(bright upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back with Jenn Saavedra, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell and we're going to discuss people culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jenn, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time. So I'm excited to share some of our learnings with you. >> I mean, I bet there has, I mean post pandemic companies, they're trying everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and what it looks like. Last May there was really a theme of flexibility but depending, and we talked about, well, millennial or not, young, old, and it's just really was mixed. So how have you approached the topic? What are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? What's working, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to... Over to you. >> Yeah, well, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. In March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is we're such a data-driven company. There's so many headlines out there, about all these things that people think could happen will happen but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, how do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while, we asked them, do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that we were which is great, but we always know there's nuance behind that macro level. So we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things we're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive, and to have a really healthy business. >> Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. But there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get promoted. And so I'm curious, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we want you guys to work the way you want to work. But then I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office week so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange new ever changing world? >> Yeah, well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fiddle. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. They tell us time and time again one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really want to meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. So, for us it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid. But just like if you, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, work out with your leader what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >> I mean, you talk- >> So that's what we do. >> You were talking before about myths and I want talk about team member performance 'cause there's, a lot of people believe that if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage 'cause they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? Is there some truth to that? What do you think about that? >> Well, for us, we look, again we just looked at the data. So we said we don't want to create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really want to have an inclusive culture, we want to be outcome-driven. We're a meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment. Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data and that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >> And it's personal too, I think I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office 'cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to you Jenn and folks at Dell is, whatever works for you we're going to support. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and very specifically, empathic leadership has been said to have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study, it was like two thirds of the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I asked myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing with our folks? So especially as it relates to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >> I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the value that you bring to the company then you're not going to get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward. Empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible and confident that you can take us forward, but also that you know and understand me as a human being. And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about as leaders we've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point because we've been talking about it for so long we send out the email, we have the all hands, and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on this change curve where I am, let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along the journey. >> Jenn, in the spirit of myth busting I mean, I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is going to have a harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation in post isolation economy as they could pre-COVID. But I notice there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation, satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top 100. But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model, and in doing so, have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. Number one on the list is Dell, SAP. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, I go, Yeah, okay that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in an industry where there's only two in the top is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations. How'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in this new world? >> Well, thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a culture, and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices that whole ecosystem, from recognition rewards, to performance evaluation, to interviewee, to development. We build it into everything so it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, "The most special thing about Dell "is our culture and our people." And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >> I don't you think too that repetition and, well, first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah it's not just a poster on the wall. But I remember like, when we're kids your parents tell you, okay, power of positive thinking, do unto others as you have others do it to you. You're going to do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were- >> They might have had a point, right? >> Values were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and paying it forward. But I guess my point is, and it's kind of a point observation but I'll turn it into a question. Isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >> I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time. And as an HR professional, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture. It's our business leaders, it's our CEO, it's our COOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're going to get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed into everything that we do. And I think it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done 'cause that's not how things really work. >> Well, and it's a culture of respect, high performance, high expectations, accountability, having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years, you always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time, Jenn. Again, congratulations on being number one. >> Thank you so much. >> You're very welcome. Okay, you've been watching a special presentation of theCUBE inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand at thecube.net and you can check out siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of Breaking Analysis. This is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: theCube presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome back to theCube's continuous coverage HPE Discover 2022 and from Las Vegas the formerly Sands Convention Center now Venetian, John Furrier and Dave Vellante here were excited to welcome in Jen Huffstetler. Who's the Chief product Sustainability Officer at Intel Jen, welcome to theCube thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> You're really welcome. So you dial back I don't know, the last decade and nobody really cared about it but some people gave it lip service but corporations generally weren't as in tune, what's changed? Why has it become so top of mind? >> I think in the last year we've noticed as we all were working from home that we had a greater appreciation for the balance in our lives and the impact that climate change was having on the world. So I think across the globe there's regulations industry and even personally, everyone is really starting to think about this a little more and corporations specifically are trying to figure out how are they going to continue to do business in these new regulated environments. >> And IT leaders generally weren't in tune cause they weren't paying the power bill for years it was the facilities people, but then they started to come together. How should leaders in technology, business tech leaders, IT leaders, CIOs, how should they be thinking about their sustainability goals? >> Yeah, I think for IT leaders specifically they really want to be looking at the footprint of their overall infrastructure. So whether that is their on-prem data center, their cloud instances, what can they do to maximize the resources and lower the footprint that they contribute to their company's overall footprint. So IT really has a critical role to play I think because as you'll find in IT, the carbon footprint of the data center of those products in use is actually it's fairly significant. So having a focus there will be key. >> You know compute has always been one of those things where, you know Intel's been makes chips so that, you know heat is important in compute. What is Intel's current goals? Give us an update on where you guys are at. What's the ideal goal in the long term? Where are you now? You guys always had a focus on this for a long, long time. Where are we now? Cause I won't say the goalpost of changed, they're changing the definitions of what this means. What's the current state of Intel's carbon footprint and overall goals? >> Yeah, no thanks for asking. As you mentioned, we've been invested in lowering our environmental footprint for decades in fact, without action otherwise, you know we've already lowered our carbon footprint by 75%. So we're really in that last mile. And that is why when we recently announced a very ambitious goal Net-Zero 2040 for our scope one and two for manufacturing operations, this is really an industry leading goal. And partly because the technology doesn't even exist, right? For the chemistries and for making the silicon into the sand into, you know, computer chips yet. And so by taking this bold goal, we're going to be able to lead the industry, partner with academia, partner with consortia, and that drive is going to have ripple effects across the industry and all of the components in semiconductors. >> Is there a changing definition of Net-Zero? What that means, cause some people say they're Net-Zero and maybe in one area they might be but maybe holistically across the company as it becomes more of a broader mandate society, employees, partners, Wall Street are all putting pressure on companies. Is the Net-Zero conversation changed a little bit or what's your view on that? >> I think we definitely see it changing with changing regulations like those coming forth from the SEC here in the US and in Europe. Net-Zero can't just be lip service anymore right? It really has to be real reductions on your footprint. And we say then otherwise and even including in our supply chain goals what we've taken new goals to reduce, but our operations are growing. So I think everybody is going through this realization that you know, with the growth, how do we keep it lower than it would've been otherwise, keep focusing on those reductions and have not just renewable credits that could have been bought in one location and applied to a different geographical location but real credible offsets for where the the products manufactured or the computes deployed. >> Jen, when you talk about you've reduced already by 75% you're on that last mile. We listened to Pat Gelsinger very closely up until recently he was the number one most frequently had on theCube guest. He's been busy I guess. But as you apply that discipline to where you've been, your existing business and now Pat's laid out this plan to increase the Foundry business how does that affect your... Are you able to carry through that reduction to, you know, the new foundries? Do you have to rethink that? How does that play in? >> Certainly, well, the Foundry expansion of our business with IBM 2.0 is going to include the existing factories that already have the benefit of those decades of investment and focus. And then, you know we have clear goals for our new factories in Ohio, in Europe to achieve goals as well. That's part of the overall plan for Net-Zero 2040. It's inclusive of our expansion into Foundry which means that many, many many more customers are going to be able to benefit from the leadership that Intel has here. And then as we onboard acquisitions as any company does we need to look at the footprint of the acquisition and see what we can do to align it with our overall goals. >> Yeah so sustainable IT I don't know for some reason was always an area of interest to me. And when we first started, even before I met you, John we worked with PG&E to help companies get rebates for installing technologies that would reduce their carbon footprint. >> Jen: Very forward thinking. >> And it was a hard thing to get, you know, but compute was the big deal. And there were technologies and I remember virtualization at the time was one and we would go in and explain to the PG&E engineers how that all worked. Cause they had metrics and that they wanted to see, but anyway, so virtualization was clearly one factor. What are the technologies today that people should be paying, flash storage was another one. >> John: AI's going to have a big impact. >> Reduce the spinning disk, but what are the ones today that are going to have an impact? >> Yeah, no, that's a great question. We like to think of the built in acceleration that we have including some of the early acceleration for virtualization technologies as foundational. So built in accelerated compute is green compute and it allows you to maximize the utilization of the transistors that you already have deployed in your data center. This compute is sitting there and it is ready to be used. What matters most is what you were talking about, John that real world workload performance. And it's not just you know, a lot of specsmanship around synthetic benchmarks, but AI performance with the built in acceleration that we have in Xeon processors with the Intel DL Boost, we're able to achieve four X, the AI performance per Watts without you know, doing that otherwise. You think about the consolidation you were talking about that happened with virtualization. You're basically effectively doing the same thing with these built in accelerators that we have continued to add over time and have even more coming in our Sapphire Generation. >> And you call that green compute? Or what does that mean, green compute? >> Well, you are greening your compute. >> John: Okay got it. >> By increasing utilization of your resources. If you're able to deploy AI, utilize the telemetry within the CPU that already exists. We have customers KDDI in Japan has a great Proofpoint that they already announced on their 5G data center, lowered their data center power by 20%. That is real bottom line impact as well as carbon footprint impact by utilizing all of those built in capabilities. So, yeah. >> We've heard some stories earlier in the event here at Discover where there was some cooling innovations that was powering moving the heat to power towns and cities. So you start to see, and you guys have been following this data center and been part of the whole, okay and hot climates, you have cold climates, but there's new ways to recycle energy where's that cause that sounds very Sci-Fi to me that oh yeah, the whole town runs on the data center exhaust. So there's now systems thinking around compute. What's your reaction to that? What's the current view on re-engineering a system to take advantage of that energy or recycling? >> I think when we look at our vision of sustainable compute over this horizon it's going to be required, right? We know that compute helps to solve society's challenges and the demand for it is not going away. So how do we take new innovations looking at a systems level as compute gets further deployed at the edge, how do we make it efficient? How do we ensure that that compute can be deployed where there is air pollution, right? So some of these technologies that you have they not only enable reuse but they also enable some you know, closing in of the solution to make it more robust for edge deployments. It'll allow you to place your data center wherever you need it. It no longer needs to reside in one place. And then that's going to allow you to have those energy reuse benefits either into district heating if you're in, you know Northern Europe or there's examples with folks putting greenhouses right next to a data center to start growing food in what we're previously food deserts. So I don't think it's science fiction. It is how we need to rethink as a society. To utilize everything we have, the tools at our hand. >> There's a commercial on the radio, on the East Coast anyway, I don't know if you guys have heard of it, it's like, "What's your one thing?" And the gentleman comes on, he talks about things that you can do to help the environment. And he says, "What's your one thing?" So what's the one thing or maybe it's not just one that IT managers should be doing to affect carbon footprint? >> The one thing to affect their carbon footprint, there are so many things. >> Dave: Two, three, tell me. >> I think if I was going to pick the one most impactful thing that they could do in their infrastructure is it's back to John's comment. It's imagine if the world deployed AI, all the benefits not only in business outcomes, you know the revenue, lowering the TCO, but also lowering the footprint. So I think that's the one thing they could do. If I could throw in a baby second, it would be really consider how you get renewable energy into your computing ecosystem. And then you know, at Intel, when we're 80% renewable power, our processors are inherently low carbon because of all the work that we've done others have less than 10% renewable energy. So you want to look for products that have low carbon by design, any Intel based system and where you can get renewables from your grid to ask for it, run your workload there. And even the next step to get to sustainable computing it's going to take everyone, including every enterprise to think differently and really you know, consider what would it look like to bring renewables onto my site? If I don't have access through my local utility and many customers are really starting to evaluate that. >> Well Jen its great to have you on theCube. Great insight into the current state of the art of sustainability and carbon footprint. My final question for you is more about the talent out there. The younger generation coming in I'll say the pressure, people want to work for a company that's mission driven we know that, the Wall Street impact is going to be financial business model and then save the planet kind of pressure. So there's a lot of talent coming in. Is there awareness at the university level? Is there a course where can, do people get degrees in sustainability? There's a lot of people who want to come into this field what are some of the talent backgrounds of people learning or who might want to be in this field? What would you recommend? How would you describe how to onboard into the career if they want to contribute? What are some of those factors? Cause it's not new, new, but it's going to be globally aware. >> Yeah well there certainly are degrees with focuses on sustainability maybe to look at holistically at the enterprise, but where I think the globe is really going to benefit, we didn't really talk about the software inefficiency. And as we delivered more and more compute over the last few decades, basically the programming languages got more inefficient. So there's at least 35% inefficiency in the software. So being a software engineer, even if you're not an AI engineer. So AI would probably be the highest impact being a software engineer to focus on building new applications that are going to be efficient applications that they're well utilizing the transistor that they're not leaving zombie you know, services running that aren't being utilized. So I actually think-- >> So we got a program in assembly? (all laughing) >> (indistinct), would get really offended. >> Get machine language. I have to throw that in sorry. >> Maybe not that bad. (all laughing) >> That's funny, just a joke. But the question is what's my career path. What's a hot career in this area? Sustainability, AI totally see that. Anything else, any other career opportunities you see or hot jobs or hot areas to work on? >> Yeah, I mean, just really, I think it takes every architect, every engineer to think differently about their design, whether it's the design of a building or the design of a processor or a motherboard we have a whole low carbon architecture, you know, set of actions that are we're underway that will take to the ecosystem. So it could really span from any engineering discipline I think. But it's a mindset with which you approach that customer problem. >> John: That system thinking, yeah. >> Yeah sustainability designed in. Jen thanks so much for coming back in theCube, coming on theCube. It's great to have you. >> Thank you. >> All right. Dave Vellante for John Furrier, we're sustaining theCube. We're winding down day three, HPE Discover 2022. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson and with me today, I have Jen Bennett, technical director out of the office of the CTO at Google. Jen, welcome to theCUBE. How are you? >> I'm doing great, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> It's great to have you here. Now, some estimates have 1% of global electrical production. So all of the electricity produced globally, 1% of that is being used currently for the category we call ICT or Information Communications Technology. By 2030, the estimate is that if that goes unchecked, unmeasured, unmitigated, we could be at between 8% and 20% consumption of all of the electricity generated globally, at that point. The question I have for you to start this off is, is that sustainable and if not, what are you and the folks at Google thinking about in this area? >> Yeah Dave, that is a great question. And I think one that's top of mind for many of us in the industry, and there's unfortunately not a simple answer, but for sure, I think that sustainability has been something that's been a core value of ours from the very beginning at Google. And we've really focused on the impact that we have throughout, you know, our computation on climate and on other aspects of the environment. And so I think this is something that's a really important topic that we need to discuss. And so, you know, I want to give you a little bit of a history from a Google perspective. You know, in 2007, we were the first major company to become carbon neutral. So today, you hear a lot about companies talking about carbon neutrality and how important that is to reach, you know, some of these targets that we've been talking about from the Paris Climate Agreement, et cetera. In 2017, you know, as we were looking at this target of how do we become more carbon free, we became the first company, first major company to match a hundred percent of our electricity use associated with our computation that you talked about earlier with renewable energy. So this was a really big push for us. So with the question around, is it sustainable, has to kind of go back to, well, where does the energy come from and how is it generated? And renewable energy is one of those big pieces of the puzzle here. And so we invested very heavily in what was called Power Purchase Agreements. This is, you know, creating the mechanisms, the financial instruments to, you know, enable energy companies to transition from maybe things that are less carbon friendly to more renewable energy. So that was a big emphasis that we put on that first decade of climate action. Since then, and you may be familiar that in 2020, we announced probably our most ambitious goal yet, which is to operate on carbon free 24 by seven. So one of the things that you'll appreciate is that renewable energy, the sun doesn't shine 24/7, wind doesn't blow 24/7. And so we need more to become carbon free, 24/7 around the clock. We need storage techniques. We need a lot of other potential, you know, technologies that are evolving. And so we're very committed to investing in making sure that we advance those technologies just like we did with renewable energy. And so this is a really ambitious goal. We don't know how to get there yet. And that's why we often referred to is as a moonshot. >> Yeah, so yeah, that is a moonshot. And it's interesting because it sounds like you've decided to use a metric that is more difficult than the metric you could use, which is aggregate neutrality. You mentioned the sun doesn't shine 24 hours a day. Well, of course it does somewhere on the planet, but not on an individual facility. So if you're... If you're measuring carbon neutral at a certain physical location, that's a higher bar. So you talk about storage with batteries and things like that. So it's admirable that you're not taking the sort of easy way out, and looking at it just from an aggregate perspective. >> Yeah. And I guess I would say, you know, I think it's a journey. So you referred to it as sort of easy way out. And, I know, I certainly... I think this is one of the challenges is that oftentimes, action... Climate action can seem overwhelming and we have to find ways to advance and to get to impact. And so I think, you for us and our journey, you know, we started with how can we best make the use of the energy that we have. And so we applied machine learning in our data centers to optimize the energy utilization so that we could really bring down, you know, or optimize how we used energy in the first place. Of course the most renewable energy is the energy you don't use. But then I think the next point was where do we go next and how do we continue to advance to a place where we do get to a carbon free future, at least for us with our energy use as well. And I think, just as importantly, the next step is, "And how do we enable others?" And that's where we're at today. And so, you know, we've made some really exciting announcements and we're hoping that that's just the start of many more to come. >> Well, let's talk about that. So how do you enable others on this journey? >> Yeah, it's great. So when we talked a little bit about carbon free and that idea of energy in 24 x 7, one of the things that we started to focus on was how do we look at energy on an hourly basis, not on an annual basis or on a monthly basis. And so, as we started to pull the, you know, gather that data instrument up, we realized that this information is extremely valuable to our customers as well, who leverage our cloud platform. And so one of the big announcements that we made as part of our suite of sustainability offerings is really... It's called carbon footprint. And it's really providing that information to customers that use our cloud technology to give them a sense of where, how carbon friendly, the energy that they're using. Of course, we are carbon neutral and so effectively the neutrality is zero. But for those who really want to make sure that they're selecting locations where there's clean energy, making sure that their digital infrastructure is running as efficiently as possible. This new tool carbon footprint will give them the opportunity to see that just like you might see on your billing, you know, how much you spend, how much carbon emission there is associated with that as well. So that's one of our big announcements and we've worked very closely with customers like HSBC and Twitter and Salesforce as we've developed that capability so that we know that it helps meet their needs as well. >> So right now the part of your carbon footprint that is managed by this capability would be say GCP consumption or the Google part of a organization's footprint. Any plans in the future to integrate other data sources into a centralized capability? >> Yeah. So I think we have a lot of other exciting news we shared as well. You know, we recognize that our customer's digital footprint is a growing part of their business. As we've seen, sort of the pandemic has accelerated this shift to digital, and we want to make sure that we're bringing the most climate friendly cloud platform, to enable that. But a lot of our customers also have other parts of their business that aren't digital. And so being able to bring sustainability offerings to them, to help them with data, as you mentioned, but also with other tooling is really important. And so the other exciting announcement that we made is that, we are bringing Google Earth Engine to Google Cloud for our customers and Google Earth Engine has been around for over a decade used by, climate researchers, NGOs, It's really a trusted platform for earth observation. And so we're really excited to bring this to our Google Cloud customers as a mechanism, to look at the impacts of climate on their business, as well as see how their business is impacting the environment. And so this is an amazing platform that we're really excited and have partnered very closely with customers like Unilever, to leverage this platform in their business. >> So what are some practical examples of data sources that come out of the Google Earth platform and how they integrate from a sustainability perspective? What are some insights that organizations can gain by leveraging this? >> Super question. So, within Earth Engine, there is, over 50 petabytes of data and over 700 curated data sets. It's the world's largest for earth observation. Things like satellite imagery to look at land cover and deforestation for example, soil moisture, water, and availability of water in flood zones. There's just a... It's a really rich catalog and has been, you know, really curated over a matter of time. It brings also not just historical data, but is constantly refreshed. And so for someone who wants to look at changes over a period of time, it's really the perfect platform for that. And so for example, with Unilever, we have been looking at deforestation and the association with their supply chain because of course, many companies like Unilever have committed to a zero deforestation, And pit land conversion as part of their commitments to climate action. And so this is a really powerful capability. It's sort been kept within the research community and the NGOs for such a long time, that we're really excited to start to now evolve that into applications where we can make a real difference. I think this is part of our mission is to say, "How do we extend our reach in our climate action to not only the billions of users that use our platform, but also our customers who also reach many, many users through their products." So we're really excited about that opportunity. >> So imagine five, 10 years in the future. How does this play out? Give us a view into the enterprise of the future and the kind of information they're going to have at their fingertips. You gave a great example of deforestation within a supply chain, and we're not talking software supply chain here, we're physical supply chains, >> Physical supply chain, yeah. >> If think about a modern enterprise having hundreds or thousands of connections with other enterprises when you're trying to understand what the impact is that you're having on the earth, you have to take all of those things into account. So, can you kind of walk us through a scenario of what that might look like in the not too distant future, the kinds of things they'll have access to? >> You know, I wish I had that, the vision of five to 10 years from now, but if I look at what has evolved even over the last few years, you know, we've been... As consumers, we have so much information at our fingertips, that's both a blessing and a curse in many ways. And I think our job as technology providers is to make sure that the technology that we bring enhances the ability to make decisions quickly and that's... And effectively. And I think that's really what the power of these tools is enabling. So if I look into the future and I look at a little bit of the past and say, you know, "How do we navigate?" We often navigate no longer by paper maps. We navigate by using digital maps. And that same capability is what I'm talking about with some of this geospatial capability is being able to see that information in a way that's very meaningful, very powerful, but also helps you make decisions right now. And so I think that capability is going to be really critical and it's going to bring the complexity of information in a way that I believe is going to help us make better decisions. So today, if we take that... if we continue to take that example that we talked about, you know, often we talk about a lot of decision-making in terms of, you know, pricing, I think in the future, you're going to start to see the complexity of decision making, you know, sort of, you know, becomes more complex, but with the capability and the tools and some of the AI capabilities, we're going to be able to make that very tangible for people so that the decision making is fairly straightforward, but enables us to take into consideration the complexity of the ecosystem. Really excited about the future. I also believe that the future involves a lot more collaboration than maybe we see today, because I think one of the challenges with climate change is, we need to come to an agreed, you know, a shared truth, a shared sense of truth. And that really means we have to break down some of these silos we've created, you know, whether it be in business, whether it be in collaboration with the ecosystem but we're going to start to see a lot more collaboration around data. >> Yeah. Well, Those other things, those other costs that are sometimes hidden and hard to fair it through, in economics terms we refer to those as externalities and may have always been a challenge, how do you account for those real costs of your activity? Jen, I have to say that your passion for this comes through, despite the technology dividing us, it must be a delight working in an environment where you have the support of your organization. And you've got a clear mission that you can wake up every day and pursue that. Talk a little bit about that from a personal perspective. >> Yeah, I wake up every day, well, wake up, I think about this all the time, and I'm reminded of it, everything that I do, you know, whether it be turning off the lights, whether it be running the water too long. I mean, we're now experiencing droughts like we never have you know, historically. And so I think all these things impact us on a personal level. It's really... I feel so fortunate to be able to be thinking about this, to be able to take on something that really is one of the most pressing issues of our time. But I will say I'm also truly inspired by the customers I get to work with and their passion for the same topic. And I really feel like we've crossed this point of really moving to action. So it's no longer just about debating, you know, the science, if you will, we've really started to move into and what action can we take? And I think that is really what is going to both help move the technology and the ability to leverage technology and push us to continue to develop solutions that help make those actions real. But I also am very inspired by the fact that we have these large commitments across organizations to really make change. And I think this is what we all need. >> Well, Jen, thanks for joining us today in this CUBE Conversation and sharing some of the insights that you have along with Google and your customers. We appreciate the work that you do, it's critically important. With that, this is Dave Nicholson. Thanks for joining us for this CUBE Conversation. Until next time, see you then. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. It was last week, we're going to have some continued conversations here. I've got a couple of guests joining me. One is an alumni. That's Jen Felch, the Chief Digital Officer and CIO at Dell Technologies. Jen, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thank you. And joining Jen is Deepak Patil the SVP and GM of Dell Technologies Cloud. Deepak, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you very much Lisa. Excited to be here. >> So the event was last week. It was huge. We know that. And, of course, challenging in the fact that we're also used to being surrounded by thousands and thousands of people in Las Vegas and thousands and thousands of partners, but it's still a great opportunity for Dell Technologies to engage its customers and its partners in the ecosystem. We heard a lot, Deepak, last week about this shift from Dell to deliver as a service. This is what Project APEX powered by Cloud Console. What can you tell us about that? >> Absolutely, Lisa, and what an exciting week it was. We did announce Project APEX at the Dell Technologies World. We are very excited about it. Project APEX marks a strategic milestone for us and our company in three specific areas. Number one is we are on a path to significantly accelerate our transformation into an as a service world. Number two, we are investing in radically simplify the way our customers engage with us. Discover, purchase, manage offers from us. And number three is we are continuing our commitment to provide more flexibility, more choice to our customers. And to make it happen, Project APEX essentially brings all the efforts across the entire Dell Technologies from product development to services, to go to market motions, marketing, finance under the Project APEX umbrella. It's a significant endeavor and we are really excited about it. Of course- >> Companies, oh go ahead, sorry. >> I'm sorry. Of course the Cloud Console that you mentioned is a key component of realizing the Project APEX Division and taking Project APEX to our customers. We are in the public preview of the Cloud Console. Using the Cloud Console with a few clicks, our customers can browse through a catalog of cloud services from us, as well as our partners using a self-serve immersive experience, they can then purchase products like the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform subscription. IT professionals then can provision and deploy workloads, including hybrid solutions like VMware Tanzu. Our customers can then manage and monitor workloads, and using real time insights and data, they can take actions like extending and expanding the system when the capacity is running low. As you know, we also announced storage as a service offering, but an offering like storage as a service using Cloud Console, our customers can see real time insights and cost breakdowns by the teams or cost centers. So, in many ways, the cloud Console really brings the power of Project APEX and the entire cloud operating model to our customer's fingertips. We're very excited about it. >> Lot of work there. So one the things I remember talking Dell Technologies World 2019 about the big digital transformation that Dell Technologies was undergoing. Deepak, you mentioned from a Project APEX perspective, this acceleration of transformation. Jen, over to you, as the Chief Digital Officer and the CIO, how has your team been able to enable this shift to the as a service model to facilitate the self-service and all of the capabilities that Deepak talked about? What's that been like? >> Well, it's been pretty exciting from a couple fronts is, you know, we've always had some aspect of as a service in our offering, whether that is software, our DFS organization, or, you know, as funny as it might sound, our actual services organization is certainly as a service. But as Deepak mentioned, and what our customers tell us, is that let's do more of that. Let's take the broad portfolio of technical solutions and services that we have today and make them simple, consistent, give IT leaders and organizations choice. And so, as the internal team, internal IT team, we play two roles. One is to, we're an internal customer. We're a very large customer of all of the Dell technology products and solutions. And so, we get to offer a lot of feedback about how we would like to work, what we've been doing to really innovate in terms of how we bring things together. And mostly we get to be those early adopters for our product groups in groups like, like Deepak's, which is wonderful to be able to give that early feedback and contribute to great solutions. The second part of it is actually doing the enablement of as a service of how, what are the underlying components that go into the engagement platform that Deepak mentioned, the Cloud Console. How does that leverage the scale of Dell, yet create those really simple consistent, transparent choices for our customers? So our teams get to sit side by side in terms of how we develop these solutions and how we're bringing Project APEX to life, both as a customer and as a development partner, so that we can really bring that together for our customers. And I'm pretty excited about using the solutions. We get to, you know, be involved with it every day. And I can't wait until it's running even more of our infrastructure internally. >> Big, big effort. Deepak, let's come back to you and talk about the market. As we know, this is a very competitive market, congested. You talked about some of the other things that we talked about on theCUBE as well for Dell technologies, world storage as a service. With this landscape that is highly competitive and has been for quite some time with this new strategy, Project APEX, what part of the market, or parts, is Dell going after? >> Absolutely. And just one comment on what Jen said. The work that Jen's team and my team are doing sitting side by side is an example, and just one of the many examples, but a shining example of how we are putting the power of unified Dell technologies behind this effort. Going back to your question, Lisa, we are in what we call it the fourth industrial revolution or whatever you want to call it. We are in a massive shift to a simple, flexible and an operating model full of choices with respect to this as a service cloud transformation, across the industry. Over the next few years, whoever essentially captures the market is going to have to deliver three core promises to our customers. Number one, is we know that we're in the middle of a multi-cloud hybrid cloud world. Any service provider, any cloud provider that eliminates the seams across different cloud environments and makes a multi-cloud experience truly consistent and simple and modern and seamless is going to have a massive advantage. Number two, customers' workforce are going to be all over the place. Good portion of their workforce are going to be in their data centers, good portions of workloads are going to be on Edge, And then are going to be good portions of workloads that are going to be in public cloud. Anybody who meets customers where they're at so that customers don't have to massively invest, invest massively in re-engineering and the VR protector and refactoring, but still enjoy the benefits of this new cloud operating model, from performance and reliability to scalability and efficiency, with the minimum possible efforts, is going to create a significant value proposition. And number three, anybody who essentially focuses on outcomes and experiences and workloads, rather than products and specific offers is going to have a significant benefit. And the work we're doing under the umbrella of Project APEX essentially delivers on all three of those promises. As I mentioned, we radically and massively simplify and eliminate the seams across different cloud environments. We focus on outcome based conversation and with the work that we're doing on with VMware on our massive 4,200 plus people partner, 4,200 plus partner ecosystem, we are working to meet customers where they're at instead of forcing them to re-engineer and re-architect and move to cloud instead of the cloud coming to meet them wherever they're at. So we do believe that the strengths that we traditionally have always had with respect to the broad technology and product and services portfolio, 30 plus thousand sales force, 4,200 plus people partner ecosystem, and a massive asset through the partner, just the best 20 plus year old partnership we have with NEOM brand, and the broad product, as well as partner portfolio at NEOM. We even like a chances in terms of helping each and every customer we work with fundamentally modernize their own portfolio, help their customers and make significant progress on their digital transformation journey. >> We definitely know that there was a big engine, a lot of momentum behind the size and the scale of Dell itself. So going back to you, Jen, if we think about some of the things that we heard again at Dell Technologies World, when we spoke with Jeff Clark, who's the COO and Vice Chairman of Dell technologies. Just in the last couple of weeks, he talked about six areas and IT innovation that Dell is focusing on. and I wanted to get your thoughts on these. Pirate Cloud, Edge, 5G, AI and ML, data management and security. In your opinion, Jen, what of this suite of six areas of IT innovation sets Dell up for success? >> That's a good question. And you know, I would say these six areas are not foreign to us. They're not necessarily brand new. They're all sit kind of right next to areas where we have very deep expertise. And so I think about the fact that, you know, we design, manufacturer, service and manage IT solutions all over the world. Large customers, small customers, consumers. We have an incredible breadth and reach of what we're doing today both from the solutions that we provide and the experiences that our customers are driving. Whether that is, you know, extending work from home or learn from home or they're, you know, going through a digital transformation as Deepak talked about, trying to really simplify their ecosystem. Oftentimes it's Dell, that's sitting right there with them. So we have an opportunity, I think unlike many others, to bring the technical expertise from the products and services that we offer, along with the experience from really working with the best and brightest of customers, as well as this ecosystem of partners 42,000, I mean, Deepak, that's a really big number, but that creates a real opportunity for innovation as things like 5G really emerge. And we have the power behind the data management analytics to support ML and AI. So, you know, when I step back and, and look at kind of what sets us up for success, it's not something that just happened yesterday. It's something that's been happening at Dell for a very long time, which is the deep technical expertise and really close engagements with our customers so that we can focus on bringing technology to solve the problems of today and set us up for the future. I know, as an IT leader, I appreciate the fact that solutions from Dell are very open. So they give us a lot of flexibility to not only provide a solution for today, but solutions that will last over time, that we have some flexibility. We don't have an incredible lock that we can never get out of it. So I am very optimistic about the future and look forward to these innovations and really, we have solutions in most, all of these areas today. I know they'll just continue to get better and better. >> Jen, last question for you before we wrap, because of course, Project APEX that Deepak talked about and kind of dug into, massive undertaking, of course, during the time of a massive change to the entire world, where suddenly, this shift to work from home was a rapid pivot. I can imagine as your teams, you talked about both of your teams really kind of not co-locating physically anymore but being able to work together. How did you manage that, and to enable the team to stay on track, to deliver this for Dell Technologies World? That's a big, it's a big task. >> It is a big task, but we have great teams. And, you know, I think as we've, we've kind of, the status quo has been disrupted, not necessarily by us, right, but by the environment that we're in. And so Deepak and I, and several other leaders, we keep our teams close and focused on where we're aiming, what we're, you know, what our mission is so that we can continue to innovate. And I will tell you, I feel like we have an incredible focus. The vision is clear as to where we want to go. And it probably just sounds simple but it's just engaged leadership. That's how we keep people focused. That's how we're keeping our eye on the ball of where we're headed. >> That's, couldn't be more important. You know, you talked about simplicity, about that engaged leadership is so key. You guys, thank you so much. There's so much more we could dig into. I wish we had more time. Thank you for sharing what's going on with Project APEX, Dell technologies, how it's helping customers transform, because we know right now, that digital transformation is only accelerating. So we'll have to have you back to talk about what's going on. Deepak, Jen, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, Jen Felch and Deepak Patil, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual experience. (digitized music)

>>from around the globe. It's the cue with digital coverage of out systems. Next step 2020. Brought to you by Out systems. Welcome back. I'm stupid, man. This is the Cube at Out systems. Next step course. When we gather at the events, one of the big things to talk about is the community and out system show is no exception. Lots of developers, lots of community engagement. A Z they're building and sharing what they have. So to dig into that topic, happen it. Welcome to the program. 10 Lopez. She is the senior director of Community and Advocacy without systems. Again. Thank you so much for joining us. >>Hi. Thanks so much for having me. >>Well, Jen, you know they're there. So much discussion in the industry right now is like OK, what does that the current moment in time with the global pandemic mean for events? What does it mean for communities? The term I've heard used so much is, you know, how do we bring ourselves together even while we're apart? But if you could, you know, give us You know what does the community on help systems look like? You know, you've had this event before. If this was 2019 you know, what did the community activity in the community engagement looked like? >>Yeah, we're definitely in a different world right now, right? So in 2019 gathering the community together, you know, whether it was at at Max step or another in person events that we often had. Um you know that that is such a huge part of building community is getting people together and being able to have those conversations. And, um, sometimes it's just ah, whether it's meeting at, you know, you're getting some coffee and you meet someone. All of those in person things, um, are hard to do online. But we're really working hard this year at, you know, finding those ways to connect in a bunch of different ways with the community. Um, we have our regular technical talks and that sort of thing that we're doing. But we also have a chat where you can come in tow and chat with other community members. We're gonna have ah, 24. You know, we have this 24 hour zoom going on. So you could you know, we're fine trying to find his many ways as possible. Teoh sort of at least get those conversations and have the ability for the community to connect with each other. >>I'm wondering if you can, you know, people look at communities and especially in the developer community There's so many different pieces of that. Uh, when I talkto Gonzalo he was talking about how do we enable the next? You know, 10 million developers? When I talk to help communities, it looks like the app Dev is obviously a big piece of ah of what you're addressing. But you characterize if you could And if you have any staff but loved, understand, you know, the community, the growth of community. You know where the engagement activity is. >>Yeah, thanks. So the community growth of the out systems community has been phenomenal. Um, last year we saw are just for this year with on 90% growth since last year. Uh, we have 22,000 developers on a monthly basis who are actively doing things in the community. Um, that's anywhere from between building APS and asking questions in the forum and, um, using downloading forge components which are reusable APS attending user groups. There's all these things right. We have this activity level that we've seen that has just been through the roof. And, um, Cove in for the community has actually been, You know, we've seen a huge birth specifically march in April, we saw a great increase in new members coming on. And then what happened is our other members jumped in answering way more questions than we've ever had in the forums offering to help in different ways so that between the increase in gross, the growth and increasing activity, uh, the community itself has jumped in to really help out other people. >>Well, if you look at the development community and the tools they use and how they engage there, really, the work from home, you know, movement probably hit them a little bit less that than the average knowledge worker because they're used to being online there. Used to engaging in these environments. Often it is a distributed community, so it sounds like it makes sense. What what else? From a covert standpoint, You know, I've talked to some of the out systems customers and the ability it baked into the five former, something that they're take advantage of. Do you have any interesting stories around. You know how the community is rallying, you know, specifically with Kobe going on? >>Yeah. So, actually, that that Brown was a huge thing for us. We had at both internal and external. We were getting a lot of folks coming to us and saying, you know, everybody wanted to help, right? Especially in the beginning off when it kind of hit globally, everybody wanted to help. So what we did is we launched a program that we called the community the coveted 19 community response. Orban, um and we weren't quite sure exactly how people might react. But what ended up happening is we had thousands of people give ideas. And with those ideas, we had teams of people who were working on building these acts and actually launching the abs to help different communities all around the world with various issues. Whether it waas, you know, um, on an uber like up that was created to help people in a certain community, you know, find somebody who could go to the store for them. Um, there were, you know, these different acts were being created by the community. The ideas were coming from the community and people just really rallied around it because everybody wanted to help and they wanted to participate and be a part of something. And they were able to get these APS out in, you know, record time. Um, I would see other folks. Everyone was was trying to rely on technology at the time. And I would see other folks saying, Oh, you know, we had a team of five people spent 22 weeks building out. You know, our first M v p of this happened at out systems we were seeing people in, you know, two people in one week having, like, awfully blown, flushed out, being created. Um, So we were able to you not just help with the technology simply but help really quickly when it was needed right away. >>You know what? One of the themes I've been hearing a lot at the show is How do we close that? That Helen skill gap? Um, I have to imagine with your community engagements, the advocacy. You've got some visibility in tow. You know what things is out system engaged with when it comes toe educating the next generation, helping people take advantage of some of the new technologies adoption of the new AI features. It gives a little viewpoint as those changing dynamics in the community and specifically for developer. >>Yeah, I think it's it's really interesting. So, um, we have a number of programs with our between our education program and, um, low code schools and various programs where we're getting not just new developers coming in and burning out systems right away. But but actually getting developers who were coming from other programming languages who were ready to learn something new, who are like, Hey, I'm hearing a lot about, you know, uh, these these different ways to be innovative and I, you know, build an act quickly and it's still secure and stable and robust. And all of this. And so we have a lot of people on, you know, coming in in different ways. We're also really excited about a new partnership that we've just launched with women who code. We're you know, we're working really hard at going beyond just sort of those regular ways of people coming in. We want to help bring people from, you know normally, who may be underrepresented intact at the moment because we want to help bring that new generation in and that generations coming from all walks of life. And, um, you know, coming up with working on lots of different ways, Teoh, educate and and bring them in and keep them intact. >>Yeah. You know, Jen, such an important topic. I'm so glad that you brought it up, you know, diversity. Um, you know what? One of the things when when I think about we're lowering the bar. Ah, and you know what necessary skills? You have to get started to be a coder so often it's I have to have this degree. I need to understand these languages. So, you know, do do you feel this general movement is making it more accessible? Are we in a You know, what are we doing? What we doom or to be able to reach out, find some new pools of talent that can help us close this gap. And you know, then, as you said, keep them in tech. >>Yeah, and I think that will be key, is keeping them in tech. But, um, there are right now it's a It's a strange thing to say this is an opportunity, right? But with lots of people. Um, and specifically here in the US, where I am, Obviously we have a lot of folks who have lost jobs, right? People are looking for ways to get into something new. What's great about being able to learn? Ah, out systems is that that you're going to have a a different kind of job, right? You're going to have one of those jobs with an enterprise organization, um, or or or, you know, one of our partnerships. And it's going to level up your career and it totally differently. And there are, um, uh, lots of organizations right now who are also looking to find those those ways online there, like we have all these members in our community. But we're trying to get trained and Intertek and in different ways, and they're reaching out to us as well and saying, Hey, we're hearing a lot about you know, all of these innovative things out systems is doing. How do we work together? And so it's been really exciting to see that it's not just us going out and reaching out its people saying, Oh, I see these really cool things that you're doing and you know, we want to help get our members, um, learning and into this as well. >>All right, let's look a little forward. If we could, Jen, you know, tell us. You know what? What do you What do you see in the future? You know what feedback you're getting from community? What things should we be looking at? Going forward, >>Going forward. I think that, um, development is really going to be focused on on being able to be creative and innovative and finding new ways to do things. We don't have to do things the same old way anymore, right? We can, uh, build a robust application, uh, quickly and likely saw with co bid. Um, you know, we had big issues, and people were able Teoh, uh, figure out a way Thio Thio use technology to actually help fix these issues or solve a problem really quickly. And I see that very much that people it lights something in people's minds of Oh, being a developer doesn't have to just mean sitting and coding all day. It means, you know, doing really but robust things that I can do to help people and use technology in a totally different, innovative way >>Wonderful. Don't want to give you the final word when we talk about out systems bringing the community together. What do you want? People toe understand and connect with on this community? >>Thedc, um, unity itself is very generous and giving and one thing, but I have really, really loved about being a part of out systems is the community itself because they are working really hard to help bring new developers in help train them, give them mentor ship. So there's a There's a big feeling of, you know, it's not just every person out for themselves. They really want to help lift each other up. I think it's really important for, you know, feeding that technology, that new generation and that innovation that that is coming from it. All right, >>well, 10 Lopez thank you. So so much for helping us dig inside the community. Definitely looking at the engagement opportunities this week. And ah, thank you for all of the information that you share. >>Thanks, Dio appreciate it. >>Stay tuned for more cover jumps to minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCube with digital coverage of OutSystems NextStep 2020. Brought to you by OutSystems. >> Hi, I'm Jen. I'm the Head of Community and Advocacy here at OutSystems. I'm really excited about NextStep especially for our development community. We have a ton of technical talks specifically to help you learn and grow in building OutSystems applications but we also have booths to learn more about the community, to get to know various training and what certifications you can get. There may even be some free stuff. There's also a booth specifically around career. If you're looking for a job, if you're an organization that's looking to hire someone. We have a lot of information and stuff going on there. You can chat with the teams in all of these places and we will also have an ongoing 24 hour Zoom with the community to come in and have those conversations. So, join us for tons of knowledge, technical talks, and also to get to know the community a little bit. We look forward to seeing you there. (calm background music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this CUBE conversation. We always love when we get to dig in with CIO's talk about what's changing, talk about what's happening in the globe. Happy to welcome to the program first time guests, Jen Felch she is the CIO and also the first Chief Digital Officer for Dell Technologies. Jen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> All right, so as I mentioned we've had quite a few Dell CIOs over the years, well, I shouldn't say that many that Dell does have CIO's have a pretty long lifecycle. You've been with Dell for a number of years. You now take the CIO role. And for the first time as I mentioned, it is also the Chief Digital Officer. So maybe let's start with give us what your charter is and why it is important now that the CIO also has that digital mandate. >> Well thank you. It's a role I'm really privileged to have and the combination of the CIO, which is a very traditional role in the sense that we have responsibility for all of our IT infrastructure and applications, and the Chief Digital Officer is really about driving that digital transformation, automating processes, and working directly with the various business functions on the process, the KPIs and the automation of them. So it's a role that I've fully embraced. I have been at the company for quite a while, so that gives me a good background in the processes that we operate, and hopefully bring that to the organization about how we can use automation and technology to make some dramatic improvements in the products that we offer, but mostly the customer experience and employee experience that we create. >> When I've talked to CIOs over the last couple of months, of course the global pandemic has been something front and center. And for those CEOs that had gone through some kind of digital transformation, they were glad that they had gone through it because of that agility that leveraging data is absolutely needed. You had gone through a delly rather substantial transformation of coming together of Dell and EMC. So I guess how has the IT processes and previous transformations had the company ready to deal with the current situation everybody working from home and the like. >> Well, Stu a great question, you started off with having interviewed my predecessors and I would say for most leaders of IT organizations they always leave a legacy, so luckily for me, there were some good things left from those who had led this organization before which would be investments in our network and VPN capabilities that I'm quite thankful to Bask Iyer at VMware, who really led the charge for us in making the case that those were important investments to make as a company getting out ahead of what might have been, no, there wasn't an urgent need, It was the right thing to do. And those things have been incredibly valuable to us as we've now moved everyone to working from home. So our digital transformation really starts from the ground up, whether we're talking about the infrastructure, the network, the devices that we have in employee's hands, the move to modernizing our applications so that they actually work effectively while people are at home, while people may have different levels of bandwidth available to them. Those investments really pay off in the fact that we have over 90% of our employee base working from home being productive. And I think that's really a testimony to my predecessors and the work that our team has been doing to really operate a modern infrastructure, modern applications, modern IT organization. >> So Dell is a global workforce, so I'm wondering if you could just bring us inside a little bit as to what is different about everyone working remotely versus just working across all of the locations that Dell has and I'm curious, are there things that you look at now and say that these are longterm trends. What stays the same and what adjustments, if any, need to be made as to how you think about that underlying IT enablement for the workforce. >> So, great question, I think personally some of the things that I was surprised about when we think about, okay, we have to enable everyone to work from home. Well, we ran into sometime there are legal constraints in terms of what people are able to do from home with respect to taking a call. Call agents being able to respond from their homes in India. That was just something that we were allowed to do, not just Dell, but all organizations were allowed to do during this pandemic. So being aware of what was regulatory, we had as we went to deploy devices, let's say laptops to people who had been desktop based, we had to become much more aware of trade compliance of moving equipment across borders and making sure that we had the appropriate information for doing that. So, I mention those because those are typically not the things we're thinking about as an IT organization. We know that people are going to come into the office, they will get set up as employees or contractors and we'll see them periodically, right. We'll see them in the office on a fairly regular basis, if not every day, even our remote workforce shows up to the office every once in a while, right. And now we've said, okay, we'll deal with all of the restrictions that we face into. And luckily we have a really robust supply chain that helped us navigate through some of the issues with respect to equipment. But that was probably one of the bigger surprises and as we look ahead, really being thoughtful about how people work from the environment that they're in. And what I mean by that is, initially we set up a connected workplace initiative over a decade ago, and we had some requirements for people. They would have a nice quiet place to work, it would be dedicated, they would have appropriate childcare, so they could focus on their work. They were creating a work environment in their home, much like we have in our offices. That doesn't hold true today. So people are working from their home with whatever bandwidth they have available, whatever space they have available. Their children are home, everyone came home, oftentimes their parents are home. So what we're finding is that what's required from the IT professional is to have empathy for the situation that people are in and from a technical perspective providing the best solutions that we can, so they can be highly productive. From a cultural perspective, you didn't ask about that but I'll throw it in there is also just making sure that people know what they're responsible to do so that they can have more flexibility in the times that they choose to work. So they really have flexible hours while they're working from home so they can accommodate everything else that might be going on. And I don't think that is going to change. I think those things are here to stay, which is respecting what individuals have going on in their lives. Making sure that it's clear what expectations are and giving them the technology to be highly productive. >> Excellent, wonder if we could step back to the discussion we started about your role as the Chief Digital Officer, bring us in what's the outcome that we're looking for here. I saw an interview that quoted you and it said that in many ways, the IT department is becoming like a software company. What does that mean for a company like Dell? In some businesses it's like, Oh, we're going to create a new business off on here, banks change what they're doing. We understand what Dell is. Dell as an infrastructure company, obviously as software, but ITs job is enabling Dell technologies. So help us understand a little bit what that digital role is inside Dell. >> Yeah, thank you for the question. So when we think about, let's just say a traditional IT organization that people can get into the mindset that people are going to make IT as their captive organization that will execute that request, and maybe third party software, partners, et cetera, to execute the ask. In a software company, you have a kind of a different approach, which is how do you understand what users are really trying to accomplish? How do you have empathy again for the role that they have and the outcome they're trying to achieve, and how do you bring really a more elegant solution to bear as a collective team. So the things that we're doing around that are forming into what we call a balanced team. So we have our business users, as well as our technical teams, our developers and designers sitting side by side, not actually sitting side by side in today's world, we're actually in a virtual team but it's team that says together we have an outcome that we're trying to achieve. And we may iterate on a regular basis throughout the day to see how the users react, the technology that we have available and how we come up with the best solution. So one aspect of working like a software company is actually working side by side to innovate. The other is having all the operational rigor around our DevOps pipelines, automating our own processes, making the most of your developer's time so that we can spend that time really innovating, coming up with great, highly scalable solutions. When I say more like a software company, those are the things that I'm talking about as really engaging so that we can come up with disruptive solutions or much more elegant solutions that address user needs, and behind us, we have really streamlined operations within our IT organizations so that we spend our time doing great work versus assigning tasks to each other. >> Excellent, I'm curious. What's the role of data in that? Obviously Dell technologies has a strong footprint in data and when we talk to Dell customers being able to not just store data, but extract the value and insights out of that data is hugely important. So what is that intersection of data and digital in your organization? >> I mean, data is digital. When we talk about creating experience, it's often it's either creation of data, the insights that come from data, applying advanced, we call them advanced. It could be machine learning, different aspects of AI, actually applying intelligence to the data that we have so that we can make for more frictionless experiences for our employees or for our customers, ideally for both, everyone has a frictionless experience. So data is incredibly important to driving digital transformation, creating great experiences, driving operational efficiency. And luckily for us I think we have a really strong culture of being data driven. People all across the organization are very comfortable looking at data, digging into it, asking what it means and understanding whether or not we're making good decisions with the insights or poor decisions. I think that makes it kind of nice that there's not a lot of education about data that has to go on, but it is on the critical path of having good data to create insights in all of our transformations. >> Excellent, and one of the things we've often highlighted over the years with some of your predecessors is IT often gets access early and is one of the feedback to the product themes as to what works well and what doesn't. Anything recently that you could share about latest innovations coming out of Dell that your team is leveraging. >> Yeah, I love this role actually, because we do get to work with the product groups about the solutions that we're offering to customers. We might not be a very typical customer just given our size, but we do get to offer our feedback and do a lot of collaborative work. Right now we're working with our PG teams on this new work from home environment as we look at the type of capacity that people need on their laptops to be able to support teams and zoom and do that in a very effective way. I think those are the kinds of things that you'll see from our product group. They can use our employee base as really a test bed to look at what are some of the dynamics that we're seeing. And then that goes directly into the new products that come out. So it's a nice opportunity, certainly we get to use things that are early. They might not be ready for primetime yet, but we get to offer our feedback, that benefits us and I think it also benefits our customers that they get to leverage our tests and trials in their own operations. >> Alright so you talked about building on the legacy of the previous CIOs at Dell, as you look forward to whatever this new normal is going to be as COVID-19 rolls out and we move beyond it, I'd like to get your viewpoint on the role of the CIO going forward. >> Well, I think more than ever all of our companies are dependent on their IT organization to ensure that they can continue operations well depending on their employee base being at home. So that's probably you might say it didn't need to be stated but employees depend on us to be productive and be able to do their jobs, which I think is really key as individuals we're looking to that IT organization to say set me up so that I can be productive participant in the workplace. Now more specifically, when I think about what we're doing, we're looking at this is a new it's really kind of a new typology of what our IT environment looks like. The traditional boundaries of what has been the workplace or the office in set of buildings has now expanded into people's homes. So we're looking at the devices that people have, the laptops or desktops that they may be using at home, as well as the software that provides security and access for them. Then through to the network, we have a big investment in our software defined SD-WAN initiatives that have not only provided us with cost savings, but a lot of flexibility which I think is the imperative for most IT organizations going forward is we really need that flexibility and then into the data center there's no stopping on the migration to using cloud native technology and building out our hybrid cloud that gives us again much more flexibility as we move forward. So, the role of the CIO, I'm certainly biased but I think it just keeps getting to be more and more important as we enable new ways of working, and it is really important to build flexibility into the go forward plan. We're not sure what's going to change, we can just be sure that it will, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, some great points there. We we've been saying for years, of course, that IT matters more than ever so much discussion about how IT work with the business. What I got from your intro though also is this current situation really put a highlight on the employees themselves too. An important thing that we've seen CX and the like all putting the call centers and the employees and everything, but current situation, of course, having us all reflect on the personal impact that global things and technology have on us. Jen Felch, thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure to chat with you and definitely look forward to watching your digital initiatives progressing in the future. >> Well, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed it. >> Alright, Be sure to check out thecube.net for all the interviews that we have. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (dramatic music)

>>law from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering A ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to Vegas. It's the Cube, live from AWS reinvent 19. Lisa Martin here with John Walls and John. We've been hanging out with about 65,000 folks, or so >>just are best friends. But Wade talked about this just a little bit ago, but I really have impressed again with kind of discontinued energy and focus, and you know it's gonna go well beyond the show. But three days of back to back to back Great presentations, Great programming obviously show for still jam packed a really good show. Hats off Day W s >>absolutely right. The energy has not wavered one bit. And oftentimes, by day three, that challenge. There's so much excitement >>not out here, >>not in Vegas. Don and I are pleased to welcome a couple of guests to the Cube. To my left, we've got Jen Doyle, the VP of operations from one strategy, and Ricardo Madan, VP of technology products and service is from Texas is I got all right, give me carte Blanche on how to pronounce that, By the way. So guys, one strategy and Techsystems general store with you give her audience and understanding of one strategy. What you guys are way you deliver. Yeah, so we >>are a eight of us. Born in the cloud, dedicated partner of our Amazon Web service is we're premier consulting partner who focuses exclusively on delivering to our customers high quality. Eight of US expertise across industries. Yeah, so because we're exclusively in aid of us, it's a cost industries and pretty agnostics for customer size scale. So we have that unique capability to really dive deep on being the experts on the eight of us when our customers are the experts of their own business >>and tech systems. >>So tech systems Global Service is we are a full stack technology consulting professional service is GS I global system integrator on. We really pay attention to that term full stack because we cover every facet of the software systems operation have life cycle. But increasingly, in the last couple of years, what has been the heart and soul of our ecosystem of confidences and practices and capabilities has been cloud and even more so has been a W s, which is one of the reasons that we're super excited about coming together with one strategy. >>Cloud. Obviously, it's not. It's not a thing. It's the thing, right? So So we kind of moved that passed that when people come to your clients come to you and they will understand that this cloud experience, especially if they're if they're native cloud right there. Not not a legacy, not bringing stuff over. But they're gonna want to launch what's kind of the checklist that the preliminary of that elementary looked at you do to assess what their needs are, what they're like. It's what their opportunities are and kind of how you get them to start faking about exactly what they want to get done, because I assume it's It's a big shoulder hunch and a lot of questions about where do we go from here? So how do you get them to, I guess, oriented toward that conversation in that discussion, >>Yeah, so a lot of the way good place to start is just a really understand their business right now. It's no longer just a IittIe side of the house kind of discussion it's a whole business. So our first step is really to dive deep and understand their business schools, their culture and what their actual end goal is going to be. And so we have a really great part program that we partner with eight of us called the eight of US Well-architected Review program, which we were really fortunate to be one of the top initial partners selected for the beta program a few years ago and then a launch partner for them when they went public last year to really dive deep in, be able to figure out exactly what are they doing? What do they want to be doing and how to get there both on scale, vertically and horizontally, howto costs save and how to really make sure when they're doing it they're doing in a year fashion. >>And where are those conversations happening? Are they happening at the White Sea level, or is it really up, as Andy Jassy was talking about Tuesday? These types of transformations have to come from the executive senior level. Are you having these conversations with the heads of business? We've really been >>seeing that kind of transformation, and it's been phenomenal. Where that change in culture is no longer just the I t side of the house, it is senior leadership. Like Andy, Jassy said. It's now a holistic business approach where you need that alignment in the senior leadership down and that inclusivity in that kind of far and a lot of our conversations, you're getting everybody really buying into the eight of us cloud initiatives that are going on and keep me honest. I know on your side as well. Tech is experiencing a lot of that same thing >>indeed, in the wayto kind of, I guess, divide and conquer the vectors from where we lean in tow, handle those conversations and prioritize the needs and even deal with the different audiences Lisa, like you're talking about because, like Enterprise, I T owners and business owners, ultimately they care about making the business better, but they're approaching it from different lenses and a W s language. There is a methodology in a mindset called working backwards, and it really is the process of beginning with those goals those business goals that Jen talked about in framing them up just super tight. Before we talk about how many lines of code or how many servers are gonna be preventing. We don't want to even get into that. So we've got that really good flowing understanding of the quantified needs and howto really kind of celebrate what that is and then work backwards from there. That the conference Because it's such an all encompassing conversation, especially with enterprises that air nascent to the cloud, they've only dip their toe in the water. Kind of like what What Andy was talking about during his keynote a couple days ago uh, are specific methodology. Under working backwards, we break it up into two pieces. One is called Think big and one is called Act Now and act Now. Starting from there is usually for the folks, and that's like the technology solution there. Fluent enough, they're lucid enough and what their business is going to get out of cloud and out of a migration and out of native development. All that good stuff so we can kind of go right surgically in tow. Hey, how did we just make you better? Based on our combined expertise and our experience? Think big is a little bit more involved, kind where the question was going because you're thinking about O C M. Organizational change management. And how does that culture really In Stan? She ate itself to move fast and be agile and think in a lean way. And, oh, repurpose lots of skills and lots of roles that kind of go extinct after a while. So how do we take in all this? Great talents unorganised ation and UPS killed him. And next gen them to really operate inside of this new cloud ecosystem. >>So you're talking about really organizationally this leadership holster change or shift, if you will, Taking ownership of it from the very top. How do you characterized maybe what that mindset looks like today, as opposed to maybe 45 years ago? It's so easy to put it over. You know, just throw it over the I t guys and developers, and we're gonna focus on our marketing and our sales that we're going to know that you know that the C suite is there, right? Much more president, These kind of discussions. Yeah, you have to have that. Do you know >>how >>to drive that kind of fundamental change? >>For sure. I think a lot of it has to do with the accessibility that AWS Cloud is really bringing to the industry where it's now in such a easily integrating way and your entire business. It's sea level. As you say, down to the interns can have that same accessibility using that tool box. The eight of us allows for them to really jump in hands first and start making things right away. You could be spinning up instances within seconds. It's so simple for people at all levels of knowledge. It's not just the 20 years of I t. That could be the only ones to understand what's going on anymore. >>What are some of the barriers that AWS and Cloud are have removed that 5 10 years ago, customers were concerned with ABC that now those barriers have been mitigated, not be new barriers. But what about the evolution that you've seen A W s really sort of fuel, >>so that way could even think back to some of what What John you were talking about? The kind of erstwhile mindset was a very big iron one. You didn't really look ATT technology and I t as anything more than a utility. Now it's a competitive advantage. Not now you have. That's why you know, you have this whole concept of being a digital native and digital transformation. All these big words. They get so much air time. But that's really been an acceptance in an adoption that technology has gotten to the point where we're moving quicker, better faster is a function of celebrating CX customer experience and enhancing it and using technology to really make organizations move quicker, move faster, adopt new features into whatever their products that is, whether it's online or whether it's packaged whatever. And it's so I think those barriers that AWS has really kind of bubbled up to the surface and then sifted off has been that integration into the business. And that, that is, that's been a transformation that no other company has really enabled outside of AWS for years. Think about like Gartner and forced or an I. D. C. They would talk about the number one objective right is to be aligned with the business, but always in like a subservient role that was more of a foot forward in a leadership role that you see inside of these organizations >>used to be all those of the I t guys. >>Yeah, that's >>what the I t. Guys. Right? I mean, home on the whole thing. Saved. Go. If you look forward, then when you sit down with whomever and you're trying to walk them through their process and get evaluated, What their needs aren't so on so forth. What's the biggest hurdle you gotta get over with down somebody to say, You've got to be You've got to be totally present. This is your your i t offering should be. You should be cloud or your hybrid multi whatever you might be. But you got to be cloud What's the big challenge there? You think you really get somebody jumping in the deep end? >>Honestly, I would really say it's the culture change right now. It's been such a huge digital transformation. You can't deny that. But the culture transformation that's going along with that has really been phenomenal. And that's a lot of people who are at that point of starting their cloud journey, are starting to realize they have to change the way that they look at everything it, as you mentioned several times. It's not just the technical side anymore. It is the business side, and that's the big culture shift of getting over that. There's a lot of technical debt in there, with all the on creme in different areas that people have invested in. And honestly, right now, the day of lift and shift is gonna is kind of going away. It's all of the new cloud. Benefits, like surveillance and containers is really going to be revolutionary, but that education and enabling it really needs to be more prevalent in everybody's vocabulary. And not just the I t. Guy who could tell you about it. It needs to be the sea level, the enablers, the stakeholders in the middle that really understand what's going on. >>So could you talk to us about one strategy and tech systems coming together tell us a little bit about that, what you're doing together and how you might be an eight, an enabler of that cultural transformation that is absolutely linchpin. >>So there's that that enabler on that accelerator t kind of that that change and not to overuse the word accelerator. But that's just kind of one vector that we can talk about a little bit, and it's really what we're encouraging our customers to look at because they've got a broad choice of size of system integrators like us. But if you're not coming to the table with really depth of expertise, depth of expertise, that can help mute a lot of the complexity that were alluding to. Because even even though we've got so many benefits and so much growth happening inside the Ws world, there's 175 service is today. There have been 2500 feature updates releases across that portfolio Just this year alone, there's 5 to 10 new announcement today and then outside of the Ws stack, you've got hundreds and hundreds of other members of the Dev Ops Tool chain. They get bolted into that so that you know the way that we're kind of getting customers to overcome. Some of that reticence is by muting a lot of that, simplifying it and coming to the table with real accelerators, where we've invested collectively hundreds of thousands of lines of code that we've built and put together for AWS proprietary tools for better adoption, whether it's database freedom and getting like kick started off of your legacy oppressed database environments and into the the purpose built platforms inside of a W s, whether it's micro service's libraries and frameworks that we built for customers to help them start to decompose. Some of those those big, expensive, you know, high technical debt applications that General was talking about into micro service is to containerized to make him run faster in the cloud. So that's, you know, that's where we're leaning in from, Uh, not just with the expertise and the combined resume of hundreds of awesome engagements that we've moved customers to the cloud in and hundreds and hundreds of terabytes that we've moved. But it's it's doing it in a way where the customer knows that they've got a real leader here with them, side by side in the journey. And it doesn't happen in one or two conversations. I mean, this is going on across many different settings and demos and think big sessions like like we were talking about. It takes, it takes some time. >>Yeah, I mean that I think the combined family of Texas one strategy will really be phenomenal for our customers. 48% of the market right now is using AWS cloud and to keep up with that scale of innovation and growth. Just to be able to do that, businesses need eight of US experts and that's who we are. It's in our name our. We have one focus, one strategy and that's eight of us. We are developed based on the same agile, lean leadership principles the eight of us has and with the several competencies that we have. Such a Czar Data and Analytics Machine Learning Dev. Ops Migration Way have a proven track record of not only being the AWS experts but being able to be agile and grow with that same speed that eight of us ours to keep up with the training our teams on that expertise. And I think with tech systems, global footprint and ability to find these amazing talent combined with our skill set, we will be able to create a larger geographical footprint to deliver to our customers in a way that they will not only see our ability to deliver what they're doing but exceed their expectations. >>I imagine the amount of engagement that you're gonna have after an event like this three days you mentioned there after 175 service is that AWS is delivery the volume of announcements. It's incredibly challenging to keep up with that. Plus, there's 2500 sessions. You know, customers can't go to that many. So imagine there's gonna be a lot of leaning on one started Genentech systems to say, Help us deconstruct, deconstruct this digest all the opportunities here. So you guys air. I'm sure going to be very busy after this event. But we thank you for joining John and me today and telling us what you guys were doing individually and collectively together. We appreciate it. Thank you so much for our pleasure. For John. Walls were out. Vegas, baby, this has been the Cube. This is the end of our third day of continuous coverage of lots of stuff going on aws reinvent John. It's been a blast hosting a few segments with you >>as always. >>Nice job. See you next time. >>Thanks for having >>All right. I will see you next time. Thanks for watching

>> from Palo Alto, California It's the Cube covering the em where women transforming technology twenty nineteen Brought to You by V. M. >> Where >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground of'Em were in Palo Alto, California, at the fourth Annual Women Transforming Technology Event, or W T. Squared one of my absolute favorite events to cover. And I'm pleased to welcome from one of the sponsors, Jennifer Cohen, the vice president of operations at Toyota Research Institute. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you, is that I'm really excited to be here to >> This is such a great event. It's It's morning time. You and I both have a lot of energy coming from even before you walk into the keynote here. Collaboration. The positive spirit, the energy, all of these women talking about and menas well past experiences. It's you walk in, and the energy of Deputy squared is palpable. This is your fourth year. So you being here now at all four >> have, and that's why I keep coming back because the energy here is so good because every year I walk away with tips I can use at work and in my personal life, championing diversity >> and diversity inclusion one of the tracks here, as well as trucks like helping emerging leadership the younger generation, which is key because the attrition rates in technology are so, so high. Tell me a little bit about Tech Toyota Research Institute, Terra What you guys doing? And what made it important for tea Right to sponsor W T Square this year. So Toyota Research >> Institute is a subsidiary of China. We're working on a really exciting things like autonomous driving robotics to help elders, agent place and material sciences. So it's really exciting next level stuff. And it's thrilling to kind of coming to work every day on things that we've been hearing about in the world. And now they're real world things, not just the Jetsons, you know? Yes. >> And so you were here as I mentioned the last three years. But last year, uh, when you were here, you were saying a minute ago. You leave this event every year with really useful kind of we'LL put it into tech terms act personal insights, absolutely clueless about your conversations at Tier I that where they said yes, this is an important event for us to >> sponsor, absolutely so that when I When I came back last year, I had brought a couple of folks from T. Ry to attend the event because I've been attending since the beginning. And as I said, every year I find something that I can bring back to the teams, if not multiple things. Andi weaken our chief diversity officer, Our senior chief of staff is also our diversity inclusion Head. She was very passionate about also supportive event. We're involved with Grace Hopper. We have a women's employee resource group. We're really putting our efforts our time here. They were glad to sponsor. And what was so exciting to walk into that room full of energy today and to see t rise logo up there? It was amazing. >> And I'm sure that for that you mentioned that there's about twelve of your your folks that are here that probably feel it's great that you're not just it's not just a logo. Now, this isn't just branding. This is actual. We're here, You're here. It's a focused, concerted effort. That tiara has an in fact when you join Tiara on the last couple of years, one of the things that inspired you was there's a Chena female leadership here, which is not >> common. No, it's definitely not definite, not common in my career. So one of the reasons I started at here I was because of my manager. Who's her name is Kelly K. She's our EVP and CFO, and she's an amazing leader and so on having the opportunity to go to another company. I wanted to go to one that makes a difference. Like tea, right? Look working to improve the quality of human life. And I wanted to work for somebody that I really respect. It could learn from on. It's been pretty rare in my career tohave women, female leaders to report to. So it's been amazing. And that, I think shows in the role that I have the role, that our chief of staff has Kelly's role and the fact that we're here today. It all flows through. >> So talking. Let's talk about more about flow as VP of operations tell me, like, for example, last year's W T squared what were some of the learnings that you brought back and used in your team, whether it's your management style or even hiring the next generation, >> so a few things that I've learned and not all of them are from last year. I'LL be honest. I'm not. All of them are ones I've just up like at you write. But some of them are things about management. Patty Vargas was here a couple years ago, talking about winds and challenges and really highlighting wins and every team meeting that something that it took back. And it well, it's not necessarily diversity. It's been transformational for me as a leader and really helpful to my team's. Then something. Other things I learned were about on, especially in a few years ago, about saying tohr, I'm not accepting any candidates until you have a diverse candidate pool. That's made a really big difference. And it's hard to say it's hard to stick with because it is hard to find women in technology. However, sticking with that has really helped in my career, hiring folks to have a more diverse team, >> so sticking with it, you've been in a technology for a long time. Tell me a little bit about your career path where you stem from the time you were a kid knowing I love computer science, or was it more zigzag ee >> Ah, little's exactly I was actually history, major say, But I always love technology. Back when we had trs eighties, I love technology. And so I actually started doing that to put myself through school, and I loved it so much. It's what I've stopped what's happened in technology for twenty five years, starting as health desk and systems administrator and moving my way up in my career over time, and every so often they still let me touch something technology and a firewall or some of my best. I keep a little bit of that skill set, but it is quarter who I am, and it's quarter Why I made it. Twenty five years sets >> a milestone. Congratulations, by >> the way, twenty five years in any industry that techno technology industry. I was reading some reports the other day upwards of forty five percent contrition, which is higher than any other industry. What have been some of the secrets to your Obviously I'm imagining persistence, but twenty five years is a long time to stick with anything, but you clearly have a passion for this, but I'm sure it hasn't been easy. Give us a little bit of an understanding and maybe some of those more challenging times you encountered. And how did you just kind of with that internal rules also know I'm I like technology. This is what I wanted. >> So, you know, it's always tough being the only woman in a room that's happened the bulk of my career, although thankfully, not a tear I but it has happened across and actually was the only woman at one company, and I thought it was gonna be a great opportunity. And I love the technology that we were doing. And I was excited Teo to infrastructure in operations and support it. And it was really a bad experience. And it wasn't imagine purposeful, but it was not great. And I was there a very short period time when I realized it wasn't gonna work and I had to take a real hard look. Don't want to keep doing this for a living. I do. I don't want to give up technology. So the right thing was to give up that company, right? And the right thing was t make sure that I stayed and what I loved, but not in the wrong spot. So I think being stubborn and persistent. Not being willing to give up the stuff that I love because the environment wasn't right was a huge part of why I have made it this far. And my daughter is a computer science major, and so I really want for her not to have to go through those things apart. The reason I come here today, what I'm excited about W T two is I want to make sure she has a far easier time of it than I had growing up. >> So was your daughter always >> an interested Or did she? Is she kind of following in Mom's footsteps? She >> wasn't the beginning. Actually, she don't want anything to do with it. And my mom's a c P A. And I don't want to do anything to find >> a way. >> So maybe a cool and her uncle, but never the parent, >> exactly. But as she took coding classes, she actually did Girls who code the seven week immersion camp she found like me that she loves it. So I think she'd like to not compare it to Mom. She doesn't want to hear Mom wars, but she absolutely has that same passion. She she loves to code and see the output and see the changes it can make in her life and potentially others. >> So she'd underground. Currently she is. You should give you anything back on the diversity in her. Yes, is she >> does. And I wish I could give you something inspiring. But unfortunately, she it's for four girls to forty guys. >> Okay, so maybe she has that. Maybe it's a DNA thing where she has that some people might say Stubbornness bad. However, I think you're a great example of how that can be, you know, sort of flipped that coin and look at it is persistence. What keeps her saying, I don't care that I'm for forty? >> I'm not sure. I think e think it's similarly the same thing that it's she's passing around and also she's had everybody's in lovely to her. She's had no mistreatment, so she's definitely loving it, but does notice that she's one of, you know, four out of forty. So but would you >> would you advise? And I, I know not like to say the next generation like your daughter's generation, but it's It's the generation of US women who are in technology now with the attrition rates. If they're in a situation, how would you advise him to recognize the experience that you shared with us? That this is situational? This is an industry wide. I'm not going to make a generalization. What would your advice be to them in terms of making that decision to not not leave? >> So I would say, actually, a mentor of mine told me when I was years ago at a company says, Do you like the work or do you do not like the work? Do you like the people do not like the people. If you don't like the people, you need to go somewhere else. But if you like the war, if you don't like the work here in the wrong industry and I like the work and I always have So I would say if you'd like the work, find the right opportunity and see what change you, Khun, doing the company that you're at. If you're at a company and things aren't right, have you to talk to a man in your manager HR there's ways tto see if you could fix it and if you can't, it's okay. Go somewhere else and do what you love. >> I love that it is. Okay, So one of the things that I'd loved digging on as well as you had gone to Terry's a HR and said, I'm not going to be looking at any candidates until you actually did >> a previous companies. But that is my stance since then, >> you know, >> it's without a diverse school, >> okay? And so what is diverse mean to you? What do you say to them? I know you can find us. >> Yes, Well, I diverse. I don't I don't want to dictate it. I just don't wanna have to, you know, the team's all be the same person. I think Joy is talking up the keynote right now about how important it is that we be careful of bias and that we look at those things and that we are having the people who build the technology be well rounded because this technology that's built here in the Valley goes all over the world has to serve everyone, not just the folks who build it. So I think it's having that same mindset going into it, goingto hiring >> one of and that's so important. And there's also debated. Is it a pipeline problem? I just read Emily changed Look proto Pia and where she kind of documents where that pipeline problem was created? Yes, many, many, many decades ago. And a lot of people would say it's a pipeline problem. But the majorities, the underrepresented, which isn't just women and people of absolutely well who say it's not a piper and problem this. And even if we look at a I, there's so many exciting possibilities. All the autonomous vehicle weren't that tear eyes doing, for example, that will impact everybody and jurors facial recognition? You know, there's probably people in the baby boomer, a generation that have iPhones with facial recognition. But the things that joy wish areas about the bias Easter thes malls being trained on, really, it gives me goose bumps. Didn't mind blowing more. People need to understand. We need better data and more diverse data, not just that to train the models to recognize more agree, but there needs to be lots of different, uh, data sets. So this inclusiveness and I think of diversity, inclusion. One of the things that I thought of when Joy was talking about inclusivity is its inclusivity of different data sets and different technologies, so that ultimately going forward, we can start reducing these biases and this technology that is all for good. >> And I think one of things that we've done is, you know, for our company, we actually had on all hands doing unconscious bias training like we are absolutely committed to making sure that we're thinking about those things on the idea if it's pipeline or if it's or or if it's not, I think it's a combination because the fact is, my daughter is in a class with four girls in forty men, and that's not necessarily, you know, there's no judgment there, but that's the reality. So there's pipeline. But I also think we can demand is hiring managers to have a diverse pool come to us? University isn't just I speak to women because that's what you know. That's my story. But there's not. There's, You know, we had those other kinds of diversity inclusion, you know, we have our G d l G B T. Q plus energy starts a lot of letters to get out at once. We have our women than allies. Yogi Employee resource Scripts were supporting that. It's here, I But I think, you know, we see people out there in the world all trying toe push forward on this. I think if we come out of these conferences and take those actions, that's how overtime it's going to get better. So that's my personal thought. >> I love that last question. What are you looking forward to? Taking away from Debbie U T squared for inclusive innovators as the >> well being of a company doing innovation? I'm really curious to see what's presented today, and I know that we've heard studies that talk about women, run companies and with women on board that profitability and innovation go up. So I think that the more inclusive we are, the better. All of our technology that comes out of the Valley is going to be so I'm looking forward to the whatever thought leadership is here today. That's different from each year that there's something different here that I learned it's not the same thing was Pipelines four years ago, right? Like the last year. It was a lot about women's leadership, so I'm really excited to see what comes out today. >> Well, Jennifer, I thank you so much for sharing some of your time on the kid with me today. And I think a lot of people are going to be able to learn a lot from us. Well, we appreciate your time. Thank you. My pleasure. Lisa Martin on the ground with the Cube. Thanks. For what?

>>Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's the queue covering IBM edge 2015 brought to you by IBM. >>Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube. I'm John furrier. We are here in Las Vegas for a special presentation inside the cube. A special announcement. We have mayor AC Borden, mayor of Memphis and Jen Crozer who's the vice president at IBM alliances and Alliance. Welcome to the cube. So mayor Memphis, I'll see renounced city, great culture. Um, smarter cities is a big thing right now. So talk about why Memphis, why IBM, why are you here? What's the big announcement? What's happening in Memphis? >>Well, it's a great day for Memphis in addition to the Grizzlies had slipped that in there, but uh, one, uh, of, of, of just the handful of cities that are receiving what are known as IBM smart cities challenge grants, we pick a challenge. We have, uh, they help us come up with a solution to it. And it's not some abstract idea. In our case, it's how do we weed out the non-emergency calls from the true emergency calls and our EMS service? 120,000, over 120,000 calls a year, about 25,000 of them are not truly emergency calls. So what that does is it takes valuable time and resources away from those true emergency, a true emergency calls. It should be attended to on a priority basis. >>So I know that you have a Twitter handle and you've got a lot of followers. Is the tech culture in Memphis emerging describes the folks that they, what's it like in Memphis from a tech perspective? Are there people who have moved over or there's rabbit. I know there's a lot of folks in town really talk about the tech community. >>Even in my generation, I'm on there just to do a little quality checking. Also on a double analysis. I'm still in this from Zinn. Uh, we're one of the three cities that will received the, uh, Twitter grants, which will allow us to access us and get that data there and use it as we make decisions. So that's really going to be unique for Memphis. So yes, Memphis is a up to date. >>Jen, I gotta ask you because one of the things that's near and dear to our heart in the cube is technology for the advancement of better signal, not noise, whether that's society, education, the Twitter data, and we've talked to in heat you saw about this is that it's the signal of the humans. Um, and this notion of smarter cities is bringing technology to impact the human lives, not just making people get an iWatch or what are, there's some real benefits. Talk about the grants, talk about what IBM is doing because this is real important stuff. I mean, smarter planets to marketing slogan, but the end of the day technology can help people and talk about how that's part of the grant and, and why Memphis and what are these guys doing that's unique. That could be a great case study for others. We started building a smarter planet at one of the things we had to think about was what was the acupressure >>points that would have the biggest ripple effects. And it's cities, right? More than half of the world's population lives in cities. And that's growing by a multiplier every day. And so that's where we wanted to start and we've been really gratified when we started smarter cities challenge, which is a pro bono program. Give us your toughest problem. We will send you a team of six IBM executives for three weeks to help you solve it for free. We've had over 600 mayors apply and we've delivered more than 115 teens >>and in Memphis. I got to ask the question about how you look at the, the governing process now with mobile computing, you can hear everything. They're talking back in real time and it might not be as organized. Certainly tweeting all over the place and kind of getting that data is really key. What's your vision >>that that's the key. We know Memphis, we know what information we have with that. We have what in the world do you do with it? So what better partner than IBM? We know Memphis, but IBM knows the world. We're not the only one who's faced this challenge. So with this team of experts, the IBM professionals who will be owned the ground there, they will then say, here's what you have. Here's the best way to use it. Here's what they did in Rome. Here's what they did in Berlin, London, New York or wherever. So the key is not how much information do you have but what in the world can you do with it in real day to day solutions to those everyday problems. And let me point this out. This is much more than just technology with the process we're going to employ in Memphis using nurses perhaps as dispatchers so that they can ask a few more questions when the call comes in are perhaps helping us set up a system in which nurses will go to the homes of the individuals who we call frequent flyers who often call when, it's not true any emergency but this is because life is on the line here and you really have to have the ability to analyze in real time and apply the right solution. >>And this is why IBM's expertise on a worldwide basis is so critical. >>We always talk about, we always talk about two aspects of real time near real time, which is people get today it's close enough, but when you're in a self driving car maybe or an emergency situation, you want real time. So that's really the key here. Yeah, >>that's the gay real time information being employed in a real real life situation. And that's what any emergency call that's. >>So I've got to get under the hood a little bit cause we like to go a little bit into the engine of, of the, of the local environment. I mean it, people who know life today, they got their cell phones, they think it's easy to call nine one one. It's not that easy. You have these old systems and the cell towers are connected to the municipal networks and you've got a lot of volume of calls coming in. That's a challenge for the local, the technology team and with this new system that's going to clear it up. So, so talk how you guys go from this clogged, you know, traffic calls to really segmenting the emergencies from the nonverbal. >>Again, that's another critical point. We're confident this is going to work and it will somewhat declaw if that's a word unclog because I experienced just without the grant shows us that we could weed out so many of the other calls. They will not be coming in to your nine one one. So that's, that's a big, big help right there is to make sure if we could weed out 25,000 calls, which is what we had last year. We're not truly emergency calls, you wouldn't speak in terms of a Claude nine one one system. >>I was talking to a friend, they're like, give me an example of some of this clog networks that I go, well imagine your phone going off a million times a night. The notifications, cause we're in a notification economy that you have to kind of weed through that. So how are you guys using the data? What's the technology? Can you give some specifics to what's being implemented, the team and how the local resources inter interact with IBM? >>Well I think, you know, the mayor's called out this one source of data that he's getting and mayors we know are getting multiple strings. So we have our intelligent operations center that IBM uses to create dashboards for mayors to see real time data about several different industries or sources or areas that are important to them. But I think that your point about the humans talking is a really critical one. And I want to come back to that because it's easy for us to fixate on the technology. And I think one of the things we've seen in this program is the technology enabling city leaders to hear their constituents in new ways, what they're saying and what they're not saying. And also for them to communicate back with them and close the loop on feedback as policies and programs are inactive. And the thing about the presence of IBM is kind of like a good housekeeping. It will open up Memphis to resources from other national groups. As a matter of fact, we're already using funds from another entity to set up our dashboards for performance in all areas, including of the nine one one calls. So IBM is like this huge magnet. But once folks see, Hey, IBM is in there, others who come in and say, we're going to help Memphis as it develops this system. So >>may I have to ask you a question. If as automation and technology helps abstract away a lot of the manual clogged data and understanding the signal from the noise, what's relevant, what's real time, you have a lot more contextual visibility into your environment and the people. How would you envision the future organization of the government and education and, and uh, police, fire, et cetera, working together? What's the preferred future in your mind's eye? As technology rolls out? The preferred future will be >>the, that when we come up with an innovation like this will be a non event. It would just be, it ought to be the order of the day. Uh, government sometimes kind of lags behind. No, we want to get to the point where we're leading. Uh, quite frankly, my vision is that this soon will become a non event. It will become the order of the day. Uh, humans are citizens will not be afraid of, Oh, I bet not call. I'm going to get a computer on the end of the line or they got a gadget down. They're just going to try to innovate me and see if I'm going to say it would be the order of the day. That's, that's what we're working forward and what we are emphasizing here is not what we are taking away but what we are bringing in. Additionally for this technology, we will actually be able to have a good diagnosis, a good case record built on what we call the frequent flyers. We know the people who call every two weeks, but they will feel so much better when two days before they usually call. A nurse will show up and say, came to check on you and that's what's coming out of this will be customers. This will be the new norm >>because is work. This is already that they're happy people, happy customers, happy voters. Hey, you nailed it. Barack Obama had put in for the first time a data scientist on the white house, DJ Patel, a former entrepreneur, former venture capitalist. Data science is a big deal. Now. Um, are you guys seeing that role coming into the local presence as well? Yes, >>and it's so critical to government and the private sector. If you come up with an item that's not reducing the profit margin, you just shut it down. We can't do that in government that week. Every service we provide, we're locked into that. I cannot say, well the police department where we are, we're not breaking even on that. Let's just shut that down. We won't run three shifts. We'll cut out that third shift. So we have a mandate. It's an imperative. What we're doing here is not an option. This is an absolutely essential. >>So you're excited for the grant. What's next after the announcement? What do you guys be doing together? We've got 16 cities around the world who will be getting these teams. So it's time to schedule them and get started and have the grant now, how many mayors applied and what was the numbers again? Over the life of the program, over 600 mayors have applied for this. This year it was just over a hundred and we are sending teams to 16 cities this year. Well, you guys can get that technology go and get some more music pumping through the world. That's a great place and I'll see the technology, help them. This is a citizen. Thanks for, for sharing the great story. Congratulations, mr mayor. Thanks for joining us on the cube. We right back here in Las Vegas. You watching the cube? I'm John. We'll be right back.

live from Las Vegas Nevada it's the cute covering knowledge 15 brought to you by service now okay welcome back everyone we are live in Las Vegas this is SiliconANGLE Mookie bonds to cube our footage and event coverage would go out to the event started sitteth on the noise i'm john furrier likos day volante our next guest is Jen Stroud senior director and general manager of the HR applications within service now a former customer now general manager welcome to the cube thank you great I get the service now shirt on the jersey of the number everything right I'm official how does it feel so give us a quick you know Darkseid is always a dark side but I won't say which one it is is they always say with the VCS you join the dark side when entrepreneurs join the VC ranks but in this case service now pumping on all cylinders just like a well-oiled machine with the fast side yeah fasten what's it like give us the perspective it's been tremendous that I've been to two knowledge events before but as a customer very different perspective on this side and it's been it's been fabulous very fast you move fast here you have to keep up but it's been wonderful for me to engage with the partners and the customers here to see all the great things that customers are doing with the platform and with our product and also understanding where they want to see us take the the product going forward as a culture like its service now as a company you're in there ask you there for profit yeah kid jittery revenue from customers and I have a product they bring to the customers to get paid for that what's it like internally was the culture like what's the people like it's it's been incredible to be a part of this culture and a little I wasn't what I expected I knew it was going to be very fast-paced but coming in and being able to rely on everyone to make sure you're successful everybody is interested in everybody being successful and I think that starts from Frank on down he's created that culture and so that's what it's about everyone is staring in the same direction and we're I've always said in Silicon Valley you know people you know high fliers come goes a lot of love you come in and out but building a sustainable business is really haha yeah so you gotta give props to Frank's loop and talk about what you've learned Massey HR managers are out struggling this is in the press now small medium-sized businesses you see all kinds of certainly in Silicon Valley where I live you know eight lawsuits coming from just not keeping your eye on the ball little things like yeah Oh someone's offended in a meeting boom lawsuit I've been discriminating against so there's all kinds of stuff happening just by having shot eh our practices so talk about what that means why that's happening is it just because they're lazy or the games change the technologies change what's going on with in the HR application space I think some other people have said it in my colleague Eric hammer who's a solution consultant now leads the enterprise practice said it HR is kind of a 10 to 15 well five to ten years behind IT they're finally understanding that you can't manage with spreadsheets and email anymore and we're seeing it I don't care the the size of the organization or what their annual revenues are there are many organizations struggling with the same thing how do they provide a better experience for their employees and how do they do it in a consistent way and so that's we're seeing it out there the opportunities large and small with with customers it's very consistent Frank Frank mitch is a real time piece what's your perspective on that I mean being real time means service and complaints and managing that I'm sorry Dave I know oh absolutely i mean that's you want to be able to support your employees in a way that they're used to being supported in interacting outside of work right and yet especially the younger generation they come in and they want to work with a company that understands how to how to do that not you know managing through emails and so they want to come in with a hit company that you know gets it so service now is able to provide that type of experience so the state of Technology in HR is changing quite dramatically we were talking I was talking earlier guys from KPMG you know peoplesoft gets acquired by oracle it sets off this chain reaction taleo success factors work day comes into the market space and so the tech base is changing and then all of a sudden service now starts to play and people are confused people asked you yesterday yeah alist me who are you competing with with work day and of course no although you know but we've been asked eight or nine times already I'm just two days you'll continue to be asked you know and then you said something just recently to John that people they can't you know manage effectively with spreadsheets and the like so there's a lot of confusion because there's a lot of ton of technology that's begin going into a human humble management for decades there's some new cool cloud texts coming out technologies work days just you know one example successfactors many others and then and then service now with service management tied to the HRP so what's happening on the technology substrate how would you describe the changes that are going on it's it's amazing I mean they're the companies are understanding very quickly and you look at companies that have done results from their 2014 surveys of large leading HR organizations they understand that they have to to change and to leverage SAS technology in order to be able to to keep up so you like you were indicating we don't have any plan to compete with the workdays or the essay peas or PeopleSoft out there are our whole philosophy is let's figure out how we complement what they do and give like Frank said yesterday and I love what he said let's give let's give our customers choices let's give them good choices that they can they can have a good choice what they want to do ok so you're an HR pro so that's the many people in our audience have the same question that you've been asked nine times today yep you're not competing with the the transaction component that is work day you don't go to service now to to change my you know data about my self but we could if you want to though okay so we could be that front end so I mean again that's Ultima you start there you say yes sir then that make sense yeah go through service now so every request but we're not going to store that we're not we're not the system of Ragnar the system of record there that's the difference mm-hmm right okay but now love flip it so you're not going to go compete with with work day no but if I'm work day and I'm saying wow this company's service now is doing really well they grow in a 50 plus percent a year they got this great market cap maybe I should start doing some of that stuff now they could yeah but they're not going to do the other things it's hell's force like Frank said the other day well hey I talked to penny off all the time you know we're birds of a feather in a lot of ways we're developing apps they're developing absolutely a company like service now with a market tam of 40-plus billion you're playing in a lot of places especially when I have a platform that can do anything that's right now where do you see that all going well I mean in my view when I look at what I want to provide HR leaders I want to provide them out of the box a product that meets the majority of their needs and delivering services to their employees I and I want it to continue to and will expand on this and future releases look and feel the great user interface because it's all about the employee experience with HR IT doesn't care about the employee experience HR cares about the employee experience so really really working on that user interface and that experience and and the workflows for me the the possibilities are limitless what is it you and the work days of comprehensive system but optimizing workflows is interesting because there's so many different workflows in HR so there's that kind that stands like the strategy just picking it's almost like I Tina sends pick a few critical workflows could be trendy hey we got this new law comes out or longboarding of course is the big one that everybody's talking yeah so what is those use cases what are the key ones you guys are well I mean you have leave of absence as a big use case every HR organization and and it's it's one that can be very sticky it can also bleed into legal and other areas of the business so leave leave of absence managing those leave of absence requests some basic ones that are easy to ition reimbursement employment verification really standard that we that we will be offering out of the box too to our customers a pto request managing time off those are all yes you're lying fruit to use automation automation the other ones are just more yeah it's rewire or something or you know could be exposure that's right yep what percent of companies in your experience do performance reviews I just want to ask you as an HR pro ah too many too many too many do you think it's a I reproductive I think the so this is another probably great reason why I joined this organization is in Frank's and Shelley's philosophy on performance reviews and it's not formal the way we consider it formal or HR many HR organizations do with you know the whole performance review and setting goals he really believes that that that whole responsibility lives with the manager and HR is there to support the manager and I love that philosophy but we have to as a as we're developing our product understand that unfortunately this organization don't share Frank's philosophy ok so you're saying that many organizations have the HR oh they do the performance I feel like a neophyte I didn't know that what that's insane absolutely would you have the HR department it is performing well and i and i don't necessarily i don't i don't agree with it but it absolutely i would majority of organizations HR still manages the whole performance whether the sense that they sent a syntax they had the structure and process yeah which controls the behaviors of Manokotak attendance it's a whole they don't do the review submitted yourself they don't do their reviews but they they set the schedule and you must have your reviews done by this time and you must miss assurance icon the dentist makes your teeth pulled yeah basically and then they're constantly pounding on managers when they don't get it done to get it done get it done get it done i mean that's that's the way it was in my previous company no no offense but it just does it's not it doesn't work well what does frank with what what what Frank's philosophy and Shelley's philosophy is here and that is managers are responsible for the performance of their team and you reward people for their performance and then comes in the last place already no prize for you yeah so I want to ask question about systems of engagement versus a record this comes up a lot and that I look at it a little bit differently as I don't look it from the HR perspective mother from the day big data side what's your view of it from an HR perspective what is the definitions of those systems of engagement systems of record I can also imagine so I look at it and this from this is the my philosophy when I was on the customer side I wanted to create that one stop shop where my employees could come where they knew exactly i took all the guesswork out for them here's where you come to do everything now ultimately they may be the they may be interacting and engaging with a form and service now and that was going to feed being an integration to our hrs is system which was oracle that's fine but they don't need to know that for them I wanted to create that standard look and feel standard system of engagement that was predictable for them easy to use and that's really what you want to provide employees you want to make it easy that's an employee that's the app that's user interface user experience that's right flows and clicks yep click stream where all the information is ultimately stored is a whole different matter and not necessarily important to me other than I want to be able to integrate with those systems so bad you I bed ux taking that to the next level means you don't get the data you need for the systems records so the engagement date is pretty critical engagement is is absolutely critical if you want your your employees to use it if it if it is a bad you I if it isn't a good experience they're going to go I'm not going to use this and they're going to they're going to the employees make themselves heard very loudly so they'll let you know if it's a bad experience so that creating that great system of engagement where it's easy to use and they know how to use it that's important about mobile as it relates specifically an HR context that's the conversation we're having are you happy with where you are with mobile is there a lot more work to do there very happy with where we are but as with everything I think we can continue to enhance what we offer it's absolutely a necessity in HR as you think about where many of the employees make their benefit decisions it's not at the office on their lunch break it's at home with their with their families and so they may be you know looking for information and the knowledge base or making a benefit selection on their mobile device at home not at the office so being able to provide that capability on a mobile or you know iPad device is very critical she has talked a lot about you know the affinity with work day of course I know an eel and Frank you know birds of a feather and friendly but there's a lot of other HR platforms out there oracle SI p many others what about those we also so right now we're focusing just because the market there's a lot of shift to an interest in work days Oh cloud its cloud yeah and but other the other ones are also coming up with they have cloud as well as record yeah yeah so so with the Geneva will have a two-way integration with worth work day to make that easier for customers but then we'll be focusing on additional out-of-the-box integrations with those other hris systems as well so does it have to be cloud-based I mean everybody's cloud now everybody is just like it better because you're why it's this is part of the mantra it's easier it's easier for you it's easier for the customers it doesn't action okay yeah this is a big so what's your goal now you're in there get your running shoes on three feet in a cloud of dust making things happen to get some teammates to support you servicenow yeah what's next what's what are you gonna work on what's your plan well we just don't we're still not known enough in the HR industry as a trusted platform in HR so we've got our work cut out for us there and so you know it is about what we're building in the product that's going to help us but it's also going to help us getting out at HR tech that's coming here mandalay bay and octo we'll be here other events working with analysts as well to help them understand what we're doing and really it's going to be about creating more success and a great customer base so that you know this time next year I hope to you know be able to say you know we really are one of those vendors that HR looks to first and not you know us trying to get in there to have the because I think once they do and once they look at what we have to offer it's it's it's very intriguing for them but we really want to be you know on top of their mind it sounds like your strategy then is to say hey you know what you big pickle the big decisions we're going to come in create some value pretty nimble pretty agile land and expand and if that grows it grows and not really mutually exclusive to some other platform no and in we absolutely are concentrating right now on where we are very successful so we have a lot of great customers already on the IT side so they all have HR departments so we're absolutely focused there in 2015 but beyond we really want to expand and be first okay Jamie keep a track and we'll be following you if you need any help let us know we go stroll at the cube to HR tech con and in October it's the cube we are live here at Las Vegas extracting the scene from the noise shared that with you I'm genre Dave vellante we'll be right back after this short break of the next guest stay tuned off

>>Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change, just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings with >>You. I, I mean, I'll bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah. Well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing, so for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company. There's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language, because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked them a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have a really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment and how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office, be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah. Well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, We'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role work, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I, >>You were, were talking, that's >>What we, you were talking before about myths and you know, the, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, People in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance. We looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where >>You work. And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, I think we think, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing? You know, with our folks. So especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about as leaders, we've probably been thinking about a decision or a transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, We're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we sent out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on this change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. Culture. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation in post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I notice there's, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model and doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one of the lists is Dell sap. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool. Top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it and how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewee to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important and then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster on the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power a positive thinking, do want to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the see you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>That you might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and you know, paying it forward. But, but so it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our CEOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. It's a culture of respect. You know, high performance, high expectations, accountability, having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years, you always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the Cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Ante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

>>Hello everyone, This is Dave Lanta and you're watching The Cube's coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind the scenes interviews featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're gonna explore Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here. And don't forget, it's Cyber Security Awareness Month. Sam Groot is here. He's the senior vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? >>Always great to be here, Dave. >>All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud Apex, multi-cloud. What's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? >>Yeah, yeah. Look, Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud is becoming a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we, we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design, where essentially organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multi-cloud by by default, rather it's multi-cloud by design, where you're very intentional in how you do multi-cloud. >>And how we deliver multi-cloud by design is through Apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, they've like, we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that, you know, the beginning of this year we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SAS based backup service. We've introduced or announced Project Alpine, which is bringing our storage software, intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run an Amazon Azure, aw, I'm sorry, Amazon, aws, Azure or Google. And then, you know, we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announce key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information or our data from on-prem through the Snow Snowflake cloud. >>Or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem SA providers. And then finally I would say, you know, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat, where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announce a strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know, VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the la at the recent VMware explorer, we announced new Tansu integration. So, So Dave, I, I think in a nutshell, we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. >>Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies world. First time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus sort of default, which is great Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware, of course, you know, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting Red Hat. So seeing that expand, now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's gotta be new. Speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type That's right. Ecosystem's, telcos, what and what's this new frontier platform all about? >>Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about clouds and multi clouds. We've talked about private and hybrid clouds, we've talked about public clouds, clouds and cos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives. And that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We see upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years of delivering edge solutions. >>81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the Edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of Edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a, a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge solutions. Say the bottom line is the game has gotta change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to un unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And Project Frontier in its most simplest form, is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really gonna be able to manage, OP, and operate their edge infrastructure and application securely, efficiently and at scale. >>Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name. It is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capabilities. That's right. Integration's. Is there hardware involved? >>Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure, orchestration, orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really there's, there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of 'em. You know, freedom of choice. We definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there, even more so at the Edge than any other part of the IT stack. You know, being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or IOT frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Frontier is, you know, being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment, you know, and of course backed by an end and secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. >>And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with the centralized management through Project Frontier and Zero Touch deployments. You know, one of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the frontier is really IT resources and being able to have that IT expertise. And we built in an enormous amount of automation helps streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution, which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands, which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Frontier is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certain, excuse me, certainly, and into the future. >>Yeah. Sam, no truck rolls. I like it. And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust, so we have Mother's Day, you, we have Father's Day. The kids always ask When's Kids' day? And we, of course we say every day is kids' day and every day should be cyber security awareness day. So, but we have cyber security awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and, and how are you responding? >>Yeah, yeah. No, there isn't a more prevalent top of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company is really have been forced to reckon with the cyber security and ransom secure issues out there. You know, every decision in IT department makes impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly, positively, hopefully impact it, but also can negatively impact it as well. So data security is, is really not a new area of focus for Dell. It's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cybersecurity and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system. And having the right supply chain in the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. >>Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together. That, that coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment. We are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security, it certainly is not absolute all correct. Security architectures assume that, you know, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you gotta be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. >>Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation now with cloud, you've got, you know, shared responsibility models, you've got that multi-cloud, you've got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the, the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their r and d and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay. Sam, put a bow on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, look, I I think we're at a transformative point in it. You know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume it in different ways, such as as a service, a lot of customers edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy, we've got the right portfolio. We are the trusted partner of choice to help them lead, lead their, their future transformations into the future. So, Dave, look, I think it's, it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in it and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. >>Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right. A Dell Tech world in Vegas this past year, one of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of, you know, the younger generation. And that conversation was, was with Jen Savira and we're gonna speak to Jen about this and other people and cult culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022.

>>As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell emc and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell com culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell. Technologies's gonna share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell good long term investment? >>Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the president of Dell's ISG business unit, who's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam GrowCo is the senior vice President of marketing. He's gonna come in the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we're gonna see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Savira, who's Dell's chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're gonna geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet cfo, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to the >>David, It's good to see you and good to be back with you. So thanks for having me. >>Yeah, you bet. So Tom, it's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin, you had to give up your gross margin. Pinky as kidding. And, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro, but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company at your size, you've had some success at the top line, which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >>Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey. If you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but, you know, stepping into the last 18 months, it's, you know, I, I think I remember talking with you and saying, Hey, you know, the scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was, you know, 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did, which was a pretty incredible growth story as we think about how we helped customers, you know, drive workforce productivity, enable their business model during the all remote work environment. That was the pandemic created. And couple that with the, you know, the, the rise then in the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the, of the pandemic coupled with, you know, the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November, as you know, as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade within unlocked, quite frankly, shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable, you know, 18, 24 months. It's, it's never dull at Dell Technologies, Let me put it that way. >>Well, well, I was impressed with you, Tom, before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is, is, is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with fed tightening and you're combating inflation, you got this recession looming, there's a bear market you got, but you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But it spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >>Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave, and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 700 and, you know, $50 billion or so. If you think about our core IT services capability, you couple that with some of the, the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that, that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity, total addressable market. And so from, from that perspective, we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, you know, number one share in some of these, you know, our highest share position may be, you know, low thirties and maybe in the high end of storage you're at the upper end of thirties or 40%. >>But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and, and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So, so you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as, as you highlighted, we actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about as you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings, was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our, our total revenue stream, But we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was, was holding quite frankly. >>And so we gave a a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a result of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlight it continues to be challenging. You know, you, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and, and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue principle, particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the long term, but I do think that there is, you know, that there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters, who knows quite how long, you know, to, to make sure the business is properly positioned and, you know, we've got a great portfolio and you're gonna talk to some of the team LA later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. >>So the opportunities there, there's some short term navigation that we're gonna need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right >>Now. Yeah. And as a global company, of course you're converting current local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's, that's, that's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know, the best companies not only weather the storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to cut out, come out the other side stronger. So I wanna talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the the business growth. You mentioned the tam, I mean, even, even as a lower margin business, if, if you can penetrate that big of a tam, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software. And, but so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >>Yeah, look, I, I think it comes down to we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term digital transformation continues. I I, I am on numerous customer and CIO calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation in infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's gonna slow or, or pause or maybe they're not gonna invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters, but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the, the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our, the telecom providers across the globe open up their, what a cl previous been closed ecosystems, you know, to open architecture. You think about, you know, what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data gravity and latency matters. >>And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us, you know, yes, we will, We're continuing to invest. And you Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, you know, we are in, in, in normal times a, a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so. You know, we've got a negative, you know, CCC in terms of, you know, how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our, you know, our capital allocation strategy, which has now returned, you know, somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, you know, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, you know, we are a great sort of, I think, value creation opportunity in a over the long term that the long term trends are with us, and I expect them to continue to be so, >>Yeah, and you guys, you, you, you do what you say you're gonna do. I mean, I said in my, in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put 46 billion on the, on the, on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core, which that's quite remarking. That gives you some other opportunities. Give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play, but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >>Hey, Dave. Yeah, look, I, I just think if you look at the gr the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we com you know, if you look at, say we're a hundred billion revenue company, which we were a year, you know, last year, that as we reported roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client and in PC space, roughly, you know, 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are gonna continue the opportunity to grow, share, grow at a premium to the market, drive, cash flow, drive, share, gain is clearly there. You couple that with, you know, what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management, you know, we, and you cut, you put that together with the long term trends around, you know, data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in, in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain, our services footprint, you know, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >>Well, Tom, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >>Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >>All right. You're watching the Cube's exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell and we're excited to get his thoughts, keep it right there.

>>The transformation of Dell into Dell emc. And now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the enterprise technology industry. The company has gone from a Wall Street darling rocket ship PC company to a Midling enterprise player, forced to go private to a debt laden powerhouse that controlled one of the most valuable assets in enterprise tech i e VMware, and now is a hundred billion dollar giant with a low margin business. A strong balance sheet in the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry and financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever of Dell EMC of the Dell EMC deal was detailed in Michael Dell's book Play Nice But Win in a captivating chapter called Harry You and the Bolt from the Blue Michael Dell described how he and his colleagues came up with the final straw of how to finance the deal. >>If you haven't read it, you should. And of course, after years of successfully integrating EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, all of this culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program. Now today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're gonna hear from four of Dell's senior executives, Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's gonna answer the question, why is Dell a good long-term investment? Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau, who's the president of Dell's ISG business. >>That unit is the largest profit driver of Dell. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Groot, who is the senior vice president of marketing, will come on the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering, and then the new Edge platform called Project Frontier. Now it's also cyber security Awareness month that we're gonna see if Sam has, you know, anything to say about that. Then finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell actually has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Vera, who's Dell's chief Human Resource Resource Officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I wanna share our independent perspectives on the company and some research that we'll introduce to frame the program. >>Now, as you know, we love data here at the cube and one of our partners, ETR has what we believe is the best spending intentions data for enterprise tech. So here's a graphic that shows ET R'S proprietary net score methodology in the vertical access. That's a measure of spending velocity. And on the X axis, his overlap of pervasiveness in the data sample, this is a cut for just the server, the storage, and the client sectors within the ETR taxonomy. So you can see Dell CSG products, laptops in particular are dominant on both the X and the Y dimensions. CSG is the client solutions group and accounts for nearly 60% of Dell's revenue and about half of its operating income. And then the arrow signifies that dot, that represents Dell's ISG business that we're gonna talk to Jeff Boudro about. That's the infrastructure solutions group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of of the remainder of Dell's business, and it is, it's, as I said, it's most profitable from a margin standpoint. >>It comprises the EMC storage business as well as the Dell server business and Dell's networking portfolio. And as a note, we didn't include networking in that cut had we done. So Cisco would've dominated the graphic. And frankly, Dell's networking business isn't industry leading in the same way that PCs, servers and storage are. And as you can see, the data confirms the leadership position Dell has in its client side, its server and its storage sectors. But the nuance is look at that red dotted line at 40% on the vertical axis that represents a highly elevated net score, and every company in the sector is below that line. Now we should mention that we also filtered the data for those companies with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, but the point remains the same. This is a mature business that generally is lower margin storage is the exception, but cloud has put pressure on margins even in that business in addition to the server space. >>The last point on this graphic is we put a box around VMware and it's prominently present on both the X and Y dimensions. VMware participates with purely software defined high margin offerings in this, in these spaces, and it gives you a sense of what might have been had Dell chosen to hold onto that asset or spin it into the company. But let's face it, the alternatives from Michael Dell were just too attractive and it's unlikely that a spin in would've unlocked the value in the way a spinout did, at least not in the near future. So let's take a look at the snapshot of Dell's financials. To give you a sense of where the company stands today, Dell is a company with over a hundred billion in revenue. Last quarter, it did more than 26 billion in revenue and grew at a quite amazing 9% rate for a company that size. >>But because it's a hardware company, primarily its margins are low with operating income, 10% of revenue, and at 21% gross margin with VMware on Dell's income statement before the spin, its gross margins. Were in the low thirties. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on r and d because because it's so big, it's still a lot of money. And you can see it is cash flow positive. Dell's free cash flow over the trailing 12 month period is 3.7 billion, but that's only 3.5% of trailing 12 month revenue. Dell's Apex, and of course it's hardware maintenance business is recurring revenue and that is only about 5 billion in revenue and it's growing at 8% annually. Now having said that, it's the equivalent of service now's total revenue. Of course, service now is 23% operating margin and 16% free cash flow margin and more than 5 billion in cash on the balance sheet and an 85 billion market cap. >>That's what software will do for you. Now Dell, like most companies, is staring at a challenging macro environment with FX headwinds, inflation, et cetera. You've heard the story and hence it's conservative and contracting revenue guidance. But the balance sheet transformation has been quite amazing. Thanks to VMware's cash flow, Michael Dell and his partners from Silver Lake at all, they put up around $4 billion of their own cash to buy EMC for 67 billion, and of course got VMware in the process. Most of that financing was debt that Dell put on its balance sheet to do the transaction to the tune of 46 billion. It added to the, to the balance sheet debt. Now Dell's debt, the core debt net of its financing operation is now down to 16 billion and it has 7 billion in cash in the balance sheet. So dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So pretty good picture. >>But Dell a hundred billion company is still only valued at 28 billion or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar H HP's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc. Dell's, you know, laptop and PC competitor is around 45 cents. IBM's revenue multiple is almost two times. By the way, IBM has more than 50 billion in debt thanks to the Red Hat acquisition. And Cisco has a revenue multiple, it's over three x, about 3.3 x currently. So is Dell undervalued? Well, based on these comparisons with its peers, I'd say yes and no. Dell's performance relative to its peers in the market is very strong. It's winning and has an extremely adept go to market machine, but it's lack of software content and it's margin profile leads. One to believe that if it can continue to pull some valuation levers while entering new markets, it can get its valuation well above where it is today. >>So what are some of those levers and what might that look like going forward? Despite the fact that Dell doesn't have a huge software revenue component since spinning out VMware and it doesn't own a cloud, it plays in virtually every part of the hardware market and it can provide infrastructure for pr pretty much any application in any use case and pretty much any industry and pretty much any geography in the world and it can serve those customers. So its size is an advantage. However, the history for hardware heavy companies that try to get bigger has some notable failures, namely hp, which had to split into two businesses, HP Inc. And hp E and ibm, which has had in abysmal decade from a performance standpoint and has had to shrink to grow again and obviously do a massive 34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. So why will Dell do any better than these two? >>Well, it has a fantastic supply chain. It's a founder led company, which makes a cultural difference in our view, and it's actually comfortable with a low margin software, light business model. Most certainly, IBM wasn't comfortable with that and didn't have these characteristics, and HP was kind of just incomprehensible at the end. So Dell in my opinion, is a much better chance of doing well at a hundred billion or over, but we'll see how it navigates through the current headwinds as it's guiding down. Apex is essentially Dell's version of the cloud. Now remember, Dell got started late. HPE is further along from a model standpoint with GreenLake, but Dell has a larger portfolio, so they're gonna try to play on that advantage. But at the end of the day, these as a service offerings are simply ways to bring a utility model to existing customers and generate recurring revenue. >>And that's a good thing because customers will be loyal to an incumbent if it can deliver as a service and reduce risk for for customers. But the real opportunity lies ahead, specifically Dell is embracing the cloud model. It took a while, but they're on board as Matt Baker Dell's senior vice president of corporate strategy likes to say it's not a zero sum game. What it means by that is just because Dell doesn't own its own cloud, it doesn't mean Dell can't build value on top of hyperscale clouds, what we call super cloud. And that's Dell's strategy to take advantage of public cloud CapEx and connect on-prem to the cloud, create a unified experience across clouds and out to the edge that's ambitious and technically it's non-trivial. But listen to Dell's vice chairman and Coco, Jeff Clark, explain this vision, please play the clip. >>You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. That's if, if you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want, They want to leverage whatever they can, and at the end of the day there's, they have to differentiate what they do. Well that, that's >>Exactly right. If I take that and what, what Dave was saying and and I, and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to delivery a distributed platform, game over, >>Eh, pretty interesting, right? John Freer called it a business operating system. Essentially, I think of it sometimes as a cloud operating system or cloud operating environment to drive new business value on top of the hyperscale CapEx. Now, is it really game over? As Jeff Clark said, if Dell can do that, I'd say if it had that today, it might be game over for the competition, but this vision will take years to play out. And of course it's gotta be funded and now it's gonna take time. And in this industry it tends to move. Companies tend to move in lockstep. So as often as the case, it's gonna come down to execution and Dell's ability to enter new markets that are ideally, at least from my perspective, higher margin data management, extending data protection into cyber security as an adjacency and of course edge at telco slash 5G opportunities. >>All there for the taking. I mean, look, even if Dell doesn't go after more higher margin software content, it can thrive with a lower margin model just by penetrating new markets and throwing off cash from those markets. But by keeping close to customers and maybe through Tuck in acquisitions, it might be able to find the next nugget beyond today's cloud and on-prem models. And the last thing I'll call out is ecosystem. I say here ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. Because a defining characteristic of a cloud player is ecosystem, and if Apex is Dell's cloud, it has the opportunity to expand that ecosystem dramatically. This is one of the company's biggest opportunities and challenges. At the same time, in my view, it's just scratching the surface on its partner ecosystem. And it's ecosystem today is is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but in a, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. >>The snowflake deal is an example of up to stack evolution, but I'd like to see much more out of that snowflake relationship and more relationships like that. Specifically I'd like to see more momentum with data and database. And if we live at a data heavy world, which we do, where the data and the database and data management offerings, you know, coexist and are super important to customers, like to see that inside of Apex, like to see that data play beyond storage, which is really where it is today and it's early days. The point is with Dell's go to market advantage, which which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem hybrid edge super cloud player that I wanna partner with to drive more business. You'd be crazy not to, but Dell has a lot on its plate and we'd like to see some serious acceleration on the ecosystem front. In other words, Dell as both a selling partner and a business enabler with its platform, its programmable infrastructure as a service. And that is a moving target that will rapidly involve. And of course we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technology Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vte. We hope you enjoy the rest of the program.

>>As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell emc and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell com culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program today In conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell good long term investment? >>Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau was the president of Dell's ISG business unit. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grow Cot is the senior vice president of marketing's gonna come in the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we're gonna see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Savira, who's Dell's chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're gonna geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet cfo, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to the cube, >>Dave, it's good to see you and good to be back with you. So thanks for having me, Jay. >>Yeah, you bet. Tom. It's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin, you had to give up your gross margin binky as kidding, and, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro, but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company at your size, you've had some success at the top line, which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >>Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey. If you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but, you know, stepping into the last 18 months, it's, you know, I, I think I remember talking with you and saying, Hey, you know, this scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was, you know, 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did, which was a pretty incredible growth story as we think about how we helped customers, you know, drive workforce productivity, enabled their business model during the all remote work environment. That was the pandemic created. And couple that with the, you know, the, the rise then and the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the, of the pandemic coupled with, you know, the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November, as you know, as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade within unlocked, quite frankly shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable, you know, 18, 24 months. It's, it's never dull at Dell Technologies. Lemme put it that way. >>Well, well, I was impressed with you, Tom, before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is, is, is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with fed tightening and you're combating inflation, you got this recession looming, there's a bear market you got, but you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But it spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >>Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave, and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 700 and, you know, 50 billion or so. If you think about our core IT services capability, you couple that with some of the, the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that, that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity, total addressable market. And so from from that perspective, we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, you know, number one share in some of these, you know, our highest share position may be, you know, low thirties and maybe in the high end of storage you're at the upper end of thirties or 40%. >>But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and, and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So, so you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as, as you highlighted, we actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about as you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings, was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our, our total revenue stream, but we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was, was holding quite frankly. >>And so we gave a a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a, of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlight it continues to be challenging. You know, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and, and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue principle, particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the, and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the long term, but I do think that there is, you know, that there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters, who knows quite how long, you know, to, to make sure the business is properly positioned and, you know, we've got a great portfolio and you're gonna talk to some of the team LA later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. >>So the opportunities there, there's some short term navigation that we're gonna need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right >>Now. Yeah. And as a global company, of course you're converting local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's, that's, that's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know, the best companies not only weather the storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to cut out, come out the other side stronger. So I wanna talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the the business growth. You mentioned the tam, I mean, even as a lower margin business, if, if you can penetrate that big of a tam, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software. And, but so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >>Yeah, look, I, I think it comes down to we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term digital transformation continues. I I am on numerous customer and CIO calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation and infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's gonna slow or, or pause or maybe they're not gonna invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters, but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the, the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our, the telecom providers across the globe open up their, what a cl previous been closed ecosystems, you know, to open architecture. You think about, you know, what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data gravity and latency matters. >>And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us, you know, yes, we will and we're continuing to invest and you know, Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, you know, we are in, in, in normal times a, a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so, You know, we've got a negative, you know, CCC in terms of, you know, how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our, you know, our capital allocation strategy, which has now returned, you know, somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, you know, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, you know, we are a great sort of, I think value creation opportunity and a over the long term that the long term trends are with us, and I expect them to continue to be so, >>Yeah, and you guys, you, you, you do what you say you're gonna do. I mean, I said in my, in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put 46 billion on the, on the, on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core, which that's quite remarking and that gives you some other opportunities. Give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play, but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >>Hey, Dave. Yeah, look, I, I just think if you look at the good, the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we com you know, if you look at, say we're a hundred billion revenue company, which we were a year, you know, last year, that as we reported roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client, in in PC space, roughly, you know, 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are gonna continue the opportunity to grow, share, grow at a premium to the market, drive, cash flow, drive, share gain is clearly there. You couple that with, you know, what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management, you know, we, and you cut, you put that together with the long term trends around, you know, data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain, our services footprint, you know, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >>Well Tom, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >>Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >>All right. You're watching the Cubes exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell, and we're excited to get his thoughts, keep it right there. >>Welcome back to the cube's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit. I'm Dave Ante and we're going inside with Dell execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're gonna dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits in to that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. And with me now as friend of the cube, Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you. Welcome. >>You too. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you and thanks for having me back on the cube. I'm thrilled to be here. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. You know, we talk all the time about operating in a data driven multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems, Jeff? >>Sure. Hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. There are motivation, they're top of mind, everything we do, my leadership team and I spend a lot of time with our customers. We're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points, and we wanna get their feedback in regards to our solutions, both turn and future offerings, really ensure that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data for no surprise going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'd say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those are driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first the data. As we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. >>And you can just think of that in it's everywhere, right? And so as it as the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud. Which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds running across multiple locations that's on-prem and off-prem, it's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately, for most of our CU customers, multi-cloud is actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed. It's been a lot more of multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And if you really think about our customers, I mean, I, I, I've talking to 'EM all the time, you think about the data complexity, that's the growth and the gravity. >>You think about their infrastructure complexity shifting from central to decentralized it, you think about multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts that all creates operational complexity for their teams around their processes of their tools. And then you think about security complexity that that dries with the, just the increased tax service and the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? They, what they really want from us, and what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The immediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and aligned versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really wanna simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT and a more agile it. And they want more control of their data, right? >>And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious and we've probably all heard it a bunch, but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe, and we believe as Dell that we, it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of it. We're already doing this today on just a couple quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported recently, we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience. We go back to that complexity and it was across a very distributed environment, including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries and hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level. >>Objective things like cost complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer A is a big New England Patriot fan. And Dan, Dave, I know you are as well. Oh yeah, this one's near, near data to my heart, it's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all the businesses that create more, I'd say data driven, immersive, secure experience, which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for real time insights for things like cyber resiliency, but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a PA fan like I am, did they truly are meeting us where we are in our seats on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time you're there. The bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make it simpler for our customers and to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're gonna do this, is it through a multi-cloud by design approach, which we talked a lot about with you and and others at Dell Tech world earlier this year, >>Right? And we had Salesforce on, actually at Dell Tech group. The craft group is interesting because, you know, when you get to the stadium, you know, everybody's trying to get, get, get out to the internet and, and, but then the experience is so much better if you can actually, you know, deal with that edge. So I wanna talk about complexity though. You got data, you got, you know, the, the edge, you got multiple clouds, you got a different operating model across security model, different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a bandaid. So I wanna, I wanna talk to, to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long term strategy. >>Sure, I'd love to. So first I, I'd like to state the obvious, which are our investments in our innovations really focused on advancing, you know, our, our our customers needs, right? So we are really, our investments are gonna be targeted. We, we believe customers can have the most value. And some of that's gonna be around how we create strategic partnerships as well connected to what we just spoke about. Much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is in the orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places and customers, you know, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity, really enabling those developers that do what they do best, which is creating more value for their customers than for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud anywhere. >>Data lives we're focused on, also focused on consumption based solutions, which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility, which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software to define common storage layer, that common storage layer. You can think about this Dave, as our ias if you will. It underpins our data access in mobility across all data types and locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, colo, edge, and it's delivered in a secure, holistic, and consistent cloud experience through Apex. We are making a ton of progress to let you just to be, just to be clear, we've made headway in things like Project Alpine, which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announce this back in in January, which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds. >>Really delivering the best of both worlds, allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services and storage software, such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. But in addition to that, we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services, right? They're on demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're really, we're, we're on our way to win at the edge as well with Project Frontier, which reduces complexity at the edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their edge operations, optimize their edge environments and investments, secure that edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Project Frontier here with Sam Gro Crop, the very near future. So I won't give up too many more details there. And lastly, we're also scaling Apex, which, oh, well, shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings, which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on their as a service transitions by modernize the consumption experience and providing that flexible as a service model. Ultimately, we're trying to help our customers achieve that multi-cloud by design to really simplify it and unlock the power of their data. >>So some good examples there. I I like to talk about the super Cloud as you, you know, you're building on top of the, you know, hyperscale infrastructure and you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer, you call it your is. And that's, that's a ingredient in what we call the super cloud out to the edge. You have to have a common platform there and one of the hallmarks of a cloud company. And as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and, and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero zero sum game. And, and I think Super Cloud recognizes that, that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and, and, and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? >>For me, it's, it's pretty clear. It's, it's, it's critical. I can't say that enough above the having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed, and I agree with your super cloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you, I would certain no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges our customers are having on their own, not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these close stacks that discourages interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of our, of each of our teams. We del I guess have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first. And to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi-cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. >>I mean, just think of what we're doing with VMware. We continue to build on our first and best alliances with them in August at their VMware explorer, which I know you were at, we announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data and their infrastructure. For multi-cloud specifically, we strength our relationship with VMware and with Tansu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multi-cloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say, and using your analogy, I could think of that as our multicloud platform. So that's kind of our PAs layer, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very long standing and strategic partnership with Microsoft and I'd say stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multicloud space. >>Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for the edge, right? As you think about data being everywhere, we've established partnerships for the Edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge, but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics and data management. Using your Supercloud analogy, Dave the sa, right? This is our Sasa, we've announced that we're collaborating, partnering with folks like Snowflake and, and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then given customers choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we've we're expanding our colo partnerships as well with folks like eex and, and they're allowing us to broaden our availability of Apex, providing customers the flexibility to take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical not only for, for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's been critical, critical for the entire, you know, industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem as we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions really to meet their needs. We'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and you know, and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. >>So it's been an interesting three years for you, just, just over three years now since you've been made the president of the IS isg. And so you had to dig in and, and it was obviously a strange time around the world, but, but you really had to look at, okay, how do we modernize the platform? How do we make it, you know, cloud first, You've mentioned the edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand? Just some closing thoughts and if you could summarize. >>Sure. So I'd say first, you know, we discussed we're working in a very fast paced, ever-changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multicloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're gonna help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multi-cloud by default, as we've discussed before, to multicloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of it and, and what they're trying to accomplish. >>Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go pats and we'll see you on the blog. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right, you're watching exclusive insight insights from Dell Technology Summit on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Hello everyone, this is Dave Lanta and you're watching the Cubes coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind the scenes interviews featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're gonna explore Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here. And don't forget it's cyber security Awareness month. Sam Grot is here, he's the senior vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? >>Always great to be here, Dave. >>All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud Apex, multi-cloud, what's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? >>Yeah, yeah. Look Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard, heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud is becoming a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we, we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design. We're essentially, organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multicloud by by default, rather it's multicloud by design where you're very intentional in how you do multicloud. >>And how we deliver multicloud by design is through apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, Dave, like we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that, you know, the beginning of this year we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SAS based backup service. We've introduced or announced project outline, which is bringing our storage software, intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run an Amazon Azure, aw, I'm sorry, Amazon, aws, Azure or Google. And then, you know, we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announce key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information or our data from on-prem through the Snow Snowflake cloud. >>Or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem SaaS providers. And then finally I would say, you know, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat, where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announce the strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know, VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the la at the recent VMware explorer we announced new Tansu integration. So, So Dave, I, I think in a nutshell we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. >>Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies world. First time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus sort of default, which is great Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware of course, you know, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting Red Hat. So seeing that expand, now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's gotta be new speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type, that's right, ecosystem, that's telcos what and what's this new frontier platform all about? >>Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about cloud and multi clouds, we've talked about private and hybrid cloud, we've talked about public clouds, clouds and cos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives. And that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We see upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years of delivering edge solutions. >>81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the Edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of Edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a, a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge solutions. Say the bottom line is the game has gotta change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to un unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And Project Frontier in its most simplest form, is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really gonna be able to manage, OP, and operate their edge infrastructure and applications securely, efficiently and at scale. >>Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name, it is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capabilities. That's right. Integration's. Is there hardware involved? >>Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration, orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really there's, there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of 'em, you know, freedom of choice. We definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there, even more so at the Edge than any other part of the IT stack. You know, being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or I O T frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Frontier is, you know, being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment, you know, and of course backed by an end and secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. >>And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with the centralized management through Project Frontier and Zero Touch deployments. You know, one of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the frontier is really IT resources and being able to have the IT expertise and we built in an enormous amount of automation helps streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution, which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands, which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Frontier is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certain, excuse me, certainly, and into the future. >>Yeah. Sam, no truck rolls. I like it. And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, we have Father's Day. The kids always ask When's kids' day? And we of course we say every day is kids' day and every day should be cybersecurity awareness day. So, but we have cybersecurity awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and, and how are you responding? >>Yeah, yeah. No, there isn't a more prevalent pop of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company is really have been forced to reckon with the cybersecurity and ransom secure issues out there. You know, every decision in IT department makes impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly, positively, hopefully impact it, but also can negatively impact it as well. So data security is, is really not a new area of focus for Dell. It's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cyber security and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system. And having the right supply chain and the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. >>Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together. That, that coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment. We are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security, it certainly is not absolute all correct. Security architectures assume that, you know, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you've gotta be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. >>Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation now with cloud you've got, you know, shared responsibility models, you've got that a multi-cloud, you've got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the, the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their r and d and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay, Sam, put a bow on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, look, I I think we're at a transformative point in it. You know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume it in different ways, such as as a service, a lot of customers edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy, we've got the right portfolio, we are the trusted partner of choice, help them lead, lead their, their future transformations into the future. So Dave, look, I think it's, it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in it and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. >>Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right. A Dell tech world in Vegas this past year, one of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of, you know, the younger generation. And that conversation was with Jen Savira and we're gonna speak to Jen about this and other people and culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the chief human resource officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings >>With you. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah, well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company, there's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid in 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experience is. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have it really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it in the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well yeah, but we also want you to know in the office be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah, well I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies isn't necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>You were, so >>That's what we, you were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so I think we think, and, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I I wanted to switch gears a little bit, talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, what am I missing? I hope, you know, with our folks, so especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on a change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I noticed there's a, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And they doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition of rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewing, to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster in the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the say you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but so i, it, it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs ev, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect, you know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out s silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Valante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

>>Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change and just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings with >>You. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah. Well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing, so for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company. There's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language, because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked them a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have a really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office, so, so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kinda strange new ever changing world? >>Yeah. Well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fiddle. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>Mean, you talking, So that's >>What we do. You were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, People in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture, We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data and that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cuz the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, I think we think, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I asked myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing? You know, with our folks. So especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is honest change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along the journey. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I notice there's, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you know, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And in doing so, have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who worked for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists like go, yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really b been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewee to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster on the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make this, you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a, values >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but, so I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect. You know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You'd always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay, you've been watching a special presentation of the Cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Ante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.