>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with too many man, You're watching The Cube Life from Del Technology. World twenty nineteen were here with about fifteen thousand other people, about four thousand Del Technologies Partners. But how? And now for the first time, we're pleased to welcome the CEO of Virtus Dream. Rory Reid Worry. It's great to have you joining student me on the Cube today. >> It is Lisa. It's a pleasure and riel honor to be on the show today. >> So this morning's Kino we were talking before we went live starts with lots of energy news announcements, partnerships, collaboration, walking, you. You're in industry veteran, which will dig into, I'm sure during the segment. >> Thirty five years. >> Thirty five years. That's >> amazing. Thirty five years is how old tells going tto be tthe when the next week. >> Thirty five years. >> That's a magic number. Congratulations. Thank you Virtus Dream. Talk to us about the integration you lead those efforts. Massive acquisition. What's going on now? What's exciting? You >> Well, I think it's kind of amazing what happened in the integration. This is the largest Tak integration in the world. Sixty seven billion dollars. Shortly after Del goes private, they're going to acquire Delhi, M. C, I, E, M, C and V M, where the huge undertaking thousands of people work on it less than ten months from the time it was announced. October of fifteen. It goes live on September seven sixteen. That's amazing, and our customers reacted and are partners in a just a kn amazing way. It's almost like it didn't happen. You know, I'm biased. I think it went really well. But look at the numbers. Look at the reaction in the marketplace. The growth, the synergy, the revenue, the kinds of impact. And then you see today at Del Adele Technology World. Michael does a keynote. He talked about the impact. Karen comes up and talks about giving back and the work that we're doing around Pathetic and printing three D and artificial intelligence based your limbs. I If you're not fired up about that, you can't get energized. And then you top that off with just a GN amazing discussion about the partnership between VM wear and Del Technologies on the Del Cloud And then the work that we're doing with Microsoft and Satya comes on stage with Michael and >> Pie. I >> mean, this is a power pack woman, and we put this company just three years ago together and look at the kind of impact its house in the industry. Amazing, just amazing. >> So worry. Yeah, I think Jeff Clarke said it well this morning. He said, If you're into technology and can't get excited by what's going on, you know, May maybe you're you know, it's kind of you know, my words. Maybe you're not in the right space. You've got a few of the interesting pieces of the Del Technologies family they talk about. You know, the massive acquisition of DMC with V M. Where Purchase dream Not such a small acquisition itself. Over a billion dollars, one point two billion dollars to billion dollars. And, you know, I remember back Bhumi wasn't out that long ago either, for you know, it was less than a billion dollars, but it was a >> ***. *** is an amazing set of technology. I know you're going tohave Chris McNab on later today. Chris and I have worked on what he called the gloomy acceleration plan the last two years. Way with that team have put in a strategy around taking advantage of just an amazing set of technology. Boo Mi's cloud integration software, I believe, is the absolute best on the planet and the work that we've done. We've doubled that business in the last eighteen months. We've added probably a billion dollars of market valuation they've reached. They add thousands of customers every quarter to that portfolio, the reach and touch and how that's going to drive the way data and applications talk in the cloud era. It's just at the beginning of the impact there. And then you look at a company like Virtus Dream. It's the leader in mission Critical application Work loads on the cloud. This is a company born on the cloud. It's based on the cloud nine years ago. It's the one hand to shake. Customers choose us with their most important applications and data because they need to know that it's gonna work and that we have the experience to Planet Tau migrated, optimize it and bring it to the cloud to cloud of fire and that were the single hand to shake. What's different about us is we have an eye *** way had the infrastructure as a service. We have a software stack with extreme software. Take time. I get fired up about Bloomie's technology Virtus Stream Extreme software. Amazing. And then on top of that, you layer on a white glove said of application and professional services. Very cool. But what was the coolest? Where some of the announcements today and how we're playing with its all of'Em went bare VM were based on, uh, Virtus Dream. And when they announced the partnership with Azure and the idea of V M wear work, clothes on Azure that's actually running will be running and running on. And we've been working with Microsoft and IBM where a virtuous string and it's and then and then you know >> when you say it's running on Virtue Stream, Is it your data centers? Is it part of the soft? Oh no, The >> data, the data centers air all Adger. It's using our software and our technology team have built that said, a technology that we've been in partnership for months with Microsoft and IBM, where to create this offering as one of the Cloud Service partners foundational. It's pretty foundation and you know it. But at the end of a think about del technology is one in the ingredient brand. Sure, that's foundational. This is a company built for the next ten years. Del Technologies. And the impact it's gonna have in the industry is just beginning. Where is it going to go? You saw it this morning in the Kino. Michael has some big, big ideas, >> so worry. A lot of times we look at things in the industry and people is like, Oh, it's binary. It's public cloud or Private Cloud. I've worked with a lot of service providers, and when you look at the world multi cloud, it's really more of an end in putting. That is together. Many of the service providers that air You know where I am seeing her del partners before you know, three or four years ago Oh my gosh, A ws and Microsoft. Well, okay. A partner a little like us off, But Amazons, the enemy. And today it's well, I have our stuff and I'm partnering and I probably have connections between them. Help us. Paint is toe where virtue stream fits into this. You know this spectrum today? >> Your stew. You're on the right point about multi cloud. We just did a press release today at a virtuous stream where we partnered with Forrester. We do, ah, whole industry study on the cloud and the future of the cloud multi cloud ninety seven percent of customers. We spoke to that force or spoke to have a multi cloud strategy for their mission. Critical applications at eighty nine percent of them plan to increase their spend on multi cloud mission critical activities. How we play in that space is that we're the trusted player we've done over eighteen hundred ASAP migration. Where an epic health care leader go talk to Novaya. They asked them how it's gone on Virtus Dreams Cloud amazing set of mission critical capability. But what we're taking is there's this infrastructure is a service in the software stack on the services that software stack is extreme. What we want to do is enable that software stack to manage data and applications in a private environment, a public environment on Prem, and it's all based on the M where so it ties directly into Jeff and Pat's announcement This morning, where they talked about Veum, where being a platform and how they're going to create the Del Cloud on that platform. Virtus Dream is one of the destinations for mission critical workload, but because it's based on VM, where technology it seamlessly begins to integrate across that and allows us to manage data and applications linking our extreme software with the BM, where capabilities that allowed that data and the AP eyes to exchange data and flow freely in a multi cloud world, ninety seven percent of the customers and the forest to research we just released are going to go multi cloud for mission critical, not just based. This's for their most critical applications data >> so future your energy is outstanding in your enthusiasm for this. What are some of the early reactions that customers air having to some of this exciting, groundbreaking news that's coming out today? What do your expectations? >> Well, you know, I spent time with customers, uh, every week and we talk about it, but I've actually talked to customers this day today about it. They found the energy, the passion that the technology that was introduced this morning was sort of game changing because to Stu's point, they are going in a multi cloud era and they know it's going to be multi cloud. And there's going to be on Prem public private. It's gonna link altogether. They need the technology trusted advisors that can work with them, not with a single answer. That only fits one way. Adele Technologies. You want to run on Prem? We have those capabilities you want to run on public count. We have those technologies you want to run in a hybrid kind of solution or a private cloud. We're going to create the ability with these announcements today, tow link it together and create the ability to do it seamlessly, efficiently, productively, cost effectively that allows Our customers too dramatically transformed their business to take them on that digital transformation to disrupt their industries and win. Because when our customers win, we win. That's what we do. Adelle Technologies, we and able our customers to win, and it's all about the customers every single day. You talked about the integration when Michael said every day when we were doing the integration, he said on every decision. When we were building the company, we basically built a new company level by level, he said. The guiding principle that every decision is customer in How does this matter of the customer? How does it make a difference for the customer? And I think we live that everyday. There's fifty fifteen thousand of our closest friends here in Las Vegas there, pretty excited to be here. And why did they take that time? Because we're one of their trusted partners on their digital transformation journey. That's not a bad place to be. If you can't get excited about that, >> Yeah, I'm Rory in the wrong industry. It was amazing to me how fast that immigration work happened. We talked to Howard Elias a bunch along the journey. I'm glad we finally get to you, get you on the record for >> Howard's in the Be's and Guy. What an awesome partner. >> And so you know, one of them's dried. It's ten months is you know, if this thing had taken twenty four months, so much of the industry would have changed by the time from when you went into when you went out. So I guess How do you how do you look at kind of those massive waves versus you know where you need to be with products today in the market and where customers are because you know the danger. You say I want to listen to the customers. Well, you get the old saying if you ask customers they wanted, you know Ah, faster buggy. You know how right you are so right, You make sure you're, you know, hitting that next wave and keeping up with it. I look at you know, all the pieces you have of the puzzle that is the family and in different places along the spectrum. >> Well, I think there's, you know, there's value in the diversity of thought, right, and we talk about on Workforce. But it's a business. The idea that Del technologies is this group of businesses and all these experiences coming together and the interactions with customers from the smallest mom and pop shops farms toe all the way to the most Jake Ganic industry. Transformational companies. You were exposed to a lot of things, and with the kind of forty, one hundred and forty thousand professionals working together and with Michael's vision and the El Tee's vision, there's an ability to see that future, and he is always looking at the future. It's interesting. I worked for a lot of interesting people, but you know, Michael's ability to Teo understand data and of you, he said. It's about having a big year, right? Your ears be twice the size of your mouth. I mean, you gotta listen. And I seriously think he must have a tree of Keebler elves creating data and information. I've never seen so much someone with more data and information. And he he listens. He values the input. He's quick to make a decision, but the team rot rallies around that idea. How can we find that future? And if we make a mistake, let's fix it fast. Let's learn really quick. Make that decision, learn quickly, adjust and capture the opportunity. And it's all about speed and what matters to the customer. I've seen it firsthand. I've been here four years. I spent twenty three years at IBM. I spent five years in Lenovo as their CEO and president. I was CEO and president of Advanced Micro Devices. It's amazing environment where you create a place where technological leaders come every day to solve the most difficult solutions with the founder of the company. That's one of the industry icons, and it's just an amazing privilege and honor to be part of it. And I think you feel that from every person you talk to, that's part of Del Technologies. I am being part of that. Integration was one of the most proudest experiences of my life, and you know what we did way never ran it as an integration office. We kept the decisions with the line with the business, and we had a rapid pays to get through it and decided, and we learned quickly and we adjusted as we went. It wasn't perfect, but it wass pretty close. It's pretty close and I'm bias. I got it. I buy just But it was good. It was good. It was really a great thing. And Howard, amazing guy. But it was because people believed in the vision and they all work together. And when people work together, you can grow, do amazing and great thing. >> You're right. It's all about the people >> it is >> or it's been such a pleasure. Having you on the cute this afternoon was to me. I wish we had more time because I know we can keep talking about it. You're gonna have to come back >> anytime. You like me. It was a pleasure. And thank you so much for taking time to speak to me when you talk to boo me this afternoon, make sure you get into that technology's world. Vast cloud integration platform >> you got. All right, guys. Thank you. Thank you. First to Minuteman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Day one of our double sat coverage of Del technology World twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

(click and snap) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group here in Boston in the shadows of Fenway Park. Happy to have with me Mike Franco, who's the principal solutions architect with Virtustream. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. Thanks for having me, and this is a terrific event. It really is. I mean to be here with one of our first channel partners, and by that I mean Winslow Group has been part of Dell for many, many years. They now sell the whole Dell EMC platform with the acquisition last year. And Virtusteam, we opened up a channel partnership just a few months ago, and they were one of the first to join. And here I am in front of hundreds of clients. This is a great opportunity. >> All right, that's great. So we've talked to Scott Winslow, his organization, some of the partners. So, I understand a lot about the Dell relationship. How WTG has been kind of expanding into cloud. Virtustream. Tell us why there's a channel partner now. What that means, and what you look to for somebody like Winslow Group. >> Well, Winslow Group opens up a lot of clients for us, okay? And we need to sell through those partners. Most of these clients are running operations, maybe in the small midsize business, which are really perfect candidates for what we do. Virtustream provides a managed cloud. So unlike the Amazons, the Googles, and the Azures which are great solutions, we're finding clients and saying, "Hey, that was good." But as we start moving to these mission critical applications. The applications that are running my business. We need a managed service. We need performance. We need IO type of critical workloads to be run in a more secure and performance- laden type of cloud. >> Yeah, Jeremy Burton gave the opening remarks. The CMO of Dell. The Dell family really has a large portfolio. I look at kind of the hybrid and multi-cloud world these days, and from a Dell standpoint, you know, VMware has a number of solutions, including VMware on AWS. Dell was working with Microsoft on the Azure (mumbles) solutions. How does Virtustream fit into the overall portfolio? How do you help position, you know, where that fits, okay? Get the mind share and (stutters) the users? >> Great question. I mean, back in May, we announced a connection, okay? So our Cloud Connect, which is vRealized into our stream based clouds. Extreme is our cloud management platform, and a technology that we use to run our off prem clouds. So clients now have the capability through vRealize automation to recognize our cloud into revision, and to modify and manage their workloads through that. We also announced in May, a partnership with our sister company Pivotal. Okay, on their Cloud Foundry. So we now have in Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, the capability to run Cloud Foundry in a managed fashion. Okay, again, Cloud Foundry is a technology that a lot of developers will be using to build applications, but it also runs those applications. And now that those applications are becoming stateful and a critical part of their business, they're looking to somebody to manage that. And now we have the capability. And then we talk about the rest of the EMC portfolio, where Native Hybrid Cloud is a package solution that's built on vRacks or vRails, right? Dell's converged black forms with the Native Hybrid Cloud or Pivotal Cloud Foundry, lay it right on top of it with the tools to be able to manage it. That's sold directly to a client, and we have the capability as Virtustream to manage those. So now the client can have these on-client premise solutions, as well as being able to tether back to our enterprise cloud. Our Virtustream Enterprise Cloud. >> Yep. Mike, we saw in the storage industry, there's lots of different solutions, because there's lots of different needs. I find there is no typical cloud strategy when it comes to most companies. But when you're talking to users, whether it be at this event or you know, out talking to customers, you know, why are they coming to Virtustream? What are the big questions they're asking you? What are the challenges that they see, and how do you help them? >> So, I see most of the time they come to us is because at these types of events, they are clients that are delighted with Dell EMC technologies, right? Dell EMC is a leader in almost every product that they sell, okay? And not only that, but the customer satisfaction, the client care service that Dell EMC provides is second to none. We're an extension of that, okay? We have the ability to manage either on prem, or of prem, and that gray area in between in helping them enable to get to the cloud. So, it really has opened up a lot of doors for Virtustream, and yes the solutions are endless. But we had the capability to manage that for them on their prem, and we've been very successful doing it. >> Great. Mike, we know SAP was one of those solutions that really Virtustream made its name on. Well, I know you continued to work on that. Can you give us, you mentioned Cloud Foundry. What are some of the applications? What are some of the big use cases that your customers are having success with? >> So in June we announced the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud. Okay, so what is that? That's our enterprise cloud, now tailored specifically for the healthcare compliance. So it's HIPAA compliant. And also, we're managing some of the more critical applications. The healthcare environment is not cloud native, okay? It's still based on the platform too, right? They virtualized the client server, the three-tiered architecture database, web and app server type of environments that the systems have reckoned, okay? We're expanding into electronic medical records, EMRs, critical client patient care, some analytics for medication. So we're moving into those other areas that's complimenting the SAP work that we're doing. >> Okay, well Mike, appreciate you giving us the updates on Virtustream. Thanks so much for joining us here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Conference. (click and snap)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back inside Dell EMC World 2017 here on theCUBE, we continue our coverage. Day 3 here in Las Vegas from the Sands Expo, sandwiched in between the Palazzo and the Venetian. A great show, a great vibe, and it's been a good show for Virtustream. And we have with us the president and CTO and a co-founder from Virtustream joining us now, Kevin Reid. Kevin, good to see you, how've you been? >> Been great, it's just very energizing being here this week. >> Yeah, what about the week for you? I'm sure you have a couple of announcements we'll get to in just a moment, but just want to get your take on the show here as we wind down. >> You know, the show's just been incredible. You know of course, it's the first year that they're all coming together, if you will, as the brand of Dell EMC as one show for the stage. It's been a great stage for us, great audience, looking at the range of countries and clients represented. We've actually just been blown away at the energy behind what Dell Technologies now represents as the overall set of brands in the portfolio. >> So let's get to the news that you made this week. One in the healthcare space, I know very important space for you, and in the connector space as well with vCloud. Let's go ahead and take them one at a time if you would. >> Absolutely, so healthcare cloud, you know, for us just a fantastic area when you look at just all the regulatory issues associated with healthcare in general, and certainly we don't have enough time on this show to go into what all that means, but the ramifications are. >> No, we'd like to get into HIPAA compliance if you don't mind. >> We actually talked about it yesterday, so if you want to talk about it again. >> Just kidding, just kidding, we don't have time here, right (laughs). >> It's just been fantastic because with all that change becomes all the investments that the healthcare companies are having to make, whether it's in EHR or EMR and as you look at changing out those systems of record that really run the critical patient care for those healthcare providers, it really presents a great opportunity. So what we've done is said let's leverage our core competencies of mission critical and let's gear that towards the healthcare space and let's leverage our compliance in HIPAA and other things like that and be able to bring to the market a capability that's multi-talented, that's utility oriented, but has that mission critical SLA that we're accustomed to providing our clients over the years. So we're very excited about that. We think it's a great market, a great industry overall, and we've seen fantastic feedback even in this show from clients who are very excited to now engage and what that could mean for them. >> So, Kevin, the connector announcement. VMware, we're at De\ll EMC World, VMware a huge part of the Dell Technologies' portfolio. What's the news around connector? >> So with the connector, what it really allows us to do is take what has been our cornerstone differentiation over the years, which is really around the mission critical, high service levels, when you think about guaranteed service levels, almost think of us as more of a managed infrastructure, as a service that has those high SLAs associated with it. So having clients be able to take the VMware estate and then be able to provision and manage workloads that are then being provisioned into the Virtustream, high SLA mission critical environment, is a big step for those enterprise customers. It's a big step for Dell Technologies as a brand. And it doesn't necessarily change the fact that you can also do that to other public cloud providers, you just get a higher level of service by doing it with Virtustream. >> So let's talk a little bit about that value prop of Virtustream. Doing the acquisition, it kind of made sense to me. EMC, traditional enterprise, high availability company, you know you had the VMAX 5, 6, 9s array. Virtustream, you guys did a wonderful job with taking a complex application SAP, providing some provisioning tools around that, and making that a consumable resource in the cloud. Talk to me a little bit about the conversations you've had on the show floor with traditional Dell EMC customers. Are they starting to really warm up to this expansion of the Virtustream brand beyond SAP into other mission critical apps? >> Absolutely, and that really represents the huge growth opportunity for us. As Virtustream we were very successful, as you mentioned, going into the SAP application space because typically SAP will be the system of record for a lot of these large enterprises. And what happens is, with your system of record, things like data persistence and performance guarantees, high IO, large footprint workloads, they're absolutely germane to those systems of record, but SAP is not the only application that fits into that category. When you look at all the different verticals and you look at the areas like we mentioned with healthcare and some of the key applications like Epic and MEDITECH and Cerner, and then you look at the other verticals, there are always these very key systems of record that require that sort of heavy weight capability around mission critical. And so leveraging all of our learnings in the application space, that we can bring that level of mission critical infrastructure performance with that application-centric automation that is focused on that kind of capability, it just makes sense. So it opens up the aperture in terms of the number of apps that we can now run on the Virtustream platform. Technically we could do it before, but now with the reach of Dell EMC, it not only allows us the account penetration by getting in there with relationships that are already leverageable with Dell EMC, but it allows us to also reach the partner community on the software side and be able to talk to application vendors that we can actually bring on to the platform as well. So we're very excited about that. >> So this isn't really anything new for you guys in essence. SAP is what I like to call one of those core center of gravity applications, it's heavy. You're going to have a lot of applications around SAP, and those applications are going to be just as critical, transaction applications, payment processing, big data apps, and you guys have hosted those applications before. What are some of the lessons learned from hosting the SAP ecosystem of applications that you're being able to now transfer that to other enterprise applications? >> Well there are a couple of very key lessons that we've learned. So first of all, you're absolutely right in the sense that when you have that mission critical nucleus, all the things that sit in the ecosystem come along with it. And for us, we've always for years been able to run anything that runs on the x86 platform, so we're certainly not limited to any specific application set. But what we've learned actually over the years in dealing with that concept of the ecosystem, the peripheral systems, is integration. And not only integration in the sense of technically allowing those systems to talk to each other, but we find is when a client is looking to set up a new training environment, or a new testing or QA environment, or they're even leveraging the concept of utility and consumption, if you don't need that system active at night, then you should shut it down. And if you don't need it on the weekend, you should shut it down, but yet in a lot of these complicated systems, the way in which the integration comes up and which systems talk first and then second and then third, are very critical. So over the years we've picked up on things like that level of application automation, what we call landscape management. So you're not just managing a VM, you're managing an entire landscape, which you have to blueprint and then say, for that blueprint, if you're going to shut it down, what's the way of doing that that's fastest, but also runs the least risk of data corruption or other issues that can occur if you just, for some reason, fall out of sequence. So that's one of the very critical lessons that we've learned. The other piece of it is really around tweaking the environments where we've found that by analyzing the actual resource consumption of these apps, which we measure on five minute increments, it allows us to have a much better introspection, if you will, of that entire landscape. And so it allows us to predict whether it's at night or certain times of the month, you know if you're in financial close as an example, or for some of our very labor intensive environments that have warehouses or manufacturing, time and attendance systems that kick in at certain shift change hours. And being able to predict when they need the resources and allocate those resources accordingly. So these are some of the very critical lessons that we plan to take from our years of running and perfecting the art of running SAP and taking them to some of these other mission critical applications as well. >> Well, Kevin, again, great news that you've launched this week in a couple of respects. Glad to hear the show's going well. And just want to congratulate you personally, I mean, I always like having co-founder on the show. It's just, you build something from scratch and obviously it's worked extremely well, so congratulations on that. >> Thank you very much. >> John: I admire that, so good for you. >> Thank you. >> Good to have you, Kevin Reid from Virtustream with us here on theCUBE. Back with more from Dell EMC World 2017 in just a bit. You are watching theCUBE here on SiliconANGLE TV. (bright 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)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. We're back at VeeamON 2022, we're winding down coverage to The Cube day two. We've done a lot of VeeamON. We're at the Aria hotel, smaller physical audience, huge hybrid audience, little different program. Great keynotes, really loved the keynote yesterday and today kind of product day today. Sean Smith is here with myself and David Nicholson. He's the staff Solution Architect at VMware. Sean, thanks for coming on the Cube, taking some time with us. >> Hey guys. Great to be here and great to be in person again. >> Yeah, it sure is. Hoping to see VMworld is no longer VMworld, right? >> It's VMware Explore now. Yep. >> Okay. Awesome. Looking forward to that. That was one of the first shows we ever did. It's kind of got that same vibe, I hope you don't lose that, the core of VMware. >> What we've been told is it's still going to be, the core of what we do and it's going to be the showcase of VMware. >> Which is the ecosystem, great vibe. You always know a million people there, which is great fun. How's it going at VMware today? I mean, let's start there. It's been a while since we've talked physically with... >> Yeah. VMware is, we've come through the pandemic, fairly well, relative speaking to what others have done. I'm part of the VCPP Program, the VMware Cloud Provider Program, and I look after cloud service providers, cloud builders, people who are actually building out networks for customers and environments that are very specialized and focusing on their needs and VMware is forefront with cloud service providers these days, doing really well. >> The last time we were physically proximate to VMware executives, I think Pat Gelsinger was still the CEO, Dell still owned the majority of VMware. So that spin happened. So that's good. I think the ecosystem in particular is probably really happy about that. Does it have any effect on your world? >> From a day to day business perspective, not really, right. Obviously we still have a very tight relationship with Dell. We still do a lot of innovative solutions and products with the Dell team. We have a tight integration there. It really gives us the opportunity to also work with many other vendors as well. And focus on solutions that our customers are looking for really, is where VMware is tryna focus. >> Yeah. It's funny, we were at Red Hat Summit last week. IBM Think was right across the street there was very little mention, if any, I think they talked about an IBM mainframe at Red Hat Summit. That was it. I mean IBM fully owns Red Hat, but a lot of people said, we hope that it's going to be like VMware and you guys have always had that independent culture. >> Fiercely independent. >> Fiercely independent. Yes. >> Yes. It's like when you coach, I don't know me anyway, when I coach my kids baseball, I'm a tougher on them than am with the other kids. I think you guys were sometimes tougher on your own or... And rightly so, you have a huge ecosystem. >> We do. >> That is epic. And so you have to look out for that. VMware has always done that. VCPP the V is for a VMware what's what's the acronym. >> So the CPP is Cloud Provider Program. It's a program that's specifically aimed at our cloud service providers. There's several solutions within the program, which are really focused on helping them build business, helping them go to market, helping them with being able to, for certain part of it compete with the hyperscalers and our support several cloud providers, mostly out of the Northeast, and they're doing really well. They're doing well against the hyperscalers, they very often provide solutions that are not easy to get on a hyperscaler. When you want to have customer interaction and things like that. So the VCP Program as I said, is really tailored, it has solutions which are very much focused on allowing them to build their businesses as a cloud service provider. >> Just a follow up if I may. >> Yeah. >> So the history of VMware Cloud has been really interesting. At one point vCloud Air, we know what happened there. This is not vCloud Air. >> This is not vCloud Air. It's got nothing to do with vCloud Air. It's really a program where we provide solutions that the cloud builders build with, right? So it's software solutions. There's no hardware involved. There's no VMware having the environment, it's really cloud providers building solutions. >> So it's interesting, Dave, this has come full circle, you used to work at Virtustream. There was point Rodney was like, bring it on AWS, correlation and back said, we can't lose to a book seller and all that was just, fun marketing talk for media people like us. But the interesting thing is, well, so VMware Cloud on AWS. Huge success of VMware Cloud Foundation. Doing really well. And obviously you've got momentum. Everybody thought, not everybody. >> It's in Google's, in Azure, it's in Oracle. >> Yeah, yeah. Sorry. >> It's an IBM. >> IBM a... >> It's an IBM. >> Number one in IBM. Yeah. >> And so a lot of people thought, I shouldn't say everybody, but a lot of people thought, MSPs, the cloud service providers, non-hyperscalers are cooked through 2010, 2011. The exact opposite happened. >> It's 100%. >> It's growing like crazy. We want to understand why, but it's come full circle. >> Yeah, it certainly has. I mean, the industry has changed considerably and especially over the last few years with COVID, I will say that the cloud service providers that are support and by the way, Virtustream was one of them, when I first joined VMware, I supported Virtustream. And they have had to adapt their businesses, the hyperscalers have come at them with everything that they've got and honesty, the cloud service providers that I support are phenomenal growth. They they're growing on a par with what some of the hyperscalers are doing. So there's definitely a place for cloud service providers, they've got great business, they've got great customers, great relationships. And it's as I said, it's growing a huge business. >> So we've talked a lot about theme from the perspective of the idea of a Supercloud. Something that can overlay a variety of on-premises and off-premises providers and provide sort of a unified view, unified management methodology. How much is what at least was formerly known as the SDDC stack, the Software Defined Data Center stack, still a part of VMwares vision that is right in line with that, from what Veeam is doing. How much of your business is deploying SDDC stacks that are then customized in one way or another. >> 100% of it. >> 100% of it. Right, okay. >> Yeah. So, when you're talking about having that single view of everything in the cloud provider program, there's a product called VMware Cloud Director. and it is the multi-tenant view of the infrastructure and the environment that the cloud providers are building. Right. So VMware Cloud Director has gone through many iterations and we've recently launched Cloud Director Service, which is a SaaS offering of the product. But what it actually does is you put it on top of VMC on AWS. you put it on top of GCVE, you put it on top of the cloud service providers, SDDCs, right. All of these are SDDCs underneath. >> AVS and Azure. >> AVS and Azure. >> I was associated with that. So I must have it mentioned. >> Exactly. >> They're all SDDC's. >> SDDC's, yeah, yeah, exactly. And as well as your on premise environment. Right. So all of these federate together through the VMware Cloud Director, and you end up having a single pane of glass across all of those environments. So whether it's running in the hyperscale, or running on your premises, running in a cloud service provider's environment, you have a single view, a single interface that you log into and you can see everything that's going on inside your environment. So it really brings that holistic, single view of everything to reality. >> How about from a licensing perspective? >> So from a licensing perspective... >> I'm a non-premises customer, I'm running VMware on-prem, I have been, I was at world VMworld 2004 and enjoyed BattleBots. So hopefully you'll start bringing BattleBots back. >> We will have to. >> And now I'm dealing with a service provider. That is one of the partners that you're working with. How does that licensing work? >> So the Cloud Provider Program actually has a slightly different licensing model to what you would have on premises, right? They have a rental model with VMware, it's a PAYGo model, right. One of the great things about the program is that it's consumption based. So it makes it easy for cloud service providers to build a consumption based business, which is kind of where everything is moving, right? >> Yeah, for sure. >> So whether you have an on-premise environment that's licensed through what we call perpetual or ELA licensing, from a VMware perspective, you can still layer on top, that cloud service provider solution VCD, right? And you would obviously have a financial relationship with the cloud service provider in terms of the environment that you have with them. And they will be able to hook up that environment to your on-premises environment and get that single view. So the licensing is not a restriction, right, you can still continue to have your traditional licensed environment in your data center, as well as being able to connect into these seamlessly, right. That's the great thing about it. And that's where VMC, AVS, GCVE, the OCVS, the Oracle version, the RBM one, you can bring all of these together and really look at it from a holistic perspective, bring in things like NSX-T and other solutions like that VM as well, it works seamlessly across all these environments. >> I am talking about Supercloud, I asked Raghu last year, who's virtually at VMworld, I kind of explained that concept of hiding the complexity, the abstraction layer, being able to hide the underlying primitives and APIs, seems like it's evolving. One of the things he said was yes, but if developers want to go there, we let them. And that was a key point, because you're getting more into that DevOps. >> Correct 100%. >> And I would imagine the cloud service providers really oftentimes need for their reasons to get to those underlying primitives and APIs. >> And actually VCD is the enabler, right? So VCD allows you to provide a container based service sitting right alongside your IAS in the same SDDC, right? We're not even talking about segregating them out, you can have it inside the exact same SDDC, all linked together, all taking a common security approach to what's going on and providing you with that ease of use. So from an end user perspective, the DevOps type of people, VCD is an awesome solution, because they can go in fire up a new VM, or fire up a new container or whatever, without having to go through the rigmarole of asking IT for a VM, or asking somebody's permission, as a organization, you would give your DevOps teams certain amount of resources, how they use it's up to them, right? Whether they put containers in there or they bring VMs, it's all there. And it's all in one single solution. >> You mentioned that your community is doing very well growing it let's call it 35, 40% a year. And it's a market that's quite large worldwide. Because it's a lot of local, regional CSPs, a lot of big country CSPs and you said... >> It's four and a 1/2 thousand of them. So, it's huge. >> There you >> Versus four hyperscalers. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Include Alibaba. So, they might be individually smaller, but collectively they're larger. But you said that the hyperscalers coming after them with everything they had was a comment that you made, are customers choosing CSPs over hyperscalers? If so, when and why. >> Sometimes they are choosing CSPs over hyperscalers, but not always, very often they're choosing CSPs and hyperscalers, right. And it really depends on what their needs are. So historically speaking, it's been everybody rushing to the hyperscalers because that's the flavor of the day let's move out of our data center. It's much cheaper to run everything in these hyperscalers, and they do it. And then the bill comes in and reality suddenly hits. And it's definitely not as cheap as they thought it was going to be, right. So there's many aspects that cause tenants to not only rethink that, but also repatriate, right. Repatriation is a big thing for our cloud service providers. Things like egress costs, most cloud service providers have no egress costs, right? They encourage movement of things amongst themselves and for their tenants, because that's what they want, right? So egress costs are a huge problem for many tenants who come into these environments and that's sometimes why they would choose a CSP over a hyperscaler. But really, it's more about choosing the right place for your workload. There are workloads that belong in hyperscalers, right? And if you have a solution with a CSP like VCD, that allows you not only to be able to connect your on premises and the CSP, but also the hyperscalers and actually have a much more holistic solution where you can determine where you want to put stuff and put it in the right place. It's more about that, than it is about choosing one over the other really. >> Yeah, and sometimes it's more of a business differentiation than a technical one. Is it a hyperscale or is it a CSP? If you're licensing the SDDC stack and you're running it on IAS in Amazon or in Google or Azure? >> I think the other thing too is the CSPs oftentimes they manage service providers, right? Is that true? >> The relationship, right? And that's one of the things if you talk to a cloud service provider and yesterday I was, I had a session and I was talking to a bunch of people about VMware stuff. And I said to them, how many of you have tried to pick up a phone and talk to somebody at AWS? And there was laughter, because the reality is that what AWS does is a kind of one size fits all approach, right? There isn't somebody on the end of the phone that you can pick up and call, if they have a major outage that outage is affecting 1000s of different customers and you one of those thousands really means nothing to them, right? Whereas a cloud service provider, generally speaking, has a very tight one-on-one relationship with both from an engineering perspective, right. With their tenants, but also at a higher managerial level. So they create those relationships and those relationships often drive these things. It's not always financial, there is a financial component to it, but very often it's the relationship, have they got somebody that they can talk to? If they getting many different solutions, can they get all those solutions from one provider? And if they can, it's much easier for them to manage from a... >> And I think so does that manage service... There's also a lot of things that despite their breadth and portfolio that the cloud service providers don't support, you can't do Oracle rack in the cloud, right? But you can in a service provider. >> Exactly. >> And Oracle, look you can negotiate with Oracle, so you can get similar pricing AWS, but this price is two x. They're either on-prem or in Oracle. So I could take my Oracle instance, stick it into a managed service provider or cloud service provider, do whatever I need to, and there are I'm sure 1000s of configurations like that, that aren't necessarily identically supported, security edicts that aren't necessarily exactly the same, so many specials that managed service say welcome to your point. AWS is as long as it's black, it's good. >> Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing, right? Those cloud service providers are doing exactly that. They have Oracle racks in there, they have all sorts of those solutions that are there in their data centers. And proximity is also an issue, right? Very often the people who are using those systems need their ancillary things to be close by, they can't be 10s or 20s or 30 milliseconds away, they need to be sub millisecond connectivity. And those are the areas where the cloud service providers really shine, they can offer those solutions that really enable their tenants to get what they want at the end of the day. Again to your point, you can negotiate with Oracle, but these cloud service providers do it day in and day out. Who wants their business? >> Who wants to do that with Oracle anyway, their lawyers are smarter than yours. Veeam, what are you doing with Veeam, in resilient architectures and cyber recovery? >> Yeah, we are a sponsor here at the event and Veeam is a great partner with VMware and we're great partner to them. A lot of cloud service providers actually use Veeam as their primary backup solution for their tenants, right. VMware Cloud Director that I was talking about just now, the thing that gives you a view of everything over the top, Veeam was actually one of the very first vendors to integrate with VCD. And you can use your Veeam environment directly from the screen, you right click, and you say do a backup and that's as easy as that from a Veeam perspective. So we have a lot of integrations with Veeam. We help the cloud service providers, ransomware is a big talking thing around this event, but all over the place, right? So a lot of the solutions that Veeam brings to the party, these cloud service providers are also deploying into their environments to help with ransomware. They have so many solutions that help those cloud service providers provide a holistic solution. >> Well, Veeam was basically founded saying, Hey, we're going to better our business on VMware. I first saw Veeam at a V mug, I think in Boston, and I was like, who is Veeam? VMware is that their product? It was just so you guys have had a long relationship, even though initially VMware was probably saying the same thing, who the heck are these guys? Well, how do you like them now? Sean, thanks so much for... >> Thank you. It's been great to be here. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back shortly. We'll get a couple more segments left. Dave and I are going to wrap up later in the day, you watching The Cube at VeeamON 2022, be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, we've got Pat Gelsinger back on theCUBE. He stopped by yesterday, did a flyby after his keynote to kick off our intro section. He's back for the sit-down. >> (laughs) Welcome back. >> I can't get enough of you, Pat. >> CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger. >> Yeah, I love to photobomb you guys, so it was great. >> Anytime. I know you're super busy, business is going great. And you know, what a three years its been. I remember the keynote you gave at VMworld a few years ago. This was really on a time where, I would call it the seminal moment for you because you saw a vision, and we've talked privately and on theCUBE about, and you gave this speech of this is going to be the preferred future, and it was very visionary-oriented, but it ended up happening. That became the beginning of a run for VMware. And since then, you've been kind of chipping away and filling in all the tech pieces, the business model, and deals, with Amazon and now Azure and others. How are you feeling about it? What's the highlights? What's your perspective of where we are now? What's the notable accomplishments? >> Well you know, it's been just great. And you think about the run that we've been on where we, five years ago, we described a hybrid future. And you know, most people said, what are you, stupid? And you know, student body right to the public cloud. And now everybody is starting to understand the difficulty of replatforming, right? And says wow, this is really hard. I can spend millions and millions of dollars, in fact, one customer's estimate was that they were going to spend almost $1 billion replatforming all their applications to the cloud. And when they got them cloud-native, what do they have? The same apps. So imagine going to your board and saying I'm going to spend $1 billion just so I can be on the cloud, but give you no new business value. You've got to be kidding! And that's why this hybrid future, and as I like to joke, Andy, five years ago, Andy Jassy said if you're running your own data center, you're stupid. And Pat said if you're using Amazon, you're stupid. And now we're doing bro hugs on stage with each other. (laughter) >> And by the way, hybrid, you picked that trend that was right. Multi-cloud, though, came out of more a reality, less of an operating vision, 'cause hybrid cloud, you know, you saw the dots, connected those dots, but I think multi-cloud was much more of just a reality. When people started to realize that as I started doing stuff on premises, wow, I got native workloads on the cloud, and there are benefits for being in the cloud first for certain workloads. But then the multi-cloud thing comes up. >> And I think everybody has started to realize, and I really, as I would say, I think every CIO needs a three-cloud strategy. Making their private data centers into a proper operating private cloud. And some of this week's announcements, I'm sure we'll get back to those a little bit, to me are just a huge dimension. You know, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, you know, a huge accelerant of making your private data center op like a private cloud, right, at scale. Second, you need a primary public cloud partner. And I think most people should pick a primary. Not one, a primary, and then a secondary cloud, right, you know, as their partners. And then you have your range of SAS offerings. And I think that needs to be the core, right, of every IT, CIO's strategy for the future. And our objective is to create an environment between what we're doing with VMware Cloud Foundation, and now VMware Cloud on Dimension. What we're doing with Amazon, our preferred partner for the public cloud offering. What we announced this week with Azure, right? Our 4000 other cloud partners, including, you know, very successful relationship with IBM. And saying, okay, that's your infrastructure. And the bulk of your workloads should run on a VMware environment that we can operate across that, with the same tools, the same interfaces, the same security, the same management tools, and then use the other cloud services as they bring you business value. You're a fan of Tensorflow? Go for it, baby. Right? You know, and use it in your app. You love function as a service with Lambda, go for it. But the bulk of your workload should lay in here and use these where they have business value. >> And to follow up on the three legs of the cloud stool, the CIO's legs, number three is for what? Is it for risk mitigation, exit strategies, or more specific best-of-breed, horses-for-courses type of workloads. >> Yes, yes, and yes. To some degree, really it's saying, nobody wants to say, I'm only in one. Right? Nobody wants to lock in for it. Also you know, clearly, hey, you know, these are technologies that break. You get more resilience that way, right? You want to be able to manage your cost environments. There's clearly this view of okay, you know, if I can do one, two, and three, I can do N. 'Cause most people are also going to end up picking, oh, I'm in Hong Kong. Okay, I need a Hong Kong cloud, because my data can only go there. You know, I'm in Malaysia, oh, they require all data to be there. 'Cause a practicality, if you're a big enterprise company, it's not just going to be three. You're going to need to be four, five, and six as well, for regional. And then you're going to acquire somebody, they're using a different partner. It really says, build an operational environment that works that way. Give myself business flexibility. I have application flexibility, and if I've done that, I really can move to the other environments that my business requires. >> I think one of the reasons why you guys have been so successful, if I go back five or six years, I remember you laying out the market, the market segmentation, you're obviously close to customers. You're a very clear thinker. You've obviously looked at the market for multi-cloud. How do you describe that, how do you look at the TAM, how big is it? >> Well you know, if you think about cloud today, right, we're closing in on $100 billion of the public cloud. You add SAS to it, you know, you got almost another $100 billion at that level. And you know, the overall data center market is probably on the order of, you know, $1 trillion-ish. >> Give or take. (laughs) >> Yeah, on that order. And then you know, you throw the operations costs inside of it, you're probably looking at something that's, you know, on the order of $2 trillion as well. So this is a big market, right? You know, part of the excitement that people are seeing in this cloud environment, is that they can just go faster. And as I described in the keynote today, we want to enable every one of our customers to stop looking down and look up, right? Spend less time looking down at the infrastructure. We're going to operationalize it, we're going to automate it for you, we're going to take care of it so that every one of your engineers can become software engineers building app and business value. >> I want to ask you on that point, because one of the things, I was talkin' last night, the analyst said at the briefing or the reception was, having a debate with one of the strategists in Dell, and I'm like, look it, outcomes are great at the top of the stack. Looking up, you want outcomes. But during the OSI stack days, no one cared about outcomes. It was either token ring or Ethernet. Speed won, so certain things have to be speed-driven, world-class, and keep getting better. And so that's what we're seeing as an infrastructure requirement. Horizontal scalability, operational scale. So that's a speeds and feeds game. So the outcome there is faster (laughs), and simpler. Up the stack, data becomes a big part of that. That, more, is where we see outcome. Do you see it that way, Pat? Because you know, again, infrastructure is often, that's how they said it on stage. We want to have whole new-paved, new infrastructure for this generation, essentially a refresh of infrastructure. Okay. Well, what does it look like? It's got to be fast, got to be flexible, software-defined. Your thoughts? >> So you know, clearly, I mean, what we're trying to do is we build this common infrastructure layer. And build an environment that allows you to be fast, but also allows you to be in control and cost-effective. Because if you would say, oh, I just want to be fast, ah, that doesn't work, right? We still have limited budgets, and you know, people, someday there's a CFO day of reckoning. But you also have to realize, part of the hybrid cloud laws that I described this morning, you know, one of those is the laws of physics, right? Hey, my factory automation for robotics needs to be 40 milliseconds, period. And if I round-trip to the cloud at 150 milliseconds, guess what? (laughs) >> Latency. >> Right. You know, my image recognition for being able to detect my autonomous vehicle is less than 50 milliseconds. I can't round-trip to the cloud. It has to be fast, right, but we also need to be able to push more of this data, more of the inference of my machine learning and AI closer to the edge. That's why, you know, you heard Michael talk about, and Jeff talk about this explosion of data. Most of that data will be at the edge. Why? Because every camera, you know, every sensor will be developing it, and I'm not going to round-trip it to the cloud because of economics. I can't afford to take all that data to the cloud. It's not just the latency. >> Latency matters. >> Yeah. And so for that, so I can't take it to the cloud, I got to be able to compute locally. I got to be able to apply the inference of my AI models locally, but you know, I also then need to scale aspects of cloud as well. My third law, of course, was regulation, where you know, guess what? I was just with a major customer in Latin America, and they said they are repatriating 100% of their data and applications out of the public cloud, 'cause the new president, right, is assisting on data only in his country for all of their nationalized resources and assets. >> So that's driving the change. This brings up the multi-cloud kind of thing earlier. You guys got to play in all the ponds out there, in the industry. But let's talk about on-stage here at Dell Technologies World. You were on-stage with Michael Dell and Satya Nadella, and I was lookin' up there. I'm like, man, the generational knowledge of the three people on-stage, the history. >> (laughs) I think that just means I'm getting old. (laughs) >> Well I mean, you've seen it all. I mean, from Intel, to EMC, to VMware. Dave and I, Dave's a historian of tech, as he'll self-claims, but I'm up there, I was pretty blown away. You guys are leading the industry. What kind of moment was that for you, because now you've got Microsoft doing a deal with VMware. Who would've thought that would happen? >> Well, maybe two different aspects to it. You know, one is, I've known Satya for over 25 years. You know, he was sort of going through the Microsoft ranks, Windows NT, SQL, et cetera. (laughter) You know, at the same time I was. So we got to know each other. Almost 25 years since our first interactions. When Michael Dell first came to Intel to meet Andy Grove to get microprocessors so he could start his business, I was there. So I mean, these relationships are decades old. So in that view, it's sort of like, hey Satya, how's the wife, you know. (laughter) Hey Michael, how's Susan doing? Really, it-- >> But you haven't even gone anywhere, you're still in the industry. (laughs) >> Yeah. But then to be able, the announcement was really pretty special in the sense that I call it 20 years in the making. You know, not a year or two, 20 years in the making, 'cause VMware and Microsoft has essentially been at odds with each other for two decades. You know, at that level. And to be able to be on-stage and saying, that's right, we're cooperating on cloud, we're cooperating on client, and we're cooperating on futures, okay, that's a pretty big statement as well. And I think customers respond very positively to that. And you know, I'm-- >> It's been a bold move, and you also made a bold move with the cloud, too, Pat. I got to say, that was another good call. Partnering with Andy Jassy. Again, once, both idiots, I guess, calling each other clever, you know. (laughs) Hey, public cloud, at odds, partner. Boom. >> And I really think this idea, moving headwinds to tailwinds. And you know, the Amazon partnership with Andy, and as we say, it's our preferred cloud partner, VMware Cloud, our native US hub, VMware-offered service. You know, super committed to it. We're closing in on 2000 customers on that now. >> Clarify the Amazon relation. I saw some press articles that kind of missed, skewed a little bit. They kind of made it sound like the Azure deal was similar to the Amazon deal. So just explain the difference between the VMware deal with AWS and Andy Jassy, that relationship, and the other cloud ones. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, thank you. And what we're doing with Amazon is VMware is offering a cloud service that I operate for customers, that runs on Amazon. And that is a VMware-delivered service. They're our preferred partner. We're not bashful about that, that if we have the choice, that's the one to go to. It's going to be best. But what we've done now with Azure is we've made the VMware Cloud Foundation, the same underlying components, available with CloudSimple and Virtustream, they're partners, to have a VMware Cloud Foundation offering delivered by Microsoft as a first-party service. So VMware Cloud, VMware is delivering it. In the Azure for VMware services, that's being delivered and supported by Microsoft. >> And that's the same deal you did with IBM. >> It's very, the same-- >> Google and other ones. >> Yeah, the same as we've done with our 4000 other cloud partners, right? And obviously, Virtustream and CloudSimple are part of that 4000, and they're making the VMware Cloud Foundation available to Azure customers now. >> And what's the benefits to VMware's customers for those deals? >> Well, imagine that you're somebody in, Walmart was quoted in the press release, as an example. Walmart's a big VMware customer. Walmart is also a big Azure customer. So their ability to say, oh, I can have a hybrid environment makes a lot of sense for that kind of customer. So we really do see it as saying, you know-- >> Customer-driven, basically. >> Absolutely. And people said, which are you going to sell to us? Well in most cases, customers have already decided who their major cloud partners our. We're saying that VMware offering, even though we're first and best with Amazon, we're saying as they make their cloud choices, we'll have a valid VMware Cloud Foundation offering available. >> And best, I want to understand best. Best is, in part, anyway, because of the engineering you guys have done. When we interviewed Andy Jassy in November at re:Invent, he said you can't have a lot of these types of partnerships. And it's very deep integration. Is that why it's best? And what makes it best? >> Yeah, I call it first and best for two reasons. One is because we are engineering, we are co-engineering, the bits first get done on VMware Cloud, and then we make 'em available to the other partners. That's where we're doing the core engineering, the innovation. Andy has hundreds of engineers working on this. I have hundreds of engineers working on it. So it's first and best from an engineering sense. And, given it's my service and my offering, we're selling it aggressively in the marketplace, positioning it as part of the broader set of solutions and leveraging that, like you saw this week with the Dell EMC offering, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. It's leveraging all that first and best work to now bring it on-premise as well. So it really is both the engineering as as a go-to-market. >> I'm going to ask some CEO questions. (laughs) So Tom Sweet has said they're happy to have the Class V transaction behind them. I'm sure you're glad, too. Thank you. That was very generous of you. >> (laughs) >> You've been incredibly good at acquisitions. I mean, obviously Nicira, Heptio, CloudHealth, AirWatch, I mean, on and on. >> VeloCloud. >> VeloCloud. I mean, most acquisitions, frankly, don't live up to their objectives. I think that's not the case for VMware. So now you're, good news is you draw off a lot of cash, so you're building up that pot again. How do you see, going forward, use of that cash? R and D, M and A, maybe you could make some comments there to the extent you can? >> Yeah, and you know, we said the primary ways we use cash, stock buybacks and M and A. And that continues. We did the special one-time dividend, which helped Dell go public. Everybody's happy. The market's responded super positively on both the Dell side. They're up, what, 40% since they go public. VMware up almost 50% this year. Just tremendous. >> Tremendous, $80 billion value now, awesome. >> Yeah, just tremendous. And, right then, we said going forward, it's business as usual for us. We're going to continue to do stock buybacks. We're going to continue to do M and A's. As you've said, we're good at this acquisitions stuff. And part of that is, I call it, imagine you're a hot startup company. And you say, do I want to be part of VMware? And we try to answer these questions. Do we have vision alignment? >> (laughs) >> Second is, can we accelerate your vision? Because most startups, you know, I mean, you talk about unicorns and so on like that. But what really motivates them is their vision. And if they believe their vision is going to be accelerated as part of VMware, so they're on this and we're going to turn 'em to that, aw man, they get excited. Do we have a cultural fit? I mean, with every CEO of our acquisitions, and HR does, we really, are they going to fit our team? Because you know, cultural issues, you can't butt your heads day and night. Life's too short. >> Certainly VMware, you guys are (laughs) that culture's very hardcore. Work hard, play hard. (laughter) >> Yeah, and you know, it has to be this deep drive for technical innovation, right? The technical due diligence that we do with our startups. Right? It's sort of like, you know, this is like a PhD exam for these, I mean, they really got to know their stuff. >> Yeah, so people don't fit in the culture at VMware, and there-- >> And we've said no to a number of potential acquisitions over cultural issues as well, if they're just not going to fit. And hey, we're not going to be perfect, but the fact that we can bring these companies in, accelerate their vision, give 'em a culture that they're excited about. You know, we have maybe 90-ish% success rate. The industry average is below 50% >> Yeah, fantastic track record. I mean-- >> And that just gives us the ability to do organic and inorganic innovation, which to me is like, a potent recipe. >> And you got the radio conference coming up. What will your talk, theCUBE will be there. Pat, you've created great shareholder value. You turned those headwinds into tailwinds, and we were watchin' the whole time. It's been great to watch. And what's next? You have your VMware tattoo still on from VMworld? (laughter) Like you have a jail tattoo? >> No, I'll tell you >> Cute tattoo. >> a little inside, I'll tell you a little inside story. My wife, you know, after the VMworld keynote with the tattoo on, we were leavin' on vacation two weeks later. And all she said to me after the keynote was what's that tattoo thing, it better be gone by the time we leave for vacation. (laughter) It's like, there was no, honey, that was a great keynote today, it's like, that better be gone! (laughs) >> Nothin's better than watchin' that video and that CUBE sticker we had on your hand. Pat, great to see you, as always. Great commentary, great analysis. Congratulations on all the success with VMware. Again, the transformation's just getting started. We're seeing a lot more good things for you guys as well. >> Yeah, and you know, this has been a great week in some ways. I sort of joked this morning on-stage that, it almost felt like VMworld. We talked about VMware technologies and that Dell partnership accelerating so well. >> It's not AMCWorld, it's DellWorld now, it's a whole new vibe. >> (laughs) And you know, with that, you know, I just really believe in the superpowers that I talk about, we're just getting started. So we're going to be doing this a long time together. >> What's on your plate in front of you now? You got VMworld coming up in a few months. Priorities, objectives, what's on your plate? >> Well, I have to leave some of the secrets for what we're cookin' up for VMworld this year. But some of these steps clearly, in the developer container space, super important for us to really make some progress there. Obviously, we'll have some incremental cloud announcements as well. >> ContainerWare rhymes with VMware. (laughs) >> Yes, that's very good! We have an advertisement on that coming out, so a new ad. But it really is, I think, that topic area's one that, how can we really solve that for customers that really can deploy at scale containerized environments for an enterprise workload. So, excited about that area. And you know, maybe just a few deliverables from what we announced this week. >> Alright, take your CEO of VMware hat off, put your CUBE analyst hat on. What's the most important story here at Dell Technologies World, if you were a commentator? You can't say VMware 'cause that's biased, but you got to be objective. You can say VMware if an objective. What's the most important storyline here as a backdrop for Dell Technology Worlds, what's the real net net to customers? >> Well you know, I think, and I'll say, as exciting as the Microsoft announcements were, I think the most important thing was VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, on-prem. Because to me, you know, the fact, I go to CIOs, and I've done this probably five times since the keynote finished on Monday. And I say, how many of you have fully updated your hardware, your firmware, your operating systems, your networking stack, your compute stack, your management on the latest releases, all of them patched, upgraded appropriately for your environment? >> And they say, their eyes roll. (laughs) >> And the answer is none. Not some, none. I have customers that are askin' me to extend support for vSphere 4.5. It's like, what, that's been EOL'ed for a year and a half, what are you talking about, right?! But the reality is that most people go to the cloud, public cloud, not because it's more cost-effective or because it's better, it's because it's easier. So what we've really said is we can make easy in the private cloud and truly deliver that hybrid cloud experience. And I think the customers really experience the TCO benefits, the acceleration, the reductions in their operational environments, the personnel associated with it, the security benefits of being always patched, upgraded the most release. You know, now you're talkin' about attacking that other $1 trillion of operational costs that they're bearing in the personnel and so on. To me, that is like, so powerful if we really get that engine going. >> And the simplicity that comes out of that, is just-- >> You know, and again, the demo that we showed. That was the VMware Cloud on AWS being able to demonstrate, now, a complete picture into the on-premise environment. That's powerful. >> Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. I know he's got to go. Thanks for your generous time, I know you're really busy. Again, Pat Gelsinger. >> Love you guys, thank you. >> Thanks, Pat. >> Love you too. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, creating a lot of shareholder values, got a lot of tailwinds at their back. VMworld's coming up, theCUBE, of course, will be there with two sets. As usual, theCUBE cannons, two sets here, firing cannonballs of content here at Dell Technology World. I'm Jeff Furrier with Dave Vellante, stay with us for more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. Day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We got two sets called theCube Cannon. We've got the Cannon of Content, interviews all day long, out at night at the analyst briefings, meet-ups, receptions, talking to all the executives at Dell Technologies VMware and across the industry. Stu, Dave, today is product announcements on the keynotes. Yesterday was the grand vision with Michael Dell and the big reveal on the Microsoft partnership with Satya Nadella's surprise visit onstage, unveiling new Azure-VMware integrations with Dell Technologies. Dell announced the Dell Cloud, which is a little bit of Virtustream, but they're trying to position this cloud, I guess it's a cloud if you want to call it a single cloud of glass. Dave, single pane in the glass with a variety of other things, unified workspace and some other things. This is Dell trying to be a supplier end-to-end. This is the pitch from Dell Technologies. We'll be talking to Michael Dell, also Pat Gelsinger, the CO of VMware. Dave, were you impressed, were you shocked, were you surprised with yesterday's big news and as the products start coming online here, what's your analysis? >> Well yesterday, John, was all about the big strategic vision, Michael Dell laying out check for good and then the linchpin of Dell strategy which of course is VMware for cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, kind of VMware everywhere. I was surprised that Satya Nadella flew down from Seattle and was here on stage in person. Didn't come in from the big screen. So I thought that was pretty impressive. You had the three power players up on stage. Today of course was all about the products. Both Dell and EMC have always been very practical in terms of their engineering. Stu, you used to work there. Their R&D is a lot of D. It's sort of incremental product improvements to keep the customers happy, to keep ahead of the competition, to keep the lifecycle going. They had like 10 announcements today. I can go through 'em real quick if you want, but they range from new laptops to talking about new branding on servers, new storage devices. You had PowerProtect which is their new rebranded backup and data protection and data manage portfolio, an area where Dell EMC has been behind. So lots of announcements. Another kind of mega launch tradition and again, a lot of incremental but important tactical improvements to the product line. >> Last year, what we heard from Jeff Clarke is they're looking to simplify that portfolio. Back in the EMC days, it was oh my gosh, look at the breadth of this. Every category, they had two or three offerings and you know, the stated goal is to simplify that and that means most categories are going to get one product. It's interesting. You talk about networking just got rebranded with that Power branding. I kind of said there there's marketing behind it. If you know what that product is because it's the Power brand and they put it out there. So you know, PowerMax, has been their tiered storage. They had a good update for Unity. It's Unity XT. Doesn't have a power name yet so maybe there's still some dry powder left in the product portfolio there, but they're making progress going through this 'cause these things don't happen overnight. It's great to spin up the clouds, but in the storage world, customers, they trust, they have the code, they test it out. So going to new generations, making that change, does take time but you've seen that progress. The tail end of that integration between Dell and EMC on the product side. >> Stu, what's your analysis of the products so far 'cause again like Dave said, it's a slew of announcements. What's resonating, what's popping out, what's boiling up to the surface? >> Yeah so look, the area that I spent so much time on, John, that hyper-converged infrastructure. If you look at a lot of the pieces underneath it all, it's VxRail. One of the things we've had a little bit of a challenge squinting through is oh wait, there's this managed service stack, it's VxRail underneath. Oh wait I've taken the appliance and I put VCF. Oh that's VxRail and then I've got this other, it's like I see three or four solutions and I'm like is it all just VxRail with like a VMware stack on top of it? But it's how do I package it, what applications live on it, how is it consumed, manage service, op ex, cap ex. So they've got that a little bit of complexity when VxRail itself is you know, dirt simple and really there so they're making progress on the cloud piece. Dell is the leader in hyper-converged. I'll point out, you don't hear anybody talking about Nutanix here, but Dell still has a partnership on the XC Core. They're going to sell a lot of Dell servers into Nutanix environment so I expect you'll still have the Nutanix show. John you're going to be at that next week. They're still going to talk about Dell. I'm sure you'll talk to Dheeraj. Yes they made a partnership with HP, but that does not kill the relationship with Nutanix just like Microsoft, heck. I'm going to see Satya Nadella on stage at Red Hat Summit next week and you're like oh well VMware and Red Hat. Red Hat's here. Red Hat's a Dell-ready partner. If you want to put open shift on top of their stack, they can do that so hardware and software, everybody's got their pieces, everybody's got their pieces, everybody competes a lot, but they partner across the board. IBM Global Services is here. There's so many companies here. Dell's a broad company, deep partnerships. The question I have is Pat Gelsinger was just on stage saying that this SDDC will be the building block for the future. I said kudos to them. They've got it on AWS, they've got it announced with Azure, we announced it with Google, but that is not necessarily the end state. VMware is a piece of the puzzle. I don't know if VMware will be the leader in multicloud management. vCenter was the leader in virtualization management so how much of that will there or do I get an Amazon and then start moving some stuff over? Do I get to Azure and start modernizing my environment so that I don't need to pay VMware and I don't need virtualization. VMware and Dell are going to containerize everything so in the future, are they containerware, you know? That's the competition kind of post-it note. They are VMware at their core. VMware is centra of the strategy and there's still some work to go, but they're making some good progress. >> I want to get your thoughts, guys, on the role VMware is playing here at the show. Normally they're here, usually they're here, but this year it seems to be much more smoother integration of talking points, messaging, product integrations. The show's got a good beat to it. Pretty packed, but the role of VMware, Dave, Stu, what's your reaction and thoughts? We've seen them dance all the time. Obviously VMware, Dave as you pointed out yesterday, a big part of the valuation of Dell Technologies, but what's your observation on the presence of VMware here at Dell Technologies World? >> I mean I've said many times that this company and I said this about EMC, it's kind of a boring company without VMware. You put VMware in the mix and all of a sudden, it becomes very strategic and very interesting from a lot of standpoints. Certainly from a financial standpoint. Remember, the Class V transaction that took Dell public was the result of an $11 billion dividend because of VMware. They took VMware's cash and they said okay, we're going to give nine billion to the shareholders. Without VMware, that wouldn't have happened. As well, the multicloud strategy, the underpinning of that multicloud strategy is VMWare. What strikes me, John and Stu, is that the cultural change. You had Dell, you had EMC. They said ah yeah the companies are compatible, but they're different companies. They maybe had shared kind of goals and values, but they had different cultures and really in a short timeframe, Michael Dell and his team have put these two companies together and they have aligned in a big way. I mean they are basically saying VMware and Dell, boom. That's how we're going to market and you know, Pat's coming on later today and I'm sure he'll say hey we love NetApp, we love HBE, we love IBM, but it's clear what the preferred partnership is. >> Dave, when the acquisition happened, there was talks of synergies and we were like oh where are they going to cut everything? If I look around here, they've got the seven logos of the primary companies. It's Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream and VMware. They're one company. Michael Dell will go on calls for any of them. Friends of mine at Pivotal says you talk to Michael quite a bit. You know, he's out there. We talked about it yesterday. Dell and VMware are closer and tighter aligned than EMC and VMware ever were. Now on the one hand, EMC kept them separate because the growth of virtualization required that. Today in this cloud environment, it's a different world and it's matured so VMware, sure, there's still work on HP and IBM and all this other stuff, but Dell leads that move as you said, Dave. >> John, you're big on culture. This is a founder culture. What's your take on what Michael Dell has accomplished and how does it stand to compare with sort of other great cultural transformations that you've seen? >> Well I think HBE is a great example of a culture that split, was uncharged there. We know what happened there and I think they're hurting, they're losing talent and they're not winning in categories across the board like Dell is. I think Michael Dell, the founder-led approach that he's having 'cause he told us years ago, if you guys remember, here on the record, also privately that I'm going to take this off the table with EMC and I'm going to do all these things. We're going to execute. So he brought his execution mojo and ecos of Dell and become Dell Technologies, as Stu pointed out, a portfolio of multiple companies under one umbrella and he brought the execution discipline and this is a theme, Dave. Last night at the analysts reception, as I was talking to other analysts and talking to some of the execs, both from VMware and Dell Technologies, that the execution performance across the board both on product integration, which was a weak spot as you know, is getting better, the business performance discipline. We're going to have the CFO on here to talk more about it, they're executing. Howard Elias is going to be on this afternoon. He called this three years ago when he was talking about the integration that they saw synergies, they saw opportunities and they were going to unpack those. They stayed relentless on that. So I think this is a great example of keeping the founders around for all the VC-backed companies. You're thinking about getting rid of founders. Never let a founder leave a company. They bring the vision, they bring also some guts and grit and they bring a perspective and you can put great talent and team around that, that attract and retain great executives like Michael's done and he's poaching HPE, other companies and pulling talent in 'cause they're executing. They pay well, it's a great place to work according to the statistics. So again, this is all because of the founder and if the founder's not around, you have all the fiefdoms and the policists who kick in and then it becomes kind of sideways. So that's kind of what I see other companies that don't have founders around and HP lost their founders obviously and then the culture kind of went a little bit sideways. So they're trying to get back in the game, seeing them go back to their roots. We'll see how they do. We don't do that show anymore and again we don't have a lot of visibility into what HP's doing but we do know, Dave, that they do not have a lot of the pieces on the board that Dell does. So if you want to have an end-to-end operating model, and you're missing key value activities of an end-to-end value chain, that's going to be hard to automate, it's hard to be a performant, it's going to be hard to be successful. So I think Dell is showing the playbook of how to be horizontally scalable operationally and offer perspectives and data-driven specialism in any industry in any vertical. >> Yeah Dave, if I can just on the cultural piece 'cause it's really interesting. You talked about EMC, East Coast hard driving versus VMware, software, Silicon Valley company. While they're working together, a lot of it, you know, I talk to VMware people and they're like well it's great the Dell force is just selling our stuff. It's not like I'm having storage shoved down my throat or we have to have our arms twisted. It's the product portfolio that they're selling, the vSAN, NSX, the management software suite and those pieces, things like SD-WAN, there's some good synergies there. So the product portfolio is a nice fit that just jointly go out to market that they just really line up well together and Dell's a very different cultural beast than EMC was. >> Well again, staying on culture for a moment, when I discussed with some of the folks that I know out of Hopkinton the narrative early on was oh Dell's ruining EMC, tearing it apart and so forth. When you talk to people today, they say, you know what, it was painful. Dell came in and said okay, you're going to be accountable, really had an accountability culture, but now they've come out the other side, the narrative is it was the right thing to do. Jeff Clarke came in and sort of forced this alignment. There's like no question about it. People, this is a guy who you know, his calendar's set for the year. People know where he's going to be, what meeting he's going to have, what's expected and they're prepared and it seems to be taking hold. I mean if a $90 billion company that's growing at 14% in revenues, in profitable revenues, that's quite astounding when you think about it and I think it's a big result of the speed at which Dell has brought in its operating model to the broader EMC and transformed itself. It's quite amazing. >> Awesome show, guys. We've got clips out there on the #DellTechWorld on Twitter. We've got a lot of videos. We've got two sets here, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Final word on this intro for day two, guys. Thoughts on the show? It's not a boring show. It's a lot of activities, a lot of things. They've got an Alienware eSports gaming studio which I think is totally badass. A lot of kind of cool things here. It's not the glitz and glam that we've seen in other EMC Worlds before or Dell Worlds, but it's meat and potatoes and it's got a spring to its step here. I feel it's not, it feels good. That's my takeaway. >> Well the big theme is hybrid cloud and multicloud. Jon Rowe as we were leaving the room today that we were early with that multicloud. Thanks for everybody else in the industry for hopping on board. The reality is the first time I heard the sort of hybrid cloud was called private cloud. Chuck Hollis wrote a blog back in the mid to late 2000s. Now I will make an observation in the customers that I talk to. Multicloud is not thus far, has not thus far has been a deliberate strategy. In my opinion, it's been the outcropping of multivendor, shadow IT, lines of business and I think the corner office is saying hold on, we need to reign this in, we need to have a better understanding of what our cloud strategy is, build a platform that is hybrid and sure, multicloud, to build our digital transformation. We need IT to basically help us build this out to make sure we comply with the corporate edicts and that's what's happening. It is early days. There's a long way to go. >> Yeah, as Dave, as you know, I sat right down the hallway from Chuck Hollis when he wrote that piece and I went and I called up Chuck and I was like hey Chuck, this sure sounds like my next generation virtual data center stuff that I joined the CTO office to work on and he's like yeah, yeah, new marketing branding and I wrote a piece, exactly what you said, Dave, on Wikibon.com, hybrid and multicloud were a bunch of pieces, you know. It's not a cohesive strategy. The management's not there. We're starting to see maturation. Some of the point products, you know, developed really fast. When we talk about VMware on AWS, that happened really fast. I heard if you stop by the VMware booth here at the show, they're showing outposts and I said is a diagram? No, no, I've got customers in production running this. I'm like hold on, I need to hear about this. Outpost in production? But that strategy as you said, hybrid and multicloud, we're starting to get there, starting to pull it together. David Foyer wrote a phenomenal piece about hybridcloud taxonomy. We've spent a lot of time on the research side. Really what does the industry need to do, how should customers think about all of the layers? You know, data and networking and all of these components to help make not just a bunch of pieces but actually drive innovation and help be better than the sum of its parts. >> Well ironic followup on that post, the Chuck Hollis post was around they called it the private cloud and it was all about homogeneity and now multicloud is everything but homogeneous. Outpost, however, is. Same hardware, same software, same control plane, same data plane so interesting juxtaposition. >> We'll see Amazon Outpost. Guys, go to SiliconAngle.com, Wikibon.com. Great hybridcloud, multicloud analysis coverage and news. And some of the headlines hitting the net here. Dell Technologies makes VMware linchpin of hybrid cloud, data center as a service, end user strategies from Zdnet. eWEEK, Dell makes major hybrid cloud push. Obviously great analysis, guys, right on the number. Day two, CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. We've got two sets. Rebecca Knight, Lisa Martin and more. Stay tuned for more coverage of day two after the short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's a big show, the 10th year that theCUBE is at this show. I'm Rebecca Knight, this is my cohost Stu Miniman. We've got two sets, and joining us now is Matt Liebowitz. He is the global lead multicloud infrastructure at Dell Technologies, thank you for returning to theCUBE. >> Yeah, like I was saying before we came on, I've been a fan of the show for years so it's great to actually be on it for once. >> Well, welcome. >> Well, for twice. (Rebecca laughing) We're going to talk about the stresses of cloud sprawl right now. And there're so many different possibilities, solutions. It's a multicloud world. How do you even make sense of it all, and how do you help customers make sense of it? >> Well, I think the first thing that we typically do is just try to get customers to understand what they have. You know, they've got workloads in private cloud, they've got workloads in public cloud, and we try to do an analysis, figure out what's where, what's the best fit, what cloud is most appropriate for each application, and then just build a plan to build that infrastructure and get them where they need to be. >> Matt, I love that, and I want to hear what you're seeing from customers, 'cause when we look at it, and we hear what's described is really, when we talk about HyperCloud, and when we talk about multicloud it's, I have a bunch of pieces and it wasn't necessarily a key strategy. The customer was just like oh, I'm doing cloud stuff all over the place, and in many ways we've got the silos that we've spent the decade or so trying to get rid of even more. So how do we help get their arms around it? There're so many different layers of the solution, to make this innovative and a wholesome solution rather than just, oh my Gosh, I've got the things all over here and I'm spinning plates, as a company. >> Right, I think you said it. The most common thing we see from customers when they say, I'm doing multicloud, is they're actually using more than one cloud, but that's really multicloud. You really need to tie it together with a cloud management platform, something that can bring all the pieces together that's API enabled, that's you know, they can programmatically access resources. So when customers tell us they've got multicloud, but they're really consuming something in Azure and something in AWS, they've just like you said Stu, just created more IT silos, and so we're trying to get away from that. They can use all those clouds but wrap it together on that common control plane, so you can understand your estate and actually manage it and consume it. >> So it sounds as though customers, I mean we're sort of painting this picture of customers really, really at a loose end here. I mean, how would you describe the customer mindset today? I mean, obviously some customers have a strategy and know exactly where they're going, but the vast majority really don't. >> I think most customers are responding, and the needs of the business are changing. They need need to respond more quickly, and so they just consume cloud resources as they can. And that often leads, like you said Stu, due to the sprawl. And so again, like we try to just wrap it together. Do an analysis, figure out what's out there, and help them not only understand where the application should live, but wrap an operating model around it so they can start consuming it properly. Understand what they're going to advertise in their service catalogs. So Matt, one of the reasons I loved him to talk to into consulting people, is you're not trying to push a product. It's like, certain ones it's like okay, management's really important, but we understand as an industry we're never going to get to that mythical single pane of glass. So is there a framework, is there maturity model? How are you measuring where they are, and how to move them gently along? I guess the journey is what we've said to kind of a holistic solution of that. >> Yeah I mean there's tons of, we take what analysts do. We also have our own studies and indexes all the way starting from what we kind of digital laggards all the way to the digital leaders. And what we found is actually most of the customers are either laggards or they're just starting out. Maybe they've made some loose investments, but they haven't walked the path that far. And so it's like you said earlier, there's stuff kind of everywhere. Customers don't often know where to start, but I think they're responding to the needs of the business. I don't think it's anything that they're doing that's wrong, but it's a little bit of the Wild West for sure. >> So what best practices have emerged when you're talking about the digital leader versus the digital laggards? You said they've made some investments. They have an idea of where they want to be. What're some of the other things that you've seen that really separates them from the pack? >> Yeah well, so I'm going to be a consultant just like you said, and it's all about business value and business outcome. The customers are the most successful. Have a business reason for what they're trying to do. They're not going to public cloud because Gartner said they should. They're doing it because they know they're going to get an outcome. They're going to be able to go into new markets or operate faster, deploy applications faster, things like that. And those are the ones that are further down the line, that I would say the ones that are the laggards are the ones that are just sort of peaking under the covers of what they should do. They're just starting out, they've got some workloads in multiple clouds and they need to get a handle on it, but they're just starting. >> All right, so in the keynote this morning there's a lot of talk about cloud. VMware is at the center of the strategy there, but partnering with a lot of different players out there, of course AWS wasn't talked on the stage much this morning, but we know how important that is in the VMware environment. And Microsoft was up on today. How do these new announcements fit into the discussions that you'll be having with customers? >> You know I think, customers need in a lot of ways, I hate to say it, but also an easy button for cloud. If they, often when they try to build it themselves, they bring the components together themselves, it's really difficult to do that integration work. And like you said Stu, I'm in consulting so we're all about the outcome. But this product is Dell Technology's cloud, I think is going to help accelerate for us in consulting so that they can quickly get to a state where they have a functional cloud they can start consuming. And then we can help them with the day two, to actually drive business value, consumption of the cloud and that sort of thing. But yeah I mean, I think VMware's doing a great job of reading the landscape and understanding that people are consuming AWS, they're consuming Azure. And VMware owns the data center, I think that's crystal clear. So they need to work with what the customers are using today, and I think they're doing a really nice job of that. >> I'm curious as a consultant how you are helping companies really implement these new things, because as we know, digital transformation doesn't really have anything to do with the technology. It's really about getting employees onboard and customers onboard, and thinking differently about how they get their jobs done. So how are you helping your customers think through these things? >> Yep, so we have a framework on how we approach these for multicloud and for lots of other things, where we use a methodology that we call kind of as is to be, where we kind of determine their current state, project where they're going to be in the future, build a roadmap that's actually actionable. But then I think what differentiates the methodology is we tie it to a business case. We tie it to an outcome and a financial outcome, so that executives and IT leaders can see that this is not just another IT project. They're going to get true value out of it. We build a roadmap pretty quick in three to six weeks. That's actually actionable, we build consensus, and that's how we get started. >> All right, Matt are you doing some sessions here at the show this week? >> I did one bright and early at 8:30 this morning. >> All right, love to hear about it, especially any good questions from customers. >> Yeah, so my sessions are on migrating workloads to modern data centers. So I think the way I started that was just hey, let's define the modern data center. And I said kind of, quick show of hands, who thinks your modern data center ends with the four walls of your infrastructure? And thankfully not many people raised their hands, because the modern data center is composed of your on-premise's resources, whether that's private or hybrid, but also public. So I think a lot of the questions that I've got is just how do I get there? How do I convince IT leaders to buy into this? And that's, like I said, we use our methodology to build consensus and help them get there. >> I'm curious, when you talk about the modernization, what's the role of data in there? >> Say it one more time. >> Data, how does that fit into the cloud strategy overall? >> Well, a data's another service. One of the things we've started to look at, is we talk about infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, is big data as a service, as an application that you can build into your cloud and then automatic it and orchestrate it just like anything else. So when customers or end users need to consume a data lake or something like that, they can do so using the same tools that's in frameworks that they do for other resources. >> When you're thinking about the challenges that customers face today and sort of looking ahead in terms of what you see are the future challenges, what is it that keeps you up at night? >> Ah, future, you know, cloud sprawl. The way we started this keeps me up at night because when every, and I talked to customer this morning actually, who was talking about their yearly Azure or yearly AWS spend, and the numbers were staggering and they're getting higher and higher. And at this point it's not shadow IT, this is IT leadership saying we want to drive more and more to the cloud, and they think it's quick and it's easy, and you can take your credit card and do it. But a lot of IT is not prepared to operate as a kind of OpEx instead of CapEx, and so this is a big change for him. And that's what keeps me, that's what gets me worried, is that in consulting when we come in really late to that conversation, and they're already consuming millions and millions of dollars a year in AWS or Azure services. It can be hard to right that ship. It can be hard to say okay, that's fine, you've made that investment, but let's look at what makes sense to run on premises. Let's look at what makes sense to run in different kinds of clouds and do it at an application level. >> All right, what other things at the show this week? You've been to the show for a number of years. What's exciting you, what're some of the conversations you're already hearing? So as cloud person for me, where I focus on multicloud, the announcements today were really exciting, specifically I'm kind of interested in your opinions too on the Dell EMC cloud, or the VMware cloud on Dell EMC. I think giving customers the option to consume cloud in a way that is just like public cloud, but using the same tool sets and frameworks they've been using for years, I think is compelling. You know, Virtustream has proved that that works, that that model works. And so I'm excited about that, although I'm kind of interested in your opinion, what others have said on that. >> Yeah so actually, if you listen to the keynote analysis we did this morning I'll do, but I'll frame it back as a question for you to get your thing. >> Well done. (Matt and Rebecca laughing) >> It's our show, you're not allowed to ask us questions. Chad tried to do that once. But so when the VMware and AWS partnership happened, the question we all had as industry watchers was oh my gosh, what does that mean for Dell? I feel today really started to answer that. I'm curious how you position it with customers. I'm sure you must be getting the question from customers being like, on the Dell EMC side, hey VMware and Amazon, where do you guys fit in this whole puzzle? >> Yeah, well it's funny. Someone made a comment today that the keynote today sort of answered the question of who won the Hypervisor awards? They're over, at this point I think we've conceded VMware has won that battle. And so when you think about VMware partnering with something like Amazon, to me and to Microsoft too form the announcement today, it makes perfect sense because customers that have large investments in on-premise's VMware deployments, it's a lot of work to convert that to something like a public cloud in Amazon or in Azure. So to be able to consume public cloud using AWS services on the network so it's operating at LAN speeds, but doing it with the same tools I think is compelling. So to customers that say, does this compete with you? Does this compete with Dell? I say no, this is part of the story. Multicloud is all about bringing pieces together in a common framework that we can consume all together, so. Now that doesn't concern me at all, but well done reflecting it back to me. >> (laughs) That's his specialty. >> He's been doing this a long time. >> Yeah, this is not his first rodeo. Matt Liebowitz, thank you so much for coming on the theCUBE. It was great having you. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, first Stu Miniman. We will have so much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell's World Technologies coming up just after this. (relaxing music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman theCUBE coming to you from Dell Technology Worlds 2019 day one, there's only about 15 thousand people here and about four thousand of Dell Technologies closest partners. We're very pleased to welcome back one of our Alumni to theCUBE, Chris McNabb the CEO of Dell Boomi. Chris thanks for joining us! >>u Lisa it's great to be here, Stu great to see you again. You know it's really exciting. >> This morning we've had such an electric day, I'd say we're half way through day one. This mornings key note kicked off with a lot of energy. First of all I have to say Michael Dell coming out to Queen music, that was for me you had me at hello. >> Yeah me too. After seeing Bohemian Rhapsody, it was the only way to go. >> He must be a fan of the movie! >> Exactly. >> Yeah Chris do you have your walk on music picked yet? >> I don't yet I'm still kind of shuffling through a couple different options. >> Okay well we can help with that, we're music fans too. >> Gotcha. >> But so much excitement, so much energy, so much collaboration across all of Dells brands, Michael saying with big energy, Boomi is leading with cloud data integration. Talk to us about what's going on at Boomi we were with you guys about five months or so ago at Boomi World, what's happening now, what's exciting you? >> So every day is exciting at Boomi we continue to grow extraordinarily rapidly across the world and we are focused on accelerating business outcomes for our customers, it is simple as that. It's why our customers stay with us we have over 97% retention rate so we're successful at doing that and when you can come in and produce wins for people, you know they have data silos all over the place, they need to be able to reconnect their systems, apps, databases, but also their processes, people and devices. And once you look at that whole landscape when you can come in and reunify that for them in a way in which they can engage customers, partners or employees in new ways, it's just a huge win and it's a pleasure to get up out of bed every morning without problem. >> Chris It's a powerful story I have to admit it took me a little while to kind of squint through and understand what Boomi did because a lot of times it's like oh it's the cool cloud native, new factor everything like that and we understand getting from the applications that I have today to you know whatever that digitalization, monetization, modernization I have is challenging and there's multiple ways to get there so if I can the thing that was exciting is we hear a lot you know let's meet you where you are and a lot of that is my applications and my processes, my work flow so to modernize and go through that digital transformation, some of it is to create brand new but a lot of that is how do I get what I have to that new multi cloud environment and that was the shout out I heard from Michael this morning about Pivotal, VMware, and Boomi as part of that spectrum to help get us there. Do I have that right? >> Yeah Stu you do, it's just listen, Hybrid IT is going to be here a really long time. People are going to try and survive a scenario where you've got 15 different apps built by 15 different vendors, you've got shadow databases, you've got all this stuff and you're like, but I've got customer data everywhere. So when you're looking for something as simple as a list of customers, what list? None of those data sources are the same, so how do you aggregate that, how do you filter that, how do you do it. So Boomi doesn't want people to just survive Hybrid IT, Boomi wants you to thrive in that environment, want you to really get going and be able to easily unite that, aggregate that, filter that as necessary. So now I have a unified data set in which I can go and engage my sales force and my customers with, and that's really where we play is trying to get it all to be reconnected or unified. >> It's essential everything is about the customer experience, Stu and I were just at a show that was all focused on CX but to have a good customer experience you have to have the right technologies enabling your own workforce to deliver what the customer needs because customer satisfaction yield business outcomes, it's a whole cycle there. >> Yeah. >> For our viewers who want a better vision of where does Boomi fit into you know, I'm a Dell EMC customer, I'm VMware customer, where does Boomi fit in and help these customers to transform that integration layer that allows them to take advantage of this exciting multi cloud world? >> Yeah so Lisa I'll just tell you a really quick story, I'll tell you a personal story. When Boomi has been growing very very rapidly, 62% growth through last year alone, so we're adding people really really fast. As a result of that scale we were horrible at onboarding our new employees, we had a really bad problem, so we looked to our own platform to transform our business and our net new employees experience with that business. Long story short I didn't have people, everybody was busy, I got one of our partners to use our platform to create an entire new employee onboarding process for Boomi. Our net new employee just kind of jumped to the end of the deal, we now have a 21st century engagement mechanism for our employees, that partner of ours put that whole solution together and put it into production in four months, most importantly let's talk about business outcomes. My net new employee NPS went from minus 76, worse number I've ever heard in anything, been in IT 30 years, to plus 92, six months after it's in production we're ready to go. So now to give you a sense, people used to have to fill out a case and go to our case management, fill out a case, schedule a meeting to get a picture taken to get their security badge, now selfie, do you like it, submit, you're done. And all of that, the mobile app that tracks it and performs it, all the engagement, all the interaction with all the systems, we provision our employees across 27 different systems all instantaneous, that used to take us 60 days to get them on to all those different systems. So all of those outcomes is all done with the Boomi platform, the integration requirements, the low code, and the mobile app is all Boomi. So that's why we focus on outcomes. >> So Chris in the key note this morning, want to understand how Boomi fits into some of these environments. We saw Microsoft obviously a big push, long Dell partner, and the other one Kubernetes is the area for all the cloud native discussion and various pieces. How do those fit in to your world? >> So Stu first of all to really understand sort of the bigger picture with Dell and their transformation story right, essential hardware provider, infrastructure provider, you've got VMware and Virtustrea almost making an infrastructure as a service sort of like the bottom of a triangle. You have Pivotal cloud boundary, building applications for competitive advantage right, and then no application works without data. And when you talk about it from a platform perspective that's how I like to think about it and explain it to people that's how Dell Technologies can bring all of this to the table and focus it now on your transformation. When ti comes to the specifics around what VMware and Pivotal are doing with Kubernetes and Google and some other folks and so on, the way we distribute integrations is basically via container technologies, we've had Docker Support now Kubernetes support, so it's very native to us that's how we can manage it from one spot and yet deploy really anywhere as it runs, so there's a lot of data capabilities that really align very well with Pivotal, we also have the Pivotal Data Services Tile so if you're an application developer, you're building that really cool app and oh that's ready to go but you need data from somewhere, you click the Boomi tile it's that data services tile, you can embed it right into your code, in and out comes the data sort seamlessly for you, it's a much better experience for the developer. So all of these companies are coming together to make sure these platforms align in such a way that our transform and outcome focus for our Dell technologies customers. >> We've heard a lot of that, companies coming together. Collaboration was one of the themes I took away from this mornings key note with the guys and gals that were on stage. We've heard that from Dell Technologies, Dell EMC folks, this morning, today, yourself. That collaborative effort is really clear when you're talking to customers. Speaking of collaborating with customers on the evolution and iterations and things, what were some of the, I'm curious, the theme of Boomi world was you guys were going to reinvent iPads, about five months since, you're smiling. >> Yeah. Talk to us about how you've collaborated with some of your key customers to do that, where you are today five months after saying hey, this is what we're going to do we're going to shake this up. >> The future of iPads is extraordinarily exciting, and come to Boomi world next year and we're going to tell you a really good story. But when you talk about redefining the ion iPads, going from integration platforms of service to intelligent platforms of service, and how AIML can change this game. We brought together key partners who have had extensive experience both in AIML, a lot of big public companies that you would know, as well as our customers and now you start looking at things in combination to dramatically speed up how integrations done and who's capable of doing it. I always felt like if I could get integration down into the hands of business analyst, and down into the hands of smart people but not software engineers, leave them for the really hard technical problems, the things that push your business forward, and not hey I need a data set from HR for salary reasons or whatever. And voice and combination with AI allowing you to generate and respond to natural language, hey sales force I'd like the pipeline report for Western North America please, back comes the data set and all you have to do as a user of that is form a question and humans are awesome at that they've been doing it since they were two, and when you can start to leverage that kind of capability, AIML for natural language, you figure out how to interact with it, you get patterns on how to do that that's in our database from the thousands of people that have interacted. So when we look at the future, leveraging our partners for skills that we're not expert at yet, AIML gave us a leep, customers what is it that you need us to do first? And we're starting to bring all that together In a very very interesting way. >> Alright so Chris Boomi has it's own show, but I'm sure there's a lot of overlap between the customers here. What are some of the key objectives and what's your teams goals for this week here at Dell Technologies World? >> Well this week here you know we have a lot of customers here as well, obviously in the Boomi World show we're very specific to the user community that we've got so you get a lot of tracks about specific tips and tricks that you can have and specific ways to do things, best practices, did you know we could do this, did you know that, all that kind of things. Here it's a little bit broader picture, you're dealing with a broader audience, there's more of an awareness problem in some cases some people aren't quite sure what Boomi does and why Dell Technologies has a company like Boomi, so we're here to change that from an awareness side. Got some really cool demos in how we do that, and kind of engage, and then we have our specific customers who we can pull off to the side and talk about their specific challenges. What's next for them, what're the next transformations they want to achieve and what's the next outcome they've got in line and how can we partner with them to help them achieve that. So it's really kind of a two fold kind of a thing, our booth is awareness and is there an opportunity to work together and partners, what's the next step for us. >> One of the things I heard when you shared that Boomi's personal story, the Boomi on Boomi story was the massive impacts that you've made to just the employee onboarding process and I shouldn't say just because we all know, again we talked about customer experience a few minutes ago and that's essential for any business, but to have a good customer experience you have to have successful, enabled, productive employees on all that lines, front lines, middle lines, back lines, et cetera. When you are talking with prospects who maybe are very familiar with Dell Technologies and most of the brands, how well does that story resonate that this is really fundamental integration, especially in this big hybrid multi cloud world in which we live, to have this integration as a core enabler of digital transformation, but also of employee experience, customer experience, business outcomes. >> You know Lisa a lot of times when you talk to people, like if I were to tell you the Boomi story and we had never met it's a little hard to believe that I could do that much and have that big of an impact in four months. It's kind of like oh okay, is he selling me? So a lot of times when we meet people for the first time, if we can get them to just give us a chance, we do a lot of proof of concepts with people, we're cloud software so I can give it to you right now, I could just set you up with an account in three minutes and you're off and running. So you can play with it, you can get experienced with it, you can kind of understand how we do that. Like if we have a claim that we're six times faster than Legacy providers it's like well how do you do that? Well you get a sense of how we do that, and how leverage, meditate it, we use AI to do that, we generate things for you, et cetera. So there's a bit of a awareness and then they take that Missouri side, but can you show me, I'm not sure I believe you, show me. We do that in POC's and then we can kind of really get the ball rolling. So that tends to be the general pattern that we go through with net new customers and prospects, to try and get them exposure. >> You guys have I think it's over eight thousand, over 82 hundred customers globally, you've got some big brands, you've got Lyft, you've got Sky, Chevron, GE, one of my favorite stories from Boomi World was one of your customer award winners, Digital Angel, and how they're reinventing this smart bed technology for hospitals in the Netherlands. Something I wasn't aware of before even technology in a mattress. Talk to us about how Boomi is an enabler there. >> Well it's such a great outcome story. So the smart mattress is intended for the Geriatric Nursing Home settings, and one of the biggest most fundamental problems with health care in a geriatric setting is infection with body sores, decubs, and very simply moisture is a massive cause, lack of movement is a massive cause, and it depends a little bit on age and so on but so they install the smart mattress in all the rooms, and it records and its monitoring your breaths, your perspiration, any moisture events, your heart rate, and so on, and all this data it's just spitting out data and Boomi's there to catch it. Now what Boomi does is it sits on the mattress, and just processes data and as long as everything's fine it just sort of processes it, the minute any thresholds are met, so if you haven't moved in two hours, two hours is kind of a magic number for people if you have not moved in two hours, Boomi immediately sends up an alert in the form of a case, and this case in Tampa Bay in their service now system it shows up on their board priority one case, go get Lisa and give her a nudge, get her to move around a little bit. Same with a moisture event, that's a priority one, go dry them and so on, and they've been able to dramatically reduce the infection rate for the elderly as they reside in these nursing home settings just to be attentive, they know immediately when something needs to be done and only when it's done, you don't get the false positive. So that setting to me and what Digital Angel's doing with that mattress is changing outcomes, and then Boomi just sits on all the mattresses and communicates the individual to the common nursing setting, it's great. >> Pretty powerful stuff. >> It's awesome like I said it's fun when you can make such a big outcome change for people that who you get that kind of reduction in infections in a short period of time, it's very exhilarating. >> So Chris last thing I wanted to ask is, it's addressing people always often look at the pieces of the Dell family as independent and on their own, they've got their brand their on the banner and everything, but you know we talked to Rory about and we saw on the stage this morning a lot of how the pieces are really working together from the top strategy all the way down to the field, how they're working together, give us your perspective as one of the CEO's in the Dell family as to how that's moving. >> Stu I refer to it for folks as our unfair competitive advantage, it's as simple as that. The horse power, the just sheer sort of economy's of scale, and the technical ability, the innovation and the customer first perspective that all these business bring together, as we come together and work together, we have an ability to change customers lives forever in combination and I haven't met a leader of a business that has said well wait a minute, where's my piece of the puzzle, where is this, how do I win, there are no I's when we come together. Rory running the Virtustream business and we're talking about Boomi now runs on Virtustream and as you move mission critical applications how can you get Boomi there so people can share the SAP data that's there now in Virtustream, into other parts of the organization. Talked about the Pivotal Tile, I've got some work going on with Sanjay at VMware, and it's never I, it's always how do we do more for our customers and when we do that and then you put the Dell go to market field behind it, I don't know how many there are 20, 30 thousand sales makers in Dell technologies alone doesn't include VMware and the rest of us, it's an extraordinarily powerful ecosystem that is focused on one thing, customer results. And I'll tell you it couldn't be better, as a leader of a business within there, it literally couldn't be better. >> Wow Chris that is outstanding thank you so much for sharing your perspectives -- >> My pleasure. >> And what's going on with Boomi, we look forward to seeing you at Boomi World 2019. >> Lisa I can't wait, Stu I hope you can make it this time. But thank you very much I really appreciate you having me one. >> Oh our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching us live in Vegas, day one of Dell Technology World's 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 2018, brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we've been live all day at Boomi World 2018 in Las Vegas. I am Lisa Martin with John Furrier. John, this is the second annual Boomi World, the first time theCUBE is here. We've had a great day. Started things off with Michael Dell, who I really found it very telling that Boomi, as a business unit of Dell Technologies, that the CEO of Dell Technologies comes here to kick things off this morning. What is your impression after talking with Michael and some of the folks from Boomi, what is your impression of Boomi? >> Well I think Michael Dell has talked about, he always talks the same talking points, 'cause we've done them so many times, he's got the traditional Dell business, Dell Technologies business foundation, you've got EMC merger of equals, but he's quietly been incubating some key flagship directions. One is VMware, which hasn't been incubated, it is quite a market leader in virtualization, the relationship with Amazon, so VMware is kind of its own, the main flagship. Pivotal has been really core. So he talks about VMware, Pivotal, and the portfolio of Dell Technologies. So I think for me the big takeaway from this event is that Dell Boomi is the third flagship of the kind of armada of Dell's future. So having Michael be here, he could be at VMware in Europe, in Barcelona, he's here. He sees Boomi as a core linchpin to connect into the growth of Pivotal, which has been growing off VMware, and now you've got Boomi coming up the rear, saying, hey, we could actually tie stuff together. And they solve a problem that the average productivity developer or IT person, who doesn't want to write a lot of code, they call it low code, to deliver kind of the assembly and integration of the next generation applications. So net new applications while improving existing. And this is under a category called Integrated Platform as a Service at an enterprise level. So I think Boomi is becoming a strategic part of the Dell playbook. I think that's a big surprise to me because Boomi is known, but their growth has been phenomenal, 80% numbers he said. So this has been kind of a coming out party for Boomi in the sense that this is real. >> I'm curious, though, why do you think, so the Dell Technologies companies Pivotal, RSA, VMware you mentioned, Dell EMC, Virtustream. Why is it that you think that Dell Boomi is a business unit of Dell Technologies and not one of those, part of the seven-eight standalone companies. >> Well they bought them eight years ago and it's evolving, so it's organically grown and it's on a relevant weight. The relevant weight is cloud native, cloud scale with data as a value proposition that's the scale horizontally. So from different database you want to pull that data into realtime. That's a key integration point whether it's APIs for stateless applications or having statuses with data. This is the battleground you're seeing with Kubernetes, you're seeing it with network services at the micro services level, so they solve a big problem. The rest of Dell is just a massively huge portfolio of products that solve the enterprise other problems. So why have 26 vendors, he said, when you can go to Dell and get all the basic things you need but have an enabler for the future. And that is really about having that bridge to the future and that's what Michael wants and that's what Dell's doing is just saying, look it, VMware runs your stuff and a lot of stuff around it Pivotal's going to integrate you in with cloud, cloud-native, cloud-foundry, and do all these things, and Boomi's going to help tie it all together. That's a nice value proposition, that gives customers comfort in my opinion. I think that's a good story and I think Boomi could be a big part of that piece of the puzzle. >> We heard a lot about trust today, we hear a lot about trust, John, at every event, talking about data needs to be trusted, but Dell Technologies, and Dell Boomi as well, as a trusted advisor, you mentioned the growth numbers, I think 80% last quarter that Michael Dell shared this morning. Chris McNabb, the Boomi CEO, also talked about that. But they've also grown this, it's doubled in its second year. It's gotten too big for San Francisco. They have 7,500 plus customers and counting globally. They're adding five new customers a day. One of the things that I heard pervasively throughout the day is how symbiotic Dell Boomi is with their customers, with their employees, and with their partner ecosystem. So they now come and say, with the iPaaS market, fifth year in a row as a leader in the partner MQ, but now they've come out and said today, we want to redefine the I in iPaaS. iPaaS is a well established market, they're now saying, we're going to use intelligence, and I think it was north of almost 30 terabytes of anonymous metadata, and as Michael has said a number of times, companies need to be using their data as a way to identify their competitive advantage, and they're doing that. >> That's a core value proposition and I think Boomi is undervalued in my opinion the way the market sees them because no one has yet valued how important the insights are out of it. Because people are just now starting to operationalize this notion of, well, I can get insights out of a legacy, value critical mission system in a cloud native environment. So these new value propositions that are emerging and Boomi, it's easy to say, hey, on the face of the numbers, okay, the purchase price per customer is low, but the value's high, the value of the data's high, so I think the only thing Boomi's got working against it is its own success could be a problem on the ticket. So there's a lot more revenue around Dell than what Boomi's doing on a straight product basis. They've got a great product market fit, check the box there, that's a great thing. Question is, if I'm a competitor, I could say, oh, I'm going to put them in a box, but they do more. There's so much going on around Boomi that I think Dell's smart in saying, okay, the purchase price that they're going to get in bookings revenue is x, but the value's high enough, that's why the growth is there on the sales side, but the actual contribution to overall Dell is much higher. So I think Boomi could be a very strategic piece of the puzzle for Dell. >> It really sounded like that today from Michael Dell on down. And they came out today and said boldly, Dell Boomi is your transformation partner really carrying on the theme of Dell Technologies World which theCUBE was at just about six months ago which was all about digital transformation, IT transformation, security transformation, workforce transformation. That theme at Dell Technologies World of the platform of the possible extended here with Boomi, unlimited possibilities. >> Yeah, I think people look at the cloud and then they try to figure it out and I think it's pretty clear that the SaaS business model shows the scale. But there also used to be an analogy in business where it's kind of like McDonald's or fast food and people always move from station to station. In IT people are now wearing multiple hats so you're going to see that the trend move towards multiple hats, people wearing multiple hats and managing multiple things. Boomi allows that to happen because when they do integration they don't have to go back and fix it. So you can ship it and move on to the next thing which could be another task. So I think the people management side of the culture of DevOps is a big thing. >> And Michael talked about that, the people culture, the change management. That's really challenging. And we asked him to share, well, Dell Technologies now, 34 years after he started his business in his dorm room with $1,000, probably couldn't have imagined it is becoming what it is. But this is an organization that has transformed itself dramatically, and had to transform its people and culture to, I would argue, be the fuel for that digital IT security transformation. >> It's the fuel for the rocket ship, and that's what Dell was talking about. It's very interesting to see how they play it out but I think Boomi's got some upside big time for Dell and I think that the customer traction shows that the data value in integrating fast and having that low code automation is a winning formula. It's in line with where VMware's going, it's in line with what Pivotal's doing, and it's in line with this digital transformation trend. I think that's what they're talking about. >> Well I enjoyed hosting with you today, John. I think it was a really interesting event and I love unpacking things like integration. It's so much more than that, and they did a great job of articulating that. >> We talked about Kubernetes too, when Kubernetes came out on theCUBE too. Always good to get those Kubernetes soundbites. >> We talked about blockchain as well, and how Boomi and partners are enabling customers to really take advantage of a blockchain. They're announcing some support with that. IoT, as Michael said, speaking of boom in Boomi, there's going to be a boom at the edge. Again, that was a theme from Dell Technologies World that came here today, and some of the customers, the last customer we just had on-- >> Yeah, I mean, the thing that I'd say too is Boomi's got this cool vibe going on, but remember Boomi was born in the cloud that means they're cloud native. All their stuff is cloud, so they understand the culture that they're selling into. And I think that gives Dell a cool factor here and very cool and relevant with the trend lines. So I think they've got a good opportunity. Great to host with you, great time. >> Excellent. Well, thanks John. >> Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin for John Furrier from Boomi World 18. Thanks for watching, we'll catch you next time. (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.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. You are live here on the CUBE as we're wrapping up our coverage here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We are in The Sands. We're live in Las Vegas for 14,000 plus attendees. Four thousand I think at the business partners summit. Really well attended, the solutions expos floor still crowded, and some really neat stuff inside there. Along with John Troyer, I'm John Walls, and we're joined by Doug Schmitt, who's the president of the global services at Dell EMC. Doug, thanks for joining it, we appreciate it. >> Well, thanks for having me, John. >> Yeah, let's talk about global services, alright? First off, I mean, big waterfront, right? That's pretty broad. Tell us about how you segment the responsibilities and what all that means. >> Well yeah, so the overall services family really has four groups in it. It has a consulting team, as you imagine, has an education services team, we have Virtustream, for cloud, helps manage the cloud for our customers. And then my team and I have responsibility for support, deployment services, installations, and also manage services. Good size team, in the sense of helping our customers, around 60,000 direct and indirect team members in 180 countries. >> So, say, 100 plus, right, almost 200 countries. We had somebody on from the global side yesterday and we just barely nicked into this a little bit, but I was interested what you think about it, on a global basis, at least we tend to think of the US, right, and I mean, it's US-centric. But you've got to deal with, you know, EU compliance and different kinds of governance, and of course different work cultures, different government, different governance, what have you. So, complicated, right? I mean, this is not easy stuff, to be able to bring the product to a different culture, different mindset, right? >> Well, that's, yes. I mean, what you're asking is yes, the complexity is there, which is that it really, but that's the value we bring to our customers. One is, believe it or not, the size and the scope helps us build better products. The feedback from our customers across multiple channels, whether it be through the data we get back through PhoneHome and AI helps us build better products globally, as well as help our customers. The calls we get in, social media, we're able to really aggregate that, take all that data and that information, build better products, and custom build the solutions for the regions or the countries that we're in. So there's, yes, the complexity has some minuses, but it has actually more pluses in helping us build better services, solutions, and products for our customers. >> Could you give me an idea of something you picked up from somewhere else, that turned out to be useful, across the board, or just maybe something that you hadn't thought of, whether it was some response of a customer in a different work environment, that you could apply across the board? Does anything come to mind like that? >> Well yeah, I think you look at things like WeChat in China, things like that that are occurring and how they're using both the social media, texting and all of these things about doing business and wanting services, and so that helps us build better social media platform, to listen to our customers. We take those learnings and then apply them globally very, very quickly. Those would just be one example, but you can pick that up across the product and the solution side as well. >> Doug, a couple of things you've said have already kind of sparked my imagination. I mean, support used to be, file a ticket, and if you don't have a ticket, don't bug us, right? And it was very reactive. And already you've talked about a lot of things that are proactive, both the PhoneHome capabilities and other data collection and proactive capabilities. Can you talk a little bit about how your team, you need to be digitally transformed, your customers are, you've got to be more proactive. We can't just be sitting, we can't say, have you filed a ticket, well then I can't talk to you. >> No, that's correct. No, that wouldn't work today. You know, that's exactly right. The customers' feedback to us, and we hear this resoundingly, loud and clear, is look, it's got to be proactive, it's got to be predictive, and it's got to be remote. And it's all about being fast, accurate, and keeping that up time in those environments running. So to your point, what we've really done is, we use that data to predict when a hard drive's going to fail, so if you're a customer, whether it's a server, and by the way, we've taken that technology and put it into the consumer products as well. So hey, we get ahold of the customer and let them know that something's going to fail before it fails, and that's the proactive predictive. And we're really getting that, quite frankly, from the data we're getting back on that PhoneHome, using that big data to then triangulate and build better products, better services. The other thing, though, that we've done, and we continue to do, is, not every customer on that proactive side wants to be contacted the same way. I'll use my family as an example. My daughter wants to be texted. You know, she's got to use text. My wife likes email, and my parents, by the way, still want to be called, because they want it to be explained, what's going on. And so we have to also build in the omnichannel with that predictive and that proactive capability. >> There's been an evolution in the acceptance of talking back to the vendor, you know, machines talking to machines, on prem, over the years. Are most people now at the phase where they don't consider that a security risk, or a privacy, people who didn't understand it in the early days were very careful, everybody's still very careful about what goes through their firewall, but are we at a place now where that's just part of normal? >> I think it's becoming more widely accepted. I wouldn't want to say that everybody's there yet. >> Troyer: Perhaps not the three letter agencies and a few others, things like that. >> That is correct. I mean, you know, look, it depends on the environment. By the way, and that's the key, is using that information to customize the services for those environments, right? And a little bit of, that's a good point, because that's how you want to contact or how much you can do. But we can tailor that for the customers' needs, and using that information to make sure we do that. >> Seems like there may also be a staffing, I'm interested in your staffing, because digital transformation, let's make it real, the entire industry has a interesting competency issue, in that we've got to be all main, we've got to all be current, there may be new sets of skills coming up, we certainly expect on the IT side of the house, your customers to become more skilled at new technologies. But you're in support, the support and installation side, how are you looking at training your people and upskilling your people to be able to deliver that kind of proactive support? >> Well, that's a great question. And I'll take it from two points, actually. One is, as the machine learning and the AI helps us solve what I call low complexity issues right now, moving up the stack every day, to do more complex issues, then what you find is that when customers do contact us, or we do need to reach out to them, it's usually a complex situation, right? And so we spend a tremendous amount of resources continually upskilling our talent in the remote support, deployment, as well as installation, so that they're able to handle that. So spend a lot of time with our education services team, to make sure that we're out in front of all the new technologies and the capabilities. You've heard a lot about remote and virtual learning, where we're on the cutting edge of that as well, that helps us stay abreast and up to date as well. But yes, it is going to take additional time and resources to stay ahead of that curve. We're there, but we want to make sure we stay there. >> And was that something that, I won't say you coax people on or bring them along, but help them understand that if we're on the cutting edge, you've got to be on the leading edge of the cutting edge, right? You've got to be the leader in this, right? In your workforce. I mean, how do you, I guess they're motivated, professionally motivated, right? But you do have to bring, it's culture, and you've got to create a different kind of culture, don't you? >> Well, no, you're right on that. But I think, culturally, what we've always, always had at Dell Technologies, is listening to the customer. And all 60,000 get to hear every day from our customers multiple times, so that in and of itself helps us. We're listening, we hear what the customers want, what we need to be doing to help them. That pushes us to want to stay up on that. Look, you can't be in the services industry, as you well know, without having that natural desire to want to learn, to want to help your customer, and so, look, we have to have the resources and the capabilties inside that education, but culturally, that's been built in, because we listen to the customers. >> And how different is it from the customer perspective than maybe five years ago, 10 years ago, in terms of expectation, in terms of what you, the kind of support they expect to get from you? Has that been altered as you give 'em new tools, you make 'em faster, you make 'em smarter, you make them more agile, but they also, are they turning to you for different things, or a different level of service now? >> Oh, yes, absolutely. And I think that starts with, if you look five years ago, the service was really, I'll call in when I have a problem. First, the expectation is, I want you to call us, before we have an issue, and let us know what we need to do to prevent it, and the second one is, if I do have to contact you, via multiple omnichannels, then I got to have the best and the brightest now, inside the organization. So routing and getting all of those to the right resources at the right time, right? As you're saying, the technical capabilities, the complex environments, the customers want to get to the right person quickly and accurately now, the very first time they get ahold of us. >> Yeah, so Doug, you mentioned, Dell Technologies, right? This is the first Dell Technologies World. It's no longer, I went to a few EMC Worlds, I think I was on the first CUBE back in 2010, at EMC World. That was mostly storage folks, right? Now, you've got storage folks, you've got server folks, you've got VMware here as a big presence, Pivotal was doing things. Systems are more complicated now, so it may be a two-part question, how is the show going for ya? And also, this implication that Dell Technologies is a stack, and there's a lot of IT people now that have to cover more of the stack, and how does that affect your job in terms of complicated cross-rack systems that are pinging back home and need help? That's about three questions in one. >> I think there's a few in there, right? Well, first of all, I think that when talking to the customers, and being here at Dell Technologies World, what we're hearing is actually confirmation on the proactive, predictive, remote support, and also getting to the correct talent very quickly, as you've mentioned, and the education and capabilities of the team. So that's good, because they're validating that. But more specifically to your question about, how does that translate into the real world, to how we're delivering? Well, first of all, with that information coming back and being remote, we can get it to the correct people very quickly. So, yes, it would be far more complex five years ago if we didn't have that technology, wasn't there for us. Now we know we who we need to get it to and who the best person is to solve the problem. And that's really what we're using, and transform to, is that technology helps us get it to the right place at the right time to solve the customer's issue. >> And where do you see yourselves going? As technology evolves, right, demands change, expectations change, global services is going to change. Can you make any kind of, give me a crystal ball prediction here about, this is where we're going to have to be in two or three years out, in terms of meeting that custom demand and wherever they are and whenever they want it. >> Well, yes. Well, look, we talk about transformation and making it real here at Dell Technology World, but we're living that every day as well, right? So we're helping our customers with it, and look, the transformation doesn't just, it's not just something we talk about externally. We're doing that internally, as you're saying, to stay ahead of the market, helping our customers with the transformation. And so as we look forward to that, from a services perspective, what we realize is look, that complexity and the speed is going to pick up. We know that we have to continue to use that big data, as Michael said, is the fuel, we know that's the fuel to provide better service, better products. We want no daylight between services, our engineering and product teams, and sales. And we're using that information to make sure we build better products, that we provide better solutions and better services, faster, to our customers, and we're also using that information and giving it to the sales teams so they can go out into our customers' environments and help them with their transformation. >> And what's the challenge for you in making all that happen? Everybody's got a nut to crack, right? Everybody says okay, this is, so for you, if there's a next hurdle or next barrier for you to get over to be able to deliver on that, what would that be? >> Well, we're using the data today that we have, which is very rich, and we're transforming that into solutions for our customers, but look, that data is, we're getting more of it every day, making sure that we don't obsess about the data, that it doesn't control us, that we're using it, right? I mean, that's part of this, is you definitely want it to be the fuel, but you got to aim it the right way. And I think that's the key, is making sure that we get that pointed in the right direction. >> As you're doing this kind of thing, I'm kind of curious about hiring, right? What kinds of roles are you looking for, to bring in, that can do that? 'Cause that's very sophisticated, data scientist perhaps, that's pulling in people from engineering, you must be able to, are you able to pull on from the rest of the organization like that, or who are you looking for? >> Yes, I've talked about real time questions, right? We could be talking about that one for hours. The answer is yes, and that is a good point. If you look at services now, compared to five years ago, it's hiring data scientists, it's hiring the analytics and the deep analytics folks that can help program. I mean, all of this comes together, right? And so we're working very closely with the schools globally to pull those scientists in, and that's a big hiring competency that we've been focused on for the last four years, and we're going to continue that, we see that continuing down the road. >> Well Doug, thank you for the time. We appreciate you telling the global services story. Great show. And we wish you continued great success, and I assume it's been a really, really good week for you, too, right? >> It has been an outstanding week, so thank you. >> Walls: Excellent, you bet. >> Appreciate having me. >> Joining us from Dell Technologies World 2018, you are watching us live from Las Vegas on the CUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018, the inaugural Dell Technologies World event. Have two sets side by side, three days of broadcast. I'm Stu Miniman, joined with my cohost for this segment by John Troyer. >> Happy to welcome back to the program John Byrne, who since the last time we caught up with has a new title now, the North American Commercial Sales at Dell EMC. John thank you for joining us. >> Pleasure. Good to see John, John and Stu thank you. >> All right John, what are you doing here? Isn't it almost like the end of like financials? On the road, everything like that. But, yeah, tell us a little bit about kind of the change in role and what that meant for you. >> Yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of amazing. I was only here a year ago and here I was talking about bringing together Dell EMC's brand new channel. And we're very proud that we're talking about then it was a $35 billion organization. Here we are 12 months later, $35 billion to $43 billion channel organization, which is spectacular. And it's all thanks to our wonderful partner community and what they did. They were the ones that helped us with our vision, our strategy. The wonderful program that the team has developed, and we're seeing it unfold. That's been an incredible journey. And now one of the good things is obviously when we were building this initiative there was a power of and. We want both motions to continue to go, direct and channel. And you saw the results, both are growing. So obviously my new role and I've been asked to run North America Commercial Sales under Marius Haas, by Michael and Marius. >> I'd like to dig into it a little bit. I spoke to Marius on Monday, actually in our kick off this morning, talking about kind of EMC channel and sales and Dell channel and sales, a little bit different. I mean, EMC had a great channel, has a great channel continuing, but very much considered belly to belly as how they do that. Dell has been a little bit more partner and channel focused for longer. So I'm wondering, give us a little bit of insight. So you had the channel piece, you've had the sales piece. We hear things like, oh there's turning a direct rep into now he's more of an overlay. Through a little bit of those dynamics, what's happening from the sales standpoint and the impact on the channel. >> I think we got to remember the channel is an important wheel to everything we're doing here. With Dell Technologies we have 40,000 sales makers. Within our channel ecosystem we have 140,000 people. That is a sales army. They've gone after the market with the portfolio that we have, with the capability that we have, frankly done properly is unstoppable. And actually educating how both rose to market, how we want to play with one another. We look at, it is the power of and, and especially as we go through these transformational journeys and we're talking about digital and IT and workforce security, but we need everyone to play here. The wonderful news is, you saw, and I'm sure you have from Michael, a year ago we're a $73 billion organization. Within a year we're $80 billion organization. Phenomenal growth. However, the exciting thing for me, that's in a $3 trillion market. So 2.66%, that is so much upside for us, for all of us, that look, done properly, we're going to win is the general feeling. >> It's a pretty remarkable transformation. I mean transformation has been a theme of the whole show here, right? Digital transformation, make it real. You've been involved with both channels and Dell EMC sales. The role of the technology trusted advisor has changed over the last few decades. How are you approaching both your field force and the channel and your partners there, about this new role of how do we make digital transformation real in the field? What kind of upscaling do you need to be doing? And competencies do we need to be working on for folks that are listening that might be out in the field working directly with customers? >> We've all been in the industry for a long time. You think, rewind 10 years ago, you talk about technology, you talk about IT it was a call center. You fast forward to now it's a business imperative. You know when we're talking to our customers they clearly they want to get ahead of this transformational journey. However, we know then that less than half of them have already begun the journey. Here's the good news, those that have begun the journey, here's what we know. They're moving faster, their customer satisfactions are up. They're driving incremental revenue. The costs are going down. They're driving their incremental operating income. And I think what you're seeing here, right here right now, it is no longer this discussion around the transformational journeys. Making it real is here. You're seeing like AeroFarms. You're seeing McLaren onstage talking about bringing Formula One all the way through to medical. You're seeing TGen and a wonderful, wonderful company with the capability using technology to identify cancer earlier in children. I mean, that is what our purpose is all about. Now with that of course you have to evolve your own sales organization as well as your partner ecosystem. And we're treating our partners and their sales teams as exactly one in the same. So the way they're training and all the competencies that we'd expect of our own sales team is exactly what I'm expecting from our partner community. Like, it's an evolution we're going through here. Our sales team, we're training them on these transformations. We're showing them a purpose, how we're going to do it, but the other thing was more exciting for myself. We're also targeting the next generation of sales leaders. You know, working with universities. We want these top graduates to come here, to enjoy this wonderful company and what we're doing here. So now we're investing in people. We actually set up sales universities here in the US. It can be a three month program, it can be a two year program, spending anywhere between, up to almost $400,000 on a graduate coming through so that they understand exactly that the transformations are just natural in their DNA. That's what we're looking for right now. >> I love that, and Stu I love, I mean we both have a history with the Dell Technologies organizations over the years, and I'm impressed by how many people that I have met that are either long-term employees or have left and come back, right? And that investment in the people has got to be critical for your growth, especially at this size. >> Yeah, I think, John, we've gone beyond the, hey, what do you do and how do you do it, right? And now it's like what is your purpose? Our purpose is to impact human lives each and every single day. And I gave you some examples. But look, our ability using technology to connect more people around the world. Our ability to actually use technology to live longer, for us to identify, again, cancer earlier in people. That purpose is inspiring. And then you learn we're spending four and a half billion dollars in R and D to bring world class products and capabilities to the market. Done properly and with that true transformational mindset, as well as not forgetting that there's a massive market on IT infrastructure and the consolidation and winning in that space. Like I think we're, we as a collective community along with our customers we're praying to do wonderful things. >> All right, so, I want you to bring us inside your customers. So you've got North American Commercial Sales. Big market. Probably one of the most dynamic changing markets in the globe these days. what are some of the biggest challenges you're hearing from your customers who talk about digital transformation, make it real. What is your organization hearing while they're out there. >> Well also, actually you talk about North American Commercial Sales. I didn't frame it, where I work $19, $20 billion of the organization. >> Stu: Just a small piece. >> Just a small piece, but of course within we have state and local, we have education, we have federal government, we have the media and business space. Each of them all realize this digital transformation is here. And the conversation they're having with us is how do we get ahead of this, right? What experiences have you enjoyed yourself as an organization or with your partner ecosystem to make it real to them. So we're spending a lot of time with them in our executive briefing centers with our solution architects, showing well how to we enable the AeroFarms that we just talked about? It's really making a real (mumbles) conversation that we're having with them. Now there's the other edge spectrum of our customers, which is look, we want to continue to sell an unbelievable amount of PCs, and unbelievable amount of servers and storage and hyper-converge, and backup. So we have the wide spectrum. The good news is the conversation normally goes to let me tell you about Dell Technologies Advantage. Why did Michael spend $24 billion taking us private? $67 billion giving us all this wonderful array of assets. And as you walk them through these transformational journeys the normal response is oh my goodness, I did not know you did all of that. And then, okay, I'm not ready yet to go all the way there. But the comfort that you have it, okay let's begin a discussion. And that's what we're finding with a lot of our customers right now. >> All right one of the things, look you mentioned so many of the verticals there, and the commonality amongst most of them is change. Talk a little bit about the training, competencies, you know, your organization, how do you keep up? How do you help your customers keep up? >> Yeah, like, what is, change your dye it's kind of the mantra right now. We are spending an unbelievable amount of time on training. But with training also you acquire a lot of consistency. It's interesting we were here only two months ago for our field ready seminar, our sales kickoff. The feedback from our sales team was wow this seems very similar to last year. (mumbles) good. You got to learn these transformational journeys. Gone are the days of just going in and selling a single unit of product. You have to become the trusted advisor. So with that all of our training, all of our competencies are around understanding each of the transformations, how do you layer in Pivotal and Virtustream, and VMWare, and RSA, and SecureWare, and of obviously Dell EMC. How do you bring all of this together? And then also making it very clear to our sales team, This is my expectation of your role. This is what I expect you both to do. And here's the specialty teams that are around here, around you, to make you successful. So we have the training. It goes on every, actually it's consistent training, but two big ones per year. And with (mumbles) partners they've got to do exactly the same thing, that's what we're saying. >> John, as you and your sales leaders go out and talk to IT and you know, you're not, again in the field, you're way beyond oh check the box to order a new round of laptops or a new round of servers, right? Or server refresh. As you talk to the CIOs out there and the senior IT leaders, where are we in this transition? Are they getting it? I guess it's quite a range of responses. >> It really is, look some are already there. But are we there? Absolutely not. I think we're in single, we're more or less single digit. But again, when those CIOs, when they see, are you telling me look I can not only modern infrastructure, I can actually save money by getting to the modern infrastructure and I can layer in insights into my business using your technology, be it big data, be it AI, and I can yield more profitability at the end of it? You find them all in. But they're all in different levels obviously of expectation. >> Are there any characteristics of an organization that is either, is going or is ready to go that you see? >> I wouldn't say, here's what I will say. If you look across all of our transformations, VMWare is always consistent. I will tell you security remains a big theme. The other thing we've found is, again, as we get through these transformational discussions, the starting point still tends to be client. The client still seems to be the gateway to the data center for us. And I think you're also seeing, a lot of times we're also seeing, now everyone recognizing the workforce, the workforce has changed forever. Gone are the days when we remember sitting at a desk from nine til five. Look people are working remotely, people want to be reductive. They want to always be on. And I think that's why you're seeing this resurgence in the PC market. If you look now we've got 21 quarters of consecutive share gain, number one in the world on units, on revenue. Number one on profitability. Number one on server, number one on storage. Obviously number one with VMWare. That's consistent is they want to be dealing with Dell Technologies. >> John I want to give you the final word on key takeaways from the show. But I have to take away a couple things. Yes it does rain in Vegas, and you know, people, you know, playing at events, so other than those two things, what do you hope that people come away from from Dell Technologies World 2018? >> I hope people, well a few things. One, I hope they understand our purpose. We are and we have a desire to impact human life each and every day, by being the essential infrastructure. There is no longer buzz words around these transformational journeys. It's here. You can feel it, you can see it, there's real proof points. I think it's also clear these two motions that are happening. Mass consolidation of IT infrastructure, we want our customers and our partners to leave with Dell Technologies. And as you go through this transformational journey there is only one company who has all of the portfolio to satisfy all the needs, and it's Dell Technologies with the support of our customers and partners, and I'd be remiss if I don't always end by just saying, thank you. None of this is possible without wonderful customers supporting us on this journey. So that's (mumbles). >> All right, John Byrne really appreciate catching up with you. Look forward to catching up with you in the future. Hope you keep this job a little more than a year this time. >> I need to. John, thank you as well, thank you. >> I'm Stu Miniman with John Troyer. We'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and about about 14,000 other people that are here live in Las Vegas. We're joined by a couple of folks from Dell EMC. We've got CUBE alumni Beth Phalen, President of Data Protection Division. And Sharad Rastogi, Senior Vice President of Product for Data Protection. Great to have you guys on the program. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So day one, very high energy keynote talking about four ways in which companies that are going to be successful can transform. Security, workforce, digital, IT. Beth, what are some of the trends in IT that you're seeing now in relation to data protection? >> Yeah, data protection is transforming in the same way that the rest of the IT environment is. The move towards simplicity, automation, converged infrastructures, hyper-converged infrastructures, all playing out in data protection. And it's a really hot and dynamic market right now, so there's a ton of interesting things going on. And of course, y'know we, like the rest of IT, is thinking how to help our customers best take advantage of the Cloud. >> Well, speaking of the Cloud, how has Cloud affected your business generally, and specifically, how are you responding? >> Yeah, I mean, I think Cloud is going to be a massive trend and we're already seeing that, right, and I think that really two dimensions of how the change is happening. One, I think is, just the workloads are migrating from on-frame to Cloud and we are really helping our customers save and store more data in the Cloud and do better disaster recovery from the Cloud. At the same time, y'know, people are thinking about lifting and shifting their existing workloads to the Cloud, and also having more Cloud-Native applications, how do you sort of protect that, right? So we're doing a lot of work in terms of and how those trends happen and how we help them. At the same time, with the Cloud, data protection itself is evolving, right? It's no longer just about protecting the data, but it's also about compliance and visibility, it's about governance of the data, it's really about management, making it available, so those are trends in which I think, this industry is going to basically evolve over time. >> I mean one of the challenges with data protection and generally backup specifically, it's always been an afterthought, always with bolt-on. I got one size fits all. The industry obviously has been very much aware of that and working hard to address that, is it a, what's the fix? Is it software? Is it hardware? Is it mindset, process? I wonder if you could address that, Beth. What are customers doing to make data protection y'know more resilient? >> I think making sure that data protection is tightly integrated with their applications. So whether you're the VM admin or the database admin, you don't want to have to have some other interface to go to, it just has to be a natural extension of what your day to day job is. So as we work to make our products very well integrated with the end applications and at the same time give that overall visability and governance, we can meet both needs. >> So automation is part of that, obviously, unlike my iPhone where the backup never works. (chuckles) I have to go manually initiate it, even though it's supposed to work that way, but so where does automation fit? >> So we really want to automate and simplify the workflows for data protection, right? Y'know make it very easy for our new users like the VM admins, the database admins, the Cloud admins. Y'know, how do you make it easy for them to protect the data? How do you, sort of, create role-based access for them? So, y'know, we're really simplifying and amplifying that as we go forward. >> So I want to touch, Beth, for you, on security transformation. I was mentioning earlier, Michael Dell talked about those four transformative elements that businesses need to undertake to be successful. And security transformation is one of that, but what does security transformation actually mean? If we look at, and one of the things Michael Dell also said in the keynote is, y'know, obviously proliferation of data keeps growing and growing and growing, as do attack surfaces. So how does a company leverage data protection not as an afterthought, like you were saying, or a bolt-on as it was before, but as part of a strategy to actually transform from a security perspective? >> I mean data protection can make sure that, data protection helps ensure that they can get to their data after something happens. So you can protect all that you want, there's still no 100% guarantee that you're going to be able to keep the malware out. So with things like cyber recovery, we're able to give customers the confidence that they're going to have a good copy of their data, independent of what happened to them. So it's really the flip side of the coin of security you have to provide security, you also have to provide confidence. You're going to be able to recover if you are attacked. >> So ransomware has obviously been a big topic in the news last, y'know couple years, y'know the prescription was always well, create an air gap and then you talk to the guys, y'know the black cast on his eye and he says, "Air gap, I get through that no problem." So what are your customers doing? Obviously it's a big concern of a lot of executives, comes up in the board room, what do you guys recommend? >> So I think this is actually, you're absolutely correct, it's a big board level conversation today about how do you protect your most mission critical most valuable data? And, yes, there are attacks, yes, there are threats, but really it's about how do you recover back to a stable, steady state? And y'know air gaps are valuable, I mean they do prevent you from external threats and with our cyber recovery solution, y'know we're actually helping our customers think about first, about what is your most mission critical data? And then how do you sort of protect it and how do you make it available, y'know if and when that disaster does strike you? And make it easy for you to recover back to your steady state? >> And I would think part of that is your response mechanism and the process by which you respond, how quickly you can respond. Does Dell EMC play a role in that process part of it? And what role do you play? >> Yeah, I mean absolutely. So y'know the, what's most important in a cyber recovery is that you get back to a safe state, right? It's a little bit different than a classic disaster recovery y'know where you have weather or some other event which is striking that, right? So what's different in cyber recovery versus classic DR is that you actually have a little bit more time but you want to get back to the right steady, safe state. So you also do a lot of checking of the data, you sandbox the data, you make sure it's actually all safe there's no external malware in there, you protect it and then you make it available in the recovery, where you do need to. So it's a little bit different than a classic disaster recovery. >> Right. >> So I was looking on the Dell EMC website the other day and saw a couple of stats that I'd like to get some insight on from a real world customer perspective. And I read that Dell EMC protects 150 petabytes of data in the Cloud and 2X more data in the Cloud is managed by Dell EMC Technology than the closest competitor. Give us an example, Beth, of a customer that you've really helped to facilitate resiliency, really this theme of business resilience. >> So, absolutely, and especially working with Virtustream, customers are able to seamlessly extend their data domain storage capacity into a Cloud. And so by setting up their Clouds here, data domain will automatically, based on a time policy move backups into that Cloud, into the Cloud configuration. One customer that comes to example is in the medical field, you can imagine both the importance or privacy and the importance of retention of records in the medical field and so they come to mind as somebody who's really taken advantage of being able to do Cloud tiering to keep their TCO down, but at the same time meet their requirements around record retention. >> All right, so takeaways? From Dell Technologies World? What should we know? What do you want your customers to take away from this event? >> I think, number one, I'd say y'know for data protection there is a huge value in terms of low-cost, high performance, y'know those are key requirements that remain. Simplicity, flexibility, are also very important and they're coming. And then finally I would say that, think about Cloud workloads and how you use the Cloud to better protect your data? >> Okay and then, Beth, I wonder if we could ask you, what should we be watching over the next y'know near-term, mid-term, even long-term, if you want to throw that in there, from Dell EMC? >> One, you're going to see us bringing even more products to the market that are easy to deploy, easy to configure, easy to use. In all kinds of new and exciting creative ways. And, two, as people's data sources become more and more disparate and they're moving to Sass and using a Cloud-Native environment, we will continue to be working with our customers to make sure they can still protect their data. So we're going with our customers on that Cloud journey. >> Well thank you guys so much for stopping by and sharing with us some of the trends in IT where data protection's concerned, the innovation that Dell EMC is doing and how you're helping customers to really embark on a successful security transformation. >> Yeah. Thanks, Lisa. >> Great, thank you so much. >> Great talking to you. >> Thank you! >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, we're live in Las Vegas, day one of Dell Technologies World. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (light electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Dell Technologies World. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, break it all down. Stu, this is our ninth year at Dell, EMC, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies World. >> Yeah, I mean Dave, and Old EMC World was one of the first places I met you. I think it was like 2008 or something like that. There was like a little blogger lounge. >> Yeah, this is 15 for you, I think it's 11 or 12 for me. >> Stu: Yeah. >> So it's been quite a run. I mean you remember the early days of this event. It was really a technical show. And I think that's probably why it's had such staying power. Because the roots are embedded in technology, but wow what a long way we've come. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, Dave, theCUBE, oh my god, I can't believe, double set here. We were looking at photos of us shoved in the corner with horrible lighting and no good cameras, and we've got a massive crew here. You're always looking sharp as usual, Dave. >> Thank you Stu. (laughing) >> Yeah, I mean gosh, that first year, I was wearing a vendor polo. (laughing) No hoodies back then. I wear a hoodie some now. But it's interesting for me, especially, since I spent 10 years working at EMC. I've been at Dell World for four or five years, kind of the mash up of those two is the biggest tech merger we've been covering since it was announced. This show has a lot of Dell overtones. So you and I have been that, Dell World was originally that CIO event. You had people like Bill Clinton and Elon Musk up onstage here. At this show we've got people like Walter Isaacson up onstage, I love reading his books, listen to the podcast. >> Dave: Andy McAfee. >> Andy McAfee, who you and I have interviewed a few times, talking about the second machine age, so some of those kind of high-level business issues as opposed to the deep in the portfolio, Dave Donatelli upstage walking through 37 different product announcements. >> So back then did you have hair or was this... >> Yeah, come on Dave, I was, when I started at EMC I was 7 foot tall and had hair. You know, the years of tech beat me down. >> So let's look at this merger, Stu. We go back, we've said, you and I have talked about this a lot. It was inevitable. You had Amazon coming in hard, driving margins of the enterprise down. Something had to happen to HPE, something had to happen to EMC, these infrastructure companies, and we said at the time that what we were going to see is 19% gross margin company married to the 16% gross margins company, come somewhere together in the low 30s gross margin. That's exactly what we've seen. The thing that's a little bit surprising to me is we've seen growth out of Dell. I've seen a lot of growth out of many enterprise infrastructure companies that are large and incumbents. Obviously people like Pure Storage grow very quickly. But at the time the merger we pinned them at slow 70s and they're now $80 billion, and we want to break that down a little bit. But did the growth surprise you? Particularly the client side grew. And the storage side declined multiplicitously. >> Dave, as you've been breaking down and I've been watching you, half of their business is the client side, and when they call out 21 consecutive quarters of growth, well if half the business has grown, that's good. And VMWare, doing well. We just interviewed Pac Elsinger. You know, VMWare's clicking well, integrating with the cloud. There's a lot of change there. Just one quick thing, talk about EMC. For me, one of the saving graces for EMC is they never bought a large services organization. You know, back in the day it was like, oh they were going to buy Accenture. There were some of these things. You look at the companies that have 100,000 services people, they're having to trim down, they're having to spin things out. You know the Dell spin merge, is Dell did spin off per row. So, while there have been some consolidation and some reductions since Dell and EMC have come together, you know, overall they're growing, there's good, there's new areas that they're putting R and D together. >> Just to give our audiences a little sort of overview in case you're not that familiar with what Dell has become, Dell Technologies, I mean, essentially you're looking at an $80 billion business. The core client side and infrastructure of the enterprise side comprised about 69 billion. VMWare's almost 8 billion, and then other, you know RSA, and well, whatever was back then pivotal before the IPO, etc., you know, Dell Financial, etc., was about 3 billion. That gets you to 80 billion. As you said, the client side is about half of the business. It's growing very nicely at about 7% a year, and it's about five and a half, 5.6% operating income. The ISG business, which is the core of, the classic EMC, all the server stuff, all the networking stuff. It's about, let's see 30.7 billion, almost 31 billion. The servers and networking side are growing at 20% a year. The storage is declining quite significantly. Double digits, they're sort of moderating that decline. And it's a higher percentage operating income, as percentage of revenue about 7%. You'd like to see that significantly higher. Now you go to VMWare, right? VMWare is 10% of the company's revenue but it accounts for half of the company's operating cash flow because it's margins, operating margins, are way up, high 20s, low 30s-- >> Yeah, I mean Dave, it was, I remember VM World, I think it was two years ago, I went to Michael, I'm like, "Michael, people think you're going to sell that off." And he was just foaming at the mouth. He's like, "They're stupid, they don't understand math." >> Dave: Well why would he? >> You know VMWare absolutely-- >> I mean, there's a 35% operating margin business, I mean it's a fantastic business. >> Dave, to be honest, everybody watching, is VMWare went through a little bit of a downturn. You know, the show two years ago wasn't great. >> Dave: Okay, right. >> But you know, NSX is now cooking, vSAN's doing great. There's lots of good areas that they have there. And the cloud picture. I mean turn back three years ago, Dave, VMWare was making statements like, when the old bookseller wins we're losing. EMC on their side was kind of trying to play a little bit with public cloud, but it was well understood in the field, public cloud is your enemy. And the market has matured. It understood that companies are figuring out their cloud strategy and their application and data strategy. And it's not a winner take all, zero sum game, everything goes to one of the top three or four public cloud players. >> So I got to ask you, so you feel as though that's sustainable, right? 'Cause I got to say, if I were AWS I would be looking at this saying this awesome. I need to get into the enterprise. I got to deal with the number one enterprise infrastructure player in VMWare in terms of its brand and its presence. I mean half a million customers, I think, is the number. I'm very excited. The flip side of that is the reality is, that deal for VMWare has been a huge tailwind for them. So help us square that circle. >> Yeah, and Dave, it's nuanced and complicated. Because when I talk to service providers, when I talk to the channel partners here with VMWare and with Dell, they're all starting to work more and more with VMWare. So you know, short-term, next two to three years, I think there's a great tailwind for VMWare to get involved here, but my concern is long term that people get on Amazon and they say, this is great and look at all these services and all of these things, maybe I don't need to pay for my server virtualization anymore. Maybe I don't need some of those pieces. What do I need in my data to center, sure I'll continue, but it's slowly declining like you mentioned. Storage is on a bit of a decline overall. So it's death by 1000 cuts. It is that replacement. For me it's always watching that data and that applications. It is tough, like super tough. David Floyer always say migrations, don't do 'em. You're going to go through so much pain, especially things like database migrations. But it is something that's happening. It's going to take the next five to 10 years as we look at these shifts. People are building new apps all the time. That tends to favor the public clouds, and there's so much happening in that space, but you know, the whole Dell family including Pivotal and VMWare, Virtustream, RSA, there are places where they win and still do well because, remember of course, none of these companies, it's not like they have 75% market share. So you know, if you ask Michael Dell, number one thing is he wants to take market share from HPE, and if he continues to take some of their market share it can help offset some of the things that he's losing to the public cloud. >> And well you have to take market share in a market that's not growing that fast. But you know, as we say on theCUBE many times, these disruptions are not binary, right? We still have mainframes for example. In fact, they're helping their tailwind for IBM right now. So you can put forth a scenario where yeah, a lot of these cloud native apps are going to be built in AWS and a lot of VMWare customers are going to do that, but as we often say, organizations can't just take their data and stuff it into the cloud, the public cloud, right? They've got to bring the cloud operating model to their data, to their business. We ask Pat, is it just use case specific, the Amazon Cloud and IBM I guess as well, or is it really bringing that cloud experience. And you know, he definitively said it's both, and I presume you buy that? >> Yeah, and I mean, Dave I listened to Michael DEll's keynote, and he said their goal is to integrate from the edge to the multi-cloud world. There's things that I want to understand this week. You know, I talked to some of my, you know, the real pellor heads here, that do really advanced type of technology. There are sessions here on containers. There's probably people talking about serverless here at the show. So they're looking at those next generation things, especially the VMWare side of the house is there. At the edge, you and I got to hear really the IoT strategy that Dell laid out towards the end of last year. Edge, absolutely huge opportunity, and there is no clear leader today because it's very early here, so how real are some of these opportunities to really expand beyond the traditional market because look, Dell's doing great in servers, that's the core of their business. It's the main driver for a lot of it, and you know, as Michael's happy to say, he said, "You know, hey, the PCs "and laptops are still doing well "two decades after IBM called it the post PC world." >> Thank goodness for client side. I mean that has been the savior here. What do you think, I mean you were at EMC for a number of years. What do you think happened to the storage side? That was a surprise to me because EMC is very rarely, if ever, a lost share in storage. They've either held share or bumped it up, doing acquisitions and so forth. But you had kind of Tucci with his hand at the wheel, doing tuck-in acquisitions, really focused on maintaining that share. Do you think it was just the disruption of the merger? Was it just inevitable that you had just the storage business getting too long in the tooth? What happened? >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, and there are so many things. Everything from the quarter shifted. So you know, it was going to take the end of quarter, which EMC always had a huge hockey stick on, shifted by a month. So some of it it was just financial where it landed up in the quarter, some of the big shifts that are happening in the market. EMC was very early on flash and did well in it, and they've got the VMAX and they've got the XtremeIO, and they're doing well there, but there's lots of competition there. Hyperconverge, once again, Dell and EMC doing great there. But there are some of these macroshifts and clouds eating away at it. So I don't have a single answer. There's so many different pieces. You know, storage has always been a knife fight. One of the things I want to understand this week, Dave, is the old EMC, well, we're going to have nine or 17 different products, and they'll all overlap. You wonder if Dell is, I really expect that Michael Dell, Jeff Clarke are going to streamline that portfolio. Profitability, make sure that they're getting the market share that they need because the old model might have worked in a growing market, but in a flat to slightly negative market it's not going to make much sense. >> And you already said that, I mean you made the point, Michael's keynote, the keynotes generally this morning, no question had Michael's fingerprint on them. That's much more like a Dell World than a traditional EMC World. We had Jeremy and Jonathan coming out on motorcycles and all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, much more staid. I think conservative, sending a message of steady. We're here for you to support your digital transformation. We are your infrastructure partner, so I mean, I think it's clear who's running the company. Alright, Stu, well, looking forward to this week. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, double CUBE sets, check out thecube.net for all the live coverage. Check out siliconangle.com, wikibon.com as well for all the research. We'll be back right after this short break. We're live at Dell Technologies World 2018.

>> Narrator: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's the CUBE, covering ACG Silicon Valley Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the CUBE, we're at the ACGSV, the 14th annual Grow! Awards, Mountain View California. They're just about ready to pull everybody into the keynotes and we are able to squeeze in one more interview. Excited to have Christian Kim, SVP of sales from Dell EMC. Christian, great to meet you. >> Thank you Jeff, good to be here. >> Absolutely, so you know, Dell, EMC merger took place about a year and a half of so ago, seems like it's doing really well, we'll have Michael on next week; we'll be at Dell Tech World in Vegas. >> Excellent. >> And so you're out on the front line, you're out in the sales role. How's it going out there? What's going on with the merger? How are customers digging it? How do you like having all those extra resources at your disposal? >> Well, I would say Jeff, it's a great question. The integration and the merger has gone exceptionally well, in my opinion in our first year. I think when you put the two big companies together like that, generally there's going to be a few bumps in the road but I would say the reception from our customer base has been very positive. I think the biggest thing that we see is, just the whole "better together" message, that all of the resources from the strategically aligned businesses like Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, Vmware, VirtuStream, RSA, and SecureWorks all working together to support the customers. >> Pretty amazing group of companies. We've just had Pat on a little while ago, you know, there was a lot of concern a couple years ago, 'what's going on with Vmware?'and they've really done a great job kind of turning that around, getting together with Amazon and that partnership RSA was last week, 45,000 people. Hot, hot hot in the security space and obviously Pivotal just did their IPO, right, last week. >> They did, yes. >> So you guys are in a good space, I mean, I remember when Michael first went private you could tell he was like a kid in a candy store, right, as he's talked about the '90-day shot clock' they didn't have to worry about it anymore. And so, you know, having an aggressive founder as the leader, I think really puts you guys in a great position. >> It does. When the founder's name's on the building, I think generally it sets a good tone for the culture and the objectives for all of the employees across Dell Technologies. >> And he's such a real guy, right? He tweets all the time, he's really out there and I always find it interesting that there's certain executives that like to tweet, that like to be social. Beth Comstock is another one that comes to mind. Pat tweets a little bit when he's really doing some of his philanthropic things, Michael does as well. And then you have other people that are scared of it, but Michael really wants to be part of the community, he tweeted out today his condolences around the crazy tragedy up in Toronto, so it's really nice to have a person running the organization. >> Yeah, he's a very active CEO and Chairman. Likes to be in front of customers, very involved with the employee base, I couldn't ask for anything more. >> Alright, so we're almost out of time, priorities for 2018, we're, hard to believe, a third of the way through, what are some of your priorities, what are you guys working on, what's top of mind? >> I'd say our priorities are certainly customer focused, focusing on business outcomes, the four areas that we really drive and work closely with our customers on are all about digital transformation, IT transformation, security transformation, and workforce transformation. Those are the big things for us this year. >> It's a good place to be. >> Thank you very much Sir. >> Well Christian, we've got to leave it there, they're shooing everybody into the keynote room so thanks for taking a minute. >> You got it. My pleasure. >> He's Christian Kim, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching the CUBE from the ACGSV Awards, Mountain View California. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special presentation of theCUBE here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program Mike Apigian. Mike's senior director of education services at Dell EMC. Mike, great to talk to you. >> Thanks, Stu, thanks for having me. >> Talk about careers, you talk about jobs. When you're talking to partners and end users, what are some of the biggest concerns they have, especially, you know, how do things like skillsets and training fit into it? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, it's twofold, really. Part of it's the technology and how the technology industry's changing so fast, and, to your point, needing to keep up with that, which is blistering. That's definitely a big challenge we look to address. And then the other part of it is just time, time in the day, and the ability to get out of work to train. That's actually driven a big shift in the industry to different ways of learning, different types of learning experiences that don't require someone to be in a physical classroom all the time. >> I have to imagine that that's the case. Tell us, what's the state of certification these days? You know, there's always debates in the industry. It's like, "Ah, have I just had the same certification "for the last 20 years, "and I just kind of go through the rote?" Or, "What am I learning on the job, "how are my certifications changing?" You mentioned remote versus there. What's the industry look like these days? >> There is a big focus, as there always has been, around certifications on specific technologies, vendors products, and obviously at Dell EMC, we have a big focus, there. We have portfolio certifications to meet that need. But what we see in the market and hear loud and clear from our customers is that, with all the change going on and the change driving, IT professionals need to be skilled, knowledge, proficient in much more than specific products and technologies. It's really the connection across multiple demands. Infrastructure, applications, and security, which is really the interesting part of it and opportunity for us. >> What is the focus and why does the Dell family of companies have a right to kind of be a major partner for users in doing the certifications and the education? >> We feel there's no one in a better position to really help build that knowledge and validate those skillsets based upon, first and foremost, Dell EMC's breadth of infrastructure and the capabilities there, and with certifications really broadening across that infrastructure, looking at it more holistically. And then, when you think about the family of Dell technologies and bring in VMware, Virtustream, and Pivotal, and RSA, very much adjacent technologies and broader solutions that really tie into what we envision and what we see and hear from our customers as defining and requiring the skillsets of the future. >> Give us the landscape of what the certifications look like today. You've got some news that you're going to tell us about, you know, what's new today, also. >> Yeah, yeah. I mean, the current state today is, as I mentioned, very product-centric. Maybe a combination of products, and moving forward, now, we're excited to have more transformational certifications which span those different domains. For example, as organizations begin or continue to modernize their data centers, implement integrated systems, converged systems, it requires a different skillset to manage and support that infrastructure that's now being deployed and leveraged in a different way, just as one example. >> You know, you said "Across multiple domains," but bring us inside a little bit as to what's involved here. >> Certainly. There's definitely a simplicity aspect to it, absolutely. Contrasted to deep expertise in server storage network, but that dynamic with the converged and hyperconverged infrastructure is actually administrator that it may not need to have as much depth in any of those areas, but they need to have breadth across all of them. Also, skillsets, knowledge and experience around different cloud and operating models to really round out the skillsets required there. >> Okay. Who are these certifications targeted at? What kind of stage in their careers, what kind of path is there? Help us understand a little bit the journeys that people are on with their jobs and careers, on certifications. >> The new certifications that we have really spans quite a range. We have associate-level certifications. Think of that as very foundational in concepts, which aren't even anchored specifically on Dell EMC products, but more concepts around converged infrastructure, cloud, hybrid cloud environments and concepts. For something like that at that associate level, it could be a technical person, a technical professional. It could be a business professional. It could be someone coming out of a university, or even while they're in the university that's focused on building some knowledge and some skillset to enter the IT industry. For that, there's a pretty broad spectrum. And then, as you go up the levels or tiers within our certification program, as you'd expect, more advanced. Higher levels of knowledge. As you get up to the highest tiers in the program, it's really not just grounded on knowledge, but actually real-world experience. In some cases, the experience required may be five years of the right experience, or in some cases, with our new enterprise architect certification, it's at minimum 15 years of experience. >> How do you balance that, and how does that fit in IT with business and those various skillsets? >> Great question, 'cause you're right on about the technologies. There's the role itself in that example, architecting enterprise-wide solutions where there's extent in many years of experience required. But when it comes down to a technology perspective, obviously the shelf-life on many of those is not quite that long. It is a balance, there. What I'd also say is that what these certifications help validate and what we see required in the market today is not just that technical focus, but very much so the business focus, the business acumen, and the ability to engage with the business, understand business requirements, the corporate strategy, if you will, where they're going, and really translate or convert that into enterprise architecture. An enterprise architecture that's very different than the past, that more sets the stage for an organization to be successful moving forward. >> If I hear you right, it's really a pairing of the technology and the business and making sure that there's good partnership there. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> You mentioned skillset in the market. What are some of the big gaps? You know, what are customers coming and saying, "Hey, I've got people with skills, "but I need to retrain them." Where's the place where you see the biggest opportunity today that some of these new certifications are helping? >> A couple that come top to mind, first one is security. A hot topic everywhere. A critical step in that, in implementing security, is making sure the infrastructure is secure. We hear that over and over again, and what we see is that a very product-oriented approach in IT to securing products or parts of the infrastructure. One of the new certifications we're excited to have brought to market is infrastructure security, and it's looking across the spectrum, across all Dell EMC infrastructure, as well as connections to VMware and other vendors. It's really focused on taking a security-first approach and implementing the right security controls in the infrastructure to meet an organization's security policy and requirements. >> Security, you know, super hot. What else from the announcement do you want to make sure people understand, some of the new pieces that are helping on these transformations? >> You know, I think another area that is definitely worth a shout-out is the deployment of multi-cloud environments. Dell EMC infrastructure, private cloud, connectivity, and integration with different public cloud providers. That's what our large customers around the globe are doing. >> That's one of the biggest problems we've seen is the operating environment for that multi-cloud world is challenging for customers. There is no single pane of glass, and if I'm a Dell customer working with like, Azure in Azure Stack, I've got one thing if I'm a VMware customer, and I'm looking at VM with Amazon, that can be very different, and customers are stuck in the middle. How do you, from an education standpoint, live in that multi-cloud world? What do you do, where do you say, "Oh, hey, I've got an associate program here, "but you might want to take the AWS associate program here," and terminology and, you know, multi-cloud environments. >> The certification is, it's called the multi-cloud administrator expert certification. There's a path to get there. There's actually multiple paths to get there, and it really focuses and anchors around Dell EMC infrastructure and VMware vRealize Suite and the automation capabilities there. Now, the certification isn't just validating the knowledge. It's actually also the real world of experience of managing that environment, and it extends to public clouds. As part of that certification, it's validating that individuals have the experience and have actually working environments where they're actually integrating into those different public cloud providers. That could be, of course, both Dell EMC and Vmware cloud partner providers, but also into other popular cloud providers like Virtustream, Microsoft Azure, AWS, and so on. We're not certifying them on those third-party cloud providers, but our certification validates an individual's experience and their proficiency working with those environments. It's part of a larger solution. >> Mike, your background from the EMC side, maybe speak to a little bit the portfolio you mentioned. Virtustream, Vmware, of course, has very rigorous types of certifications there. How do those play across the various solutions? >> Yeah, there's a lot of great synergies there. As I mentioned, our certification validate into some of those areas, but an additional opportunity for the individuals who are looking to get certified, for example, it's called co-badging. For individuals who have a specific Dell EMC certification, like that multi-cloud expert, as well as a, in this case, a VMware certification, their VCP, not only do they get to proudly wear those two badges, but there's a third co-badge which really distinguishes that person as having a broader set of experience across that even bigger solution. >> Last thing I want to touch on, Mike, is, you know, plan it for the future. Talk to a little bit about the rollout of some of these new certifications, and how does this prep customers not just for the needs of today, but where they need to go in their career for the next five years. >> Yeah, sure. What we're validating in these certifications is absolutely relevant to a lot of our customers that we see that are transforming at a rapid pace. But what I'd like to say is that, you know, transformation's a journey. The masses of organizations are in motion. They're obviously at all different stages, but really, what we're focused on validating is the future skills needed. We see a big, a lot of pent-up demand, actually, for that today. What we, for example, our master-level certification, to your question about what's next, where it's going, that is a extremely rigorous certification, not one that you, that is achieved via an online-proctored exam. It's actually conducted by a board review. Candidates submit applications, and depending upon the application, it's accepted or not. Those that are accepted actually will have the opportunity to present in front of a board. It's something that we'll run quarterly. Our first one at Dell Technologies World, just coming up in a couple months. We'll run them quarterly after that, and for those who passed the board review and have the extensive amount of experience and meet the requirements achieve that master-level enterprise architect certification, in that case. >> Great, well, we're looking forward to being, we're going to have theCUBE at Dell Technologies World. It's actually the first event we ever did was EMC World back in 2010, so it'll be, I can't believe, our ninth year doing theCUBE there. Lots of coverage. Mike, I just want to give you the final word. We were talking offline a bit. We've got friends in the industry, lots of things have changed. Purse level, what do you give people that have been in tech for a while? What advice do you give them? >> I'd say, like any role, even outside of tech, but I think mostly in tech, is keeping up with the pace of things. That right there is a full-time job, as you know and as our customers know. Coming from the learning industry and education services, it's a passion of mine and something I get really, really excited about. >> Mike Apigian, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the update, we look forward to hearing the results from the board reviews at Dell Technologies World and beyond, and be sure to check out thecube.net for coverage of Dell Technologies World. Lots of other shows in 2018 and beyond. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (fast electronic music)