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

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in Las Vegas for a wrap up on day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE coverage at Dell EMC World, our eighth year covering EMC World Now, first year covering Dell EMC World. It's part of the big story of Dell and EMC combining entities, forming Dell Technologies, all those brands. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-hosts this week, Paul Gillin and Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor. Guys, great week, I thought I'd be wrecked at this point. But, I mean, a lot of energy here but we heard every story. We heard all the commentary, we heard the EMC people trotting in, about their customer references. We hear the executives on message. Bottom line, let's translate it for everybody. (laughing) All the messaging, pretty tight. >> Yes. >> All singing the same songs. My take away real quickly on messaging, they want to portray that this is all good. Everything's fine. No icebergs ahead. We are going to help customers try to move from speeds to feeds, a bigger message. Not getting there yet. Still speeds and feeds. 14 (mumbles), 14G, that's kind of the high level, thoughts? >> This company wants to dominate. I mean, what we heard again and again these last few days is number one, number one. They want to own the top market share in every market in which they play, and they have a broad array of products to do that. They have a huge mix of products, maybe too many products, but with some overlap, but that's okay, but they clearly are trying to blanket or carpet bomb those markets where they think they can win. Interestingly, there are some markets like big data, like software or cloud infrastructure where they are choosing not to be a big player, and that's okay too. It means they are focused. >> John: Keith, your thoughts. >> So, again, I agree with you, tight marketing. They wanted to get out this message. I think if the present analysts get together at the beginning, they emphasized 310 analysts, from analysts and press, from all over the world. They get out the message. They get these guys and gals in here to cover that message that Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, is the leader in this space. You know what? When big mergers like this happen, I can't think of one that happened well. They are usually rocky to begin with. We haven't seen those rocks at the beginning. We haven't see that at the show. It seems like the messaging has been consistent, the customers more or less get it, and that we can't detect the chinks in the armor, so I think they did a great job of getting that out there, and portraying the stress of the brand, and throughout the show. It was a great show for them. >> They have a good story. Their story better together, obviously that's the whole theme. My impression is, in weaving through all the messaging, is generally, authentically the people are pretty happy with it. I think EMC people have been trying to break out of this, we're a storage company, you know, and I won't say they had a little bit of VMware envy, but VM World events were always different than the EMC World, so those culture clashes weren't necessarily too divergent, but different. You had storage guys, and you had VMware developers, right, so I think EMC was always trying to break out and be bigger, and just couldn't get there. Dell wanted to be more enterprise, right, so I think the two together actually is better, in my opinion. Now will it work? I still think your post is still open. They merged for the right reasons, but look it, they're not done. They got a boat-load of work to do. >> I think they're aware, to Keith's point, they are aware that history is against them, that mega mergers don't work, never have worked in this industry, and so that creates a lot of pressure to make this one work, and the good thing about that for both companies is that they're aware of what went wrong in the past. I mean, we had Howard Elias on this show the first day. Howard Elias went through two of the worst tech mega mergers in history with Compaq Digital and HP Compaq, knows where a lot of those landmines are, so they seemed hyper aware of getting everyone on message, getting everyone talking positively about synergy, and as you said John, the language was consistent from the start. >> Alright, I want to ask you guys a pointed question on that point cause it kind of brings out the next question. Management team, do they have the chops, because, to your point, history's against them, okay? We sat down with Michael Dell, founder, lead entrepreneur, still at the helm. He's a billionaire. They're private, so no shot clock on the public markets. Marius Haas, he's a pro. Howard Elias, a pro. Goulden, he does his thing. On and on and on. I think they got a pretty deep bench. I mean, your thoughts guys? >> So, let's think about that. How many bad mergers has EMC gone through? Data domain >> Paul: Home run. >> Incredible. >> Paul: Home run. >> Home run. >> Paul: DSSD. >> DSSD, well, not so much, but that wasn't really that big of a merger. >> They kind of cleaned that up pretty quickly. >> Yeah, they did, what doesn't work they get it out quick, so great management team understands the complexities of mergers. VMware merger, or acquisition, probably one of the best in the history of tech, so the management team has the chops to understand where the value is added, extract that value, and expand it. >> That's a great point. And they know when to leave stuff alone too. >> John: Yeah, engineering lead but they're also, because we heard Jeff Boudreau on talking about the storage challenges. He's like, we know what to do, we took the lumps trying to, late to the game on Flash, we're not going to be late to the game in these other areas, and he is very hyper focused. But the other thing that we didn't talk about is that EMC has just been an impeccably, credible sales organization. They know how to sell, they know how to motivate sales people. They know how to tell the tell the enterprise sales motion, which is the biggest challenge in today's industry. Every company I talked to, startup to growing IPO is we need better enterprise sales. Look at Google. Look what they're doing in the cloud. They are struggling because they have great tech and horrid sales people. They are hiring young people doing phone work. Enterprise sales is a tricky game. >> Arguably the best enterprise sales force on the planet was EMC. I mean, these are the guys who would get on a plane at midnight, would charter a plane at midnight, to get to the customer's site to fix a problem, and no other company does it like that, and Dell has a lot to learn from that. If Dell can really take that knowledge and that culture and absorb it into their own enterprise sales force, they are going to have huge opportunity with their server division. >> I want to take a minute just to thank our sponsors for their awesome CUBE coverage. You guys did great. Dell EMC, Toshiba, Virtustream, Cisco, Dato, Nutanix, Druva, and VMware. Thanks to your support, we had two CUBEs covering VM World, 20 plus videos a day, for 3 straight days. All that's on youtube.com/siliconangle. Of course, siliconangle.com for all the journalism and reporting. Wikibon.com for all the great research, and also a shoutout to Keith at @CTOAdvisor. Check him out on Twitter, always part of the conversation, super influential. Guys, great job this week. Just high level marks. My take away? Hyper converge, big time focus on these guys. VMware is the glue, Hybrid Cloud, and they're defensively using Pivotal to hold the line on Amazon, so thoughts on that point? I see you rolling your eyes. >> I just got out with James Watters, the SVP within that business unit. Pivotal is a key part of this. You know Michael has stressed on theCUBE, on Twitter, how important Pivotal is to their long term success. One of Dell's challenges, Dell EMC's, and this is not just Dell EMC, it's infrastructure companies throughout the landscape, is getting out of that conversation with their VP of infrastructure, getting into the offices of the CIOs, COs, CMO, and having these business conversations, and it's going to take a Pivotal type of solution to get that done. I thought Michael made a very great point that that white glove services, that's basically their service organization, is basically the older EMC services organization that's used to getting on a flight, solving the problem. Whatever the original statement at work was, they are willing to tear that up, and get down, get dirty, and get that done. They need to translate that >> The question for you then is this, without Pivotal, they have no play for the app developers? >> Keith: None. >> Amazon would mop that up and they'd have no positions, so I would say it is certainly a placeholder, a good one, I'm not going to deny that. The question is how big is that market for them. Can they get there, can they hold the line on Pivotal and bring in some resources and cavalry to keep that going, thoughts? >> This is where VMware comes into play. VMware has the relationship with the software layer at least, and they have a great story to tell. They need to get in front of the right people and tell that story, that CrossCloud story of being able to develop using CF and then move that to any cloud using NSX. Great story, but John, to your point, they have to get into the right rooms and have the right conversations, >> Yeah. >> Keith: That's a tough thing to do. >> I also got to give them some time. I mean, this merger happened eight months ago. I think it's pretty remarkable what they have pulled off here in such a short time, and to think about the developers are probably not their first priority right now. >> Alright, so we are going to do the metadata segment of our wrap up, which I just made up since it's such a good name, metadata, in the spirit of surveillance. What metadata can you pull out of your interviews, guys, that's a tea leaf that we could read and just nuance points, I'll start. Pat Gelsinger talked about Pivotal sharing, in between the conversations kind of weaved in, yeah, we had to spin out Pivotal, but I could almost see it in his eyes, he didn't say it specifically, but he's like, we shouldn't have sold it, right? And they had to because he said he had to work on the foundational stuff, get NSX done, get that right, but you can almost see that now as, I'd like to bring that back in, although a separate company. To me, I find that a very interesting data point, that that actually makes a lot of sense to your point about VMware. That might be an interesting combination. Why take Pivotal public, roll it into VMware. >> Yeah, I think that is going to be a interesting space to watch over the next few months. VMware and Pivotal have started to once again come back together with solutions. This NSX, CrossCloud talk makes it very compelling. It's hard to predict Dell EMC being relevant long term. They understand the value short term. They have a short rope to take advantage of this cross selling between the Dell and EMC customer. They can grow this business, get revenue short term, but there will be a cliff where they need to make that transition. Cisco is trying to make that transition into a services company, a software company, and it's hard to turn down one knob and turn the other one up. We'll see if Pat, Michael Dell, and the team have the chops to get it done. >> Cisco has to endure the public markets while they are doing that, which is one advantage Dell has. >> Data point that you can extract that you take away from this? >> Synergy, synergy. I mean when two companies this big come together, you're looking at a lot of product line overlap. I came out of this, though, thinking that there really isn't that much product line overlap. You've got a company that's strong in the mid market, with the small companies, a company that's strong in the enterprise, storage, servers, not a lot of overlap there. The big question for me, so I think the synergy question is this merger makes sense from that perspective, and the big question is software, what are they going to do with those software assets, and to your point, the future is going to be, software defined everything, and that's not a story they're telling yet. >> Keith, extracted insight that you observed that was notable that you kind of picked out of the pile of the interviews. Anything notable to you? Something obscure that made you go, wow I didn't know that, oh that's a good piece of the puzzle to put together. >> You know what, just the scale of, you look at the merger, 57 billion dollars, and on paper you are like, okay that's interesting, but a lot of the numbers coming out, you know, we talked to the senior VP of marketing and he says, you know, my guys are making bank, actually that's to paraphrase him. You said that John, that they are making bank, and one of the things that I worried about was the culture, the sales culture between Dell and EMC. Dell sales culture, very web based, very, you know I had a Dell rep and there was not an awful lot of value add, EMC >> Paul: Value add. >> The value add, and those guys earned their money, and bringing those two together and making sure that customers don't miss a beat and still get that EMC value, but Dell is able to maintain that same cost structure, I thought that was a really complicated thing to do. It seems like they are executing really well on that, and I thought from a customer's perspective, you want your supplier to make money and you want it to not be too disruptive, but you know, you want to see some value. >> Great point, that was one of highlights of my take aways, Marius Haas' interview around sales and comp and structure. They are used to a lot of bank, those sales guys, and now it's like, hey we're going to give you a haircut, what? I was about to make a million dollars on commissions this year. >> This merger will not work unless the sales organization is in sync. >> Other notables for me, just that jumped out at me, that kind of made me go, that amplifies a point, that's memorable is Michael Dell's interview hits home the point of entrepreneur founder, lead guy, and there's only three left in the industry, Ellison, Dell, and Bezos, in my mind that are billionaires that are actively, not mailing it in, they are actively driving their business, have a great ethos and culture that is creating durability. I find that the key point for me, that was a moment. I think he does sell Pivotal a little too much, which gives me a little red flag, like hmm, why is he pushing Pivotal so much, what is he hiding, but that's a different story. Michael Dell, founder. Gelsinger shared some personal commentary around his personal life. 2016 was the hardest year of his life. >> Keith: That was a mean story. >> Personal and business. Almost got fired. Remember last year? >> Yeah. >> Pat Gelsinger, you're fired. So, he had a tough year, now he's kicking ass, taking names, evaluation's on the rise. That jumped out at me. And finally, the little nuance in this merger is the alliance opportunity. Dell had the Intel, wintel, Microsoft relationships from day one, that history, Intel was on stage. EMC's had it, but not at the deep level that Dell did. So I see the alliance teams really grooving here, so that's going to impact channel marketing, SIs. I think you are going to see a massive power base, to your scale point, around alliances in the industry, the ecosystem. It's either going to blow up big or blow up bad. Either way its high octane power, Intel. >> Keith: It is a big bet. >> It's a big bet. Those are my points. Anything that jumped out at you, final thoughts, interviews? >> Jeff Townsend threw off an interesting statistic, 70% of the traffic on the internet will be video by 2020. I never heard that one before, but that has some pretty interesting implications for how infrastructure has to manage it. >> Yeah, great for our business. We're doing video right now. Keith, anything that jumped out at you, anything else? >> The scale of this show compared to, I've been at Dell World, I've been to EMC World. The energy is different here. I can say that for sure, from the EMC Worlds and the Dell Worlds that I've been at. Customers, I think, are wide eyed. I've been to plenty of VM World's. It doesn't quite have the flavor of a VM World, but I think customers are starting to understand the scale of Dell EMC, the entire portfolio. You walk the show floor, you're like, wow I didn't know >> John: The relevance has increased. >> Just little bits of this larger Dell technologies that customers are picking up on, that they're keying on that there's value there. >> The 800 pound gorilla, the very relevant impact, people are taking notice. >> If you are a one product Dell customer or a one product EMC customer and you are coming to the show for the first time, I think you're a little bit wowed. >> Alright, guys, great job. Keith, great to have you host theCUBE. Great job, as always. Really appreciate you bringing the commentary to theCUBE. Great stuff. >> Always great being here. >> Paul, great editorial, great insight, great questions. Great to work with you guys. Great to the team. Thanks to our sponsors. Go to siliconangle.com, wikibon.com, and go to youtube.com/siliconeangle and check out all the videos and the playlists, more coverage, great. Thanks for watching our special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. See you next time.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas here at Dell EMC World, The Cube's live coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Keith Townsend. We're joined by Don Norbeck. He is the senior director, customer experience engineering, architecture and product management here at Dell EMC. It's a mouthful, but we got it in. >> Figured I'd try and get the largest title ever. >> So, well done, good job. So, talk to, explain to our viewers a little bit about what you do as a customer experience engineer. >> Well it's really broken down into three things. The first thing we do is really look at our customers through data analytics and the try to understand what makes them successful. That's looking at their initial C set, that's looking at their interactions with our services teams and our support teams, looking at the configurations that they have. Looking for patterns of causality and correlation. Second thing we do is a lot of our customers have a lot of ideas on how to expand the platforms and portfolios that we put out there on our CPSD. How to expand the V Blocks, the Vx Racks, the Vx rails. We take those ideas as field innovation. We look for the ones that are repeatable, and we bring them back into the general roadmap. The third thing that we do is, this is a new program, is what we're calling a not-so-secret shopper. So, we go out, and we act as a customer. We buy it, we experience the sales cycle. We ask the questions to go and consolidate down to the need. We go and install it, and we live with it for a while. And we give that feedback, from an end-to-end customer experience perspective. >> And so talk about that not-so-secret shopper program. I love it. What are you finding? What's the feedback? >> We're finding that you can only prepare for every question that you know, so we find a lot of times customer experiences have been great, but there's those little things, that we don't think are nits, but do come up when you switch your perspective and put it into their shoes. Literally and physically sometimes. That you're not going to understand what a customer feels, unless you're acting like that customer. >> Rachel: You've walked a mile in the customer's shoes. >> Exactly. That goes a long way. Because when you're an engineer, you tend to think of things within your own data center or within your own product development experience. You don't always have that perspective. And I had a unique thing 'cuz I came from a customer. Seven years ago I bought one of the first V blocks. It took me about eight weeks to bring up, we had revenue flowing through it. We set it up as a cloud for a service provider, and I continue to drive that experience, what I felt, back into what we do everyday. >> So, how has the customer conversation changed from seven, eight years ago, to now? Same conversation? Different conversation? >> It's actually both. So this is my tenth EMC World, Dell EMC World. I've been as a customer and as a presenter, and we tell the transformation story. We tell the transformation story that you have to stop doing certain things, like playing around with cables, to be able to do certain other greater things for your organization for the line of business. We still tell that story, and it surprises me every EMC World that there is a percentage of customers that have not heard that, that can benefit from that experience. Sometimes you get a little jaded saying the same things over and over again. But it is impactful, it does. For those customers that have gone through that transformation, it's talking about what's next for the platforms. >> Yeah, so what are the opportunities that you're seeing out there? What is next? >> I think this show itself is highlighting some of the opportunities. You go back two or three EMC Worlds ago, and it was all about the product line itself. There's a VMAX World, there's a VnX World. Now those things are still highlighted, but they're highlighted in how you can use them to achieve an outcome. They're embedded in a system, they're embedded in a solution, they're embedded in a practice, or an approach to an outcome for a customer in innovation. So, I think a lot of customers are hearing that story, and you're seeing a switch from asking how many spinny drives does this have, to how can this change my business, change the way that we approach a business problem. >> So, I'm interested in this second phase, this story behind innovation as I've gotten, whether it's a Vx Block, a Vx Rail, whatever the platform that I've gotten in, there's integration points, and I need help figuring it out. What are some of the innovations that your team has helped when you're or, actually what are some of the most interesting use cases that's come to your team and customers asked you to help expand the capability of the platform? >> Excellent question. We've heard our customers. Coming into our last year, we have five V Block families. Vx Block, and then have Vx Block version, so 10 different model lines. Customers wanted to combine some of the model lines, and we found and heard, that you couldn't get from say a 300, which was a VnX based, add a VMAX to it, it wouldn't work. But if you started with a VMAX base, and added a VnX base to it, it would work. The reason was the size of the MDS switches in between. So that doesn't make sense. You should be able to enable that to have a customer to have two storage arrays based on the need that they have. So the two innovations that came out of a customer, one was a process innovation, which was listen to the customer and tell us what they were going to become, rather than just what they needed today. So asking that question helped us gear them to an infrastructure that can support both use cases. Second one was changing the architectural approach. And moving from three or five model lines, that you have to take the new, hottest component, and try to jam it into each of them, and do five different engineering approaches, well maybe if we just did one engineering approach, we may be able to apply it to all the model lines that are appropriate. So, instead of having a system out approach, it was infrastructure up and customer need in. >> So what I keep hearing is, really understanding the customer's needs, and it sounds like you need, this requires a lot of empathy. So how does this work just from the developer's side, in terms of working so closely with the customer, and knowing the great questions to ask. I mean, is there any kinds of advice that you give to your team, in terms of how to really get at the problems? Because sometimes, the customer doesn't even understand what the problem is, they just know there's an issue. >> First thing is to get out of speeds and feats. If you get out of just the technical bits, we usually have the argument, green cables are better than blue cables. That part doesn't matter. The part that matters is what you're going to use it for. So getting past that into why, and the outcome is the first approach. And then, after you get out of, get answers based on that, you go into what I call PACCS, performance, availability, cost, compliance, security. Those are the hows that you achieve the why. Then it can get down to blue cables and green cables. But engineers always want to start with the green cable. I had bad experience with blue cable, so I need the green cable this time. Why did you have a bad experience? You can ask a bunch of questions to elevate the discussion. >> So put your customer hat back on. First V Block that you bought was eight years ago. You're almost coming up on your second refresh. What excites you about the new portfolio products, where the portfolio has moved, what excites you? >> What excites me is if you think about all the configurations that are possible, it's ten by a really large number, but not all of them are good. You can do anything but you can't do everything. What excites me is that we're spending more and more time narrowing down the prescription on what's appropriate for purpose. And that's interesting for me as a customer, because if I can buy something and I know it is appropriate for purpose, I can worry about that purpose, not just the infrastructure that I put it on. So that really excites me. Other things that really excite me are we're going to that broader architectural approach but still maintaining the prescription that allows us to give the support experience. And how we're doing that is, we're going to see some things later in the year around the refresh of the V Block that allows a lot more interconnectivity from those purposes. And that architectural infrastructure allows us to package things for purpose, rather than creating a system for purpose. That's really interesting. But what really gets me, is the future. The next step after that is how we bring the benefits of software definition, that is really, lit the HCI world on fire, to the convergence world. How do we bring that back down? So we have an amazing portfolio from servers to storage to networking. Wouldn't it be nice for us to go out and scan what a customer has, and tell them what their infrastructure could become? What purposes it could be used for, what configurations are no good, what configurations are known bad, that you should go in and remediate? And I think we're really at the point where the software investments that we're making are going to lead us to that type of experience. >> I'm sensing the theme of next year's Dell EMC World. Don, thanks so much for joining us. It was great. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Keith Townsend. We'll have more from Dell EMC world after this. (upbeat techno music)