>>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.

>>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.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Docker Con Live 2020, brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back to the DockerCon studio headquarters and your hosts, Jenny Burcio and myself John Furrier. @Furrier on Twitter if you want to tweet me anything and @DockerCon as well share what you're thinking. Great keynote there from Scott CEO, Jenny, demo, DockerCon jobs, some highlights there from Scott. Yeah, lovely intro, sorry about to do the keynote. The little green room comes on makes it human. We're all trying to meet >> Its certainly the reality of what we are all dealing with right now. I had to ask my kids to leave though or they would crash the whole stream. But yes, we have you know, we have a great community, large community gathered here today and we do want to take the opportunity for those that are looking for jobs or hiring to share with the #DockerCon jobs. In addition, we want to support direct health care workers. And Brett Fisher and the captains will be running all day charity stream on the captain's channel. Go there and you'll get the link to donate to directRelief.org, which is a California based nonprofit delivering aid and supporting health care workers globally with response to the COVID-19 crisis. >> Okay, if you're jumping into the stream, I'm John Furrier with Jenny, we'll be your hosts all day today, throughout Docker con, it's a packed house of great content, you have a mainstream, theCUBE, which is the mainstream that will be promoting a lot of cube interviews, but check out the 40 plus sessions underneath in the interactive calendar on Dockercon.com site. Check it out, they're going to be live on a clock. So if you want to participate in real time in the chat, jump into your session on the track of your choice and participate with the folks in their chatting. If you miss it, it's going to go right on demand right after sort of all content will be immediately be available. So make sure you check it out. Docker selfie is a hashtag take a selfie, share it. Docker, #Docker jobs. If you're looking for a job or have openings, please share with the community and of course, give us feedback on what you can do. We got James governor of the keynote coming up next. He's with red monk, not afraid to share his opinion on open source on what companies should be doing. And also the evolution of this Cambrian explosion of apps that are going to be coming as we come out of this post pandemic world. A lot of people are thinking about this the crisis and following through so you know, stay with us, for more and more coverage, Jenny favorite sessions on your mind for people to pay attention to that they should they should look >> First I'm going to address a few things that continue to come up in the chat. Sessions are recorded especially breakout sessions after they play live and the speakers in chat with you. Those go on demand they are recorded, you will be able to access them. Also, if the screen is too small, there is the button to expand full screen and different quality levels for the video that you can choose on your end. All the breakout sessions also have closed captioning. So please, if you would like to read along, turn that on, so you can stay with the sessions. We have some great sessions kicking off right at 10:00 a.m. Getting started with Docker. We have a full track really in the how to enhance on that you should check out devs in action, hear what other people are doing. And then of course, our sponsors are delivering great content to you all day long. >> Tons of content, it's all available, they'll always be up always on a large scale. Thanks for watching. Now we got James Governor, the keynote. He's with red McDonald's firm, he's been tracking open source for many generations. He's been doing amazing work, watch his great keynote. I'm going to be interviewing him live right after so stay with us and enjoy the rest of the day. We'll see you back shortly. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> 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 rocketship PC company, to a middling 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 $100 billion dollar giant with a low-margin business, a strong balance sheet, and the broadest hardware portfolio in the industry. The financial magic that Dell went through would make anyone's head spin. The last lever 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 theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be hosting the program. Now, today in conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit, we're going to hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's going to share his views on the company's position and opportunities going forward. He's going to 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 going to talk about the product angle, and specifically, how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grocott, who's 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 Cybersecurity Awareness Month, that we're going to 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 going to speak with Jenn Saavedra, who's Dell's Chief Human Resource Officer, about hybrid work, and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. However, before we get into all this, I want to 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 theCUBE, 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 ETR's proprietary Net Score methodology on the vertical axis, that's a measure of spending velocity, and on the x-axis is overlap or 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's 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 going to talk to Jeff Boudreau about. That's the Infrastructure Solutions Group. Now, ISG accounts for the bulk of the remainder of Dell's business, and it is its, as I said, its 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 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 for Michael Dell were just too attractive, and it's unlikely that a spin-in would've unlocked the value in the way a spin-out 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 $100 billion dollars 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 30s. Now, Dell only spends about 2% of revenue on R&D, but 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 its 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 ServiceNow's total revenue. Of course, ServiceNow has 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 et al., 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 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 on the balance sheet. So a dramatic delta from just a few years ago. So, pretty good picture. But Dell, a $100 billion company, is still only valued at 28 billion, or around 26 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE's revenue multiple is around 60 cents on the revenue dollar. HP Inc., Dell's 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 that's over 3x, about 3.3x 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 its lack of software content and its 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 pretty much any application in any use case, in pretty much any industry, in 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 HPE, and IBM, which has had an 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, has a much better chance of doing well at 100 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 going to 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 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 he 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 supercloud. 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 nontrivial. But listen to Dell's Vice Chairman and Co-COO, Jeff Clarke, explain this vision. Please play the clip. >> You said also, technology and business models are tied together, and an enabler. >> That's right. >> 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, they have to differentiate what they do. >> Well, that's exactly right. If I take that and what Dave was saying, and I summarize it the following way: if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> Eh, pretty interesting, right? John Furrier 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 Clarke said, if Dell can do that? Uh, (sucks in breath) 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 got to be funded. And that's going to take time, and in this industry, it tends to move, companies tend to move in lockstep. So, as often is the case, it's going to 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 cybersecurity as an adjacency, and of course, edge and telco/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 its ecosystem today is both reseller heavy and tech partner heavy. And that's not a bad thing, but it's starting to evolve more rapidly. The Snowflake deal is an example of up-the-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 in 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, I'd like to see that inside of APEX. I'd like to see that data play beyond storage, which is really where it is today, in its early days. The point is, with Dell's go-to-market advantage, which company wouldn't treat Dell like the on-prem, hybrid, edge, supercloud player that I want to 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 evolve. And of course, we'll be here watching and reporting. So thanks for watching this preview of Dell Technologies Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante, we hope you enjoy the rest of the program. (upbeat music)

(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)

(bright music) >> Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante, 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 going to 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 Grocott 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 in 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 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 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, 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 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 in 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 announced key partnerships with SAS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information, or our data, from on-prem through the 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 SAS 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 announced a strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know VMware is going to always continue to be a key partner of ours. At the more recent VMware explorer, we announced new Tansu integration. So Dave, 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 to the default, which is great. Alpine, which is sort of our, what we call, "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 got to be new, speaking of ecosystem, the Edge is like a whole different you know, OT type of ecosystem, >> That's right. Telcos. 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 clouds. We've talked about public clouds, clouds and Kronos, 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've seen 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 in things like manufacturing, retail, Edge, healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge Solutions. Say, the bottom line is the game has got to change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to unlock this new Frontier for customers to take advantage of the Edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And with Project Frontier in its most simplest form is a software platform that's going to help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really going to be able to manage, 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. Is there hardware involved? >> Yeah, so of course you'll run it on a Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really 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 them. 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 a secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with a 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 to help 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. (laughing) And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, you know, 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, (laughs) but we have Cybersecurity Awareness Month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers 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 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 and the right partner to partner with to deliver that. It's 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 coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are going to 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 got to 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 got that multi-cloud, you got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their R&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- >> That's right. >> on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >> Yeah, look, 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 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. At 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 Jenn Saavedra, and we're going to speak to Jenn 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. (bright music)

>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering PagerDuty summit 2019 brought to you by PagerDuty. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Q. We're a PagerDuty summit. It's the fourth year of the show. He's been here for three years. It's amazing to watch it grow. I think it's finally outgrown the Western Saint Francis here in lovely downtown San Francisco and we're really excited to be joined by our next guest. He's Alex Solomon, the co founder, co founder and CTO PagerDuty. Been at this over 10 years. Alex, first off, congratulations. And what a fantastic event. Thank you very much and thank you for having me on your show. So things have changed a lot since we had you on a year ago, this little thing called an IPO. So I'm just curious, you know, we have a lot of entrepreneurs. I watch a show as a founder and kind of go through this whole journey. What was that like? What are some of the things you'd like to share from that whole experience? >>Yeah, it was, it was incredible. I I, the word I like to use is surreal. Like just kind of going through it, not believing that it's real in a way. And adjoining by my, my lovely wife who came, came along for this festivities and just being able to celebrate that moment. I know it is just a moment in time and it's not, it's not the end of the journey certainly, but it is a big milestone for us and uh, being able to celebrate. We invited a lot of our customers, our early customers have been with us for years to join us in that, a celebration. Our investors who have believed in us from back in 2010. Right, right. We were just getting going and we just, we just had a great time. I love it. I love 10 year overnight success. 10 years in the making. >>One of my favorite expressions, and it was actually interesting when Jenn pulled up some of the statistics around kind of what the internet was, what the volume of traffic was, what the complexity in the systems are. And it's really changed a lot since you guys began this journey 10 years ago. Oh, it has. I mean back then, like the most popular monitoring tool is Nagios and new Relic was around but just barely. And now it's like Datadog has kind of taken over the world and the world has changed. We're talking about not just a microservices by containers and serverless and the cloud basically. Right. That's the kind of recurring theme that's changed over the last 10 years. But you guys made some early bets. You made bets on cloud. He made bets on dev ops. He made bets on automation. Yeah, those were pretty good. >>Uh, those, those turn out to be pretty good places to put your chips. Oh yeah. Right place, right time and um, you know, some, some experiential stuff and some just some raw luck. Right. All right, well let's get into it. On top of some of the product announcements that are happening today, what are some of the things you're excited to finally get to showcase to the world? Yeah, so one of the big ones is, uh, related to our event intelligence release. Uh, we launched the product last year, um, a few months before summit and this year we're making a big upgrade and we're announcing a big upgrade to the product where we have, uh, related incidents. So if you're debugging a problem and you have an incident that you're looking at, the question you're gonna ask is, uh, is it just my service or is there a bigger widespread problem happening at the same time? >>So we'll show you that very quickly. We'll show you are there other teams, uh, impacted by the same issue and we'll, we, we actually leveraged machine learning to draw those relationships between ongoing incidents. Right. I want to unpack a little bit kind of how you play with all these other tools. We, you know, we're just at Sumo logic a week or so ago. They're going to be on later their partner and people T I think it's confusing. There's like all these different types of tools. And do you guys partner with them all? I mean, the integration lists that you guys have built. Um, I wrote it down in service now. It's Splunk, it's Zendesk, it goes on and on. And on. Yeah. So explain to folks, how does the PagerDuty piece work within all these other systems? Sure. So, um, I would say we're really strong in terms of integrating with monitoring tools. >>So any sort of tool that's monitoring something and we'll admit an alert, uh, when something goes down or over an event when something's changed, we integrate and we have a very wide set of coverage with all, all of those tools. I think your like Datadog, uh, app dynamics, new Relic, even old school Nagios. Right. Um, and then we've also built a suite of integrations around all the ticketing systems out there. So service now a JIRA, JIRA service desk, um, a remedy as well. Uh, we also now have built a suite of integrations around the customer support side of things. So there'll be Zendesk and Salesforce. That's interesting. Jen. Megan had a good example in the keynote and kind of in this multi system world, you know, where's the system of record? Cause he used to be, you want it, everybody wanted it to be that system of record. >>They wanted to be the single player in the class. But it turns out that's not really the answer. There's different places for different solutions to add value within the journey within those other applications. Yeah, absolutely. I, I think the single pane of glass vision is something that a lot of companies have been chasing, but it's, it's, it's really hard to do because like for example, NewRelic, they started an APM and they got really good at that and that's kind of their specialty. Datadog's really good at metrics and they're all trying to converge and do everything and become the one monitoring solution to the Rooney rule them all right. But they're still the strongest in one area. Like Splunk for logs, new Relic and AppDynamics for APM and Datadog for metrics. And, um, I don't know where the world's going to take us. Like, are they, is there going to be one single monitoring tool or are, are you going to use four or five different tools? >>Right. My best guess is your, we're going to live in a world where you're still gonna use multiple tools. They each can do something really well, but it's about the integration. It's about building, bringing all that data together, right? That's from early days. We've called pager duty, the Switzerland monitoring, cause we're friends with everyone when we're partners with everyone and we sit on top right a work with all of these different roles. I thought her example, she gave him the keynote was pretty, it's kind of illustrative to me. She's talking about, you know, say your cables down and you know, you call Comcast and it's a Zendesk ticket. But >>you know then that integrates potentially with the PagerDuty piece that says, Hey we're, you know, we're working on a problem, you know, a backhoe clipped the cable down your street. And so to take kind of that triage and fix information and still pump that through to the Zen desk person who's engaging with the customer to actually give them a lot more information. So the two are different tracks, but they're really complimentary. >>Absolutely. And that's part of the incident life cycle is, is letting your customers know and helping them through customer support so that the support reps understand what's going on with the systems and can have an intelligent conversation with the customer. So that they're not surprised like a customer calls and says you're down. Oh, good to know. No, you want to know about that urge, which I think most people find out. Oh yeah. Another thing >>that struck me was this, this study that you guys have put together about unplanned work, the human impact of always on world. And you know, we talk a lot in tech about unplanned maintenance and unplanned downtime of machines, whether it's a, a computer or a military jet, you know, unplanned maintenance as a really destructive thing. I don't think I've ever heard anyone frame it for people and really to think about kind of the unplanned work that gets caused by an alert and notification that is so disruptive. And I thought that was a really interesting way to frame the problem and thinking of it from an employee centric point of view to, to reduce the nastiness of unplanned work. >>Absolutely. And that's, that V is very related to that journey of going from being reactive and just reacting to these situations to becoming proactive and being able to predict and, and, uh, address things before they impact the customer. Uh, I would say it's anywhere between 20 to 40 or even higher percent of your time. Maybe looking at software engineers is spent on the some plant work. So what you want to do is you want to minimize that. You want to make sure that, uh, there's a lot of automation in the process that you know what's going on, that you have visibility and that the easy things, the, the repetitive things are easy to automate and the system could just do it for you so that you, you focus on innovating and not on fixing fires. Right? Or if you did to fix the fire, you at least >>to get the fire to the right person who's got the right tone to fix the type. So why don't we just, you know, we see that all the time in incidents, especially at early days for triage. You know, what's happening? Who did it, you know, who's the right people to work on this problem. And you guys are putting a lot of the effort into AI and modeling and your 10 years of data history to get ahead of the curve in assigning that alerted that triage when it comes across the, the, uh, the trans though. >>Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's another issues. Uh, not having the right ownership, get it, getting people, um, notified when they don't own it and there's nothing they can do about it. Like the old ways of, of uh, sending the alert to everyone and having a hundred people on a call bridge that just doesn't work anymore because they're just sitting there and they're not going to be productive the next day I work cause they're sitting there all night just kind of waiting for, for something to happen. And uh, that's kinda the, the old way of lack of ownership just blasted out to everyone and we have to be a lot more target and understand who owns what and what's, what, which systems are being impacted and they only let getting the right people on the auto call as quickly as possible. The other thing that came up, which I thought, you know, probably a lot of people are thinking of, they only think of the fixing guy that has to wear the pager. >>Sure. But there's a whole lot of other people that might need to be informed, be informed. We talked about in the Comcast example that people interacting with the customer, ABC senior executives need to be in for maybe people that are, you know, on the hook for the SLA on some of the softer things. So the assembly that team goes in need, who needs to know what goes well beyond just the two or three people that are the fixing people? Right. And that's, that's actually tied to one of our announcements, uh, at summit a business, our business response product. So it's all about, um, yes, we notify the people who are on call and are responsible for fixing the problem. You know, the hands on keyboard folks, the technical folks. But we've expanded our workflow solution to also Lupin stakeholders. So think like executives, business owners, people who, um, maybe they run a division but they're not going to go on call to fix the problem themselves, but they need to know what's going on. >>They need to know what the impact is. They need to know is there a revenue impact? Is there a customer impact? Is there a reputational brand impact to, to the business they're running. Which is another thing you guys have brought up, which is so important. It's not just about fixing, fixing the stuck server, it's, it is what is the brand impact, what is the business impact is a much broader conversation, which is interesting to pull it out of just the, just the poor guy in the pager waiting for it to buzz versus now the whole company really being engaged to what's going on. Absolutely. Like connecting the technical, what's happening with the technical services and, and uh, infrastructure to what is the, the impact on the business if something goes wrong. And how much, like are you actually losing revenue? There's certain businesses like e-commerce where you could actually measure your revenue loss on a per minute or per five minute basis. >>Right. And pretty important. Yeah. All right Alex. So you talked about the IPO is a milestone. It's, it's fading, it's fading in the rear view mirror. Now you're on the 90 day shot clock. So right. You gotta keep moving forward. So as you look forward now for your CTO role, what are some of your priorities over the next year or so that you kind of want to drive this shit? Absolutely. So, um, I think just focusing on making the system smarter and make it, uh, so that you can get to that predictive Holy grail where we can know that you're going to have a big incident before it impacts our customers. So you can actually prevent it and get ahead of it based on the leading indicators. So if we've seen this pattern before and last time it causes like an hour of downtime, let's try to catch it early this time and so that you can address it before it impacts for customers. >>So that's one big area of investment for us. And the other one I would say is more on the, uh, the realtime work outside of managing software systems. So, uh, security, customer support. There's all of these other use cases where people need to know, like, signals are, are being generated by machines. People need to know what's going on with those signals. And you want to be proactive and preventative around there. Like think a, a factory with lots and lots of sensors. You don't want to be surprised by something breaking. You want to like get proactive about the maintenance of those systems. If they don't have that, uh, you know, like say a multi-day outage in a factory, it can cost maybe millions of dollars. Right. >>All right, well, Alex, thanks a lot. Again, congratulations on the journey. We, uh, we're enjoying watching it and we'll continue to watch it evolve. So thank you for coming on. Alright, he's Alex. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at PagerDuty summit 2019 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone and welcome to The Cube here at IBM Think in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay. I'm John Furrier, the host of The Cube. We're here in this Cube studio as a set for IBM Think. My next guest is Jennifer Shiin who's the founder of 8 Path Solutions. Twitter handle Jenn, J-S-H-I-N. Great to see you. Thanks for joining me. >> Yeah, happy to be here. >> I'm glad you stopped by. I wanted to get your thoughts. You're thought leader in the industry. You've been on multiple Cube panels. Thank you very much. And also Cube alumni. You know, IBM with the data center of the value proposition. The CEO's up on the stage today saying you got data, you got blockchain and you got AI, which is such the infrastructure of the future. And AI is the software of the future, data's at the middle. Dave and I were talking about that as the innovation sandwich. The data is being sandwiched between blockchain and AI, two super important things. And she also mentioned Moore's law. Faster, smaller, cheaper. Every 6 months doubling in speed and performance. And then Metcalfe's law, which is more of a network effect. Kind of teasing out token economics. You see kind of where the world's going. This is an interesting position from IBM. I like it. Is it real? >> Well it sounds very data sciency, right? You have the economics part, you have the networking. You have all these things in your plane. So I think it's very much in line with what you would expect if data science actually sustains (mumbles), which thankfully it has. >> Yeah. >> And I think the reality is you know, we like to boil things down into nice, simple concepts but in the real world when you're actually figuring it all out its going to be multiple effects. It's going to be, you know a lot of different things that interact. >> And they kind of really tease out their cloud strategy in a very elegant way. I mean they essentially said, 'Look we're into the cloud and we're not going to try to.' They didn't say it directly, but they basically said it. We're not going to compete with Amazon head-to-head. We're going to let our offerings to do the talking. We're going to use data and give customers choice with multi cloud. How does that jive for you? How does that work because at the end of the day I got to have business logics. I need applications. >> Yes. >> You know whether its blockchains, cryptocurrency or apps. The killer app's now money. >> Yep. >> If no one's making any money. >> Sure. >> No commerce is being done. >> Right. I mean I think it makes sense. You know, Amazon has such a strong hold in the infrastructure part, right? Being able to store your data elsewhere and have it be cloud. I don't think that was really IBM's core business. You know, a lot of I think their business model was built around business and business relationships and these days, one of the great things about all these data technologies is that one company doesn't have to do all of it, right? You have partnerships and actually partners so that you know, one company does AI. You partner with another company that has data. And that way you can actually both make money, right? There's more than enough work to go around and that much you can say having worked in data science teams right? If I can offload some of my work to different divisions, fantastic. That'd be great. Saves us time. You get to market faster. You can build things quicker. So I think that's one of the great things about what's happening with data these days, right? There's enough work to get around. >> And it's beautiful too because if you think about the concept that made cloud great is DevOps. Blockchain is an opportunity to use desensualization to take away a lot of inefficiencies. AI is also an automation opportunity to create value. So you got inefficiencies on block chains side and AI to create value, your thoughts and reaction to where that's going to go. You know, in light of the first death on a Uber self-driving car. Again, historic yesterday right? And so you know, the reality is right there. We're not perfect. >> Yeah. >> But there's a path. >> Well so most of its inefficiency out there. It's not the technology. It's all the people using technology, right? You broke the logic by putting in something you shouldn't have put in that data set, you know? The data's now dirty because you put in things that you know, the developer didn't think you'd put in there. So the reality is we're going to keep making mistakes and there will be more and more opportunities for new technologies to help you know, cheer that up. >> So I was talking to Rob Thomas, GM of the analytics team. You know Rob, great guy. He's smart. He's also an executive but he knows the tech. He and I were talking about this notion of data containers. So with Kubernetes now front and center as an orchestration layer for cloud and application workloads, IBM has an interesting announcement with this cloud private approach. Where data is the central thing in this. Because you've got things like GDPR out there and the regulatory environment not going to get any easier. You got blockchain crypto. That's a regulatory nightmare. We know a GDBR. That's a total nightmare. So this is happening, right? So what should customers be doing, in your experience? Customers are scratching their head. They don't want to make a wrong bet, but they need good data, good strategy. They need to do things differently. How do they get the best out of their data architecture knowing that there's hurdles and potential blockers in front of them? >> Well so I think you want to be careful of what you select. and how much are you going to be indebted to that one service that you selected, right? So if you're not sure yet maybe you don't want to invest all of your budget into this one thing you're not sure is going to be what you really want to be paying for a year or two, right? So I think being really open to how you're going to plan for things long term and thinking about where you can have some flexibility, whereas certain things you can't. For instance, if you're going to be in an industry that is going to be you know, strict on regulatory requirements right? Then you have less wiggle room than let's say an industry where that's not going to be an absolute necessary part of your technology. >> Let me ask you a question and being kind of a historian you know, what say one year is seven dog years or whatever the expression is in the data space. It just seems like yesterday that Hadoop was going to save the world. So that as kind of context, what is some technologies that just didn't pan out? Is the data link working? You know, what didn't work and what replaced it if you can make an observation? >> Well, so I think that's hard because I think the way I understood technology is probably not the way everyone else did right? I mean, you know at the end of the day it just is being a way to store data right? And just being able to use you know, more information store faster, but I'll tell you what I think is hilarious. I've seen people using Hadoop and then writing sequel queries the same way we did like ten plus years ago, same inefficiencies and they're not leveling the fact that it's Hadoop. Right? They're treating it like I want to create eight million tables and then use joins. So they're not really using the technology. I think that's probably the biggest disappointment is that without that knowledge sharing, without education you have people making the same mistakes you made when technology wasn't as efficient. >> I mean if you're a hammer, everything else is like a nail I guess if that's the expression. >> Right. >> On the exciting side, what are you excited about in technology right now? What are you looking at that's a you know, next 20 mile stare of potential goodness that could be coming out of the industry? >> So I think anytime you have better science, better measurements. So measurement's huge, right? If you think about media industry, right? Everyone's trying to measure. I think there was an article that came out about some of YouTube's failure about measurement, right? And I think in general like Facebook is you know, very well known for measurement. That's going to be really interesting to see, right? What methodologies come out in terms of how well can we measure? I think another one will be say, target advertising right? That's another huge market that you know, a lot of companies are going after. I think what's really going to be cool in the next few years is to see what people come up with, right? It's really the human ingenuity of it, right? We have the technology now. We have data engineers. What can we actually build? And how are we going to be able to partner to be able to do that? >> And there's new stacks that are developing. You think about the ecommerce stack. It's a 30 year old stack. AdTech and DNS and cookiing, now you've got social and network effects going on. You mentioned you know, the Metcalfe's law. So with all that, I want to get just your personal thoughts on blockchain. Beyond blockchain, token economics because there are a lot people who are doing stuff with crypto. But what's really kind of pointing as a mega trands standpoint is a new class of desensualized application developers are coming in. >> Right. >> Okay. They're dealing with data now on a desensualized basis. At the heart of that is the token economics, which is changing some of the business model dynamics. Have you seen anything? Your thoughts on token economics? >> So I haven't seen it from the economics standpoint. I've seen it from more of the algorithms and that standpoint. I actually have a good friend of mine, she's at Yale. And she actually runs the, she's executive director of their corporate law center. So I hear some from her on the legal side. I think what's really interesting is there's all these different arenas. Legal being a very important component in blockchain. As well as, from the mathematical standpoint. You know when I was in school way back when, we studied things like hash keys and you know, RSA keys and so from a math standpoint that's also a really cool aspect of it. So I think it's probably too early to say for sure what the economics part is going to actually look like. I think that's going to be a little more longterm. But what is exciting about this, is you actually see different parts of businesses, right? Not just the financial sector but also the legal sector and then you know say, the math and algorithms and you know. Having that integration of being able to build cooler things for that reason. >> Yeah the math's certainly exciting. Machine learning, obviously that's well documented. The growth and success of what, and certainly the interests are there. You seeing Amazon celebrating all the time. I just saw Werner Vogels, the CTO. Talking about another SageMaker, a success. They're looking at machine learning that way. You got Google with TensorFlow. You've got this goodness in these libraries now that are in the community. It's kind of a perfect storm of innovation. What's new in the ML world that developers are getting excited about that companies are harnessing for value? You seeing anything there? Can you share some commentary on the current machine learning trends? >> So I think a lot of companies have gotten a little more adjusted to the idea of ML. At the beginning everyone was like, 'Oh this is all new.' They loved the idea of it but they didn't really know what they were doing, right? Right now they know a little bit more. I think in general everyone thinks deep learning is really cool, neural networks. I think what's interesting though is everyone's trying to figure out where's the line. What's the different between AI versus machine learning versus deep learning versus neural networks. I think it's a little bit fun for me just to see everyone kind of struggle a little bit and actually even know the terminology so we can have a conversation. So I think all of that, right? Just anything related to that you know, when do you TensorFlow? What do you use it for? And then also say, from Google right? Which parts do you actually send through an API? I mean that's some of the conversations I've been having with people in the business industry, like which parts do you send through an API. Which parts do you actually have in house versus you know, having to outsource out? >> And that's really kind of your thinking there is what, around core competencies where people need to kind of own it and really build a core competency and then outsource where its more a femoral invalue. Is there a formula, I guess to know when to bring it in house and build around? >> Right. >> What's your thoughts there? >> Well part of it, I think is scalability. If you don't have the resources or the time, right? Sometimes time. If you don't have the time to build it in house, it does make sense actually to outsource it out. Also if you don't think that's part of your core business, developing that within house do you're spending all that money and resources to hire the best data scientists, may not be worth it because in fact the majority of your actual sales is with the sale department. I mean they're the ones that actually bring in that revenue. So I think it's finding a balance of what investment's actually worth it. >> And sometimes personnel could leave and you could be a big problem, you know. Someone walks about the door, gets another job because its a hot commodity to be. >> That's actually one of the big complaints I've heard is that we spend all this time investing in certain young people and then they leave. I think part of this is actually that human factor. How do you encourage them to stay? >> Let's talk about you. How did you get here? School? Interests? Did you go off the path? Did you come in from another vector? How did you get into what you're doing now and share a little bit about who you are? >> Yeah so I studied economics, mathematics, creative writing as an undergrad and statistics as a grad student. So you know, kind of perfect storm. >> Natural math, bring it all together. >> Yeah but you know its funny because I actually wrote about and talked about how data is going to be this big thing. This is like 2009, 2010 and people didn't think it was that important, you know? I was like next three to five years mathematicians are going to be a hot hire. No one believed me. So I ended up going, 'Okay well, the economy crashed.' I was in management consulting in finance, private equity hedge funds. Everyone swore like, if you do this you're going to be set for life, right? You're on the path. You'll make money and then the economy crashed. All the jobs went away. And I went, 'Maybe not the best career choice for me.' So I did what I did at companies. I looked at the market and I went, 'Where's their growth?' I saw tech had growth and decided I'm going to pick up some skills I've never had before, learn to develop more. I mean in the beginning I had no idea what an application development process was, right? I'm like, 'What does that mean to actually develop an application?' So the last few years I've really just been spending, just learning these things. What's really cool though is last year when my patents went through and I was able to actually able to launch something with Box at their keynote. That was really awesome. >> Awesome. >> So I became a long way from I think, have the academic knowledge to being able to apply it and then learn the technologies and then developing the technologies, which is a cool thing. >> Yeah and that's a good path because you came in with a clean sheet of paper. You didn't have any dogma of waterfall and all the technologies. So you kind of jumped in. Did you use like a cloud to build on? Was it Amazon? Was it? >> Oh that's funny too. Actually I do know Legacy's technology quite well because I was in corporate America before. Yeah, so like Sequel. For instance like when I started working data science, funny enough we didn't call it data science. We just called it like whatever you call it, you know. There was no data science term at that point. You know we didn't have that idea of whether to use R or Python. I mean I've used R over ten years, but it was for statistics. It was never for like actual data science work. And then we used Sequel in corporate America. When I was taking data it was like in 2012. Around then, everyone swore that no, no. They're going to programmers. Got to know programming. To which, I'm like really? In corporate America, we're going to have programmers? I mean think about how long it's going to take to get someone to learn any language and of course, now everyone's learning. It's on Sequel again right? So. >> Isn't it fun to like, when you see someone on Facebook or Linkdin, 'Oh man data's a new oil.' And then you say, 'Yeah here's a blog post I wrote in 2009.' >> Right. Yeah, exactly. Well so funny enough Ginni Rometty today was saying about exponential versus linear and that's one of the things I've been saying over the last year about because you know, you want exponential growth. Because linear anyone can do. That's a tweet. That's not really growth. >> Well we value your opinion. You've been great on The Cube. Great to help us out on those panels, got a great view. What's going on with your company? What are you working on now? What's exciting you these days? >> Yeah so one of the cool things we worked on, it's very much in line with what the IBM announcement was, so being smarter, right? So I developed some technology in the photo industry, digital assent management as well as being able to automate the renaming of files, right? So you think you probably a picture on your digital camera you never moved over because you, I remember the process. You open it, you rename it, you saved it. You open the next one. Takes forever. >> Sometimes its the same number. I got same version files. It's a nightmare. >> Exactly. So I basically automated that process of having all of that automatically renamed. So the demo that I did I had 120 photos renamed in less than two minutes, right? Just making it faster and smarter. So really developing technologies that you can actually use every day and leverage for things like photography and some cooler stuff with OCR, which is the long term goal. To be able to allow photographers to never touch the computer and have all of their clients photos automatically uploaded, renamed and sent to the right locations instantly. >> How did you get to start that app? Are you into photography or? >> No >> More of, I got a picture problem and I got to fix it? >> Well actually its funny. I had a photographer taking my picture and she showed me what she does, the process. And I went, 'This is not okay. You can do better than this.' So I can code so I basically went to Python and went, 'Alright I think this could work,' built a proof of concept and then decided to patent it. >> Awesome. Well congratulations on the patent. Final thoughts here about IBM Think? Overall sentiment of the show? Ginni's keynote. Did you get a chance to check anything out? What's the hallway conversations like? What are some of the things that you're hearing? >> So I think there's a general excitement about what might be coming, right? So a lot of the people who are here are actually here to, I think share notes. They want to know what everyone else is doing, so that's actually great. You get to see more people here who are actually interested in this technology. I think there's probably some questions about alignment, about where does everything fit. That seems to be a lot of the conversation here. It's much bigger this year as I'm sure you've noticed, right? It's a lot bigger so that's probably the biggest thing I've heard like there's so many more people than we expected there to be so. >> I like the big tent events. I'm a big fan of it. I think if I was going to be critical I would say, they should do a business event and do a technical one under the same kind of theme and bring more alpha geeks to the technical one and make this much more of a business conversation because the business transformation seems to be the hottest thing here but I want to get down in the weeds, you know? Get down and dirty so I would like to see two. That's my take. >> I think its really hard to cater to both. Like whenever I give a talk, I don't give a really nerdy talk to say a business crowd. I don't give a really business talk to a nerdy crowd, you know? >> It's hard. >> You just have to know, right? I think they both have a very different sensibility, so really if you want to have a successful talk. Generally you want both. >> Jennifer thanks so much for coming by and spending some time with The Cube. Great to see you. Thanks for sharing your insights. Jennifer Shin here inside The Cube at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier, host of The Cube. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.