>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE,
covering Dell Technologies World 2019
brought to you by Dell Technologies
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Okay welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas
with Dell Technology World 2019
and I'm John Furrier and my co-host Dave Vellante
breaking down all the action,
three days of wall-to-wall coverage.
We go all day, all night here at Dell's great event.
We're here with the CMO of Dell Technology Allison Dew,
great to see you, thanks for coming on.
>> My pleasure, it's nice to be here.
>> Good to see you again, Allison.
>> It's fun.
>> What a show, action-packed as always.
We got two sets, we call it the theCUBE content cannons.
We're just firing off content,
a lot of conversations, a lot of boxes being checked,
but also growth, lookin' at the numbers.
The business performance of Dell is strong.
Leadership across all categories, large-scale,
and an integrated approach with the products
and the relationship with VMware paying off in big-time.
Azure News, Microsoft integrating in,
so a lot of great product leadership, business results,
things are booming at Dell Technologies.
>> They really are and you know,
when you think about the journey for us
in particular over the last three years
since starting the EMC combination,
and all of the things that are written
about integrations, technology integrations
of this scale and scope,
and you look at what the teams together
have successfully done, the business performance,
the share growth across categories,
and as of today, the true end-to-end solutions
that we're announcing in partnership
with VMware and Secureworks.
And we tend to be a pretty humble culture,
but I will say, I think it's a pretty impressive result,
when you look at most integrations are focused
on don't break anything,
and not only did we not break anything,
we've kept the trust of our customers,
we've continued to grow the customer base,
and now we're really focused on,
how across the Dell Technologies family,
primarily with VMware and Secureworks
and Pivotal do we bring to life the solutions
that solve our customers' biggest IT problems.
Pretty amazing spot to be in.
>> You know one of the luxuries of doing theCUBE for 10 years
is that we've had conversations over 10 years
and I remember many years ago
when Michael was about to go private,
we saw him in Austin, was a small Dell world
back then, we had two conferences,
and he was standing there alone.
We approached him, Dave and I, and we had
a long conversation with him, he was very approachable,
and then when he talked about, when he did the private and
then the acquisition at these points,
everyone was pooh-poohing it at saying,
it's a declining market, things are going,
why would you want to do this?
Obviously the scale benefits are showing,
but the macroeconomic conditions of the marketplace,
you couldn't be happier for.
Public cloud drove a lot of application deployment,
you have SAS businesses started,
you have on-premise booming,
refresh and infrastructure, a complete growth.
>> Right.
>> Yeah, there's actual growth there.
>> Right.
>> So the bet paid off.
You as a marketer have to market this now,
so what's your strategy
because you have digital transformation
as the kind of standard positioning posture,
but as you have to market Dell Technology
on the portfolio of capabilities,
which is large, I can only imagine it's challenging.
>> So let me actually back up,
and to one of the points that you talked about,
and then I'll answer your actual question.
So I can't remember off the top of my head,
but we very jokingly talk about, in the era
since the PC was declared dead,
we have sold billions of PCs right
and it would be funnier if I could remember the number,
but you know we used to joke around with Jeff Clark,
ala Monty Python, I'm not dead yet.
>> Yeah.
>> And so you get this hype about what's happening
in the industry, and the truth is
it's actually a very different picture
than some of that hype, and one of the reasons I think
that's important is because obviously we've continued
to take share on the PC business,
we've continued to grow there,
but we also believe that the hype sometimes applies
to these other technology cycles as well.
So if you go back a couple of years ago,
it was everything was going to the public cloud.
If you don't go to the public cloud you are a dinosaur.
You don't know what you're doing.
You're going to go out of business.
The traditional infrastructure companies
are going to go out of the business,
and to be honest, that is also just nonsense, right.
And so if you think about what's evolving,
is we believe very firmly that we're going
to see the continued growth of a hybrid cloud,
multi-cloud world and it's not one thing or the other.
And in fact, when you look at all of the research
around the economics of doing one or the other,
it all becomes workload-dependent.
So for some workloads you should go to the public cloud.
For some workloads, you should have it on-prem
and that conversation may not be
as interesting a headline, but it's the truth.
>> It's reality actually.
>> It's the truth.
>> Well it's also reality,
the workloads are dictating
what the architecture should be or the solutions.
That's what you're saying is a reality.
>> Exactly, and so that's why we're so excited
about the announcements that we had this morning
with VMware, with Microsoft.
We're really talking about a multi-cloud,
hybrid cloud world, and across all of the solutions
that we announced this morning.
The key, continuity and what we're really focused on,
sounds so hackneyed, is how do we make it simpler
for our customers?
How do you make it simpler to manage and deploy PCs?
How do you make it simpler to manage
and deploy your cloud environment, that's it.
>> So let's talk about the show a little bit,
let's see 15,000 attendees, 122 countries represented,
4,000 channel partners,
250 industry analysts and media folks,
so pretty big numbers.
You could see it in the hallways.
It's not quiet.
You're kind of doing a lot of this.
>> It's actually sort of hard to pay attention
to you guys with all the noise in the background.
You must be used to it.
I'm like a goldfish, like what's happening?
>> Now the interesting thing to me is,
and we were talking about you know,
it's the transitions, consolidations,
oh it's traditional infrastructure companies are dead,
et cetera, et cetera.
I'd observe that over the years the testament
of today's leaders is they respond,
they don't just sit back and say oh Unix is snake-oil.
Do you remember that famous quote?
Look at what Microsoft has done,
but my point is Michael's keynote today,
it wasn't about a bunch of products,
it was about big visions, solving a lot
of the world's problems, and really conveying
that Dell is in a position to help these companies
as a partner.
I presume you had some input to that keynote, I just wonder.
>> I hope so. (laughs)
>> What the thinking was there?
>> So there's a lot of conversation and it's,
you don't have to go that far in the media
to read everything about technology
as a force of evil in the world.
One of the things that you notice,
Michael's keynote this morning
and I'll come back to what we're doing about it
again later this week, is we are
putting a very firm stake in the ground
that we believe that technology
is overall a force for positive change
in the world and we're having a conversation
about that on Wednesday
that I'll talk a little bit more about in a second.
And there's a subtlety there,
that I think sometimes again,
may not be the most interesting headline but is true,
which is technology in aggregate
drives great progress in the world,
however we as leaders, we as humans,
also have a responsibility to drive the responsible use
of technology and so you see some
of the conversations that we're having
later this week in the Guru sessions, for example,
where Joy Bilal-Meany is talking about responsible use
of AI and some of the inherent biases in AI.
Those are the tough issues that leaders
need to be tackling now.
>> Yeah well and one of the other you know,
you're right a trade press loves to pick up on it
and pick at it but one of the things to talk about,
of course, is jobs, automation affecting jobs,
I know Erik Brynjolfsson is one of your speakers,
he's been on theCUBE before, and the discussion we had
was machines have always replaced humans.
For the first time ever,now they're replacing humans
in cognitive functions.
So the the answer is not protect the past
from the future it's educate people,
find new ways to be creative.
I mean, technology has always been--
>> That's right.
>> Part of human good and human advancement.
There's always a two-sided coin, but it's got to be managed.
>> That's right, one of the conversations that I think
gets lost is when we talk about,
I am a Battlestar Galactica fan,
the second one not the one from the 70s,
so you know I always say jokingly--
>> Darn.
>> Yeah, yeah.
>> We're a little older.
>> Did you watch the one from the 2,000s?
>> Yes, of course.
>> 2,000s are so good.
You know the conversation about are the Cylons
coming to get us?
And is AI really the thing that's destroying
what's happening for human populations?
The reality is AI has been evolving for many years,
so it's not actually new.
What is new is the combination of AI
and data and the compute power to make that real
and I do think it requires a different conversation
with societies, with employers
about how do you continue to reeducate your employee base?
What does that mean?
And that is really meaty stuff
that we need to be leaning into.
On aside, you've got me thinking
of this whole Battlestar Galactica.
My mind's thinking Star Trek, Star Wars.
I heard a rumor that you guys had so many unhappy employees
because Game of Thrones was on yesterday.
>> Yeah.
>> That you actually rented a big screen?
>> Yeah, we did.
>> A lot of Game of Thrones fans?
Are you in that mix?
>> So yeah.
>> No spoiler alerts.
>> No, I won't say anything about what happened.
But I'll tell you,
so we have all of our employees who work at the show,
have to get here on Saturday or Sunday
at the very latest.
And even me personally,
we came to Las Vegas and I thought, well I can watch it
in my hotel room and then my hotel room
didn't have HBO and I thought I don't really
want to watch it on my little HBO Go app
that's about this big because we're all waiting
for what's going to happen in episode three,
and I won't tell you if you haven't seen it.
>> It's a lot of battling.
>> So exactly, so my team and I had this conversation
about could we have a joint viewing
of Game of Thrones and it's really my team
who did all of the work,
but it was super-fun and we had a party
with a bunch of team, had a few beers and it was fun.
>> That's a great culture.
>> I just wanted to get that out there.
I think, cool culture.
Allison, you mentioned something about the press
and stories for good and how people looking for headlines.
You know we're not advertising, so we're not trying
to chase the clickbait, it's about getting the story right
and sometimes the boring story doesn't get the headlines.
Or the page views, advertising.
So we're in a world now where a lot
of other people in the media, they're censoring posts,
there was an incident on Forbes
where I wrote a negative post about a company
and they took it down, that was Oracle.
A lot of journalists looking for stories
just to put tech in a bad spot.
>> Right.
>> And there's a lot of tech for good,
but a lot of people can't point to one thing saying
that's an example for tech for good
and there's some few out there missing children,
exploited children, trafficking, all kinds of things,
talk about that dynamic because this is changing
how you market, how people consume.
You have the role of open communities.
>> Yep.
>> Social networking.
A lot of dynamics going on.
How do you view all this?
>> So first of all, I think so much of the conversation
about tech for good or tech for bad
actually indexes only on social media and media broadly,
and perhaps that's because it's the media
who are writing about that.
And so there's sort of this loop that we get in
and I do think there are real issues
that we need to think about in terms of social media.
You guys likely saw Kara Swisher
had a an op-ed in the New York Times
after the Sri Lankan bombings
where she, long-term technology advocate,
actually said after the Sri Lankan bombings
when the government shut down
all social media communications,
I thought that was a good thing
and so that probably actually did help
with the immediate situation on the ground
and yet is a very scary precedent, right?
I'd like to to take the conversation
and say what about media?
Right, so there's a lot of work that we need
to do in order to maintain media fairness
and then there's a whole other conversation
about technology that we're not talking about.
Everything that we're doing
in terms of medicine and indexing the human genome,
and addressing deafness and Michael talked
about that even this morning,
there are these really big technology problems
that were really leaning into,
and yet we're either talking about Amazon drone delivery
or what Facebook is doing.
We need to talk about those,
but let's talk about where technology
is really struggling to address real problems.
>> I just read an essay yesterday
from Dana Boyd who wrote a great fascinating piece
around extremism in social media.
Media's being hijacked by these extreme groups
and they're mixing up causation and correlation
and conflating many things
to just tell a story to support an initiatives,
no curation.
>> Right.
>> And with social media everything's open
so that just flies out there.
And so that's a big problem.
>> And then takes off, you know.
>> So how do you deal with that as a CMO
'cause you're spending advertising dollars.
You're trying to deploy capital.
You now have a new open source kind
of mindset around communities customers
are shopping themselves now.
>> Right, so this is going to sound
possibly a little bit overly simplistic
but what I am responsible for in my job
is the reputation and brand of this company right.
I think about other things in terms
of how we think about media and everything
but I want to make sure that we are
spending our media dollars in a responsible way
and yet also recognize that people
can disagree with us and that's okay
and be comfortable with, we can be both a media advertiser
on a publication who might write a review
where they don't like one of our products
and I'm never going to be in the business
of saying take down our media dollars
because that sets a terrible precedent
and frankly there are people who would
say take down our media dollars
so that's one thing that we're really focused on.
And then the other is,
we consistently year-over-year are recognized
as one of the world's most ethical companies
and I will tell you from the leadership with Michael
across the board I believe that that is true.
And we actually think about business in an ethical way
and we behave in an ethical way and that's why frankly
you're not reading those headlines about us
which are a lot more problematic.
>> It's a cultural thing you guys have.
Michael's always been a direct-to-consumer.
That's been a direct mail, back in the glory days, now--
>> We still do that actually.
>> Cloud, SAS, he texts me all the time.
Hey John, what's going on?
So he's he's open.
>> Yeah.
>> He's also now with Cloud and SAS,
it's a direct to consumer business.
>> I love your positive attitude.
You have a session tomorrow, Optimism and Happiness
in the Digital Age, looking forward to that.
I have a personal question.
So you started out your career, I think,
in East Asia studies, right?
>> That's right, good memory.
>> You speak multiple languages.
>> Yeah.
>> I think three languages?
>> If you count English, three.
>> Yes okay so you're trilingual.
>> Trilingual, yeah.
>> If you speak two, you're what?
>> Bilingual.
>> Speak one, you're what?
>> Monolingual, American.
(all laughing)
American, I was like, I know this joke.
>> I wonder how that affected sort of your career?
>> Absolutely.
>> In terms of getting into this business.
>> I would first say that I was
an incredibly naive undergraduate.
I wanted to be an editor of a paper
and I loved foreign languages.
So I studied Japanese and French
and that led me to going to Japan
as a very naive 22 year old and I started working
in this small Japanese ad agency.
I was the only non-Japanese person
in that company and of course I learned
some functional things in terms of the art of advertising
but what I actually learned was how to survive
in an environment that was so different to mine.
Even if you speak Japanese, it is a language
of unsaid things and you have to constantly
be figuring out what's actually happening here
and so ironically that decision that I made
at 18, very naively, to study Japanese
is one of the things that sets the course of my life
because I've always been, my entire career,
in international jobs and I think if I ever had
to come back to just being in an American job,
I wouldn't know what to do with myself, I'd be so bored.
And it's also one of the reasons
when we talk about technology and education and AI
and what are robots going to do,
This is my personal opinion, somewhat controversial opinion
which is of course we need to support STEM,
of course I want to see more women in STEM.
At the same time, I want to see us focus our children
on critical thinking skills.
How do you write well?
How do you have an argument?
How do you convince somebody?
And that's because until I went to business school
I was a liberal arts major born and bred
and so that's not the pat answer that you expect
from somebody in my job which is it's all about STEM.
It's about STEM and more.
>> Emotional quotient's a big thing we're seeing a lot.
The whole self.
That's a big part of the kids growing up being aware.
>> Yeah.
>> Socially emotional.
Allison, thanks coming on theCUBE and sharing.
>> My pleasure.
>> Great insights here in theCUBE.
We're here with the CMO, Allison Dew,
with Dell Technologies.
I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante.
Stay with us for more day one coverage
after this short break.
>> Awesome.
(upbeat electronic music)