>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Along with cohost Keith Townsend. We are joined by Todd Pavone, he's the COO of Dell AMC. Thanks so much for joining. >> Well all my kids call me dad, whatever. >> Rebecca: We can call you anything you want. >> Dad's good, yeah. >> Daddio alright. >> So Todd, the theme of this conference is about providing companies with the tools that they need to realize their digital futures. Lay it all out for me. What do you see as sort of the biggest problems that you're trying to solve. >> Sure, that's a good question. If you're a CIO today, I think there's lots of them in this show these past few days. They have lots of challenges, right. If you're CIO today, your budgets are flat or decreasing. Your users are asking to do more faster. The evolution of change is at a crazy pace. You look at your operating budget, the mast majority is spent on maintenance. So as a CIO you have to do something different. You have to transform. If you think about that, IT has changed so much in the last 10 years. IT is actually the differentiator if the business will succeed or fail. Years ago, I've been doing this a long time, years ago it was just a support function. It is now the differentiation if you'll succeed or fail. So if you think about that scenario of a CIO, they have to change. They have to transform. They have to modernize their data center. So everything we've been doing for the last several years is helping the CIOs and data centers transform. Transform so they can simplify the complex. So they can deliver faster. They can have better service levels with the users. So their staff can actually work on strategic initiatives, not on the things that just are keeping the lights on. So they can help their business transform and differentiate. And that's what's it's all about. Is helping them transform. >> So what are you seeing out there right now that is making you confident about the landscape. >> So for us, in CPSD, the BU we've been in, we started this about seven or eight years ago. What we see is results. It's all about delivering results. We're seeing customers improve their time to delivery by 4x. Customers cutting their total cost of ownership by 50%. Customers able to provision new services to the end users at a 5x rate. Measurable, tangible results. The metric I care most about in our business is repeat customers. About 70% of our customers are repeat. Meaning they're deploying the technology and solution and they're seeing the benefits. They're saying this is how we want to run data center of the future. What's really cool is, we're helping them change their businesses and be more successful long-term. That's the best part of what we're doing. >> So let's talk about overall market. Where is Dell in this market? How big is the market? And where's Dell in this market? >> Dell technology, you're talking about hundreds of billions dollars market. It's an enormous market. From a Dell technology perspective, it's all about how do we help transform the data center. How do we provide the essential infrastructure for the data center. If you start to peel that back and you look at the market that our business unit is in, Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, we're focused on the hybrid cloud solutions engineering systems all the way down to our Blueprints solutions. You're talking about a 20, 30 billion dollar market, depending on how you look at it. It's big and growing. Fortunately, our space is one of the fastest growing markets in the industry. Customers are deploying converge and hyper-converge at a rapid pace. And thankfully we're the ones helping drive that that change. >> So what are the big value props coming from a technology perspective. You talked about hybrid cloud. You talked about the actual systems, what are the value props for Dell's converge systems versus competitors. >> So if you think about the top x we talk about this build to buy continuum. So what we want to be able to do is have a continuum of offerings, depending on where the customer's maturity is, they can leverage wherever we are in their transformation. At the tip of the pyramid is our hybrid cloud solution. So this where companies may want to deploy a turn key hybrid cloud. From application all the way to infrastructure and within a very short period of time have a fully enabled running cloud that they could offer to their end user customers. Value for that is time to market. We have customers deploying a full hybrid cloud in days. If they had to build themselves, it would take months and many months. So speed is a huge part of that value proposition. Obviously leveraging of VMware technology in that solution is key to what we're doing. Leveraging Pivotal for our native hybrid cloud solutions is very differentiated. Those are two technologies that are in the Dell technology portfolios, VMware and Pivotal that we can take advantage of. In the engineered systems landscape, I hit on this before, but it's all about speed to deliver. We know if customers were to build things out themselves, it would take them 140 to 150 days. We know we can do it in 45 days. So think about that, it's a three to four times x improvement in delivery. We know it requires less people to manage. We know we can save 50%-60% total cost of ownership by deploying these engineer systems versus managing themselves. Those are big numbers. Those are numbers where you can actually take those dollars and reinvest in other things. It comes back to what I said upfront, it's all about solving those pain-points for the customers. Simplifying the complex, allowing them to go work on that are really strategic to their business. I used an example yesterday of Blockbuster. My three boys and I would go down to Blockbuster every Friday night, we'll rent movies. Blockbuster is not here anymore. >> Rebecca: Nope. >> What happened? I can tell you, their IT organization was supporting their point of sale systems in their stores. They weren't thinking of new ways to distribute content. Why? Because they had no time. We want companies to be able to have the time to work on strategic things that are important to them. We want to enable them to do that. >> So that's a great example of being short sightedness. And the dangers of being short sightedness at time of profound transformational change. What is your call to arms to customers, what's your advice? >> Customers have to, it's hard to change. It's easy- >> Rebecca: And you resist it. It is. >> You have people that have been doing things for a long time, it's hard to change. It's not just about technology change, it is about changing process, changing the way people work. You have to have the intestinal fortitude to go do it. People when they see change, they kind of want to run from it. You have to embrace it, adopt it. Because if you don't, you may not be positioned in the long-term. First thing, for us, we need change agents. We need customers to have change agents that are willing to put push back, willing to try to do something different. Willing to innovate, I'm willing to break some glass. And when they do that, at the end of the day, we know they're going to be better off for it. But again, it's hard to do. That's probably the first thing we ask them, be willing to accept some major changes in what they do and how they do it. >> So this seems like this would be something that's contagious. Once a customer embraces that change, talk us through that next level of conversation and the future conversation. >> Typically there needs to be an event. Something to trigger them to go change. Could be data center consolidation, it could be a new application rollout. It could be a strategic initiative by the executive team. So most of our customers will start with maybe one or two applications. And they'll say, let's go see how this works. Let's go test how this works. Especially if they're big. If they're a large enterprise, they're not going to do a global change for everything. They're going to say, let's start with a subset. Once they see the subset work, then they start rolling more and more applications into this new way of running their data center. When we talk about with our customers, I like to use autonomous driving as an example. To me, we see a data center someday where basically, things will happen autonomically. You'll set a business policy, workload will dynamically base upon that policy. We're requiring humans not to get involved. It's kind of the same thing, back to my analogy of Tesla. You get into Tesla, the car actually starts to drive itself. How is it doing that? It's doing real-time data analytics, it's understanding all its environmentals, it's making decisions. Why can't the data center get to the same place? Because if you can do that, think all the savings you can now reinvest in the things that are real important to the business. So we try to set a strategy and vision that customers understand and appreciate. And then we try to give them the building blocks of how they're going to get there. >> Just as we'll remember the days when we used to drive to the supermarket, we'll remember the days when we had to run the data center. >> Exactly. That's the hope. That's the hope and dreams of what we're trying to do. >> Next year's conference. >> Next year's conference. >> I'm all in. I'm all in. >> We got more. We got more. Thanks so much Todd. >> Todd: Thank you guys. >> I appreciate it. >> This is great. >> Great to have you on the show. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Keith Townsend. We will be back with more after this. (Lively techno music)