>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Hello. Welcome to the cube here at Dell tech world. I'm John furry host of the cube with Dave Alon here with Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell technologies cube alumni comes on every year. We have the cube here. It's been two years. Michael, welcome to the cube. Get to see you. >>Hey, John, Dave, great to be with you guys. Thanks for being here. Wonderful to be back here in Vegas with >>You. Well, great to be in person two years ago, we had the cue with the pandemic a lot's happened. We were talking end to end solutions here at Dell tech world in person two years ago, pandemic hits. Thank God you had all that supply for the, for the people having the remote remote end to work now back in person. What's it look like now with, with Dell tech end to end, the edge is important. What's the story, >>You know, edge is, is the physical world. And if you, if you step back from clouds and, you know, multi-cloud, you sort of think about what is the purpose of a cloud or a data center? Well, it's to take data out of the physical world and move it to this place, to somehow enhance it or do something with it and create business value and hopefully create better outcomes. Well, it turns out that, you know, increasingly a lot of that data is gonna stay in the physical world and all of those nodes are gonna be connected. They're gonna be intelligent and we're seeing it in manufacturing and retail and healthcare, transportation, logistics. We're seeing this rapidly intelligent edge being formed. And then of course, with the new networks, the 5g we're seeing, you know, all, all this develop. And so here on the show floor, we're showing a lot of those solutions, but our customers are, are highly engaged. And certainly we think that's a, a big, a big growth factor for the next decade. >>And it's been ING to watch the transformation of the it world and cloudification and the as service, uh, consumption model, which you guys are putting out there has been very successful, but cloud operations is more prominent now on premises and edge and cloud. So the combination of cloud on-premise and edge hardware matters more now than ever before Silicon advances, um, abstraction layers from modern cloud native applications are what people are focused on. What's the story that you cite to the CIOs saying, we're here to help you with that new architecture cloud multi-cloud on premise and edge. What's the main story for you guys with the customers? >>Well, you know, customers want to go faster, right? And they want to accelerate their transformation. And so they wanna shift more resources over to developers, to applications, to access their data, to create competitive advantage. And so we talk a lot about the value line and what are those things below the value line, where we can provide that as a service on a consumption based model and accelerate their transformation, kind of, you know, do for them what we've done inside our own business. And, you know, it's absolutely resonating. We're seeing great growth there. People continue to, to need the solutions, but as we can automate the management and deployment of infrastructure and make it super easy, it gives them a lot of cycles back. >>You know, Michael, my, the favorite part, my favorite part of your book was you were in, I think you were in his, in his home court, in his dining room at Carl Icahn's house. And you said, well, why don't you just buy the company? And then you'll do what you're doing. I I'll buy it back for cheaper. Now, thankfully, you didn't have to do that. Cuz you had an environment of low interest rates and you obviously took it into the other direction, added tremendous value, 101 billion in revenue last year, 17% revenue growth, which was out astounding. When you think about that, um, now we're entering a new chapter with VMware untethered of course you're the chairman of both companies. So how should we think about the new Dell what's next? >>Well, so look, we, we have some unbelievable core businesses, right? We have our client system business and we've all learned during these last two years, how incredibly important it is to enable and empower your workforce with the right tools in the remote and high hybrid work. And we're showing off all kinds of new innovations here. That's a huge business force continues to grow, continues to be super important. Then we have our ISG, the cloud data center, the network of the future, the edge, you know, the, the sort of epicenter of where we're embracing, consumption based business models. That's absolutely huge. Then we have these new, new businesses that we're building with telco with edge, put it all together. It's a 1.3 trillion Tam that we operate in, as you said, more than a hundred billion dollars last year. So there's plenty of room for us to continue to grow and, and expand. And you know, as we make this shift to outcomes, it's obviously more valuable for customers and that, you know, increases our opportunity, increases the, the value we can create for all our stakeholders. >>And number one, number one, share in PCs, by the way, congratulations, again, hit that milestone. All of our gamer, uh, fans in our discord want to know what's the hottest chips coming. What's the fastest machines. What, how's the monitors coming? They want faster, cheaper. What's the coolest, uh, monitors out there right now and, and machines. >>Well, uh, you know, what what's, what's amazing is the, the pace of innovation continues to improve. So whether it's in the GPU, the CPU, the, the resolution, I I'm pretty partial to our 41, uh, display 11 million pixels of fun. And look, I mean, we, we it's, it's, it's clear that people are more productive when they have large screens and all the performance is enabling photo realistic, uh, you know, uh, gaming and photo realistic, everything. And these are immersive experiences. And, you know, again, uh, what companies have figured out to bring it back to, to, to a little bit of business here, John, is that when you, uh, give people the right tools, they're more productive, they're more engaged and look, people are smart. They know what tools are available. And, you know, uh, the thing that actually is most representative of how a person thinks about the tools they have at their organization is actually the thing that's right in front of 'em. And so, you know, this ability for us to provide a pool set of solutions for organizations to keep their workforce productive, to run their applications and infrastructure securely anywhere they want. That's, that's a winning proposition. >>Michael trust was a big theme of your keynote yesterday. And when you acquired EMC and got VMware, it really changed the dynamic with regard to your ability to, into new parts of organizations. You became a much more strategic supplier. I, I would argue. And now with VMware as a separate company, do you feel like you have built up over the, you know, five or whatever years that muscle memory you kinda earn that trust. So how do you see the customer relationship with that regard to that integration that they, they loved the eco. So system competitors might not have loved it so much, but the customers really did love. In fact, the, the U S a, a gentleman yesterday kind of mentioned that, how do you see it? >>You know, customers, uh, are not as interested in the balance sheet and what you know, where different holdings are, what they, they want things to work together, right? And they want partnerships in ecosystems. And certainly, you know, with VMware, even before the combination, we had a powerful partnership. It obviously solidified in a super special way. And now we have this first and best relationship and I've remained the chairman of VMware and super excited about their future. But our ecosystem is incredibly broad. And you see that here in this show floor, and again, making things work together better and more effectively building these engineered solutions that allow people to very quickly deploy the kind of capabilities they want, whether it's, you know, snowflake now working with the on premise and the edge data and more of these, you know, multi-cloud, uh, eco of systems that are being built. It's not gonna be just one company >>You called the edge a couple years ago. You're really prominent in your, in your speeches. And your keynotes data also is a big theme. You mentioned data now, data engineering seems to be the hottest track of, of, of students graduating with data engineering skills, not data science, data engineering, large scale data as code concepts. So what's your vision now with data, how's that fitting into the solutions and the role of data, obviously data protection with cybersecurity data as code is becoming really part of that next big thing. >>Yeah. I mean, if, if you look at anything that is interesting in the world today, uh, at the center of it is data, right? Whether it's the blockchain or the defi or the AI drug discovery, or the autonomous vehicles or whatever you wanna do, there's data in, in, in the middle of that. And of course with that data, well, you've gotta manage it. You, you need compute engines, right? You need to be able to protect it, secure it. And, you know, that's kind of what we do, and we're not going to create all those solutions, but we are gonna be an enabling layer to allow that data to be accessed no matter, you know, where, where it is. And, and, and of course, you know, leading in storage continues to be a super important part of our business. Number one, larger than number two than number three, number four, combined, and, and most of number five as well, and, and growing share. And, and you saw today, the software defined innovations, allowing that, you know, data layer to exist across the edge, the colos, the OnPrem, and the public clouds >>Throughout a stat yesterday. I can't remember if it was a keynote of the analyst round table, but it was 9 million cell towers. And if I heard, right, you kinda look at those as potential data centers talk about that's >>Right. It it's actually 7 million, but, but probably will be 9 million and not, not too long, I don't have the update, but so yeah, the public clouds all together is about 600 data centers. They're about 7 million cellular base stations in the world. Every single one of those is becoming a, you know, multi access, edge compute node. And what are they putting in there? They're putting many data centers of compute and GPS and storage. And, you know, 5g is not about, uh, connecting people that was 4g and before 5g is about connecting things. And there are way more things than there are people, right? And, uh, you know, this, this, this edge is, is rapidly developing. You'll also have private 5g and you'll have, you know, again, embedded intelligence I believe is gonna be in everything this next decade is going to be about that intelligent, connected future, taking that data, turning it into useful outsides in insights and outcomes. And, you know, lots of new businesses will be existing. Businesses will be transformed and also disrupted. >>Yeah. I mean, I think that's so right on and not to pat ourselves on the back day, but we called that edge distributed computing a couple years ago on the cube. And that's, what's turning into the home with COVID you saw that become a workplace, basically compute center, these compute nodes, tying it together as we, what everyone's talking about right now. So as customers say, okay, I want to keep my operations steady, steady, and secure. How do I glue it together? How do I bring these compute node together? That seems to be the top question on, on top of people's minds. And they want it to be cloud native, which means they want it to run cloud-like and they want to connect these compute node together. That's a big discussion point. What's your view on, >>Well, you know, if you, if you sort of have a, a cloud here, a cloud there cloud everywhere, and you, you know, have lots of different Kubernetes frameworks, uh, and you've got, you know, everything is, is spread out, it's a disaster, right? And, and, and it's, it's a, it's a, it's a real challenge to manage all that. So what people are trying to do is create ruthless standardization. It's like, how do you drive cost out and get speed? It's ruthless standardization create consistent environments where you can operate the across all the different domains that, that you want. And so, uh, you know, this is what we're bringing together in, in, in the capabilities that we're delivering. >>And that chaos is great opportunity for you. Um, how are you feeling about VMware these days, new team, uh, give us the update there. >>Yeah. The team is doing well. You know, I think the tons message is resonating. You know, people want Kubernetes and, and, and container based apps, for sure. That's the main, you know, growth in, in, in, in, in new, in new workloads. Uh, but they also want it to work with what they have. Yeah. And they don't want it to be locked into one particular infrastructure. So software finding everything, making it run in all the public clouds, you know, we've had a great success with VxRail, you know, that, that absolutely continues. We have, uh, 200,000 plus nodes, 15,000 customers and growing, we have edge satellite nodes and we continue to work together in SD wan in software defined networking in VMware cloud foundation, uh, you know, expressed, uh, in, in, in all locations. >>You know, one of the things that we've been seeing with the trend towards, um, future of work, which is a big theme, here is a lot of managed services are popping up where the complexity is so ha high that customers want to manage services. Uh, and also the workforce of it's kind of changing. You got a younger generation coming in, how do you see that future of the workforce? The next level? It's not gonna be like, yesterday's it, it's gonna be distributed computing dashboard based. And then you've got these managed services, you know, need to have the training and expertise maybe to run something at scale. How do, how do you see that connecting? Cuz that seems to be another big trend people are talking about, Hey, it's complex someone manage it for me. And I want ease of views. I want the easy button in it. >>Yeah. Well we we've all been at this a while. So we can remember, you know, the beginnings of converged infrastructure and then hyperconverged, which wasn't that long go. And now we have consumption based business models. These are all along the trajectory of the easy button that you're talking about and customers really thinking about the value line, where are the things that really differentiate and add value for their business. And it's not below the value line in those infrastructure areas are creating that easy button with appliances, with consumption based models and allowing them to deploy the scarce resources. They have to the things that really drive their unique differe. And you know, if you look at our managed services flex on demand, all the sort of ancestors and predecessors of apex, those have been great businesses for us. And now with apex, we're kind of industrializing this and, and making it, you know, at scale for all >>Customers, you know, the three of us, we go back, we, we, our first interactions with you separately, we're in the nine. And then we reconnected in the 2012. I think it was Tarkin Mayer had a little breakout session with CIOs. You brought us to early on a Dell tech world in Austin. And of course it was, >>It was just Dell world. Then Dell >>Four, we had Dell tech, you and then EMC world in 2010 was our first cube. And now that's all come together here in Las Vegas. So, you know, it's been great. Uh, the three of us come together and so really appreciate that. Yeah. >>Awesome. Absolutely awesome. >>Well, you know, really appreciate you guys being here, the wonderful work you do in thank you in, you know, bringing out the, the, the stories and, and showing off and helping us show off the innovations that, you know, our team has been working on. You know, during the past year >>It's been great in conversations and, and on a personal note, it's been great to have, uh, chat with all the top people and your company. Appreciate it. Um, someone told me to ask you this question, I want to ask you, you, we've all seen waves of innovation cycles up and down. We're kind of on one. Now you're seeing an inflection point, this next gen, uh, computing and, and web three cultural shit F with workforces and distributed computing decentralization. You mentioned that DFI earlier, how do you see this wave coming? Cause we've seen cycles come and go.com. Bubble kind of looks the same as the web three NFTs and stuff. Now it seems to be Look different, but how do you see this next wave? Cuz looking back on all the other ones that you you have lived through and you rode >>Well. So, you know, the, the way I see it is is, uh, to some extent, these are like foundational layers that have to be built for the next phase to occur. And if you look at the sort of new companies that are being founded today, and we see a lot of those, you, you, you, you see'em, we invest in a bunch of 'em, you know, they're, they're not going and, and kind of redoing the old foundational layers, they're going deeply into vertical businesses and, and disrupting and adding value on top of those. And I think that's, that's really the, the point of, of technology, right? It's enabling human progress us in, in all fields, it's making us healthier. It's making us safer. It's making us more successful in everything that, that we as humans do. And so all these layers of technology are enabling further progress and I think it's absolutely gonna continue. It's all been super exciting. Yeah. You know, so far for the first several decades, but as I, as I believe it, it's, it's just a pre-game show. >>And it's clear your strategy is, is, is really building that foundation of a layer, hardening it, but making it flexible enough, anybody read your book, you're a technology, visionary. A lot of people put you in a, you know, finance bucket, but you can, you can see that you can connect the dots. And that's what you're doing with your foundation of layers. You that's where you're making the bets, isn't it? Uh, you don't can't predict the future. You've said that many times, but you can sort of see where it's going and be prepared for >>It. Well, you, you, you know, you think about any company in, in the industry or any public sector organization, right? Uh, they're, they're, they're wanting to evolve more quickly and transform more quick, more quickly. Right. And we can give them an infrastructure or set of tools, a set of capabilities to help them go faster. >>Yeah. And the other one thing in the eighties, when you started Dell and we were in college, there was no open source really then if look at the growth of open source, talk about those layers, open source, better Silicon GPS, faster, cheap >>More now and now we even have, uh, open source instruction sets for processors. So I mean the whole world's changing. It's exciting. You have people around the world working together. I mean, when you see our development teams, uh, whether they're in Israel or Ireland or Bangalore or Singapore, Hopton Austin, Silicon valley, you know, Taiwan, they're, they're all, they're all collaborating together and, you know, driving, driving innovation and, and, and our business is not that dissimilar from our customers >>Like great to have you in the queue. Great. To have a physical event. People are excited. I'm talking to people, Hey, haven't been back in Vegas in two years. Thanks for having this event. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Absolutely. Thank you guys. >>Michael Dell here in the cube CEO of Dell technologies. I'm John far, Dave Volante. We'll be right back, more live coverage here at Dell tech world.

(upbeat music) >> In 1946, the acerbic manager of the Dodgers, Leo the Lip Durocher famously said of baseball, great Mel Ott who was player manager of the Giants at the time. You know what happens to nice guys. They finished in last place. The phrase nice guys finish last was born. It became popular outside of baseball. Well joining me today is someone who was a consummate gentlemen and a nice guy who proves that idiom absolutely isn't true at all. He's also written a new book "Play nice and Win" Michael Dell chairman and CEO of Dell technologies, welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thank you very much, Dave, always great to be with you. Wonderful to be on the CUBE and thanks for your great coverage of Dell technologies world. >> Yeah. We're very excited to be covering the virtual version this year, next year we're back face to face I'm Sure. And we're going to talk about your book but I want to start by asking you to comment on the past 12 months, how are you going to remember 2020? >> I'm going to remember it by the resiliency of the world and our team, the adaptability the acceleration of digital transformation which is pretty amazing around the world. The vital role that technology played in addressing some of the biggest challenges, whether it was the creation of vaccines or, you know, decoding the virus itself or just addressing all the challenges that the world had. You know, I think it's a game changer in terms of disease identification and how we prevent these kinds of things going forward. You know, there's still a long way to go in terms of how do we get 7.5 billion people vaccinated and safe. I also think it exposed, you know some of the fault lines in our society. And that's a great learning for all of us in terms of access to healthcare and education and, you know, the digital resources that power the world. And so, yeah, those are some of the things that really stand out for me. >> Well, I mean, I think leaders like yourself and position of influence, absolutely passionate about some of those changes that we see coming in society. So hopefully we'll have time to talk about that but I wanted to get into the business. I think a lot of people, myself included felt that 2020 was going to be a down year for big tech companies like yours and that relied heavily on selling products that data centers and central offices but the remote work trend and the laptop, boom offset, some of those on-prem softness and headwinds combined with VMware the financial performance of Dell technologies was actually quite amazing. Why were you able to do so well last year? >> Well, first of all, you're right. We did, we had record pretty much everything record revenues, record operating income, record cashflow and be also paid down a record amount of debt. And so I think the strength and resiliency of our supply chain, as well as the broad diversified nature of what we provide our customers continue to serve us very well as they moved to this sort of do anything from anywhere in the world. And it continues the first part of this year, business is very strong >> You know, a few weeks ago, of course you officially announced the spinoff of Dell technologies. Wasn't a huge surprise but the 81% equity ownership of VMware are you worried about untethering VMware from Dell or maybe you can share more on what this means for the future of, your two companies and your customers. >> Right? So, I think this will drive additional growth opportunities for both Dell Tech and VMware, while it unlocks a lot of value for our stakeholders. What we've done is to formalize the commercial relationship into a series of agreements and those are unique and differentiated and they provide lots of flexibility and we've driven a tremendous amount of innovation together and that's going to continue and it will, one of the things we said back in 2015 you'll remember is our commitment to keep the VMware ecosystem open and independent and working across the whole industry. We've done that. You'll continue to see us innovate together with Edge solutions, certainly all the great work we've done with VxRail SD LAN, you know Tanzu creates this platform to modernize applications and VMware Cloud and Dell technologies are the easy path to a multi-cloud architecture. And, that continues to work super well and is not going to be slowed down at all. So... and of course, I'll continue to be a chairman of both companies and we're not selling VMware we're distributing our ownership to our shareholders. >> Well, of course, Dell is the largest sort channel if you will, for VMware. So that's ... you guys got a tight relationship but I want to ask you about digital transformation and everybody talked about it pre COVID but nobody really knew exactly what it was but COVID sort of brought that into focus very quickly. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. So going forward, how do you see that whole digital transformation playing out? >> You know I think the plot of any company is to figure out how it can use its data and turn that into insights and outcomes and better results and ultimately competitive advantage faster. And as you said, you know, if it's not able to do that, it's probably going to go out of business. And that agenda just got massively accelerated because it was kind of digital was sort of the only thing that worked during this, this past period. So every organization has figured out that technology is not the IT department, it's actually the fulcrum of progress in the entire company. And so we're seeing sort of across the board a dramatic acceleration in the investment in digital technologies, you know, Edge is growing very fast. I think 5G just accelerates this and, you know you're seeing it in all the demand trends. It's quite positive and, you know, I think you'll see even a more rapid separation from those companies that are able to take advantage of this and quickly adjust their businesses their organizations, and those that are >> You better hop on board or get left behind, you know, the Edge. You mentioned the Edge it's a little bit like digital transformation, you know kind of pre COVID and even post COVID. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people but the telecoms transformation and 5G they have there certainly real. How do you see the Edge? >> You know, the Edges is ... think of it as actually the real world, right? It's, not a data center sitting in the center of the universe somewhere. And look today, you know only 10% of data is processed outside of the data center, but, you know, it's estimated by 2025 you got 75% of enterprise data will be processed outside of a traditional data center or a Cloud. And so as everything becomes intelligent connected 5G accelerates that it's going to be a huge acceleration of this whole process of digital transformation. And you know, again, think about this. I mean, the cost of making something intelligent used to be really expensive. Now it's asymptotically approaching zero. And of course all those things are connected. They're talking to each other and exactly what does this mean for every industry. Nobody's really quite sure and not everything is going to work, but, you know we're seeing it in manufacturing, in retail, in healthcare and the growth on the Edge is really accelerating in a meaningful way. And it's not so much about, you know people talking people with machines, we know how to do that. Now it's about the thing right And, you know you've got like 200 billion arm processors, you know out there in the last couple of years, all those things talking to the other things, generating data it happens in the real world. That's what the Edge is. >> Yeah as you know, we're a big fans of the arm model. And I think it just presents huge opportunities for companies like Dell. I want to ask you about Cloud. And I have to say, I think, you know companies like Dell have been maybe a little bit defensive over the last several years when it comes to Cloud but I think you starting to see the Cloud as a gift with all that CAPEX that's being built out by these hyperscalers. You know, thank you. It seems to me, you can build on top of that. How are you thinking about the Cloud as an opportunity for you and your customers especially as the definition of Cloud evolves? >> Well, first, you know, what we see is and the Edge is kind of the third place or the third premise, right? You got Clouds in the public form, you've got the Colo which is really growing fast and, you know the private hybrid Clouds, and now you've got the Edge. And so you've got infrastructure all over the place with Edge being the fastest growing. You know, one of the big things we see is that customers want a consistent way to operate and execute across that whole platform. And, you know, one of the other things that we've been focused on at Dell technologies is how can we move our business to more of a service and subscription on demand and provide customers that flexibility to to pay as they consume. And so, to some extent this is an evolution of, you know, products to services to managed services, to everything as a service. And so, you know, looking at our balance sheet you'll see over $40 billion in remaining performance obligations as we moved the business to that kind of model and it's been growing double digits for several quarters in a row. And so, you know, we're embracing Cloud and on-demand, and as a service, and obviously here at Dell technologies world we're talking a lot about Apex and our continuing initiatives to move our whole business in that direction. >> Yeah. Apex is a real accelerator for that model. I want to switch topics a little bit. I got a long list of things I want to talk about ESG, sustainability, inclusion, you know, is another topic that, that I'm interested in. I want it. And I said before, people like yourself in a position of influence to influence public policy and obviously the employees and your ecosystem why is it not just the right thing to do? Why is... why are those things good business, Michael? >> Well, it's good business because people want to be part of something that is important and purposeful. You know, it's not just make a profit and earn a living right? You know, people want to be inspired and feel that they're part of something special. And look, I think if you look at the positive changes that have occurred in the world certainly you could turn on the news and see the horrible things that happened in the last 24 hours or something like that. But if you step back and think about the amazing progress that's happened in the last several decades, you know a lot of it's been driven by technology and by businesses that have stepped up and made a difference and made commitments. And, you know, we're one of those companies that has made a series of commitments you know, 10 years ago, we set out with our 2020 goals. We accomplished significant majority of those retired those. Now we set out our progress made real 2030 goals all around the ESD themes. And it's not only the right thing to do but it is good for business. It inspires our team members, our customers and I think initiatives like progress made real at Dell and thousands of other companies. Ultimately, those are the things that are going to drive progress forward. I believe, you know, more so than government edicts or regulation, those can play a role. But I think, companies voluntarily driving things like the circular economy and how we include everyone in our business and provide opportunities for everyone to succeed no matter where they come from. I think those are the things that are really going to drive the world forward. >> Well, I want to ask you about public policy because as you say, it's not just the government, but of course sometimes the government can get in the way. You're seeing a lot of vitriol around Val break up big tech but the same time, you're seeing the US government and the EU very willing to help out with the semiconductor competitiveness in the like I know you were tapped with the new administration President Biden, tapping, you know, the best minds in tech and you were asked to part sort of participate give feedback. What can you tell us about, you know your advice to the US government? >> Well, you know, lots of great discussion with the new administration and it's a delight to see that they're focused on semiconductors and sort of the industries of the future. This is a big deal. I mean, you know, we've got some big global competitors out there other nations that are with a deterministic strategy very focused on the industries of the future. But US, you know if you think about the atomic age and, you know the Apollo missions that created the whole semiconductor industry ARPANET and ultimately the Internet and that kind of stopped right there, you know, there wasn't as much government investment in some of those big R and D initiatives that really drove an enormous creation of industries and success for the United States and its citizens. And so I think focusing on semiconductors and how you build the infrastructure of the future really important for the United States to continue to be a leader in that you know, we were, you know, producing a one point about 37% of the world's semiconductors. It's now down to 12% and dropping and really important that more investments are made in that area. It's a combination of capital, talent, you know education knowledge, and also, you know, the policies that promote the development of these kinds of businesses. >> Yah well, Pat's got a very big challenge ahead of them. And so that's why but we've said Intel's too strategic to fail in our view but I wanted to plug your book a little bit. My former boss, you and I have talked about this. He was also a gentleman who proved Leo Durocher wrong. He was very nice guy, but also a winner, Play Nice But Win, why did you decide to write another book? >> Well, you know, Dave, a lot has happened in the last 20 years and especially the last nine or so years since we went private and, you know merged with EMC and VMware and went public again. And, you know, I'd say we... first of all, you know when I wrote the first book in 1998 I wasn't comfortable disclosing a lot. And, and I wasn't vulnerable enough and didn't feel, you know, able to do that. Now I do, you know, I'm older, you know hopefully a little wiser. And so I think everybody's going to like hearing some of the fun stories about not only my childhood but you know, the dorm room and beyond, and leading up to, you know the pivotal changes that have occurred the last decade my alligator wrestling with Carl Icahn and other, you know there's lots of fun stories in there. I got arrested one time. It was only for speeding tickets, don't worry but you know, lots of fun. I'm really looking forward to the book coming out and being able to talk about it. >> I can't wait. You know, I've said many times anybody who could beat the great icon is interesting to me. I wanted to ask you, I mentioned my old boss, Pat McGovern. I used to say to them all the time, "Pat how come you don't buy more companies?" And he'd say," Dave, you know the vast majority of acquisitions and mergers they failed to meet their objectives." Did you ever imagine, I mean... I did the EMC acquisition. Did... how could it not have exceeded your expectations? I wonder if you could give us your final thoughts on that. >> You know, and I talk about this a lot in the book. I mean, these are kind of the ultimate considered decisions. And in the case of the EMC combination it was something that we had thought about going back to 2008, 2009. And then, you know, started thinking about it in 2014 worked on it for a full year before it got announced in 2015 and finally closed in 2016. But yeah, I mean, you know, we thought it would be great. It turned out to be even better than We thought the revenue synergies were far greater. The teams were quite energized. Customers liked what we were providing and you know it's ... and, of course the markets were supportive Right? You know, we were paying close attention to interest rates and how we could structure the merger in a attractive way. And, you know, thank goodness, lots of hard work lots of determination, you know, it's worked out quite well. >> Yeah, great commitment from the Dell team as well. Congratulations on that. Go ahead, please. >> And any adventure continues right? It's...( both chuckles) >> I can't wait to see the next chapter and I can't wait to get the book, but congratulations on that, all your tremendous success you're you are a winner and a gentleman and a friend of the CUBE, Michael Dell. Thanks so much. >> Thank you so much Dave. >> And thank you for watching. And this is the CUBE continuous coverage of Dell tech world 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there, right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies, World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> And welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. This is theCUBE virtual. It's a virtual event. We're not in person this year, obviously because of the COVID pandemic, our guest Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Technologies. Great to see him back on again and remotely. Michael, sorry we couldn't be there in person but thank you for coming on virtually. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be with you John. >> You know what a year it's been. I got to say, it's been one of those years where you don't know what's going to happen next. And it's been kind of crazy. I want to get your take on how you guys are getting through it. And specifically you guys have had great business performance. We've seen the results of what's going on with Dell Technologies, VMware, but there's a crisis. People need more machines, they need more internet access. There's a huge demand for modern applications with cloud and on-premises, not everyone's going to be there on-premises. So the workplace, the workforce, the workloads are all changing, but you hit all of them. The consumer from having a great machine, internet access, this kind of digital divide where people are remote schooling is super important. Can you talk about how you guys are doing, how the company's doing, how you're doing and what you guys are doing to help bridge this new cultural environment of this digital divide? >> Sure. So again, great to be with you and thanks for all your great coverage at Dell Technologies World. Once again this time virtually. Look, I think having a resilient supply chain is always important but these last eight months it's been incredibly important. Demand has certainly shifted around and having you know, secure remote work from anywhere has been a high priority for lots of organizations. I think something like 4.5 billion people were asked to go stay in their homes. So, you know it was work from home, learn from home, entertainment, E-commerce, telemedicine, everything went online and I think we got a glimpse of the future. And I think a lot of this actually gets carried forward. And certainly the priorities that we've been focused on, you know multicloud, app modernization and containers, the tremendous growth at the edge, data management, software defining the networks, AI, 5G, all these things I think get accelerated. So amid the tragedy and the challenges. I do think there's a great acceleration of the fourth industrial revolution. >> You brought this up last time, last year as well. And again this is pre everything's kind of going to be before COVID kind of after the COVID world, but you were kind of teasing this out last year and I want to get your thoughts because now more than ever, you mentioned some people don't have laptops to even do the remote work and remote schooling. And then internet access has been discussed for generation of having more broadband in areas that are underserved. This is a super important piece. Can you just share some of the initiatives that you guys are taking because I know you guys have some things going on, you're doing a lot of philanthropy. Again the supply chain is on the business side is super important, but you know specifically this society, how are you guys helping? >> Right. So, you know just in the United States, you've got roughly 15 million kids who don't have either the broadband access or a device. And we've got a pilot program running to begin to address this. And, you know it's part of the broader 2030 moonshot goals that we laid out, you know actually last year for the next decade. But I do think, you know what the pandemic exposed, it exposed the fault lines in our society in access to healthcare, to education, to justice and certainly, you know we have a kind of digital inequality, right? If you don't have a device and you don't have access, you're left out of economic opportunity and you know that's something we should all be focused on. We believe, our broader ecosystem can make a big difference there. And it's one of our priorities. >> You know technology has been a big enabler over the years. You know we've talked many times privately also on theCUBE around these inflection points. I mean you started Dell technologies in your dorm room and now you got kids doing stuff in the elementary, (indistinct) to the thing on space with, you know cybersecurity and space is a big trend and they're starting early in elementary school. Now you got the boardroom and everywhere in between. The tech trends are the big opportunity. You know I want to dig into it. And I want to get your thoughts because you know with cloud computing, gen one, you say check, scale, it matters. But the big wave right now is everything as a service. And so you got to be nimble. You got to be agile. But that's easy to say and hard to do. I want to get your thoughts on how you see everything as a service from platform to SaaS, to developer as a service, to cube as a service, to Dell as a service. Everything is becoming a service. What's under the covers there because it's not easy. Automation machine learning. What do you seek? This is going to get us out of the pandemic as more people are agile. Give me your thoughts. >> That's right. So, you know we've actually, as you point out, we've been at this for awhile and you know if you look on our balance sheet, you'll see almost $24 billion deferred revenues. So it's not a completely new idea to us. And we are aggressively expanding as a service. So our customers and partners can access our solutions anyway they want and we're committed to making everything that we provide available as a service. And one of the things we're talking a lot about here at Dell Technologies World is providing a consistent experience no matter where customers run their workloads. And so we've unveiled project Apex, which is really bringing together all of our as a service and cloud offerings into a consistent unified effort. We're enhancing the Dell technologies cloud console. And this is going to give customers the power to manage every aspect of their cloud journey. And as a service journey through a simple unified self service experience. We're going to be talking a lot about storage as a service. Storage is always important to Dell technologies and providing scalable lastic storage resources that can be deployed, owned and managed on premise, but owned by Dell Technologies. And we're going to bring some updates to the Dell Technologies cloud platform to make it easier, simpler to consume, lower the barriers to entry and extending our subscription availability. >> You know in the platform businesses and all the people talk about platforms. And over the years, when you have a platform business you have to kind of dog food or kind of you know, do it first before the customers dig in to using the service. You mentioned, you guys have been doing Dell as a service across your product lines, and we've documented that certainly on SiliconANGLE in theCUBE, but now you got to bring it to customers. Can you tell me how that's going because with the pandemic, some things are obviously customers need to double down on building modern apps, having programmable infrastructure. As you guys have everything as a service from the Dell side. Now the customers have to do their part. They've turned their offerings into as a service. Can you take us through trends you're seeing in your customer base around the pandemic? And you know this is a permanent is a cyclical. What's the customer impact of everything as a service. >> I think this is clearly the demand, you know trend (laughs) from customers. And, as I said we've been embracing it for some time. One of the reasons we created this project Apex is to bring it all together because I would say we want to to go faster right? (laughs) And we always want to to go faster. And the, you know what you've seen from customers in the last eight months is you kind of exposed the digitally enabled and the not so much digitally enabled. And, a lot of customers have accelerated their progress on their digital journey quite a bit during these last eight months. And, you know as I said, I think a lot of that gets carried forward. You know we ourselves, over a weekend basically said, okay everybody work from home now has worked really well. There's lots of benefits to that. There are productivity benefits, environmental benefits. And I think we're all finding ways that we could be more productive. And I think a lot of this will persist after the pandemic. >> Yeah. When we were covering VMworld just recently this event that they had the virtual event. What came out of that was the 5G trend. And some of the conversation was 5G is not a consumer app. It's really a business app. Could you share your thoughts on 5G? Because it will enable the edge, intelligent edge 5G is super important. What's your vision on how 5G will roll out? Do you agree with it more as a business app not so much consumer? >> Yeah. I mean the first application will be, hey let's have 5G phones. Great. But you really can't talk faster all right, on your 5G phone. (laughs) So what is this all about? It's about making things intelligent and having the things talk to each other and they're going to be way more things talking to each other than there are people. Imagine every arm processor or embedded processor out there in the world now being connected and intelligent, the amount of data that gets created. So it's really about connecting all the things. And that is you know incredibly exciting possibility. Organizations have to reimagine themselves. Given that future and 5G will be the digital fabric that allows this new future to be created. >> When you look at Dell Technologies out 10 years to 2030, what does it look like as you eliminate about the internet things and the edge, what's the vision for Dell 2030? >> So first I think you're going to have autonomous infrastructure and it's going to be highly distributed on the intelligent edge. And that's going to enable enormous advances in really all human endeavors and Dell Technologies is going to be the essential infrastructure company to power all of this. And, you know our moonshot goals point the way in another sense, where we talk about advancing sustainability, cultivating inclusion, transforming lives and upholding ethics and data privacy. And you know we didn't create those priorities for the last eight months, but certainly the last eight months put a real magnifying glass and exclamation point on their importance. And, you know we continue to be super optimistic about the role technology has in the world and the role that we can play in helping customers achieve that. >> And the role of cloud is cloud going to be abstracted away? Is that cloud going to continue to be a big part of it as cloud on premise, mean as these environments look more cloud-like operationally and autonomous, does that kind of go away in 10 years? Do you see that becoming just part of the resource pool? How do you view that? >> Well, clouds are infrastructure, right? So you can have a public cloud, you can have an edge cloud, a private cloud, a Telco cloud, or hybrid cloud, or multicloud, here cloud, there cloud, everywhere cloud cloud. Yet, they'll all be there, but it's basically infrastructure. And how do you make that as easy to consume and create the flexibility that enables everything. >> Yeah. And we saw that VMware, they had talked about telco cloud as a trend. We see that everything's going to be a cloud. Everything will be a service. That's our view. I want to get your thoughts on entrepreneurial thinking. You've always been an entrepreneur, even as you've got this massively billions of dollars in companies out there you're still innovating. Right now entrepreneurial thinking is needed more than ever. And can you share your advice to people out there who wanted to be more digitally enabled, who have to think about the next 10 years. What entrepreneurial thinking can they apply now? Because let's face it COVID has exposed what needs to be worked on what should not be worked on. So there's clearly a digital push there. What entrepreneurial tactics what would you share with the folks out there who really want to be on the wave here and be digitally enabled position for the future? >> Well, you know I kind of started with experiment, take a risk, find a new problem and figure out how to go solve it. And look, I continue to be inspired by all the new entrepreneurs and new companies out there being created. And while there's certainly, you know one trend in consolidation in parts of our industry, there are always new and interesting things happening in the world of technology. And that's where you see a lot of these new companies being created. And you know that always excites me. I don't see too much of a shortage of entrepreneurial thinking out there, but well you know use more of it because that's how the world pushes forward when you have people with new ideas, willing to take risks, capital available to, you know support that risk-taking, you know that's where you get new innovation. >> Yeah. I could see the opportunities executed on them. I want to get your thoughts on AI, obviously as we've seen huge backlash on some of the, with the elections here going on, and you got all the, you know, tech for good on one side, tech for bad on the other and everything in between. Technology isn't any abler. And it does have some consequences, but there's some great things going on with technology. I know you've been advocate for the past two years of specifically hardcore for technology for good. As AI becomes more prominent as machine learning and data comes into the picture, can you give your thoughts on where we are with technology for good? What are some of the highlights and what areas we need to work more on? And how has the role data and AI play in it? >> I do think technology is overwhelmingly used for good and, you know long time ago, you know fire was technology, right? Somebody came to the village and said, "Hey we got this new thing you know called fire. "And you know it can warm a home "or it could burn down the whole village." But overwhelmingly technology innovations have advanced human progress. And I only think it's accelerating from here. And as everything becomes intelligent and connected, AI is the only way to double reason over all that data, especially the streaming data in real time. And all of that is going to accrue positively to great human outcomes. And every business has to reimagine itself, to create better products and services, to create better outcomes for the students, the patients, for manufacturing to create success and competitive advantage, and you know AI machine learning. These are just tools. Sure there are always going to be challenges, but we as humans have to make sure that the tools are used overwhelmingly for good. Again, I tend to be optimistic. I think the vast majority of people do want to do good things in the world. And so prevent against the kind of worst case scenarios but, I remain optimistic. >> Why are the wheel tools? It's all about the humans running them. And that's a big impact. Michael, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate you coming on virtually with theCUBE and thanks for allowing us to be part of your virtual digital experience. For the final word just share for a minute, what people should walk away with this year. I know it's virtual. It's not face to face. It's a very intimate event when it's held face to face, but you're doing a virtual, a lot of content out there. But for the people watching, what should they walk away with this year from the Dell Technology World Digital Experience? What's the main message? >> So you know Dell Technologies wants as ever to be your best partner in the digital transformation. And we're investing heavily in multicloud, in the edge, in data management, software defining the networks, providing the compute to deal with all these enormous workloads with AI, at 5G and continuing to create this secure work from anywhere environment. So, again, thanks to our customers and partners for the tremendous trust they place in us. And we're looking forward to a great year ahead. >> Well thanks for everything that you do. I know you're just planning a lot of equipment for kids in school and for businesses and continue to innovate. You're doing your part with the supply chain. Thank you for having your team stay on that. Of course, we're doing our part trying our best to get the content out there. Thank you so much for the time, Michael. Great to see you. I hope to see you in person soon. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE covering Dell Technology World Digital Experience 2020. I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMWorld 2019. Brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back to theCUBE live here in San Francisco for VMWorld 2019. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante For CUBE coverage live. We're here with Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies. Great to see you. >> Great to be back with you guys. Thank you guys for all the great coverage here at VMWorld. >> Thanks for coming on. >> And being here. >> I know you're super busy, got a lot of time. So let's get right to it. You're not on stage, you haven't been involved in the keynotes, it's been pretty much a VMWare show, but Pivotal being bought by VMWare, big news, Carbon Black, those were the acquisitions coming in that got everyone abuzz, but there's a lot of technical integrations going on with VMWare, as Dave called it once, the crown jewel for you. >> I agree. >> What's goin' on? I mean, what's inside your head right now? Share what's goin' on. What's on the chess board? >> Well, you know, if we step back to 2015 when we announced the combination and fast forward to today to 2019 we're really delighted with, you know, the progress, and, you know, how we've been able to bring the Dell Technologies family together, the great progress and innovation going on here at VMWorld. You know, you see it on stage, and you know, more today as well. Integrating Kubernetes right inside of vSphere. You know, that's super important. Obviously bringing together the developer and the infrastructure, you know, with build, run, manage, connect, and protect, all the progress we're making at the network layer with NSX, with security, with Carbon Black, and all things Dell are powered by VMWare, so our Dell Technologies cloud vision, the multi-cloud vision, again, think about it from the perspective of the customer. We always start with the customer. Customer is looking for a developer-centric environment that is location agnostic, right? And they don't want to get locked in, and when you think about computing, increasingly it's highly distributed. Right, you got Edge, you got all sorts of clouds, you got software as a service, and how do you seamlessly move things around. And VMWare Cloud Foundation is the perfect substrate to be able to manage in that >> I want to get into that-- >> Future world. >> I want to get into the whole the spare parts comin' together. You guys are pulling a lot together with Dell Technologies, but first I want to say that this is our tenth year covering VMWorld, it's our 10th year-- >> Congratulations, thank you. >> This is the last show standing, 'cause the first show we did was EMC World, which you bought, so that's technically part of Dell Technologies. We've been covering theCUBE, when we first met you-- >> Still there, it's just now even bigger. >> Don: It's even bigger. >> When we first met you you were a public company, and I remember we had conversations around going private and some of the things that you saw and you wanted to do, you're doing them. So we're now five, six years into that. You've been number one in a lot of categories. You like to talk about, we're number one in service, we're number one in storage. You've been number one in a lot of those things that you used to compete and still do. Now the game has changed, the platform of cloud is certainly there, you're bringing all these piece parts together. Not easy, I mean it's, you look at it, it looks obvious on the surface, but it's not obvious putting it together. This is kind of what's happening right now. This seems to be the top story for Dell Technologies. You're bringing the collection of Dell plus VMWare and new stuff into the fold. Is that the right kind of way to categorize it? >> You know, I think if you, if you look at it as a trajectory it's all very clear and it's not really that different from the vision that we laid out in 2015 and 2016. And certainly we were given a incredible opportunity to be able to bring, you know, EMC and VMWare into the Dell Tech family, along with Pivotal, and it's resonated with customers. We've had incredible revenue synergies, and I couldn't be more excited about the level of innovation that we're driving, and the feedback we're getting from customers continues to be quite positive. And you know, what I see out there, looking out, you know, five years, 10 years, is this boom in Edge computing. And I think there again it plays to our strengths and how do we enable this digital future for our customers, you know, and to be able to unleash all this data to enable humanity, and that's why we built this company. >> So as it relates to the Edge, and one of the areas that you're not number one in, one of the few, is public cloud. So you're kind of redefining the notion of cloud with multi-cloud. So I wonder how you think about that opportunity. You're known for go big or go home, you like big markets, how do you look at the total market for multi-cloud and Edge and as it relates to sort of the existing on prem business, the public cloud growth that you're seeing, what do you see for that multi-cloud/Edge new cloud opportunity? >> Well, since we're here at VMWorld, right, VMWare has about 70 million workloads. I think that's actually bigger than the public cloud, right? You can correct me if I'm wrong, right? >> Yeah, I mean they are, look, on-prem's way bigger than the public cloud, right? No question. >> Exactly, and what's happening, of course is-- >> Are grown faster, sorry, but it's much much bigger. >> The line is blurring between, you know, what's a public cloud, what's a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, Edge, and so, look, our opportunity is to really make all that go away for customers and allow them to choose and express our unique value add in whatever form the customer wants to use it. So you've seen us align with all the public clouds. You know, you're seeing us take steps in the Edge. We're continuing to improve the on-premise systems. You know, with project dimension now it's the VMWare cloud on Dell EMC that we're managing for you. And it's on-demand, it's consumption, and it's consumed just like a public cloud. >> And I (voice muffled) numbers there. >> It's all coming together and who's got a better capability and position than we have? >> Well that's what I was getting at about the piece parts being put together, bringing the spare parts, because I would agree that the on-premise is bigger than the public cloud, but, you know, it's like it's a declining old technology that's being refreshed so you have the customers looking at, you know, that's why containers are popular. You can put containers around legacy. But those technologies have to transform into new ones. This is the cloud platform, I think, opportunity, and so you guys now have VMWare cloud on Dell EMC, which is what looks like it's a managed service for the on-prem as kind of a starting point to kind of re-platform IT or the enterprise because, yeah, it's a big market that's declining or transforming, the spends there, but it might not be the same as it was before. You know what I'm saying? So that's kind of where we see that. Your thoughts on that dynamic. >> Customers don't want to be locked into a particular way of doing things, and if you think about workloads and containers and where these things will reside, one thing we know is it'll change over time, right? And new requirements, security regulation, performance, cost, et cetera. We see things moving back and forth, and I maintain that when we're here on theCUBE, you know, at the 15-year anniversary or the 20-year anniversary, we'll be talking about the Edge being bigger than all the clouds combined. >> Yeah, I like that Edge story. One of the things I want to get thoughts on, you said on theCUBE last year, data tsunami. You've always been pro data, that the data piece is a critical aspect of this new equation. There seems to be a competitive battle for what I call the control plane of data. That's my words, no one has really written that up yet, but data is a strategic asset when you're dealing with applications, whether it's, you know, cloud native and/or on-premise using microservices, but Edge, certainly in data, is a critical thing, too. Do you move compute to the Edge? Do you have data at the Edge? So data's a critical ingredient in all this. What's update in your mind in terms of how that's changed or is it still the same course? What's the current vision of the data role? >> I think it is the critical ingredient. I mean, that's sort of the plot, right? And when you think about neural networks and machine learning and AI and all of those great tools, they're nothing without the data, and we're just at the beginning, you know, we're in the pre-game show of 5G. And we have an increasingly intelligent and connected world, and so, you know, if you think you have a lot of data now, in five years from now you have a thousand times more, and so we're building out this infrastructure to enable, you know, humanity to really bring value from that data. >> Michael, when you bought EMC, I was having a conversation with one of your, CEOs of one of your competitors, and that individual said that, well, Dell's not going to be able to buy companies anymore 'cause of all this debt. And I said, well, what about VMWare? >> How about 40 companies in the last four or five years? There you go. >> So my question to you is around M and A, you obviously as Dell, you bought a lot of companies, Joe Tucci before you bought a lot of companies. Now you and Pat are buying a lot of companies. You've learned a lot about M and A. What do you look for, and what have you learned, what do you look for? I'm sure you've made some mistakes along the way, but what do you look for in M and A? I mean, what's the secret sauce as to how you're successful in M and A? >> Well what we don't do is wake up in the morning and say, "Let's go find a company to buy." Okay? We actually start with the strategy of the company and what are we trying to accomplish and what is the strategic intent and the problems that we're trying to solve on behalf of our customers? And, there are many ways to do that, right? We have organic innovation, you know, the list of the top, you know, patent holders and producers just came out for 2018. We were ranked number 12 of all companies in the entire world. That's pretty good, you know? Up from number 18 the year before. You know, we were a couple patents behind Apple, and, you know, our organic innovation engine is very very strong. Then we have partnerships, right? We're not going to do everything ourselves, right? Look out there at the expo you see every company in the industry is part of the VMWare ecosystem, love it, fantastic, right? Then we have investments. We have our Dell Technologies capital. And we're continuing to make investments. We're going to announce another one here, it'll probably get your attention, in the compute space, in the AI space. And we continue to sort of shoot ahead, you know, three to five years into the future with these new investments. And then of course, acquisitions are also a tool to accelerate. And if you think about how we built NSX and adding new capabilities into the software-defined network, which I continue to believe is an enormous opportunity that we're incredibly well positioned for. So we have a platform to add new capabilities, but you know, acquisitions are just one of the factors. (voices muffled) >> Well and you also have some dry powder, if I may, and it relates to this, that you haven't really pulled the trigger on yet, which is Dell Boomi, Secureworks, and RSA. I mean these are assets that, you know, it's not exactly clear where they fit in the whole family. You have a lot of options there. I don't know what you can share about those. >> You are correct, we do have a lot of options, and we have some great assets that continue to grow. You know, Boomi continues to boom a long, and adding thousands of colors and continues to be, you know, quite well adopted. But here at VMWorld super excited about the ability to bring together Kubernetes and Pivotal and VMWare all together. You know, I think, you know, if you look at the endpoint business on a revenue basis nobody has a bigger endpoint business than Dell Technologies, all right? And you know, with what we're doing in Workspace ONE, which was already having great momentum, and now with Carbon Black, the ability to secure those endpoints, which are increasingly very diverse, as we were talking about before. You know, our capabilities continue to expand. >> You guys have done a great job. I mean, Dave and I were commenting, the shareholder value, stakeholder value, both shareholder and stakeholder that you've done, went private, then went public, all this financial success, congratulations, but I want to talk about Pat Gelsinger and VMWare because we were commenting during the vCloud Air transition before the Amazon relationship where, you know, Pat saw the wave, he's like, look it, we got to go and make a, clean this mess up. Those weren't his exact words, but something along those lines. They made, the team looked at Amazon, partnered with Amazon. Since then the VMWare stock price shareholder value (voice muffled) so all good moves around, so you know, props to everyone, but the whole tech for good thing is now part of, I want to get your thoughts on this because this backlash against tech these days, right? And I thought Pat's keynote yesterday was clever to point that out that it's the neutral opportunity to shape it. This is now a big part of, it's not window dressing anymore, this isn't about just throw some niches out there, this is part of corporate culture that is directly relevant to some of the political wins happening. Your thoughts on balancing and shaping tech for good and leveraging the financial success, the stakeholder success, not just shareholder, your thoughts. Right, well first of all I think the biggest thing that we can do is to, you know, use all this data to enable humanity in a positive way, right? And that's sort of our core mission as a company and what we do. I think as Pat correctly pointed out, you know, AI doesn't wake up in the morning and say today I'm going to be bad or today I'm going to be good. It's what do we as humans ask these things to do? And you know, storytellers are good at scaring people, and as long as there have been humans telling stories to each other, we've been fearful of new things, right? But the reality is that the vast majority of technology is used for good. I do think there are some companies in today's world that have been looking the other way because they've been minting money. >> We know who they are (chuckling). >> By using customers' data and they're exploiting their privacy in a way that is not good. And, you know, I think they're going to be subject to regulation and, you know, the rules will change. We're not one of those, right? >> If I may, I mean, look, the tech industry, yes, there's some examples, but the tech industry in general has, I think it got a bad wrap. And I'm glad that people like yourselves and leaders like yourself are sort of saying, hey, we actually are doing good. Here's some examples, and really leaning into that because I would say, on balance, the contribution to society of tech has far outweighed the negative. >> And look, the way we've always approached this is to say, you know, what do, you know, what is the best possible thing that we could be doing here? And, you know, if we're waiting for a regulator to show up and tell us that we did it wrong, that's completely the wrong answer, right? So if you look at, for example, in our sustainability and, you know, the environment, we're way, way ahead of any rules or things. You know, we're proactively thinking about how do we dramatically improve our footprint and the materials and the energy consumption, and certainly we have legions of stories about how technology and genomics research and disaster recovery in, you know, imaging to, you know, understand, you know, what's going on across the globe is having an enormous positive difference. >> One of the things you mentioned about the Facebook example, you didn't actually say Facebook, but it pretty much was Facebook, was it was weaponized and there was some digital damage and some collateral damage, but when you talk about Edge computing one of the national defense security concerns is when it's not just malware attacks we're worried about to steal credit cards, there's take over of actually machines. So the industrial IoT piece of it, there's a lot of concerns around the role of leaders like yourself and companies around national defense because with the ransomware of 13 cities hit, was that cyber? Was that intentional? Was that just blackmail? We don't know. I mean, you take over a self-driving car and you can make it do something. That's lives are now in danger, not just credit card data. So the whole discussion around cyber defense becomes now a topic that politicians are not really that qualified to address right now. >> Well, it's-- >> The role of our industry is changing. >> Yeah, it's something we spend a lot of time on, and obviously with RSA and Secureworks and the intrinsic security that we build into our software and hardware infrastructure solutions, we spend a lot of time on this. You're absolutely right as everything becomes intelligent and connected, the attack surface and the vulnerabilities also become much, much larger. So we have a real responsibility not only in securing our supply chain, but in securing all of those, you know, devices and virtual machines, the containers that are out there running the infrastructure of the world. I mean, we have about half of the world's mission critical, you know, organizations are running their most important things on Dell Technologies. >> It's great that you've been proactive, having good judgment as a corporate citizen. I think that's a great leadership, congratulations, and that's something that everyone should emulate. My final question for you is what are you excited about right now? I mean, a lot going on. You got a spring to your step. VMWare stock is still at a high, even a little dip here with some of the political landscape going on, but still, a lot of integration. New techs happening. You got Kubernetes, you got a lot more on top of that with microservices. You got 5G, as you mentioned, is pregaming right now. But a lot of other stuff is going on. What are you most excited about? >> Well, you rattled off several of them. I think, you know, on-- >> Pick your favorite. >> The stage with Ray O'Farrell and Greg Lavender, they had a kind of landscape there of 21 new technologies that are super interesting. I could geek out and get excited about any, any >> your favorite. >> Any one of those. You know, look-- >> Hey, hey guys, it's my turn. >> Hey. >> Hey. >> You ran over here, my turn. >> John: Okay, all right. (voices muffled) >> Did he do okay? >> He did good. >> Good, okay. Thank you, Michael. >> Sure thing. We ready to let you take over? >> All right. >> Come on in. Mic him up. I think he's got to go. Michael's got to go? Okay, well, Pat's on deck here. >> I'm saying 5G, very excited about 5G. >> Pat want to get in the batter's box here. He wants to get into the game. >> It's 5G, data explosion. >> Michael, thanks for, thanks for joining us. Really appreciate it. >> Absolutely. >> We'll be back with Pat Gelsinger who's on set right now, ready to go. We'll be right back. (light techno music)

(funky music) >> Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE. Day three of our live coverage from Dell Technologies World 2019 continues. Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman and we're welcoming to theCUBE for the first time Michael St-Jean, Principal Marketing Manager for Red Hat Storage. Michael welcome. >> Thanks Lisa. Hi Stu. >> So day three this event is still pretty loud around us. This has about we're hearing upwards of fifteen thousand people. A lot of partners. Give us your perspective on Dell Technologies World 2019. >> I got to tell you this is an awesome show. I got to tell you the energy, and not just in the sessions but out on the show floor as well. It's amazing. And some of the conversations that we've been having out there around things like emerging technologies, emerging workflows around artificial intelligence, machine learning things like that. And the whole adoption around hybrid cloud, it really speaks to all of the things that we're doing, the initiatives that we're leading at Red Hat. So it's a great validation of all of the things that we've been working on for the past 10, 15, 20 years. >> And you had a long-standing relationship with Dell. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> 18 years or so? >> Yeah, yeah we've had not just a long relationship but very collaborative relationship with Dell over the past 18 years. It's something like If you take a look at some of the initiatives that we've been working on, we have ready architectures around open stack, around open shift. We have just, we have highlighting a few things here around Microsoft sequel server, around SAP HANA. And actually, we're really talking a lot around open shift and a ready architecture that we've developed, that we have architecture guides, deployment guides all around open shift and open shift container storage for Dell hardware. And actually, next week at our Red Hat Summit event, you should really take a look on Wednesday morning our keynote, our EVP Paul Cormier will be talking about some great, new, very interesting initiatives that we've been working with Dell on. >> Alright well Michael I'm excited we're going to have theCUBE at Red Hat Summit in Boston. It's our sixth year there. I'll be one of the hosts there. John Walls will be there with me. We're going to have Paul Cormier on the program. (laughs) Jim Whitehurst hacking the keynote. It's actually not a secret Satya Nadella and Ginni Rometty will both be up on the main stage there. And just my perspective you were talking about hybrid cloud. As you said, Red Hat Summit, I've been for many years. That hybrid cloud, that adoption. They're both open stack at the infrastructure layer and up to the application with open chip. Something we've been hearing for years and you're right. The general themes seem to echo and resonate here as to what I've been hearing at Red Hat. Can you help expand a little bit those conversations you're having here? I love you talking about some of that app modernization analytics that are going on there. How does that fit into the ready architectures that Dell's offering? >> Sure. Well I represent our storage business unit. So a lot of times, the conversations I'm having over there at the booth are kind of revolving around storage and storage growth. How data is expanding, how do we deal with the scalability of that? How do we deal with persistence of storage and containers for staple applications, things of that nature. But really, at the end of the day as I'm listening to some of the other conversations that my colleagues are having over there, it's really about how do we get work done? How do we now move into these areas where we need that cloud like experience not just in a public cloud or even in a private cloud but everywhere that we touch infrastructure. We need to have that simplified cloud-like experience. >> So just point on your subject area. Talk about the containerization and what's happening with storage pieces. Give us that layer between the infrastructure layer because let me say I believe the t shirt I saw was Linux is container, containers are Linux. So Linux has lived on Dell hardware for a long time. But anything that users should understand about the differentiation between whether they were bare metal or virtualized in the past and containerized environments today? >> Yeah well I like to say that you can't spell Red Hat without storage. (laughs) I don't know that that's particularly true but (laughing) >> It sells good. >> It sells good. Yeah so storage is near and dear to my heart but really at the end of the day, you can't have storage sitting in an island, it has to integrate and be collaborative with the rest of the portfolio that we're expanding out for our customers solving real issues, real problems. And so we've been watching industry trends and certainly these are things like that from an industry we've been looking at over the past five, 10 years so nothing new but we see the evolution of certain things like for example developers and data analysts, data scientists, these people are really charged with going out there and making dramatic differences, transforming their companies, their organizations. And as that transformational application, service development or bringing back insights on data is really integral to a company's ability to transform or differentiate in the industry. They have to be much, much more agile. And it seems that they are more and more taking over a lot of the role that we would normally see traditional I.T. managers making a lot of the purchasing decisions. A lot of the industry trends show that these folks, developers, data analysts are actually making some of those I.T. decisions now. And of course, everything is really being developed as cloud native. So we see cloud native as being more of the new norm. And if you kind of look at the expansion of data, Lisa Spellman a couple of days ago said "Hey look. "We've seen data double in the past two years "but we're only using two percent of that data." >> Two percent? >> Two percent. >> Wow, it's not very much. >> Yeah. And if you look at IDC mentioned that the data sphere has now grown to over 33 Zettabytes. A zettabyte is a billion gigabytes. So put that into perspective. Alright. 33 Zettabytes. By 2025, they project that we're going to grow to 175 Zetabytes. How can we make better use of that data? A lot of that data is coming from IOT type applications. You look at trends, traffic trends and how that might be correlated to weather activities or other events that are going on or archeological digs or all sorts of just information that is brought back. How do we make best use of that information? And so the need for scalability in a hybrid cloud environment, has become more and more of a key industry trend as the data sphere continues to grow. And I think across all three of those, that's really driving this need for hyper convergence and not just hyper convergence in the traditional sense. we've seen hyper convergence in the field for probably about five, 10 years now. But initially it was kind of a niche play and it was based on appliances. Well the past two years, you've seen the Gardner reports on hyper convergence really talking about how it is moving and evolving to more of a software defined nature. And in fact, in the past Magic Quadrant around hyper convergence, you see Red Hat show up. Something that is probably not known that Red Hat has hyper converged offerings. It's something that actually we didn't get into it just because the analysts were suggesting it. We had customers come to us and they were trying to put together Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat virtualization, storage, et cetera et cetera with varying degrees of success with that because they were doing it more or less as a project. And so we took upon ourselves to develop that, put it into a product and start to develop it with things like Ansible for deployment management. We have dedupe and compression with our virtual data optimization products, virtual GPUs, et cetera. So we're really in that space now too. >> Yeah Michael I mean it really from our standpoint it was a natural extension of what happens if you look at what hyper converged was, it was simplification and it had to be tight integration down at the OS level or the virtualization level. As a matter of fact, when we first wrote our research on it, we called it server SAN because it was the benefits of storage area network but built at the server level. So we said those OS manufacturers. Now I have to admit, I called out VMware and Microsoft are the ones that I considered the biggest ones. But as a natural fit that Red Hat would look out of that environment and if you look at the leaders in the marketplace today, we're here, VMware is here, their softwares piece. Techtonic has transitioned to be a software company. So yeah, welcome to the party. It's been a fun ride to watch that over the last five years. >> Yeah absolutely. >> So let's talk about customers and this spirit of collaboration. You just mentioned sort of the entrance into HCIs being really driven by the voice and the actions and the needs of Red Hat customers. You guys have three major pillars, themes that you have been delivering at Dell Technologies World. Talk to us a little bit about this and how your customers are helping to drive what you're delivering here and what you'll be delivering in the future. >> Yes certainly. I mean that's the whole open source model. And we don't we don't just contribute to the open source community but we develop enterprise grade infrastructure solutions for customers based on the open source way. And so essentially, as I think of it these market trends that I was talking about. It's not that we're leading them or that we're following them. It's we're tightly integrated with them because all of these industry trends are being formulated as we're in progress. It's a great opportunity for Red Hat to really express what we can do with our customers, with our partners, our developers, the folks that we have on our staff that are working directly in the community. Most products that we work on, we're the number one contributor for. So it's all very special opportunity for us. I would say from a storage perspective, what we've really focused on this year is around three main pillars. One is around data portability for those application portability projects that we see in open shift. So being able to offer an enterprise grade persistent storage for stateful applications that are running in these containerized environments. Another area is around that hybrid cloud scalable storage. And this is something that being able to scale that storage to hundreds of petabytes is kind of a big deal (laughs) and especially as we see a lot of the workloads that we've been working with customers on around data analytics and now artificial intelligence, machine learning. Those types of data lakes type projects where we're able to, by using open stack or open shift, we're able to do multi-tenant workforce workload isolation of the work that all of these people are doing while having a shared data context underneath with Red Hat storage. And then the third is around hyper convergence. I think we've touched on that already. >> Yeah so Michael before letting you go I have to touch on the hot thing that everybody needs to understand what's going. The ripple that will be felt throughout the industry. And I'm not talking about a certain 34 billion dollar pending acquisition. (laughs) Constant in the last, most of my career there has been a certain logo that I would see at every conference and that Red Hat that I got my first one, I don't know, 15, 16 years ago. So the shadow man has been deprecated. There's a new Red Hat logo. >> Oh yeah yeah. And we just brought out the new logo today. So a great segue into actually, it was last night, they pulled down the old logos, they put the new logos on the buildings, pretty much around the world. I think it's May Day in Europe. So maybe some of that will happen tomorrow or. Trying to think of what time it is, probably tonight. So yeah it's a great new logo and it's, our old logo has been over, it was around for 19 years since 2000. And it came back from a lot of feedback from customers but also from people who didn't know Red Hat, didn't know what we did. And quite honestly, some of them said that shadow man looked a little sneaky. (laughing) >> I guess on the rise of all those cyber challenges, maybe they're right. >> (laughs) so we have a new logo just launched today. Very proud of it, we're looking forward to working with everybody in the industry and go forward with all these new, wonderful opportunities that we have. >> I look forward to pointing out to all the vendors that they're now using the old Red Hat logo just like they do for every other vendor in this space when it changes. >> As of how many hours ago. (laughing) >> Well it'll be interesting to see and hear what Stu and team uncover at the summit next week in terms of the impact of this brand. We thank you so much for your time Michael, >> Absolutely. >> joining Stu and me on theCUBE. I guess it is just after day of day three. It's hard to tell right it's all blending in together. (laughs) Well we thank you for your time and your insight. >> Thank you very much and see you next week Stu. >> Exactly. For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from day three of our coverage of Dell technologies world 2019. Thanks for watching. (light music)

>> 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 the cubes. Live coverage here, Adele. Technology rule in Las Vegas. I'm John for Developed, a special guest. Michael Dell, Chairman, CEO, Del Technologies Cube. Alumni. Great to see you again. Yearly pilgrimage. People can come on the Cube. Good to see you again. Thanks. May always >> Great to be with you guys. >> All right, So I gotta ask you because, you know, Dave and I were talking on yesterday's kickoff on our intro about the conversation we had. I think six years ago we saw you standing there in Austin, but still a public company didn't go private yet. And then the series of moves going private and we're like, That's great. Get behind the curtain. Get things reset. Look at the cash flows. Looking good. You had the clear plan as the founder and CEO is kind of a new kind of reset, if you will. And then up to now the execution in just the series of moves. When you look back now where you are today, where you were then how do you feel? What's absurd? What did you learn? What's some of the highlights for you? >> Well, look, we feel great, You know, our business is really grown tremendously. It's all the things we've been doing has been resonating with customers have been ableto, I would say, restored the origins of the entrepreneurial dream and success of the company and reintroduce, uh, innovation and risk taking into, ah, now ninety one billion dollars company growing in double digits last year and certainly the set of capabilities. That way, we've been able to build organically and in organically on DH with set of alliances. We have the trust that customers have given us, you know, super happy about the position that we're in and the opportunities going forward. As I've said, you know, a zay said Mikey. No, yesterday. I think all this is really just the pregame show. Tow what's ahead for our industry and for the role that technology is going to play in the world. >> And the role of data you mentioned also used to quote you Yes, that you said data a CZ the life, blood of digital transformation of the heartbeat, visual transformation and It's also revitalizing all the other components of what looked like a consolidated market is now actually being reborn the PC, technology, infrastructure, fabrics and other software opportunity. So Data has kind of brought in a whole nother level of kind of revitalisation and the industry, which is actually causing more investment in what looked like older category of you know it and computers whatnot. This's been a big, big tailwind for you guys. >> Well, data has always been at the centre of you know how the technology industry works and now we just have a tsunami explosion of data. And of course, now we have this new computer science that allows us Teo reason over the data in real time and create much better results in outcomes and that combined with the computing power, all organizations have to reimagine themselves, given all these technologies and certainly the infrastructure requirements in terms of the network, you know, the storage, that computer bill out of the edge, tons of new requirements, and we're super well positioned to go address all that. >> I enjoyed your keynote, Michael. So I thought it was excellent. One of your better ones and you painted a picture of tech for good. Uh, really life changing things that you guys and your customers are doing. You gave some examples that be an example of example was great Draper Labs. But you also paid a picture. You need a platform for this digital transformation. We've seen the numbers. Eighty percent of the workloads are still on Prem. What do you think that looks like ten years down the road? What do you What's your vision say? >> Well, the surprise outcome ten years from now is they'LL be something much bigger than the private cloud and Public Cloud. It's the edge and actually think that would be way more computer data on the edge in ten years than any of the, you know, derivatives of cloud that we want to talk about. So that's a ten year prediction. Yeah, that's that's That's kind of what I see. And maybe maybe nobody's predicting that this yet, But, you know, let's come back in ten years and see what it looks like. >> So I like to do that hybrid hybrid. Klaus been around for a while, but talked about. It's been kind of operating, Ma. We see that multi cloud is really kind of surged in importance in conversations because I think people wake up and go. Hey, I got multiple clouds. I got azure over here for ofthis three sixty five. I got some Amazon over here. I got some home grown stuff over here. I got a data center so that people kind of generally Khun, Khun, relate to the reality of multi cloud hybrid. Live it more of a different kind of twist, but certainly relevant. But multi cloud has got everyone's attention and you guys launched Del Cloud. Is that a multi cloud, or is that a cloud to multiple clouds? Explain your view on that and where this goes. >> So really, what we're doing is we're bringing to customers. All the resource is they need to operate in the hybrid, multi cloud world. And first, you have to recognize that the workloads want to move around and to say that they're all going to be here, or there is in some sense, missing the point because they're going to move back and forth. And, uh, you know, you've got regulation cost security performance late and see all sorts of new requirements that air coming at you and they're not going to just sit, sit in one place. Now, as you know, with via Work Cloud Foundation, we have the ability to move these workloads seamlessly across. Now, essentially all the public clouds, right. Forty, two hundred partners out there infrastructure on premise built and tuned specifically for the VM wear platform and empowered also for the edge and a love. This together is the Del Technologies Cloud. We have obviously great, uh, capabilities from our Delhi emcee infrastructure solutions and all the great innovations that Veum where coming together >> scale has been a topic. We talked on the Cube many years. We saw Amazon get scale with public cloud scales of competitive advantage is now becoming kind of table stakes both for customers trying to figure out how to operate a digital scale, speed a life. You guys have a scale level now that's pretty impressive. What you guys done with the puzzle pieces, You cut puzzle pieces, you know, cos capabilities now across the board, as you guys look at scale is a competitive advantage, which it is, and we talked about this before. You now have to integrate seamlessly in these pieces. So as you compose as customers compose the variety of capabilities. It's gotta be frictionless. That's a goal. How do you look at that? How do you talk to your team's about this on DH? What's your view on scale? And is this something you guys talk about inside the company? >> Well, inside the business, you know, the first priority was to get each of the individual pieces working well. But then we saw that the real opportunity was in the scenes on how we could more deeply integrate all the aspects of what we're doing together. And you saw that on stage, you know, in vivid form yesterday with Pat and Jeff and Sasha and even more today again. And there's more to do. There's, although there's always more to do. Were working on how we build a gate, a platform bringing together all of our capabilities with Bhumi and data protection on DH bm wear, and this is all going to be super important way. Enter this A I enabled age of the future. >> Michael, you got a track record of creating shareholder value. We're big fans of, you know, we'LL have CNBC on in the office and Michael's on everybody coming across, right? Davos? Picky, Quick. We're also big fans have asked you to sort of knocked down to three criticisms. And sure, it was really a conversation about stock price, you know? And you Did you knock down the debt structure? The low margin business, the ownership structure, its center. But you never came backto stock price, so it looks like a couple of ways to invest. Now VM wear directly. Also looks like Veum where you could you could buy cheaply through Del What your thoughts on on that? You know where Dell sits in the market today? Its value. >> I think. You know, investors are increasingly understanding that we've created an incredible business here and certainly, you know, if we look at the additional coverage that we have and you know, they're they're a CZ their understanding, the business, you know, some of the analysts are starting to say, Hey, this doesn't really feel like a conglomerate. Direct quote. Okay. And, uh, if you think about what we demonstrated today, yesterday and we'LL demonstrate the future, you know, we're not like Berkshire Hathaway or, uh you know, uh, this is not a railroad that owns a chain of restaurants. This is one integrated business that fits together incredibly well, and you know it's generating substantial cash flows. And, you know, I think investors overtime are figuring out value. That's intrinsic. Teo, the overall Del Technologies family now wave Got lots of ways to invest, right? Get, Be aware. SecureWorks pivotal. And, of course, the overall Del Technologies. >> Yeah, and just a follow up on that. I mean, I've observed on the margin side I mean, when del went private, it was around nineteen percent gross margins. Now you're in gross margin heaven, you know, absorbing the emcee. And it seems to be headed in the right right direction. So it's a nice mix >> know, in our in our cloud, an infrastructure group, almost ninety percent of the engineers are software engineers. And so you think aboutthe innovations you saw in states today with power Macs and Unity, X T and our power protect platform. You know, basically all software running on power power it surfers and platforms that we've created. >> What's on your plate now, Michael? As you come out, come out of Del Technologies world. You got business to take care of what your goals what's on your plate. What's your object? Is what you trying to accomplish in the next year? >> Well, certainly continuing to execute for our customers growing faster than the industry. You know, maintaining and improving our customer NPS levels and keeping the innovation engine cranked up on high. You saw a lot today on DH yesterday. Stay tuned, Veum. World's coming in in August and they'LL be much, much more way Continue toe innovate together Lucy with Veum where so we've got we've got lots more in the cube >> and you got cash will come in, which means your suppliers to a lot of customers Congratulations. I want to get your final thought on my final question on the Tech for good One of the things I saw yesterday on the Kino that you gave was that popped out wass. It wasn't about the speeds and feeds around, you know, the performances get great performance on the tech side. You gotta be, you know, the infrastructure level Scott be performing, but it's about solving problems. And I think this is a direction that you're taking the company saying there's outcomes out there. The problems that can be solved with tech We're hearing a whole tech for bad narrative in the media these days. Tax evil text. Bad. But there are awesome spots where technology is creating great things for society. This is a theme for you. Can you share? Why that focus? And when some of the highlights >> it's right. I mean, if you if you step back from the what happened in the last twenty four hours, twenty four days and even twenty four months, you start looking at, you know, twenty four years you start to see is thie. Outcomes for humanity have gotten dramatically better, and technologies played an enormous role in that. I'm massively optimistic that in the next three decades they're going to be really miracles. In terms of how do you dress things like deafness and blindness and paralysis with a I and embedded technology inside the body. The, you know, things were able to do now with sequencing the genome and using all this data to create personalized medicine solutions. Yes, technology can be used for bad, but the vast majority of it is used for good by people that have good in their hearts. Right. And and, uh, you know, uh, it goes beyond making great businesses and making people more productive. It's actually changing lives and very positive ways, >> while the other big narrative in the pressure here is automation and taking away jobs. And it's a serious concern. However, you know there's no reason to protect the past from from the future and this great opportunities ahead education and someone, even you and Susan but big supporters of that, obviously. So we're optimistic for the future. I know I know you are. The best is yet to come. As I'd like to say >> Absolutely, we agree. >> Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, you great entrepreneurial track record you celebrate thirty five years from the original dorm room. So some of your Facebook posts now here he took a business that you knew T mature couple players. This is a trend we're seeing. Zoom communication just went public. They took video streaming and holding meetings and completely when cloud base and disrupted it. You saw >> runs on Dell EMC by the way >> runs on Dell, did not know that it's only a lot of Michael great, but this is an entre. I want to get your advice to other articles that might be watching us because you now, with the technology with data and cloud and tech, you, Khun, go into existing markets that don't look good on paper that people might dismiss as that's over. That's a mature market You've certainly taken Del Technology's got all the pieces and are executing at a home of the level. Zoom did it for video on the cloud. There are zillions of these opportunities out there that entrepreneurs. So the advice don't be discouraged by what looks like a big fat market. So your what's your advice?  >> and I I feel something is coming. That's quite significant. And right now you mentioned this new wave of companies that air coming public and they were built on a foundation of technology infrastructure capabilities. You know that was established, Let's say, ten years ago. Okay, well, right now we're just at the kind of beginning of five G and A II technology, and all these embedded sensors and low latent see communications, and there will be a whole another wave of cos I suspect many, many more across all industries that, you know, just unlock all kinds of new capabilities and an opportunity. So I'm super excited about that. Andi, I think I think it's it's just going to get more interesting. >> It's amazing to think of the tools you had thirty five years ago, when you started and how you've transformed. So congratulations. >> Thank you. Spend the time again. Thanks for having us again here. Tenth year, Del Technologies. Well, thanks for having us. And great to have a conversation. >> Thank you. And the rest of the cube team for all your great coverage. >> Thank you very much. Michael Dell, Chairman, CEO, Dell Technology here. David Velante myself, John Furrier. Stay tuned for more day to coverage. We got two sets here. It's a cube canon of content blown out. The content here, Adele Technology, world Check out Dell's hashtag del tech world for all the highlights will be right back after this short break.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019 brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are on day one of theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019. We've got two sets, lots of great guests, lots of great conversations already. We're pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Mike Apigian, Senior Director of Education Services at Dell Technologies. Mike, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Our pleasure. So here we are talking about digital transformation. We've been talking about it for a long time. >> Yes. >> I love how last year's Dell Technologies World was make it real, it being digital transformation, IT, work force transformation, security. This year it's about real transformation. We talked a lot about the technologies. What are some of the other things though that companies need to be thinking about as enablers of this transformation? >> Sure, great question and obviously the technology is a huge part of it, right? But of course, myself being from Dell Technologies Education Services, a big focus on the people. So that is what we see as an additional critical focus because at the end of the day, digital transformation is big. It's really big and technology alone isn't going to suffice, right? It's not going to be just that. So focus on the people and you know we hear it time and again from our customers, from research in the market that you know, one of the top three actually barriers from customers and organizations driving adoption and that success in digital transformation comes down to having the right skillsets in place. >> Yeah so Mike, I'm glad we have you on. We just had your Chief Customer Officer Karen Quintos on. >> Yeah. >> And she was talking a little bit about the skills gap. So we know how many people we're going to need to have and you know, half of the programs we're going to need is going to require them retraining of you know, my work force there, so. >> Absolutely. >> We've talked to years with what used to be EMC and is now Dell Education Services. >> Sure. >> From storage certification to converge certification to cloud certification. So what's the latest and greatest? What is the kind of go-to skillset that people need and the ones that people are calling up and saying oh my gosh, if I could learn this, it's going to really catapult my career? >> Yeah so the Dell Technologies now, Dell Technologies proven professional program has been in place for years. A lot of industry-recognized certifications to your point, a lot focused on storage, data protection, product-related and over the past 12 months to 18 months, we've actually got a lot of expansion beyond that into more areas of transformation and those areas where we've expanded beyond just products have been tied back right to that skills gap that we're seeing in customers and what they're challenged with that they drive digital transformation. So some examples being more of a focus on converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud. We have some associate level certifications we recently brought to market there. Multicloud, that's a big focus for us. Obviously some of the discussion and announcements this morning focused around multicloud and they talked about cloud chaos, right? So we have some expert level certification in place focused on that. We also have a focus around security and specifically designing infrastructure with that security-first mindset and then finally the other most recent transformational type of certification is a master level. So think of a career pinnacle level certification that's focused on transformational architecture. >> Yeah Mike, just to follow up on that, one of the things I hear in multicloud is there's certain technologies that might allow us to move, but one of the biggest challenges is skillset because if I learn and I understand how to configure it and how to manage it and how to do it here and if I move somewhere else, even if it's 70% the same, oh my god, that's not awesome. Can you just, I wonder if you can step back and give us you know, what you see out there and what works today and where do we need to go as an industry as a whole to try to help users to live in this multicloud world that we're already in but struggling with? >> Yeah I mean there's a ton of proficiency in the silos, right, in managing specific infrastructure service storage network now also around converged infrastructure as well as cloud deployments, but to your point, in a multicloud environment, there are different providers, both private and public, different technologies, and it can get complex fairly quick, right? So having the skillsets to kind of take a step back and look at that holistically and understand about workload placements, you know, there's knowledge and skillsets that require to make some of those determinations. We obviously have a lot of services capabilities that help provide that, but there's a level of obviously proficiency that our customers want and need in house as well. So a lot of it is building that knowledge and understanding the decision points and the criteria for the different providers as well as workload placement and movement across that multicloud environment. >> Essentially-- >> Very different than skill sets in the past. >> Sorry about that, very excited. I'm curious about if we talk about talent and retention with respect to some of the guys and gals who've been around for a while, Michael mentioned on stage this morning that later this week is Dell's 35th anniversary in business and as we look at all the technology transformations and multicloud world that we live and Stu mentioned, what are some of the benefits for, I don't want to say an older population, but say the veterans of technology? Why, what are some of the things that Dell Technologies Education Services will deliver to say the more seasoned individual to stay relevant and be able to adapt as quickly as technology is so that they're competitive for jobs themselves? >> Yeah, yeah, great, great question and I mean it's the pace of change is so fast and it's impacting everyone, everyone from recent college graduates, right, getting right into the field that we're in in technology as well as to your point, seasoned veterans who've been around for a while and that's where a lot of the difficult transformation is taking place, right? 'cause it's the roles of the past and today, the skillsets of today, like those roles and skills that have gotten us to today are very different than what's needed to get us to tomorrow and that's where a lot of our technical training, our curricula as well as our industry certifications come into play and helping build that knowledge, the required and the skills and the certifications to validate those capabilities for the next generation workforce. So it's really for the right out of school and maybe new to the field as well as evolving throughout their career. >> All right so Mike, we know that your team's doing things throughout the year, talking to your customers, but you've got 15,000 people here at Dell Tech World. I've seen the hands-on lab, I know there's always certification. So give us from your team, you know, some of the big focus, some of the activities and some of the takeaways that you want people to have from your team. >> You know, the one big thing that I would give a plug for is our proved and professional center. So right downstairs in Casanova 501, we have 57 certifications available and we have hundreds and hundreds of customers and partners that will be taking certification exams and then achieving certification this week, all right? We have a promotional offer. So every attempt at, first attempt at every exam is free just for this week so I encourage everyone who's here to check it out. In addition to taking those certifications in preparation for that, we have 29 different preparation sessions that we're running. So right downstairs, two rooms next door where we're rotating through on topics that are specific to our latest and greatest product lines, PowerMax, PowerEdge MX, in addition to that cloud-focused data science certification prep sessions, multi-cloud expert. There's a whole array of prep sessions that are helping our customers and partners prepare for taking those certifications. >> AI machine learning? >> There are some intersections with that as well, certainly, as part of our data science curriculum and certification exams. >> And where are customers in terms of discussing with you, say maybe at last year's Dell technologies World, like these are some of the certifications and the trainings that we really need. Talk about that sort of bi-directional symbiosis where customers are, I'm assuming, help you the teams identify, develop and then deliver this spot-on training. >> Yeah that's a great question. So actually every year here at Dell Technologies World, we have a customer advisory council and that should last two years, came out loud and clear last year was more of a focus in some of the areas that they're challenged with from a transformation perspective. Security came into play in a big way, different aspects of cloud and multicloud, enterprise architecture, a lot of our focus related to Pivotal and a lot of the offerings there, application development. So all of that feedback and discussion that we have into customers actually feeds into our prioritization and road mapping and it has a big impact on the technical training and the certifications that we bring to market. So we're going to be our customers throughout today, also tomorrow and that'll be additional input to where we go in the future. >> All right, Mike, what other feedback are you hearing from customers? We hear in the keynotes some of these broad topics and you talk about AI and IoT and edge computing and how much of that funnel back and are they looking for help on that now or you know, how do they start getting themselves ready for some of these massive waves that are coming? >> Yeah that's definitely part of the themes that we hear and the feedback that we get from customers and what's really relevant to them and that ties into their skills transformation as well. As you said, IoT, AIML, data engineer. That's a more recent role that we're focusing on and you'll see a bunch coming out from Dell Technologies Ed Services on that in the not too distant future so a lot of that. Those themes are, we hear the exact same, same customer base and those are areas that we're addressing in our roadmap and as we bring new technical training offerings to market. >> So listening to your customers is key. As Stu mentioned, we were talking to Karen Quintos a little bit earlier that that's essential for pretty much any role, but you're listening, you're taking that into account, you're designing it and delivering for that. A lot of benefits we can talk about for the individuals going through the training, right, in terms of upscaling and job retention, but from your customers' perspective, do you have a favorite example of a customer who's really been able to transform their company because they've made this investment and ensuring that their talent has the latest and greatest education? >> Yeah, and actually, we've seen, we've done a bunch of research in market and what we see time and again is a really really strong correlation between those organizations that are focusing on and investing in their people and the skills development, a correlation between that and the progress and success that they're having with their transformation initiatives, right, and one area where we've been engaging a lot deeper with customers as of just recent and beginning to do a lot more of is we call it an organizational learning program. So we obviously offer technical training and certifications, but this is more of a consultative engagement with our customers more at the organization level and very consultative and we work closely with them to understand their digital strategy, their plans, and as part of that, drive a very prescriptive assessment of what's going on in their environment from a people and skills perspective. So really understanding their current state and where they want to go, where they need to be, and based upon the findings of that assessment, we work closely with them to develop a defined documented strategy and plan. In this case, it's a learning plan. It's a continuous learning plan for that organization over a series of quarters to work against and drive and really capture, gain those skills and knowledge that's required to help move them forward. >> Yeah, Mike, I love that. It reminds me of the joke in your space is what if we give them new skills and they leave? And of course the alternative is what if we don't give them new skills and they stay? >> Exactly. >> So last thing I wanted to ask is talk a little bit about internal. There's a lot of change going on. You've been from the EMC to Dell for quite a few years. >> Oh yes. >> I won't say how many just to protect the innocent, but one of the things, I mean I spent 10 years at EMC and the training was something that helped me a lot in my career. Talk a little bit about, you know, what's changed and how you help the internal teams and all the different groups stay up on the latest and greatest areas. >> Absolutely so in Education Services to your point, we support our employees, technical employees, around the globe, our partners and customers. So huge focus on enabling those employees and if you think about it, right, they are, they're the front lines, they're the folks that are with our customers and they need to be as up to speed, if not more up to speed in these areas of technology. So we have a massive undertaking to enable our services audiences, pre-sale systems engineers, our consultants around the globe to ensure that they are up to speed and quite knowledgeable on the latest and greatest technologies and really how those come to life within our customer environments. >> It seems like maybe Education Services is a catalyst for this internal cultural transformation that we're seeing from Dell Technologies. >> It absolutely is. There's transformation everywhere. It's internal, it's external and at the end of the day, kind of back to where we started, right? It comes down to the people. It's our customers and us as a company, our most important asset and at the end of the day, you know, the people need the right skills to be successful and to go digital. >> Great stuff, Mike. Thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon and sharing all that you're doing to help transform Dell Education Services for your internal folks and your customers alike. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us live from Las Vegas. Day one of theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas! It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019 brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Furrier on theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. This is day one of theCUBE's coverage for three days, two sets, lots going on. I'm pretty sure I can guarantee you a very energetic conversation that John and I are going to have with Dell Boomi CTO Michael Martin. Michael, great to have you on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here. Nice to meet both of you. >> So Michael Dell, the other Michael, talked about (laughs), you probably get that a lot the other Michael, >> No, not really. (laughs) >> Talked about Boomi's a leader in cloud integration this morning during the keynote. Stu Miniman and I had the chance to talk to your CEO Chris McNabb, who came with tons of energy. We want to talk to you about Blockchain. >> Blockchain? >> What, yes! Am I surprising you? >> Yes. >> What are your perspectives on it? Does it live up to the hype? >> Wow, that's a really good question. So, you know it's really funny because I talk to people about Blockchain all the time to be honest with you. And I would say that for as many people that are as excited about the technology and the possibilities, there are equal number of people that are the naysayers. Right, the doubters. And a lot of times the people in those roles are technology people, right? They'll say, well just use a database for that. Right, what, you know, what difference does it make? But they're missing the point. The point is this, what's really happening in the industry is collaboration. Blockchain, it is a technology, but the point is, it's creating relationships in business that have never been created before. So if you go and look at these consortium and work groups that are spinning up, you see a construction consortium, an energy consortium, health care consortium, transportation consortium, supply chain consortium, and you look at the people that belong to those, it is amazing the collaboration between these companies because of Blockchain as a concept. So really it is the, it's transforming the industry. So my advice is either get on board or you're going to be left behind. >> All right, so first of all, we're both pro Blockchain everyone knows, theCUBE knows, I love Blockchain. I love the idea of token economics. The ICO's initial coin offerings has really poisoned the market, I think, in the general market. Because people see Bitcoin, Ethereum, all kinds of currency, it's a lot of fraud outside the United States, and the government's cracked down on it, we know that story. But the fundamental technology is, changes the relationship between people and data, and their interactions. And so I think, I agree with you 100%, but also it's a cultural shift, too. You're thinking about new ways to do something. And I always say, I'd love to get your reaction to this Michael, because I always say to people, hey when the internet started the web, it was dial-up, it was the slowest piece of you know what you could ever see. But it was the first time we saw web pages, we could self-serve ourselves with information. So I think people tend to compare what I could do alternatively with a database to the early stages of where Blockchain, you had some latency issues or you're doing them real time, no problem, don't do Blockchain. But if you look at the benefits of what it could provide from supply chain to community, they're there. And it's disrupting the business model behind it. >> It is. >> And I think that is a part of the clue train that people can jump on and understand that if they just take the leap of faith, kind of like the web. There were people who poopooed the world wide web. It's a toy for people, aww it's nothing. >> Yeah. >> The graphics are horrible. Speeds are slow. No one really uses it. (laughs) >> You could say the same thing about cloud, and IOT, right? Think about 3 years ago, everybody's IOT drug, right? Everybody's happy, IOT IOT, right? But now? I'll make a provocative statement that I now say that I'm comfortable in saying is, if it's a business, you are not incorporating device data, either as a producer or a consumer, you're already behind. You're already behind, and so, I will probably say the same thing about Blockchain in 24 to 36 months. If you are not working on a strategy to have your business be more competitive by incorporating Blockchain, you're going to be behind. >> Talk about where people can get on the clue train here, because it's a good point. There's always the early adopters, the people who take the arrows in the back, so to speak. The entrepreneurs, and we've seen some cases of that. But it's maturing fast. Where are the entry points for say, a technologist, a business person, is there a pattern that you see that might be a good way for someone to jump in. How do they jump in? I mean it's certainly you can join a community, and get involved, but I mean, in terms of holistically thinking about impact to their business, to their customers, where should they be staring at for Blockchain? >> I always have two answers. One is, my business hat, and one is my technical hat. One is, join a consortium. Join a work group. Learn what others are doing. And look at your competition, right? There's a vast amount of data out there. So, just go ahead and search on your competition. It's very easy. And I guarantee that if there's anything that's motivating, it's what your competition's doing. But the second answer is this, get your hands dirty. Learn the technology, right? Don't be a PowerPoint strategy. Learn the technology. For sure. So understand what's there. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of Ethereum. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of Hyperledger Fabric. Start learning the technology. Really get your hands on it. Because that's what we had to do in Boomi, is. We've been also been looking at it for roughly two years. And it was last year that we came out with our support, because of working with our customers and partners, that we too had to work on a strategy of where is Boomi positioned, and how does it bring value to the market for our customers for Blockchain? For us, we had to just start doing it. So now in the past year, we're doing it, and we too, belong to different alliances, and participate and can't go without saying that with Dell technologies very much invested in Blockchain across the business, especially VMWare, we reap the benefits at a much broader scale. So we're just been in a great position of learning and understanding where Boomi fits. >> Why is it, if you look at your existing customers I mentioned before we spoke with Chris McNabb about an hour or two ago, I think I saw on Boomi.com there's over 8200 customers that you guys have, Rory Read energetically talked about how much growth you guys have achieved, the numbers of customers, sheer number of huge that you're adding monthly, quarterly. When you talk to your existing integration customers, what are those conversations, kind of along the lines of John's question, where you're talking to these customers about why integration is so important as it relates to Blockchain? >> Well, first of all, most importantly is customers need an integration strategy. They just need a strategy on integration. So let's push Blockchain aside, right? Like Michael Dell and everybody else says, "Every business needs to integrate." And let's fact it, the majority by far of customers that need an integration strategy are integrating data between legacy on-premise solutions in cloud, right? Once they get established of understanding the processes and the procedures in bringing in a solution like Boomi, it's a natural extension that boom, you already have Blockchain support, you're just extending your integration strategy to now basically on board. >> What kind of Blockchain features do you have in the product and the road map? What's it looking like? Where's the use case for you guys? >> So, I'll tell you what we're seeing. First of all, our support is Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, it's also fully compatible with VMWare announced their beta in Blockchain at the end of last year, so we're fully compatible with the VMWare Blockchain, with is Ethereum-based. And for us, most of the conversations that we have, now of course, we all know that there is every industry is dabbling or really trying to be a front runner. But the clear front runner for us is Trusted Lineage. Track and trace, it's really tracking supply chain. That is by far the most predominate scenario that we see. Our partners and customers we work with seem to be the most interested in. >> It's interesting, digital is all supply chain. >> Yes. >> It's connected. >> Yep. >> And then, connecting the analog is interesting too. Some, a lot of examples we see a lot is shipping goods, a physical activity. >> Right. >> Where there's a digital component in it, that the ledger plays beautifully for. So, it's the confluence of physical world meets digital where now you have human relationships to a digital connected network. >> That's right. >> And if everything's connected, everything can be a supply chain at some point if you're looking at data. >> Right. >> Your thoughts on that? >> It's interesting you bring this up, because we've been talking like it's a business-automated process. You run something, it integrates, it pulls data, it transforms data, but interestingly enough, the other thing that people tend to think about is, they tend to think of Blockchain in a silo, right? I'm just installing Blockchain and here it's over humming in the corner, waiting to do something, right? But that's not going to be the case. Interestingly enough, people also think that's just integrating applications back and forth, but when you pull up a phone, and maybe do a financial transaction, you're really communicating with a smart contract in the back end. You are actually a person communicating or integrating with a smart contract. This is the beauty that people now, if they just to start thinking about it, and they learn it, is, oh, okay. Again, Boomi will help you integrate data back and forth between smart contracts. But it also presents you the user interface for a smart contract. >> And it removes the middle, intermediaries or middlemen and so that means in software is that you're going to go direct software-to-software with these smart contracts. So that's one. But also just in the real world, if you and I are online, and we want to do something, we could have a digital smart contract, no lawyers are involved, we can just agree and then it's immutable. >> That's right. >> So that's another benefit. Again, these efficiencies come from things being taken away. >> That's right. >> This seems to be a big part of the Blockchain. >> It is. As a matter of fact, geolocation's another example. Whether it be freight, or ships, or trains, we're already seeing cases where based on geolocation, it's denoting where the goods are, based on geolocation. A human's not even involved at all. It's all automated based on proximity. Right? It's all like this ecosystem is becoming just alive in itself and just starting to be self-building. >> What do you hearing of the integration of Blockchain into Boomi's product road map? What are you hearing from your customers, and your partners? >> For us, I will tell you that given that we've been working on this, there's no question that the validation and quality of what we have is because of our customers and partners. But, hands down, everybody's still on the journey. Everybody's trying to figure out. >> Early innings? >> Very much so. The other thing I need to point out, just to make sure the viewers know this, is Boomi itself is not a Blockchain, right? It's not a mechanism by which you install a Blockchain node, right? It is the ability to interact with a Blockchain that's pre-existing. That's very important because sometimes people look at us like, "Oh is Boomi helping me deploy a Blockchain?" It's like, no. We're helping you integrate your business with a pre-existing Blockchain, and there's a big difference there. >> And that's the partnership consortiums that you guys are a part of, that's the important part of you have mentioning to any consortiums. Not so much, you need to stand up your own, Blockchain, Hyperledger, for instance, patchy license, no problem. >> Right. >> So that's kind of where that integration point is. Okay, what's about speed and performance? Speeds and feeds because again, I've known about the latency issues around how tokens are being written to the Blockchain. It's not super fast, it's some innovations happening, so that's also I would say limiting the scope of the early market adopters. But if you're doing just a trivial transaction, where latency's not involved, it's a great use case. Where do you see the performance of Blockchain? How is that coming along, and what's your view on that? What do you see timetable-wise, and just if you throw a dart at the board, you know? >> Everybody want to aspire to be, to overcome the highest volume transactions today, which we know as probably credit card companies, right? Like that's the benchmark. And I will tell you that there is a ton of research going into performance. For example, today Boomi and VMWare work with the University of San Diego's Supercomputing lab. It's commonly known as, the short name is Block Lab. So, we actually are working together. >> I saw that, there was a recent announcement? >> It got announced not too recent, but I think it could have been at the end of last year was the first press that we did. Coming up now in May or June, we will, there will be another press release of what's going on. So, from a performance standpoint, again we are many universities, as you could imagine, it's a great university project for just that reason. And so we're involved in that together with VMWare. >> So with the developer involvement now, Ethereum attracted a lot of developers. >> Yep. >> And then there was some ease of use issues, performance, natural, then other languages, other Blockchain approaches came out. Where are the developers gravitating towards now, do you see? Because Solidity is a unique language for Ethereum but it's not as easy as Java script, for instance. >> Right. >> You got a Java script guy out there who can sling Hyperledger, possibly, so I'm starting to see tool chains, and how developers' orientations or preferences come into play. >> You do. I mean, whoever heard of Solidity, right, before Ethereum came on the scene, right? That's a whole different programming language. But the two front runners by far is Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. Hyperledger Fabric, I mean, having support for Java toolkit, so that's going to cater to a much broader audience. So you've seen the evolution of both of these catering to more mainstream languages like Go and Java. It's going to happen. Yeah, it's going to happen. >> Predictions? >> Predictions? >> Yeah, when are we going to see Blockchain hit the mainstream? What's the tipping point? It may be a better question, tipping point, what's the catalyst? Tipping points? What's your, just your mental model? How do you think about looking at the signals from the marketplace to see a tipping point? For mainstream, at least awareness? >> Based on what we're seeing in the industry today, I believe that enterprise businesses will have to be integrating with Blockchains in 12 to 24 months. 24 months is probably the max, but 12 to 24 months, I don't think you're going to have a Fortune 100 company that's not integrating with a Blockchain, for one reason or another. Whether it be, currency or Trusted Lineage. But 24 months. >> Wow! Michael, Boomi, Blockchain, I feel like I need to say bazinga! I need another B-word. >> Boom. >> I promised you boom, Boomi, Blockchain. I promised you an energetic interview and I think these guys just gave it to you. Thank you so much, Michael, for joining John and me on the program. Excited to see what comes up and hopefully see it at Dell Boomi World. >> Yes, thank you very much for having me, it's great. >> Oh, our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE Live from Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching! (electronic music)

>> 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 Stew Minimum and we are on Day one of the Cubes coverage of Del Technology World twenty nineteen. We've got two sets, lots of great guests, lots of great conversations. Already. We're pleased to welcome to the Cube for the first time that Mike, a pigeon senior director of education services at Del Technologies like Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me >> our pleasure. So here we are talking about digital transformation. We've been talking about it for a long time. I loved how last year's Del Technologies world was. Make it, really it being digital transformation, it t workforce transformation, security. This year, it's about real transformation. We talked a lot about the technology's what are some of the other things, though the companies need to be thinking about as enablers of this transformation >> your great, great question and obviously the technology is a huge part of it, right? But of course, myself being from Del Technology education services, a big focus on the people So that is what we see as an additional critical focus. Because at the end of the day, digital transformation is is big. It's really big, and technology alone isn't going to suffice, right? It's not going to be just that. So focus on the people and, you know, we hear a time and again from our customers from from research in the market that, you know, one of the top three, actually, barriers from customers and organizations driving adoption and success in digital information comes down to having the right skill sets in place. >> So, Mike, I'm God we have you on. We just had your chief customer officer, Karen Kito song, and she was talking a little bit about the skills gap. So we know how many customers, how many people we're going to need to have and, you know, half of the half of the programs we're gonna need it's going to need going to require retraining of, you know, my workforce there. So we talked for years with you know, what used to be emcee ends now, Del Education services, you know, from storage certifications to convert certifications to cloud certification. So you know what was the latest in Great is what is the I kind of go to skill set that people need And, you know, the ones that you know people are calling up saying, Oh my gosh, if I could learn this, you know, it's going to really, you know, catapult my career. >> Yes. So the Del Technologies now del Technologies proven professional program's been in place for years. A lot of ah, uh, industry recognized certifications to your point. A lot focus on storage, data protection, product related. And over the past twelve months to eighteen months, we've actually in a lot of expansion beyond that, into Mohr areas of transformation and those areas where we have expanded beyond just products have been tied back right to that skills gap that we're seeing in customers and what they're challenged with as they drive a digital transformation. So some examples being more of a focused on converged infrastructure hybrid cloud way, have some associate level certifications we recently brought to market there, uh, multi cloud. That's a big focus for us. Obviously, some of the discussion announcements this morning focus around multi cloud, and they talked about cloud chaos. Right, So we have some expert level certification in place focussed on that way. We also have a focus around security and specifically designing infrastructure with that security first mindset. And then finally the other most recent transformational type of certifications, that master level. So think of it a career pinnacle levels certification that's focused on, uh, transformational architecture. >> Yeah, Mike, just a follow up on that one. One of the things I hear in Multi Cloud is there certain technologies that might allow us to move. But one of the biggest challenges is skill set. Because if I learned and I understand how to configure it and how to manage it and how to do it here and if I move somewhere else even if seventy percent the same Oh, my gosh, that's not awesome. Can you just wonder if you could step back and give you know what you see out there? And you know what works today and where do we need to go? Is an industry as a whole try to help users toe live in this multi cloud world that were already in but struggling with? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a ton of proficiency in in the silos, right? Indian managing specific infrastructure server storage network now also around converge infrastructure as well as cloud deployments. But to your point in a multi cloud environment, there are different provider's, both private and public different technologies, and it gets it can get complex fairly quick, right? So having the skill sets to kind of take a step back and look at that holistically and understand about workload placements, you know there's there's knowledge and skill sets that required to make some of those determinations. We obviously have a lot of services capabilities that help provide that. But there's a level of obviously proficiency that our customers want in need in house as well. So a lot of it is building that knowledge and understanding. The decision points in the criteria for the different providers, as well as work, replacement and a movement across that multi cloud environment. It's very different than skill sets in the past. >> Sorry about that. Very excited I'm curious about if we talk about talent and retention with respect to some of the guys and gals who been around for a while. Michael mentioned on stage this morning that later this week is Dell's thirty fifth anniversary in business. And as we look at, you know, all the technology transformations and multi cloud world that we live in. This two mentioned What are some of the benefits for? I don't want to say, you know, older population But, say the veterans of technology White What are some of the things that Del Technologies, Education Services will deliver to say that more seasoned individual to stay relevant and be able to adapt as quickly as technology so that they're competitive for jobs themselves? >> Great, great question. And I mean, it's it's the pace of change is so fast, and it's impacting everyone, everyone from from recent college graduates, right, getting right into the field that that were in in technology as well as your point seasoned veterans who've been around for a while. And that's where a lot of the difficult transformation is taking place. Right, because it's it's the rolls of the past, and today the skill sets of dead like those rules and skills that have gotten us two today are are very different than what's needed to get us to tomorrow, and and that's where a lot of our technical training our curriculum as well as our industry certifications come into play in helping build that knowledge required and the skills on the certifications to validate those capabilities for the next generation workforce. So it's it's really for the right out of school and may be new to the field as well as evolving throughout their career. >> All right, so, like we, we know that your team's doing things throughout the year talking to your customers. But you got fifteen thousand people here at Delta Tech World. I've seen the hands on labs. I know there's always certification. So give us from your team. You know, some of the big focus, some of the activities and some of the take away if you want people to have from >> your one big thing I would give a plug for is our proven professional center. So right downstairs here in Casanova five o one, we have fifty seven certifications available, and we have hundreds and hundreds of customers and partners that will be taking certification exams and and achieving certifications this week. All right, we have ah promotional offer. So every attempt attempt at first attempt at every exam is free just for this week. So encourage everyone who is here to check it out. In addition, Teo to taking those certifications in preparation for that we have we have twenty nine different preparation sessions that we're running so right downstairs two rooms next door where we're rotating through on topics that are specific to our latest and greatest product lines. Power Left Power Max Power Edge A Max In addition to that cloud, focus data Science certification Prep sessions multi cloud expert. There's, Ah, whole array of prep sessions that air helping our customers and partners prepare for taking those certifications. >> Aye aye, machine learning. >> There is some some intersections with that as well. Certainly is part of a data science curriculum and certification exams >> and where our customers, in terms of discussing with you, say, maybe at last year's Del Technologies world like these are some of the certifications in the trainings that we really need. Talk about that sort of bidirectional symbiosis where customers are. I'm assuming helping you didn't teams identify, developed and then deliver this spot on trainings? >> Yeah, yeah, that's a great question to Eric. See, every year here at Del Technologies world, we have a customer advisory council and Actually, the last two years came out loud and clear. Last year was more of a focus and some of the areas that the challenge was from a transformation perspective. Security came into play in a big way. Different aspects of cloud and multi cloud enterprise architecture. Er, um a lot of our focus related Teo pivotal and some of the offerings, their application development. So all of that feedback and discussion that we have in customers actually feeds into our prioritization and road mapping, and it has a big impact on the on the technical training and the certifications that we bring to market. So we're going to be with our customers throughout today, also tomorrow. And there will be additional input to where we where we go in the future. >> All right, Mike, what are their feedback? Are you hearing from customers? You know, we hear in the key note some of these, you know, broad topics, and you talk about, you know, a I and I ot and ej computing. And how much does that funnel back? And are they looking for help on that? Now are you know, how do they start getting themselves ready for some of these massive waves that are coming, >> Yeah, that's definitely part of the themes that we hear and then and the feedback that we get from customers and what's really relevant to them and that ties into their skills transformation as well. As you said, I o t a m l data engineer. That's, ah, more recent role that we're focusing on on and you'LL see Ah bunch coming out from Del Technologies at services on that in the not too distant future. So a lot of that those themes are we hear the exact same same customer base, and those are areas that where we're addressing in in our road map and as we bring new technical training offerings to market. >> So listening to your customers is kiss as to mention we're talking to Karen can just a little bit earlier that that's essential pretty much for any role. But you're listening. You're taking that into account you're designing and delivering for that long A benefits. We can talk about it for the individuals going to the training right in terms of ups, killing and job retention. But from from your customer's perspective, you have a favorite example of a customer who's really been able to transform their company because they've made this investment and ensuring that their talent has the latest and greatest education. >> Yeah, yeah, actually, you know what we've seen? We've done a bunch of research, and Mark, what we see time and again is did a really, really strong correlation between those organizations that are focusing on and investing in their people and the skills development, correlation between that and the progress and success that they're having with with their transformation initiatives. Right. And one area that that where we've been engaged in a lot deeper with customers as of just recent and beginning to do a lot more of is we call it an organizational learning program. So way obviously offer technical training and certifications. But this is more of a, uh, consultative engagement with our customers more thie, organizational level and very consultative and way work closely with them to understand their digital strategy, their plans, and is part of that drive a very prescriptive assessments of what's going on in their violent from a people and skills perspective. So really understanding their current state and where they want to go where they need to be. And based upon the findings of that assessment, we work closely with them to develop a defined, documented strategy and plan. In this case, it's a learning plan. It's a continuous learning plan for that organization over a Siri's of quarters to to work against and drive and really capture gain those skills and knowledge that's required to help move him forward. >> Yeah, Mike, I love that. Reminds me of the joke in your space is what if we give them new skills and they leave? And of course, the alternative is What if we don't give them new skills and they stay back? So I want the last thing I wanted to ask is talk a little bit about internal. There's a lot of change going on. You've been, you know, from the sea to the Del for quite a few years. We'LL se How money Just to protect the innocent. But you know, one of things. I mean, I spent ten years in the emcee and the Internet. The training was something that helped me a lot in my career. Talk a little bit about you know what? What's changing? How you help the internal teams in all the from groups stay up on the latest and greatest areas. >> Absolutely so in at education services. To your point, we support our employees. Technol employees around the globe are partners and customers. So huge focus on on enabling those employees. And if you think about it, right, they are there, the front lines, they're the folks that are with our customers. And they need to be as up to speed, if not more up to speed in these thes areas of technology. So we have, ah, massive undertaking to enable our services audiences pre sale systems Engineers are car consultants around the globe to ensure that they are up to speed and quite knowledgeable on the latest and greatest technologies. And really, how those come tto life within our customer environments. >> Sounds like maybe education services is is a catalyst for this internal cultural transformation that we're seeing from Del Technologies. >> Absolutely is. It's his transformation everywhere. It's internal, its external and at the end of the day, kind of back to where we started, right? If it comes down to the people, it's are our customers and and us as a company, our most important asset. And at the end of the day, you know the people need the right skills and to to be successful in to go digital. >> Great stuff. Mike, Thank you so much for joining student me on the cue, the stuff for noon and sharing all that you're doing to help transform del education services for your internal folks. Your customers like we appreciate your time. >> Thanks for having me. >> Our pleasure. First time in a man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us live from Las Vegas. Day one of the cubes. Coverage of Del technology World twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

(energetic music) >> Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier. We're in Las Vegas and we have somebody from the city of Las Vegas here. We've got two gentlemen joining us. Bill Baver, the VP of NTT. Hey Bill, good to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, appreciate being here. >> And your partner in crime Michael Sherwood, the IT Director Las Vegas. The city of Las Vegas, where we are right now. >> Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Love having you here. >> Thank you for having us. So guys, theCUBE comes to Vegas a lot. There's a ton of shows here. You can fit a ton of people. Last year, Bill, we'll start with you, NTT and Dell Technologies announced this exciting smart cities initiative. Talk to us about, in the last year, first of all why NTT is partnering with Dell Technologies and what you've done. And then of course we're going to dig into Las Vegas as one of those smart secure cities that Michael, I can tell, is just tell dying to tell us about. So, in the last year, what's going on? >> Well, first off when you start digging let me see. I want to see how this really plays here. (laughter) So, I'm ready for that. So, yes last year we announced a partnership between Dell, NTT and Las Vegas. And it's really a three way partnership. And since then, if you ever work with city governments, how far the city of Las Vegas has come has been amazing. So within six months we installed equipment that was supposed to be there. And then started for the last six months running a system there, running it around public safety perspective, and really starting to bring true insights to what they're doing. The Dell part brings equipment on the edge and our core data center. How to go back and forth between the entire Dell family. Dell, EMC, VMware, and then the NTT family that's there. And then really the third leg of the stool is the city of Las Vegas and the insights they've allowed to us to recognize and sort of bring to them. So they can make changes in how the city is looking at and running the environment. >> And why did you decide to start this partnership with the wonderful city of Las Vegas? >> It's really around innovation. So, Michael Sherwood, and the city of Las Vegas have really become a leader in innovation around the country and they're really willing to take chances. And they have an innovation zone that allows them to do projects rather quickly. Not as quick as this sometimes, but rather quickly. Then, we can start to see results and then they can adjust and start to figure out how it's going to roll out and sustain across the city. So, it was their innovation and it was really Michael's legacy of what he's been doing so far and what his willingness to work with partners has been. So that's really a reason to do this as we went forward. >> So, how about the innovation strategy? Because, obviously, Las Vegas, a lot of people come here. Destination, public safety's been critical. Number one. I've seen the evolution of just really smart moves whether it's blocking the sidewalks from anyone driving on them to the use of video and processing video. You need AI for that. So it's probably a melting pot of interest to be on the forefront. >> Why would innovation go anywhere else other than Las Vegas, where we're the innovators of entertainment. We're the innovators of fun. So, why not be the innovators of technology and innovate with great companies like NTT and Dell. I mean you can't get any better. If you want to talk about a cube of perfection that would be it right there. You have innovation around the board surrounded by great companies. Las Vegas is innovative. We have a culture here to use technology to not only make our citizenry safer, but to insight development, to insight economic growth. So innovations not just something that is just limited to technology. It's limited to all facets of society. >> That's great culture too. You don't really have to change the culture if people are already there. What leading edge stuff are you working on now that'd be really cool to talk about? I mean smart cities, obviously, cameras on corners looking at things, so traffic, EIOT devices. What are some of the things? Share with us, open the kimono a little bit. Talk about it. >> So, first off, one thing. We do not say cameras, we say optical sensors because that's more pleasing to the ear. So, as we gather data it'll go, so go ahead. >> All right, thank you Bill. (laughter) So optical. Even I learn something every day in innovation. I mean now we have optical sensors. >> It's all optics. >> It's all optic. Let me just start with, you know public safety's very important. So we're doing some things there with our partnership with Dell and NTT. I like to call it autonomous policing. Where we're really providing real time analysis of a location. So, in the old days or current days of policing, police randomly drive around and do a patrol. That's what we call it. What we're looking at now is using cameras to provide, excuse me, optical sensors, to provide real time situational awareness to those first responders. So as they're responding to an incident, number one, there really is an incident. Because the optical sensor has validated that there is an issue there. And as the officers respond to that, they're actually able to see real time analysis from those optical sensors that's giving them a safety presence. So we're really taking policing, and really putting policing where it needs to be when it needs to be there. That's one category. The other one's mobility. We all want to get from point A to B the most convenient way possible. And what we're doing with the Dell NTT partnership and this optical sensor system, as well as analytics, is really looking at improving traffic flow, but improving traffic flow smartly. And something that's scalable that not just Las Vegas can do but any city could do across the world. Again, Las Vegas, we don't consider ourselves just a national US based innovator. We look at ourselves as world innovators. So really mobility is somewhere that can go anywhere in the world. Same with public safety. >> Talk about the architecture of innovation. How do you guys pull this off? What's the playbook? A lot of people want to be, first of all, cultural change is hard. You guys are there, like I said earlier. What's the playbook? You got to have multi-cloud architecture. You got to start thinking about getting a system set up. Either like some sort of sandbox or I've seen (mumbles) innovation zone. How do you pull it off? What's the playbook? >> I think the playbook goes down to a great team. Without a great team and great partners it doesn't matter what technology you have behind it, it's the team and partnership. That's really what makes this special. You see the bond between myself and Bill. But that goes through all levels of NTT, as far as all levels of Dell. So it's about bringing winning players and winning skill sets together, and then taking great technology and funneling around that. That is a success. Anybody can be an innovator. It's nothing special, though I'm available to help people innovate. But, I think what it really takes is understanding your business. Understanding your performance measures that you want to hit. What do you want to do? In a football team, they want to score a touchdown. In my job I want to use my resources effectively as I can and create things that are safe, and create a better Las Vegas for everybody. >> Speed is critical. It used to be the old days, months to get projects done. Then it became weeks, now it's days, hours. The shift in the time spectrum has radically changed. >> It's tough. It's tough for government. Government is traditionally not known for it's agility and speed. You know, we're changing some of that here. But we're still struggling in a couple of areas. We have some refinement to do. I think, nationwide, purchasing is hard. We want to be fair and equal to everybody. But, at the same time, we want to get these solutions out in the marketplace because it is helping the city be more effective. So, there's challenges still. But, overall, the future is very bright and the technology and expertise that our partnership has really is making, I mean, in one year I don't think any government in the US has done as much as the city of Las Vegas has with our partnership. >> I would add that Michael's being a little humble on that there's not a lot of, everybody can do innovation. We have an innovation zone that allows him the flexibility to do that. So, that's really important. And then the technology, Michael is right that it is tough. There are times that it didn't work to the schedule. But that goes back to the teamwork of everybody saying our end goal is we want to get this done, and going towards that. >> Talk about the innovation zone. Talk about the innovation zone. Is that a physical zone? is it where you can deploy new towers and test stuff? >> It's downtown Las Vegas. If you're familiar with Fremont Street, it's the big canopy area. So, it's about 80 square blocks around that area that incorporates an entertainment district, a government zone, a medical, where we basically have fiber optics. Different type of technologies and we ask partners to come in and test. But, to follow up a little bit, I'll disagree with my panelist here. You know, every city can do >> That you're not humble? (laughter) >> But every city can do innovations. It's about understanding risk and taking a little gamble and a little chance. We do that everyday in our lives, but yet when we get into out work we seem to forget about risk. >> It's a tech playground, too. You're going to attract great people when you have this kind of flexibility to just deploy. Do bake-offs, test new equipment. >> You got it. Again, so many people know Las Vegas just for what they see while they're here. Which is fun and entertainment. We want everyone to know that Las Vegas also means business. We're here to be discovered. We're here to be used. Not abused, but we're here to be used. (laughter) >> If you're bringing you equipment into you're tech zone does it stay in Vegas? (laughter) >> Everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. >> It can't leave. >> Including the equipment. >> Like hotel California. >> All the equipment. Yes >> Exactly. >> I'd like to have the people remain as well. But no, I mean we're open for business. We're not just a great place to play. We're a great place to develop your products and sell product. >> So talk to us about, not just the innovation zone, but as you mentioned before, this is a challenging thing for governments and municipalities to undertake. It's expensive, right? There's a tremendous amount of people that are coming in and out of Vegas 24 by seven. When you're talking, I presume, Michael, that you're talking with you're talking with your peers in other industries about, this is why we set up an innovation zone. This is why it's so critical. Here's the advancements we've made in terms of safety in the last year. What are some of the industries that you talk to and some of your recommendations for them to take that gamble and to find the resources to make this happen? >> Well it's finding the great partners obviously is one. But two is start small. So many cities want to do, I want to replace all my street lights with smart lights. In Las Vegas that would be over a hundred thousand street lights to replace. A huge project, daunting. But why not start small? Get an understanding of the technology. Understand how it works. And then see what you like and what you don't like. And then you can go ahead and, from a small pilot, then, with the education behind you start branching out and making it bigger. And I think the key to my success is start small gain knowledge, gain success, and then build on that success. Don't try to shoot for that one shot and you're going to be a winner. >> That's great advice. What about some of those key constituents of yours, you mentioned some of the things you're doing with policing and from a government perspective. Who have been some of your key constituents to become champions of what you're doing with NTT and Dell Technologies? >> It's really the people, the people that visit here. I look at everybody as a customer. Whether you live here, play here, you're a customer of Las Vegas. And so we want you to be happy. We want you to be able to get from A to B. It doesn't do us any good if you're stuck in the car because you're not spending any money. And so, I want you excited. I want you having the best time of your life at the best restaurants. I want you having the safest experience here. I want you to return. So my objectives are no different than a private business. Except, I have the whole community. So it's when people in the community say thank you for letting us get to A to B quicker. They never thank me personally, but they're happy about it. I'm not hearing complaints about being stuck in traffic. >> Getting to A, B quicker is a lot of really long stop lights in Vegas. Any optical sensors going to help us with that? >> Taxi lights? >> You've got to come down. This year, we actually, in January we did an autonomous vehicle all the way from Mandalay Bay down to the Golden Nugget. Great technology. It worked. We're getting there. Yes, traffic is still in certain areas an issue. But come down to the innovation district. You want to drive around there it's great. >> We've got to have theCUBE there. We've got to get a tour of this. >> We've got the inside track here. >> In time. >> I know a guy in Vegas. You're out guy >> I'm your guy. (laughter) >> Guys, talk about the key learnings. You can both share some data around the journey the past couple years as technology has shifted. Obviously, apps or renaissances happening, more apps are coming over the top: Saska, cloud, partnerships or people equations happening. What's some key learnings or scar tissue that you guys have learned over the past few years that you could share to folks watching? >> I think one of the first parts is the learning is partnership and your end goal. Because, there are going to be bumps in the road as we go, and there were bumps. Things couldn't get installed as quickly. It didn't work the way we wanted. That's why we started as a proof of concept. But then the other part of the learning is start small and grow. It's not only start small in an area or even a section of the city. It's how does it grow so that you have a sustainable model for the city so they can then pay for it as they go forward. We all want to make sure that it gives us a model forward. So the openness of the NTT and Dell partnerships to allow us to have that time to do it, that was really important for us to figure a model forward. And now we're fitting into the city model a lot better. And it's making it work beyond just the innovation zone. That's where we're taking it now, and that's the key for us all. >> Mike, any learnings? >> Definitely, let me tag on to his openness. Number one is an open platform. Having a platform that's open, that your data's accessible regardless of what changes. Everybody knows technology changes rapidly. So having agility to situations. Today, right now it's mobility for me. It is public safety. But I really look to the future as curb monetization. Where we're monetizing that curb with autonomous vehicles. How do you get there? If you have a closed system that doesn't have the interface, doesn't have the agility, you can't get there. So, the open architecture is something to me that with the learning, I would have never come to that conclusion without the partnership and the learning avenues. But the open architecture is key. >> The most important question I want to ask, Michael, to you is, when the Raiders come to town, that's going to change the game big time. The Oakland Raiders, the black hole. Whole new fan base. >> I'm excited. (laughter) I'm looking for that to be, even though I live on the other side of the stadium so I have to go through there on the weekends. But I'm super excited. I'm not just excited about the game coming. I'm excited about the innovations and the new opportunities for a great city. And we have the Golden Knights you get to have a phenomenal season this year. Give them a shout out, and wait to come. I will bet you in the next year there will be some new sports franchises here. >> And the tech involvement, all kidding aside about the Raiders, it's fun to talk about because they're moving here, that's great. But the tech involved in sports is cutting edge. You've got entertainment, obviously, here inside the venues. And you've got service, managing the team, it's the same IOT problem everyone else has. >> It's in a little mini-city of it's own. It's going to have it's own IOT opportunities there. We're working closely with the stadium authority in that regard. We're sharing our experiences, sharing our partners. But, couldn't be more excited and actually, elated to have them here locally. >> Working closer to get tickets? (laughter) >> How about a suite, I was thinking suite. I'll ask for the suite. >> I'll be with the regular people. (laughter) >> Remember I'm a civil servant of the government here. Very low connections on my lane. >> Last thing, Michael for you, is we talked about the public safety issue. But, in terms of the opportunity for you to let more of the public know. There obviously have been some public incidents here that have been known the world over. It's an important message to get out to everyone. This is a global city. What are some of the opportunities that you have to share what you guys are doing with NTT and Dell Technologies so that the perspective visitors know, I'm coming into a pretty, this is a very AI enabled city that's really looking out for my best interests. >> I'm here on theCUBE. I thought if I was here >> This is it. >> everybody would know about the great things we're doing. >> That's true. >> So, beyond that though. It's part of why we're here today is to share our story and to start outreaching more. We're doing more in the community than we've done before. We're opening a great innovation center downtown. We're calling, it has many name currently now, we're trying to focus on one. But, the concept is basically a technology embassy. Where we're going around the world and sharing our story and letting companies know that they can come here and test their technology, and we can share that with the community. So, really technology is nothing without a great community that supports it. And so, a lot of what I do is sharing that message about what we're doing. We share with our partners, and we come on shows. There's only one show to come on, but this is the show, where I'm sharing what we're doing first. >> He's a quick learner. I think the thing that's been really cool for you guys to share, what NTT Dell and the city of Las Vegas are doing to turn Vegas into this AI enabled city for societal good, but it's also this whole message I think I've heard from you guys in the last 15 minutes is this is all about community, collaboration, people. We thank you both so much for giving us some time this morning on theCUBE. Now you're alumni so you've got to get stickers. And you've got to come back, 'cause this is only going in a better direction. So we're excited to hear in the next year what happens. Doug, Michael, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Great being here. >> Appreciate it. >> Excellent. For John Furrier I'm Lisa Martin. Can you feel the buzz of Dell Technologies World 2019. Stick around we'll be right back with our next guest. (energetic music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome to Del >> Technologies with Cubes Coverage Our tenth year covering DMC World del World Here >> Pat Kelsey who test Not your time yet, but you're going to be coming on later. >> Great key note. Thanks for coming by. >> I appreciate it. Explored back tomorrow. You later. All right. >> Not Kelson. You're kicking off the cube coverage. Three days. The wall, the wall colors. Got two sets. Shotgun of content. We got to cube cannons blowing out the content. I'm John Force to minimum David. Want a key note? Uh, really kind of the tectonic plates in the industry. Kind of coming together you had on stage is something. The Tele CEO of Microsoft, Michael Dell, CEO of Down, founder of Del Technology and Pat Gayle Sr. Legends in the industry Captains of the industry. Really a critical juncture for Del technology worlds and a slew of other announcements. But the Del Cloud unified workspace but showing Microsoft on stage. This is a game changing move for Del technology world sure del del Technologies. But also of'Em. Where. Bm where in bed with eight of us. We know that cover that relationship now, going multi cloud all the way with Azure and seeing the CEO on stage Pretty incredible days. >> I think you nailed it. It's a V m wear story, John, and the numbers tell it. VM wears market value's eighty three billion Del owns eighty percent of it. That's sixty >> six billion. What's left. Dell's market value is forty seven billion. That says, the Del Cores worth negative nineteen billion. If it weren't for VM, where Satya Nadella wouldn't be here and you're seeing Michael Dell really drive the integration? He said that several times on stage today. How much collaboration? I love the collaboration across the divisions. You saw Jeff Clarke with Pack yell Sigur talking about new desktop management, talking about VM wear Cloud on del. It's of'Em were story You're right on >> and pack. Kelsey is to really key message up their simplicity, simplifying I t. The Common operate. I felt like we were in a Cube interview four years ago because that's was the basis of hybrid cloud now kind of coming to fruition. Clear visibility, at least on the tech stack side on the operating side, this is an operator world in a developer world, and simplicity and ease of operations is going to be the critical differentiated for the winners. >> Yeah, so So, John. First of all, I think we're getting some clarity on this multi cloud world. Look, one of the things that Veum where did so? Well, not just that wave, A virtual ization, but V Centre was the centre of I t management. And the question is, can they extend that into multi cloud world? When Veum where made the partnership with a W s. It's like, Oh my gosh, what does that mean to Del We got the answer today. What? That means Adele Veum were cloud on Del AMC hardware for me personally. That relationship between VM Rendell I think it's closer from the top executive all the way on down to the field go to market than it ever was. I was one of the first people working with VM where a DMC I watched that relationship emcee always kept them is kind of the way own you, But you're gonna be independent work across the board across the board. You hear. You know V s right. V X, Ray Allen and XX and P. K s and all these wonderful products Dell and VM work developing together, going to market together. It has ripples, but Amazon likes it. Microsoft like that big deal to see Veum wear and Microsoft partnered together. There are some challenges with some other partners Visa vi, Cisco And you know, some of some of the others, like IBM and HB that, if historically partner a lot with the anywhere but a lot of exciting news and definitely on >> and cha gi ve m were knocked down Google last month. >> So, guys, this is the theme we're seeing. We see Zoom went public. That was a videoconferencing disrupting an existing industry people thought would never be disrupted. You heard something and tell a stay on stage. Say on stage here that the new generation of new APS need new infrastructure. So a re vamp, a reset revitalisation of infrastructure to power APS via cloud. It's kind. The same game computing resource is software APS but with a whole new distributor architecture. A boom is coming. We see the stock market is up huge. You see the tech earnings last week across the board. Solid results. This is now a game change. This is not a bad business to be in. You know what was once could be. A declining business sees more remote workers, people working from multiple locations, mobile unification with cloud computing, a complete renaissance across the board game. I mean, this is a big revenue opportunity. >> Well, Mike Michael Dell's Kino wasn't just about products. It was about innovation. He talked about solving world problems, a big picture stuff on. Then he let Pat and Jeff get down a little bit more into the product. Weeds and you'LL hear more of that. But Michael is laying out a huge vision. What a juxtaposition between that's what, four, five years ago, you had sort of Joe Tucci, the chairman, up on stage. Michael was there. You had. You had John Chambers there. Now Michael owns the whole kit and caboodle. He's calling the shots, and people want to do business with them. Veum, where again, As you pointed >> out to me and Lucia question, you've been following the emcee for a long time. When we interviewed Michael Dell years ago, when he was in private that he bought AMC one of things. He said a lot. People were pooh poohing the whole deal. Why they want to buy that boat anchor. He said, scale matters. So are we seeing a new generations do elected to weigh in on this too, of competitive strategy where scale matters because you look at what Del Technologies has done and is doing there essentially rolled up the global I t business and are competing at scale with synergies not even looked at before early on when we talked about it. But we started see from fruit off that scale Amazon prove scale cloud Uh, Microsoft moves of the clouds scale up now the earnings air up Thoughts >> Well, what strikes me, John, is that, you know, they always talk about end end cos talk about synergy. Synergy is a code word for cutting what you heard today. You had be ave up there, you know, talking about a video and talking about the end end capabilities that Del technology brings Del by acquiring the emcee. And of course, VM. Where is a much way more strategic partner for corporations way more than many of these startups? Khun B. so that is their linchpin. You could maybe criticize him on innovation and, oh, maybe they don't have the hottest product, but and end throw in financial services and other services. People want to do business with this company because they trust >> to scale clouds scale, delle scale, scale. >> So we heard Tom suite this morning. Talk about that, Del. Maybe I missed a couple of turns in the marketplace and they needed to go private to kind of rearrange things When they bought emcee. We knew that there are a couple of tail winds that they could arrive hyper converge infrastructure. Absolutely one. We've been watching that trend since day one that their outpacing the industry there. The leader. If you talk from a software standpoint, VM wears their. If you talk from a hardware standpoint, Dell's there who's number two in the space nutanix, which also is a complicated relationship. But Del sells that in Vienna, where still is the primary hyper visor on that environment, so they're still beating the market growth. But they're doing that by gaining market share on DH taking it. Michael always loves to talk about when he's taking market from the business So the question is the overall macro, you know, how long can they keep that double digit growth going? And Dave, I know you're looking to begin with Tom Sweet. A >> ninety billion dollar business grew fourteen percent last year. So this company, in order to grow it has to gain share because the market is not. You're not going that fast. You can't rely on repatriation. I'm sorry that people are going to just disappear from the cloud and come back. So you've got to gain share the other thing, I think, to their favours. Let's face it, they really did have their act together in storage. They were kind of missing the boat there and took their eye off the ball. PC stayed strong. They got their act together in storage, which helped with the product. Mitch mixed higher margins. So last year was a very, very strong year. Twenty twenties going to be a tougher compare, but it seems like they still have some knobs to turn >> just about competition. But, um, Nutanix, what do they do? VM where relationship with a W s. I'm sure. Andy Jackson looking distant, healing words like chaotic, complex, the bane of our existence. Kind of talking about cloud in general and you deal with multiple clouds were packed. Nelson, you say that, um kind of public cloud losing babe flavor here means to you got the public cloud dominating. Now, all this talk about on premise and you got nutanix out there. What? What happens in Nutanix here? >> Yes. Oh, look, Nutanix astute. Doing well on Dell is a very important O am. But way just on nutanix made a big partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Which, of course, I'm sure Michael doesn't like that happening. You know, Nutanix needs to keep growing their rice software company. It's interesting to talk about the other competitors I mentioned Cisco. Cisco is transforming themselves into a software company. Del Del Technology is the core business wants to be the leading infrastructure company they have VM wear. Bumi and Pivotal are their software branch with the core. Business is really around that scale that that that whole you know, infrastructure piece and it's a different chuck it the Mark >> Chuck Robbins that Cisco CEO Cisco's not yet made a big, bold move like a red at move. Well, could nutanix be that move game? >> Well, I don't know. I don't know. I think I play is an I o T. But But But to your point about your question about the cloud Cloud is not attenuating Amazons, with thirty billion dollar company growing forty one percent a year throwing off twenty five thirty percent operating margins. I mean, that's where the innovation is. That's where the scale is. Everybody wants to do multi cloud because they don't have a cloud. It's your only path if you don't have a cloud. So So I think Cloud's got a long walk >> look and they talk to you know, I tell you, you know, my community got all excited when Michael got up on stage and said, We're all in on Corin eh? Teas and what we're doing with multi cloud you're going to hear under the covers here. Everything is going from VM wear V M as that unit down to container ization, you know, talking about at that application modernization. That's where they're going to lean on VM wear modernizing some what they're doing. And you know, of course, pivotal in Bhumi are the ones that are the tip of the spear in that area. >> I don't think David, it's a suit point there. The Amazon growth will continue because if you look at what Del Technologies has rolled out today, certainly that Microsoft thing is well shot across the bow. Multi cloud, Nice checkbox. Great to see the committee of the CEO there. But everything benefits with sass in the clouds. SAS is a cloud game And if scale on the clouds gonna be there, I only see the public cloud getting stronger because the scales they're the economics cannot be ignored. Certainly the data equation will be interesting, but anon a premise infrastructure that's set up operating like a cloud. I think we'LL ultimately benefit because Amazons weak link, if there is one, is that they really don't have a sass business, right? So they have a series of customers that deuce ***. But that's going to be an opportunity for all those workloads to run on the clouds. And the question is >> going to be >> how how >> cloud like is what we here today. And I I'm a skeptic. I want to see it first, you know, Show me. >> Yeah. No, I mean, what do we hear? What are you know Veum works, you know, services on Azure. It's the STD sea stack. So we understand what that is. It is more than just virtualization. But we used to say Private Cloud just can't be virtual ization plus plus. So Veum wears, you know, expanding and changing that model. But, you know, is it cloud enough? I mean the David, you know? Oh, you want to finance it with an effects we could totally have That affects affects the two. It's great. But, you know, >> at the end of the day, innovation and economics winds and the cloud guys have the scale. I mean, look at the amount of money we heard from Google last month. They spent what, twelve billion dollars in Cap Ex through April. It would take Oracle six years to spend that much in Cap Exit would take IBM three and a half four years to spend that much in CAF X. They're cost structure is going to be so much lower. And ultimately, I believe that's going to win. >> Talk about the winners and losers because we heard at the Bank of America you mentioned also what you just said. They're the future has redefined not how you got here, how you move forward. What's the competitive positioning posture for a winning supplier in the modern era of Iranian Cloud? >> I think it's really smart that Adele is forcing these integrations and getting out ahead of this multi cloud thing, I guess said before. If you don't have a public cloud, you've gotto get into that multi cloud management business. VM wears their their their obvious linchpin. They're early in the game. This is Guest is going to play over the next five to seven years. But VM wear has knocked down eight of us. Google, now Azure. They've got a relationship with Alibaba. It's just a matter of time before you see that one happening. So they are in the pole position. The other one is IBM Red Hat. I mean, those are the two favorites in my >> and by the way, red hats here. And if you want to run, you know the latest greatest red hat solution on the Del Ready notes. You know, of course you can do that. So you know, we'd love to talk about competition, but at the end of the day, it's what's good for customers and can they pick and choose the option of their choice. How much do I get? A full stack. That's the same. And how much is their choice? And I didn't hear the word choice. Ah, lot because, you know, they were focusing on certain announcement day. But absolutely, Adele has done a good job in the space in the cloud space of laying out the top choices that customers want. >> The choice wasn't used because the choices del they'LL ship you VX rails. I'm not sure they'll be shipping other things in there. Maybe they will, too. Thanks for the analysis. Degraded. Al says, man, It's gonna be a great show. Three days of wall to wall comes to cube sets two cannons of content coming your way here A Dell Technology world. The Cube cannons stay with us for three days. I'm jumpers Do Minimum day Volonte Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight All here in Las Vegas for Delta No stay with us We'LL be right back

(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.

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back theCUBE's live coverage here for day two, were kickin' it off, for wall-to-wall coverage, three days of CUBE interviews here in the VMware village, the VMworld village. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, our next guest is a special guest CUBE alumni Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies, Founder of Dell, Michael Dell, named after the company. Great to see you again, thanks for comin' on. >> Great to be with you guys, and thank you as always for the incredible coverage you provide for our events, and so many great events across the whole industry. You got two two teams goin' here at the same time. >> It's great, isn't it? >> Tremendous coverage. >> Thank you. >> Great community. What's interesting is this is our ninth year doing VMworld, and we've gotten to know the community really well, and it's just been so much fun and it's been great to see everyone, and more exciting now is this years keynote which I thought was pretty interesting. You know you look back just four years ago the cloud, and what was doing cloud, who wasn't doing cloud, and everyone's throwin' around "well they don't have a cloud strategy" what does that mean, right? So it's very clear what's happening with cloud right, everyone knows the cloud's going to be there, but the role of infrastructure hasn't changed, so, at the end of the day you made a big bet, going taking Dell private, and the things that you've been doing certainly with VMware and others; infrastructure is never going away, so, that was a good bet. I mean, storage doesn't go away, all these things are still happening, and Amazon announcing RDS on VMware on-premises is absolute validation from the customers that on-premises activity is still going to be super relevant in a cloud world, and so it's not like anything's really changed it's just the rearranging of the resources. Your thoughts on this trend, and your bet on infrastructure? >> It's a data economy, right, it's a multi-cloud world, that's a two way street. And if you think about the billions of connected devices, the explosion in data, overlay on top of that, all the new computer science, that requires all kinds of new infrastructure, there's a boom on the edge. And so, absolutely, this is why you see our business growing so quickly, and doing as well as it's doing and we're investing in innovation, strongly, you saw it you know yesterday, today in the keynotes and, it's resonating extremely well with customers. And so, I think we're very well positioned, we've been gratified by the response you know from customers and partners around the world and look you know the you know every business is increasingly recognizing the importance of you know technology and data, and, you know that requires lots of new tools and technology, and it's why we created Dell Technologies, right, to be the essential infrastructure company and you know it's working well, it's actually working better than we thought it would work. So, it's all good guys. >> Well, you know, my old boss, whom I think you knew Pat McGovern used to say that 90% of mergers and acquisitions failed to meet their objectives, so then we have many, many examples of that. In roughly 36 months from when you announced the merger/acquisition, you've completely transformed Dell, you went from a company that was like sort of a half super power obviously in client, and you were relevant in other areas, but you weren't number one. To like number one in all the magic quadrants and in record time, it was one of the most amazing transformations I've ever seen. >> Thank you, thank you. >> You're welcome, but, I'd really like to understand, you know, what were the conditions that allowed you to do it, obviously they say it's better to be lucky than good, you're both good and there's probably some luck involved. What were the conditions that allowed you to make that transformation in such record time? >> Well certainly a big one was the acquisition of EMC. >> Well right. (all laugh) >> And along with it, you know VMware and Pivotal, right? And we theorized, and actually as you guys know, this story goes back a long way, right? It actually goes back to 2001 when Dell and EMC started working together, when VMware it was just a little, you know, when Sanjay showed the slide about the server virtualization; actually before VMware was server virtualization it was workstation virtualization. >> Workstation, that's right. (laughs) >> And we were an investor in VMware, and we thought that was cool. Anyway, so you fast forward to 2013, we go private, 2014, Joe Tucci and I restart the discussion that we'd had earlier back in 2009 about combining together, 2015 we announced it, and we thought that if we could combine everything together that customers would really like it. And, you know, thankfully as we've found that's been true, it's been more true than we thought, and, and the innovation engines are crankin' on high, you know $12.8 billion in R&D invested in the last three years. And you see here at VMworld and at Dell Technologies World, the strength of the roadmaps, so, every turn of the crank we're just getting stronger and stronger. We never believed that you know everything was going to go one place or the other, okay, it's actually great that the edge is booming. Now if you said "Did you know that five or 10 years ago?" No, I didn't really know (laughs) but you could kind of see some things starting to happen. Look, you know distributed computing will be even more distributed in the future. (laughs) >> And so you had good products, you had a great combination, that makes a lot of sense, and you know we were. >> And incredible people too, >> The team. >> The quality of the talent that we are blessed with is amazing, and it's a flywheel, because you can attract the people, and the very best people, and develop them and train them, and they want to come be part of the winning company. >> And we saw a lot of, and they saw that on theCUBE we commented about the synergies that were probably unrealized or unrecognized by others, you obviously saw that. But then also there's the other side of the equation of the financial opportunity, you took a financial risk, you put your own money into the deal, there's a lot of engineering going on- >> We took the risk, it's the man in the arena, you know, and not everybody wanted to take the risk, and, you know I, I'm happy to take some risk. >> Yeah, but the rewards are lookin' good, I mean, I mean if you're keepin' score, which I'm sure you are, the numbers are lookin' pretty good, so. >> This has been good. >> There's the financial side of it, and then also risk/reward payouts are also part of the entrepreneurial thing. (laughs) >> Yeah, I mean if you look at our last quarter, you know, gap revenues up plus 19%, non-gap revenues up 17%, data center, ISG business up 25%, right? I mean we're clearly gaining share, number one in storage, in all flash, in NAS, you know in backup and data protection; and every category of storage unstructured, you know, we're bigger than number two, and number three, and number four, all combined together! (John laughs) Number one in servers, right? Number one in virtualization in all flavors, you saw what Pat showed you know with the progress with NSX, with Workspace ONE, obviously server virtualization. You know, number one in client as well, right? In you know client revenue, so. The business is quite strong and healthy, and what's really interesting is if you look at it across customer types, you know the very largest, the small, the medium, the government, the state, local, top 50 countries, pretty much everything is growing double digits all across the world; every customer, every route to market, every channel. So, you know, I think the industry is stronger than people understand, that's the first point, I think there's this data economy, and this tsunami of data that's being created, and that's driving demand for infrastructure products and solutions, which we have the best in the world, and then on top of that, we're gaining share. >> These market forces are interesting. >> So all of this together is, it's a good news story. >> And the market forces you mentioned that really were somethin' that I think a lot of people in the industry at the time that you were contemplating the deal. And we talked privately about this, so I want to kind of bring this up here on theCUBE, way back when. The industry pundits were looking at the industry almost like a siloed map of TAM, total addressable market. And these other forces, if you factor those in as a market force, it changes the analysis of what you talk about, and we talked privately many times, but one time we were talkin' about the maturity and size of the on-premises IT market, it wasn't "Oh, IT's dying!" It's like huge! (laughs) I mean it's massively mature, so, and we talked privately about that; that's somethin' that a lot of people missed, they didn't miss that the size of the market was so big, might've been you know flat, but it's a ature market, but then these outside forces transform, and now the deal with Amazon highlights that bet. >> It's a two way street, now it's goin' the other way. And look, if it's obvious, there's probably no opportunity, right? (laughs) And so, you know I've kind of made my life of doin' stuff that maybe wasn't quite obvious to everyone, okay fine, that's just how it goes. So, maybe it wasn't obvious to everyone, and I remember when we announced, you know in 2015, everyone was like "Whoa, whoa, what are you doing?" right, so why are you doing it? And now it's kind of like oh, that seems like a really good idea, right? (John laughs) Look, I'll tell ya what I think is maybe not so obvious right now, although I think people are startin' to figure it out, is boom on the edge, I think the edge will be bigger than the cloud. The private cloud, the public cloud, the SaaS, the edge will be bigger. >> And what are some of the tell signs on that? How can you tell? >> Okay. Very very simple, go to ARM, and say how many microprocessors, and sensors and controllers should be sold? 120 billion, okay. Seven billion people in the world, 120 billion, that's already sold! Okay. This isn't the next five years or 10 years, the numbers are only going to go up; and that's just ARM! So, you think about everything becoming intelligent, the cost of making something intelligent going to zero, the cost of prediction, in the form of AI, and learning, and inference going to zero, and how that refactors the economy and the explosion in data as a result. Oh my God. (laughs) >> So that's a- >> Incredible opportunity for infrastructure. >> So that's a factor that makes that AWS VMware deal more sensible, because the conventional wisdom was just that, it was a one way trip to the cloud; it's turned out to be a boom for the data center. So, edge is maybe one reason why, but, perhaps there are others, your thoughts? >> Well it's, you know, look at TensorFlow, you know we, let's just go back to our last quarter, right? Server and networking business grew plus 41%. Well if server and networking business is growing plus 41%, everything can't be going to the big three public clouds, it's not. So there is a boom on the edge, it's the AI, it's the ML, it's the software-defined data center, cloud is an operating model not just a place, right? And, you know, again, you know big growth in our appliances, you know taking all the innovations of VMware and expressing those in you know consumption models and you know making it easy for customers to deploy, it's all workin' quite well. >> You mentioned the- >> And we're uniquely positioned you know as Dell Technologies to be the best choice for customers. >> Yeah, you're the store for all of us. I want to drill down on the IOT edge boom, the tell sign you mentioned is really interesting, I like that, but also I want to tease out what Pat Gelsinger said on stage yesterday, he said, you know IOT, 'cause you know we're being kind of critical of the IOT, not super critical but, it's maturing, but there's no real products yet available in a true sense. But Pat said "It's being connected now." So you mentioned ARM, penetration used to be, you know that from the PC game, everyone should have a PC, now everyone's got PC's and laptop's; so the penetration game is not the issue, they're already there. So as things be fully connected with mobile, it's not so much the penetration numbers per se, it's the network ability, and the intelligence, so. >> Yes, that's right. >> AIOps on the IT side, AI in apps, and Pat said the apps are the networks, so this is a new networking dynamic, networking things together, making them more intelligent is the new metric, do you agree? >> Absolutely, and look, most of the 120 billion aren't connected, but, you know they're going to be connected >> They have phones. (laughs) >> And there's going to be 1.2 trillion, right, it's just going to keep growing. You know in five years, in 10 years, it's going to be way way more, and then you got 5G coming, and it'll be node-to-node connection. And so, yeah, and then you overlay the AI, it's, all of this is reinforcing itself. You know at the center of this there's a relatively simple thing that's happening, right? And it starts with data, right? And you know this is no different than it was in the '60s or '70s, right? With the beginnings of IT, it's just now, the cycle is going much faster. Starts with data. With your data, you make better products and services, right, and when you make better products and services you attract more customers, and you get more data. It's just now, right, the number of devices, number of nodes, and the network connectivity, and then you insert AI and machine learning and neural networks, you know etc, on top of the data, and then it goes even faster. And that wheel's just spinning faster and faster and faster and it's not going to slow down. >> It's causing a renaissance. >> You talk about networks, and I, there's a metaphor, I like the metaphor of networks of data. And you talk about you know you lived for decades on the cadence of Moore's Law, well that's not the innovation anymore, John calls it the innovation sandwich data plus AI, and cloud for scale. >> And you'll take your intelligence, and your compute, and your infrastructure to your data, that's why there'll be a boom on the edge; we're already seeing it in manufacturing, in retail, and you know, anybody that thinks that everything's goin' to the center of the universe somewhere, it's jut not right. But hey look, when there's some disagreement there's opportunity, and I'm perfectly willing to step into that opportunity. >> Opportunist! (all laugh) >> So obviously you're doing well on the upside, and the rest of your take, and what I think the operating model's interesting, you mention that cloud and DevOps flipped everything upside down, where apps are now programming networks. What you're talking about with data is a sideways force coming in, that's disrupting IT's footprint as well as the operating model, and I think this is what, I think it's compelling what this new flywheel between cloud, mobile, ML, AI, and edge, is that that integrated flywheel is this vitreous circle. More compute, faster access to data, faster access to data, better AI. So better, more data, more accurate data, better AI, that circles around, that's a flywheel. This is coming sideways, this is not an upside down, this is just a ... >> And what our customers are realizing is that because of all this, they need to have more developers, right? And they need to express their competitive advantage in the form of their data and with software. And, so what they want is a developer friendly, developer ready secure infrastructure that is cloud agnostic, cloud neutral, and can operate in an autonomous fashion; and they can decide exactly where to put workloads, based on security, performance, cost, you know, etc, right? And it'll be a workload dependent type discussion. And you know again, with Pivotal, with VMware, with Dell EMC, we are really well positioned to help our customers with that. >> So I got to ask you, so if, what you just described, to me, is a new era, it's not a cloud of remote services anymore, it's this ubiquitous, intelligent platform; and it feels like it requires a new brand. (laughs) And we're seeing the evolution of the Dell brand, the Dell EMC brand, now Dell Technologies brand; talk about the brand, and what we can expect going forward. >> I would say, light touch, right? (laughs) And so, you know we, revealed the Dell Technologies brand when we did the combination, but we also kept the you know important brands that've been part of the companies history, in the form of VMware, and Dell EMC, and Pivotal, and so. >> RSA. >> Exactly. SecureWorks, and Boomi. >> Boomi, yeah. >> And so, if you've got a business that's you know close to $90 billion, and it's growing at 17, 19%, you know you don't really sit around and say "Hey, let's change a bunch of stuff!" Right? (all laugh) So, I think people are understanding what we're doing, they understand what Dell Technologies is more and more, and the brand is resonating well; so we feel very good about how all that's working. >> You said on theCUBE here that VMware's the crown jewel of Dell Technologies, obviously you can see the results. Elaborate on that now, give us the updated answer today, 'cause obviously, you look at some of the things that are goin' on. You know NSX has turned out to be a very good investment payout from VMware as kind of an interconnection point between multiple clouds, the Amazon relationship is deeper, and it's very clear for the field sales teams, it's great go-to-market from what we're hearing. And then the senior managements are involved in both levels of those companies. So VMware actually is interesting position in going to a whole nother level. Update us on the crown jewel status of VMware. >> So, you know within the world of infrastructure, in the software domain, a software-defined data center, you know VMware is the successful company, by far, right? And, the level of innovation that is coming from VMware is really profound, I mean it's the highest it's ever been, 'til next year, right? (laughs) Just go back and look at Pat's keynote and the things that've been rolled out, and you know we're completely and tightly aligned you know as a Dell Technologies family, so. You know VMware is at the center of everything we're doing, in all of the areas that we've talked about. At the same time, right, we've kept the ecosystem open, you see here on the show floor, the whole industry well represented, and participating and engaged, and that's been an important part of VMware's success from the beginning, and will be forever. >> Well we used to laugh out loud, belly laugh when people said you were going to sell VMware, I mean it was just like that made no sense, (John laughs) but it's given you incredible financial flexibility, it throws off cash, it accounts for nearly, I think roughly half of the profits, and now you're taking the $11 billion dividend which gives you the ability to clean up the capital structure, create more clarity, and then become a public company again; so can you talk about that a little bit? I don't know how much you can say but, you know we used to joke about the 90 day shot clock, seems like that's where you're goin', you're obviously comfortable there, you're a well run company. Your thoughts? >> So, you know, I've been doin' this for almost 35 years (laughs) and 25 years of it, you know, we were a full public company, we're actually a public company now, right? We make all the public filings, it's all out there and available; but the equity of Dell Technologies so that the, we have a proposed transaction, which you've seen. The proposed transaction will have the effect of retiring the tracking stock, which we created in the combination. >> At a great premium. >> Exactly. And that, you know, retiring the stock, it'll be replaced with a combination of cash and equity in Dell Technologies. What I see is no change in how we're operating, and our strategy, our relationship with our customers and partners, and in VMware's independence. You know, what I would tell ya, if you've got any further questions we have SEC filings, you can refer to those, we've got all kinds of answer in those, and we have an investor day coming up you know in September where you know we'll go into more detail. >> Is that at HQ, the investor day, is that in New York? >> That's in New York City. >> Well, products drive value, value provides customers the ability to pay you for those valued services, that's called a business model, you've got a good one goin' on. Congratulations, congratulations on the great bet, and it's great to see the results and it's fun to keep in touch, thanks for comin' on theCUBE, really appreciate it. >> Yeah, congrats! >> Thank you guys very much, thank you. >> Thanks for spendin' the time. >> Thanks for the great coverage. Alright. >> Great to see ya. >> Michael Dell here on theCUBE at VMworld 2018, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, more live coverage after this short break, stay with us, we've got full day two and day three coming two CUBE's here in Las Vegas, stay with us, we'll be right back. (bubbly music)

(energetic electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're in a very special place. We're in Austin, Texas at the Dell EMC HPC and AI Innovation Lab. High performance computing, artificial intelligence. This is really where it all happens. Where the engineers at Dell EMC are putting together these ready-made solutions for the customers. They got every type of application stack in here, and we're really excited to have our next guest. He's right in the middle of it, he's Michael Bennett, Senior Principal Engineer for Dell EMC. Mike, great to see you. >> Great to see you too. >> So you're working on one particular flavor of the AI solutions, and that's really machine learning with Hadoop. So tell us a little bit about that. >> Sure yeah, the product that I work on is called the Ready Solution for AI Machine Learning with Hadoop, and that product is a Cloudera Hadoop distribution on top of our Dell powered servers. And we've partnered with Intel, who has released a deep learning library, called Big DL, to bring both the traditional machine learning capabilities as well as deep learning capabilities to the product. Product also adds a data science workbench that's released by Cloudera. And this tool allows the customer's data scientists to collaborate together, provides them secure access to the Hadoop cluster, and we think all-around makes a great product to allow customers to gain the power of machine learning and deep learning in their environment, while also kind of reducing some of those overhead complexities that IT often faces with managing multiple environments, providing secure access, things like that. >> Right, cause the big knock always on Hadoop is that it's just hard. It's hard to put in, there aren't enough people, there aren't enough experts. So you guys are really offering a pre-bundled solution that's ready to go? >> Correct, yeah. We've built seven or eight different environments going in the lab at any time to validate different hardware permutations that we may offer of the product as well as, we've been doing this since 2009, so there's a lot of institutional knowledge here at Dell to draw on when building and validating these Hadoop products. Our Dell services team has also been going out installing and setting these up, and our consulting services has been helping customers fit the Hadoop infrastructure into their IT model. >> Right, so is there one basic configuration that you guys have? Or have you found there's two or three different standard-use cases that call for two or three different kinds of standardized solutions? >> We find that most customers are preferring the R7-40XC series. This platform can hold 12 3 1/2" form-factor drives in the front, along with four in the mid-plane, while still providing four SSDs in the back. So customers get a lot of versatility with this. It's also won several Hadoop benchmarking awards. >> And do you find, when you're talking to customers or you're putting this together, that they've tried themselves and they've tried to kind of stitch together and cobble together the open-source proprietary stuff all the way down to network cards and all this other stuff to actually make the solution come together? And it's just really hard, right? >> Yeah, right exactly. What we hear over and over from our product management team is that their interactions with customers, come back with customers saying it's just too hard. They get something that's stable and they come back and they don't know why it's no longer working. They have customized environments that each developer wants for their big data analytics jobs. Things like that. So yeah, overall we're hearing that customers are finding it very complex. >> Right, so we hear time and time again that same thing. And even though we've been going to Hadoop Summit and Hadoop World and Stratus, since 2010. The momentum seems to be a little slower in terms of the hype, but now we're really moving into heavy-duty real time production and that's what you guys are enabling with this ready-made solution. >> So with this product, yeah, we focused on enabling Apache Spark on the Hadoop environment. And that Apache Spark distributed computing has really changed the game as far as what it allows customers to do with their analytics jobs. No longer are we writing things to disc, but multiple transformations are being performed in memory, and that's also a big part of what enables the big DL library that Intel released for the platform to train these deep-learning models. >> Right, cause the Sparks enables the real-time analytics, right? Now you've got streaming data coming into this thing, versus the batch which was kind of the classic play of Hadoop. >> Right and not only do you have streaming data coming in, but Spark also enables you to load your data in memory and perform multiple operations on it. And draw insights that maybe you couldn't before with traditional map-reduce jobs. >> Right, right. So what gets you excited to come to work every day? You've been playing with these big machines. You're in the middle of nerd nirvana I think-- >> Yeah exactly. >> With all of the servers and spin-discs. What gets you up in the morning? What are you excited about, as you see AI get more pervasive within the customers and the solutions that you guys are enabling? >> You know, for me, what's always exciting is trying new things. We've got this huge lab environment with all kinds of lab equipment. So if you want to test a new iteration, let's say tiered HGFS storage with SSDs and traditional hard drives, throw it together in a couple of hours and see what the results are. If we wanted to add new PCIE devices like FPGAs for the inference portion the deep-learning development we can put those in our servers and try them out. So I enjoy that, on top of the validated, thoroughly-worked-through solutions that we offer customers, we can also experiment, play around, and work towards that next generation of technology. >> Right, 'cause any combination of hardware that you basically have at your disposal to try together and test and see what happens? >> Right, exactly. And this is my first time actually working at a OEM, and so I was surprised, not only do we have access to anything that you can see out in the market, but we often receive test and development equipment from partners and vendors, that we can work with and collaborate with to ensure that once the product reaches market it has the features that customers need. >> Right, what's the one thing that trips people up the most? Just some simple little switch configuration that you think is like a minor piece of something, that always seems to get in the way? >> Right, or switches in general. I think that people focus on the application because the switch is so abstracted from what the developer or even somebody troubleshooting the system sees, that oftentimes some misconfiguration or some typo that was entered during the switch configuration process that throws customers off or has somebody scratching their head, wondering why they're not getting the kind of performance that they thought. >> Right, well that's why we need more automation, right? That's what you guys are working on. >> Right yeah exactly. >> Keep the fat-finger typos out of the config settings. >> Right, consistent reproducible. None of that, I did it yesterday and it worked I don't know what changed. >> Right, alright Mike. Well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day, and don't have too much fun playing with all this gear. >> Awesome, thanks for having me. >> Alright, he's Mike Bennett and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching The Cube, from Austin Texas at the Dell EMC High Performance Computing and AI Labs. Thanks for watching. (energetic electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its The Cube, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. (soft electronic music) >> Welcome to The Cube's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman And this is the second of three days of wall to wall coverage we have here at The Sands convention center and I am thrilled to welcome to the program, back to the program, Michael Dell, who is the CEO of Dell Technologies. Michael thank you so much for having us here and thanks for joining us on The Cube. >> Oh, great to be here. Thank you guys for all the great coverage. You always do a wonderful job getting into the technical details and kind of exploring everything in depth and we appreciate you and your team being here. >> Well thanks so much. You started off the keynote talking about the platform for the possible, said it was 34 years in the making. Now this is my 15th year at the show formally known as EMC World. I'd attended the Dell Show for a number of years, so tell us, start with what's really different now about the company's all together, it's renamed now, Dell Technologies World. Why is this the platform for the possible? >> I'm kind of amazed and inspired when I step back and look at what our customers are doing with our technology and we have hundreds of technical sessions here where we get in depth as we've always done at, historically, EMC World, but we're also taking a broader view and saying, "Hey, what's this really all about?" What's the impact on the world? This was one of the motivations for bringing together Dell and EMC and VMWare, and Pivotal and the whole family and it's working. So we're telling the story through the eyes of our customers and it is really an amazing time when you think about what's going on in the world. We have this incredible platform that's been built over the last 30 years, but now there are all these new enabling technologies that are going to take it much further and the domain of information technology is not the IT department anymore and we're seeing that in a big way, so it's a super exciting time and obviously we think we're a unique company across digital transformation, IT, workforce security and it's working. So it's all good, Stu. >> Michael, one of the great lines we liked in the keynote was today we'll have the most change that you've ever had in your life, but compared to what we'll see tomorrow, it's going to keep changing faster. When I look at the Dell Technologies family, I know a lot has changed. Pivotal just went through an IPO. I have to imagine the tax laws changing in the recent administration has impact. What's changed since the day one decision to purchase EMC, the largest merger in technology history to today, maybe give us a little bit of insight as to what's happening inside the family that's different. >> You know, there've been a lot of reports about the tax law. That actually was not much of a change. Kind of inconsequential change. It's very good for the broader industry growth and kind of broader economic growth and we're quite excited about that and so I see it as a net positive. You know, when we step back and go back a little bit in time here to 2009 when Joe and I first talked about this idea, 2008-2009. Wasn't the right time, financial crisis. We re-started it in 2014, announced it in 2015. Here we are four years after we had the last set of initial discussions and it's all come together very well. Look, I mean, the revenues are much stronger that we thought. Business is excellent. The demand is very strong. There's a portfolio effect. I think you're seeing increasing integration of the family of businesses, particularly with VMware and Dell EMC and Pivotal. And the relevance of what we are doing has never been greater and so we're able to have conversations with companies that are very different that we had before. At the same time this is occurring, the business leaders and the chief executives of companies are waking up to the power of technology, whether it's because of some new disruptor showing up or because they realize that they have to change and evolve. Used to be it was just us folks in the tech world that were in this fast changing world where everything was moving very quickly and we used to, when people wanted to come work for us, we'd say, "Hey, how do you like it when things change? "How are you dealing with ambiguity?" If they didn't like it, we'd say, "Yeah, you probably shouldn't come work here "because you won't be happy "if things are changing all the time." It's like that in every business now and, like you said, it's only going to get faster. >> Right. So, wondering if, you look at the portfolio, Michael. One of the things since the EMC acquisition and it's a pretty broad portfolio. There's some streamlining that I understand's happening. How do you balance the streamlining with the breadth of portfolio, make sure you're reaching the customers? >> There's absolutely some kind of simplification and optimization of the expansive set of capabilities we have. We also have some incredible platforms and so what you want to do is rally around the platforms and that's exactly what we're doing, so you'll see us not only create a very seamless and logical path for every customer, but rally around the winning platforms and you already detect that as a theme here at Dell Technologies World and it's going well. >> When you look at your overall portfolio, wonder if you could talk to some of the macroeconomic things happening, on margins that are happening. If Dave Alonte was here, are we talking a half of your business is client. You've got the ISG portfolio. That transformation of when Dell went private and now bringing EMC in, which allows you to change things. How do you look at that and what does Dell look like when you get to, say, the 2020, 2030? >> You know, right now it looks great and I think it'll look even better in 2020. What I see is we have positioned ourself as the essential infrastructure company and there's a massive infrastructure build-out and it's on the edge, it's a distributed core, and it's the cloud, and cloud is not just the public cloud and everybody's kind of figured that out now. We were saying it before it was cool, So if I think about the different businesses, you know Pivotal's doing great and we don't need to say too much about that because it just went public and we're in a bit of a quiet period, but the Pivotal business is a great business. VMware is doing fabulously well. Pat did a great job yesterday with the keynote and I think if you watch the keynote, you see, wow, Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, VMware, really, really working together at a very deep level. And then you go into our client business. Client business is growing really fast, but not as fast as our data center business. The data center business is growing even faster, so we're gaining share. You'll see it in the first quarter. We'll gain share in storage, we'll gain share in servers, we'll gain share in clients, and there's a portfolio effect where customers look across everything that we're doing and they say, "Yeah, I don't really want "to deal with 25 little companies. "I want to have a bigger relationship "with Dell Technologies." So bringing everything together, putting real effort behind these big platforms that we have, and look, we've got some big new initiatives. NSX, network virtualization. You know I'm a big believer in that and I think this is ultimately bigger than server virtualization and we're in an ideal position with our open networking and VMware NSX to drive that forward. >> Michael, both Allison and Jeff brought some great customer stories up on stage. One of the things sometimes you hear out there it's like, well, Dell, they're just an infrastructure company, and infrastructure, you know, I care about my data, I care about my applications. What's the role of infrastructure and maybe give us, what does infrastructure mean to you when we talk about those digital transformations that you're helping your customers through? >> Well you sort of go back to what's the plot here? And the plot is better outcomes, results, and success for a business. Well how do you do that? Well you do that with data, right? And people talk about clouds. Well what are clouds? The clouds are built on infrastructure. It's a bit like the internet. 20 years ago we'd say, hey we have the internet, we have the internet product strategy, Vice President of the internet, internet product division. Where's all that now? It's just everywhere. Cloud, AI, very, very similar. At the core of all this is the data and the computer science. You want to have artificial intelligence machine learning? Got to have data, so that's infrastructure. AI is eating software and software is eating hardware, but AI doesn't run on software. Software doesn't run on software. Software runs on hardware, so you got to put it all together, right? And that's exactly what we do. >> Alright, Michael what learnings have you had going through this? I know there was a lot of planning. We talked to Howard yesterday, talking about some of the cultures coming together, the big survey they did that like the top five things across everybody. It was like, not only were the top five things in agreement, but even the order was in agreement, but have to imagine that there were some things, bringing these large companies together. I might notice that in the keynote so far it's been all people that came from the Dell side that are up on stage. PowerMax Bob I know is from the EMC side, but mostly from the Dell side. What have you learned so far? How have some of those cultural pieces come together and how do you keep a quite large organization rallying and focused around what's an ever-changing and broad portfolio? >> You know, it's been a lot of fun, first of all to have so many unbelievably talented people join our company and that was a real delight because there's just a wealth of enormously talented people now in our company. Over-communicating, listening, getting to know them, understanding their point of view, and ultimately creating a shared vision and an aspiring vision for what we want to do in the future. And then, of course, when you're winning, everybody sees it and everybody's excited and they want to be part of it and they're engaged and it's working. So, certainly during the period before the integration and still today, we're in the business of technology and we've got products and services, but ultimately it's a people business right? And the talent comes in and walks out every single day, so you got to keep them engaged, excited, and fortunately we're doing that. And we're adding a lot more, so we need a few more thousand sales people, so if you're really talented and you know how to sell stuff, come join us at Dell Technologies, because we're hiring more sales people. >> Well Michael, I think you're going to get calls there. On a personal note, I've been watching on social media. Everybody's really, you give your time back. You spend time. I know something you really enjoy is speaking to people, understanding what's going on, getting into it, and for someone, Michael you created all of this and you've been there, just giving your time and getting involved is impressive. I've read like every book that Walter Isaacson's done. We're going to see a biography from him about you some time in the future or? >> Well look, I think if you're honored enough to have a biography by Walter Isaacson, that's pretty good. I'll leave that to him. He's a great one for sure. Look, I mean, I just think this is my job right? (laughs) Our job is to be with our customers, be with our people, learn, listen. That's how we become a better company and I wouldn't know what else to do if I wasn't doing that. >> Yeah. One of the things in your keynote you spoke about is helping customers, making it real. Like in Jeff's keynote, it was that the business and the IT are becoming one and the same. Maybe if you, do you have any good customer stories or how are you helping customers making it real? >> Yeah I think this topic of change management is really important because let's say you're a customer and you come to Dell Technologies World and you see this amazing, dizzying array of new things and you're like, "Wow, that sounds great but how do I do it?" And so, I'll give you one story. We met with a large, rather large company, and they had a situation where for any number of reasons, the IT environment was sort of put on hold for a couple of years. There were things going on around them that were beyond their control. They just really couldn't do anything, so the environment very quickly atrophied and they wanted very quickly to get up to speed and needed a lot of help and so we pulled in our professional services team. Make no mistake, we're not trying to replace Accenture or TCS or something, but a thin layer of architecture consulting to very quickly help them map out what the new architecture should look like and then go make it happen. And of course, we have lots of partners all over the world that also are engaged in helping that happen. But we're very aware that change management is a big topic for a lot of our customers and we're spending a lot of time on how do we make it easier, so make these more ready-made solutions for the fast track to the modern data center, like the VX Rack, VX Rail, V Block Solution. >> Yeah, we touched on it briefly, but that concept of change, when I talk to customers, one of the challenges they have is they learn about something, they get ramped on it. By the time they've rolled it out, there's something else that it's like, oh wait, maybe I should have waited. It used to be, oh geez, I should have started that project two years ago and now it feels like, wait, maybe I should wait another year because things are changing so fast, economics are changing. How do you work with customers and, internally, how does the team manage this just unprecedented rate of change? >> I think there's a pretty massive movement going on across organizations to be more agile and it kind of started in software development, some technical organizations, but now you're seeing it spread. We're certainly working as a company to do more and more of that and I think we're living in a very dynamic world. First we had the internet and all the things that that brought. Now we have the 5G and the block chain and autonomous computing and all kinds of new things that are being explored out there and so we have to be highly adaptable and flexible. I think companies that aren't able to do that are going to have a problem. We are in a way blessed that we grew up in a world where if we didn't do that, we'd have been out of business a long time ago. >> Michael, you mentioned crypto. We've talked to the VMware and Dell EMC teams that are starting to look at those technologies, do some of the underlying things, but you're a big investor. You've made some big things, everything from, I think about the radio frequencies in the sports arena. What do you think of this whole crypto, Bitcoin, all that. What's your take on that from a personal side? >> Well look, as a personal investor, I have almost none of my money in cryptocurrency, so I'll be clear about that. I'm a massive believer in distributed computing and block chain, but I don't have a lot of my money, or really, in anything to speak of in cryptocurrency, so maybe I'm missing out on the next great investment opportunity. Don't really know. I guess we'll find out, but big believer in distributed computing and block chain. >> Yeah I think you'll be doing okay either way, Michael. Want to give you the-- >> It's worked out pretty well so far, so I'm... >> (laughs) Want to give you the final world. There's so much here, over 14,000 people, lots of tracks. I've been talking to all my friends. It's a great nerd fest as I think some people have said, so always geeking out. Give us a final takeaway, what you hope people walk away, and what maybe they understand Dell Technologies a little better about than they might not have in the past? >> Well first, very grateful for our customers, for the trust they place in us. It's really gratifying to see how the Dell Technologies capabilities have resonated, and look, I think a lot of people are a bit surprised at all the capability we have across the company. That's really the purpose of this event is to bring it all together, explain the capabilities we have. We want them to engage in the hundreds of technical sessions that we have, but still come away with, I wish I could have gone to some more, right? And so we have all those online and for us this is also big ears. We're listening and we're learning. We're hearing from our customers and we're going to go take that back and bring the next set of innovations and we want to be the trusted partner for our customers. We think there's never been a better time to be doing what we're doing and there's a business investment cycle that's technology-led that's very powerful and there's no company on the planet that has the capabilities Dell Technologies has across all the four transformations. >> All right, well Michael Dell, thank you so much for joining us here. Really appreciate getting to talk with you and getting to cover this event. We have two more days full of live coverage here from Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman And you're watching The Cube. Thanks Michael. >> Michael: Great, thanks Stu. (soft electronic music)