> Yes, yes. >> Thank you, Cheryl, so much for comin' by, >> Absolutely. and congratulations on growing the partner community this year and having over 800 meetings. Wow, that's a lot! >> I know. >> We're busy. Thank you! >> You are busy, thanks so much. We want to thank you for watchin' theCUBE. We are live in Los Vegas, day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman! We'll be right back after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our first day of coverage at Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are joined by a customer of Dell EMC, Fernando Almeida, the head of Infrastucture at Grupo Boticário. Welcome to theCUBE, Fernando. >> Thank you, thank you for invite me. I appreciate it. >> So you've been, as we were talking before we went live, an EMC customer, you're using VMware. This is your first Dell Technologies World, and you picked a big one. 14,000 attendees, loud music. There's a rock band going on there. Just an orientation, for our viewers, of Grupo Boticário. The largest perfume and cosmetics franchise in the world. So it automatically just smelled better when you got onto our side. (Fernando laughs) You guys have a presence in 1750 countries, cities, excuse me, and producing 300 million products every year. With that size of an organization, to be competitive, to offer different shaded products and a superior customer experience, and you think, we've got to transform our business. Where do you start? >> First of all, thank you for inviting me here. I'll talk a little bit about Grupo Boticário. Is a Brazilian company. It's maybe, I think 20,000 employees around the Brazil. Present in 11 countries. I dunno exactly counted but we present in 11 countries. The Grupo Boticário has 4,700 stores around the world. Yes, big, really big. The company is the-- I think is-- We don't have another company. We take companies like us, you know, it's the big one, McDonalds or Avon, no. Boticário is the biggest. The retail company start in 1977. Grupo Boticário is holding, responsible for five brands now: quem disse, berenice?, The Beauty Box, Eudora, and now Vult is the new one. The Grupo Boticário started in 2010, one roading responsible for five brands. It's a great company, a big one. >> Keith: It is big. >> Yeah. >> So, talk to us about some of the challenges being that big, that dispersed. As IT infrascture lead, people look at you to make sure that operation team's going. So talk about some of the pressures as you guys are competing. You really don't, as you say, you don't have a peer. But you have to stay ahead. Talk about some of those pressures of competing on your team. >> The most important, to support this company, we need to stay aware with the technology and they all help us to stay aware with the IT Transformation. My 2018 challenge is change the products, put on IT technology, the most products that they'll have, or other providers. Now when I see-- Do you guys know, see or know something like Butchcar stores, for example. When I go to these stores, we have a lot of lanes to pay. And now, after IT Transformation, we don't have more cashiers, for example. It's like Apple, for example. >> So I can come there and buy a product using my mobile phone. >> Exactly, exactly. This project lead was VMware products, Dell products, EMC legacy products, now Dell technology. I think this is a big project in 2018. >> So let's talk about, you said over 4,000, I think maybe 4700 stores. >> Fernando: Yes, yes. >> So you have a lot of people expecting this seamless, easy experience. Not just the consumers, but also the sales associates in the retail stores. Talk to us about the deployment model. As you needed to evolve IT to support that and allow your company to be competitive, from a technology standpoint, did you look at going from traditional infrastructure to converged, hyper converged? Talk to us about the transformation of your IT infrastructure as an enabler, of your digital transformation. >> Yes, good questions. Before a digital transformation we had, we lost our sales. Because a lot of lanes. >> You had a lot of customers like me, yeah. If there's a long, I can spend two hours shopping, long line-- >> Long line. >> I'm out of there. >> Go to another, you know it's crazy. After meeting with Dell, with VMware, I saw the-- I can't remember the products that I use. Airwatch. >> Keith: Yes. >> Yes, and they show us and it's pretty good to use here. Take care of the big store, to put these products, and I see the difference between a store with a cashier and the store without cashier. The sales grow up like 15%. >> Wow! >> Yeah, yeah. >> That's a dramatic improvement from the business bottom line perspective. >> Because the performance, agility. 15%, just one store. It's amazing. >> That's an amazing story. So Airwatch. VMware, I have to give them more credit. When they bought Airwatch, I can express my head, one billion dollar business. >> Fernando: Airwatch. >> Yeah, one billion dollar business. So it's amazing watching the growth for Airwatch and hearing your story. Can you talk about, you know, Michael Dell talks about Dell Technologies on top of Dell Technologies are best. Let's talk about the back end. Are you guys using some of the products that we saw on stage this morning, VxRail et cetera? >> Yes, yes, yes. We started out using VxRail this year, 2018. In the past, 2017, we changed storage. For example, we had mechanical discs. I can't remember the exact model, but we change for All Flash storage. The performance is pretty good. It's amazing. We put the offline stores, VxRail, Airwatch, all Dell Technology products, you know. Because of this, now we have 20, 25% more performance. It's really good for us. I think this is a big change for us and a big project when I talk about IT Transformation. >> One of the things that we hear often, and especially since the acquisition of the EMC Federation a couple of years ago, is IT leaders want to have seamlessness, simplicity, agility. Those are all keywords everybody needs to have them. But they want to have one stop, a one-stop-shop like Dell Technologies considers themselves. To be able to make digital transformation real. So you were using EMC acquisition, VMware as well. With Dell Technologies, is that allowing you to have this one-stop-shop location and be able to facilitate the transformation to ultimately meet customer demands, that are improving revenue and sales? >> Before the old technology, we have EMC products of course. But now, we have-- When I look at my point of view, the customer point of view, it's better after the change, after the merge, because we have just one company and a lot of products. I just talk to one person to buy a lot of products. It's more easy, it's more closed up (in Portuguese), it's more commitment. I think the portfolio right now is much better than before the merge, EMC with Dell. Now I think is better, much better. >> So let's talk about some of those sales and architecture meetings that you're having with Dell Technologies directly. What's different about that? 'Cause EMC will always come in and say "Oh, we have VMware, we have RSA, we have Pivotal." Unfortunately, they didn't have a server group. They didn't have a desktop group. Much, much bigger organization. One of the fears, is that they would become like their competitors and you'd go talk to a Dell Technologies rep, and there's just too much technology and they wouldn't be able to solution. It doesn't sound like that's been your experience. >> Well, before the merge, we used just EMC storage, only. Because I think, this is my opinion, I think the better products that EMC have in the past, before the merge, is the storage. And now, when I see Dell Technologies have kept the storage, but we have hyper convergence, we have VMware, together with this company. It is one company. For customers, I think it's much better. Just talk to one person like say, a few minutes ago. But, I'd think, when I see my environment in Boticário, I have a lot of challenges in this year because I need to say more. I need to put technology on my stores, to say more. I need to offer, for my final customer, a great product in agility, performance. If we have this, we have more sales, we have more stores. >> One of the things too that I was reading about getting ready for this show, is we're going to hear a lot about digital transformation, IT transformation, data. The volume continues to grow and grow and grow. And we have new technologies, emerging technologies: artificial intelligence, machine learning, IOT. How are you going to be able to leverage all of this data that you have across all of these stores. Data about customers, buying habits and things like that. How are you envisioning, in the future, leveraging emerging technologies to be able to, like you said, increase the number of stores, increase sales, and ultimately delight your customers? >> It's a surprise. (Keith laughs) I can't talk about it. >> Lisa: (laughs) Oh! >> It's really a surprise but you know, we have a great challenge when I think artificial intelligence and the other products, hyper convergence, block chain for example, but, it's a secret. I can't talk. >> It is a tough challenge. We hear the buzz words. I think I agree that it is a competitive advantage that I can take the stuff, stitch it together, and come up with a solution that's acting competitive and helps you to outsell your competition. So, I can appreciate that. Just one quick question about speeds and fees. A global company, a lot of data as you sell a lot more data. Michael said as you grow, the data grows, that you enable better use of the data. It feeds upon itself. What are the building blocks of your data platform? What technologies specifically are you using within Dell's storage portfolio? >> We use Airwatch, like I said. We use all-flash platforms. We use a lot of products, man. >> You're also using some BI-- >> VxRail, Isilon 2. Now we use Isilon 4 to support the stores. Of course, the most important to support the stores is all-flash storages and Airwatch. >> To sum up, you've already made big improvements to sales, to the customer in-store experience, to performance internally, as you mentioned switching to All-Flash Array. So you're well on your way in this digital transformation. We won't ask you any more questions about the secret sauce of using emerging technologies, but we look forward to hearing, maybe next year, what you're doing there to delight your customers. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, Fernando. >> I appreciate it, thank you. >> And you've been watching theCUBE. We want to thank you, as well. We are live, day one of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, with my co-host Keith Townsend. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.