>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas,
it's theCube covering Dell Technologies World 2018.
Brought to you by Dell EMC,
and it's ecosystem partners.
>> And welcome back as we continue
our coverage here on theCube,
of Dell Technologies 2018.
Big show going on here in Las Vegas,
we're at the Sands right now,
14,000 people strong in attendance.
This is day two of three of live coverage
right here on theCube.
Along with Keith Townsend,
I am John Walls and we're now joined by
Matt Liebowitz who is the Global Lead of
Multi-Cloud Infrastructure at Dell EMC Consulting.
Matt, thank you for joining us here on theCube.
>> Happy to be here.
Long time listener,
first time caller.
(laughter)
>> John: Alright.
You're on the phone, Matt go.
(laughter)
And Vijay Kanchi,
who is the Global Innovation Lead
of IT Transformation at Dell EMC.
First time listener as well, Vijay?
>> Yes, absolutely,
and delighted to be here,
thank you.
>> John: Or long time listener, first time caller.
>> Matt: Got to get that terminology right.
>> John: Matt in New Jersey you're on, go.
Let's talk New Jersey Devils.
Let's talk first off about the way
your two units intertwine.
Just so we set the table here a little bit
and understand how the two of you
and the people with whom you work,
how you interact at Dell.
>> Matt: It'd maybe make sense if you start Vijay,
and then I'll... >> Yes, so we're part of
Dell EMC's consulting organization,
and within that consulting organization,
Matt and I work together to focus on
IT transformation programs.
So we design and develop services
for our consulting services organization,
to go deliver IT transformation programs.
>> John: Okay.
So, digital transformation you know,
thrown around quite a bit
these days. >> Vijay: Yeah
When you look at it from the macro picture,
from an organizational standpoint,
from their perspective.
What does that mean,
if you will,
how do you get organizations to buy-in?
Because I'm sure the IT professionals with whom you work,
they're in large part,
they're there,
I would guess.
But they've got to bring along
an entire organization with them,
and that's a tall task, Matt.
>> Matt: Yeah, there's no doubt that when it comes to Cloud,
and especially Multi-Cloud,
Like you said,
the whole organization needs to come along for the ride.
It's not something that IT can do in a vacuum,
and we've seen when they try to do it in a vacuum,
they're often unsuccessful.
So get those stakeholders involved,
outside of IT,
executive level,
bring them in,
show them, share with them your KPI's for success.
Show them what success looks like,
and then bring them along for the ride.
That's ultimately how you get success with Cloud.
>> Keith: So let's talk progression.
What are the most successful projects,
at least what is the data points you see
out of the most successful projects
when the C-Suite says you know what,
we're going to do digital transformation,
IT go execute.
What are the critical points of information
IT needs to collect,
so that they can come to Dell EMC Consulting
to help execute on that strategy?
>> Matt: Well it's a long list.
How much time do we have?
(laughter)
You know again,
I think success criteria,
what success looks like is really important.
Because I think what you said is what often happens.
You know IT leaders or leaders of the organization
say we need to transform,
we need to change our business to adapt.
>> Keith: Yeah, what is transformation,
what does that even mean? >> Right.
That's up to the business to define
what the next stage looks like.
And so that could be anything from
just being able to operate like a Public Cloud,
provision quickly,
iterate quickly on new software and new development tools.
Or it could be a major transformation of the whole business,
where they're entering a new market
and they need to operate a little differently.
>> Keith: So what... >> Vijay: Just to add
to what Matt just said,
you know from a digital transformation perspective,
it's all about getting velocity of application,
functionality out to customers, users, and stakeholders.
When a C-Suite leadership comes and says
we need to go transform all our business,
then they really look to IT as
a significant player to enable that.
And one of the biggest issues that you have
in driving capability to market fast,
is being able to go build infrastructure
or environment pretty quickly.
Most IT organizations are,
you know,
dealing with technical debt
that's been around for at least 25, 30 years.
It starts with,
you know,
Legacy critical systems that are potentially Mainframe,
Client Server,
all the way through,
you know,
digital platforms that they've built up.
And so in order to be able to go make that work,
I think the one key important thing
that we always talk about is,
you need to go get automation of your code delivery process,
and then you need to go in and build infrastructure
and environment so that you don't have as much
queue time versus run time.
Cause ITs have historically been in
the request-response business.
I'm sure in your world as well,
if you need a fix to your computer,
the first thing you have to do,
call up or send a request that goes to somewhere,
somebody is sitting behind the queue
and they're processing it.
And so the whole objective to make digital transformation,
is to be able to reduce and eliminate
the queue time eventually,
and enable the run time.
So that's kind of the first thing,
from an operational perspective,
and then from an outcomes perspective,
it's about sitting down and bringing
a cross-functional team of folks
from Marketing,
Business units,
IT,
Security and Compliance,
and bringing them together to figure out
what sort of outcomes they're looking to achieve,
what does that journey look like timing-wise,
from an outcomes perspective,
and then work to bring everybody together
to establish a shared purpose,
and a shared objective.
So those are some of the key things that we find
that almost every single time you engage with customers,
you've got to have those conversations first
in order to be able to go dig under the covers
to figure out where the issues are,
and then start to unclog the jams where they exist.
(coughing)
In the plumbing of IT.
(laughter)
>> This is part of that people transformation
Michael talked about on stage today,
yesterday,
and then was brought up again on stage today.
Having that conversation,
for someone who's usually head down,
maintaining AIX,
maintaining new infrastructure for a digital,
we're not equipped to normally have that conversation.
Where are you seeing the gaps in skill,
and how do organizations close that gap
so they can even come to you guys and say,
you know what,
we can see clearly we need to automate our CICD process,
help us through that,
which is where you guys excel.
>> So go ahead Matt.
>> Well I think that it's a challenge
because sometimes they don't even know what they don't know.
>> Keith: Yeah, don't know what we don't know.
>> Right.
And so they'll come to us and give us a request like that.
We need to modernize our infrastructure,
we need to automate,
and deliver IT as a service.
They don't really know what that means.
And so they're going to need to re-skill
some of their folks.
And I think that's operationally very scary
for individuals who work in IT.
But the reality is,
and you know we see this over and over again,
if you want to attract the best and the brightest in IT,
you need to be working with the latest technology.
And so folks shouldn't be afraid of that change.
They should embrace it because ultimately
it's going to drive their career forward,
and when they're working on the latest and the greatest,
they're going to deliver value for the business
instead of just keeping the lights on.
>> John: And that's kind of the challenge.
So it is,
I just figured this out,
right,
(laughter)
and all of a sudden,
that cycle exponentially,
I mean capabilities increase,
your skill set is lagging,
and now you've got to play catch-up as an IT professional.
>> Keith: I just learned how to spell Kubernetes yesterday.
(laughter)
>> If you could teach me,
that'd be great.
>> Capital K.
(laughter)
>> I mean it's true though.
I've been working with virtualization for a long time,
and it's funny to see the progression
back in 2001, 2002,
where everyone just thought this thing is crazy,
nobody's going to do this.
You know,
we get to the point where we're having conversations around
virtualization-first policies,
and now we're talking about Cloud-first policies.
So technology and the pace of change waits for nobody.
And so we have to help organizations be ready
to adopt that change. >> John: What is it right now?
What's the big leap you think that on the client's side,
that their teams have to make?
>> Vijay: So there's probably three areas that I see
that they have to make some changes.
So from a business perspective in IT,
they need to trust IT and integrate their needs
and requirements into a process where,
businesses really often times don't know what specifically
they want from IT.
They know and they have some vision
of what they want to achieve.
And so they need to go sit with,
in a collaborative way,
that the IT teams and often times the security teams,
the CISO teams,
to build together,
I'll call it a cross-functional team,
that can really come together to tease out,
and brainstorm their way through to figure out
what are the outcomes that they're trying to achieve.
What is the strategy,
and what do they need to look like in three years from now,
and then work their way back.
So that's one piece,
this cultural shift in how IT engages with business.
The second part is around how do organizations get better?
We've been hearing about the DevOps changes that drive,
but DevOps is as much a tools and technologies conversation
as it is a cultural shift to get the people that were
authors and critics,
coders and operations folks,
problem creators versus problem managers and maintainers.
So those roles have been very cantankerous
for the last 20 years,
because the operations folks are responsible
in driving for stability,
reliability,
and availability.
Whereas coders are focused on driving new innovation.
So fundamentally different objectives.
So in order to make that shift,
you need to go in and create another environment
and culture of shared pain and shared objectives
and shared rewards.
So that's another key chain.
And then from a skills perspective,
what we're finding is that,
when we get to the technology and infrastructure part,
the folks who used to be storage,
administrators,
network administrators,
computer administrators,
et cetera,
they now have to go broader,
not as much deep in silos,
and they need to look at convergence,
for example,
infrastructure.
They need to be thinking about stitching that together
with security and DevOps and Cloud SecOps.
And so those are the key differences.
From an administrator perspective,
you need to go in and take your existing skills,
and expand to be more broader,
versus silo.
There are some new skills that are needed
to enable all this.
I kind of look at the third part being
the new skills are,
you need folks that never did this type of stuff before
to go start doing Cloud Administrative,
Multi-Cloud Management and Operations.
You need to be able to go do what Google calls
Sight Reliability Engineering,
and what Cloud Foundry calls
Platform Operations and Platform Engineering.
So those are... >> Keith: So,
even before we get there,
>> Yeah, yeah
>> From a brefa capability for the Dell organization,
consulting organization,
the requirements and demand on the organization has changed.
It went from,
you know I help design,
install,
and operationalize a VMAX and VMR infrastructure
to help me enable a DevOps practice,
which is two completely different sets of skill.
From a practical perspective, >> Vijay: Absolutely
two years ago you look at Comcast's DevOps team,
that whole team is now at Wal-Mart.
>> Vijay: Yep. >> How do you guys
create and nurture the skill set
needed to even deliver the capability from a services side?
>> Well I mean,
that's a great question because we have to transform too.
>> Right.
>> Because we have to transform
and meet the needs of our customers.
That's primarily the responsibility of the
consulting organization,
to stay on top of technology,
and move into those new areas of skill.
You know if you look back just a couple of years ago
and you saw the kind of work that
our consulting organization was doing,
you know a lot of things like
helping customers migrate Exchange Servers
and Sequel Servers,
we don't do a lot of that anymore.
We're helping them design and create a
transformation roadmap for Multi-Cloud.
So it's really important for us to keep
our folks as skilled and looking six, 12,
18 months in advance,
so that we don't have the problem you just described,
where our entire team moves from,
you know,
one organization to another,
our customers need something from us
and we can't deliver it.
That's a high importance for us.
>> Viajy: And from a consulting organization perspective,
as Matt said,
we are having to reinvent ourself
probably at least two or three times
in the last five years.
That's because of the pace of change in the marketplace.
And so we have a shared responsibility to help drive
some of our thinking around this transformation,
internally ourself.
One is to be able to go figure out
what other types of services we need to go build,
to deliver transformational programs to our customers.
So define the what.
And that's primarily my responsibility.
And then I work very closely with Matt
to figure out,
what are the skills we have in our organization today,
what are the next new skills that we need to go build,
and then what are the skills that we have today
that we can extend to support these new things
that we see coming.
Such as taking infrastructure administration and management,
to providing and transforming that into
providing it in the context of micro services,
for example.
Or infrastructure as code,
storage as code,
security as code,
et cetera.
So those are some of the things that we try to make.
And then from a business perspective,
we are trying to build-out skills to look at
what types of organizational changes do we need to make.
What other types of transformational programs
and transformational metrics that you need to track,
so if you have an 18 month transformation program,
or a nine month transformation program,
that you're not going to go wait for 18 months
to see if you've achieved your outcomes.
We've identified KPI's for the transformation program,
where you look every 90 days to say are you achieving that.
So we have two teams.
We have a team of what we call Discipline Leads,
folks like Matt,
who are championing and evangelizing our organization
to say here are the things that you guys need to change to,
and find training enablement,
to go drive that globally around the world
as part of our consulting organization.
And then there are going to be skills that we don't have
that we go and acquire in the marketplace.
But to your point,
it's not like they're sitting around
waiting to be plucked off the marketplace.
(laughter)
So you know,
part of it is finding the right people
who have a little bit of the aptitude
that can make the pivot,
and then learn fast.
So it's a little bit of everything,
and it's as much an art as it is to science,
to cope with that. >> Matt: It's funny too again,
if you look back at our organization just a few years ago,
we didn't have a focus on Public Cloud,
and now we've got folks that are trained and certified
and some of the best in the world at
Public Cloud technologies,
because we have to change and we have to transform
just like our customers.
>> John: You know we talk about
being nimble and agility. >> Oh yeah.
>> You do too, right? >> Yeah.
>> You have to walk that walk as well.
>> I'm less nimble the older and older I get.
(laughter)
>> Aren't we all, Matt?
Aren't well all?
>> Organizationally you're absolutely right.
>> Well listen gentlemen,
thanks for being here.
We appreciate the time.
No longer first-time callers.
>> That's right. >> Alright.
>> We'll be back soon.
>> You're now Cube veterans.
Thanks for being with us.
>> Thanks for the time.
>> Back with more here from Las Vegas.
You're watching theCube coverage
of Dell Technologies World 2018.
(techno music)