>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube,
covering Dell EMC World 2017.
Brought to you by Dell EMC.
>> Okay, welcome back, everyone.
We are here live, this is the Cube coverage
of Dell EMC World 2017.
I got to get used to that, I'm used to saying EMC World,
but this is Dell EMC World, the first year officially
as the Dell EMC World, a continuation of our
eight years of live coverage, proud coverage
with the cube and I'm joined with Paul Gillan,
my co-host this week for three wall-to-wall
coverage days and our next guest has been on every
year that Cube has been in existence,
Howard Elias is the president of Dell Services and IT,
a good friend of the Cube and senior executive
at Dell Technologies and Dell EMC.
Howard, great to see you.
>> Hey, great to be back.
>> You've seen every corner of EMC over the years,
you have so much experience and you've been really
the captain in holding the wheel on the transaction
at close eight months ago,
in September of the Dell Technologies,
now Dell EMC company, really smooth considering
what could've gone wrong, you kind of stayed away
from all the icebergs, but yet it feels good.
I haven't heard any real horror stories at all,
I heard all positive things, the story is great,
I just tweeted pretty much my take on the story.
Win, consolidate to pre-existing traditional IT,
and then have a growth strategy around cloud-native,
convert infrastructure, good story.
Okay, how is it going?
>> You know what, and thank you for that.
First of all, great to be with both of you
and it's just going great.
And I do want to make sure I co-captain the integration
together with my great friend and colleague, Rory Read.
But really we had the great benefit of Joe
and Michael kind of setting the stage.
We've talked before on the Cube about the industrial
logic of the deal, but frankly, the team has come together
in a phenomenal way.
We are aligned, we are operating as one company.
You've heard Michael and David both talk about
better together today, we'll hear more about that
from Jeff and Pat and others over the next couple of days.
And look, for all of the things that could've gone wrong
in a very large combination like this,
they went right instead.
And the best proof of that is our customers.
Our customers are buying more from us,
the conversations are richer, they are more
strategic, they are more in-depth and they're rooting
for us and we're rooting for them.
>> Dave and I would sometimes be critical of the EMC,
but you guys never really had a bad strategy,
you never really stayed out,
you never went outside your swim lane
with respect to services and what you do.
Pure storage, get the arrays, get the software
to find a data-center in there,
but now with the acquisition,
I got to ask, the question is,
the portfolio of deliverables that you guys
now have and Michael kind of strutting on stage,
kind of proud of his new families, he says,
the brotherhood or however he puts it,
you've got a lot more at your disposal,
more in your bag if you will, for services.
Especially VMware and NSX doing extremely well.
We're going to have Pat as guest here tomorrow.
Not a lot of pressure yet to have that cloud story
completely baked, multi-cloud is a nice placeholder,
but you have a lot more.
Talk about where that new growth is coming from
in the services.
>> Well, specifically on cloud I would say,
by the way, and we talk about this a lot,
cloud is not a place of computing,
it's a style of computing, it's the new way
all computing is done and I would say we're a great
leader in providing all of that capability in a hybrid
fashion, a multi-cloud world.
Look, much more on that later, but you said it,
we've always believed that where we've been,
technology and IT is a means to an end and we're now
all about helping our customers with the broadest
portfolio in the industry, across those four main
transformations, digital, IT, workplace,
and security.
It's really the story about helping a customer
become more digital, become more agile,
become more flexible and really in addition to those
systems of record that they've been working on
for a number of years and we've been helping them,
it's really those systems of engagements and the systems
of insight that really give that end-to-end view
in this new world.
>> Howard, I want to ask you, I want to go back
to the acquisition briefly because I'm a Massachusets guy
as are you--
>> Yes.
>> You went through, you were digital during the Compaq
acquisition, Compaq or the HP acquisition,
both deals that I think we could say generously
did not go very well.
>> Howard: Yeah.
>> What did you learn from that experience
that you brought to this integration?
>> I'll tell you, and this is really one of the things
about what went right.
A lot of it is based on experience,
you know, what you learn to do right is learning
what not to do wrong the next time,
and I was engaged in some of those, certainly
didn't lead those, but I was engaged with them.
But look, we had a lot of things going for us.
Joe and Michael completely aligned, business
colleagues, respectful friendship over a number of years.
Dell and EMC had a strong partnership
for a better round of a decade,
so we already learned how to work well together.
And in the cultures, we understood
the way each-other worked.
The industrial logic of the deal, the complementary
technology portfolio, complementary market
and customer segments, the ability to now have scale
in a world where scale matters, where customers
are looking to drive out cost, efficiency
and agility.
And look, what Rory and I did is we applied
all of those lessons learned.
We picked our best people, pulled them out
and put them full time on the job.
We had rigorous cadence, regular face-to-face
meetings with Michael and Joe all the way
throughout, kept everybody informed and it's just
come together extremely well.
>> All right, how about the services you were doing,
first talk about the hard news you're announcing
at the show and then specifically talk about
the digital transformation.
Not to put a damper on your messaging,
but we're kind of bored with digital transforming,
we want to get some meat on the bone.
And I like the quote on stage,
digital transformation is about IT transformation,
I think that's where your bullseye is.
So, hard news and then where's the meat on the bone
with respect to the IT transformation
that's part of that digital transfer?
>> Well, first of all, hopefully you won't get
too tired 'cause digital transformation is the mantra
for a long time to come.
We're in the early days, and by the way,
to us, digital transformation is really
business transformation.
It's becoming more software-defined,
it's becoming closer to your customers,
it's understanding your customers' needs
many times before they even know they need it
and that's that whole real-time insight analytic AI,
machine-learning, all of that is going to be happening.
So, we're on that mission big time.
And in terms of services, we've described a three-phase
journey that will take a couple of years.
Phase one, we talked about collaboration
where the teams were coming together, learning each other,
systems, processes, tools being different,
so collaborate, operate as one in front of the customer.
We're in phase two right now, integration.
We're starting to bring, we have already brought
the teams together, but for example,
at this show we're announcing bringing all of our services
under the marketing umbrella of pro-support and pro-deploy.
There are still different systems and tools
and entitlement, but we're going to start to bring
together that integration where ultimately,
systems processing tools come together
and that gets to the third phase of unification.
And so it's a journey.
But throughout that journey we are protecting
the value we deliver our customers.
Those customers that are used to the service
that they get today, the way it's delivered,
the people that are delivering it,
we are not changing that as we bring our customers
along the journey.
>> You mentioned a number of times, analytics
and the importance of understanding the customer better.
Dell EMC does not really have a play in that area,
there is no software component that addresses that market,
is that a market that you think you would like
to address directly or would you do that through partners?
>> We actually do that today both directly
and through partners, really Pivotal being a key part
of the overall Dell Technologies portfolio,
we actually have a big data, digital transformation
practice as part of our consulting.
If you think about our consulting organization
where we help in IT transformation, digital transformation,
workforce transformation, we work with our customers
and partners on security as well.
Pivotal is the key part, but we also work
with many others and in fact, one of the offerings
we're announcing here at the show today
is an IOT assessment service.
So, something to really work again from base
infrastructure because you think about edge,
to core, to cloud, how to make sure you aggregate
the data, do the real-time analytics as opposed
to the edge, and then trend data more and the core
and long-time archival in the cloud.
>> At that point, I want to ask you about the cloud
strategy because everyone in the press,
what's your cloud strategy, what's your cloud...
I think you guys have a good play.
I think the cloud strategy, multi-cloud is legit
and hybrid cloud is real, a 100% real.
Multi-cloud is still not ready for prime time
for a lot of other reasons, but you guys
are doing something in the cloud,
with disaster recovery and some storage stuff.
Take us through the sequence, because you said,
it's early innings, I would agree.
What are the sequence or the order of operations
in terms of the kinds of services
that go to the cloud first?
>> Well, in terms of what application are services?
>> You guys are working with customer zone,
what are the customers doing with respect to,
what are they going to the cloud for,
first with respect to Dell, Dell EMC?
>> Again, it gets back to, cloud is not a place.
We're not moving things to a cloud,
we're actually, all applications, all workloads,
all services and processes are becoming
cloud-enabled.
Whether that's helping the customer in their data center,
with the private cloud, a hybrid cloud hosted
by a partner or on public cloud and you said it.
We actually, with our services organization,
we'll actually sit down with the customer,
we'll look at their entire application
and workload portfolio.
We run it through filters of economics,
service level, security and performance
and from there we build a roadmap with the customer.
Which types of workloads make sense in your own
private cloud, which do you want to host
in a virtue-stream cloud or a partner's cloud
or which do you want to do in the public cloud?
How about data protection?
Do you want to protect the data in the cloud,
to the cloud, from the cloud?
All of those are conversations we take our customers
through and we have many, many, many,
not just dozens now, hundreds of examples
where we are working with customers
on implementing their hybrid cloud strategy.
>> Paul, before you go, I've got a question,
but I got a question from the crowd,
the crowd is watching, thank you for sending
the questions on crowdchat.net/dellemcworld.
Can they deliver integrated services for on Prime?
Reasons people go to the cloud.
So, one of the reasons is integration end-to-end.
How are you guys delivering some of those
integrated services on Prime?
Because that's where it started.
>> It is starting there and we actually do both,
operational services, residency-based services,
but also manage services.
Again, both directly and with partners
based on where we've got capabilities and skills
and geography and verticals.
We work with our customers to deliver again that continuum.
Many customers have the skills to do it themselves,
most customers do not.
And they want us to augment their skills,
again, whether it's operational-residency services
or a full-fledged manage service for cloud.
>> As the head of services, I want to ask you about the,
kind of the odd timing, you came on in September,
in November, Dell sold off large part of its services
business, business and former Perot systems to AT&T,
what was the thinking there?
Should we think of that part of the services business
as being completely different from that which you--
>> Extremely different.
And I Know we get some questions on this,
so thanks for asking, it is great to clarify it.
The Dell Services Organization, the old former Perot
business that Dell had acquired was really more
outsourcing, IT outsourcing, some BPO, some APO.
Work that we really did not want to continue doing
in the new company going forward.
Our services are closer to the technology,
technology-enablement services, to help the adoption
and consumption of our technology and we really
work with a broad ecosystem of partners to deliver
the more outsourced services, APO and BPO.
So, it's very clean from that set, we actually
did not divest any of our technology services at all,
and in fact, we're investing more.
>> That's consistent with what HP did with Point Next,
similar kind of, they had the EDS kind of thing,
completely orthogonal to your operations,
is what you're saying?
>> Right and we've got such a phenomenal partner ecosystem
that do this very well, each and every day,
and all kinds of customer verticals and all kinds
of geographies, they really have scale
and we do this together with them.
>> Okay, tough question, I'll put you on the spot,
Howard, but I know you can handle it,
if you could go back and get a mulligan
from last year at the integration,
what mulligan would you take, what would you tweak
and change with the integration?
>> You know, I'll tell you, I'm actually asked
that question a lot and I'm not sure
I would change anything.
Look, let's face it, did everything go perfect?
Nothing ever does.
Are there some things that we go bump
in the night occasionally?
But all the big stuff, if I focus on the major stuff,
right, in terms of the company structure,
the operating model, the organizational structure
of the company, the alignment of the goal to market,
the alignment of the services, the product roadmaps
and the portfolio, all of that went about as well
as it could be expected.
>> Talk about the momentum, VMware, I was just commenting
in my opening, has a bigger market cap than actually
HPE, just on the standalone basis.
VMware is central in your services, you mentioned
clouds, the great cloud play, recent deal with
Amazon Web Services, how are you guys looking forward now?
And if you could add some color to the conversations
you're having with customers?
So, you get a lot of things at your disposal,
I'm trying to understand the top areas
that customers are engaging you guys are,
with respect to the VMware and this cloud-native
shift in NSX.
>> Actually, the big conversations are exactly that,
in three dimensions.
One is working with both Pivotal and VMware
on the paths and layers, right, so they want
to see that platform in place, they want to see
the agility, the flexibility, the cloud-native
essentials that are necessary to develop and deploy
these new applications.
By the way, also refactoring existing applications
that they're deciding to keep into a more
cloud-native world.
Second is automation.
How do I automate the IT infrastructure?
Yeah, I'll modernize it, I'll go all flash,
I'll go scalable, but how do I pull the labor cost
out and be able to take that labor into more creative,
innovative areas of my company, but I want to automate IT.
And then, third is to make sure that the cost-effectiveness
and the resiliency of that infrastructure is top-notch
and world-class.
Those are the conversations.
The CIOs today, their job is getting more and more tough,
they need to pull cost out, they have to have agility
and flexibility.
Oh, by the way, the systems can never go down
and I want that new IOT thing, I want that new
data analytic thing, I want that new machine-learning
thing, so give me that agility and flexibility
and creativity going forward.
And those are the conversations we're having every day.
>> Howard, as a guy who sort of oversaw this consolidation
of these two companies, you have a chance to do something
I think no two big companies have ever done before
which is successfully merge.
We were thinking earlier about, is there a precedent
for a merger of this size that actually worked out
and we couldn't think of one.
>> Howard: Certainly not in IT.
>> Not in IT, right, exactly.
What makes you think this one will be different,
other than the fact you're running it?
>> I'm running services and IT now,
I help put the playbook together.
Look, the senior leadership team is now running it.
And that's why we're going to continue to win,
because of our relentless focus on customers,
we all spend a tremendous amount of time understanding
what our customers are doing, what more they want us
to do, the feedback from our customers.
We spend almost as much time with our partners as well.
But this leadership team is on the mission.
And it's about creating the essential infrastructure
company for the next great era of IT,
the industrial revolution where we know that companies
need to transform in all those dimensions
we talk about.
And our leadership team, and we're just actually
going through our next, we call Tell Dell Survey,
where we also get feedback from our team members,
from our employees and our measurements are clear.
We measure ourself on customer MPS, our team-member
employee MPS, our relative market share performance,
are we gaining share or are we not and then all of that
will deliver the financials that we all look for.
And we are all aligned on that.
>> Howard, you also oversee the Dell IT program,
this is proven IT program.
What is that about?
I heard some buzz about that.
>> Yeah, so this started several years ago
where a lot of customers would say,
"So, you want me to buy..."
(sound cuts out)
So we actually (sound cuts out).
Things that work.
(sound cuts out)
>> Cooking up in...
(sound cuts out)
>> They have to.
Witness richness of our portfolio because (sound cuts out).
>> Howard, thank you for coming.
Consecutive year, it's been a great journey for all.
In fact, I remember the (sound cuts out).
A 160 billion dollar market that's true private cloud,
so you guys remember one in that as well, Dell EMC,
great to see you and congratulations on a very
successful transaction and hope to see
more updates along the way.
>> You got it, great to see you, thank you very much.
>> All right, this is the Cube live coverage from
Dell EMC World 2017, I'm John Furrier
with Paul Gillan, we'll be right back
with more coverage, stay with us.