(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (soft electronic music) >> And welcome back here on The Cube which, of course, is the flagship broadcast of Silicon Angle TV. Proud to be here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We've been live Monday, now today Tuesday, back live again tomorrow. Hope you join us for all three days of coverage. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're joined by Jim Franklin who's the director of solution management at Dell EMC. Jim, good to see you this afternoon. >> Hey, nice to see you as well. >> How's the show been for you so far? >> Fantastic, and there's always a lot of energy at Dell World. It's always exciting to be around, see our partners, our customers, hear our executives speak, gives us some clarity on what we're doing at my level. [Men Laugh] So it's a fun time, it's energetic, it's Vegas. >> Get's ya. >> Good combination right? >> Yeah, so. (laughs) Get you energized. >> So before we jump in, what are you hearing from customers now? Because we've been talking to a lot of folks in your shoes at Dell and just kind of curious what are people bending your ear about? What are they most curious about? >> Yeah, so a lot of our customers and our partners are interested in, I'll call them hot trends. So what from my perspective are we seeing, where are there problems? So for that, things like how do I continue to try and outpace the data that keeps coming, because like death and taxes, the data keeps growing and growing and growing so they're looking at it going, how do I start to consume all this data? Can you help out? Hey but what about this cloud and how do I make the cloud a reality? Several of them haven't actually even started on a cloud strategy, so they're saying, hey what's the best way to look at that? And then they're looking at it saying, if they're the infrastructure guy or if they're the backup administrator, they're saying, how do I actually flip my economic model from a cost model to a profit model? So these are the sorts of conversations we're seeing, not only with our customers, but our partners are trying to help them out as well. >> So take us back. Let's go to the most simple or at least maybe the most elementary stage and say they're not even thinking of a cloud strategy yet or they're just now embarking on that. >> Jim: Just sniffing out. >> Yeah, walk us through that. What do you do because you would think by now obviously, their awareness is viable. We should be there, but they don't know where to go. >> So most customers know that this is now trusted technology, a trusted operating model. The problem has to be is how do you actually get there? What does that journey look like and what choices do I have? So even those early adopters that jumped out to public cloud for sort of a quick fix, we see them especially for my area, which is business critical applications, SAP Oracle, Splunk, they're coming back to an on-premise cloud for reasons like being able to recover out of that or this now they've discovered is their intellectual property and there's a little bit of reluctance just to go send that out to sort of an unknown place, so we see a lot of customers that are not bringing it back, but they now learn how that economic model can work, so they're trying to go in with sort of a cloud mentality. So still do the operational, the show back, the charge back, but maybe bring that in house, so you're more comfortable with it, so you can innovate on that. >> So as we're talking about these traditional, mission-critical apps, SAP, Splunk, Oracle Suite, these applications that are very rigid. The cash register, SAP, the cash register of the world. We don't want to change, you get the product guy. He's like, hey we want access to the mission-critical data. We want to be able to change it on the fly. You have the SAP guys going back and saying, no, no, no. >> Jim: Wait a minute, yeah. >> Wait a minute, we'll give you N+1 environment to develop in and then you prove to us, but it takes nine months to get an N+1 environment so you can do the development. How is Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, helping solve that agility problem for these legacy applications? >> So the first thing that we have to do, if you're going to keep it on premise is we advise our customers, modernize the infrastructure, because a lot of times you'll come up on a server or a storage refresh, right? This is the plumbing, right? This is underneath the guts of the house. It's not exactly attractive stuff, so if you can actually move to speed based technologies, things like Flash, right, fantastic technology. If you can virtualize it, if you can start to consider scale out and scale up technologies that are ready to go. Software Define has been a boon for these things. SAP is now adopting this like Software Define. That's fantastic for our folks, I guess. You guys know the advantages of Software Define. It can spin up, spin out, scale up, scale, in a much more pragmatic, quicker way. So these are sort, see now we're entering into things like VX Rack, VX Rail, and they have the resiliency, the stability, the scale in order to support these applications. They're built now solid enough that you can trust them to run, so now you get those operational efficiencies, you get that ability to scale, you get the performance, and you get it at a little bit better price point as well, so I think that's where customers are starting to be less reluctant to move those big humongous SAP, Oracle workloads, because it can be trusted. It's now that technology's aged enough and is resilient enough, then now customers are doing it and they're doing it quite rapidly. >> So step two of this is once I get some agility, what I thought was, traditional rational, you know what, Dell should never move SAP to the cloud, because it's static, it doesn't change, and it's costly. Well I now have these use cases where I'm spinning up N+1s all the time and I'm bringing them down. That's elastic. That sounds like the cloud. How do you help make that transition? >> So SAP actually, as one of the trigger points is this move to HANA, the memory database. And the economic model was, it's a little pricey, that software, right? So SAP has actually gone in with a cloud-first mentality. So they've actually helped us out here. They've promoted them as, so HANA enterprise cloud, for instance, is a way for you to get in on HANA at a price point that's a little better, the subscription based model. And you can start to migrate some, like a BW app, something a little smaller. Remember back in the days when we first virtualized? You wouldn't virtualize your mission-critical app right off the bat. You picked something small that you could eat. We don't eat our meal one big hunk at a time, right, we eat little bites of it, so we're doing the same thing with-- >> Keith: Unless you have four brothers. >> What's that? Unless-- (laughs) >> You have four brothers. >> You eat quickly. >> You use those. >> You do it all, right. >> Or you get real quick with your elbows. So we advise our customers, take a small BW app that you got on Oracle right now, flop it over there, put it in the cloud. You'll be able to cost-justify this much, much better and then with the work on tangible use cases, start to pull in more data-rich, hydrate that really fast, awesome analytics engine, and start to use it for the power of good. It's a super hero. It's a super hero technology, so we want to invoke it. We want to bring it alive. We want to apply it towards new innovations and that's what our customers are doing now. Financial services, health care, the retail market. So now our customers are starting to say, hey how can I apply this super awesome, super hero technology to my retail space. How can I inflate my tires 5 PSI more so I save my company 10 million dollars? So these, all these use cases now are coming. Now I call this, my personal thing, I call it now cool IT. We're no longer in the trenches doing the plumbing for SAP, we're now moving on to cool IT where we can start to do data analytics, we can start to apply use cases, start to ingest more data, maybe that oil rig out there in the gulf, I can start to pull in more of that data, I can start to do analytics on it. I can start to show the business that I'm meaningful, that I am a profit center, I know what's going on. >> Yeah, what's from the big jump there in terms of opening people's eyes, opening a company's eyes to how rich that data is for them and how applicable it is and how actionable it is, because that's been one of the bugaboos, right? People were like, I got all this data, where there's treasure there. >> Jim: There is. >> You got to find it, you got to get there. >> Right, right. So that advancement, some of the technology, like HANA's a hardened database now, not hardened in terms of its access, but hardened in terms of the technology itself, so I can actually put more in it and ingest it. The other thing that's happened is we've moved out to the edge, things like the gateways and things like that. Now I can apply that technology, but I don't have to suck it all in. And we'll go back to the original point, the cloud has enabled a lot of this traffic, the data traffic to go out there and what we see our customers now doing is now they're able to actually quiesce the data and just, we always could do this, but it never came together in such a way that it was cohesive, that I could have universal translators of all this different data coming in and I could actually quiesce it. And now, to me, the part that always matters, the UI work, like I can actually visualize and then SAP, and Oracle, and all the, they can now make it visual. I think that's the key. So if I'm a CFO or I'm a CEO and I'm talking to my CIO and I don't need to talk about numbers. I can literally visualize the data on my screen, on my iPad or whatever device I have. That now, what we see with our eyes, is much more believable than what we hear with our ears. >> John: Absolutely. >> So you can see it. And that's, I think, that's the big differentiator I've seen is we don't do customer presentations anymore. We show them with their own data. So we used to do that design thinking way back in the day, but now you can actually apply that with the technology we have and I can visualize it. >> John: Seeing is believing, right? >> Immediately customers, you don't have to do a business justification. They see it. They see it right there in front of their own eyes. It's fantastic. >> So, talking about design theory or design approach, there has to be a point where industry-wide or even within your practice where you're at the 50, 60% of the solution for most customers and there's a customization point. Where are you guys at in that? Is it 50, 60, 70, 80% at that point? What-- >> Well that's what makes it fun for a guy like me, because in solutions we can validate, we can do performance optimization and that's, for the most part you're talking servers, network storage, stuff we've always done and we can optimize that to a large extent, but once you flip the script and you look from the application down, you can start to tune from that perspective, so we can get about 70, 80% of this well constructed. It's that last 20% where the customer's saying, hey I'm a financial services arm and I'm trying to catch the flashboys or the stock traders that are manipulating the market. Well that requires a new set of tools, right, a new set of approach to how to do this, how to analyze your data, how to introduce automation, so for us, the last mile, particularly with our SI partners, who are really good at doing this. SAP is really good at doing this design thinking session. We could sit down with a customer now, we could ask them where do they want to make money. How do you want to invest in IT so that your analytics is fully realized, your data is fully realized, and they have wonderful use cases. So now we're not talking about how does widget X work with application Y, we're talking about how do I apply this data in the direction of the use case you're trying to solve for and that's the last 20% or something like that. >> Is that where art meets science in a way? All of the sudden, like you said, you've got your 80%, this is the way it's going to be. >> Now, now. >> This stuff works. >> Now we're going to fine tune. >> Jim: Yeah. >> So there is some art maybe that comes into play there. >> There is. We found that it tends to be vertical specific and there is an art form to it, which is why our global system integrators are wonderful, because they're artists. We could go in with them and we could have that conversation. We could sit down for, you could even sit down just for a couple hours and pretty soon you're having a great conversation, understanding really what the customer's business is like and then targeting that particular use case and making it tangible. >> So that's pretty interesting. You say you sit down. Who exactly are you sitting down with, because traditionally Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, talked to the infrastructure group. You're talking about a completely different level. This sounds like application level folks, analysts, not the traditional Dell contact. >> Yeah, which makes us a little bit specialized. So you still want to sell to the back of the house, the infrastructure guys, the folks that are-- >> Keith: It's going to need a PowerMax. >> Right, and it's a completely different conversation though and I'll connect the two in just a minute, but we go in and we'll talk to the VP of applications, we'll talk to the DBA. These are the folks that actually, they're not worried about the widget, the disc behind it. We'll sell them a VMAX, or a PowerMax, excuse me, at the end of the day, but they're not so worried about that. They're worried about how do I get fiduciary responsibility out of this? How do I control my regulations? What do I do about data locality? How do I look at the pressure on that oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico and make sure it's not going to burst? How do I proactively send out my maintenance man, not on every month, but when I know on the 5,000th open of that train door, that I need to proactively go do that, because at 5,000 open and closes, it's going to fail. We've done that with analytics. We know that. So for us, most of those conversations tend to be at the, you look for the DBA or the VP of applications or the CIO and in this way, this is the beauty of how this all, we're actually going in with the Rainmaker ISV. So we're going in with SAP, we're going in with Oracle, and now we combine what traditionally has been Dell, the infrastructure guys with SAP and we never used to call, we used to call six months detached from each other. Not anymore. Design thinking, IOT, use case, data analytics has brought us right together and we're in the glide path together now. It's a much different partnership now with those guys. >> Yeah, good recipe, right? >> It's fabulous. >> It really is. >> It's great, it's a fun time. >> Yeah I can tell, I can tell. And thank you for being with us. We appreciate the birds-eye view but as you said, this is kind of an exciting time, right? Because you're able to, you're transforming your business and other businesses at the same time. >> Jim: Yeah, best thing to do, yeah, love it. >> Very cool. Jim, thanks for being with us, appreciate your time. >> Yeah, appreciate it, thanks for having me. >> Joining us for Dell EMC. Back with more from Dell Technologies World 2018. 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