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>> Live from Las Vegas,
it's theCUBE!
Covering Dell Technologies World 2019.
Brought to you by Dell Technologies
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Hey, welcome back everyone.
We're live in Las Vegas with theCUBE coverage
of Dell Technologies World.
I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante.
We're here with CUBE alumni Marius Haas,
who's the president and Chief Commercial Officer,
Dell Technologies.
Great to see you again.
>> Always great to be here, sir.
>> So, the movie just gets better and sequels,
and Dell into the year three of the acquisition.
>> Oh, I love the script, and we're going to keep going.
>> You guys are executing.
>> This is a Game of Thrones, it's not going to end.
>> (laughs) And you guys got all three dragons.
So, one of the themes I want to get your thoughts on,
first of all, welcome back to the cube, good to see you.
What's going on right now?
Give us an update, Marius.
You've seen the chessboard of M&A big firms
on the private equity side.
You worked at HP during those days.
You came to Dell with Michael, early on
partnering on the going private,
and then looking at the overall plan,
which is now in full execution mode.
At the integration part of integrating it all together,
it's working really good, middle of the fairway,
revenues at 90-plus billion,
where are we right now?
>> Well, I'll tell ya.
I think you and I were just discussing it a second ago,
scale does matter.
But if you can align scale with action in the portfolio
that's it's so well aligned to the trends in the industry,
and you're representing an opportunity
for a customer to select a partner like Dell Technologies
to help them solve their key business challenges,
not just for today, but into the future,
and then if you can do at scale, right portfolio,
at the velocity we're doing,
it's a trifecta that we love.
You recently talked to Tom Sweet.
We grew the business $11 billion on an already big number
just last year alone,
and we're gaining share in all our key lines of business,
so portfolios are aligning really well,
customers have been extraordinary,
and obviously building those big, trusting relationships,
not just now, but into the future,
that's a great thing.
>> And you guys got a great team,
the ability to attract the talent has been phenomenal,
I want to give you guys props on that,
but I keep coming back to the conversation we had
a few years ago, which is, okay, the big wave's coming,
everyone kind of got the cloud,
they saw the scale of Amazon,
great tell sign that continues to do great for AWS,
now it's multi-cloud.
Now IT, the original consolidation of IT that you guys
were going after had good growth and value creation
just out of the box.
And now the tailwinds, as you mentioned.
So, I got to ask you about this end to end,
this is a land grab, this end to end
operational consistency thing,
'cause it's very unique, it's hard to copy.
It's inimitable.
If you can continue to pull that off,
that's going to be a great opportunity
that's going to feed up the stack, if you will.
Talk about the challenges and why you guys
are going this end to end and the benefits to customers.
>> There is no doubt that the customers
are getting smarter every day and understanding
what workloads, what applications, what data sets
ought to reside in which ecosystems to better serve them,
and to better align to their overall
economic needs and desires if they want,
and their flexibility and agility
to be able to move those workloads and that data seamlessly
to best address their particular needs.
The beauty of what we've been able to do
is integrate the VMware architecture
into the public cloud ecosystems,
and we've got many others that are ready,
knocking on the door that want to be part of it.
So now, what a customer can have is that true agility,
that true flexibility
of moving applications and data seamlessly,
but all controlled through one mechanism.
Because at the end of the day, what's going to happen is
they're going to have their data
reside on multiple different sources,
but they want to be able to see it,
they want to be able to access it,
they want to be able to analyze it.
And once you're able to analyze it,
regardless of where it resides,
and then draw the conclusions from it,
that's what enables them to then create a predictive model
at almost a cost of zero.
>> So, on day one of the keynotes,
Michael showed the B of A video.
He said if you're a bank with two trillion in assets
or you're a two story farm house, we care about you.
So that's kind of music to your ears.
Obviously, you're a big part of that.
What's different about the commercial customers,
and what's going on in that base
in terms of their transformation, their trends,
and how is that different from the big whales?
>> Well, commercial customers, at least in my patch,
I've got the biggest of the biggest public sector accounts.
So, I've got them of all different sizes and shapes
and different stages of the journey.
And that's what we're finding everywhere.
If you're big account, small account, medium account,
every one is on this digital transformation journey,
and there's an intersection that we can play
a very big part of and then enabling them.
The creative playbook is to,
how do I go through this journey effectively?
But what we're finding is
when we took the overall architecture,
kind of R&D tenets, if you will,
around making sure that we have
a scaled out architecture model,
it does enable to have our customers adopt things,
and then be able to scale it out as their business grows.
As an example, so you can jump into having
leading-edge capabilities in technology
to help you drive your company today,
but know that we're there with you all the way to then scale
at whatever rate you want to scale at.
>> Marius, I've got to ask you, we had Tom Sweet on,
as you just mentioned, CFO,
and he talked about the multiple levers you guys are pulling
to create shareholder value,
which ultimately comes from free cashflow,
which is happy customers, great.
To the pay down the debt, that's his job,
marginal expansion, get good product develop development,
increased go-to-market efficiencies, okay,
and then obviously supply chain.
Go-to-market efficiencies, this is your wheelhouse.
As you guys go talk to the customers
and go to the market now with the sets of partnerships,
one of the changes that we're seeing is,
in IT, the conversation shifted from
not just from cost reduction but revenue generating.
So, with these new tailwinds creating
a business model opportunity for your customers,
this is not the old school, best in breed,
I've got great storage, low cost,
low cost per storage, gigabyte, this is about
I don't want to deal with infrastructure anymore.
You guys handle that.
This is what you're going after.
How will you guys go into market under the new reality,
first of all, do you agree with that,
and how are you going to market
with this new shift in the customer's mindset?
>> Well, I think the mindset now is change or die.
If I don't drive the digital transformation
within my company, someone else will do it,
and more than likely, it will be a competitor.
So, you see it happen on the Uber front,
Airbnb front, you can go down the list.
Every single one of these industries are figuring out,
I better drive this aggressively,
and make sure that I take advantage of what's happening
in the technology landscape
in order to progress and grow my business,
to be more relevant and more differentiated.
So, instead of IT being a
let me lower my cost structure model,
IT is now the enabler of changing the business model,
the enabler of us scaling at a much faster rate
to take advantage of the opportunities
that are there. >> And how does that change
the customer's selection on vendor, supplier,
because obviously you can probably say one supplier is Dell,
but that's going to change how they evaluate,
procure, consume, and their partnering.
How is that going to change their selection?
>> They want to move more and more towards
having that conversation around
what do we need to do to scale our business and, again,
create a differentiated advantage, right?
Well, last thing they want to be is
a systems integrator of all the different IT suppliers,
so when you have a partner like Dell Technologies,
it truly does have the broadest
and what I'd say, best capabilities on the planet
to then become that partner of choice for them,
to move them in this direction faster.
That's a very simple decision for them to make.
>> And how is that dynamic translating into public sector,
where there's a lot of turnover in terms of administrations,
you might have edicts in terms of multi-vendor,
what are you seeing there?
>> Well, I think, and this is consistent,
we have built a practice, what we call smart digital cities,
that we've seen the need everywhere.
At the end of the day,
regardless what public sector entity you go to,
what country you go to, whatever municipality you go to,
every single one of them are thinking about,
how can I create more jobs?
How can I create, build, and grow the economic engine
of my city, my state, my country?
And guess what, they're leaning on technology to do that.
So, everywhere we go, it's a conversation about
how can we drive efficiencies and productivity improvements
across all the things you do
and provide a greater level of service
to every one of you constituencies through technology.
Anything from securing the environment,
driving, protecting our citizens,
to providing better healthcare services,
to providing better traffic management,
to providing better education and reach, waste management,
you just go down the list.
Every single city,
every single public sector entity around the globe
is thinking about it, and again,
the beautiful thing is we can come in,
we can bring in our overall partner ecosystem
because it is a broader ecosystem that is needed
in order to be able to deliver
those end to end capabilities,
but very much on demand everywhere.
>> I've got to ask you about,
first of all, on the IT side, those public sector entities
have a huge job ahead of them,
and they're not IT huge staffs.
They need nimbleness,
and they need horse-power, basically, out of the gate.
>> Well, and the beauty of what we're able to do is
we share the best practices of what we see around the world.
You can imagine that a city of Dubai,
very progressive, right?
Clearly have the budget,
clearly have less restrictions on data privacy,
clearly have less restrictions on legacy integrations
into past solutions,
so they can move pretty quickly
with a pretty broad base view as to where they want to go.
So you take those ideas, take those best practices,
and then you showcase that to the rest of the world.
Say, okay, what can we use?
What can they use to move their agenda forward quickly?
>> I want to switch gears, talk about competition.
I saw the Tom Sweets presentation,
the analysts' briefing around competition,
and I didn't see any cloud vendors on there.
Obviously, you're going multi-cloud with your own cloud,
I see that, but just in the traditional IT space,
the numbers are great on your end, you got bigger.
Bigger is better.
HP went smaller.
They thought that focus would be better for them,
maybe it is, but now you have existing competitors
from the classic IT market to new ground you're going after.
You've got Alienware here, it's a gaming world.
You're partnering with Twitch. >> Next to us, yeah.
>> It's a beautiful set up.
So that's the future of PCs,
so you're in all of these markets.
What's the competitive view?
How would you talk about
your company's competitive strategy?
>> Well, it goes to back to what we first talked about,
if you've got scale, and you have a broad portfolio
that can address the core trends that are emerging
for the next decade or two, and you can do it at speed,
that's a very nice formula,
and that's what we're starting to really operate
at that kind of cadence
with the strategically aligned businesses,
like VM, like Pivotal, like SecureWorks
that are all coming together very nicely
to be able to drive these transformations
collectively as one portfolio.
>> Where is the partner coopetition kind of thing going on,
because SISCO, for instance,
you guys partner with SISCO on some level,
but also at the same time NSX on the VMware family side,
looking like it's competing directly with SISCO,
so you're going to have direct competition,
and then other ones that are coopetition,
where you're working as a partner maybe,
and then it's evolving.
So how do you guys have those balanced conversations?
>> It's been like that for decades, right?
You've got big players in the market.
At the end of the day, as long as you service your customer
and deliver to them what they want and how they want it,
at the end of the day, we need to collaborate
to make that happen.
Same exact reason we announced our partnership
with Microsoft and Azure earlier this week.
Customer draw was there.
They said we want you to be that single broker
that enables me to move my data and my applications
seamlessly and securely containerized to any public cloud.
Well, guess what?
Azure needs to be a part of that equation.
So, when the customer drives it
and it's clearly aligned to their particular needs,
the IT ecosystem comes together to best serve that.
>> When you meet with the top customers
and the top senior people, what's the pitch, Marius,
when you go in and say hey, we're Dell Technologies,
we've got all the puzzle pieces to help you be successful.
What's your pitch when you go in?
What's the main message that you guys say
to those customers?
>> Well, for the last couple of years,
we've been talking about the transformations
that are happening, right?
At the highest level,
it's this digital transformation journey that people are on,
the workforce transformation they're doing,
the overall IT transformation that enables that,
and then, of course, how do you secure
the whole environment?
On top of that, they're having the conversation about,
okay, let's go build the blueprint as to
what that looks like for me as a customer,
and then show me how you're going to deliver to me
the platforms that enables me to grow
and make sure that I'm making the right bets long term.
Right I don't want a solution that's just there for today,
I want to make sure that I've got a solution
that will take me to the future
and that makes me ultra-competitive.
So when you think about it, if I wanted
an app development platform,
that clearly needs to be cloud-native in mind,
I need to have agile development capabilities,
and the time to value needs to continue to shrink.
Well, guess what, we got that with Pivotal, right?
You want to be able to do your data management ecosystem
seamlessly and across multiple platforms,
clearly we have assets like Boomi that enable
that to happen very, very well.
And then you want to virtualize
your overall infrastructure layer as much as possible,
so you truly can scale up or scale down
any of your infrastructure capabilities
in order to meet the needs
of that particular workload seamlessly.
When you have the data platform,
when you have the app platform,
when you have the virtualization platform,
and you have all the infrastructure platform
so well aligned to the overall trends and transformations
our customers are doing,
it's almost a no-brainer.
It is an IQ test that all of our customers
are clearly passing.
>> And what you just laid out is probably going
to play out over the next 10 years,
and there's still a lot of invention required.
You guys aren't doing a lot of M&A right now,
paying down the debt, Tom was clear on that,
but as an M&A person I wondered if I could pick your brain.
And I'm more familiar with the tech M&A, that's my space,
but most M&A, much of it, anyway, fails.
And from your perspective, why is that,
and why are some successful,
why are some not?
>> When you add a new entity into the broader entity,
what are the synergies that you're aligning to
to make sure that that new entity has the opportunity
to scale and grow, right?
And that's why you have, sometimes, smaller deals
are interesting from an IP perspective,
but if you don't tie it back into
how are you going to go scale the go-to-market
to make it available to your broadest set of customer base,
or it gets lost in the equation, that's a problem.
And I think what we've done is a very good job
making sure that we understand how each piece
of the IP portfolio comes together
and is aligned to our overall approach
and how we help have the conversation with our customer
that we've been able to see what we call our cross synergies
of all the acquisitions that we've made
significantly exceed any and all of our expectations.
And that's an important part to do ahead of time
before you make the acquisition, know,
not just how it fits into the IP stack,
but how it fits into your overall go-to-market stack,
and how it fits in your overall value proposition
to the customer.
>> Marius, thanks for spending the time,
I know you're really busy, for coming on theCUBE.
I got to ask you one final question, how'd the show here,
Dell Technologies World over three days,
what are the three top highlights that happened here,
that give a tell sign
of the next 10 years with Dell Technologies?
>> Well, I'll you.
We've always said that we do what we say.
So I think, and I've had many analysts tell us that
my god, you guys consistently have delivered
what you said you would deliver.
So, the early skepticism of, hey this is a big company,
there's multiple cultures, not sure
that operationally you will execute, well guess what?
I think it's fair to say that teams are executing.
And then when you see the results of taking share
in every line of business,
you see the results with the customer satisfaction
is higher than it's ever been,
our partner satisfaction is higher than it's ever been,
our partner growth is higher,
is the fastest growing route to market for us.
All of that is just a testament that we are operating
on all cylinders, but what's more exciting
is the yet to come part.
And the opportunity is so big, right?
The market is, what, 3.5 trillion?
90 billion is a fraction of that,
so this is what our team members see,
this is what our customers see, our partners see,
so that momentum is just a tsunami
that's just going to keep on growing.
>> Well, theCUBE barometer is certainly showing activity
two sets, when you've got four, you know you're doing well,
so we're going to keep an eye on the pulse of theCUBE cannon
we've got here.
Marius, great to see you, always a pleasure.
Great insight, thanks for sharing.
>> John, awesome, great to be here.
David. >> Thanks, Marius.
>> Awesome, thank you so much.
>> Marius, as President, Chief Commercial Officer
of Dell Technologies, friend of theCUBE,
great executive tech athlete, as we say,
live coverage day three here at theCUBE coverage
of Dell Technologies World.
Be right back with more after this short break.
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