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>> The service experience has dramatically changed
over the course of history within enterprise IT.
Once a purely break-fix business that put out fires
technology services has become a linchpin of customer IT
execution strategies where companies carefully select
technology partners to anticipate
and remediate potential problems before they occur.
Moreover organizations have come to expect
a cloud-like experience for their entire IT estate
spanning on-prem, cloud, cross clouds
and increasingly the edge.
And technology services are looked upon by customers
to provide a layer that helps abstract
that underlying complexity of IT so they can focus
on what they do best.
Welcome to theCUBE's ongoing virtual coverage
of Dell Technologies World.
With me today to talk about the modern services experience
are Doug Schmitt, who's the president
of Dell Technologies' Services
and Alex Barretto, senior vice president
Dell Technology Services.
Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE.
Great to see you.
>> Well, thank you, Dave, thanks for having us.
>> Really, my pleasure, Doug.
And I wonder if you could start by just giving us a quick
overview of the organization that you lead.
What's new with with Dell Technology Services?
>> Well, yeah, Dave, so, you know, first of all I get
the privilege along with my team of leading over 60,000
service professionals and partners.
And we support customers in over 170 countries
and 54 languages.
And we cover the entire technology spectrum
from the edge to the core to the cloud.
And our expertise in this area is broad
and deep, as you can imagine.
And we help our customers with their transformation
with the end-to-end services.
And this includes consulting, deployment, support,
managed services, education services,
as well as asset recovery.
So, just to name a few.
So we use all of this technology and this capability
to help our customers with their digital transformation.
>> Great.
So, Alex, what's your wheelhouse?
What's your role in the services strategy and technology?
>> Yeah.
I have the great opportunity to drive strategy
operations and technology.
We're doing exciting things across all three, Dave.
But in particular the technology space,
when I think about the intersection with technology
and customer experience, a lot of exciting things
there I'm sure we'll talk about today.
>> Yeah, Doug.
I mean if you look at the past 12 months,
I mean you certainly saw a real shift
to work from home technologies
and you guys know all about the, you know the story well.
But one of the things we've been talking about is the uptick
that we're expecting, and we're already seeing it,
in professional services because there's a talent gap,
there's a skill shortage and people have to,
they have to get hybrid right, they have to fund
their digital transformation, they need help.
So there's been a lot changes in the market
during the past year.
What are you hearing from customers?
What are their priorities?
How are they changing?
>> Well, yeah, huge data Dave that looked over a lot
of changes in the market during the last year, clearly.
And what our customers are telling us
and where their changing priorities are are really centered
around two things.
The first is that all of us are helping our customers
deliver a better experience to their customers, right?
The end customers, that matters.
You know, in a brand new study we commissioned
from Forrester Consulting actually 56% of IT leaders said
that improving customer experience is the top driver
for their digital transformation efforts.
The second thing that we're hearing, and that I'm hearing,
is that they're asking us to assist
in this digital transformation.
In that same research that I talked to you about
from Forester, 81% of the IT leaders said that they need
to leverage external technology specific expertise
to help their internal IT teams be successful.
And I think just to deep dive these two items, you know,
first it's, on the first one for their customer experience,
it's just crucial for customers to transform their CX
to be competitive, that's for all of us.
And, you know, there's not an industry or a team around
that's not going through that.
Whether it's schools doing digital learning,
healthcare and all of the things.
You know, recently I just talked to a doctor via Zoom.
I mean these are all new experiences, right?
Government, incorporations, it's just, it's very remote,
it's very seamless, it's very timely.
And look, the employee experience is also closely tied
to this, right, to the customer experience.
Obviously if your employees aren't able to perform
in this environment you can't really deliver
the customer experience.
And they need the right technology
and tools to really deliver that.
And that's where we, at Dell Technologies
and Dell Technology Services,
are really helping our customers.
The second area I mentioned was really about getting
our customers ready for the future.
And, you know, digital transformation's not a one and done.
This is a ongoing journey that gets our customers
to assist their customers and their team members.
And, look, they're looking for trusted advisor
who can, you know, specialize in the experience they need
to guide them through this.
And, you know, IT is not just back office anymore,
as you know.
It's really about getting in front of this, breaking down
the silos, helping all of the departments, not just IT,
everything with their business needs
and really delivering these outcomes
that are going to help them with the customer experience
and the digital transformation.
>> Yeah, thank you for that.
And Doug, I mean, the consumerization of IT has been
going on for the better part of a decade or more.
The cloud obviously has affected how we think
about the experience and pricing and the like
and we're hearing a lot about APEX from Dell Tech right now.
What's the role of services in APEX?
>> Well, look, services has always been a primary interface
with our customers and will continue to play
a major part of that.
And this is really about services and our products
and our great solutions and software all coming together
to really deliver the best experience for our customers.
But specifically speaking about services, look,
this will be about services helping our customers
seamlessly integrate APEX offers and leverage the best
of our infrastructure management capabilities end to end.
And I talked a little bit about those at the beginning
but this will be helping the customers deploy APEX,
monitor it, operate it, optimize, support, decommissioning,
all those things from the end to end life cycle.
And, look, we'll leverage our advantages in the supply slain
as well and scale APEX globally, working with Kevin Brown
and the operations team.
So it's about bringing all the strengths
of Dell along with services to deliver APEX.
You know, services also is going to help accelerate
the value to the customers with, for example,
APEX data storage as a service, which I'm sure
you're hearing about.
We'll manage the infrastructure across the life cycle
and help our customers get the most
out of all of this great technology we're bringing.
>> So Alex, and Doug maybe you can chime in,
but you guys talked about how important
the customer experience is.
Can you tell us more about what services is doing
to specifically enhance that customer experience?
>> Yeah, sure, sure thing, Dave.
And, look, you talked about, which I thought was great,
about the notion of service is much more than just
a quick fix.
So that customer experience now spans
the entire services life cycle.
So when we talk CX it's really that entire CX.
So we're doing a couple of things to really drive
customer experience to the next level.
In fact, three distinct focus areas.
The first one is really around artificial intelligence,
machine learning and embedding that notion of AI
into everything that we do.
Whether that's support, deployment services,
managed services, consulting service, education service,
the entire spectrum of our services offering now carries AI
into the services offering.
We started with support, but now we expanded
it to the entire spectrum.
That drives efficiency and customers see that
and feel that in terms of lower costs, greater speed
and it drives value for our customers as well
because we're able to generate new and appreciated insights.
And second, if you think about the total customer experience
there are times when they do have to interact with us.
And that interaction now is full and it's a seamless,
unified and simple experience that the customers have
with us across the entire product set of Dell.
So whether it's PCs, servers, networks, storage,
we provide a single unified view and a simple view
for our customers.
And then third, if you think about our services offerings
we're modernizing them.
Doug's talked a little bit about this as well.
We're embedding technology into the services offering,
making them better and faster.
Good example of that is modern provisioning.
We launched that at the beginning of this year.
Great market feedback.
It has new features, new capability, leverages our cloud
infrastructure to deliver the services.
>> You know, Alex, I wonder if we can stay on that
for a minute because when I think about APEX,
to me it's a cultural transformation that's going on.
I mean, look, Dell is a technology company,
we're a product company and, you know, services there
to support that.
But it's always, you've always had to align with product.
But now I almost see the, you know, the product is aligning
with the customer service experience
and they're coming together like this.
So we talked about the changes and obviously the focus
on CX, could you tell us more about the specific
technologies that services is leveraging to affect that?
>> Yeah, it's a good question, David.
Often we actually talk about product as a services now
and services is the product.
As you said they're really coming together.
And there are a number of things we're doing to drive
that technology change.
Both within APEX and also outside APEX so our regular
kit CapEx model.
So a couple of examples of things we're doing
around it, data management side as an example.
We're using graph technologies to really contextualize
data, generate insights from that data regardless
of how the data is structured, regardless of where the data
is stored, and then we can present those values.
We're using that inside Dell for services.
We're actually then monetizing that and providing
that to our customers via consulting services
and managed services.
You talked about the APEX, cloud is in, hybrid cloud
is a big area for us, big focus area.
In fact all that APEX offers are actually
Dell managed customer operators.
So the managed services component is integrated
and is a fundamental part of everything around our APEX
offers that we're putting in place.
There are a couple of other areas we're also excited about.
Two of them to highlight specifically: 5G and the edge.
In 5G we see phenomenal growth and opportunities around,
for our customers, around the new digital transformation
that they can do with 5G.
But enabling that is the carriers behind
that infrastructure with 5G which we are supporting
with our managed services developing carrier grade
specific managed services capabilities
for carriers around the globe.
And on the edge side with the growth
and phenomenal exponential growth actually
of data around the far edge being driven by sensors
and greater compute needs and storage needs at the far edge
we're actually providing services
for those specific data centers.
They're very distributed, some of them are in urban areas,
some of them are in non-urban areas, and there is hundreds
of them and they require remote services capabilities
which we have that infrastructure today.
So we're at the point that in this far edge space
another area that we're excited about.
So 5G, the edge, APEX
and then our core services capabilities.
>> Yeah, the edge is like this really infinite
technology opportunity it's...
So we see that, you know, the data center
and you see the cloud and okay they were largely remote
set of cloud services.
You're seeing the cloud come into the on-prem,
you're seeing on-prem come into the cloud.
So you've got the hybrid connections here.
Cross-cloud.
And then even at the edge you've got layers of edge.
I mean, you think about, you know, the autonomous vehicle,
there's so much going on there, custom silicon, et cetera.
It's okay, you're not going to get into the auto business,
I don't think, at least anytime soon.
But all that data that's being collected
that has to get back to the cloud.
Now much of it's not going to get persisted,
a lot of it's going to stay at the edge
but a lot of it's going to come back to the cloud.
Everything's just exploding.
You've got a role there.
It's just these layers and connections
that are coming through into this kind of ubiquitous matrix.
I mean it's like the movie, it's amazing.
Very exciting times.
And, Doug, I wonder, I'm just going off here.
Doug, I wonder if we could give you the last word
maybe as I'm looking into the future beyond APEX?
What's next for Dell Tech Services and your customers?
>> Well first of all, Dave, you did a great job on that.
It is exciting.
Look, and the reason we're putting so much effort
into the emerging technologies we've talked about
is to prepare to, you know, assist our customers with this.
And you brought this up as well.
Look, the vast amount of customer data
that they're going to have to contend with is just staggering.
175 zettabytes of data will be created worldwide by 2025,
according to IDC.
And even more amazing about that is 30% of it is projected
to be processed real time.
You're talking about that edge, right?
And more than 50% of the enterprise generated data
will be created and processed at that edge,
according to Gardner.
So look, it's going to be exciting.
And over the next five to 10 years we predict
that all devices will be able to communicate anywhere
on earth and, you know, look, these types of support tools
to gather intelligence from billions of endpoints
is going to be fascinating as well.
And there will be new ways to consume this knowledge
seamlessly making the relationship between us
and the intelligence even more seamless and natural.
You know, an example of that that we're working
with right now is augmented reality, AR,
out for our field resources.
And it, you know, we're seeing the capability
it's going to provide our field engineers
and it's pretty amazing.
Going to provide a better experience for our team members
and a better experience for our customers.
You know, and customers are going to have to contend
with all of these challenges
and so we're modernizing to help them.
And kind of just summarizing up, you know, look, the value
of services is really about shifting to intelligence
as a service.
And there's three ways that this will really come about.
One is our relationship with our customers is evolving
from providing technology solutions,
you mentioned this in your opening,
to being fully integrated as a business partner.
That's the first one.
Second one, we're helping to shape how our customers
run their business from processes to resources
to the experience they deliver to their end customer.
That's number two.
And number three, it's really about measuring our success.
Everything we do is about our customers achieving
their business targets and their outcomes.
And that's why we believe intelligence as a service
is the future of services.
>> And this is where technology plays such an important role
in the services component of that.
as I said up front, it's the linchpin.
There's an inverse relationship over the course of my career
between the customer experience
and the technical complexity.
The simpler it gets for customers the more complex
it gets at the back end.
And you've got to hide that complexity.
And that's a big part of where technology
and services comes in.
We're seeing the explosion of data, as you said,
and the explosion of processing power.
It's very exciting times.
Alex and Doug, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE
and sharing the update on Dell Tech Services
and the future.
Really appreciate your time.
>> Thank you, Dave.
>> Thank you for having us.
>> All right, and thank you for watching everybody.
This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and our ongoing coverage
of Dell Technologies World 2021, the virtual edition.
We'll be right back.
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