>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of Dell Technology World del Tech, World 2020. Jeff Clark is here. He is the chief operating officer and vice chairman of Dell Technologies. Jeff, awesome to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me today. Appreciate it. >>Yeah, you're very welcome. When my first question is, when do you have time to be vice chairman? Well, >>you know, in today's world, it's pretty hectic. We're all working around the clock. If there's anything about the new norm, there are no boundaries. And unless you establish some boundaries so I've been able to find a rhythm that works for me personally, but also allows me to look after the company and, uh, kind of keep things moving and making progress of Dell. So pretty exciting times. It's certainly been a challenge finding new ways to break through new ways to get things done. But our team has done a great job rising to the occasion. >>Well, you know, a Z. You know, I didn't know you that well prior to you taking over the whole enchilada and do it going back into the enterprise. I mean, I knew you were obviously, but you have been able to see you know, how you operate in the decision making on how you rally the troops. Your several years now into the new Dell, you had to do a lot of tactical things, you know, including product portfolio rationalizations. But I wanted to start with the macro picture in a particular Can you share some of the acceleration points and the levers that you're really pulling in the operation? >>Well, clearly, if you look back at the company's strategy and I'll start there and then kind of build on from that platform if you think about the first tenet of our strategy is to win in the consolidation in our court marketplaces. So the core commercial PC market, the course server market in the course storage market, and clearly what we've been able to do and certainly been at this now for Gosh, I think it's three years now that we've been turning over the portfolio and modernizing the portfolio on the I s g side and to the point you referenced earlier. We've now modernized that portfolio. It is now under all the power brand and now represents new, fresh modern architecture er modern products that allows us to be competitive going forward across the entire eyes. T portfolio. We've had continued success on the commercial PC side. Then if you think about the next tenant of our strategy, which is to really build deeply integrated solutions across the Dell Technologies portfolio, we've made a lot of progress in the last handful of years, particularly integrating this new competitiveness of our I S G portfolio with the M R. And we're now beginning to see the fruits of that labor PC side will quickly. You've seen that with unified workspace work workspace one are leading services and are leading PC products to be able to bring a different change experience for end users on the PC side on the side. This all started with getting again this competitive portfolio. It started with Dell Technology Cloud a little over a year ago. It now is in joint collaboration around the edge. You've heard from my comments during the keynote around five g going forward. So as we think about this new modern world playing out. We now have the infrastructure competitive. We have a great asset and capability with VM, are now have figured out how to tightly integrate those and innovate on top of those platforms. And we think that's sort of the success for the future as we move forward. >>So it sounds like I mean, covitz change so many things, but it doesn't sound like it's materially changed your thinking on these leverage points or your strategy is gonna pre cove in Post Cove. It you kind of sort of approaching the same playbook, if you will. >>Well, a covert in many levels. While it's had a huge impact on many lives around the world, which we shouldn't, that should not be lost on any of us and the impact that it's had across many businesses and many parts of the world. If you step back and what I try to mention the keynote, what cove it has done is really accelerate digital transformation. I've heard many characterizations, but the way I tend to look at it is if you think of what's happened around us and the forcing of working remote learning remote the world as we look at it going forward, data driven. It's accelerated 10 years of what I thought would take us to get done into the first half of this decade. In many cases the first three years, Uh, this nomenclature that I've talk about is the future is now, and what it's really done is actually reinforced. The points that we thought were going toe happen brought them sooner and has made us believe mawr double down, if you will, that the path we're on is the right path, and we see our customers migrating that way rapidly. In fact, what's interesting? If you look at customers who embrace digital transformation earlier, we call them digital leaders. They're actually breaking away from the pack, sort of speak from their peer set and driving differentiated performance in their sector. We think that's a great, obviously proof point of digital transformation. But what all companies will have to go through to compete >>Well, it's interesting we saw early on in the US locked down worldwide, locked down you have you have such a broad portfolio that yeah, maybe some parts of the portfolio or, you know, directly negatively affected. Certainly. For instance, your you know your airline customers or your hospitality customers, etcetera. But the work from home was was a tailwind for you guys. So the fact that you have that broad portfolio somewhat, you know, one part of the business that cushioned you, maybe the other part of the business, You felt that. But on balance, you're able to get through that, and part of that was your supply chain. And some of your competitors struggled, you know, for instance, with laptop supplies. But you guys really have done a good job, sort of navigating through that, almost like you've been through it before. But nobody's been through this before. >>No, you know, David, thanks for recognizing it. One of the benefits of the Indian portfolio we have, which no one else has. The Indian portfolio that we do. We're able to weather the storm of different impacts to whether it's sectors, whether it's different parts of the business. And we've been able to do that on our our supply chain has performed well. It's been unbelievably resilient. We think it's appointed differentiation over us against anyone else in the marketplace. You couple that with our global service footprint, the two of them working together we designated those capabilities is essential. Very early in the pandemic, we protected our team members and we were able to serve our customers and a pretty non disruptive way. Now, behind the scenes are teams were doing all sorts of things to bring, uh, that continuity supply and those expectations we sent to our customers to the forefront. But I couldn't be more pleased at how we responded, and it set us up to where things were going to go. When we think about the future and migrating tomb or integrated solutions, I suspect we may talk about as a service and the capabilities needed with that services in the supply chain play a key role. >>I guess so much to talk to you about. What? I wanna come back to digital transformation For a minute. I was talking to the C i o the other day and I asked him what was the digital transformation mean to you? He said, David, I got a 15 year old s a P system. Digital transformation means to me I My business has changed in the last 15 years, but my s a P system Hasn't I gotta bring it up to speed. I have to modernize. So there's a spectrum. On the other hand, if if you're not digital today and you're, say, a restaurant, you can't do business. So what does that spectrum look like of digital transformation to you and your customers? >>Well, I think your examples were very good. I mean, our industries as a long reputation of overhyping, different constructs. The fact is, the world is rapidly digitizing. It's undeniable. If you look at the cost of a sensor and how those sensors air now being placed in everything, all of the data that's being collected as a result, That's certainly the forefront of what's happening. And every business has to deal with that. You mean you can't We talked about hospitality. You got hotel rooms that have sensors in them for lights, for water, for a temperature. You think about what's happening in the finance sector in the amount of data that's being created on the edge of that has to be processed on the edge. You think about smart factory smart hospitals in the amount of technology that's going in to bring those new areas to the forefront. So in my mind. Digital transformation is catching up with where the world's going. We know the world is going from an analog world to a digital world, and as that acceleration, mhm goes faster and faster and faster, which I absolutely we absolutely believe this happening. Companies have to change the business. They have to change their models. They have to figure out how to take all of this data and turn data into information to drive better business outcomes. We tend to get into this digital transformation and everyone to talk about this piece of gear, this piece of gear, this piece of gear. I actually don't spend any time on that. It's where customers are going. What are they doing to really instrument, if you will, the digital world they're going to participate in and have to figure out how to overcome the obstacles and barriers with that to compete in their particular sectors. That's where we come in. We help them help them with certainly the gear part of it, but more importantly, the solution orientation to bring better business outcomes to them, to help them get to where they want to go. Does that help? >>Yes, and it does, and it sort of leads me to the hybrid cloud multi cloud. To me, it's edges all part of that and it's critical for your customers. Digital transformations. I mean, what I mean by that is creating a trusted operating environment across whatever platform you're on, whether you're on Prem when you're in a public cloud, whether you're at the edge, so multi cloud is part of that. You know, I used to think a lot of this stuff was aspirational. It seems to becoming more and more really. Where do you see your customers in that maturity cycle? >>Well, I love the way you described it. What we see is the notion of Cloud is much broader than perhaps we would have talked about earlier on when I got this job was the public cloud. No, there's Public Cloud. There's private clouds, and clearly the edge is going to be a cloud operating a model. In fact, we see the world of five G edge and cloud, those three circles intersecting toe high degree. So we're gonna bring a cloud operating model to the edge. We're gonna bring new advanced connectivity data driven connective ity to this edge where all of this instrumentation and all of this data is going to be created that will have toe have real time analytics done, uh, at the edge we think, is this opportunity to really step back and go well. Those cloud things can't be separate. They have to be a set of systems. In fact, it has to become an integrated system. And we think that integrated system has to be able to move data, be able to consistently manage, consistently orchestrate and consistently Dr Operations across those three cloud environments, I think we have gone. Probably the best characterization is early innings. We're certainly not in the first inning. We're not in the ninth inning, but we're certainly into the ballgame here of helping customers orchestrate a multi cloud hybrid cloud environment. If you think about what we've done with VM wars enablement or interaction with the public domains, the work that we've done from our private area, we have accomplished a lot in a short period of time, I'd also tell you there's a fair amount of work in front of us as this spends very quickly and the edge of balls we have to connect those worlds and not leave the edge out on an island by itself. We have to bring it together. We're bringing into the public and private cloud domains that we have today, >>and I definitely wanna hit on as a service. But since we're on this topic, I wanna I wanna talk about five G and Telco a little bit. Let me just spiel for a bit and then you can respond. So I mean, this seems to be a lot of confusion around five G. There's very high expectations. There's there's a there's a lot of talk, but if it's hard toe sort of identify the true impact, that's that's tangible today, anyway. And then you got the telecom telco transformation going on. We've been We've been hearing this for a long, long time. Meanwhile, you got the over over the top providers. They're living off the infrastructure. The telcos price per bit is declining, but the usage is exploding. And so what do you make of all this? You know, the telcos air reinventing themselves. Five g is a part of that consumers Airway waiting for that. There's a lot of, you know, mixed marketing messages going on. What's your take on this and what's tells role? >>Well, look, I I tend to try to break it down into things. At least I can understand. If I look at five G is the next generation Cellular, which I believe it's far more than that. I mean, I think it's the next data fabric for the data era. I think it's going to be this intersection, as I mentioned moments ago of five g Cloud and Edge, all coming together. But I think about it from the infrastructure side that you describe. What we have is the first opportunity to bring a cloud environment to the telco space that hasn't happened before. And I think a cloud environment needs to be implemented because I think there are cost pressures in that sector, and this is going to be a way to become more competitive and to bring out new technologies and services much faster. So now if you bring a cloud operating model to this which I believe five g enables, there is now the opportunity to bring, I think, um, or standard based infrastructure rather than the proprietary ones. In the past, we now can bring a industry standard set of architectures was softer to find layers in the stack. And for the first time in the telcos space, you have the ran going through significant transformation. And on my mind, Iran is one of the significant control points in the telco or five g stack, and that is going to be more open. And then we have to think of five. G is just more than a cellular network. I mean, we're gonna have private private five G. So to the degree that it displaces why, if I will be interesting to see and unfold. But there's a huge opportunity now. Is those sensors that I talked about in the digitization of hospitals and factories and cities, all interconnected by a bunch of private five G networks, all working in an interactive combined system way. I think it just lends itself to a solutions orientation, a standardization orientation, a cloud model, and that's sort of what we do. So I get excited. All of what I just said or alluded to is not solved to your point. You've been hearing this discussion for some time, but the opportunity is large for us. It's one of the single biggest largest opportune, single biggest opportunity that we see for Delon View more and we're going to pursue it together. And we think we can take our at scale technologies that we brought to the Enterprise Data Center and bring those to the telco providers in the private five g build out. >>It's amazing, Jeff, when you think about the when you and I started in this business and how far we've come, it's It's just just mind boggling, isn't it? It >>really is. We've been at this a while and things have changed. But again, it's been on this consistent technology curve, this consistent standardization curve, and it's now applying to new sectors >>I want to end with as a service. You mentioned that before and and so you've got actually really growing business in subscriptions? Uh, you got a lot of options for customers, which is good, but sometimes it's confusing. What's the strategy around as a service? What can we expect there? >>Well, one of the things that we've done and you're right, we've made a lot of progress. We launched L Technology on demand last year. We have 2000 plus customers of $1.3 billion revenue run rate, it's growing at 30% so we're pleased. But at the same time, all the data suggest customers we're gonna want to deploy even at a greater rate. So I think I made reference during our keynote. Today, about 75% of the world's data is gonna be created outside of the data center, 75% off the edge. Build out is going to be done as a service, as is half of the infrastructure. So we think we need to take this to the proverbial next level. We announced Project Apex, Project Apex for us to take all of the properties that we have across the company, all of the different activities and to unify them a single effort for as a service model for the Dell company going forward for our entire portfolio. We think the timing is right. We think we have to be able to, if you will project APEC should be translated as the easy button for our customers. It's a way to make things simpler. It's a way to give them the choice they need to drive consistency in the operating model, and that's the path Ron, we're pretty excited about this unification, if you will. Galvanizing across the entire organization with Project Apex. >>Awesome. Listen, I know you're super busy. Appreciate all the time you've given us your You're a fun executive toe. Hang around with a mission, man. I wish we were together, but hopefully, hopefully sometime soon we can We could see each other face to face. >>I would like that very much. I missed the interactions themselves. I appreciate the time today. Thank you, Dave. >>All right, We'll see you, Jeff. Thanks again. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. Keep it right there. We're back with our next guest. It del Technology World 2020. You're watching the Cube.