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>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas,
its The Cube, covering Dell Technologies World 2018.
Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners.
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>> Welcome to The Cube's live coverage
of Dell Technologies World 2018.
I'm Stu Miniman
And this is the second of three days
of wall to wall coverage we have here
at The Sands convention center and I am thrilled
to welcome to the program, back to the program,
Michael Dell, who is the CEO of Dell Technologies.
Michael thank you so much for having us here
and thanks for joining us on The Cube.
>> Oh, great to be here.
Thank you guys for all the great coverage.
You always do a wonderful job
getting into the technical details
and kind of exploring everything in depth
and we appreciate you and your team being here.
>> Well thanks so much.
You started off the keynote talking
about the platform for the possible,
said it was 34 years in the making.
Now this is my 15th year at the show
formally known as EMC World.
I'd attended the Dell Show for a number of years,
so tell us, start with what's really different now
about the company's all together,
it's renamed now, Dell Technologies World.
Why is this the platform for the possible?
>> I'm kind of amazed and inspired
when I step back and look at what our customers
are doing with our technology
and we have hundreds of technical sessions here
where we get in depth as we've always done
at, historically, EMC World,
but we're also taking a broader view
and saying, "Hey, what's this really all about?"
What's the impact on the world?
This was one of the motivations
for bringing together Dell and EMC and VMWare,
and Pivotal and the whole family
and it's working.
So we're telling the story through the eyes
of our customers and it is really an amazing time
when you think about what's going on in the world.
We have this incredible platform
that's been built over the last 30 years,
but now there are all these new enabling technologies
that are going to take it much further
and the domain of information technology
is not the IT department anymore
and we're seeing that in a big way,
so it's a super exciting time and obviously
we think we're a unique company
across digital transformation, IT, workforce security
and it's working.
So it's all good, Stu.
>> Michael, one of the great lines we liked
in the keynote was today we'll have the most change
that you've ever had in your life,
but compared to what we'll see tomorrow,
it's going to keep changing faster.
When I look at the Dell Technologies family,
I know a lot has changed.
Pivotal just went through an IPO.
I have to imagine the tax laws changing
in the recent administration has impact.
What's changed since the day one decision
to purchase EMC, the largest merger in technology history
to today, maybe give us a little bit of insight
as to what's happening inside the family that's different.
>> You know, there've been a lot of reports
about the tax law.
That actually was not much of a change.
Kind of inconsequential change.
It's very good for the broader industry growth
and kind of broader economic growth
and we're quite excited about that
and so I see it as a net positive.
You know, when we step back and go back a little bit
in time here to 2009 when Joe and I first talked
about this idea, 2008-2009.
Wasn't the right time, financial crisis.
We re-started it in 2014, announced it in 2015.
Here we are four years after
we had the last set of initial discussions
and it's all come together very well.
Look, I mean, the revenues are much stronger
that we thought.
Business is excellent.
The demand is very strong.
There's a portfolio effect.
I think you're seeing increasing integration
of the family of businesses,
particularly with VMware and Dell EMC and Pivotal.
And the relevance of what we are doing
has never been greater
and so we're able to have conversations
with companies that are very different
that we had before.
At the same time this is occurring,
the business leaders and the chief executives of companies
are waking up to the power of technology,
whether it's because of some new disruptor showing up
or because they realize that they have to change and evolve.
Used to be it was just us folks in the tech world
that were in this fast changing world
where everything was moving very quickly
and we used to, when people wanted to come work for us,
we'd say, "Hey, how do you like it when things change?
"How are you dealing with ambiguity?"
If they didn't like it, we'd say,
"Yeah, you probably shouldn't come work here
"because you won't be happy
"if things are changing all the time."
It's like that in every business now and,
like you said, it's only going to get faster.
>> Right.
So, wondering if, you look at the portfolio, Michael.
One of the things since the EMC acquisition
and it's a pretty broad portfolio.
There's some streamlining that I understand's happening.
How do you balance the streamlining
with the breadth of portfolio,
make sure you're reaching the customers?
>> There's absolutely some kind of simplification
and optimization of the expansive set
of capabilities we have.
We also have some incredible platforms
and so what you want to do is rally around the platforms
and that's exactly what we're doing,
so you'll see us not only create
a very seamless and logical path
for every customer, but rally around the winning platforms
and you already detect that as a theme here
at Dell Technologies World and it's going well.
>> When you look at your overall portfolio,
wonder if you could talk to some
of the macroeconomic things happening,
on margins that are happening.
If Dave Alonte was here, are we talking
a half of your business is client.
You've got the ISG portfolio.
That transformation of when Dell went private
and now bringing EMC in, which allows you to change things.
How do you look at that and what does Dell look like
when you get to, say, the 2020, 2030?
>> You know, right now it looks great
and I think it'll look even better in 2020.
What I see is we have positioned ourself
as the essential infrastructure company
and there's a massive infrastructure build-out
and it's on the edge,
it's a distributed core, and it's the cloud,
and cloud is not just the public cloud
and everybody's kind of figured that out now.
We were saying it before it was cool,
So if I think about the different businesses,
you know Pivotal's doing great
and we don't need to say too much about that
because it just went public and we're in a bit
of a quiet period,
but the Pivotal business is a great business.
VMware is doing fabulously well.
Pat did a great job yesterday with the keynote
and I think if you watch the keynote,
you see, wow, Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, VMware,
really, really working together at a very deep level.
And then you go into our client business.
Client business is growing really fast,
but not as fast as our data center business.
The data center business is growing even faster,
so we're gaining share.
You'll see it in the first quarter.
We'll gain share in storage, we'll gain share in servers,
we'll gain share in clients,
and there's a portfolio effect
where customers look across everything that we're doing
and they say, "Yeah, I don't really want
"to deal with 25 little companies.
"I want to have a bigger relationship
"with Dell Technologies."
So bringing everything together,
putting real effort behind these big platforms that we have,
and look, we've got some big new initiatives.
NSX, network virtualization.
You know I'm a big believer in that
and I think this is ultimately bigger
than server virtualization
and we're in an ideal position with our open networking
and VMware NSX to drive that forward.
>> Michael, both Allison and Jeff
brought some great customer stories up on stage.
One of the things sometimes you hear out there
it's like, well, Dell,
they're just an infrastructure company,
and infrastructure, you know, I care about my data,
I care about my applications.
What's the role of infrastructure
and maybe give us, what does infrastructure mean to you
when we talk about those digital transformations
that you're helping your customers through?
>> Well you sort of go back to what's the plot here?
And the plot is better outcomes, results,
and success for a business.
Well how do you do that?
Well you do that with data, right?
And people talk about clouds.
Well what are clouds?
The clouds are built on infrastructure.
It's a bit like the internet.
20 years ago we'd say, hey we have the internet,
we have the internet product strategy,
Vice President of the internet,
internet product division.
Where's all that now?
It's just everywhere.
Cloud, AI, very, very similar.
At the core of all this is the data
and the computer science.
You want to have artificial intelligence machine learning?
Got to have data, so that's infrastructure.
AI is eating software
and software is eating hardware,
but AI doesn't run on software.
Software doesn't run on software.
Software runs on hardware,
so you got to put it all together, right?
And that's exactly what we do.
>> Alright, Michael what learnings have you had
going through this?
I know there was a lot of planning.
We talked to Howard yesterday,
talking about some of the cultures coming together,
the big survey they did that like the top five things
across everybody.
It was like, not only were the top five things in agreement,
but even the order was in agreement,
but have to imagine that there were some things,
bringing these large companies together.
I might notice that in the keynote so far
it's been all people that came from the Dell side
that are up on stage.
PowerMax Bob I know is from the EMC side,
but mostly from the Dell side.
What have you learned so far?
How have some of those cultural pieces come together
and how do you keep a quite large organization
rallying and focused around what's an ever-changing
and broad portfolio?
>> You know, it's been a lot of fun,
first of all to have so many unbelievably talented people
join our company
and that was a real delight
because there's just a wealth
of enormously talented people now in our company.
Over-communicating, listening, getting to know them,
understanding their point of view,
and ultimately creating a shared vision
and an aspiring vision for what we want to do in the future.
And then, of course, when you're winning,
everybody sees it and everybody's excited
and they want to be part of it
and they're engaged and it's working.
So, certainly during the period
before the integration and still today,
we're in the business of technology
and we've got products and services,
but ultimately it's a people business right?
And the talent comes in and walks out
every single day, so you got to keep them engaged,
excited, and fortunately we're doing that.
And we're adding a lot more,
so we need a few more thousand sales people,
so if you're really talented and you know how to sell stuff,
come join us at Dell Technologies,
because we're hiring more sales people.
>> Well Michael, I think you're going to get calls there.
On a personal note, I've been watching on social media.
Everybody's really, you give your time back.
You spend time.
I know something you really enjoy
is speaking to people, understanding what's going on,
getting into it,
and for someone, Michael you created all of this
and you've been there,
just giving your time and getting involved
is impressive.
I've read like every book that Walter Isaacson's done.
We're going to see a biography from him about you
some time in the future or?
>> Well look, I think if you're honored enough
to have a biography by Walter Isaacson,
that's pretty good.
I'll leave that to him.
He's a great one for sure.
Look, I mean, I just think this is my job right? (laughs)
Our job is to be with our customers,
be with our people, learn, listen.
That's how we become a better company
and I wouldn't know what else to do
if I wasn't doing that.
>> Yeah.
One of the things in your keynote you spoke about
is helping customers, making it real.
Like in Jeff's keynote, it was that the business
and the IT are becoming one and the same.
Maybe if you, do you have any good customer stories
or how are you helping customers making it real?
>> Yeah I think this topic of change management
is really important
because let's say you're a customer
and you come to Dell Technologies World
and you see this amazing, dizzying array
of new things and you're like,
"Wow, that sounds great but how do I do it?"
And so, I'll give you one story.
We met with a large, rather large company,
and they had a situation where for any number of reasons,
the IT environment was sort of put on hold
for a couple of years.
There were things going on around them
that were beyond their control.
They just really couldn't do anything,
so the environment very quickly atrophied
and they wanted very quickly to get up to speed
and needed a lot of help
and so we pulled in our professional services team.
Make no mistake, we're not trying to replace Accenture
or TCS or something,
but a thin layer of architecture consulting
to very quickly help them map out
what the new architecture should look like
and then go make it happen.
And of course, we have lots of partners all over the world
that also are engaged in helping that happen.
But we're very aware that change management
is a big topic for a lot of our customers
and we're spending a lot of time
on how do we make it easier,
so make these more ready-made solutions
for the fast track to the modern data center,
like the VX Rack, VX Rail, V Block Solution.
>> Yeah, we touched on it briefly,
but that concept of change,
when I talk to customers, one of the challenges they have
is they learn about something, they get ramped on it.
By the time they've rolled it out,
there's something else that it's like,
oh wait, maybe I should have waited.
It used to be, oh geez, I should have started
that project two years ago
and now it feels like, wait, maybe I should wait
another year because things are changing so fast,
economics are changing.
How do you work with customers and, internally,
how does the team manage this
just unprecedented rate of change?
>> I think there's a pretty massive movement going on
across organizations to be more agile
and it kind of started in software development,
some technical organizations,
but now you're seeing it spread.
We're certainly working as a company
to do more and more of that
and I think we're living in a very dynamic world.
First we had the internet and all the things
that that brought.
Now we have the 5G and the block chain
and autonomous computing
and all kinds of new things
that are being explored out there
and so we have to be highly adaptable and flexible.
I think companies that aren't able to do that
are going to have a problem.
We are in a way blessed that we grew up
in a world where if we didn't do that,
we'd have been out of business a long time ago.
>> Michael, you mentioned crypto.
We've talked to the VMware and Dell EMC teams
that are starting to look at those technologies,
do some of the underlying things,
but you're a big investor.
You've made some big things, everything from,
I think about the radio frequencies in the sports arena.
What do you think of this whole crypto, Bitcoin, all that.
What's your take on that from a personal side?
>> Well look, as a personal investor,
I have almost none of my money in cryptocurrency,
so I'll be clear about that.
I'm a massive believer in distributed computing
and block chain, but I don't have a lot of my money,
or really, in anything to speak of in cryptocurrency,
so maybe I'm missing out
on the next great investment opportunity.
Don't really know.
I guess we'll find out,
but big believer in distributed computing and block chain.
>> Yeah I think you'll be doing okay either way, Michael.
Want to give you the--
>> It's worked out pretty well so far, so I'm...
>> (laughs) Want to give you the final world.
There's so much here, over 14,000 people,
lots of tracks.
I've been talking to all my friends.
It's a great nerd fest as I think some people have said,
so always geeking out.
Give us a final takeaway, what you hope people walk away,
and what maybe they understand Dell Technologies
a little better about than they might not have in the past?
>> Well first, very grateful for our customers,
for the trust they place in us.
It's really gratifying to see
how the Dell Technologies capabilities have resonated,
and look, I think a lot of people are a bit surprised
at all the capability we have across the company.
That's really the purpose of this event
is to bring it all together,
explain the capabilities we have.
We want them to engage in the hundreds
of technical sessions that we have,
but still come away with,
I wish I could have gone to some more, right?
And so we have all those online
and for us this is also big ears.
We're listening and we're learning.
We're hearing from our customers
and we're going to go take that back
and bring the next set of innovations
and we want to be the trusted partner for our customers.
We think there's never been a better time
to be doing what we're doing
and there's a business investment cycle
that's technology-led that's very powerful
and there's no company on the planet
that has the capabilities Dell Technologies has
across all the four transformations.
>> All right, well Michael Dell,
thank you so much for joining us here.
Really appreciate getting to talk with you
and getting to cover this event.
We have two more days full of live coverage here
from Las Vegas.
I'm Stu Miniman And you're watching The Cube.
Thanks Michael.
>> Michael: Great, thanks Stu.
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