 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. And welcome back to Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. We're at the Venetian this week, Monday through Wednesday, here live on theCUBE. I'm John Walls along with Keith Townsend and joining us now is a gentleman who is never lacking for words or wardrobe resplendency. John. Chad Sackage. Keith. How are you guys doing? How's everyone doing? Good. The president, in case you didn't know, of Converged Platforms and Solutions Division. Yes. Dell EMC. Love the jacket, by the way. You always look slick. There's a tradition. Keith, you probably noticed this. At VMworld, Carl would always wear a bad jacket. Right. You know, the whole NSX team wore their jackets with pride and I said, someone's got to take the mantle and carry it on. But I like that jacket, it's not a bad jacket. It's like bad like that. It's noticeable. Bad like that. Thanks. Tell me, we've heard a lot already, digital transformation, right? That's really a very popular piece of the nomenclature right now. Tell me, in your mind, how do you define that for somebody at home who's watching a prospective customer that's thinking, yeah, what are they talking about? So the first thing is that buzzword bingo at these events can be over the top. And, you know, digital transformation smacks of buzzword bingo factor, like big data analytics and cloud and IOT and, but the reality of it is that those are all very real things for all of our customers. So, digital transformation is about redefining your business around a different way of interacting with your customers, how you operate your actual business, the underlying data, and at its core the thing that binds it is rebuilding yourself as a software version of yourself. So, I'll give you an example. In the automotive industry, previously the most important set of skills if you were an employee at Ford would be being an industrial designer or a mechanical engineer designing a car. What's happened in the automotive industry is that many of them now use the same core underlying car components, so they've commoditized in a sense their supply chain. The new digital version, the digitally transformed version of Ford, those skills are still important, but what's more important than ever before is the ability to build new automotive experience where it's completely driverless. So, Ford's trying to leapfrog Tesla and have cars with no steering wheels, right? Redesigning whole business models, like we see this in the automotive industry in Europe, where they're going, how do we redesign our business process and how we operate as a company if no one actually will own a car, right? So, that's an example. The other example that we saw on stage in the keynote was Boeing is, you know, obviously their business is we make planes. The previous version of them is we design a plane, it takes us 20 years to make it, then we build many thousands of them. They're now thinking, how do we get data from engines that generate two terabytes of data as they fly over the ocean? How do we change how we do service and support? And I'll give you one more example. John, did you fly to get here? I did. Keith, did you fly to get here? Absolutely, I did. You flew in Atlanta, right? No, Chicago. Chicago, okay. So, if you flew in from Chicago, you flew on United? No, Southwest. Southwest, good, because United, you know, they put a United guy. I didn't take it out of my gut. And I was not removed from my seat. I felt pretty good about it. We love our friends at United, love it. Yes. I guarantee that when you guys checked in, you checked in digitally using your mobile phone app. Exactly. I bet you found out exactly what gate you were at through your mobile phone app, right? They've had to transform how they operate and find new ways of doing it. That's digital transformation. Right, on the buzzword kick, build-to-buy continuum. I hear a lot about that. What's that all about, and why does that matter? So, do you guys mind if I play a game with you? It's just David Blaine all over again. Just as long as it's not just ice-pink. We have David Blaine on the keynote stage, general session stage, some great tricks. Great tricks. Don't pull that one on me. Okay, I was gonna, but I'll do something different. Thank you. John, I don't know you particularly well, so I'm going to play this with Keith. You're welcome to participate. All right, thank you. Keith, you've always had an identity, an online identity, as a CTO type, a technologist. Right. Did you grow up playing with Lego? Yes. Do you still play with Lego? No. Do you have children? Yes. Your children don't play with Lego at all. Be honest. Yes, yes. I would wager that at Christmas time when the kids play with Lego, you'd probably get in there. Did you grow up playing with Lego? I did not. I was a sports guy, grew up, you know, bats and balls. Perfect. You've just made my analogy perfect. In our high-tech industry, many people grew up playing tinkering with things. They like to build. Right. People who are athletes in the sports industry through balls. Do things. They do things. They don't tinker and play. I don't know why you want to throw a ball, but that's fine, I like that. So in our IT industry, you've got a whole population of people who are very creative, who've got a lot of skill and curiosity who like to tinker. The challenge is that many of the things that we used to tinker with, you and I both grew up in the VMware Revolution together. Exactly. There was a period where being a VCP was like an art and knowing how to configure the Q-depth on an HBA would make you a hero and picking what server platform or storage you would do, that's the version of building and it really suits people who like to build things with Lego. Yes. What's happening is that over time, everything becomes a commodity and new innovation comes on top. Increasingly, I can go to any customer in any industry and say, do you think if you pick server X or server Y, there's a better and a worse, but it will be the thing that makes you radically a better airline. If we're picking storage A or B, radically make you, do you think you, Bank A or Bank B, deploy your vSphere clusters differently than one another? The answer to each one of those questions is no, so why are you doing it? Why do you have your best, most creative, talented gray matter in your company reinventing what is now boring? And so the build-to-buy continuum is in essence this path for customers to take themselves from playing with Lego to consuming fully turnkey stacks. I'll use one more example. I'm sorry for the long-winded answer, but we're here in Vegas. I guarantee we will not eat a home-cooked meal for the next week, right? No. When I flew over, I had a great meal at home with my family, we bought all of the ingredients at the grocery store and it was fantastic. Bella, right? Beautiful. However, the experience involved a lot of cooking. It could have gone sideways. We selected every individual ingredient. When you get a meal here in Vegas, it's the exact same to meal delivered in 30 minutes or less and it's an excellent experience. That's a meal form of this build-to-buy continuum. Do you want to home-build your meal? Sometimes, yes, but frankly, more and more people are realizing you can get a turnkey meal. And what we're trying to do is help our customers shift so they can get out of businesses that don't differentiate them and reinvest in the things that matter like becoming a digital business. So, this is, I mean, you're known for the face-milting descriptions of technology. Just, we love knobs. Even when someone gets a V-block, for example, we love getting a V-block and first thing we ask you is, well, okay, how do I get behind this? I want to log into UCS Manager and do something fancy. What are the practicals? How does that conversation go when you slap my hand and say, no keys? The keyboard isn't for you anymore. You add value somewhere else. It's like all things. A little bit of carrot and a little bit of stick, right? And the ratio's got to be right. The reality of it is that you've got to give people who are technologists something that they can look upward to and they can redirect their creative force. So, if I say to you, Keith Townsend, you know, you and I have known each other for a long time, grew up in the virtualized world, that's now boring. You should just get a VxRail or a VxRack SDDC or a VxBlock and consume it. You then go, well, what am I going to do with my time? I want to do something cool. And my answer would be redirect your energies on learning how to build new applications in new ways or using the native hybrid cloud on top of it. If you want, redirect some of those efforts at figuring out how can you replot from some of those applications to actually make them work in a hybrid cloud way. Don't focus down here, look up. Look up. Like, if you're always looking down, you're going to walk into a pole. You know what I mean? Lift your head up, right? And use your creative energies, the Lego builder that's in all of us, except for our, you know, by the nerds. I could put it together. I know, I know. You know, they clicked together, I got that. To take those creative energies and redirect them at the things that differentiate them. Now, by the way, that's not universally true. There are certain domains where there's still a lot of art in low-level infrastructure, but they're increasingly the exception as opposed to the rule. So in words, if you said to me, I'm building, you know, Cloudera and Spark Data Lake. Two years ago, that was all art. Right. No science, right? Frankly, we've managed to build ready nodes and ready bundles with Cloudera. Spark can now run on a VX rail. So you can see it's moving along that build to by continuum, and we'll eventually get it to the point where it's turnkey. Where do you redirect those creative energies? Well, why are you deploying that Cloudera and Spark cluster? It's because you want to do data analytics and insight. So if you're a curious nerd, Lego player like us, not the athlete, it's okay. He has a checkbook. Yeah, that's right. Put it this way, we're getting out a lot of like high school teen angst, right here, right now. There's a lot of chat in the locker. You're the cool guys on the block now. I was tall, but no coordination. Oh, I don't believe that. I was short, no coordination, bad combo, but the point being, the need for brains, the need for creativity, the need for technologists is greater than ever. It's just moving northward, right? And frankly, I'm seeing a lot of people realizing that if they decide that they should start to consume things that are boring, it allows them to build things where they're still now art, right? And that's a beautiful thing. Yes it is. Before we get out of here, I'd like to go back to the continuum. I mean, ultimately, what does that mean then again to my decision making? If you're trying to bring me up to speed, and get me ahead, I guess, on the curve. So ultimately, how do I apply what you're talking about to my everyday practical decisions about my idea? The core thing I would say is, in every single case, you should ask yourself, am I doing something that is uniquely me? If I'm doing something that is uniquely me, where me is the industry, the company that you work for, you know, I can imagine like theCUBE. I love theCUBE, it's great. We do it year over year. You guys have got things that you do that are uniquely you. You guys, the people behind the cameras, the people that do the editing and the broadcasting, you know what you do that isn't uniquely you? The cameras themselves. Like theCUBE doesn't build your camera. You don't build the servers that run all of the video editing software, right? So what you do is, in any industry you ask yourself, am I doing something that is uniquely me? If so, I need to build it. If I'm doing something that is common to me and many others, I should really look to see if I can consume it rather than building it myself. And that continuum varies customer by customer, but you know, every customer has to ask themselves, who are you, right? Boeing is not in the business of building Paz platforms. They're in the business of building planes and getting data and data analytics from planes. If they had gone and said, well, I could get Kubernetes and I could get this ingredient and blah, blah, blah, and I could tinker and hand assemble, would they be able to do it? Of course, they've got lots of smart people. The question is not, can you? It's should you, right? And basically by everyone asking themselves that question, am I doing something that's uniquely me? That stuff you should build, everything else you should buy. And moved, again, I recognize that that's directional, right? 95% of the market are still building their own stuff. So if you can't go all the way, we can still help you along things that de-risk it with ready nodes, ready bundles, and ready systems, so. Chad, the time always goes by too fast. It really does, it's a great having you here on theCUBE once again. And although we can't get a sneak preview, just be careful, Wednesday, the keynote session, the dark night of IT, and that's all we know for now. But just be careful. All I know is that there's a serious risk of life and limb injury. All right, so tune in, you might see something. We hope not, hope this is not the last CUBE it appears, but thanks for being with us. John, thank you. Chad, good seeing you. Good seeing you again. All right, we'll continue live here from the Venetian. Las Vegas, Dell EMC World 2017, right after this.