>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell, EMC. >> John: Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is theCUBE live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017, our 8th year covering EMC World. Now, the first year covering Dell EMC World, I'm John Furrier, my co-host this week, Paul Gillin, on the blue set, two CUBES, two shot guns, double barrel shot gun of content. Our next guest, who's been on theCUBE every single year we've been in existence, since 2010, the Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies and Dell EMC, Jeremy Burton, formerly the CMO of EMC and again, 2010 was your first year with EMC, now. >> That's right. >> Look, I mean, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, yeah the makeup takes a bit longer, I got to cover up more wrinkles, but you know. >> You're running the show, you're on stage, your son is doing some gigs up there. Where are you now mentally, I mean, 2010, when we started our journey with theCUBE was the first at EMC World in Boston, you just joined the company. Now, here, look where you're at. I mean, do you have the pinch me moments? How the hell did this happen? Look how big we are. What's, how do you feel? >> Yeah, it's great. I mean, I almost have this belief in tech, you can never plan more than a couple years. I mean, so I kind of laugh a little bit at the five year strategy or whatever. And I'm think even personally, if you're looking out maybe more than a couple years in your career as to what you want to do, its... it can all change. It's like the start of a race. You can have all the best plans in the world, but you don't know what's going to happen when you get around the first corner, right? So, yeah, I knew last year, when Michael asked me to take on the CMO role, that the marketing team could make a difference. I'm a big believer about story and making sure that people understand what we're trying to do. It was, for me at least, it was a challenge, and a real interesting role to take on. >> Certainly a big challenge, you got the merger going on, obviously bigger role, bigger company, more portfolio product. You also have a product background you usually were doing a lot of the product stuff. What's been the impact from a customer standpoint as you've been rolling out the brand of Dell Technologies which I know is a holistic brand. But you now have a lot of brands to deal with in your portfolio. >> Yeah, well the good news is we're bigger, we have more budget, we can do a bigger brand campaign and the real goal here is; most people, when they think of Dell, they think of a PC. When they think of EMC they think of a storage array. Dell Technologies, if you look at the breadth of the company now, it really is incredible what we can do in an organization. So the brand campaign is really about redefining the company. What is Dell Technologies stand for? Well, it's about transforming your business, Transforming IT, your workforce and security. If we can get across over the next couple of years, the impact that we can have on an organization that's really where the win is. Underneath that obviously, we want to say, hey look, if you're on a digital project, Pivotal's going to be lead. It if's a software-defined data center, it's VMWear. So first and foremost, it's getting the big story of Dell Technologies, and redefining how people perceive the company. >> Well, Jeremy, so what's the message? We've been trying to read the tea leaves here, about what's the theme coming out of the show. What is the single most important message you want customers to take away? >> Number one, first and foremost, it's about, look, if every company is going to become a digital company, if you want to become a digital company, trust Dell Technologies for your journey. >> Everybody's saying that, though. I mean, that's HP's pitch now, too. So why did you adopt digital transformation as a theme, when it has become such a buzzword in the industry? Are you trying to find a nuance there? >> No, because the thing is, is that's where the world is going. And we could make up something that's ours, but the problem with that, I've never been one for saying, oh, we're just going to make up a new category. The category, people are going to become digital companies without a doubt, and I think our differentiation, and this is in the ad campaign, and you see it around the show, here, it's about making it real. At some point, you got to realize that transformation. if you're going to go build a cloud native app with HP, good luck, they don't have any software. >> I think you said on theCUBE last year, or the year before, I forget which year it was. These eight years are blurring in, and... theCUBE's on it's eight year. I think you quote said, "never fight fashion," was a phrase you always say, so I do believe that digital transformation's a little bit boring, but it's a reality. >> Well and for us, I feel like our differentiation, whether it be EMC or Dell, is we're a very practical company. And if we can't make it real, nobody can. Which is why the ad campaign only focused on customers. It was, hey if you want to look at GE, if you're going to look at Colombia Sports Wear, Chitale Dairy, we got about ten different customers, cause I think, to your point, right, it is noisy. How do you make it believable? You have a real customer saying, "I bet on Dell Technologies and they transformed my business." >> So we were talking on the intro about the transformation I know there's a lot of herding cats with the new merged companies, and you got to get every thing they want on stage, limited time on stage, not a lot of customers on stage, so I got to ask you, look it, the business transformation is Isilon Onefs, so digital transformation really means the businesses. How do you evolve from speeds and feeds culture, to real business transformation? Cause that's kind of what I hear you saying. >> That is, if you look internally at how the company's got to transform, it's exactly that. We created around the time we brought the companies together a small group sales team called Dell Technologies Select and these are folks that actually don't... carry any one brand. They carry Dell Technologies, and they're working with fifty of our biggest most transformative customers. So obviously the goal here is over time, you want that fifty to be two hundred, to be a thousand. Really, you're going to grow the DNA within that group, because the difficulty is that, some companies are doing digital transformation, some people are not even doing IT transformation, some companies are still trying to figure out the last big issue that they had. The market doesn't, it's not an on-off switch, you've got early adopters, you've got 'luggards, and everything in between, so Dell Technologies Select, was really geared towards engaging with transformative customers in a different way, across the entire portfolio, instead of; a storage, a service, a virtualization. >> Can you dig a little deeper on the sales model? Because you had the merge of two great sales organizations, one enterprise focused, is account focused, another is channel focused, >> SMB >> And direct SMB. How are you getting them to work together, or trying to merge those cultures, or are you trying to use each for what it does best? >> It's a great question, cause I think this is where many companies fall down when they merge or acquire even, right? So think of the Dell Technologies Select at the very top of the pyramid, they're the biggest, most transformative projects we're engaged on, and have a set of folks who work across the portfolio. Beneath that, we have an enterprise sales team. That, is predominantly made up from the EMC sales team, prior to the merger; relationship selling, big accounts, you know there's three thousand accounts there. Bill Scannell runs that sales team. Beneath that, you've got the commercial sales team, and Marius Haas, who was from Dell. Marius runs that. And so we're trying to preserve the higher end relationship selling that Bill Scannell and his team did. And the transactional sales team that Dell had, and then even beneath that in Jeff Clarke's organization, you've got consumer and small business. So what we've tried to do is, not complicated things. Leave each area to do what they were good at. And then to the key point we made earlier, build this very broad digital capability. Kind of new DNA; start small and grow big. >> You know, EMC has always had good partner relations, they were storage and you had some swim lanes, some stuff to partner program, and all the different stuff you were involved in. The branding was phenomenal when you took over on that. But now my observation on this show, just from watching it over the years, is a whole lift in alliance and marketing partners. Intel Dan Bryan on stage, obviously Dell and Intel make a lot of sense together. That history is there. But the alliances in Microsoft, Cisco, now a whole new set of industry alliances now, at the disposal. Has that changed your thinking a bit? And how do you look at that? Because now that's not just like a merging, that's like pre-existing and exploding. >> No, you always need partners, right? I think both Dell and EMC never believed they do it all themselves, right? And I think here we are, together, we're a much bigger company, but we still need partners. I mean Intel, we're Intel's biggest customer, right? So that makes up more relevant to them, but whereas in the past, maybe we were always thought as on the EMC side as enemy of Microsoft because of the VMWare. Now, Microsoft's an alliance partner. And it's nice that folks like Satya, he's taken over the company, and he's made it very clear that he wants to build an ecosystem, or rebuild and ecosystem. The big companies like Intel and Microsoft, I mean Cisco, we still do two billion dollars of Vblock, right? And as much as I think... we do kind of jousting between vendors at times, ultimately the customer decides who partners, and who competes. We often partner because the customer wants us to partner. >> One of the things I always like about interviewing you, Jeremy, you have your toe in the water of the future. I heard you mention VR, virtual reality, and all kinds of reality on stage; AR, VR. AI is certainly the hottest thing in the world. Deep learning and machine learning... is getting integrated into some of the products. But as a brand marketer, how are you looking at these new trends? Cause they are great opportunities, you have a great show on stage, you had great entertainment, informative, colorful, but now, soon, as a marketer, you have to start integrating some of these awesome tools, into the marketing mix. >> It's incredible right now, because... one of the things I love about the coming together of Dell EMC, and maybe this is not intuitively obvious, but a lot of the client products, a lot of the VR and gaming business that Dell has built over the years, I mean all the guys who come here, are either gamers or have got kids who are gamers. And so getting access to the Alienware team, they've got relationships with the Minecraft team, working with the folks that work on the AR and VR headsets. To me it should make events like this much more engaging. I'm a big believer that over time, these events have got to become- >> And by the way, all those new startups, are going to be running Dell servers, potentially, so a lot of this stuff is going on, your hands in it. >> Yeah, we got to make this experiential for folks. And a lot of the client technology has got that, it grabs you, right? I'm looking forward to exploring- I mean particularly augmented reality. To me, that's a technology, which is going to be massive in future. I think the way we want to present the company, is not as consumer and business, or client and data center, I think we've got to show folks the end to end. If you're doing a service request as a field service worker, and you've got your augmented reality headset on, you're going to get data for the service request from a back office system, you're going to get your knowledge from an Isilon system but it's going to be rendered in real time in front of you, as you do your work. I think the customer wants to see the solution. >> We were talking with Peter Burris in the previous segment about... are we going back to the future? The old IBM, one throat to choke, IBM was in every market, they dominated almost every market. But they had the full range of products you could get from them, from one sales rep. Are we going back to that type of model now? >> Yes and no. If you want a good indication of the future, look at the past, right? And so, infrastructure clearly is consolidating, right? What we believe, as infrastructure consolidates, it can support fewer players. So, you got to be the big player. So, in infrastructure market, we have a consolidation play, and we're very open about that. We're going to be more efficient, more economic Even if that market's flat, we're going to take more- >> But it's still huge numbers, by the way. >> It's a huge number, and then look, there's the new cloud native world. We've got to play with Pivotal there. Look at the myriad of devices you're going to see in IRT. The IRT ecosystem is not a single, vertical integrated stack. You've got sprinklers, you've got things that attach to cows, you've got... sensors on cars. I think when on part of the tech industry starts to consolidate, and you get this, maybe fewer vendors, another area opens up, and you get this incredible ecosystem. I'd say, IoT, machine intelligence, cloud native apps, that's like the next frontier, and those ecosystems are thriving, as the prior ecosystem consolidates. >> Great, awesome comment there, I think you just encapsulated- well done, the consolidation, that's a huge number, by the way. That's massive. >> It's hundreds of billions of dollars. In fact, IDC would track it and say it's about three. >> A hyper conversion that's going on right now. I mean two years ago, that was a thriving ecosystem, now it's all consolidated- >> It's consolidating, because the macro category- >> It seems to happen faster. >> Yeah, you've got to, I think in infrastructure... It's interesting, we don't necessarily in our business need to be the first mover, like we weren't the first mover to hyperconverge. But we can't be asleep at the wheel, number one, and we have to bring our distribution scale to bear. Once something goes to mainstream, as we proved in our flash, and now we're proving in hyperconverge, we has zero revenue for VxRail a year ago, today it's the market leader. That's... we weren't first to market with the product, but we've got distribution scale. The reason why a lot of these small companies are struggling is because they spend all of their VC money, or their profits, it's all spent on building a distribution channel. And so that's where Wall Street doesn't value them anymore. >> Scales and new competitive advantage, we've said on theCUBE, we continue to say that, certainly Amazon web service has proven that. Scale is the new differentiator, it's the barred to entry, great point there. I got to ask you about a point we were discussing, with Peter Burris, and we were kind of riffing on this, kind of, meaning to joke at at some of the vendors out there. Everyone's claiming to be number one, at everything. It's like, we're number one at this! We're number one. Markel's number one, Dell's number one, HP's number one. So the question is, what is the scoreboard? So the answer in our little opening was; customers. That is the ultimate scoreboard. >> Yeah. >> How are you guys going to continue to push, because there's been some wins with the combination. That's ultimately going to be the scoreboard. Forget the market share from whatever research firm. How are you getting new customers, are you retaining them, are they valuing your products and services? Your thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things there. And I think the history of Dell is pretty interesting, because the data shows that the best way for us to get into a new customer, believe it or not, is with a PC. And, it's our, probably lowest priced product, it's our, maybe the most frictionless sale. And the nice thing now is once we get in there with the PC, and maybe a low end server, there's a whole lot more value we can bring in behind it. Which is why a lot of our focus, is not just on product; it's distribution channel as well, because if that's working effectively, we can get that cross-sale going. We've already seen in the early days of the merger, customers who've got our storage, sometimes a great tactic is to go, ask the customer; "hey, can we have your server business?" And it's been amazing how many folks have come back and said, "okay," because we've got relationships. And so, adding for the next couple of years, that cross sale becomes absolutely critical for us. Because we get a new customer, but then we want to keep that customer. How do we keep them? We got to solve more of the problem. And that's called cross-sale. >> Jeremy, great to have you on theCUBE. I know you're super busy, I know you got Gwen Stefani's the entertainment tonight. Great attendance here at the show. Congratulations on the CMO role, of the huge organization that's Dell Technologies. Big brand challenge, a great opportunity for you personally. So my final question, as always on theCUBE, What are your priories for next year? When we come back, and look back... what are you trying to do this year? You've got a lot going on, give us the plan. >> I mean, I'll leave the Dell Technologies thing to Michael, he's probably talked about that already. But marketing specifically, look, 70% of the content on the internet is going to be video by 2020. So, as a marketer, we've got to get really great at producing really high quality video content. It's the way that marketing's going to be done. So the nice thing, the exciting thing for the marketing team is, hey, if you're great at doing PowerPoint or writing a white paper, you're going to be a media star in the future. But I'm a huge believer in the fact that we've got to get great at doing unique content, at scale, and that's how you cut through the noise and get people's attention, because the world is going to become more noisy, not less. So that's one of the big priorities, obviously there's a little bit of bedding in of this new marketing model, we only closed the deal back in September. We got to get the team- >> You got to big budget, that's for sure. >> Yeah but video, and storytelling, is huge. Up there, that's the biggest trend. >> And don't forget the gaming. You brought up the gaming. CGI is coming around the corner, we're going to have VR, AR... >> You're going to see a lot of that. >> Jeremy Burton, Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies. Dell EMC, here on theCUBE. Here at the first Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris will be back with more live coverage, stay with us. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, the CUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Keith Townsend. We're joined by Rodney Rogers, he's the CEO of Virtustream. Thanks so much for joining us, Rodney. >> Oh, awesome to be here, always is. >> CUBE veteran, a CUBE guy. >> A CUBE veteran. I was that top 16 thing that you guys-- >> Oh right. >> You know March Madness? >> Yeah. >> CUBE Madness. >> Yeah CUBE Madness, that was awesome. >> I think I made it to the elite, I think I might have made it to the Elite Eight. >> Who knocked you out? >> I know I was Sweet 16. >> Who knocked you out? >> I can't say that man. That still hurts too much. >> Oh, sorry, okay, I didn't mean to bring it up. I didn't mean to bring it up. But before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about how you accomplished the improbable by running these mission critical apps in the cloud. It was a mission impossible to run mission critical. How did you do it? >> Yeah, so when we started Virtustream in early 2009, AWS' EC2 was just coming into mainstream of I.T. awareness I would say. We took a look at what they did. They kind of made a market for creating ubiquitous access to the developers to develop cloud-native apps to run distributive scale type of applications. We were venture-backed, we were a startup, started from scratch. When you're an entrepreneur, you kind of need to build what you know and sell it to who you know. We were enterprise application guys. So we said we'd love to take this unique innovation and apply it to the types of application landscapes that we've grown up knowing and managing and implementing, and things of that nature. And so we specifically purpose-built software to run a cloud infrastructure as a service that focused on solving the engineering problem of IO-intensive scale-up applications. And what you have with those types of applications is IO-centricity as opposed to compute or distributive points of failure, distributive points of computing challenges that the general purpose public clouds are very well suited for. And so we kind of invented this software, we kind of melt the cloud into its molecular components so we could control the individual attributes. And it allows us to run public cloud economics because we're not bound by instant sizes, things of that nature. But it allows us to control throughput in a more acute manner to service the application environment. And that makes us the only guys that provide actually an application latency SLA for the apps to run on our cloud. And that's really critical if you go to a Fortune 500 CI and say put your mission critical, your spinal fluid apps, your order-to-cash apps, in production in a multi-tenant cloud, they've got to be sure that there's not going to be resource contention that'll actually affect and bring that business down. So yeah, we were kind of viewed a bit like we were crazy back then. And we stayed very determined. We were probably the least cool guys in the cloud. Nobody cared what we were doing five years ago. Now as you read in the press, everybody's pivoting towards enterprise. That's where the big adoption cycle is. And we are so confident in our IP and in our first move or position for this type of marketplace. We have an architecture that's purpose-built, software that's purpose-built, particularly for these types of apps. So we're quite excited about where it is today. >> Rodney, I want to get back to that, talking about how you were the least cool guys. But one of your claims to fame is that you helped realize two back-to-back unicorns. These are startups that start from scratch, that are then valued at over a billion dollars. >> Rodney: Yeah. >> What is your secret sauce? How are you able to see so far ahead? >> You know I think kind of, it sounds very basic, but one of the things you see in a venture-backed technology community a lot is product-centric initiatives, so building products for the sake of the product. We really focused on where the market demand was, right. So we saw emerging space in cloud automation. We didn't see that automation servicing what large enterprises spent 60 to 70 percent of their I.T. budgets on. So were just like the big legacy OEM guys that have dedicated hosts. We were kind of more servicing that. And we were like look, you know, last thing in the world needs is a subscale AWS. That'll be venture capital suicide. Let's go prosecute this opportunity and bring this automation, and compete more with the guys who can't compete with us. And so, I think we were back in four or five years ago there's been a lot of religious wars around cloud. It was public versus private. There's API standards, are you going to adopt AWS, there's OpenStack, build your own, things of that nature. And we were, there were many cloud purists. They said, if you can't re-architect, rebuild your app to run in the cloud then don't run it in the cloud, but rebuild and re-architect the app. You're talking about an SAP system at a Fortune 50 company, they've literally spend hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, that's not going to get rewritten, at least not in my business lifetime. >> Yeah, right. (laughing) >> It probably will eventually. And it'll morph into various SAS models. But there's a core part of the applications today, running any business, especially large enterprises, very well suited for what we do. So if there's a secret there, we stay. It wasn't a sexy thing. My co-founder, Kevin Reid, and I, we're kind of the apps antithesis of the Silicon Valley hipster. We were East Coast middle-aged guys (laughing) that focused on enterprise. It couldn't have been less interesting, I think, but we saw a prosecutable opportunity, we brought on some really smart people that wrote software. Cloud infrastructure as a service, you think storage network. It's not really about that, it's about the software that controls it, runs it, drives your feature sets. So we furiously wrote code. We were told we were going to fail everyday. And I'd go on to Twitter and read, 2010, 11, 12. We had no chance of competing with the scale guys. But we did, we created a software reason to exist. We got those economics, we run a much more utilized hardware state than anybody in the industry, much higher memory page utilization so we use that to compete with the procurement scale but we found a prosecutable margin, we're patient and we never pivoted. In a lot of the Silicon Valley language, pivot's an over-aggrandized word. When you pivot, you've generally made a mistake. We never pivoted. >> Let's talk about that focus. You guys were laser-focused on SAP. You say it's not sexy. I have SAP roots, so-- >> Rebecca: He's a geek, he's a geek. >> Yeah, I'm a geek. >> Yeah, he find a lot of, yeah. >> I think you're sexy. (laughing) >> So you guys did some amazing things with automating deployment of SAP. I would call you a COE, cloud of excellence for SAP. So talk about the maturity of moving from focused on SAP to what we hear today about Virtustream being for enterprise applications, not just SAP. Where's the secret sauce or the new advantages that customers can realize? >> So, we started with SAP because again, building what we knew. My co-founders and I had grown up around that ecosystem, so they knew the application very well. So there are two levels to our IP, one is the infrastructure automation, and that's actually agnostic to the app. We run thousands of apps. When you go run an SAP environment in the cloud, maybe 50, 60% of workloads are actually SAP. The rest are all the workloads for the supporting apps that satellite around an interface. The interface management gets quite tricky, you know, things of that nature. Ultimately, the second layer of automation is application control automation that we built. That is very application-specific. So there's a part of our core capability that can run any app, and we do very well with those apps that have that IO-centric challenge, just a different engineering problem. High IO apps place great degrees of memory burden on the underlying infrastructure, versus compute burden for scale-wide apps, generally. What we've now done is we've kind of built the foundation of the business along a horizontal line, we're kind of associated with SAP. >> Right. >> Because of heritage, and then for the application control that we've built, we've now expanded that to a number of different applications. And this week at Dell EMC World, we announced the healthcare vertical, we've gotten big into the federal and public sector, so we wanted to build a foundation using a horizontal technology, and now to really scale this, we're going to develop very specific vertical solutions. >> That's great, well Rodney, thanks so much. We're going to see you tomorrow night at the Gwen Stefani concert, you'll be dancing-- >> Absolutely, I wouldn't miss it. >> We'll both see you, I will say hollaback girl. >> Hollaback girl. >> We'll do a little-- >> We'll be on the tables. >> I will mime it. >> Awesome, awesome. >> Rodney, thanks so much for joining us. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Rebecca: Great to have you on the show. >> Awesome, thank you guys. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Keith Townsend. We will have more from Dell EMC World 2017 after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering Red Hat summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of the Red Hat summit here in Boston, Massaachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Armughan Ahmad, he is the senior vice president and general manager solutions and alliances at Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. >> It's my pleasure, good to see you, Rebecca. >> So we've had you on the program before, but your role has changed a bit at Dell EMC since then. Tell us what you're doing now. >> Sure, I have the pleasure to now lead our solutions business unit that we have under infrastructure solutions group. What we drive is focus areas of customer outcomes. Work load orientation around high performance computing. Driving data analytics, business critical applications, software defined solutions, and then also hybrid cloud. So those are our five big priorities. >> It's a big mandate. >> It is a big mandate, right? And as you know, Dell EMC is Number one in everything. That's all we talk about. You'll hear this at Dell EMC World next week. But you know, at Red Hat summit, we're really having this discussion, right, Red Hat open stack summit, which is really around our differentiation, how we're driving human progress forward, social innovation forward. So that's exciting. So as we take our applications and partner with our alliance partners, that's the differentiation we're excited to share with customers and partners here at Red Hat summit as well. >> So Dell EMC, as you said, is uniquely suited to do these things and lead in this way. But how do you make deployment easier? I mean, that's the big question that customers and partners need to know. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you as you know, being number One in everything, when I joked about this, not joking about this, if you really think about our market share in compute or servers, if you look at our market share in storage, external storage, internal storage, you look at our market share in converge infrastructure, hyperconverge infrastructure, if you see our market share in data protection, or our market share in open networking, right, so we're all the way to the far top right of the Gartner magic quadrants, number one in market shares and revenue. That's all interesting, but what's fascinating for the customers is really more about how do you make all of this real? If you envision like a pyramid almost, and you think that the bottom is all of these infrastructure layers, the next one above that is virtualization, the next one above that is orchestration, but really on the top, is a platform, top of the pyramid, that's where the business sits. Business wants a platform, and what we're doing is trying to make all of that easy. We know that customers will build and they would want to do a DIY solution. And we obviously have that, we've been doing it for decades. But we're really trying to move to that top end of the pyramid with our hybrid could solutions, our converge solutions, but more the solutions that my organization leads is the blueprint solutions. And the whole idea about blueprint solutions is that how can we offer ready offerings to customers so that they don't have to really worry about the bottom of the pyramid, but the top of a platform so that's it's easy to deploy. >> And customized for their business. >> Absolutely. >> Armughan, in the keynote on day one, we heard that one of the top priorities for customers is figuring out their cloud strategy. Now, at Dell EMC, you have a number of offerings, can you bring us up to date, where does open stack fit into that, and of course, we're going to want to talk about the Red Hat joint solution that you're after. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, open stack, let me take it even a step back, you know Michael, 31 years ago, since he founded Dell, has always stood for choice for customers, open ecosystems for customers. And even though we have Dell technologies now, the acquisition of so many of the other assets that are under Dell technologies, we're really delighted to partner and ensure that we have the right kind of choice that we're offering to our customers. So open stack, Stu, puts a very big differentiation forward. You know, I'm here with our Dell EMC team at Red Hat open stack summit and our customers are telling us in a very, very clear way, and the channel partners who are here, is that they're looking for Dell EMC to really provide open source based solutions in telecom markets, in, you know, when you take a look at telecom and it's moving from 3G to 4G to now 5G coming on, it's really going to be the applications and how those applications become scaled out versus just infrastructure becoming scaled out. So now the evolution of open stack and how Dell EMC contributes to it, we never really wanted to build our own ecosystem of open stack like some of our other competitors have done. We've always stood by Red Hat open stack based solutions to say hey, if they're number one in open stack markets and they're already tuning that, why can't we tune our infrastructure solutions the exact same way so that one plus one equals five for the customers, and it becomes much easier for them to deploy that. >> Great, so absolutely, you mentioned some of the telecoms. NFV was probably the most talked about use case for open stack at last year's summit. We've got the open stack summit here in Boston next week, we'll be covering it. Is that a top use case for your solution with Red Hat, what are the real business drivers for people doing open stack, is it just private cloud solutions that they offer that you said mentioned the open source, people are still trying to figure out where this open stack fits compared to some of the other options that they have. >> Stu, what I'm finding, and you and I have had these discussions several times across the stack of server storage networking and others, the largest cost associated with deploying or consuming IT is really your OPEX cost. So if you envision for a second a pie chart and you look at a customer spend, a capital spend, about 25% of that is CAPEX oriented, which is how much you pay for infrastructure or software. About 75% of that is OPEX oriented, which is your human cost of managing it, your serviceability and others. The whole idea about us talking about this Dell EMC ready bundle solution that we're taking to market, so we announced yesterday our opportunity to really go out and simplify all of this for customers, for cloud solutions, or for their NFV or NFVI solutions, as we're seeing NFVI-- >> And for our audience that doesn't know NFVI, what's the differentiation there? >> Our opportunity to take network function virtualization, then taking VNF capabilities, and then also making sure that we're virtualizing a lot of those aspects on NFVI so that our customers are driving service provider opportunities to then containerize these opportunities as part of open shift and others. And we feel that our differentiation at Dell EMC really, then, ends up becoming our tested validated offerings so that customers don't really have to worry about the infrastructure layer, or even the software layer for that matter, and we can just give them a platform that I was referring to earlier. So that ready bundle for open stack that we have offered, and I will be taking about it in my keynote today, that whole ready bundle at Dell EMC solution has been validated, tested. It's got not just reference architectures, but deployment guides, run books. But we've also taken it one step forward, we actually internally called it jetstream. And the whole idea of jetstream internal codename was, if you guys are familiar with jetstreams around the world, and you catch one of those jetstreams, they usually go from west to east. And if you go from Boston to London, you can get there pretty quickly if you hit one of those because it's 160 miles an hour. That's why we selected the name jetstream. And the whole idea is if you actually imagine if you put a concord in that jetstream, you can actually do that trip now in three hours, or you could've done it in concords around at the time. So if we can actually create that concord-like style of a ready bundle solution that is running open stack platform, we can not only get the customers to deploy much faster and reduce their OPEX, but there's a tooling that's required. So for example, the customer wants to deploy an open stack solution. We actually created a jetpack, jetstream, jetpack, and the whole idea of a jetpack is very quickly us providing sizing tools and deployment tools for customers so that they can get to their destination very, very fast. >> And how fast are we talking here? >> So we're talking, I'll actually have a customer, East Carolina University, on stage with me. Something that would take three weeks, they've got it done in three days using this jetpack solution. So us creating these ready bundles and deploying open stack much faster, either for cloud environments or environments for NFV and eventually for NFVI. And then we're also working with our Dell EMC code group, which is now looking at containerization solutions as well. So that's sort of the differentiations that we're talking about. >> And Armughan, I know, we're really good usually at quantifying that kind of deployment, that shrinking months to days or days to hours, that operational efficiency though, once it's in there, do you have any metrics or cost savings that your customers in general are seeing of rolling this out versus the old kind of putting it together themselves. >> Great question, Stu, so we all measured, Rebecca, you know this, you've written for HBR, which is really about ROI, TCOs for customers, what is your return on investment and your total cost of ownership. And really, what we're finding is that we can do this about 30% more effective. I'd love to say it's 80% more effective where we can take your OPEX down and others. But realistically, if you really look at East Carolina University or many of the other customers who are deploying this, they're seeing on average about 30% improvement in their operating costs. Now, it's not just related to cloud or it's not just related to NFV and NFVI. We're also seeing a huge use case of open stack now as part of high performance computing. So as high performance computing is evolving from traditional research and moving more into machine learning and AI frameworks, we're also seeing customers leverage open stack in that environment as well. >> and I wonder also, I mean, just talking about the difficulties with calculating ROI, but talking about how it's having this big impact on high performance computing, what about high performance teams, the people who are actually doing the work? >> Absolutely, and so talking about high performance team, right, the web tech, it started in Silicon Valley, now it's in Dublin, Ireland, or it's in China or all of these other places, they've really figured out, right, how do you drive efficiency. I mean, at Facebook, I think one server admin manages 50,000 physical servers or something like that. That's a scale out ways. >> And the thing we always say, it's that person's job is varied, it's not just that their doing three orders of magnitude more than the poor guy running around the data center, they've changed really how they focus on the application, and that job is very different. So they don't really even have server admins, they just have the number of head count that they need. >> The number of head count that's required. >> Hyperscale model, very different from what we have in the enterprise world. >> Absolutely, absolutely. But there are lessons to be learned from the hyperscale model. And if you can drive, I mean, according to IDC, one server admin manages about 40 physical servers, somewhere between 30 to 40 physical servers versus the number that I just shared with you, right, from these big web tech providers. So if we can even improve that to 100 or 1,000 to one admin. I think sys admins still should continue to exist even though this whole public cloud is coming in. But the rise of edge computing for us is also a big, big phenomenon. And we want to ensure that the rise of edge computing, Dell EMC is at the forefront of ensuring that we're providing analytic solutions to our customers. And a lot of the analytics are really happening at the edge 'cause you need to make those analytics decisions very quick 'cant really have a lot of latency back to public cloud for that. So our hybrid cloud solutions, working very closely with open stack to drop OPEX costs down, all of that really matters to customer right now. >> Armughan, I want to go back to something you talked about in the very beginning, which is this element of human progress. It's a professional and personal passion of yours to use technology for good, to solve some of the world's most complex problems, educating young women, working in developing countries, curing cancer. Talk a little bit about what you're doing. >> You know, Rebecca, that's a huge passion of not just mine, but Michael, and all of our executive leadership team at Dell EMC. We were talking earlier before this interview started, it's a passion of yours and Stu's. We all love to, as human beings, contribute to society. And human progress is really technologies impacting human progress in different ways. Right, if you talk about manufacturing jobs versus what automation is. But at the same time, technology is also helping in many different areas. So if you look at developing countries, now I'm personally involved in girls' education in third world countries where they're not prioritized, and what can technology do at schools to really get them to learn coding and get a differentiation out very, very quickly. But at the same time, our Dell initiatives, we call it the legacy for good. The Dell initiatives are really, not just about diversity and inclusion, it's also about improving the human progress. I'll give you an example. We have a great customer, T-Gen. And T-Gen is in the healthcare field and they drive genome sequencing solutions, so they have scientists who drive genome sequencing. Now, if you think about genome sequencing before technology, how long it would take somebody to sequence certain genomes for the purpose of cancer research, that would take you years. Now, if you can get that done in minutes, and that technology will learn, and then next time you do it, it would be even seconds for the same platform. So we actually developed a life sciences genome sequencing high performance computing cluster for this customer. And now they're able to very quickly help young girls and young kids improve their longevity with their cancer treatment that they're going through. So those are the things that really matter to our teams. And I know it matters to our customers and our partners. Because now we're not talking about just open stack or Dell EMC and our great number one in everything solutions we have. Those are fantastic, but how do you relate that social innovation, how do you relate that to human progress. To me, that is really the differentiation that we all collectively need to continue to drive and talk about this a little bit more. But we do need to find more connection points that we know that technology can help, but it's really those medical professionals and those researchers, they're really the brainiacs who use our technology, our opportunity as tech geeks, or I call myself a geek, at least, is how do we take that and then take that out to them and then real researchers can build their platforms on top of it to cure cancer. Or to go drive manufacturing jobs for social innovation purposes in middle America or around the world. That's the difference and those are the solutions that my team, along with many others at Dell EMC, along with our partners with Red Hat, we're focused on, we talk about that a lot. And Jim Witers talked about social innovation and how Red Hat is also making that a priority this morning in his keynote. >> Armughan, it sounds like your team is quite busy. And I know you've got your big event coming up next week, so you finish the keynote here, you'll be jetting our to Las Vegas. Rebecca, a big set of our Cube team will all be out in Vegas to cover the show. So give our audience a little bit of a preview of what you can about what we should expect for the new Dell EMC world as kind of taking together what EMC world has been doing for many years and Dell world in the past. >> You know, we're really excited, Stu, about Dell EMC world because this is the first time Dell world and EMC world comes together in Vegas. So we'll look forward to having you guys there. We have great speakers lined up, it's really focused for customers and technical audiences. We've got lots of partners there. But more importantly, we're showcasing all the solutions and the culmination of Dell EMC merger that has happened along with our Dell technologies group of companies like Pivotal along with VMWare along with Secureworks along with Virtustream. And how do we differentiate not just the Dell brand, which is our client computing group that we have, but also our Dell EMC, that's server storage networking, and then with VMWare and Pivotal and others. What you'll see is not just great keynotes, but some great speakers, great entertainment. I don't know if that's been released, I think it's been released. Gwen Stefani, I think she's-- >> Andy Grammar, and yeah, Gwen Stefani. >> Gwen Stefani, yeah, so that's going to be pretty cool, so we're excited about that. But the speakers that we have lined up on main stage along with, I'm more excited, I geek out, I'm a nerd, I love going into these technical breakouts where we've got lab equipment set up where people can actually get to enjoy and, I call it enjoyment, which is really geek out with understanding what are all of those solutions that we have, kind of, you know, put together. And those blueprint solutions, what are they. We have obviously, our server storage networking and data protection. But then how do you get into those labs and run some demos and proof of concepts, that makes it easy for the customers. So we're excited about that as you can see. >> Well, we're looking forward to it, we'll see you there. >> Yeah, we look forward to hosting you there. >> Armughan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> This has been Rebecca Knight and Stu Miniman, we will return with more from Red Hat summit after this.