>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and this is day three of our coverage of the inaugural Dell Technologies World. We're in the home stretch. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante joining you, with Alison Dew, the newly minted CMO of Dell. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, good to be here. >> So, you've been with Dell for a long time. >> 10 years >> You know the drill, you know the culture. But, 23 days as CMO? >> Yes >> Well congratulations. You were on stage today, awesome show. >> Thank you, I couldn't be more delighted. Great experience for me personally. Great show for our customers. >> Yeah, I'll bet. I mean, and you brought in some outside speakers this year, which has not been typical of this show, at least the legacy EMC world, and certainly Dell World did that. >> Stu: Dell World did, definitely. >> Alison: Dell World did do it more, you know. >> Yep, Bill Clinton, we saw some other amazing speakers. >> Elon Musk >> Elon Musk, I remember the year Elon came. >> So that's good, and you got to interview Ashton Kutcher >> Yeah >> Which was quite amazing. He's an unbelievable-- people don't know, he's an investor, he's kind of a geek. >> Alison: Yep >> Even though he's, you know >> An engineer by training? >> Right, so what'd you think of his discussion? >> I mean, I thought it was fantastic and, as you said, I think people don't quite realize how involved in technology he actually is. And also, how well and successful his businesses have been. And then, equally important, the work that he's doing with his foundation and the way he's using technology for really important human causes. I don't think he gets enough credit for that, so it was great to sit on stage and have that conversation. It was super fun. >> Yeah, cause we know him from That 70's Show. >> I know, I like That 70's Show. >> And he's a goofball, and he comes across He's a great actor, lot of fun. >> Yeah, there was one of the lines I actually really loved from the presentation. It's that he looks for companies that have counter-intuitive thesis because if you're doing something that everybody else is, then chances are somebody is going to catch you and everything else like that. You also had to talk about geeks. You know, John Rose and Ray O'Farrell, up there. Share a little bit about some commonalities you saw between these speakers, and some of the unconventional things they're doing. >> So, I completely agree. I love the point of talking, there's so much hype in the space. And that's why I think that line is so important. And so, the big commonality that we're really seeing and talking about this year in particular is we've been talking for years about data as the rocket fuel of the economy and of business transformation, and now we're really talking about data combined with those emerging technologies. So, things like AI, IOT, Blockchain, which are really taking that data and unlocking the business value because for years, there's been this hype about big data, but I don't think the reality has quite been there. And now as those technologies catch up, we're really starting to see some practical applications and use cases and that's why I thought, in particular, John Rose's section on AI and how we're seeing some of those really emerging practical applications was so interesting and fun and tied really well to Ashton's talk track. >> You know, that's a good point. I mean, I feel like we started covering the big data trend really early on. And I feel like big data was like the warm up. It's cheaper now to collect all this data. Now that we have all this data, we're going to apply machine intelligence to that data. We're going to scale it, with cloud economics and that's really what's going to drive value and innovation. What are your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. We talked this morning on the stage even about some of the companies, large and small, who are really doing that. I think one of the examples that's really interesting Wal-Mart using Blockchain technology to decrease the amount of time from seven days to mere seconds that it takes them to identify the source of food contamination. Really interesting things where, a couple of years ago even, frankly even 18, 20 months ago, that would have been a promise, but maybe not a reality. And so that's what I think is really exciting. Finally. >> It's something that's actually resonated with me this week. We've talked for my entire career, there's the journeys. And it was like, a lot of times it's the journey of the technology. A couple of years ago, digital transformation was "Okay, is it real? Isn't it?" Every customer I talk to, they understand making it real as you said in the keynote, where they're going. What kind of feedback are you getting from people at the show? >> So one of the things I talked about briefly on Monday, but I think is really important, is this promise and the hope and the optimism of digital transformation. And yet also, the fear behind it as well. Through some of the work that we've done in our own research for Realizing 2030, we're really seeing that about 50% of our respondents say they believe in the power of the human machine partnership, which means that 50% don't. And all of the data questions are really divided and polarizing like that. And as a lifelong researcher, that's really interesting to me because it says that there's something going on there. And yet, at the same time, we're seeing over 85% of the respondents that we talk to who say they're committed to becoming a software defined company in five years. So this idea of "I know what I want to do "I know what it means to transform an industry, "And yet, I'm still not really sure that's going to "do me or my business good. "I'm not really sure what that means for "myself or my employees, getting really practical. "Obviously about the technologies, "that's what we do, "but the examples of how people can do "that better from a business perspective." That's a lot of the customer conversation that I've had over this week. >> But you're an optimist. You believe the world would be a better place as a result of machines. >> Yes, I do and we do. Are you an optimist? >> I am, I think there's some obviously some challenges but there's no question. Stu and I talk about this all the time, on theCUBE, that machines have always replaced humans throughout history. For the first time now, it's on cognitive functions, but the gap is creativity and eduction. So I am an optimist if we invest in the right places and I think there's an opportunity for public policy to really get involved. Leadership from companies like yours and others, politicians, of course. >> Dave and I did an event a couple of years ago with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssono, you had Andy here. Cause it's really it's not just the technology, it's technology and people, and those have to go together. And Dave said, there's policy and there's so many different layers of this that have to go into it. >> And I think we're just starting to really enter into that. On that optimist versus the robots are coming to get us spectrum, obviously there are things that we have to look out for as leaders, as society, as businesses. And yet, even if you look at the example from this morning, where Ashton is talking about minimizing child sexual trafficking and using AI and machine learning to one, arrest many of the perpetrators of these crimes, as well as free thousands of children from sexual slavery. I mean, you hear those examples, and it's hard not to be an optimist. >> I want to ask you about your digital transformation and how that's being led inside of Dell, what it means to you. >> So, obviously, we are two huge companies that came together. So when we talk about digital transformation, and what that really means, have a very different way of operating and working with IT and being in a different business model, we know that really well. One of the things that's really interesting for me personally, as the CMO for 23 days, is one of the biggest line items in my budget is actually for our own marketing digital transformation. Obviously, Dell in particular, had many, many years starting in the consumer and small business, and then growing up to larger businesses, of direct marketing. And we have a great relationship with our customers, but we also have all of these legacy systems and processes and way that work is done and now as we come together with EMC and we start to build Dell Technologies, the idea of what a data driven marketing engine can be, that possibility is something that we're also working to build ourselves. And so, everything from "how do we build our "own data lake to actually bring all "of these sources of data together? "How do we clean up that data?" is something that I'm pretty deeply into myself. There's a lot of that work going on across the company, and then for me personally, as CMO. Big initiative. >> So it's customer experience as part of it, but it's also a new way to work. >> Exactly. And it sounds so trite in a way to say the technology is the easy part, but the really hard part begins when the technology is finished. And I really believe that because if I look at my own team and my own teams experience, there's so many places where they've been doing marketing one way for a very long time. And if you come in and you ask them to do something differently, that's actually a pretty hard thing to do. And the only way to unlock the power of the data and the power of the new technologies, is to actually change how work is done. And I know it's an analogy that's overused, but if you'd ask the taxi dispatch "Are you important to the taxi business?" they would have said "Yes, of course "I'm the most important person in this chain." That's how taxis get to customers. And then along comes Uber, and suddenly you don't need that. You have to really think differently about that and as a leader, that's exciting and also really hard. >> I don't know if you've ever heard Sanjay Poonen talk about change, he says there's three reactions to change. Either run from it, fight it, or you embrace it. That's it. And the third is the only way to go. >> It's the only way. >> How about messaging? I'm sensing different messaging. Much more around the business, maybe a little bit less on the products. Plenty of product stuff here, but the high level stuff. What's your philosophy on messaging? >> I used to say "I'm a person that "believes in shades of gray" and about seven years ago I had to stop saying that. (laughs) >> But the truth is, I am a person who believes in shades of gray and I almost always believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle. So you get in marketing into these debates about is it these thought leadership and high level conversations or is it about product messaging and selling what's on the truck? And the honest truth is, you have to do both. You have to set a vision, you have to build the brand, you have to talk about the business and where we're going from a business perspective. As we talk about things like 2030, that's a really lean into the future conversation. At the same time, we also want to sell you some PCs and some servers and some storage and some data protection, so we need to do that well, too. And frankly, we need to get better as a marketing machine, as a company, and as salespeople, in terms of talking to customers. The right conversation at the right time. Again, sounds like marketing 101, but it's actually quite hard to do. When do you want to have a connected cities conversation? When do you want to just talk about how to modernize your data center? >> It's true, we always talk about above the line and below the line. When you're talking above the line, you might be speaking one language and below the line, another language. You try to mix the two, it doesn't work. >> Right, exactly. >> You have to target the appropriate audience. >> The conversation one of the women on my team started talking about this and I thought it really made sense was macro-conversations, micro-conversations. So to get out of this advertising vernacular, and I grew up in the ad industry, sort of above the line, below the line, and those were always two departments who didn't even talk to each other and usually hated each other. Instead of above the line, below the line, what's the macro-conversation? How are we talking about Realizing 2030? How are we talking about digital transformation? And then what are some of those micro-conversations where I'm going to talk to you about what are the personas that you have in your work force? And lets talk about some in user compute technology together with something really simple, like a monitor, that's going to help them be more productive. Those things don't have to fight with each other, you just have to be honest about when you're doing each one. >> Target them in the right place. >> Alison, we're getting to the end of the show here. >> Yeah, I can talk a lot. >> First of all, New Media Row here gave us the biggest set. We've done this show for nine years, we're super excited. The therapy dogs next door-- >> I love the therapy dogs. >> Are really fun to see, but every once in a while, give a little bit of color in the background here. For people that didn't get to come and experience in person, I know the sessions are online, but give us some of the flavors and some of the fun things you've seen and what would we expect from you in the future? >> I think this is just one of the most fun shows. I mean, obviously it's important for us to set our vision, it's important for people to come into the hands on labs, and the training, and the breakouts, and to learn and to engage. But, you see things like the beanbags and sitting out there, the therapy dogs, and my team does want me to say that every year we get new beanbag covers so we don't recycle those. And then really experience the fun in the Solutions Expo and talking about the way that we're taking trash, plastic trash, out of oceans and making art with it, so we can talk about our sustainable supply chain in an interesting way. I think, I'm biased, but I think this is the best show in terms of actual education and vision, but also some fun. Hopefully you guys think so too. >> Well, Sting. >> And Walk the Moon. Do you guys know who Walk the Moon is? >> Yes. >> I don't. >> Me neither. (laughs) >> Come on and dance with me. >> Oh, okay. Alright, great. >> I'm a child of the 80's, what can I say? >> Alright, so 23 days on the job, what should we be watching from you, your team, and Dell? >> So, as we talked about in the very beginning, this is our first Dell Technologies World, so obviously, we have just gone through some of the biggest integration of large tech companies in the history. And we're really proud of how successful that integration has been, and yet we also still have so much work to do around telling that integrated story. Yes, Dell and Dell EMC, but also together with VM, we're a pivotal RSA Secureworks, and the extend is strategically aligned businesses. And so that's what you'll see us really lean into is "How do we tell "that story more effectively?" We're continuing to invest in the brand, so a lot of the work that you've seen with Jeffrey Wright and those TV spots we launched again in March, and just making sure that people understand what the Dell Technologies family actually is. >> So really a more integrated story. But something that Dell always tried to tell, but you didn't have the portfolio to tell it. Now you do, so that's got to be exciting for you. >> It is exciting, yeah. >> Great. Alison, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> My pleasure. Cheers, thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World in Vegas. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back. We are live here in Las Vegas. We're in the Sands right now of day two of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm John Walls along with Stu Miniman, and it's a pleasure now to welcome Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who is the President and GM of Server and Infrastructure Systems at Dell EMC. Ashley, good afternoon to you. >> Thank you, great pronunciation of my last name. >> Well, thank you very much, I've worked-- >> Not an easy thing to do. >> I worked on that, how about that? Stu and I were just talking briefly with you. What a cool exhibit floor, right? >> It really is. >> There's just a lot of-- What have you seen out there that's kind of caught your eye so far? >> Well, we brought in a lot of customers this time to show their outcomes. So I'm a car guy, so you know I went straight for the McLaren. >> How 'about that McLaren out there, right? Yeah. >> My son would love the F1 setup with the gaming, virtual reality. Top Golf is a great VxRail customer. We have GoalControl. Try to beat the AI and see if you can score a goal. I mean, there's some very cool demos back there. >> And then overall, just I'm curious about your thoughts about the show then because that's a part of it. >> That's a part of it. >> A lot of client relations you're doing here, business relations. >> Sure. We're only about half way through, but so far very, very positive energy I get. I don't know if you caught or already talked to Michael after the keynote, but certainly. >> Stu did today. Certainly, Michael was on fire at the keynote, and I really, really enjoyed the discussion with Dr. Chip Plater about, and Jeffrey Wright about, how technology connects to helping people. A lot of times engineers, stuck in a lab, looking at R&D, trying to figure out a problem, lose sight of what they're doing. Great opportunity for the team to see that and kind of expand and understand where their technology is going, what it's doing for the world, what the impact is that they're having. >> So, Ashley, your team's been real busy leading up to this, seeing some of the new products in the announcement. Before we get into this though, your role expanded a little bit since the last time we talked about, talked to Tom Burns yesterday as there was the group formerly known as VCE that turned into CPSG, It was split into some pieces, and HCI is now under your domain. >> That's right. So in addition to our server businesses, which are kind of the mainstream PowerEdge business, our Extreme Scale business, our OEM business. We had a reorganization to really kind of unlock the potential that we have in a great product set, a product set before my organization was already number one. It's a position of strength. What we're trying to do is accelerate from that. So if you think about the HCI marketplace, I think you have to be in the server business to win in the HCI business. I don't envy anyone trying to do this from a position of weakness or trying to adopt other people's technology. Our supply chain, our reach, our global services and support, and then the underlying ability to invest in the server technology and beyond and differentiate, innovate on top of that is what it's going to take to win, and maybe not tomorrow, but in the future as HCI takes off. We wanted to really accelerate that by shortening the decision-making loop, making it one mission for the team, and so that came in. In addition, maybe a quick call-out to the storage and data protection platform engineering team who also came into my group to, again, really put our best hardware and platform of systems engineers together from servers and data protection storage and kind of create a powerhouse of R&D. >> Yeah, Ashley, it's actually, it's not surprising to us, From our research side at Wikibon, we actually called it server SAN because it was really taking the functionality and what customers wanted as a business outcome from the SAN and was pulling it closer to the server. But at its core, it's really about software. One of the things that has struck me in the last few years, comparing this to EMC worlds in the past and now Dell, is what I used to see at Dell World, which was Dell is a platform that lots of things live on. So there's lots of storage partners that live on side of Dell. There's HCI partners. Of course, you've got a broad portfolio all from the Dell families, and then OEMs and other partners that fit there. 'Cause you're a team, it makes sense that HCI comes in there because you've got that platform at the server, >> Right. >> and it grows from there. >> If you circle back to just the Dell Legacy world perhaps, much more platform oriented, infrastructure at our heart, bringing that value with prop to our customers. And I've said it before, I think if you give any segment or capability time, I think a standard kind of open infrastructure hardware platform wins. It may not be a server, but it's going to look something like a server going forward. And the specialization and the value move into the IP stack and into the software. So you better be a company that can do the scale of a standards-based platform. You better have the IP, the specialized stacks, as we do in our VM-ware stacks, in our IP stacks or in data protection, storage, networking. You can see where Michael's kind of putting those two together. It's not a tomorrow thing but five, 10 years from now. We've seen it in the carrier space. We've seen it in storage. Everywhere you go, the commoditization curve takes us to standards, infrastructure, and IP in the software. >> You made an interesting point there, saying it might not necessarily be a server. Give us kind of, if you could step back for a second, the state of compute. >> Sure. >> There's compute in the cloud, there's compute at the edge, there's (chuckles) compute all over the place. A few years ago, it was like, ah, it's all going white box and undifferentiated. And in the public cloud, I say, there's probably more skews and compute in the public cloud than if I went to Dell and picked that up there. Whether that's a good or bad thing, you could probably have some insight on. But give us your view on kind of the state of compute in the industry today. >> Sure. So if I think back 10 years when we started our business with the hyper-scale, building those infrastructures as a service, multi-tenant public clouds, there really wasn't any other choice. You either did it in a legacy mode with your IT, maybe slightly modernizing, but you're still probably siloed. You probably had storage admins and networking admins, compute admins, or you went cloud. And it was such a different experience. Since then, what customers have said consistently is, why am I having to make that choice? I either go to this rent version, which is very expensive as I scale up, or I own it or I have to own it and it's different. So multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud, however you want to instantiate it. And something like hyper converged infrastructure just didn't exist. They didn't have a choice. Now, with a pushing of a few buttons, you can scale up your infrastructure, perhaps on prem or in a hosted environment. That is fairly seamless with that, and now you have that portability. >> Yeah, and I'm sorry, Ashley. I wasn't trying to poke at the cloud piece. Compute at edge use cases is a little bit different than traditional-- >> Yep, absolutely. >> Servers, what's happening with the Blade market. Definitely need to, I know we need to talk about the new PowerEdges. But there's the MX we're going to cover, too, but was just kind of, if there are form factors of servers. >> You bring up a good point. It's maybe emerging, so there's probably a little bit more hype than there is reality behind it. But there are going to be billions of sensors, trillions of sensors or things that create data outside of data center environments. That's where all the data's going to be produced, and that's where decisions are going to be made. Today, the theory is, it has to go back somewhere, although I don't think any of us are getting in an autonomous car if it has to talk back to a data center and decide what to do. >> Right. >> So there's already examples of what I would call edge compute. But what if your data center has to live at a base of a cell tower at the end of a 30 mile dirt road where someone only visits 45 days apart, and they're not an IT individual? How do you extend that infrastructure, that management domain, that security domain? How do you bring it all the way out there? How do you ruggedize it? Well, you're probably going to start with a company that's been doing fresh air cooling with 13, 14 billion server hours now, operating in fresh air environments. We understand how to bring that environment the way we've been working on that remote management, lights out management style, our security. I'll give you another emerging trend that's going to come out of that. Just at the time where we're going to extend our environments out of the safety of the data center, we're also going to go back to a stateful compute. With persistent memory, nonvolatile memory, storage class memories, and security paradigms are already shifting. We're getting ahead of that with our customers of what if it wasn't just the hard drive you had to protect but almost everything in that edge device. So the form factors will change, the connectivity will change, but what we know is, you'll likely gather as much data as you can. You'll throw some of it away 'cause it won't be useful. Right now, there's a sensor telling this building that these lights are on. Until they go off, it's not useful data. But in a car, it's very useful data. Some of that data will go back, it'll get trained because humans won't be able to take in all this data. You'll need a machine. You can't write the algorithm ahead of time. You have to learn something. Back goes that IP into the edge, and then decisions will be made at that stage. >> Before we head off, we've talked about some new products. You've alluded a little bit. So you've had a launch this week. Just run through that, if you would, real quick. >> Ashley: Sure, sure, we had a few things. >> It's nice to have a new baby to talk about. >> Sure, it's pretty exciting. And it really does stem from what we just talked about. So if I start on the PowerEdge side, if you have a strategy that is to help your customers with that digital transformation from cloud to data center and core all the way to edge, you can start to see why we're launching certain products and why they have certain technologies in them and innovations. So starting with the 940 XA, extreme acceleration, might have to rename it if you watched the keynote. Jeff called it extreme performance. He is the boss, so I think it's XP now. (Stu and John laughing) No, we'll keep it at extreme acceleration for now. That really is about large datasets training very quickly in database environments. So you want host to GPGPU to be a one-to-one ratio. You want large datasets to be local, so you need massive storage, 32 drives for instance. And you need the capability to, again, make sure it brings the tenets of security, manageability, the ecosystem with it. So, very excited about that one. I think there's some use cases we're just not even ready for. We've already have the technology today to put eight FPGAs in that system, direct connect. And there's very few workloads or even talent in the customer set to be able to enable that, but you got to get there first with the technology to allow that innovation to happen. And we want to stoke that. Then on the R840, this really was about, once you get the data in, you're going to have to make decisions. You need, still, that processing power. Maybe you don't need 20,000 cores in the box like a 940 XA. Maybe you need a little bit less, but you do need a massive storage localized in VME direct connect. That's more direct connect that any server, I think, period in the industry. And it's really about streaming those analytics, making those realtime choices. So it really fits into the strategy that we're undertaking. >> All right, Ashley, last thing I wanted to cover. It's a bit of preview that you showed at the show. The PowerEdge MX. >> Yep. >> Modular infrastructure, no midplane, should be able to upgrade it a lot more. So are we beyond where Blade Servers have gone? Do you consider this to fit into, some call it composable infrastructure. How would you position this kind of-- >> Well, I don't have some positioning yet. It's just a sneak peek. But let me tell you how we thing about it. Is it a Blade Server or not? I'm not sure the question is something we've considered yet. It's a form factor that we think for the future is really necessary, which is, we want to get to a stage, and we're putting our research into a stage of a journey where we want to get to the point where you can utilize the resources that you bring into your environment, whether they be your environment or someone else's. Today, so much is stranded connected to a CPU, and it's just the architecture that we have today. Whether it's memory, source class memory, persistent memory, GPGPUs, heterogeneous compute FPGAs, ASICs, memory semantics, IO semantics, have to leave the box. Then we can get you things like pooled up resources that can be utilized unbound, put together, then composed, if you want to use your word, or really just aligned around a workload then retired and put back in. APIs and software, we're starting to build that out. It's starting to emerge from certain management orchestration layers we have today. But we're going to need that fabric. And so, as you know, we're showing actually here today a Gen-Z demo where we're starting to build that fabric that has the latency, almost a memory-like latencies from load to store and usage, all the way out to it has the memory semantics that go all the way through from CPU all the way out to memory so that, all sudden, the node no longer traps and stands the resources. How do you do that? You better have an architecture that treats everything in the box, not just the compute part, as a first class citizen for power, for thermals, for management. Second thing, if you have a midplane, you have a point of failure, but you also are not upgradeable to these fabrics that are coming and these capabilities that are on the horizon, some of which are not even in Silicon or in a lab just yet. So when you build infrastructure, let me call it infrastructure for a second, people want it as an investment. That's the part we've talked about. There's a lot more to come, so the team's excited to get it out there. I tried to hold them back a little bit, but we cheated a little bit a showed it. >> A little demo goes a long way. Ashley, thanks for being with us. Thanks for telling your story, we appreciate the time. Look forward to seeing you down the road. >> Appreciate it, thanks, guys. >> You bet. Back with more. We are live here in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018. (electronic musical flourish)