>> Narrator: From around the Globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, Digital experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. I am Lisa Martin and I got two returning guests from Dell Technologies joining me back on theCUBE today, we've got Doug Schmidtt, President of Dell Technology Services. Doug, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Well, thank you Lisa. Thank you for having Alex and I back again. >> And Alex is here, Alex Barretto, SPP of Planning and Technology for Dell Technologies. Alex, welcome back. >> Thanks Lisa, happy to be here. >> So guys a lot has happened since we last got to sit together about 18 months ago and Dell Technologies World 2019, I think back. >> Thanks you. >> Right, you could think back pre pandemic, when we could actually be not socially distant. Talk to us Doug about what's going on with Dell Technology Services. You gave us a great update then, what's going on now and now you guys have 60,000 services and IT. Folks you're delivering services in 170 countries. Give us an update. >> Well, yeah, so look, it's really about Dell Technology Services enabling our customers to effectively adopt and leverage and sustain their IT investment. It's bottom line, helping our customers get the most out of what they're looking for out of their IT solutions, and making sure we deliver that for them. And as you stated, the size of the organization, I had the privilege of leading that team of 60,000 direct and partners in 170 countries. We provide that service and over 55 languages and really we cover services from the edge to the core. So everything in between, and it's an end to end service, meaning we can help with consulting a deployment managed services, education services, right down to the support side of it. And that really gives us a lot of flexibility to help our customers deliver what they need. And it's really about helping them navigate the digital journey, right? It really is helping them pivot to the new business model we're seeing out there. Especially today, considering as we said last time we were sitting down together. Now we're doing this virtually, everyone's going through this transformation in addition to moving more to the edge and hybrid cloud. So it's as important as ever for services to be there for our customers. And that's what we're doing every single day. >> And we'll unpack a bit more, some of the things that you've been doing since 2020 has started and made all these changes. But Alex, let's go to you for a little bit, services strategy, services technology, what's going on there? >> Yeah, so really responsible for both those areas, right strategy and technology on the strategy side, really believe we're differentiated across three batters, you think about our physical footprint, right? Quite massive, we operate in quite a few countries, as you pointed out. And if you look at a portfolio graph, we have everything from consumer all the way to the large enterprise. So big scale from a portfolio perspective. And then if you look from our digital reach, we have massive digital reach, which is really quite unmatched. And actually, that's where the technology piece really comes to shine. If you think about it? We have 200 million assets in the field today, those assets are generating 22 terabytes of data per day. That's a massive settlement not being able to use our AI engines to generate valuable customer insight. (clears throat) Last year alone, we are able to predict 3.7 million issues before they occurred, and then take proactive action on those issues. And that's just one example. But we're really investing in our software engineering capabilities, building tools that enable our customers to drive their own actual digital transformation. And as Doug alluded to, we do this across the entire services lifecycle. So everything from consulting, to deployment, to support, to manage services. >> Excellent, thanks for that, Alex. So Doug now let's kind of dig into what's been going on in the year of 2020, the year of what's next, a lot of changes and big challenges for customers in every industry, seven months ago, trying to figure out how do we survive in this mode, the massive shift to work from home to remote devices everywhere. Talk to us about how Dell Technologies has responded and helped your customers to survive and get to that thrive state in this crazy time. >> Yeah, well no, you're right. And it was something that happened very, very quickly, obviously to all of us globally. And these events in 2020, really brought us even closer to our customers, we've always listened very closely made sure we were in tune with that. Obviously, when all of this hit, we were there for them and we had to rapidly challenge and change how we delivered our service in this dynamic environment. We were able to do that we have an incredible team that obviously went to in full work remote, you could imagine that with 60,000 folks changing our service offering, so where we may have gone on site for a customer, we then set up a depot. So that we're able to do that safely. We were able to get our PPE equipment out to the field service agents that needed to be in a data center and make sure we were following all the protocols. We leverage our five Integrated Global Command Centers, these are strategic Hubs, we have around the world to really monitor and help and track all of this. So we were able to do that that was that had been digitized years before, so we were able to do all that safely. Really, this was about going in then and helping our customers mitigate the impacts that they may have had help them through that, whether it was through deployments being virtual, getting in the systems that they needed, and just helping them through their critical environments and changes. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers? Because we talked about this massive pivot for everyone, and the breadth of services that you cover from consulting to managed services to education. What were some of the things that were really the highest need that you saw from customers, especially when this first happened? >> Well, when it first happened, it was clearly the working remote, right, and helping everybody do that and doing it virtually making sure that like I talked about making sure they had the systems, making sure connection for okay, did the centers were able to handle all of that, and doing all that in a fashion in a safe way for our team members and our customers, team members, that was first and foremost priority with the safety of everyone. Once we had gotten through that, I'm going to say, look no gauge exact, but I would say starting beginning of summer, maybe May, what we started seeing that is the people really actually pivoting even more into their transformations that they were doing, their digital transformations our customers were, and they were really looking for strategic guidance in on their planning. And so we set up where our consultants were delivering half day accelerator workshops virtually to help them solve their IT challenges that they may have had. We also help them understand what we added in the space of unified workspace as a complete solution that helps them deploy support, manage all of their end user devices, so that they can achieve full productivity in this new environment. And they were asking for IT to be simple. How do we simplify a lot of this? And how do they simplify that via our managed service capabilities. And so we are working through that, again, setting up these virtual workshops, and having them understand what those capabilities were and how we can help them through that. And then look, they were also as you know, financing? Financing options? How can we do this type of service, all these different methods that we were helping with as well. It was really a great in the sense of us stepping up to help our customers and we were there for them. >> And we talked about the digital transformation, guys last year at Dell Technologies world that Dell Technologies was undergoing. Alex, talk to us about, what is going on with that digital transformation that Dell has undergone and how technology services or rather services technology is helping to play a role in that especially the last six, seven months. >> Yeah, it's amazing to your question, we actually do digital transformation every day for our customers. But as you pointed out, we're actually undergoing our own digital transformation. And that's actually quite interesting to see compare and contrast with everything that's happening with our customers. And we're able to actually take some of the insights that we learn in house and expose that to customers. So we actually, if you look at services, we invested quite heavily on software engineering, the number of software engineers that we've had now inside the services business units and all time high. If you look at the number of data scientists and PhDs that we have brought in, again, all time high, it really focused on developing AI engines that we use both internally and externally, driving digital transformation. A couple examples of that, if you look at something called PCI, which is a stands for Proactive Case Intelligence, it actually looks at the entire services journey that a customer has, and we're able to detect and put information in front of agents at the right time, the right information then actually enables them to deliver a better customer experience. We've actually seen through the implementation of PCI, a 10% reduction in the time that we spent engaging with customers and at the same time and improvement in seaside to the tune of approximately 130 basis points. So we're off a productivity improvement which helps us internally as well as obviously benefit for the customers. Another thing we're doing is actually digitizing our entire services processes. That means everything from consulting to the point of support. So we have a digital variant of what processes should look like. And then real time, we're able to actually measure active processes versus what they should be, and when we detect anomalies, we're able to correct those in real time, that again, gives us efficiencies internally, but more importantly, enables us to deliver a better customer experience. >> And that customer experience is critical, not just for Dell Technologies to deliver to its customers, but for your customers to deliver to their customers. You talked about improving the customer experience and some of the impact there, Alex, you think about the last in the year of 2020, how we suddenly went from this expectation that we can order anything on Amazon, and it shows up tomorrow to having things be delayed that we were not anticipating, talk to me about the transformation you guys are on, and we've heard a lot of Dell folks talk about the acceleration in the digital transformation that your customers are undergoing, that if you can walk us through from a strategic vision perspective, you've got the digitization going to the services, we know that a good amount of remote workforce will stay that way, for quite some time, but give us a vision into the year 2021. >> Yeah, let's talk about the future, because to your point look we have AI today, and we plan to continue augmenting and investing in AI, we're going to continue developing software applications to have our customers to drive the transformation. But if you look forward to exciting areas, and let me name three specifically, there are very interesting. The first is as a service, we're actually take in our complete services portfolio and transitioning all of it to be available as a service. That's what customers are looking for a very simple way to consume buy and consume our set of services, and we're doing that transformation and taking everything in transition to be available as a service. Second 5G, and Telco the Telco Transformation is that's going to occur as part of 5G, we're fully embracing that, so that we can have and deliver the set of services in a differentiated way leveraging the power of 5G, and you see that come about when you fast forward 2021, 2020. And then we have cloud services, also something we're very, very interested excited about. So we obviously have our hybrid cloud solution, Doug alluded to this. But on top of that hundred color solutions, we're developing and building a set of cloud services, that's going to enable our customers to be able to consumer solutions in a very simple and easy way, and get the value out that they're looking for again, >> And Doug wrap us up here with the vision overall, from Dell Technologies services, the demand coming in from customers globally, all of the changing demands and this uncertainty in which we're living in what does the future the next year so look like from Dell Technologies services level? >> Well yeah, as we've talked about, like the demand for exceptional customer, and employee experiences through all this is really driving these business model disruptions across the board. And look, we understand customers need to thrive during all this. And it's rapidly evolving and changing. So we're building our portfolio, quickly to stay ahead of that being able to listen to customers and build those services out. So we're doing that. As we mentioned earlier, both Alex and I, we've talked about the disruption we're seeing with 5G, the edge, cloud as a service. And this is driving a massive change in the industry, right. And therefore you have all the services to help our customers manage through that. And it's really about this convergence, we're seeing of capabilities that we provide, the lines between like I call these traditional silos inside support, consulting, managed services, all of that being blurred. Our customers are really looking for an outcome, they're looking for flexibility and some for things to be simple. We're helping them achieve that. And like I talked about earlier, they our customers want outcomes. And they really want to select Dell, for the comprehensive portfolio that we have. That could be everything from PC as a service, storage as a service, right into hybrid cloud. So, look moving forward, we work very closely, obviously integrated with our product teams hand in hand, we see that blurring as well. The product is a service the service is a product. We think Dell Technologies is in an ideal position to pull all this together and we have a clear vision with a world-class team will really help our customers to their transformation and deliver the outcomes they're looking for. >> It's definitely customer influence customer driven the future of Dell Technologies service. One last question done for you, this year's Dell Technologies world not going to be able to get those 14,000 or so folks together, what are some of the things, education wise that folks can learn about the different types of services? which you're offering now, some of the things that have changed since they last engaged with you? >> Well, yeah, actually, that's being discussed as you mentioned, throughout the Dell Technologies World, so it's ingrained, obviously, into our product announcements solution announcements that we're doing as a team. We obviously have everything online and links so that folks can learn more and more customers can learn more about these great solutions and the services we offer, and of course, through there, you can always click to link back to myself and the team and we're more than willing to help anybody at any time. If they have questions or further things they want to learn. >> Terrific, Doug, Alex, thank you so much. It's nice to see you again. I'll be it virtually. Maybe someday soon we'll get to be sitting down on a CUBE desk together again I hope. >> Look forward to eat. >> Thank you. Thank you for Doug Schmidtt and Alex Barretto. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual edition. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>>live from Stanford University. It's the queue covering Stanford women in data Science 2020. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >>Hi, and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host, Sonia today, Ari. And we're live at Stanford University covering wigs, Women in Data Science Conference 2020 And this is the fifth annual one. Joining us today is John Hoegger, who is the principal data scientist manager at Microsoft. John. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks. So tell us a little bit about your role at Microsoft. >>I manage a central data science team for myself. 3 65 >>And tell us more about what you do on a daily basis. >>Yeah, so we look at it across all the different myself. 365 products Office Windows security products has really try and drive growth, whether it's trying to provide recommendations to customers to end uses to drive more engagement with the products that they use every day. >>And you're also on the Weeds Conference Planning Committee. So tell us about how you joined and how that experience has been like, >>Yeah, actually, I was at Stanford about a week after the very first conference on. I got talking to Karen, one of this co organizers of that that conference and I found out there was only one sponsor very first year, which was WalMart Labs >>on. >>The more that she talked about it, the more that I wanted to be involved on. I thought that makes it really should be a sponsor, this initiative. And so I got details. I went back and my assessment sponsor. Ever since I've been on the committee trying it help with. I didn't find speakers on and review and the different speakers that we have each year. And it's it's amazing just to see how this event has grown over the four years. >>Yeah, that's awesome. So when you first started, how many people attended in the beginning? >>So it started off as we're in this conference with 400 people and just a few other regional events, and so was live streamed but just ready to a few universities. And ever since then it's gone with the words ambassadors and people around the world. >>Yes, and outwits has is over 60 countries on every continent except Antarctica has told them in the Kino a swell as has 400 plus attendees here and his life stream. So how do you think would has evolved over the years? >>Uh, it's it's term from just a conference to a movement. Now it's Ah, there's all these new Our regional events have been set up every year and just people coming together, I'm working together. So, Mike, self hosting different events. We had events in Redmond. I had office and also in New York and Boston and other places as well. >>So as a as a data scientist manager for many years at Microsoft, I'm I'm sure you've seen it increase in women taking technical roles. Tell us a little bit about that. >>Yeah, And for any sort of company you have to try and provide that environment. And part of that is even from recruiting and ensuring that you've got a diverse into s. So we make sure that we have women on every set of interviews to be able to really answer the question. What's it like to be a woman on this team and your old men contents of that question on? So you know that helps as faras we try, encourage more were parented some of these things demos on. I've now got a team of 30 data scientists, and half of them are women, which is great. >>That's also, um So, uh, um, what advice would you give to young professional women who are just coming out of college or who just starting college or interested in a stem field? But maybe think, Oh, I don't know if they'll be anyone like me in the room. >>Uh, you ask the questions when you interview I go for those interviews and asked, like Like, say, What's it like to be a woman on the team? All right. You're really ensuring that the teams that you're joining the companies you joined in a inclusive on and really value diversity in the workforce >>and talking about that as we heard in the opening address that diversity brings more perspectives, and it also helps take away bias from data science. How have you noticed that that bias becoming more fair, especially at your time at Microsoft? >>Yeah, and that's what the rest is about. Is just having those diverse set of perspectives on opinions in heaven. More people just looking like a data and thinking through your holiday to come. Views on and ensure has been used in the right way. >>Right. Um and so, um, what do you going forward? Do you plan to still be on the woods committee? What do you see with is going how DC woods in five years? >>Ah, yeah. I live in for this conference I've been on the committee on. I just expected to continue to grow. I think it's just going right beyond a conference. Dossevi in the podcasts on all the other initiatives that occurring from that. >>Great. >>John, Thank you so much for being on the Cube. It was great having >>you here. Thank you. >>Thanks for watching the Cube. I'm your host, Sonia, to worry and stay tuned for more. Yeah.

>>live from Miami, Florida It's the Q covering IBM is data in a I forum brought to you by IBM. >>We're back in Miami and you're watching the cubes coverage of the IBM data and a I forum. Tony hi. Amiss here is a distinguished engineer for Ditch the Digital and Cloud Business Analytics at IBM. Tony, first of all, congratulations on being a distinguished engineer. That doesn't happen often. Thank you for coming on the Cube. Thank you. So your area focus is on the B I and the Enterprise performance management space. >>Um, and >>if I understand it correctly, a big mission of yours is to try to modernize those make himself service, making cloud ready. How's that going? >>It's going really well. I mean, you know, we use things like B. I and enterprise performance management. When you really boil it down, there's that's analysis of data on what do we do with the data this useful that makes a difference in the world, and then this planning and forecasting and budgeting, which everyone has to do whether you are, you know, a single household or whether you're an Amazon or Boeing, which are also some of our clients. So it's interesting that we're going from really enterprise use cases, democratizing it all the way down to single user on the cloud credit card swipe 70 bucks a month >>so that was used to be used to work for Lotus. But Cognos is one of IBM's largest acquisitions in the software space ever. Steve Mills on his team architected complete transformation of IBM is business and really got heavily into it. I think I think it was a $5 billion acquisition. Don't hold me to that, but massive one of the time and it's really paid dividends now when all this sort of 2000 ten's came in and said, Oh, how Duke's gonna kill all the traditional b I traditional btw that didn't happen, that these traditional platforms were a fundamental component of people's data strategies, so that created the imperative to modernize and made sure that there could be things like self service and cloud ready, didn't it? >>Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, the work clothes that we run a really sticky were close right when you're doing your reporting, your consolidation or you're planning of your yearly cycle, your budget cycle on these technologies, you don't rip them out so easily. So yes, of course, there's competitive disruption in the space. And of course, cloud creates on opportunity for work loads to be wrong, Cheaper without your own I t people. And, of course, the era of digital software. I find it myself. I tried myself by it without ever talking to a sales person creates a democratization process for these really powerful tools that's never been invented before in that space. >>Now, when I started in the business a long, long time ago, it was called GSS decision support systems, and they at the time they promised a 360 degree view with business That never really happened. You saw a whole new raft of players come in, and then the whole B I and Enterprise Data Warehouse was gonna deliver on that promise. That kind of didn't happen, either. Sarbanes Oxley brought a big wave of of imperative around these systems because compliance became huge. So that was a real tailwind for it. Then her duke was gonna solve all these problems that really didn't happen. And now you've got a I, and it feels like the combination of those systems of record those data warehouse systems, the traditional business intelligence systems and all this new emerging tech together are actually going to be a game changer. I wonder if you could comment on >>well so they can be a game changer, but you're touching on a couple of subjects here that are connected. Right? Number one is obviously the mass of data, right? Cause data has accelerated at a phenomenal pace on then you're talking about how do I then visualize or use that data in a useful manner? And that really drives the use case for a I right? Because A I in and of itself, for augmented intelligence as we as we talk about, is only useful almost when it's invisible to the user cause the user needs to feel like it's doing something for them that super intuitive, a bit like the sort of transition between the electric car on the normal car. That only really happens when the electric car can do what the normal car can do. So with things like Imagine, you bring a you know, how do cluster into a B. I solution and you're looking at that data Well. If I can correlate, for example, time profit cost. Then I can create KP eyes automatically. I can create visualizations. I know which ones you like to see from that. Or I could give you related ones that I can even automatically create dashboards. I've got the intelligence about the data and the knowledge to know what? How you might what? Visualize adversity. You have to manually construct everything >>and a I is also going to when you when you spring. These disparage data sets together, isn't a I also going to give you an indication of the confidence level in those various data set. So, for example, you know, you're you're B I data set might be part of the General ledger. You know of the income statement and and be corporate fact very high confidence level. More sometimes you mention to do some of the unstructured data. Maybe not as high a confidence level. How our customers dealing with that and applying that first of all, is that a sort of accurate premise? And how is that manifesting itself in terms of business? Oh, >>yeah. So it is an accurate premise because in the world in the world of data. There's the known knowns on the unknown knowns, right? No, no's are what you know about your data. What's interesting about really good B I solutions and planning solutions, especially when they're brought together, right, Because planning and analysis naturally go hand in hand from, you know, one user 70 bucks a month to the Enterprise client. So it's things like, What are your key drivers? So this is gonna be the drivers that you know what drives your profit. But when you've got massive amounts of data and you got a I around that, especially if it's a I that's gone ontology around your particular industry, it can start telling you about drivers that you don't know about. And that's really the next step is tell me what are the drivers around things that I don't know. So when I'm exploring the data, I'd like to see a key driver that I never even knew existed. >>So when I talk to customers, I'm doing this for a while. One of the concerns they had a criticisms they had of the traditional systems was just the process is too hard. I got to go toe like a few guys I could go to I gotta line up, you know, submit a request. By the time I get it back, I'm on to something else. I want self serve beyond just reporting. Um, how is a I and IBM changing that dynamic? Can you put thes tools in the hands of users? >>Right. So this is about democratizing the cleverness, right? So if you're a big, broad organization, you can afford to hire a bunch of people to do that stuff. But if you're a startup or an SNB, and that's where the big market opportunity is for us, you know, abilities like and this it would be we're building this into the software already today is I'll bring a spreadsheet. Long spreadsheets. By definition, they're not rows and columns, right? Anyone could take a Roan Collin spreadsheet and turn into a set of data because it looks like a database. But when you've got different tabs on different sets of data that may or may not be obviously relatable to each other, that ai ai ability to be on introspect a spreadsheet and turn into from a planning point of view, cubes, dimensions and rules which turn your spreadsheet now to a three dimensional in memory cube or a planning application. You know, the our ability to go way, way further than you could ever do with that planning process over thousands of people is all possible now because we don't have taken all the hard work, all the lifting workout, >>so that three dimensional in memory Cuba like the sound of that. So there's a performance implication. Absolutely. On end is what else? Accessibility Maw wraps more users. Is that >>well, it's the ability to be out of process water. What if things on huge amounts of data? Imagine you're bowing, right? Howdy, pastors. Boeing How? I don't know. Three trillion. I'm just guessing, right? If you've got three trillion and you need to figure out based on the lady's hurricane report how many parts you need to go ship toe? Where that hurricane reports report is you need to do a water scenario on massive amounts of data in a second or two. So you know that capability requires an old lap solution. However, the rest of the planet other than old people bless him who are very special. People don't know what a laugh is from a pop tart, so democratizing it right to the person who says, I've got a set of data on as I still need to do what if analysis on things and probably at large data cause even if you're a small company with massive amounts of data coming through, people click. String me through your website just for example. You know what if I What if analysis on putting a 5% discount on this product based on previous sales have that going to affect me from a future sales again? I think it's the democratizing as the well is the ability to hit scale. >>You talk about Cloud and analytics, how they've they've come together, what specifically IBM has done to modernize that platform. And I'm interested in what customers are saying. What's the adoption like? >>So So I manage the Global Cloud team. We have night on 1000 clients that are using cloud the cloud implementations of our software growing actually so actually Maur on two and 1/2 1000. If you include the multi tenant version, there's two steps in this process, right when you've got an enterprise software solution, your clients have a certain expectation that your software runs on cloud just the way as it does on premise, which means in practical terms, you have to build a single tenant will manage cloud instance. And that's just the first step, right? Because getting clients to see the value of running the workload on cloud where they don't need people to install it, configure it, update it, troubleshoot it on all that other sort of I t. Stuff that subtracts you from doing running your business value. We duel that for you. But the future really is in multi tenant on how we can get vast, vast scale and also greatly lower costs. But the adoptions been great. Clients love >>it. Can you share any kind of indication? Or is that all confidential or what kind of metrics do you look at it? >>So obviously we look, we look a growth. We look a user adoption, and we look at how busy the service. I mean, let me give you the best way I can give you is a is a number of servers, volume numbers, right. So we have 8000 virtual machines running on soft layer or IBM cloud for our clients business Analytics is actually the largest client for IBM Cloud running those workloads for our clients. So it's, you know, that the adoption has been really super hard on the growth continues. Interestingly enough, I'll give you another factoid. So we just launched last October. Cognos Alex. Multi tenant. So it is truly multi infrastructure. You try, you buy, you give you credit card and away you go. And you would think, because we don't have software sellers out there selling it per se that it might not adopt as much as people are out there selling software. Okay, well, in one year, it's growing 10% month on month cigarette Ally's 10% month on month, and we're nearly 1400 users now without huge amounts of effort on our part. So clearly this market interest in running those softwares and then they're not want Tuesdays easer. Six people pretending some of people have 150 people pretending on a multi tenant software. So I believe that the future is dedicated is the first step to grow confidence that my own premise investments will lift and shift the cloud, but multi tenant will take us a lot >>for him. So that's a proof point of existing customer saying okay, I want to modernize. I'm buying in. Take 1/2 step of the man dedicated. And then obviously multi tenant for scale. And just way more cost efficient. Yes, very much. All right. Um, last question. Show us a little leg. What? What can you tell us about the road map? What gets you excited about the future? >>So I think the future historically, Planning Analytics and Carlos analytics have been separate products, right? And when they came together under the B I logo in about about a year ago, we've been spending a lot of our time bringing them together because, you know, you can fight in the B I space and you can fight in the planning space. And there's a lot of competitors here, not so many here. But when you bring the two things together, the connected value chain is where we really gonna win. But it's not only just doing is the connected value chain it and it could be being being vice because I'm the the former Lotus guy who believes in democratization of technology. Right? But the market showing us when we create a piece of software that starts at 15 bucks for a single user. For the same power mind you write little less less of the capabilities and 70 bucks for a single user. For all of it, people buy it. So I'm in. >>Tony, thanks so much for coming on. The kid was great to have you. Brilliant. Thank you. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You watching the Cube live from the IBM data and a I form in Miami. We'll be right back.

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell Technologies, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 from Las Vegas at the Sands Expo Center. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, this is day one of two sets of coverage for three days for theCUBE. There are at least 15,000 people here, we just came from a great keynote, Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger, Jeff Clarks, Sati Netella was here. John and I are pleased to welcome back to theCUBE one of our guests, we've got Doug Schmitt, president of Dell Technologies Services. Doug, welcome back. >> Well, thank you for having me. >> And you've brought a partner in crime, we have Alex Barretto, Senior Vice President of Dell Technologies Services, Strategic Planning, and Technology. Alex, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> So guys, I always love the keynotes. Michael always has- Michael and team always have great energy. Lot of cool announcements, all talking about digital transformation. But Doug, let's start with you, let's talk about the transformation of Dell Technologies Services. Give us an overview of your organization, and what you're doing for Dell Technologies Services. >> Yeah, well thank you for having us back. I know we were here last year talking a little bit about Dell Technologies, and wow, what an opening keynote this morning. And following up on that; look, service is key component, obviously. Helping our customers through their transformation. Our number one priority, it's really simple. It's literally about, for, and helping the customers. Whether it be specifically kind of, three areas: to sport, deployment, and their manning services. And helping them not only keep their data centers to the edge, running correctly. Making sure to help them through their transformations that they're going through, that we talked a lot about this morning. And then, what we do is we support our customers really with 60,000 people globally, about half of those are Dell Badge, the others, we leverage partners in various countries for. Look, it's about getting up every day and making sure everything runs correctly for them. And that's our job. >> Alex, talk about the strategy for services. Because one of the highlights in the keynote was Bank of America talking about how they got where they are today, and they go forward. It's not the same, things are changing, you guys have to change. What's changing in sevices? What's the strategy? Because it's a whole new ballgame. >> Yeah, great question. In fact, technology is- we have to ask ourselves of our own transformation. In fact, Doug and I spend quite a bit of time talking about a technology world map. Really, if you open the aperture of 'What is technology?', it's everything from data science, to our bots, to our software engineers, into the AI, engineers are developing both in-house as well as partnering with others. That is really the essence of what we're doing in services, and you see customers like Bank of America really adopting that. Because it's helpful in the value that customers get out of our technology. >> And the data was also important, they mentioned data. How are you guys using data in services? I'm sure you must be data-driven. I mean, the mandate up from high, Michael's like, "It's a data-driven world, it's clear as day." >> Absolutely, data is essential. In fact, if you look at the amount of data that's out there, and the growth of the data, it's just phenomenal. But the way I actually like to talk about data is the insights we get from data, right? Data is interesting, but the value that you get from data comes from the insights. So, we actually spent a lot of time developing models, and that's why we use a lot of data scientists, a lot of software engineers. Again, to develop models to generate value from the data. That value is what customers are looking for, and what we're focused on. >> In terms of value, one of the things that was also talked about this morning in the keynote is people and the workforce being massively distributed for any kind of business. 81% of the average worker, is outside of the traditional office, with over half of these people, I'm one of them, working in at least three different places every week. You've got customers that are highly distributed, as is your workforce. What can you talk to us, Alex, about the unified workspace announced on stage this morning? >> Fantastic new offering that we have, obviously you heard from Jeff onstage talking about that. And if you look at that, there are a couple elements that are interesting to me. First, you see all the pieces of Dell Technologies coming together to create greater value for the customer, and if you look at the value that's generated there, to your point, wherever you are as a customer, you're able to access your specific information, whatever the device. And so, if you think about your whole experience, device independent, as well as from a software standpoint, we can offer all in one. >> How, how is-- Sorry Doug, how is service integral to this, you know? >> Well that's-- yeah. What that's really about is so, you have workspace one, coming from VM, great offer and product. And then you have our services, which would be pro-deploy, are pro-support and in some cases, even the manning services, coming together with that to provide a wrapper around that. So, customers have that end-to-end experience with unified workspace, getting those four great service offerings together. Which really then brings it all together for the customer. So they have to do very little, quite frankly, to make that happen. >> One of the comments from Sati Netella was the whole new renaissance of IT needs infrastructure. You see the VX rail being bundled into data centers and service, the demo of the VM-ware cloud, where the just deploy a data center to the edge. I mean, this is just completely game-changing. How is that changing how you guys do the services? Because you guys, it was self-healing. There was a lot of stuff in the dashboard-- no one was deployed, it was all being done with software. How is this changing your mix of business, personnel, economics? >> Great question. You know, we talk about how we're helping customers transform Dell Technologies, well look, services is going through its own transformation as well. And I think that's what you're bringing up. And really, there's four pivots around that transformation we see inside of services that we have to do to stay up and make sure that we're cutting-edge for our customers. The first is around technology, Alex talked a little bit about that. But really, what that's about is the telemetry to help our customers. Data insights, it's not just the data. The second is around our systems that we're putting in place to leverage all that telemetry. You know, we're basically building a whole new CRM, bringing everything together. Our field capabilities, in terms of systems we're building out as well. So a massive transformation on the infrastructure inside just running this to support really. It's a $150 million install base. >> Can you share just stats or data on what's the most popular services you're deploying? And which ones are trending? Like, which ones are kind of, people kicking the tires on? Obviously, you've got the grooves swing on some of your key products. What's the hottest, services/products that you have? >> Well look, our Pro Support Plus is a very hot product for us, it literally provides end-to-end support for our customers, provides what we call a technical account manager, or service account manager with it. It gives you the insights then to really go help you. So it's not then about break/fix anymore. What it's about is proactive, predictive service, and then actually using that to go to the customer and say, "Hey, you know what? "Here's what we're seeing, here's how you can improve "your environment, not only prevent issues from happening, "but what are we doing to actually improve, "and carry that environment forward." And our customers love that. >> Any up and coming, trending products, services you see? Obviously, I can see yeah, there's probably going to be some new services there, but what are going to be the hot new techniques? >> I think seeing the same spot in ProManage which you'll see us carry forward here, and carrying it into the managing service is how do we continue to provide more of that end-to-end? Really, what you're seeing is a convergence of deployment, support, and managing service all really coming together. Our customers are really looking for more and more of that one-stop shop, but one offer across the board. So that's what we're seeing. >> But just to add to that, if you our ProSupport Suite, we have SupportAssist, which is our technology behind ProSupport. And the insights that we're generating; we have 55 million devices connected now. So you look at the connectivity, and the value customers are getting out of that, it's amazing. 20 Terabytes of data per day generated out of those devices. It's a lot of information coming in, customers see the value, they connect more, and again, back to your loop that you're talking about the data. >> Well, the security visibility too, just looking at the data, with all those devices now with Windows, and all the new multiple vendors. I mean, you've got all that data. >> That's right. But I think it's the insights, you know, we keep talking about that. Those insights are really helping us leverage that for the customer so they can see in front of them, and I think what we always say internally is "Look, customers aren't looking for a rear-view mirror. "They're looking through the windshield." The more we can use that insight, to help them see when and where they need to get through for their own transformation, is what it's all about. >> And talk to us about how both of you-- Doug, we'll start with you, how have customers been sort of symbiotic to the digital transformation of services in terms of knowing, "We've got to get predictive"? How are they helping you to evolve what you're delivering so that ultimately, services is part of this technology differentiation and product front that Dell Technologies has? >> Yeah, well, you know the history of Dell Technologies is really the core of our foundation. Culturally, for all 140,000 of us, is listening to the customer. And I think that culture has allowed us to adapt and stay close to not only what the customers are telling us, using the insights we're getting back, but knowing where the customers want to head. And it truly is a one-on-one listening to the customers, listening to where their issues are at, then using this technology and their solutions to solve their problems they're bringing up. But I got to tell you, there's not a big hammer that just- one answer for that. Literally, it's how are we helping consumers? How are we helping small, medium, business? Large? All of them have a variation of what's the same, and all of them have a variation of difference as well. >> Alex, how about strategy for a minute, the strategic landscape, how has Dell Technologies Services changed with the vendor landscape? Now you've got multiple vendors, it turns into multiple clouds, multiple clouds with open source software. You've got all kinds of new things emerging. How do you stay on top of it, what's the strategy, what's the long game look like for you guys? >> If I were to summarize in a nutshell, it's software. We're investing quite a bit in software, whether that is within our predictive capabilites, but as well as in deployment services, and Doug alluded to ProManage. So software is a pivotal, key component. So this is how we are approaching from a services standpoint. Whether you talk support, deploy, or manage services, the umbrella around that is really our capability to do the software component. So that's where we are placing our bets, we think that's where the future is. Whether it's SupportAssist, or our ProManager offering. It's all the backbone based on software development. >> And where is, we talked a lot about digital transformation and services, but the people, the people being essential to, we need the technology to do our jobs in any industry. What about skill, upleveling skills? It's great to have all the technology, but we need to have people to be trained, certified, professionals to be able to maximize the value of the services. Doug, go ahead and start, and then Alex, maybe from a strategic perspective, where is that people, cultural part of the services? >> Well, look it's huge. I don't think it's just for services, I hear our customers talk about it as well. And as Alex just mentioned, that software is driving more and more of it. You know, we use a lot of different acronyms and titles to kind of describe it, Digital Transformation, AI, BI. I mean there's all of this, but it is is all summarized in Digital Transformation. And the impact it has on our team members is vast. So look, open communication, yes, it is changing the way we do business, and quite frankly the world's doing business, the simple tasks are getting more and more automated through these insights, and they're going away. Making it easier for our customers means you're not getting as many break/fix calls, you're not getting these transactions. But what we're doing at the same time is we're upscaling the team, telling them where we need to be in the future, helping them with those skillsets, reset. The interesting thing is our team members are seeing the value of it, their jobs actually become more enriched because you're doing higher value things for our customers. But there is a transformation going on and-- >> And Doug, there's cultural changes as well, as we think about how we measure the business, some of the metrics that we look at, legacy metrics versus new metrics, they are different now. How we think about people development is different. So, I think it's a great question, 'cause the actual talent transformation, it's huge. There's short-term impact, and long-term impact. And if you don't plan that right, obviously you can't execute a strategy. >> How should your customers start rethinking about how they're leveraging the services? Because with unified workspace, data center as a service, and now multi-cloud, architecture is really important. Where the data sits, using real-time data you mentioned in software and data, so as they think about now, looking at not resetting, but taking services for their advantage. 'Cause they look at services, they want to be in the right position. It seems like architectures are more important now. Multi-cloud architecture. So, more technical people involved, the roles are changing. What should customers, how should they expect to be thinking about that? >> It's another great question. Well look, I'll let Alex follow up with his thoughts on this one. But I think this is really about us, the customers have to look as a true partnership. What we're really there trying to help them with every single day, is we talk about keeping the solutions in the system running to what they need, what they wanted. But we can also help by helping their staff free up time through the services we have, so they can stay focused on their transformation and provide the value that their teams and customers are looking for. That's really how we see that. So in other words, go into them and say, "Hey look, "we can take some of these tasks off, whether it be the deployment, unified workspace we talked about, you know, that was announced today. These are all about not only providing better technology for their team members and their customers, but then leveraging their time then to go spend it on their transformation. That's really it, quite frankly, simply put. >> Yeah, I would say it depends. Customers want to do a variety of things, so it depends on their business outcomes. So, at the end of the day, I would say, as you look at Dell Technologies, we have all the Lego blocks. You tell us what you're trying to achieve from a business standpoint, and we have the Lego blocks to make it happen. I think we're in a unique position to be able to deliver that valuable proposition to customers. So it's not a one size fits all. >> More data, more workloads, I've heard the term workload mentioned so many times in all my CUBE interviews, we all talk about workloads, but now with IOT and Edge, you're going to see a proliferation of more workloads, some small, some massive, and managing that workload is a huge challenge for organizations. This comes up as the number one issue. How does services play into that, how do you guys make that easier, and I love the operating model of simplicity, but when you guys take that realization into services, what do you guys bake out of that? What comes out of that? >> Yeah, I would say two things. First, the reason that workloads exists is that it's important for the business. So it's got to be up at times, it's got to be 100 percent. It's got to be up and running. We make sure that that happens. Second, if you look at the workloads, they're actually running critical pieces of the business. So we actually assure that we are providing additional value, beyond actually just running infrastructure, actually keeping value and how you should optimize that infrastructure so you can do more with less. >> Can you give, is there an example of a customer? John mentioned B of A was highlighted this morning, Draper was as well, I think some of the Trailblazer Winners were right before we started. A customer that comes to mind that really demonstrates the value that they're getting from Dell Technologies' suite of services? >> Well, look, I think there's a lot of those. But going back to maybe, we talked about the customers today in the keynote speeches that were happening. But look, there's a lot of small and medium businesses that are one, trying to stay with and ahead of technology. Lots of cases actually farther ahead in their transformation. I think I know of one that I recently had a conversation with, a doctor's office had four or five offices in a town here in the US. And they're staying ahead of that. They want us to "Look, we want to buy things that have "easy deployment, easy install/run. We also need you "to come in and help us tell us how to access "and leverage the technology we have better." Running it easier, staying ahead of that digital transformation, and providing really, their virtual CIO, with a technical account manager pulling all that together. You know, all from the storage, their server, their client products coming together; they don't view it as-- the customer's not coming to us and talking to us about individual products. It's not the discussion. What they're saying is "We need to purchase this, "we know we need this solution, we need to have you guys "come and pull it all together, we're looking "for our people to take care of the patients, "get the information that needs to the government, "and get paid, that's it. "And we need you to help us pull all that together." And we're doing that. >> Doug, my final question for you. Michael Dell always talks about this, within the hallway conversations, or on theCUBE. He says, "The best way to create valuable teams is to attract and retain the best talent." How are you guys attracting and retaining the talent, because the workforces are changing, the technology's changing. What are some of the hard problems? Because people love to solve hard problems. What's the pitch for people out there watching, that might want to work in the services group? What's the environment like? How do you attract great people? What kind of problems do they work on? Give a little taste. >> Well, first of all, you know, you have to love and want to take care of our customers, that's really exciting to me, and I know to the other 60,000 team members. That's why we get up for every day. There's an energy that comes from that. I mean, you're getting up and helping our customers whether they're hospitals, small, medium businesses, or consumers. Really being productive in their lives, whatever it may be. So there's an energy that comes from that, I think a lot of people enjoy doing that. It can't be more exciting than that, right? Second of all, career. Just so many aspects to this. You think about digital future technology, we have everything from being able to go out in the field and help our customers to remote, there's just so many different opportunities. And then we also have our employee resource group. So even participating beyond just work, we have the ability to join all of our different resources groups, whether it be Pride, or Veterans, or whatever they may be. People like and see value to just coming into work, but being able to take their passions that they have on the outside and bring it in as well. >> Real citizenship opportunities to bring and contribute back. >> Exactly right, giving back to our communities. very strong, very strong. You know I get an immense amount of pride in the things that I want to contribute to outside of work, and seeing and getting empowered by Dell to do those things. And then constant learning, constant, constant learning. >> I would also hint at a bit of competitive imagination. (Laughing) If you heard any barking during our interviews, speaking of things to do outside of work, we're next to Michael's Angel Paws, which is near and dear to Michael Dell's heart. That's the service dogs that are actually here for all of us to get our dog fixes on. So Doug, Alex, thank you so much for explaining to us the momentum, the excitement behind the digital transformation of Dell Technologies Services. >> Thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live at Dell Technologies World 2019. This is day one of two sets of CUBE coverage. Stick around, our next guest will join us shortly.

>> From Union Square in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering PagerDuty Summit '18, now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit 2018 at the Westin St. Francis in Union Square, San Francisco. Been here all day, a lot of excitement, a lot of buzz, some great keynotes including Ray Kurzweil checking in, which was really a cool thing. We're excited to have our next guest, she's Rachel Obstler, she's a VP of products for PagerDuty. She's the one responsible for delivering all this fun new, fun new toys, right? >> Did it all on my own. (laughs) >> All on your own, so Rachel, great to see you. >> Nice to see you, too, Jeff. >> Absolutely, so great event, we were talking, you know, our second year. Last year was cool, it was kind of out by the water, but this is, you know, another kind of historic, classic San Francisco venue. We're surrounded by all the gilding and everything else-- >> Yes. >> Tech companies with all their displays. >> Yeah, there are not a lot of spaces that are big enough to do an event like this-- >> Right. >> In San Francisco proper unless you're going full-on Moscone Center, so... (chuckles) >> You'll be there soon enough, I think. >> Maybe. (laughs) >> So, let's get into it, you announced a bunch of new products here over the last couple days, so what did, let's go through some of those announcements. >> Sure, so we announced two new products. One of them is PagerDuty Visibility, and PagerDuty Visibility is really designed for the person that we call the bow-tie knot in the organization. >> The bow-tie knot. >> The bow-tie knot, so you know, you have a bow-tie, a bow-tie and there's a little knot in the middle-- >> Right. >> So, the bow-tie knot is usually an engineering leader, it's someone who when there's a problem happening, an incident going on, that they're kind of coordinating between keeping track of what's going on on the ground with the responders actually trying to fix it, and telling all the stakeholders what is going on, because stakeholders don't understand things like the server XXX has some problem, right? >> Right, right. >> But at the same time you don't want those executives getting on a call and disrupting the responders who are actually busy working on the issue. >> Right, right. >> So, that person in the bow-tie knot has a lot of manual work to do to make sure they're translating constantly between what's going on and what the executives need to know, and they need to know because if there's an issue with a customer application you want to get in front of it. You want to be able to proactively tell your support team if tickets come in this is what you say. >> Right. >> You want to maybe even send an email to your customers, "We know there's an issue." Update your status page, "We're working on it." You know, tell them as much as you can. It gives them confidence that it's being taken care of. >> Right, so this gives them kind of the God view of all the things that the team is working on in terms of getting resolution to that problem. >> Yeah, it ties the technical services, which are the things that are jargon and gobbledygook, except for the people working on them-- >> Right. >> To what are business services, which are those customer applications that the executives understand and the customers understand, so with that tie you know when a technical service is impacting a customer application, which one it's impacting, and you can also let the right people know who are responsible for that customer application, what they need to know so they can let the customers know. >> Right, so what happened before without having kind of a central place to manage that communication and that visibility? >> That bow-tie knot person did this all manually. >> Just running around gathering facts and figures-- >> Yep. >> And status and updates-- >> Yep, and then-- >> From various points on the compass. >> And then fielding phone calls with people, yelling at them-- >> Right, right. >> And it's a very painful, you know, we talked to a lot of customers. It's a very painful position to be in. >> Right, well that's a good one, and then you have another one, PagerDuty Analytics. >> Yes, so PagerDuty Analytics is really a product more used during peacetime, so Visibility's used during wartime to make sure responders know which customer applications are being impacted, but during peacetime there's a number of operational analytics that you want to know about all the realtime work that you're doing. So, some examples are I had a set of engineers that were on call last week, was it a bad on call? How many times were they woken in the middle of the night, do I need to give someone a day off? Right, so to make sure you manage the health of your team. You may also want to know which of my technical services is causing the most pain for the business, so that might be a monthly or quarterly report, doing like a quarterly business review. So, which technical services do I need to invest in because even a technical service that may not be down that much, if it's impacting multiple critical customer applications it could be causing your business a lot of money. >> Right, right. >> You also may want to know what's your total time that you're spending resolving issues, right? So, how many hours are across all your employees? Are you spending, just reacting to realtime issues that may happen and is that too much? >> Right, and if you can't measure it you can't manage it, right? >> Exactly. >> And it's funny because pulling from Jen's keynote earlier today, I think she talked about, the number was 3.6 billion incidents that have gone through the system just in year-to-date 2018. >> Yep. >> So, the scale is massive. >> Yep. >> But you guys are bringing some artificial intelligence, you're bringing some machine learning to bear because you have to, right? >> That's right. >> This gets way beyond the scope of a person being able to really prioritize and figure out what's a signal, what's a noise, what do they have to really focus on. >> That's exactly right, so in June we launched a product called Event Intelligence, and what it does is it takes in all those signals that PagerDuty takes into the system and then it makes sense of them. So, it says, "Well, these things are related, "let's group them together," so as each new signal comes in it won't create a new incident that someone then needs to run down. It will put it in the existing incident, so the responder keeps getting all the context they need about the incident, but they don't keep getting notified while they're trying to concentrate and fix something. >> (chuckles) They must love you guys, they must love you guys. (laughs) So, then the other piece I found interesting and I think some might find a little confusing is all the number of integrations you guys have-- >> Mm-hm. >> With so many different kind of workflow management and monitoring and a lot of things. How does that work, how does that kind of... I would imagine there's some, you know, competition, cooperation with all these different applications, but as Jen said earlier today if that's what the customer wants that's what you guys got to deliver. >> That's right, and you know, this is a complex ecosystem, there are a lot of different tools in the ecosystem. Naturally, as companies get bigger there will be areas of overlap, but we very strongly believe in an open ecosystem. We want to interoperate with every product that's out there, so we do have a lot of different integrations. We have a lot of integrations with companies where we take data in, so monitoring data that tells you, "Hey, your server's down," or whatever else it is-- >> Right. >> But we also have a lot of integrations with, like, ticketing tools, tools that will, or a customer file's a ticket, so that, you know, you can have the information, this is what's going on in the engineering side right now so the customer support team can stay informed. >> Right. >> And also managing through workflow, a lot of companies use like an ITSM tool to manage through workflows, so integrating with them, integrating with chat tools. We integrate with Slack, you know, so there's a lot of different integrations because you want to make sure that resolving an incident is the smoothest, easiest process it can possibly be because it's stressful enough already. >> Right, right, so a lot of stuff going on here. So, as you look forward don't, you know, congratulations on getting a couple of products out today, but what are some of your priorities as you kind of look at the roadmap, you know, kind of where you guys have things covered. Where do you see some new opportunities to take, you know, some of the tools that you guys have built? >> Yeah, we see a big opportunity in that world of Event Intelligence, so we already have a product but we're going to continue to add more capabilities to it and continue to take advantage of the data in our platform. So, surfacing that data in more intelligent ways through Event Intelligence could also be through Analytics, so for instance, you know, we today can group things together intelligently, we can show you similar incidents, right? This incident looked like something that happened in the past. Well, next maybe we can say, "This looks like something that happened in the past, "and oh, gee, that got really bad. "You might want to pay special attention "because this one may get bad, too." >> Right. >> So, starting to get more predictive, really making sense of all the data that you have from the past history, our 10,500 customers over nine years. It's a lot of data that we can use to help people get more and more efficient with their realtime work. >> Right, and is there an opportunity to kind of use cross-customer data, not, you know, obviously you've got to anonymize it and all those types of issues, but clearly, you know, there's stuff that has happened to other companies that I could probably, you know, benefit in knowing that information around some, you know, some common attributes either around a particular type of infrastructure configuration or whatever. So, have you started to pull that and bake that back into some of the recommendations or... >> Yeah, so one area that we do have available as some data today is benchmarking, so without, as you said, sharing any specific customer data it's very helpful for customers to understand first of all how their individual teams are performing versus their teams, but then also how their teams are performing against the industry. >> Right. >> So, are we fast at responding to incidents? What does best in class look like? How quickly could you actually mobilize a response to a major incident? This is like great data for our customers to have as they move forward in their digital transformation. >> Right, hugely, hugely important. >> Mm-hm. >> So, last word, you said you've, you know, you're relatively new to the company but you're a wily old veteran because you guys are growing so fast. (laughs) Just love to get your impressions. It's your second PagerDuty Summit, you know, kind of the vibe, I think Jen's got a really, very positive and very specific kind of a leadership style. >> Mm-hm. >> Just share your impressions with the show and what's going on inside of PagerDuty. >> It's been great, I've loved every moment that I've worked there. I feel like we're doing things that are really innovative and we're always pushing the envelope trying to go faster and faster, so I'm really excited for the next year. >> Good. >> Can't wait to see what the next Summit looks like. (laughs) >> Yeah, what it's going to look like. Yeah, probably be like 2,000-- >> We're not even done with this one yet. (laughs) >> 2,000 people, I'm sure, all right. Yeah, but the Advanced Planning Committee's already taking notes, right? >> Yeah, right. (laughs) >> All right, well Rachel, thank you for taking a few minutes and congratulations on your product release. I'm sure there were many sleepless nights over the last several months to get that stuff out. >> Thank you, Jeff, great to be here. >> All right, she's Rachel, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE, we're at PagerDuty Summit in San Francisco, thanks for watching. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering IFS World Conference 2018. Brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference here in Atalanta, Georgia. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. It is late in the day here, the reception is about to start, the drinks are flowing, but we are still interviewing guests, and we've got a great panel right now. Joining us is Scott Helmer. He is the Senior Vice President at the Aviation and Business Defense Unit at IFS, and Henry Canaday, who is a contributing editor at Aviation Week. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> I wonder if you could walk our viewers a little bit through the idea, where does aviation and defense sit within the IFS business strategy? >> I'm happy to answer that. I think our new CEO of IFS, Darren Roos, has been very clear that there are three things that IFS will be best at. Number one, we will be best at mid-market ERP in those vertical markets that we care about. We will be number one in field service management. And we will be number one in maintenance management solutions in aviation and defense. So aviation and defense is one of the pillars on which IFS's strategy is currently based, and we have formed a global business unit inside of IFS that is specifically responsible, it's a 300 person strong team that is responsible for distributing a comprehensive portfolio of A and D solutions to the A and D market globally. >> What are the some of the biggest challenges that you're setting out to solve for your customers? >> Also a good question. We address the full range of management solution capability across A and D. So whether you're an operator in commercial or defense sector, or whether you're an inservice support provider, we provide solutions and support, all of your MRO capabilities, some of your performance-based logistics requirements, some of your supply chain requirements. Basically leveraging the core processes that IFS is differentiated around. Those being manufacturing, asset and service management, supply chain and project management. >> What's special about aviation and defense that's not been marketed or service delivery, which captures a lot of industry verticals, but the fact that you guys got carved out as a separate vertical, what are some of those unique challenges? >> What is chiefly unique about aviation and defense is the overall complexity in the marketplace. You're talking about very very complex capital intense of mobile assets, where managing the maintenance obligations in order to maintain the availability of the aircraft is under the scrutiny of compliance and is required to be done efficiently, without compromising safety. >> Not to mention the fact, your assets are flying all over the world, so they might not necessarily be able just to roll into the maintenance yard at the end of a bad day. >> And they're large and expensive, that's for sure. >> (laughs) Large and expensive. >> Henry, you've been covering the aviation industry for more than 20 years now. What do you see as the biggest trends, biggest concerns that a company like IFS is trying to grapple with right now, in terms of servicing its clients? >> Well the interesting thing about the airline industry is that it technically in many areas it's extremely advanced and very fast moving industry. In selling tickets, the industry has been going through a continual IT revolution for the last 20 years. Things like giving you notices about when your planes arrive and stuff like that. Very fast moving, changing all the time. But this is stuff, it's just money. There's no safety involved, so they can take chances, if they get it 99% right, they make enough money, they can solve the one percent errors. The problem with maintenance is it's messy, it's complex as Scott says. It's also safety critical. They can't screw it up one tenth of one percent of the time. They've been very, very cautious and very, very slow, and they look sluggish and stagnant on the maintenance side. But fortunately, now, especially the U.S. airlines are making some good money, so there's actually an opportunity for companies like IFS to come in here and really reform the maintenance program. >> We cover a lot of autonomous vehicle shows. Autonomous vehicles are coming. Obviously, a big element of autonomous vehicles will ultimately be safety. One of the things that comes up over and over again, if you look at the number of accidents, the fatalities that happen on our streets, compared to what happens in aviation, if a week on the streets happened at a week in the aviation industry, the planes would be shut down. >> Scott: There'd be no aviation. >> The threshold that you guys have to achieve in terms of safety is second to none. I don't know if there's anything even close, especially in terms of volume of people, and then, oh by the way, everyone globally is getting richer, so the amount of passenger flow. I don't know if you can speak to that in terms of the growth of passenger miles, I imagine is the metric, continues to explode. >> You've had basically 18 straight years without a fatal crash by a major American airline. That's unheard of, that's unheard of. We used to have one crash a year up till around 2000. Every time somebody annoys me with customer service in an airline, I think of this, they're doing the important stuff right, so I don't care. (laughs) >> Very well. >> Right. >> And, then do you think the efficiency, right? At least here domestically, I always think of Southwest, 'cause they were the first ones that really had fast turns, and they raced to the gate, they raced back out of the gate, in terms of really trying to get the maximum efficiency out of those assets. The pressure there, in translating to the other airlines is pretty significant to make sure you're really getting a high ROI. >> That's absolutely right. Again one of the levels of complexity that we were discussing. Certainly airlines are being forced to finally introduce some change into their maintenance operations, as the increasingly complex assets are part of the re-fleeting, as that faster traffic continues to grow. It's about both achieving greater efficiency in maintenance operations, not only without compromising safety, but ensuring the availability of that asset. Because revenue dollars still matter greatly, and those assets are your revenue producing assets that an airline has. >> Can you describe your approach in terms of of how you work together with your clients, the airlines, in terms of developing new products and new features. >> One of the unique characteristics about aviation and defense is not only the size of the client, but the length and duration of the relationships. So, we have a long and rich history, both at IFS and through the acquired MXI technologies, of working with our partners in their programs over the very long term. As much as we have domain expertise and a sizable team of domain experts inside of our business, we're able to recognize our partners that are visionaries in the industry, and we have established multiple levels of collaboration to involve them in the shaping of solution capability to support their businesses going forward. We are just launching today two new planning applications that were not only being launched with American Airlines and LATAM Airlines respectively, but were co-developed with subject matter experts at each. So they're tremendously valuable inputs into shaping our vision of what solutions are going to best drive business value for our customers over a very long relationship horizon. >> So, what have you unpack at MXI acquisition, what did that give you that you didn't have before and what's the total solution now? >> Certainly, I joined IFS through the MXI acquisition. I was previously it's Chief Operating Officer. MXI was focused on best of breed MRO capability for both defense and service port providers, as well as commercial airlines. In combining with IFS, that had a rich history in A and D, we now have the most comprehensive solution portfolio available on the market today. We are the only vendor that can provide best of breed capability, integrated into an end to end enterprise landscape, and we've got the team of subject matter experts or domain experts that are capable of delivering that value, not just the product, but the solution to the customers across all the segments of A and D. >> Just to be clear, your defense is more than aviation. I saw a military truck over on the expo hall, so it's assets beyond just airplanes when it comes to defense. >> Correct, we support on the defense side of things. We support multiple platforms, whether they're fighter jets, whether they're cargo carriers, whether they tanks, whether they're ships, we support for the operators, the offset optimization, performance based logistics, security, et cetera. For the in-service port providers, we similarly support supply chain requirements, MRO requirements, et cetera. >> Henry, as you look forward, you've been covering this space for a while, what are some big, new things coming down the road in the aviation industry that we should be looking for, 'cause we haven't seen a lot of big things from the outside looking in. I guess we had the next generation fighter planes, and then we had obviously the A380 and the 787 on the commercial side. What's new and coming that you're excited about? >> Well, technology changes slowly in commercial aviation, because of the safety aspect. The big, new things are the new aircraft, the 787 and the A350. They are really new generation aircraft, lot more composites, plastics if you will. They're using that instead of aluminum. The other things that's happening is additive manufacturing, this whole printing parts. That's real big, and I've been telling everybody the new Boeing 787 has two printed parts, one made by GE, $120 billion a year. The other made by a company called Norsk Titanium, with 140 people coming out of Norway, which is not exactly the center of innovation in aerospace programs. >> Jeff: With a printed part, like a 3D printed part? >> Yeah a printed part. Those are the two big changes in the aircraft. I mean, customers aren't going to see it, but these planes are now made largely of plastics and the metal parts are going to be more and more printed. Much more efficient way, lighter aircraft, less fuel use, more efficient, less environmental effects, etc. That's a big deal. More important than a huge airplane. >> Right, well I can imagine, we hear about the impacts of 3D printing. I haven't really seen it yet, but this vision where your ability to print parts on demand will have significant impacts on supply chains and inventory and huge, huge impacts down the road. >> And the airline industry is the most demanding. They've go to go through really massive proofs of concept and proof of materials, and it's starting to happen. >> Henry, what would you say is the most important area that IFS should focus on. If they can solve one problem in the airline industry, what do you think it should be? >> Availability would be one. Just aircraft availability, that's what. The airlines are concerned about two things. Dollar cost per flight hour to maintain and what they call a technical dispatch reliability. They want to get that plane launched 99.99% of the time. Get rid of the unpredictive maintenance problems. Schedule everything, make it quick, I want to get the planes off on time. >> It's amazing that unscheduled maintenance, regardless of industry, still continues to be such a bug-a-boo to productivity and profitability. It's one of these things that just has huge impact. >> I would completely agree with Henry. I think asset availability is the number one focus for commercial operators. Our focus has certainly been around trying to remove the impacts of unscheduled maintenance. One of the applications that we launched today allows you to react very, very quickly to unplanned or unscheduled maintenance events, and to do some what-if modeling, so that you can implement the best plan for your fleet, in order to maximize the availability of that asset. Not just in terms of bolstering or producing a better plan. We're attempting to do that even with line planning, where we're adjusting the traditional planning perimeters away from what must be done to what should be done in order to maximize the availability of that aircraft. Of course, as Henry said, everybody's focused on faster, tighter turnaround times. All of our software is designed to try and drive tighter turnaround times and greater efficiency. >> What percentage is scheduled versus predictive versus prescriptive? Maintenance. >> I think it varies by airline. The great majority of maintenance is scheduled, I mean, there's no doubt about that. They put these aircraft down for a week or a month. It's a massive amount of money. It's not the amount of maintenance, it's when unscheduled maintenance happens, it really throws things off. It may only be one or two percent of the maintenance tasks are unscheduled, but that's what throws the aircraft off the schedule. That's what leaves passengers sitting in the departure lounges, ticked off. Not getting there till the next day or the next week, whenever, so it's a very, very small percentage, these unscheduled maintenance events, but it's crucial to the airlines' economics. >> Exactly. Crucial to our itineraries, as well, as the economics. Exactly. >> Making sure that the airlines continue to do what they do best, which is get us from place A to place B. >> Precisely. Well, Scott Henry, thank you so much, it's been a really fun conversation. >> I enjoyed being here, thank you. >> Jeff: Thank you. >> Thanks, Henry. >> Thanks. >> We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference just after this. (digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello everyone, welcome to day two of theCUBE's exclusive coverage Cisco Systems' DevNet Create, their inaugural event where they're put in the foray into the developer community and the open source community, really looking at DevOps, cloud-native, with data. Great move by Cisco. We're going to analyze it again here on the opening day and review yesterday a little bit and talk about what we think is happening here and give you the take on it, our angle, and extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris for day two, head of research for SiliconANGLE Media, also, general manager of Wikibon.com. Check out Wikibon.com, great research, some free, most of it. The good stuff is behind subscription firewall via client. Check it out. Your business will do great because of it. Peter, quick plug there. Get that out of the way. But, let's talk about Cisco. >> Thank you, John. >> We said yesterday and kind of played out Cisco has an opportunity to transfer and grow their core development community, DevNet, which is only three years old, is very robust, it's the heartbeat of Cisco right now, it's the core constituency for Cisco Systems. We're talking tier one elite networking guys, the plumbers, (laughs) pack it movers, whatever you want to call them, they've been designing networks from internet scale to today, everything from Voice over IP, you name it, they've been doing it and the network has been the center of the action and the data center. It's been the most critical asset for availability, operational support, and stable. But not very adaptive, not very agile (laughing) so, you know, now-- >> Almost by definition. >> And that's the purpose is the network guys drive the network and enable opportunities, but now that shift has happened. It's DevOps application developers are driving change to the network and the big conversation is what does it mean for Cisco? What does it mean for their communities? And we were saying that this is an opportunity to extend. We had the folks first from RedHat on yesterday talking about how when you have things come together, there's opportunities. There could be a collision or there could be an opportunity so, can use data science and computer science come together. That is now big data. That's changed the game in the world. Cisco now has DevOps and networks coming together. Applications and infrastructure. This is an opportunity for Cisco. Your take from yesterday, do you feel it? Do you think it's real? What's your take? >> Well, it's real. Digital transformation's happening and it's happening because people can now do things with data that they couldn't do before and they're starting to. So, that's the base of digital transformation, but the reality is, in a digital business, you're going to be by definition, almost inherently, highly networked. And your ability to move data where it needs to be when it needs to be there to whom it needs to be so that they can consume it, is emerging as an essential capability. But, you're not going to do that manually everywhere. You're not going to do it manually in the infrastructure, it's just too complex. And you're certainly not going to do it manually in the applications. And so, you're absolutely right. Being at that edge, being at that margin between how the network does things, how the network is the basis for very high-quality capability for distributing application componentry and how the data then flows over that network under control by applications is really where the next five years are going to be, a lot of the new value is going to created and it's great to see so many developers here that are actually creating code at a conference that's being sponsored and put forward by Cisco. >> The AppDynamics is certainly a force in function for Cisco. Great acquisition. They paid a pretty penny for it, but it could've been more had they gone public (laughing) given the market that's in. So, AppDynamics comes in, Cisco now has a cloud-native direction, still work to do, but they're doing it in a way that's not all Cisco. They're not coming in with Cisco washing, "Hey, this is Cisco." They're really doing it right. They come in, 90% of the sessions are not Cisco at all. It's all community-based. Is this a working strategy for Cisco? Do you see, and what would you advise them because this is important. They have to do this, in my opinion. I think it's a great move, personally. But now, the innovator's dilemma is DevNet's exploding. You've got DevNet's beautiful community, it's growing. It's growing really fast. But, now you have Devnet Create. What do they do? >> Well, so, let's talk about the AppDynamics acquisition just for a second. As with everything, in talking about a big company acquiring a company of any size, you always have observe and see how it's going to play out, but it's got a lot of potential. One of the places that I think it's got a significant potential is in that AppDynamics, as a technology, does a great job of capturing metrics about application performance on networks and as we think about how the market and technology is going to be reconfigured so that networks can be better, more planful, more predictive about what kinds of things the applications are going to need, being able to surface that kind of data is going to be really, really crucial to setting the next round of conventions and that will lead to the answer of your question. If we think about where the market needs to go, we have full stack developers, we have networks. They talk to each other, but they don't engage in a meaningful way as often as they should and I think it's time for us to start thinking about above layer six, that layer seven, start breaking down layer seven and saying, "Well, that's where that full "distributed stack development's going to take place," so that we can start seeing how data will be reused, application services will be reused, componentry will be reused across a variety of different use cases and having that kind of a new structure defined and laid out so that it is built on the presumption that there's going to be a significant network in a way, in the middle of it, I think is going to be really important. Doing everything with RESTful APIs is really important, but I think the industry needs to get a lot more intelligent about how we're really going to build these things and not just presume that there is no network connection. There is a network connection. There has to be one and we have to build that into the architectures that we put forward in the future. >> So, programmable infrastructure as the DevOps ethos, that's what Cisco's proposing and saying they will and are becoming. I get that. I think that's the winning formula, but let's take that concept with what you just said. You're implying that okay, with now distributed infrastructure at scale, with AppDynamics and other things, the notion of a developer changes 'cause now, Cisco folks and their developer community, now is not just by itself, it's integrating in with the rest of the communities. That changes the notion of full stack developer because when you go hire, "I need to hire "a full stack developer," this stops really at the database or how low does it go? So, I think, you brought this up yesterday, not on camera, but after when we were kind of talking, is that this is an opportunity to reconfigure the new definition of a full stack developer. >> Yeah, I think so, John, and you know, one of the things we did talk about was when Susie was on camera yesterday, was the idea that yes, we can, as we introduce software-defined infrastructure, the infrastructure becomes programmable and so, we now see Cisco, CLI-type people thinking about programming instead of just doing command line work. We see it happening in the server world and the CAD world, et cetera, so there's no question that that notion of programmable infrastructure is becoming very real. What we're talking about is stepping it up and having it be available to developers in new and different ways, but utilizing new conventions that start to suggest that for time purposes, latency purposes, security purposes, think about organizing your application componentry in new ways so that the underlying network and infrastructure can provide even more robust capabilities and more consistent capabilities so that we can see further future ways of integrating these things together. And I think that's where this ends up. >> Interesting point about these network opportunity is that Cisco and networking guys are not a stranger to services. Network services have been around for a while. When you look at what came out of yesterday's conversation and this is consistent with a lot of our CUBE interviews we've done with cloud-native players like Amazon and everyone else like AWS and VMware and everyone else, is everything's a service. So the question that I have for the Cisco world is can they move quickly enough to a services model in this notion of a new network engineer, network developer, infrastructure developer? How well can they get transitioned over while preserving their core base of developers? >> I think they have to, so, and it's a great question and we're not going to have the answer from here, but I think one of the things we do need to start seeing and we're starting to hear rumblings of it is the idea that the network has to become more intelligent in the context of the services that the application developer utilizes that run above it and so, the network doesn't necessarily have to be made explicitly or overtly available, but it has to be intelligent enough so that it can provide new capabilities, new service levels, new security levels, et cetera, in a response to the way the services are invoked in the patterns of operation. You know, in many respects, we talked about this a little bit yesterday, John, I think we used to have infrastructure defined by hardware and that served the industry okay for a long time and in the last 10 years, we started talking about software-defined infrastructure. So, we moved from hardware-defined infrastructure to software-defined infrastructure and that's kind of where we are today with the idea of the network becoming more programmable. I think as a consequence of big data and recognition where digital business is going, where data really is the asset and the idea that we're going to build applications and then find data, we're going to start with data and then, decide what we need to do with that data through big data and other types of things, we're literally talking about, in the next five years, about something that we might call data-defined infrastructure where the data, the characteristics of the data, the location of the data, the way it's used, the way it creates value for the business, having a dominant impact on how the infrastructure gets configured and I think that's a, has enormous opportunity for Cisco. >> Yeah, Pat Gelsinger talks about the software-defined use and that's still part of the VMware strategy. This is kind of where it's going so I'm going to put you on the spot. >> Peter: Uh-oh. >> After yesterday's interviews, what did you learn? What did you walk away that's either net new information to you or something that validates something that you've been thinking about or had been researching and analyzing? >> Well, the first thing I'll note and somewhat self-servicing is Wikibon is known for being at the vanguard. We tend to be a little bit out in front and imagining what, how technology disruption's going to play out in response to the new use cases and business issues and it's always good to talk to people that are smarter than I am to start validating some of our positions. So, we heard a lot of, yesterday, that was pretty strong validation at a technical level and a couple of big vendors that are along the lines of what we're talking about so that was very useful. >> What did they validate? What specifically-- >> well, this notion of, for example, the notion of data-defined infrastructure. The idea that data in the future is going to be seminal to thinking about how infrastructure's intelligent, really configured based on the needs described within the data and the metadata. So, we heard that from a couple different people. Another thing that we heard was that there is a, that this not just, that Cisco's vision here of having developers and network jocks coming together to thinking about what the impact's going to be ultimately on how we create business value out of technology is something that's not just a Cisco pipe dream. We had four or five partners on yesterday, including a number of them who are quite sizable, RedHat, for example, who trumpet and reflect and are promoting similar types of concepts. And the other thing that I heard and I'm particularly going back to the PubNub conversation we had, it's really nice to see technology that is been around for a while, that works well, be really reconceived to be able to do new and different things and in particular, PubNub was talking about a deterministic Pub/Sub network infrastructure. Very interesting stuff, it's going to be really important. And the reason why I think that's important is because the lessons that we've learned in the past are not necessarily dead because we're going through transformation. One of the biggest things that I think we all need to take away from this is that we think about a computer, we think about my iPad, your Mac, a Dell machine, whatever else is, we think about that as computer, we think about a server as a computer, but the reality is, if you think about what we're trying to do through conferences like this is internet-scale computing where we look at the entire internet as a computer. Any data, any process-- >> Network's critical. The network is the essential element of it because that's what weaves the whole thing together and I think what we learned yesterday is the lessons of the past, some are going to be gone and we have to get rid of them, but a lot of them have more to do with business models. This is, we're still talking about computers and we're still talking about computer science. >> Great summary of your learnings. I learned, just to wrap up our intro segment, I learned a couple things. Observations that just popped out at me, one is Cisco has a lot of women in tech, engineers, so that was a very cool thing for me 'cause we always look at our index and theCUBE interviews over the thousands of people interviewed and still, only 18% have been women interviews. (laughing) Do more. That's our kind of passion. But they're smart and they're really knowledgeable and it's really awesome to see great women being featured. Certainly, Susie's a rockstar leader as CTO. The other thing that I learned in talking to Abby Kearns, Executive Director at Cloud Foundry and Dan at Cloud Native Foundation is open source is changing significantly-- >> Peter: It's a fair point. >> And open source communities used to be, "My community, yeah, we're winning!" And it's always been a gamer mentality or win-lose and I think now, with the horizontally-scalable cloud, you're starting to see a cross-pollination of players cross-pollinating and participating in multiple horizontal communities that together, is an expansion of the overall open source ecosystem. I think this is a new next generation dynamic that takes the tier one open source position, which really, it's our generation. We're seeing open source become tier one, not tier two, it's a tier one software where people's business models are now a open source. MuleSoft, these companies going public, multiple IPOs since RedHat just recently going public, I think you're going to see more business models on open source and open source is changing and I think cloud is a big part of that. >> That's a great point, John. And the only thing I'd add to it, since it's a great summary, is that we also heard yesterday that the very notion of leadership in the open source universe is starting to change. As people come up with new business models, they're also exploring with new ways of providing leadership that doesn't violate the basic precepts of open source because if there has been an issue in the open source universe, it's been that open source does a great job of, if you have a convention and a statement about where the product is, like an operating system, open source can do an equal or better job of it. If you start talking about use cases and a lot of business uncertainty and how open source can sometimes spend its time looking at each other, looking at other projects and filling holes in between projects and not getting to that use case. >> We've known for a while, it's not new to us that open source where the innovation is and that's certainly seeing companies have their employees there and that's where recruiting is going on, as well. But, I'm being more specific. I think the changing game in the open source community is going to be one that's going to reflect the structure of the industry and I think Cisco jumping in with this event will change the game in the makeup of open source and the projects because if you believe that the network is programmable, and that the cloud is one big computer operating system, then you have to believe that that's going to be a new domino that drops and falls and I think the impact of Cisco making programmable internet, programmable networks to developers will have a cascading effect that will ripple on and I think-- >> So, you're predicting a lot of new open source projects that Cisco's helped to catalyze. >> I'm predicting some turmoil that could be positive. Again, is it a collision or is it-- >> Peter: Yeah, it is. >> Edges coming together? >> And it's okay. >> John: And that's the chaos theory, you've talked about that. >> It's a good prediction. >> So, I think it's a lot of good stuff. We'll be watching and covering and of course, play-by-play action on theCUBE. More day two coverage on theCUBE after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, after this short break, stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy & Planning for Cisco.