>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Day two of Dell Technologies World. Loads of people here, 14,000 in attendance. 65 hundred partners, analysts, press, you name it. It's here talking about all things transformation. We're very excited to welcome back to theCUBE, Sam Grocott, senior vice president of Infrastructure Solutions Group Marketing. Welcome back! >> I'm psyched to be here, thanks for having me again. >> Lots of news, lots of buzz. >> Mhm. >> Break it down. >> We're powering up the modern data center. I think that was a big theme of this morning's keynote. We're very much focused on taking the, what we refer to as the pillars of the modern data center, to the next level, and being able to introduce a handful of new products this week. Very, very excited about them, and I think we're getting the feedback and response we expected. >> Stu: Yeah Sam, I heard Jeff actually said powers that brand that I want to hear. You know. >> Sam: Yeah. >> We got the PowerMax and the PowerEdge, and you know. >> Sam: You might want to get used to it a little bit. >> Yeah. >> Sam: You might be able to connect a couple trends here. We're powering up the modern data center, but we're not done yet. Obviously today and this week was a big push there, with the introduction of of PowerMax, the new PowerEdge servers. As well as the VX rail, VX rack XDC enhancements. But this is a journey we're on, as we power up the portfolio, and we're just getting started. >> Stu: Alright. Sam, give us the update on the portfolio. You basically have marketing for all the Dell EMC >> That's right. >> Which is the data centerpiece there. EMC you know, Joe Tucci always used to say, overlap's good, I never want to let a wedge in there. But the critique would always be, it was like oh my gosh, I can't figure out, you know, what that portfolio is. >> Sam: Right. >> It's kind of sprawling. So, how do you balance the breadth and meeting what the customers need. And how should we be looking at, both from a product and a market standpoint? >> Yeah, so, you're right. Our history is no creases, no gaps, choice for everyone. Options for everyone. The alternative, one product for everything. We've always chosen not to go that path. However, there is a balance here that I think we all strive for. And that's something that I'm working very closely with the rest of the ISG team and Jeff's team to really understand as we move forward and power up this portfolio. How do we walk that fine balance of choice and flexibility for customers and partners. As well as simplification and simplicity for end users that want to make sure that they're deploying the best upreach solution for their needs. And not confuse them at any time. So, it's a fine line. I think we're making good progress there, we're going to continue to do that as we move forward. >> When you're talking with customers, the users, what is it that they're looking to power up? What, how is it actually applied within an organization? >> Sam: The big shift going on is this world of traditional enterprise applications that are certainly considered mission critical, tier one. Those aren't going anywhere. Those are needed to require the highest levels of resiliency and data services, and everything you would expect from an enterprise grade ray. What is new is the next generation applications that have historically been run in a sandbox, off the beaten path, a line-up business, an architect. Built their own thing, and then guess what, it became important. In fact, now mission critical. This is where you find things like AI, ML, deep learning, IOT. When it becomes mainstream and important, guess whose problem it becomes. It moves to IT. Because that's where they run their end to end data services, their resiliency plans, their data replication plans, business contingency. The expectations of those use cases now, are at the enterprise level. So the bar is being raised there because they don't want sprawl of use cases and applications, especially for their mission critical use cases. So that's what we're focused on. As those apps become mission critical, providing them solutions that give them the enterprise-grade capability, but the performance and capabilities they expect for that other segment of the market. >> Sam, when I look at the portfolio, I wonder if you could speak to really who you're targeting with the messaging. Think back ten years ago, well, EMC was a storage company, Dell was primarily server and PCs and the like. Now we're talking digital transformation. Powering the future. Jeff and Michael and Allison went through all of these trends >> Transformations, yeah. >> How do you position where the products fit and who you're hitting, who some of the chief constituents that you will add to with. >> Yeah, it's gotten more complex. There's no doubt about it. Especially as the next generation work loads emerge in various spots of the organization. As well as some more, as you talk about digital transformation, you're really moving up the stack so to speak in terms of type of people you're selling to. So we've got the world's greatest sales force in the industry, but we've had to modernize them as well. So we've gone through this product modernization. How do we modernize a sales force that of course can have the storage admin conversation. The backup admin conversation. That's what we've been having for 20 years. But that's no longer good enough. You've got to be able to pivot, and go up into the CXO level in terms of the leadership of the IT department. The line of business leaders, which a lot of times are architects or specialists within a given field. And frankly even some cases, in my role, the CMO you're selling into because it's a business data analytics engine, or something that's providing new insights, new markets, and new businesses. So it has gotten more complex there, and the skills required to sell at the byte level all the way up to the boardroom level, is of paramount importance as we go forward. So we spend a lot of time on that now. >> We were talking with a gentleman from TGen earlier today, Stu and I were. It's such an exciting topic, biomedical research. Sequencing the human genome, and how much faster they can do it now, and how much more data they're generating. But they have such potential there, you mentioned Stavros for example, to be able to use that data, combine it, recombine it, to people always say, oh, actionable insights. It's one thing to be able to get actionable insights. It's another thing to be able to have an infrastructure and agility to be able to capitalize on them and deliver differentiated products to market. Revolutionize the customer experience. From a digital transformation perspective, are you finding any industries in particular, you mentioned biomedical research, where they're kind of really leading the charge here and helping you guys develop the product strategy? Or is it more horizontal? >> Sam: Yeah, I think genomics and medical and the health industry are great examples of traditional, large businesses that also play very aggressively in early adopters. I was kind of born and raised in a small company called Isilon, that is now part of the Dell EMC portfolio. And what we are able to do with a breakthrough, leading edge technology ten years ago was we went right after a vertical, go to market strategy, so genomics research, media and entertainment, manufacturing. These are areas that are large businesses but they make big bets on emerging technology, because it's the only place you can go to get those next generation capabilities as those applications mature over time. The great thing about within Dell EMC and the ISG portfolios, we have solutions that can now meet both of those roles needs. More so as they start to mature and become mission critical. I think we're even more well-positioned to help them lead through that transformation that we're seeing going on in all those different verticals today. >> Sam, one of the the things we heard in the keynotes, is are some of the emerging trends. Give us a little look forward, your ISG group, what kind of things are hot on your plate? Especially if you kind of look at the enterprise customers. What's kind of near term and give us a little bit of a roadmap. >> Sam: Yeah. Couple things. I would certainly say cloud, and moving to a cloud, first cloud enabled world. That is really driving a lot of our roadmap innovation as we go forward. So it includes everything from mobility of information, from an on-ram hybrid, to exclusively cloud native off-ram. We're innovating in all of those vectors. You really can't just pick one anymore. So that's a key area. As well as cloud-based analytics and telemetry information. Leveraging the cloud to understand how your infrastructure is operating over time. I would say that's definitely a major area of investment. The other major areas, we have a vision of autonomous infrastructure, within the storage world. Autonomous storage. Really eliminating the need for the day to day management of storage, because the system is so smart, it really takes care of all those typical tasks that consume a storage administrator's, system administrator's day to day. We are in the business of creating outcomes and helping our customers create outcomes. The more we can get them out of the managing and migrating and protecting data and into the application there, where they're adding a lot more value to the organization. I think that's a win-win for both organizations. So machine learning AI as the technology, that's going to allow us to enable an autonomous infrastructure, really make the infrastructure invisible so you can focus on your applications and your outcomes. >> What are some the things that you're hearing from channel partners in terms of, they're on the front lines, often dealing with customers that are at some stage, of a digital, of a transformation journey, we'll say. What's some of the feedback that you're hearing from the channel, we know that there's a number of announcements, we spoke with Cheryl Cook this morning. >> Sam: Yes, good, good. >> How are they being enabled to deliver these solutions, to help drive autonomy for example? >> We've got, in parallel to Dell Tech World, we've got the Global Partners Summit, we've got just an enormous amount of the channel community here for this event. We did make some key announcements, including the Dell MC Ready Bundle. I think it's a great, Ready Stack I should say. Its a great example, which reflects the feedback that they've given us, is give us all the pieces to be successful, to stand up a IT transformation, in their customer's environment. Train them, enable them, package it for them, to make it easy and seamless for them to go in and be that trusted partner for those organizations. So that's one example of the direct feedback from the channel partners. They asked for that offer. We responded very, very quickly. And now we've provided them that kind of end-to-end, kind of reference architecture to build your own Dell EMC end-to-end CI infrastructure. So, very excited about that, and that's direct feedback from the partner community. >> Alright, so that's partner. How about the customer feedback you've gotten so far? Went through a lot of announcements. I can't even imagine how many customer sessions are going on here. >> Sam: Oh yeah. >> What's the consensus so far? >> The excitement is around MVME, and look, we're not first to market. I'm totally okay with that. I'm fine admitting it here in theCUBE. But we are the first to get to market the right way. And that's really what I measure ourselves on. We didn't just build our own custom MVME modules. We didn't build something that would be difficult to add on to, in terms of MVME over-fabrics, or storage class media. We built something architected via software defined architecture, with an end-to-end MVME implementation. Our customers love that because it gives you the right away benefits of performance, but it also in the future, in that they'll be able to easily add in storage class memory, MVME over-fabrics when it becomes available into that system. So its not a forklift upgrade. It's built for today as well as tomorrow. They love that aspect. >> So if customers, their pent-up demand for the MVME solution, can you give us any guidance as to is this going to be 10%, what kind of, how fast will adoption be of something like this? >> Sam: Yeah, so, the reality is, its still fairly early days there as well. We expect this to be an offering that's going to start small and grow over time. That's why, in the high end space where PowerMax is complementing our BMax line, the Bmax 950 and 250 are not going anywhere any time soon. For our organizations that need to bring those next generation applications together, and need that real-time response, PowerMax is the way to go. We expect 60 to 70% of all organizations by 2020 to have at least one real time application running in a mission critical environment. That's one. 60 to 70%. So I would say its still early days. You're going to have a specific need for that level of performance to go to MVME. But it's going to start accelerating here over this year. Particularly with MVME over-fabrics coming to market later. As well as storage class memory. That's going to accelerate it even more. >> Stu: Alright Sam, just want to give you the final word. >> Yep. >> Take aways you want people to have understanding Dell and the Dell EMC portfolio when they leave DELL EMC Dell Technologies World 2018 this year. >> Yeah, certainly I hope they see the investments we're making to power up the portfolio. I think the announcements we made this week have been fantastic in terms of responding to market needs, customer needs. And frankly, I want them to learn more. I want them to watch more and more of theCUBE, to learn deeply how things are rolling out. What was the mind behind the madness of building these products. I know we've got a large amount of the team speaking in theCUBE, but whether its in theCUBE, or through the sessions, learn, adjust. Because everybody's modernizing, everybody needs to transform, this is a great opportunity for them to do that with their skill set and their knowledge in the industry. >> Lisa: Everybody does need to transform. Sam, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE again. >> Thanks for having me. >> Lisa: For sharing what's new, and what you're doing, leading marketing for all of Dell EMC. >> Sam: Thank you, thank you. >> Lisa: You've been watching theCUBE, we want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin, for Stu Miniman, we are live day two of Dell Technologies World in Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (pop 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 the Cube! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back here on the Cube as we continue our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live and we are in Las Vegas. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, we're now joined by Vince Affatati, whose the the global VP of sale and pre-sales at Dell EMC. It's good to see you sir. >> Thanks for having me. >> John: And Dan Serpico who's the CEO of FusionStorm. Dan, good to see you as well. >> Nice to see you. >> Thanks for joining us here we appreciate it, especially late in the day. >> Dan: Yeah absolutely, glad to be here >> First off Dan, tell us a little about FusionStorm and we'll get into the channel partnership a little bit later, but first off a little bit more about what you do. >> Great, well FusionStorm is a global solution provider, we're rapidly approaching a billion dollars in sales, probably hit a billion dollars in sales this year, and Dell Technologies is our principal partner. >> Alright and then the partnership program, if you would get, a little bit of great success, you know, it's just an absolute home run, but, again, how does working with Dan's company kind of personify what you do in the broader scheme? >> Yeah I mean, FusionStorm's a great partner, you know, part of what we want to talk about today is Ready Stack and how, kind of, this partnership and this program evolved based on, kind of cross-engineering and marketing that we do together and how, you know, Dan's team is so much closer, they're very close to the business of our customers and they have a great understanding of what's needed in the marketplace, so they're able to design and engineer and support the service solutions that are really unique, they hit an industry vertical and they really leverage, kind of, the best of our technologies, so, it's a great partnership. >> Dan: Yes it is. >> Yeah, Dan maybe you could expand a little, you said that, you know, Dell's your primary partner, why is that, you know, what kind of things do they do to enable you from a channel partner to meet what your customers need and, you know, make the money you need to run your business? >> Boy-oh-boy, we probably don't have enough time in this interview to talk about why Dell's our best partner. Look, all kidding aside, they are our largest partner, they have the broadest portfolio of technology solutions bar-none compared to any of our other partners, they're number one in most of the technology stacks, which is really important, our customers want leading edge technology. Our customers are Google, Facebook, Apple, Square, Pandora, they want leading edge technology as part of their play and Dell has really a incredible portfolio, then frankly, from the business side, the tremendous partnership with the great channel program, which gives us a terrific opportunity to partner from a marketing perspective, back-end rebates and incentives are a critical part of our value add and profitability model, so they touch all of the important points that make us a viable business. >> Vince, we talked to Marius Haas a little bit this morning about how the Dell and the EMC pieces came together and of course, you know, long history of channel with both sides, but bring us inside some of those, you know, incentives and rebates and things that Dan was talking to, you know, how does Dell set up those programs and, you know, bring us inside a little bit. >> Yeah, so, there's front-end rebates and there's back-end rebates, we're actually in our second year of rebate design, so we've done some things to kind of change it, but ultimately, there's rebates paid on dollar one across our full, a full stack, so, and then as the metal, as you go in the metal tiers, the rebates kind of increase, right, so our top tier partners get a higher rebate amount and then today, we announced a richer rebate for taking our competitive gear, so that's on the back-end and those are the traditional design. Now on the front-end we have storage rebates, we announced about five months ago or so, which incent you to basically sell our modern infrastructure or the storage side, include DPS into those designs and then take out competitive gear. We also have some incentives for proposal writing and demand generation as well, so a pretty rich program. >> Alright, so Dan here's the question I have for ya. Dell, they've got a lot of offerings out there and change is something that, you know, at the keynote this morning they said, you know, today compared to the past, you know, is the busiest we've ever been, but tomorrow there's even going to be more change. So, do they make it simple, I mean, you know, that's something, you know, we're all looking for, you got to run your business, you got to listen to your customers, you know, how is it easier when, you know, working with Dell? >> Well, I think it's easier because they are leading the pack, really, if you think about the world of technology and how it evolves constantly, everybody is leap-frogging everybody else every six months, so what you want is, you want a partner who's going to be leading the technology play for the future, honestly. Our business 15 years ago sold, 99% of what we sold 15 years ago, we do not sell a nickel today, not a nickel because that partner couldn't keep up with the evolution that takes place in technology today. So really, while I appreciate the question, it's really not about what's easy, it's what is most advanced so that you can stay competitive. >> You know, Vince was talking about incentives, he was talking about rebates, right. And so, from your side of that fence, if you will, how critical is it that you have those kinds of opportunities or you have that kind of incentive, I would think in a competitive environment, it's fairly crucial, right, I mean, you've got to be able to offer to each other and then down the line, that kind of value, right? >> It's tremendously important, we pride ourselves on our ability to help influence customers in their buy-decisions around technology, okay. And so, look we're not going to sell, regardless of what the incentives are, we aren't going to sell bad products and bad technologies 'cause that's a good way to lose customers, but certainly the financial rewards for our sellers, for our SEs, and for us as a company so we can continue to stay viable is critically important and we absolutely take advantage of the programs that are in place with Dell and others too, by the way, but certainly with Dell and direct our customers to those things that make the most sense for them. >> Yeah, right, I mean really, simple, predictable and profitable, we talk about it a lot, but that's ultimately where we're trying to go. We're not perfect, we've learned a lot, but, you know, strong partnerships like this make it clear that that's the right way to go about it and it is more than just incentives, it's staffing, it's dedicating people to help, help make the business easier, doing boot camps and joint seminars and, you know, selling together. And that works. >> Vince, the other thing, can you put into context for us, you know, Ready Stack, we've got everything from, you know, Full Stack, everything bake to, you know, some of the software platforms, you know. What's in here and, you know, how does this fit in the overall? >> So, Ready Stack is a way to address a market that we haven't gone after directly, which is the build systems, when you look at converge infrastructure, it's about a six billion dollar market. We own about 49% of that and with the VxBlock 1000, is a good example of those, kind of, integrated systems, right? But what we haven't really done a lot of and we're really going into feet-first, head-first is the idea that we want to help with customers who aren't ready to buy the Full Stack, but they want to do something that's engineered special right? So, providing, Ready Stack is a way to, it's so we're close with our, it's a partner exclusive program we work with the partners to make it easier for them to sell our tech, right, into converged environments to help solve problems. I mean, it's something that you guys do everyday, already, but it's a program to help with the engineering and provide incentives, to make that easier to do. >> Well, I think that's right, the converged infrastructure which is, you know, what we call this, is probably, outside of maybe cloud computing and that world, the single fastest growing part of the tech space today, right? It's what our customers need, it's what our customers want. I think that what's unique about the Ready Stack play here, the architecture, is that it's flexible, okay? It's flexible and leads with Dell and leads with certified architecture, as opposed to others who are just taking piece parts from different vendors, cobbling it together and calling it a certified converged play, this is a truly converged play that has flexibility. Flexibility could mean that someone's, a customer's storage needs grow faster than compute needs or vice versa, alright? So you're not locked in a solution, but you still, you're locked in on a framework that allows you to expand based on your unique needs, then when you take their architecture and their engineering capabilities in combination with ours, the blueprints, you get, you have a really robust solution that we can align ourselves with and be consistent in terms of our delivery to the customers. >> So, you tell us about flexibility, I mean that, that's kind of a buzzword, right? I mean, you want to give people the ability to customize, right? Do people, I mean, are your customers now, you know, Dan, do they really, I mean, do people know what they want or because they have new capabilities, they have new, there are new avenues they can go down, new choices. I mean, how do you get 'em there? >> Well, our customers are very smart, again, if you heard the partial list of customers that we have, they are very smart and they're looking at this. >> Stu: You mentioned a couple of big names there. >> We've recognized a few of those. >> But they are very smart and access to Dell, lot of them are here at Dell Technologies World, they read information on the internet, these are very smart people, of course, but let's not undermine our role, or underestimate our role in helping them, whether it's through our labs, to do bake-offs, we can take, we can run some of their workloads on our architecture or the Dell architecture versus others and they can see how this technology works or how their workloads work, what performs better for them for their unique specs. There is constantly discussion around white boarding, okay? The technology is moving all the time and I don't think that can be underestimated either, right? If you look at a data center, if you picked up a thousand customers and looked at their data center, probably no three of them would be exactly alike because of the nature of technology, so what you need, is you need an OEM, like Dell Technologies get a robust portfolio of products and a good partner, like FusionStorm who can offer that robust portfolio and help it be fully integrable with all these other technologies, right? Look, the truth of the matter is that we would love to rip out somebody else, but that has a depreciation life and CIOs have to live with something they bought last year, for three years. So, how is that compatibility going to exist? That's very important; so all those things are part of the education of our customers. >> Vince, I know there's a huge push at this show, working with the channel partners, bringing them all together; but give us a little view past Dell Technologies World, you know, for this program, some of the roadmaps; what should we, that are watching the industry, look for throughout the rest of the year and in the channel partners? >> So, you mean what's coming forward or what? >> Stu: Just walking away from here. >> John: The road ahead! >> Stu: Your program, the road ahead, yeah. >> The road ahead, absolutely, so I'll tell you, particularly, let me focus for a minute on, on Ready Stack and where we're going there. So, as I said, we're, the idea here is maximum flexibility, but we also want to provide guidance and compatibility and sizing. So, what you'll see from us over the next year, is a lot, a lot of engineering around this program and working on building different scenarios, common scenarios and scenarios that we're learning about, you know, working with FusionStorm and our other partners, around the world. So, you'll see a lot of engineering going on around creating these design guides to deployment guides and help with sizing and we think that's really important. You'll also notice that, this is going to be hypervisor agnostic and so they'll be support for other hypervisors in this, we realize that other people do use other hypervisors besides VMware, which is kind of odd, but we know it exists, right, so a KVM we're work, they'll be, you'll see solutions that support KVM, we'll have solutions for Docker, we'll see, you'll see Hyper-V in here as well. Again, it's a realization that there's more to this do-it-yourself kind of options and we want to be there to support that, but we do think great integration, great support, sizing, is what you'll see more of as we kind of go through the year. >> Which brings us right back to flexibility, right? Give the people what they want, when they need it, right? >> Now we also say, our engineer systems, right? VxRail, our hyper conversion converge systems, we're not saying we're de emphasizing that, we're not at all, but we're realizing that, you know, more and more working with our partners there's, we're addressing a very large and growing part of the market space. >> Dan, Vince, thanks for being with us. >> Yeah. >> Thank you very much. >> We appreciate the time, enjoy the rest of the show, but I'm sure it's going well for ya. >> It's wonderful. >> And we hope to see you down the road. >> Terrific. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for joining us. Back with more here on the Cube; we're live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018. (electronic music)