>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering Boomi World '19 brought to you by Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 2019 from D.C. I'm Lisa Martin. John Furrier is my co-host for the next couple of days. And we're very pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the Boomi CEO, Chris McNabb. Chris, welcome back! >> Lisa, it's great to be here. It's always fun. >> The energy that you guys kicked off everything with this morning, the keynote, it was awesome, it was electric. I love the numbers that you started with. Boomi World '18 was about 11 months ago and we were talking, I was watching those videos back the other day, you had about 7500 customers then. You now have over 9000 customers in 80 plus countries, over 1500 endpoints integrated, 580 partners, I could go on and on, 97% renewal rate. (laughs) >> Keep selling! >> It's amazing, though, the momentum that you guys have carried into D.C. in just a short time period. Tell us about that. >> Lisa, it's really been the result of not only hard work by our team, we continue to innovate for our product and bring new things to market. But it's our customers that drive adoption and we use customer references to gain new customers and it's their stories that resonate with the new prospects that come onboard. It's our 580 partners making sure that when our customers and prospects buy into the Boomi platform that they get implemented and they shorten the timeframe and they bring intelligence and smarts and it's our community. It's the 65,000 people that are already there solving problems, that are helping our newer customers get onboarded and get success early. So it's those four legs of the stool. It's the entire ecosystem that continues to go, all of us are going along for the ride. >> Last year we asked you what you were investing in, your team as well. And the theme was pretty consistent across the board. Product first and foremost. 'Cause the product is continuing to grow and enabling platform, some great stuff there go to market, and then the customer success equation, not customer success organization, although you have a lot there, the equation... Where are you guys this year on those three points? >> Yeah, so tremendous investment in the product. You're going to hear tons of announcements. My announcements are the tip of the iceberg. We've got huge announcements in API management and the things that we're doing there. There's event-driven architecture announcements, there's the conversational AI; we're adding voice to integration platform service, with the help of Accenture. So you can now talk to your platform and interact with your enterprise applications. That's just the tip of the iceberg on the product side. We've got data hub things and so on. When we look at the other parts, John, particularly around customer success, we're doing really well there. Our customer success rate, our retention rate is now 95-96%. Our customer satisfaction was around 97%. And it's our customer success organization that helps make sure our services are being implemented, our partners are doing the right thing, success and outcomes are being delivered, and we engage to make sure that happens. If you need a little bit of Boomi help, Boomi help comes. And we partner over the success of that, and I think when you look at the key KPIs around churn and retention, as well as customer SaaS, I think we're doing a really nice job there. >> On the follow-up on that, one of the things we've been observing and reporting on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE is the successful companies are the ones that have, that was a great product, but in the cloud era, data's a big part of it. You guys have unified data platform. We talked about this last year, how you have anonymous data, you mentioned on your keynote that you get insights. So this is again, Coupa software does this, a lot of the successful profitable companies have a nice business model, by leveraging the data. How does that fit into the equation for customer success? I want you to explain the equation specifically. I mean, you guys have great format for customer focus, I get that, but what is the equation now that you have this unique modern value proposition? >> Yeah I think the equation for us is quite simple. So we do leverage all the metadata. Every single process that's ever been run, we know how long it took, did it have an error? We know how people build connections, we have that meta, we leverage that for our customers. When we look at our customers, we have a life cycle that we walk them through. When you're talking about the equation, we have a framework, a life cycle. How do we engage in sales to make sure sales is not overselling it? How do we get them to close so they look at us as a partner? How do we make sure the implementation goes well? Will they view it alone, with a partner, or with us? Get them to success. Get them through a renewal, and then how can we help them land and expand and do more things in their enterprise to continue the winning success that they established initially. >> You talked this morning revealing Boomi's competitive, unfair competitive advantage in customers, one of the things that we talk about, Chris, at every show and you probably talk about this all the time, too, is data. It's the new oil. It's gold. It's the lifeblood of a business. Yes! If an organization, whether it is an incumbent established business that might have brittle technology and disparate systems, if that type of company can't actually see all the data, have the visibility, and ensure that all of the endpoints are sharing from a single source of truth, that data value is capped, right? You guys leveraging that. I think it's over 30 Terabytes of anonymized metadata? >> Chris: It is. >> Is a great example of unlocking the power of the data that you have to make your customers better, to make them more successful and keep them, which you've obviously done. >> Yeah, it's a part of the ecosystem play that I continuously talk about. As customers use our platform, they instill it with their knowledge, experience, and their expertise. What we do, as a pure cloud provider, because I store how they map this field to that field, how long this process took, and all of these kind of things to make up that repository, I can now, as a cloud platform lever that up. And I can increase the productivity for everybody in the ecosystem. So as customers put a little bit in themselves, they get a 10x return or a massive return out, in terms of productivity and leverage that our platform's able to provide, but it takes both of us together to do that. >> Chris, I want to talk about the hard news this morning. You guys announced with Accenture, a big partnership around conversational AI. Accenture was on stage, their brand, their expertise, coming together with you guys, in a joint partnership. Could you explain, for a minute, what that is about? Just take a minute to explain the partnership and the solution specifically. >> Yeah, so when you look at conversational AI, it's the use of natural language, right? To work with technology, and you can't preprogram it, you have to understand the variations of things, you have to understand voice as identity, so when I say my pipeline report, it knows it's me, it's my authorization, it gets my data. Accenture brings the conversational AI experience, technology, and solutions to the table. And we're now linking and partnering that into our integration capabilities and connective capabilities. So as a net result, people can talk to their phone and interact with their workflows, and interact with their datastores to get data, approve workflows, etc, in a very natural way, >> What is Boomi do and what does Accenture do? 'Cause they're involved with you. You guys have a team, you're teamed up. What's the relationship? Take a minute to explain the relationship. Who's doing what? >> So, Accenture brings much of the voice capabilities. So when we mentioned this morning that language isn't a barrier, I'd like to offer up this service in Spanish and French and English, etc. Accenture does all of that work. So they're the natural language processing there, the language independent part of that, and we're all the connectivity part. We are the workflows, we are the integration. Accenture feeds us something, whether it comes, it can come in multiple languages over WhatsApp, chat, voice, it doesn't matter, comes to me, and then we do the natural unlocking of the data. >> That's their converse piece, that converse and Boomi, working together? >> Yeah, so B in the Boomiverse, you mean? >> John: Yeah. >> So, Boomiverse and B, the introduction of our astronaut B, who going to lead you on a mission through our community and be your bot. It's a working bot and we're going to leverage that kind of capability through that as well. >> One of the interesting things about the conversational AI is that we all as consumers have interacted probably pretty recently with a call center for something. And I love how Leticia, who's going to be on from Accenture later today with John and me, was talking about, we've all been there going, "Agent, agent, agent." And a few months ago, while working for theCUBE, I realized, oh actually, as frustrating as it is sometimes, we have the opportunity to help train the models. But I'd love to get your perspective on what Boomi and Accenture are seeing in organizations, executive suites about the perception of conversational AI and the impact. They see the impact possibilities that Accenture and Boomi can bring, and are they ready for that? >> I think there's going to be a bit of an educational process with leaders in the business, but if you look at Leticia's, I think, second slide, where she says, "Seven million dollars being spent "on password resets with humans." When voice is your identity, you don't need that anymore. You don't have to remember passwords. You don't have to reset things. The immense benefit for organizations is huge. 25% reduction in Op-Ecs. That's going to get people's attention. They're going to have to work our way through it, and we're going to work through the process with them. Okay, let's do a small thing, let's try it out, let's get it working, let's scale it, and let's get it to enterprise. >> It speaks to integration opportunity. I mean, voice, video, other mediums, it's an integration game. That's what you guys are doing. And that's the whole benefit of Boomi. I'd love to get your thoughts on your success formula and how you guys are going to ride this wave going forward, 'cause you have a modern infrastructure, modern solution, you get projects off the ground quickly for customers, you get the value quickly. This is a mega trend. People, they don't want projects back at them, they want to get them done quick. You guys are solving that big problem. What's next? Where are you investing? What's your thoughts on the business? What do you do? >> Well in terms of what's next, so we really did go after the entire transformation problem. Integration's not just data to us. It's people. It's devices, it's your processes, right? So we look at it holistically, we've done that. We brought intelligence in so now we're providing insights, data privacy insights that we talked about in the keynotes, conversational AI and that's the start. But we've got to do a better job of dashboards, other insights, what is the return on investment of a Boomi purchase and how much is it helping? To what degree is transform making a bottom line impact in your business? Having the analytics to support that is going to be big. >> Lisa and I were talking on the intro round, you can't hide success anymore. You can't hide the ball. 'Cause your instrument, the outcomes, and the outcomes are either you're getting paid for value, or you're achieving a mission, whether it's the veterans or the American Cancer Institute, usage of an app, you can't hide the ball anymore! It's either success or not. You guys are very customer centric. Hundreds of use cases, best practices. This is your focus. The people part of success has been a missing link in the digital transmission: process, technology, people, culture. You guys are breaking through. Is that because the winds people are getting? Is that the energy? Is that the people? What's the people equation on your end? You've been so successful with, you guys are having success there. >> The Boomi culture, when we talk internally, who are we and what do we value? One of the first things we talk about is, we are customer-first. What that means to us is outcomes matter. It's not about buying our technology. It's not about getting data; it's about an outcome. And we talked a lot about outcomes today. In fact, at this show, throughout all the presentations, there will be roughly 100 different customer outcome stories that are shared globally. So when we talk about breaking through, because we want to partner with them and join them in their goal, and whatever it takes to do that, that starts to resonate. It's taken a while to resonate, but now it really is, and when you feel the energy on the floor, I hope you guys feel the same thing, it's just enormous and it's really starting to grow and we couldn't be happier. >> One of the cool things that I heard yesterday, Chris, I have had the opportunity to talk to a number of your customers in the last week who said, I always say, "Tell me about the differentiators, "the technical differentiators." The cloud native always comes up, the low-code. We talked yesterday about CFOs becoming citizen developers, and I thought, Wow, really? Do they know that? But on the business side, resoundingly, customers are saying cultural alignment. "Boomi understands our business." And so what you guys are enabling on the transformation of people side, as John mentioned, you're delivering that because it was one of the things that customers have said that was one of the deciding factors in going with Boomi, and they'll say, "We evaluated A, B, and C." And this cultural alignment. Yeah, I mean, Boomi has fans and it sounds kind of cliche to say, it's true! >> I appreciate that, and that is really great to hear! I stood up on stage last year and this year, and repeated the phrase, "I don't want to be their software vendor." I don't think of it that way. Nobody on my team thinks about it that way. We're building. I want to be your transformation partner. I want to be a part of, a piece of, how you're moving your business forward. Whatever it takes to do that: workflows, mobile applications, data integration, warehouse problems, insights. We can get engaged in all of that. We can go end to end in your enterprise, to open it up for you, and then provide access for your customers in ways you never dreamed of. And being a part of that is just an awesome thing for us. >> Chris, I want to get your reaction to some comment Michael Dell made, two comments Michael Dell made to me on theCUBE. 2014, I asked him, besides VMWare, the crown jewel of Dell technologies, what are you excited about? He said "Pivitol." He was fixated on Pivitol at that time. Okay, Pivitol goes public. They get bought back into the fold, it's all going on. Last year at this event, I asked him, What are you focused on this year? Now what's getting your focus? He goes, "Boomi." What's your reaction to that? Because you know Michael, when he gets fixated on something, things happen. What's your reaction to that? >> My reaction is "Thank you, Michael, "for the brand awareness." I certainly appreciate that. Certainly when he focuses on 'em, it gets attention. We have, the Boomi business as it gets capitalized by Dell has had 100% executive support everything we've ever asked for as a leadership team, we've gotten and then some. Could not be a better situation for this business, the Boomi business, and then what Michael does for it, and as we push that forward, I believe and he believes that data is the fuel of AI in the future. It's going to be all about data, and Boomi sits right in the middle of that. >> And he likes to look under the hood, too. He's not just a business guy; he's a techie. So he's looking under the hood, he likes what he sees (laughs). Of course! >> When he talks to me about it, he's been pleased with the results to date, I'll say that. >> Excellent. Well, we have this, great, as we wrap things up, a story that is near and dear to, not just my heart, but many hearts. Talk to us about what this is. What Boomi is doing with the American Cancer Society, which I think is just phenomenal. >> Lisa, I really appreciate it. So, this morning, and I'll just kind of hold this up for a moment, but, this morning we had the American Cancer Society as one of our reference customers, how they completed nine projects in 14 months, one of which impacted 30,000 patients achieving 500,000, half a million rides, and integrated together 150 partners to make sure people could get to their life saving treatments and back, and it's a volunteer network. We're happy to be a part of that. So we undertook a cause. We're going to have a pass the baton for the American Cancer Society here at Boomi World. And every time we pass the baton, $2, $1 from us, being matched by Dell Technologies makes it $2, and we're going to pass the baton here, hoping to crush it and get to a $20,000 donation. So if I could pass the baton to each of you-- >> Lisa: Absolutely! >> That's $2, >> That's four. >> John, if you'd keep doing it, I want to ring the bell, I want to crush this for the American Cancer Society. >> That's awesome! >> Pass it to the team. >> Exactly, throw it over there! >> Chris: Pass it around to everybody, let's keep this thing hopping. >> Don't throw it! >> Well Chris, that is-- >> We'll pass it around. >> Such an outstanding story. There are so many, as you said. There's going to be a 100 different customers talked about here over the next probably, started yesterday with Partner Summit today and tomorrow. That's a lot! We are happy to have a whole bunch of them on the program today and hear how many different use cases Boomi is facilitating. You guys have taken I-Pass way beyond connecting cloud to on-prem. It's edge, it's any data, any device, low-code. I know I'm speaking your language. >> I love it! >> But we're hearing that, we're feeling that, we're excited to be able to share that through theCUBE this week. >> Lisa, well listen, thank you for being here at Boomi World, it's always great to have you. It's great to talk to you. >> Lisa: Likewise. >> And I'm looking forward to a great show! >> John: Thank you for coming on. >> Well, thank you. >> Lisa: All right, our pleasure. >> Appreciate it. >> For Chris McNabb, and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Boomi World 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering, Boomi World, 2018. Brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the live Cube coverage here in Las Vegas, the Wynn Hotel for Dell Boomi World 18. So, exclusive coverage. We're here all day. Wall to wall coverage covering the impact of cloud native to application developers and owners and for businesses. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin here. We're here with Michael Dell. 13th time on the Cube. He's the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies. Continuing to defy logic. Growing leaps and bounds. Continuing to do more in the new era of IT and computing. Mike, great to see you. Thanks for coming. >> Great to be with you. Lisa, John, always fun. And here at Boomi World it's really exciting to see the ecosystem continue to grow. As people try to connect everything together Boomi is right there. Incredible business last quarter. Booking growth, 80%, 7500 customers. I still can't find a customer that doesn't need Boomi. The team continues to evolve what the capabilities. We've just had a great show here. 1000 customers showed up. Lot's of great customer stories about how they're integrating all their apps and data together. With the tsunami of data that is coming, it just gets more and more important and interesting and fun. >> You know, you mentioned on the key note stage with CEO Boomi, talking about some performance numbers that you always throw out, server growth. Continuing to grow, okay. The pundants were saying oh servers, that's cloud server-less. You still need compute, networking and storage but they do change with the cloud and SaaS has proven that business model of as a service is key. Boomi's got this little secret weapon around the unified platform that integrates a lot of these traditional components that is still going to be foundational but yet set up the next wave around AI, Edge, data tsunami that you mentioned. This is a key variable in the architectural shift. Can you talk about how you see that playing out? Because you got a couple big pieces on the chess board. VMWare, the continuous Dell Technologies portfolio kind of as the table stakes. This is kind of interesting new architecture. Explain how you see that. >> Pivotal, Dell EMC, VMWare. >> So a lot of pieces. >> Right. >> How does Boomi play into that? Because if it does be a glue layer if you will for lack of a better word, it can be very powerful. >> Yeah, so the challenge is when you go to Software as a Service, how do you connect the things together? Now, connecting 1 or 2 together is pretty straight forward. But when you start having 50 or 100 of these things, and then you've got on premise systems and now you want to have actions like an employee does something and based on their roll then something else happens, you have work flow. And then you get this, you go from a couple billion PCs to 5 billion smart phones to 100s of billions of connected things out there with this explosion in the edge. How you integrate and connect everything together with work flow and do it securely is super, super important. So we're seeing just an explosion of use cases. There was some great examples from a city digitizing and being able to detect leaks and when traffic lights aren't working. The used cases are pretty unlimited and Boomi and Pivitol play sort of at the top layer for us so the applications and integrating all the data and allowing customers to express their competitive advantage with software and data and AI and machine learning. And then of course we've got VM Ware to virtualize everything from the data center to the network and beyond. With NSX, what we're doing with NFE and software to fine win. And then of course we're the initial infrastructure company. Absolute number 1 in all aspects of the data center. And growing much faster than any of the competitors. >> And I want to also get your thoughts on VM Ware announced up to this morning, actually Barcelona time for VM Ware Europe, the acquisition of Heptio. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, Pat Kelson said in VM World, we're going in, we're going to make Kubernetes the dial tone. This is a key architectural component around orchestration. Containers certainly everyone knows, that's been standardized. People love containers. They're using them. As applications need to be more efficiently built out, out of the Boomi's value proposition, Kubernetes and these cloud native things are super important. What's your view on that? Great acquisitions, very young company? Not 34 billion dollars for a Red Hat like IBM bought but a small tuck in. How important is that trend for you? >> Well, think about what we've done with Pivitol and VM Ware together with the Pivitol container service and now adding Heptio with 2 of the 3 founders of the whole Kubernetes movement. We're going to be making Kubernetes just part of the dial tone of vSpheres. So for virtually all the customers out there, 600000 of them that use vSphere, it'll just be super easy to now have Kubernetes containers built into their vSphere environment. That's the vision. We've got a great team working on it across VM Ware and Pivitol and now the Heptio team. Adding to it. We're super pumped about all this. >> If your friend asked you at a party this weekend, hey Michael, why is Kubernetes important? What do you say to that? >> I guess it would depend on how much they know about this. >> They're a business owner responsible for application development. >> Yeah. >> They are owning to transform their organization. They realize clouds going to be a part of it. They here Kubernetes really popular, it's trending. But it's a technology. A lot of people are now getting this for the first time and seeing it as the early dopples have shown it. They try to want to know the impact and why it's important. Why is Kubernetes important as you start to get into this orchestration of apps and work loads across clouds. Why is it important? >> I think people don't want to get locked in to a particular place when it comes to their infrastructure. Kubernetes has clearly won the battle in terms of being able to be that abstraction layer. That's the simple thing that is super exciting. When it sort of went from cloud to hybrid cloud to multi cloud, people realized they wanted a 2 way street where they could move things back and forth. And now with the edge, they want to move it to the edge. With the distributed core. This explosion in data, this dat tsunami really requires a whole new set of tools in terms of the software infrastructure to be able to make it all work. >> So transformation is ... You're talking about Dell Technologies now. 34 years later you have 7 corporations under that. Done a lot to keep those brands, as they're very valuable. Dell Boomi as a business unit. Transformation is essential and Dell Boomi wants to be the transformation partner. It's also incredibly difficult. IT transformation. Digital, security, workforce. Dell Boomi works and Dell Technologies with a lot of large enterprise organizations that are still probably fairly not as well connected as they should be to find new value, new business dreams. How do you talk with customers, large enterprises that need to transform to stay competitive? Where do they start? And how dose the Dell transformation story in and of itself help those customers feel confident in what Dell Technologies can deliver? >> Right, well first thing I'd say is we actually work with customers of all sizes. We have an enormous business with small and medium and large customers. We're number 1 across the whole spectrum. We serve 99% of the Fortune 500. Since your question is about those types. They're looking at the digital transformation and figuring out this is really not an IT project. It's about technology becoming pervasive in everything that they're doing. From sells to marketing, to product creation to their whole fundamental strategy. So then it shows up in the office of the CEO and business line executives and they're having to reimagine. And so they look for a partner and Dell Technologies is very unique. 2 years and 2 months ago we put together all these companies and it's been fabulous. We've been growing double digits consistently and the response has been great because we can deliver a complete set of capabilities. Now you're right, change management, and how do I do it in my company, that's a big deal. So they're pulling on us to bring them more of a ... The don't want us to show up with a bunch of parts and drop em off. They want us to actually build them a solution that is specific to their needs. Help them implement it. In many cases, run it for them. So we do much of that ourselves with our own services organization. 60000 plus people in our services organization. And of course we have the best, all the great SIs out there that are helping customers implement and run and manage like I said, 99% of the Fortune 500. We're right there with them in this digital transformation. Of course we do the IT, the workforce, the PCs and of course security. Unbelievably important. Your whole brand trust is all based on that so we wrap the whole thing with security and no company has the breath that we have. I think we've kind of won the hearts and minds of the decision makers because of the capabilities that we have. Not that we take it for granted. We have to go earn that trust every single day. We have unbelievably talented people in our company. Over 20000 engineers. Scientists, PHDs. About 90% of them are software engineers. This is a very different company than it was 5 or 10 years ago. We're having a blast. It's a rocket ship, so. >> I had a chance to interview an IT leader and his name is Allen Bean. He's the global CTO and head of IT innovation at Proctor and Gamble. He brought the cloud to Coca-Cola. Has had a career all in IT going back to DHL in the 90s and 80s. So we were talking and I asked him, does IT matter. And Dave Alampi always brings up the book by Nick Carr. And we always talk about it. >> Love it. Such a fun topper, yeah. >> And so he says, quote, at that time some people thought it didn't matter, everyone was kind of complaining, but he says it does matter. It's a competitive advantage. And over the decades IT was outsourced. And now people are trying to bring that back in and make it a competitive advantage. This is now ... It's a mandate basically. So as people who have been kind of anemic with IT, they've got people running stuff but eventually outsource all the value. They got to bring that value in. Cloud is that opportunity. How do you respond to the leaders out there trying to figure this out. What are the keys to success around bringing back the competitive advantage and using the cloud for things that aren't core to the core competency but getting that core competency nailed down. What's your vision. >> Yeah, well, look, I mean, it's all about understanding what is your competitive differentiation and advantage as a business. And if you give that away to somebody else, you're going to be out of business in not too much time. Packers applications are great for things that aren't differentiated. But if you actually do something that's unique and valuable and special and you can't express that in software with your own data, you're going to have a problem, right? This is what companies are figuring out. This is what we're doing with Pivitol and Boomi allowing companies to build all this together. And look I think as it relates to cloud, customers have figured out it's multi cloud, right? It's a workload dependent discussion. Some workloads are great in the public cloud but in many cases, not so much, right? As we've modernized and automated the infrastructure we have customers that tell us hey our private cloud for our predictable workload, which is 90%, is 5, 6 times less expensive than AWS. We're building these converge, hyper converge, like the fast track to the automated modernized infrastructure. And look, you can decide. But we're seeing customers that want to move things back and forth and we're seeing a bit of a boomerang. Where customers have said oh everything you upload to the cloud, and no, not everything. >> And the digital transformation really is making IT a competitive advantage. So I had a long ranging interview. It's up on YouTube. I asked him a final question. I always said, okay, so you know, he's transforming Proctor and Gamble. I said okay, as you look ads and all those things what's the next mountain that you're going to climb? You're an IT pro, you said in the agenda. And I'll read you the quote. I want to get your reaction. He said, "I think we're looking forward. Latency is still an issue. We have to find ways to defeat latency and we're not going to do it through basic physics, we're going to have to change out business models, change our technology, distribution, change everything that we're doing. Consumers and customers are demanding instant access to enhanced information through AI and machine learning right at the point when they want it." So this is his next mountain. This is kind of what you were talking about on the stage here at the Dell Boomi event around the impact of AI and data. What's your reaction to that quote? >> Well to me this is all about the edge and 5G coming around the corner. And you look at all the big telcos. They're all piling in on 5G because it's 1000 times faster and 1000 times less latency. That's going to be a big turbo charge. The rocket ship. And it will just create an explosion in data and compute on the edge. And a lot of it's going to stay on the edge. Because you'll have these edge devices talking to each other. A whole new class of applications and capabilities because of that. That's super exciting. We're already seeing it with this build out of distributed core. And that's why we see so much growth in the data center business. >> So Michael, Dell Boomi, if you look at Boomi for a second, was named by the Gartner Magic Quadrant of 2018 as a leader in Ipads. Today they talked about ... >> Again, I think 6th or 7th year in a row. It's been there for quite some time. >> An established leader in an established market. But today they were talking about, hey we want to change the, we want to redefine the I in Ipads to intelligence. How is Dell Technologies and Boomi particularly starting to leverage terra bites and terra bites of customer meta data to make your systems smarter? To enable businesses to truly connect. Prim, edge devices as things continue to get more distributed and data becomes more critical? >> Yeah, so, the key to AI and all of its variance of machine learning, deep learning neural network is the data. The data is the fuel for the rocket ship of AI. And the challenge is, if you have your data spread out in 100 softwares of service providers and 3 public clouds and here and there and where's all your data? We don't really know. How do you fuel the rocket? It becomes a very difficult problem. This is the problem that we're beginning to address for our customers. We're going to have an event all about AI coming up I think next week. Where we're going to be talking much more about this. We got a number of offerings that we're rolling out. We've been helping customers for years build their data lakes and curate the data. And of course Pivitol and Boomi are essential to how you bring all of this together and make sense of it. Because if you just have all the data but you can't actually use it. If you're not already using AI and it's variance to improve your products and services, you're doing it wrong. We've identified over 450 projects just within Dell Technologies internally. As I mentioned on stage, we've sold about 700 million computers since I started in my dorm room. We have enormous telemetry data. Imagine, if you will, that something doesn't work exactly the way it's supposed to. Okay? What's the chance that has never happened before? >> Zero. >> The answers almost zero, right? Our job is to take all this data that we have, use all this intelligence and actually prevent it from happening. So we're building all kinds of intelligence and AI and preventative technology into all of our solutions from the data center to the desk top to the edge, to the multi cloud so that all these systems are just self healing and auto magically way more reliable. >> Auto magically, I like that. It just sounds like what you're saying is Dell Technologies articulating it's value and it's differentiation because you're using that data. >> You have to. >> To identify insight, to take action immediately. >> And to your point about the big companies, they have an advantage but it's a bit of a time value expiring advantage. They have the data that the new entrance don't have. >> Right. >> But they have to activate it quickly with this new computer science or else they'll be dinosaurs, right? Nobody wants to be a dinosaur. >> Michael, what's the business drivers, and you talk to customers all the time, that they're seeing and that matter most to them. Is it agility, is it transform the customer employee experience, compliant security? How would you view the pattern around the most important business driver for your customers that are trying to put the business transformation together with digital. Could you comment just anecdotally what you see? >> I think every customer is a little bit different in their journey. Some customers, security is number 1. Because of the kind of business that they're in and it just has to be that way. For other customers it's how do I increase my speed to the solution. It used to be we need a new feature. We'll get it in a year or 2. How about never. Does never work for you? That's kind of the old IT. Now with agile development you've got, what we're doing with Pivotol cloud foundry, you've got companies implementing, these are giant companies. Biggest companies in the world. They're implementing new things like in 2 or 3 weeks. It's amazing how fast. Speed and as a chief executive, that's what you crave. How can I take this new requirement that I heard from the customer and turn it into a feature that I can go offer very, very quickly? That's what you want to be able to do. It's what we used to be able to do when we were little tiny cubs. How do you do it with 200000 people? >> I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you popularized early on in your career, the direct business model, you also had the just in time manufacturing kind of ethos of build it, build to order, really streamline efficiency. So I want to kind of take the leap to now a new generation with cloud native where you have workflows and efficiencies. You have integration. So in a way the customers are now going direct to their customers and wanting to compose and build solutions. As you said on stage, these are going to be new problems that not yet have been identified. New solutions. So that customers have to be what you did. They got to build their own. So they got to build their own, they got to have the suppliers, they got to have the code. How do you see customers being successful if they want to take that efficiency approach? Kind of be 5 nines if you will in this new modern era. Because this is the challenge that they have. They have to build their own. They need suppliers. They need you guys. How do you see the customers being successful in that scenario? >> Yeah, I think what they're trying to do is shrink the time from when at that point of customer interaction, they can use the data to make the service and the product better and if it's like this lengthy value chain with all these different intermediaries and it takes weeks or months or never, that's just way too slow. They want it to be like instantaneous. How do they create that direct relationship with their customers? I only had 1000 dollars when I started so we couldn't really afford much so each dollar you invest very carefully. We just kind of out of necessity came up with some ideas that ... >> You were efficient because you had to be. >> We didn't have any choice, right? >> So when we talk about integration, we talk about it's the foundation of digital transformation, we've talked about IT, security, workforce. One of the things that you mentioned earlier that I'd like to get your perspective on, a different view of transformation is cultural. An enterprise organization as you mentioned has a huge advantage of a tremendous wealth of data. With that amount of data and the need for speed as you just talked about, where, in your opinion, and your experience, is cultural transformation as an enabler of an enterprise to really be able to react that quickly to develop new products, new revenue strengths? >> Yeah, I think it's a big challenge. And a lot of customers struggle with change management. You never want a good crisis go to waste. We sort of grew up in the business where it was change or die, quick or dead. If you don't do it you're gone, right? This was just the way our business, this was just how we had to compete. It's what we grew up in. And I think what's happened is more and more businesses are that way now. It requires the business leaders to say hey friends, we've got a real challenge here and we've got to move faster. It is change or die, it's quick or dead, I think for all businesses because this is the fastest time ever but it's the slowest time relative to the future. It's just going to get faster and faster. If companies ... The only way you get good at change is to do it more frequently. And so if you've never changed anything for 80 years in your company and all the sudden you start trying to change, it's really hard. You just have to start. >> How do you inspire say employees at Dell Technologies who've been with you for a very long time to be able to be open and agile themselves to help facilitate this transformation? >> I believe we built it into our culture that they understand that change is good as opposed to change is bad. If you fear something well then it's bad, right? We precondition people to say okay we're going to change something. Not to say every time we change something it works perfectly. We make mistakes, we learn, we trial and error. That's all fine. Fail fast. But you need a culture where you can embrace change. No question about it. I think a lot of companies that didn't really have that are figuring that out and either by crisis or by leadership or by some combination they're then forced into it. For me, it's what we grew up in. Because hey it's a tough world out there. >> Mike, I want to ask you a final question. Thanks for coming on and spending the time with us. Great interview here. Good length. Recently in the news with a lot of commentary from us as well as the industry around IBM buying Red Hat. I made a comment around the innovation piece of this and I want to get your thoughts on that because when you bought EMC, it was a merger of equals. You integrated that and the growth that you've been successful since then, I want to get your perspective. I want you to take a minute to explain to folks watching, when you did the merger equal with EMC, what happened? You've been successful integrating the organization. What innovative things have you done since the EMC merger of equals? Take a minute to explain, again, there's a lot of moving pieces on the table. You got VM Wares, you got Pivitol, you got Boomi. A lot of moving parts in your plan. You've been successful with the numbers. Financial performance shows it. Take a minute to explain what happened, where's the innovation coming out of Dell Technologies? >> So in hind sight, it looks pretty obvious, right? You take the leader and servers and the leader in storage and you say hey infrastructure hardware goes together. And by the way, if you have the leader of infrastructure software, VM Wares, you put that all together. Wow, that'd be really great. And turns out it was. It was actually much better than we thought. And so customers have really bought into that and then with Pivitol and Boomi and Rsave, Virtustream, Secureworks etc., we have such a complete set of capabilities that customers have said, hey, why do I want to buy from 20 smaller less capable companies and integrate it myself versus you guys will just do all this for me. If they were buying from 2 or 3 or 4 parts of Dell Technologies they'll say, well, why don't we just take the others, right? We been picking up huge amounts of share across the whole business. I'm talking about like 10s of billions of dollars of growth here. There's clearly a consolidation going on in the kind of existing parts of the industry but we've also got massive investments in the new cloud native parts and software defined, and security. It's been a real blessing to be able to pull all of these teams together. We had this relationship with EMC going back from 2001. We were very early supporters of VM Ware. We had a theory of victory and it's played out very well. The teams have really gelled enormously well and the customers have continued to give us their trust. >> I think, first of all servers, storage, networking is never going away. It's the holy trinity of anything in computing. Just looks different and consumes differently. But I think people underestimate the execution innovation that you guys have done. You didn't skip a beat. VM Ware didn't skip a beat. So things have happened, so that was a challenge of the integration. >> Not everybody predicted that it was going to go that way. It's actually gone much better than even we had planned. The revenue synergies have been much larger. >> Well congratulations and thanks for taking the time on the Cube. Michael Dell is here inside the Cube here at Boomi World 18. Dell Boomi World. It's the part of Dell Technologies. We think of them being the power engine for data processing, data growth, powering AI, integrating all the application workloads. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin. Stay tuned for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music) >> Since the dawn of the cloud, the Cube has been there. Connected.

>> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by The Cloud Foundry Foundation, and Pivotal. >> Oh my Bosh! One of the fun t-shirts here at the Cloud Foundry Summit. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host John Troyer. We've had a day of some really good interviews, really liked geeking out, digging into this hybrid, multi-cloud world, John. Something that feels to be coming into focus a little bit more. I had a bunch of questions coming in, and many of them, at least, I have some answers as to where they're going. What's your take on the Cloud Foundry Summit? >> Yeah, my first Cloud Foundry Summit I thought was super interesting. We got to talk to a couple users, which is always really interesting, and also some folks from the foundation. It was insightful, actually. I talked to a few vendors here, and they said, well how's the crowd? I said, not big, but the people who are here are big. Right? In terms of, there weren't 20,000 people here, there were 1,700, but the companies that are involved are serious about Cloud Foundry, they're all in, they're building apps and they're not building one or two apps, they're building thousands of apps on Cloud Foundry and moving their whole enterprise over. So, that was kind of super enlightening to me. >> Yeah, I mean, John, we know the story here. We've talked at a number of events about this. When you've got big financial companies, insurance companies, people in healthcare, if they don't become more agile, they will be Uberized. We have to have a different term, right? Uber's in the news for all the bad reasons now, so Netflix was the old term, but that digital disruption by start-ups. So, when you hear companies, oh, we're a 75-year-old company, we're a 100-year-old company, we're becoming a software company, and therefore, we're going to take our thousands of apps, and somewhere writing, we always have the new things we're writing, and then we'll move some along. So, that application really spectrum of the new stuff, and then pulling along the old one with a platform like Cloud Foundry, being that bridge to the future if you will. >> Right. Right. And, we aren't talking about a small team chatting on slack. We're talking about, in one organization, thousands of developers, coordinating on this platform. >> Yeah, absolutely. We to talked Express Scripts, I think they said they're hiring about a thousand engineers in a little more than a year. So, big companies, a lot of things to move when we're talking, Liberty Mutual is like, oh we want 75% of our IT staff to be writing code, and today they're less than 50%. So, if you're sitting in that other 50%, the writing is on the wall that you need to move in that direction, or maybe we're not the right organization for you. I'm curious, your take about that retraining of staff, we know we have a shortage of skill sets. How do they learn? How do they get, is it certifications? Is it training? What have you seen? >> Well they did just announce the Cloud Foundry certification program here today. So, I think that was an interesting component that's needed for support for this. But, really the Cloud Foundry supports all sorts of technologies and I think you see it in both the contributors here and in the technology. So, it's polyglot world, I see a lot of people, the crowd, used to, known assistments are indeed doing more programming, doing more automation, and so I think it's all of a course. I think, look it's clear, in five or 10 years the profile of people in IT is going to look a lot different. And, this is one of the leading edges of it. >> Yeah. Coming to the show and we talked about it on the intro that drumbeat of Kubernetes really gaining the hearts and minds of developers, I feel like it's been diffused a little bit. I don't know whether Kubo is the answer, but it is an answer. We've talked to some people in the ecosystem, that have other options that they're doing. As well as, of course, companies like Google, which Kubernetes came out of and Microsoft who's embracing Kubernetes, they like choice, they want people to use their platform. Keeping a more open approach for Cloud Foundry to work with other pieces of open source in the ecosystem. It's goodness? Time will tell whether this one solution makes sense. What's your take on that? >> Sure, I think Cloud Foundry has always been known as the opinionated platform. But, I think now the subtleties have come out that, yes there are certain opinions in the way things are glued together, but as James Waters pointed out, they've always had different kinds of abstractions of things running on or in the platform, in terms of whole apps or server list, we didn't really talk about today. But, so Kubernetes is sitting beside there for people who want more knobs, who already have an app, that expects that kind of scalability and management, makes sense for the Cloud Foundry. I think, they seem pretty open to embracing whatever works, and in some ways it's an analogy to what going on in the clouds like Azure and Google Cloud Platform, and that it's like, look bring us your work loads, we will run them. So, I think that's kind of an opening of at least a publicly stance of an opening. >> Yeah. I like this as Steve O'Grady said in the conversation we had with him, there's a lot of choices out there and therefore customers really, they want that. Of course there's the paradox situation. How do I keep up on all the latest and greatest? I mean, three years ago, the last time I came to the show, was like 08 Docker, totally going to disrupt this. Now it's Kubernetes, we only brought up functions as a service or as a server less, like once, and it did not seem to fit into where this plays today. But, there's options out there. Customers that are here, like what they're doing. It is moving them forward, it is enabling them to be that faster, faster, faster. More agile, meet the needs of the business and stay competitive. >> Yeah. Steve's term was different tools for different jobs or something like that right? >> We always said at Wikibon, a torse is for courses. >> Yeah. I mean a polyglot is one way that Coops' Clouds Foundry world used to talk about it. But, I think different tools is a great way. There is, we're in a technical time of great diversity. Which is awesome right? There's no monoculture here, which is super interesting, I think. >> Yeah absolutely, also the move from Cloud Foundry really started out as a predominantly, a non premises deployment and Public Cloud is seeping into it. We talked to a couple of customers that are starting to use Public Cloud, and most of them who weren't using it today were understanding where it fits. Sorting that piece out and look at solutions like Cloud Foundry as one of those pieces that are going to give them flexibility moving forward. >> Yeah. I mean I think that this is something that's going to have to develop over time. Right? It's one thing to say, I'm a layer on top of another cloud, but Amazon really wants you to use its databases, and Google Cloud really wants you to use it's services. And so, you can only stay completely independent for so long without taking advantage of those things, as you evolve these platforms. So, there is that tension there, that will play out, but it's played out over and over again at the many levels in tact. So, we'll see some standard stuff there. If Cloud Foundry has enough value, people will use it as their deployment platform on MultiCloud. Well let's talk about MultiCloud. What you think Stu? But sometimes MultiCloud is more of an ideal than a practicality for many organizations. >> Yeah. What about Pivitol? So if we look at Pivitol, number they're doing in Cloud Foundry, was, last year was about 275 million, so that number had been shared in one of the earnings calls. Seems like a very well position for the Fortune 1000. I'm always trying to figure out. What is the tam that they can go after? Who does it work for, and who doesn't it? At OpenStack we talked about, well great, the Telco NFV market looks great, but is that 20 or 50 companies. For something like Cloud Foundry, there's lots of big revenue that they can get by knocking down many of these Fortune 1,000's. But, it does seem to be that enterprise grade, therefore there's dollars attached to that. It is something that they, Pivitol, has done a solid job of converting that need, using open source into actual software revenues. Yes, their services and labs are a critical, critical, critical piece of what they do, but it is the subscription of software that they built. Many of their clients were on, I know , a three year subscription and lots of those renewals have started coming now. Expectation is that we could see an IPO by them by 2018. It's been reported I'm sure Michael Dell would love to have another influx of cash that he can help fund all of the the things that he's doing. What's your take on Pivitol coming out of this? >> I mean, from here it looks like Pivotal is very comfortable with it's place and who it's customers are. I didn't see a lot of hedging about, we're going after a different market, or we're going for the individual developer, or we think this can be used by almost anybody. These are big companies we're talking about. In the key note this morning for the foundation, talked about enterprise grade. Talking about security, talking about scale, talking about developer experience. They're not shy about it. They're serious when they say they are an enterprise grade platform. So, which I think is great right? You should know yourself and I really feel like both the foundation and Pivitol, a big part of the foundation, does know itself and knows who's it's customers are. >> Yeah. I guess the only thing that I look at is, so many conferences that I go to, is this a platform that SAS companies are building on? As we look at what the future of companies, and especially in the technology space, are going to look like, yes we have some of these big companies that are using it, but you know there's not the, oh okay, work day and sales force, and all these companies, I haven't seen these companies that are already just software companies using it. It's the industry, older companies that are trying to get more into software and therefore this helps with their digital transformation. The companies that are born in the cloud, I haven't seen that in there, and that's fine. There's definitely a diversity of the marketplace. >> Yeah. If you look at a spectrum, we're saying that all SAS companies are software companies, well those SAS companies may be even more software company than a manufacturer or a finance company. So, I think that's okay. One thing they have to watch with the ecosystem and the customer base is the speed of evolution, the speed of the ecosystem, new entrants coming in. Can they keep the velocity of innovation up? I'm sure that's one thing they're looking at. >> Yeah. It is interesting right? Will the millennials be using Cloud Foundry caring about it? Or is this more the boomer, the older generation that have used it? >> Hey, it's not a job versus Steve McGrady, it's not a job versus Dotnet or Microsoft World anymore, but they're still a lot of job developers and new ones coming in. I think hey, there's still COBOL programmers. >> Alright. Want to give you final takeaways. For me some good quality users talking about their stories. There's reality here as you said, there wasn't any big shift is to what Cloud Foundry or the foundation or what they are doing. There's not some big pivot that they need to do. No pun on Pivotal. But, sometimes you go and you're like, are they tone deaf? Are they drinking their own Kool Aid? I think this group understands where they fit. They're focused on delivering it, definitely a changing ecosystem from previous years and how they fit into that whole cloud environment. I'll give you the final word. >> Sure. That goes with some of what you said. The people seem very productive. They seem happy. They seems super engaged. The show floor when the sessions were in session, there was nobody here on the show floor. People are here to learn. Which means that they're here to get stuff done. It's kind of a no nonsense crowd. So, I really enjoyed the day. >> Alright well, John always a pleasure to catch up with you. Appreciate you sitting in for the day and talking about all of this. You brought some great expertise to the discussion. Big thanks to the team here. We actually had four shows this week from the Cube, so as we get towards almost July 4th, which means that we get a deep breath before the fall tour comes. So, I want to thank everybody for watching. As always, check out thecube.net for all the videos from this show and all the other shows. If you see a show that we're going to be at and you want to be on, get in touch with us. If you have a show that we're not at, please feel free to reach out to us. We're really easy to get in touch with. For my co host John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Once again as always, thank you for watching the Cube and we will see you at the next show.