 Live from Austin, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Dell World 2015. Brought to you by Dell. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back. We are here live at Dell World. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. Joe and Mike Coase. Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.com. Also chief analyst at Wikibon.com. And our next guest is Garo John, global VP marketing at Dell. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having us here. We really appreciate you spending some time with us. And also lining up some really awesome guests. Michael Dell, Marius Ha, Jim Ganti, Paul Perez, and the list goes on and on. And tomorrow all the topics X as well. So thank you so much. That's awesome. And thank you for being here. We really appreciate it. So one of the things we love that we've been hearing is talking about on theCUBE, the editorial framework of our coverage of Dell World and the EMC acquisition. It's just the new chapter of innovation. And the new chapter as Dell, as Michael says, the new chapter for Dell. There's a whole new era. There's a lot of work to be done. It's going to be a busy year. It is. This future-ready concept kind of plays off a term that we used to call in the enterprise, future-proofing. Yeah. Which was the sales pitch for, hey, go with us and we will be your bridge into the future and help you minimize any downside for any future scenarios. But being future-ready gives more of an agile feel to it. It feels more cloud-like. It's like agile, infrastructure is code. But Dell still has the commodity aspect of their business with it. You actually are delivering really good supply chain, great OEM business. Now you've got the acquisition on the table that's been announced. You have your business sets growing. How do you market all of this? What's the strategy? I mean it's simply just like, don't freak out customers. We're going to be big, we're going to be good. We're going to be value for you. What does future-ready mean to you? So future-ready to us is more of our technological value proposition. What we mean by that is, look at what's happening. I mean, we all know, we all know the statistics around how much data is growing. The 44 zettabytes that Michael talked about in stage this morning. Social is gathering so much momentum, big data and analytics and all of these. There's huge churn. Now, the interesting part is when you look at a lot of these technologies that are coming to bear, if you look at big data, if you look at cloud and all of those pieces, the one thing you will notice is these are highly, highly disruptive technologies. Take the simplest of examples. Look at a Hadoop architecture and compare that to a traditional Oracle database architecture. They're night and day. Hadoop hates consolidated storage and Oracle can't do without it, right? So they're night and day and the tricky part for a customer now is, hey, how do I take advantage of all of this innovation that's occurring in the market, however, not develop my IT in silos? Because that's what happened in the main frame age. A lot of these applications were developed in silos which led to greater cost, which led to higher degree of inefficiencies and all of that stuff. And as this new IT is creeping in, you're seeing that same trend. Cloud is being set up on its own with no integration into the rest of the company. Big data is being set up in silos. And the whole notion around future ready is how do you take traditional IT and new IT? And how do you blend that ecosystem so that you don't develop IT in silos? That's the key piece we want to help our customers with. And the trend that we're seeing and we're spotting right now in real time is with cloud mobile and social and big data, people are starting to see value faster. Okay, they're focusing on business outcomes. That's all kind of been out there for a while. One thing that's interesting is the customers and the users are now in charge. Very similar to the developers in charge concepts that drove the cloud. I mean, developers drove the cloud over a decade ago with Amazon and then continue Amazon's growth. Now it's all the developers are in charge. That's DevOps, that's the cloud. That's out there. Now the customers are in charge. They don't want off the shelf general purpose technology. They might cobble this, that together for this solution which might have a diverse unique requirements. So this localization, this integrated stack, these are new concepts that the customers are trying. So can you share some insight into that trend? Which is great that you mentioned that, but that is, so I talked about the technological value proposition of being future ready. That is exactly the business value proposition. Because what we have seen, more so in the last two to three years, and it's been going on for the last decade or so, what we've seen is when you look at an average IT department and you compare business sophistication and IT sophistication, 10 years ago, an average IT department was incredibly IT savvy, right? Now that the CIO has got a seat at the table and the CEO is challenging CIO around the notion of, hey, how can I use IT as a competitive advantage going forward? We're seeing more and more CIOs and IT departments get business savvy which is developing a greater need for pre-integrated, pre-configured, right size systems which is exactly what you were getting at John and that's the business side of it. So you take this technology and then you think about how do you innovatively bring this to bear from a delivery model standpoint that makes it a lot more seamless and easy for a customer to integrate in his or her ecosystem and that's the business side of future ready. So Grav, I like the way you talk about blending sort of the old and the new. Gartner has this concept of hybrid IT. I like the way you described it better. I mean, sometimes I feel like that's more stovepipes. How do you communicate that from a marketing standpoint? What's, that's new in sort of a mega trend. How has marketing to the enterprise changed and how do you communicate that? So from a pure messaging standpoint, a lot of the messaging is around the notion of converged because converge does help bridge that gap between traditional and new IT. A lot of messaging around the hybrid cloud, right? Most of the noise you see around cloud in the market today is a lot about the public cloud. However, more and more customers are coming to the realization that not everything can be ported onto the public cloud. There are requirements around governance, SLAs, cost, security, and all of that stuff that needs to be taken into consideration before you make a call. And we see the world definitely trending towards hybrid cloud. So a lot of the messaging you see from us is very, very pointed at the notion of converged and bringing together traditional and new IT, excuse me, at the notion of a hybrid cloud and those environments. That's the big change you see from a marketing standpoint. How about, can you have some fun with it? We're here in Austin, kind of a cool town. Do the consumer guys have all the fun in marketing or can the enterprise tech guys have some fun too? Oh, I think in the last, I think in the last three years or so, I think it's the enterprise guys who are having all the fun. Because I mean, look at it. Yeah, mobility is a key trend, but think about the power of mobility and think about the requirement. Like, let's take video. The answer is not how do you get a device in the hands of 20,000 people. The answer is how do you get 20,000 VMs up and running at eight AM on Monday morning so you have a productive sales force? Who gets all the glory there? The enterprise guys. Because you need a bunch of server storage networking that sits behind it to make this possible. Yeah, they might have their shiny objects, but at the end of the day I think what's getting really exciting is what's happening in the world of enterprise now. So what are some of the things that you're proud of? Some wins that you can point to in the last 12, 18 months that you want to share with the audience? From a marketing standpoint in general, the one, and then I'll talk about industry trends, not particularly Dell, but the one amazing thing we have seen is just the rise of social media as a venue to generate high value engagements with our customers. It is unbelievable. The power of search and the criticality of your first face to the customer, which is your website, 70% of CIOs that we talk to in any point of research start off by doing a search. It's actually funny. If you go into one of the Dell World Breakouts, you will see this. You'll see the presenter talk something about a topic and you'll see a person on the phone go immediately to Google or whatever they're, you know, think of choices and boom, they enter that. And hey, if you're not one of the first clicks right there, right, and if you don't have a nice website that truly shows your capability and gets the customer excited, you don't get the second thing which has enabled people across the globe to get their message out there. At one point in time, media was all about spend and the highest spend you had, the more money you had, it's not there anymore. That's exciting. One of the reports that we were tracking down is that mobiles change even Google's business model. So, but Google, the big money machine and driving leads and demand gen, Dave, we know this, we talk about it all the time. 50% of people on a mobile phone don't do Google searches. So, I mean, just think about the consequences to Google's business just on the mobility piece, right? So, you take that forward to social media, this is how people are doing business now. They're doing business with connecting to their peers, connecting with authentic, community-based, Internet of Things as people. So, there's a persona, we heard that on stage today from the marketing. Javier, it was amazing, it's like persona-based, but it's a real interest graph. It's not social graph, it's an interest graph. And see, that's one of the key exciting trends in marketing and that goes well beyond the consumer space. That gets really into the enterprise space. I mean, imagine how exciting it is to be able to talk about a cloud-value proposition through a website or a tweet to a customer and then generate high-value engagement. That's just exciting, right? Well, we're super excited too. You know, we love, we love to engage, we love to have the videos out there, we put content out there. How is that changing marketing? Because now, there's operational aspects of social, and you guys have been a leader in social. Still, it's evolving. Even social, what it was proclaimed by the high priests of social media consultancies just a few years ago is now that bloom is not coming on. It's a data-driven world. You need to have data to back it up if you want to pour more dollars in. So Google's going to lose half their business roughly on mobile, which is essentially social. How do you operationalize from infrastructure to personnel? I mean, how do you put your arms around this? Well, that's exactly what we have done for the past three or four years. We've got a social media activation center, Addel, SMAC, right? And we literally measure, in real-time, sentiment. And it could be a customer break-fix issue right down to a high-value engagement because they'll send out a message or a press release or something like that. And we've been doing that for the last five years. And we actually have a consulting practice for other companies around social media activation, social media learning, social media following, and a lot of that stuff. So we do believe we have a bit of an advantage. But you're right, that world literally changes on the R, every R. So you just got to stay really on top of it. What's your advice to marketers around this data-driven ROI base? Because everyone's seeking for that data-driven, holy grail moment where they could say, oh my God, I'm actually going to put $5 to $10 million behind a campaign. Not just throw away money. Social has been mostly dominated by PR buzz, throw some lightweight content out there. But now with the engagement models and systems of engagement and cognitive computing, machine learning, you can now start to get a feel for some of the things we've been showing you today. Which is like, okay, this is ROI. This is real social business. So the key message I would give to marketers across the globe is just think about these trends and imagine how you can market more effectively through these trends. The trend of digital is a huge trend and it's changing fundamentally the buying behavior. At the end of the day, you have to go back to how the customer buys and you have to be able to target customers. Because guess what? If you look at television as a medium of advertising and I'm not saying television is not effective anymore. However, it's not targeted. If you want to hit the CIOs and you go with the television broadcast message, you're going to hit the CIOs maybe, but you're going to hit a billion other people. So your cost per lead is going to go completely out of whack. How do you bring that cost per lead down and generate high value engagements? Digital is that next barrier. And being really open across all the vehicles, digital offers, right from search to social, to generate those high value engagements and targeted TV honestly. There's a lot of cable providers that provide you targeted TV. That's going to be the next holy grail. Getting that right is going to be able to get your message at a comparatively lower cost to exactly the folks you want to target. So you guys are doing also a good job of what I call owned media, owned, earned and paid. Paid is easy. You've got to try to check, there's a lot of different outlets, owned media, you've got to create experience, you've got Dell Live here, which is your own TV studio, you've got earned media like theCUBE, you've got Bloomberg, you've got bloggers out there. The interaction between those two, the intersection between those concentric circles is where the magic is. Is that exactly where the magic is? And that's a collaborative environment. How do you find that magic? How do you connect into it? As a company that has budget, you're balancing all the paid owned and earned, but getting at that center point. That center point can only be got when you have intimate knowledge about what your customer's buyer journey is. If you don't understand how your customer buys, then you will never get to that concentric circle, because you will not know what steps to take at what part of that cycle. So intimate knowledge about how your customer functions, how they search, what attributes are they looking for? That's what gets you to that concentric circle and generates the high value engagement. Gaurav, what are your thoughts on EMC from a standpoint of bringing together some of their capabilities? They've got EMC TV, they've got all these viral videos with Ferraris jumping underneath jumping trucks. Lotus. Lotus. Lotus. 54 million views. Lotus. Right, huge, right? People getting stuffed in the MiniCoopers. So talk about having a lot of fun with B2B. What are your thoughts on EMC from a marketing standpoint and how you'll be able to work with them, leverage that capability? From what, as a competitor honestly, which they were, till very recently, right? I've seen EMC also evolve heavily. They were a lot in traditional media at one point in time. Now you see a lot of YouTube, a lot of Google+, a lot of those kind of marketing types, which is exactly where Dell is. So I think there are a lot of synergies out there in terms of how they approach the audience and how we approach the audience. Now, we got to figure out how to bring all of that together, right? Get into the tools and all of that kind of stuff. Because the tools is a critical path to getting a lot of that capability. And in all honesty, this is literally a week old, right? So there's not a lot to think and say. You're still a candidate. Actually, Marius and Michael were complimenting on EMC, their process, they're really good with strategy and process, but the thing that they're really good at is the good at kind of knowing where the wind's blowing. And their marketing, and Jeremy Burton was done over there, he's made it fun. I mean, they're blowing up V-Max's and dropping stuff out of an airplane. They've been doing big on events. That's the amazing thing I see about EMC. Because remember, we were in that relationship for a good seven, eight, nine years, right? Marketing then at EMC was very different. Marketing today at EMC is extremely different. A lot more digital, a lot more taking the most complex pieces of an infrastructure and kind of making fun. I'm not making fun, but making them fun. Which is kind of cool. I think you're pointing about the consensus about knowing the people. It's a people-centric web, right? It's a people web now. And the people web is about relationships. And having that data and that insight, it's the semantics that's contextual and behavioral. I mean, that's how search started, right? Behavior and context. So I think managing those two variables is really hard. It's like, still it's early days. I mean, to me, you guys are pioneers in this, but most other companies in the digital transformation have not even scratched the surface on how to operationalize this. How to put budget behind it, how to put personnel. Yeah, and I mean, look, I mean, in all honesty, most companies approach social media or digital marketing as, hey, if I put a tweet out there, I'm social. Now, it's not that. I mean, there are so many components to this. There are so many vehicles that are on the rise. You've got to look at all of that. You've got to compare that to your customer's buyer journey, the buyer's journey, and then intersect it in the right way. It changes, it must change your own media strategy, too, I'd imagine, because if you know that the customer is talking to their peers, because now it's frictionless, the connected web, as Michael said, you know, the world can be for the better or worse, depending on how you play it out, but assume that people are connected. You assume they're talking, right? So you can't just shovel a message at them because they're going to talk to their friend. Hey, Dave, what do you think about that? Gara's message, yeah. I don't believe it. I do believe it. That's complete bullshit. Or that's interesting, I want more information. I like these people, I want to buy for people what I like. That's I want, I'm a tribal person. Most people are tribal, right? So do you see that similar dynamic going on where that outbound message has to change the copy strategy or the orientation, at least of the content? It definitely has to, I mean, think about this, right? You have a 45 minute presentation with a customer in an executive briefing center. You go in there with 20 slides, as opposed to you've got literally seven seconds through a tweet to communicate something to a customer. Those two messages are fundamentally different. However, it all comes back to understanding your customer, understanding the buy journey and understanding how they purchase. If you don't have the depth of that persona conversation that we were just having, if you don't have that depth, you're never going to be able to hit them the right way and you're never going to be very effective. And we talk about this all the time on theCUBE because we're out there with this authentic raw media flying all over the place. What we found, and Dave and I kind of scratch our heads all the time and look at this because it's so interesting. If you get someone's attention and they opt in and learn more, because it's an opt-in, oh, it's always opt-in. Whether you're looking through or whatever, you get someone's attention and they opt in to trust you. That's the new opt-in. You can't blow that moment. So it's okay to get attention, but you have to have a trustful linchpin to some experience. And you boil exactly that simplest of examples, pull versus push marketing. At one point in time, marketing was 100% push. Today, with digital, it is pretty much pull-oriented. And to that point, I pull a customer through whatever vehicle and I get him or her to click on a link that takes it to a web property that points to the technology that I was talking about. If that web property is not exactly what the customer was looking for, you just lost that engagement right there. Because they're going to say bye to you, right there. And that's... You got to understand people to understand business today. You're not going to do business. But people think the attention economy is the way to get leads, but my point is that it's a one-trick pony, but it works like a flywheel. If you get the trust going, then enrolls, right? Then you have a relationship. It builds on itself. It builds on itself. And that's a sustainable content marketing strategy. But I think, too, a mistake that a lot, and I'd love for you to comment this, a lot of companies make the mistake. In my view, of trying to figure out, okay, what is it that the customer wants to hear? And then let's try to change what we say and craft it so they'll believe us. And that, to me, doesn't work. What you want to do is say, okay, here's who we are. It's fine people who believe in that, believe in what you believe. Look, I think, Dave, that is spot-on. I've seen this happen again and again and again where companies pose themselves as somebody they are not. And at some point in time in that experience journey, that will hurt them. It blows up. The whole future-ready enterprise, why was it so thoughtful is because we based it on technology. It is a manifestation of how we think about the world evolving, how we think about our customers evolving, and what does our technology stand for? It's trace true. So, when you ask me to give examples, whether it be the FX2 or the Vertex or a hybrid cloud strategy, the CPS system that Michael announced on stage today, every last piece of it points back to future-ready. And I keep that message sustained throughout. So, at no point in time do I break that experience. The moment you break that experience, that's when you lost it. Well, there's also, to your point, and to build on that is the transparency aspect. And I think one of the things that, in addition to just marketing, but in the technology world, open source has changed the game because open source has created from a tier two, tier three, we're radicals back in the 90s, doing some stuff when I was growing up with open source. Main stream. It was an alternative. You got it for free. You didn't have to pay for it. Now it's tier one. Open source has created a communal relationship in the technology world. So, it's not a marketing concept per se, but it's a similar dynamic where the transparency really is the marketing, right? Yep. Yeah. Oh, great. Well, Dave, we just solved all the marketing problems for the acquisition. Well, but think about this conversation. Think about how different it is today than even five, six years ago. Oh yeah, definitely. It's night and day. Night and day. Yeah, no question. I mean, when Jeremy Burton came in, one of the things he did was, I'll never forget this at EMC, 2010, he was the new CMO, and EMC had really kind of poor messaging. He basically would talk to us and talk to a lot of people and he goes, cloud and big data. It was hot trends at the time. And all he created in marketing campaign, cloud meets big data. They didn't have any cloud or big data, but they just messaged to their customer, that was their guiding principle. But all they had to do was put that flag up. But it was a lightning rod. It was a stake in the ground. But think about this tree, Jeremy Burton. EMC used to talk about, here's my BNX. Yeah. Here's my symmetrical. Product feeds feeds. And now, and now he's bought that overarching picture to EMC, which is what we have done at Dell also is bring that overarching picture around the future ready enterprise. And then bake in the cloud story, the mobility story, the security story, and the big data story within that piece. So the enterprise story, really. Final question for you, because Michael brought it up. Actually, Marius brought up, we asked Michael same thing. This was a quote that was too good. Oh, there's a lot of consolidation, you know, the merger, I think it's going to be slicing and dicing. But still, it's a 67 billion dollar acquisition, huge workload coming. And Marius said, it's an all you can eat or all you can work environment as the employee model. So you guys have a lot of work. So there's no doubt you're going to be big. Your market's probably going to explode. There's going to be a lot of marketing activity, a lot of brand marketing, all kinds of new things going on. Tighten everything, you got to bring it together. But there's a lot of work to do. Share some color into the order of magnitude of work that needs to get done. Because it's going to be a great opportunity for employees, partners to whoever can execute the best and do good work, roll those sleeves up, we'll get promoted, we'll do good work, take on new territory, and the slackers will be identified. I mean, I mean to boil it down to that. But think about it just purely from a customer segmentation standpoint. The reach it gives Dell into G500, G1000, G2000 spaces. The reach it gives EMC into the small, medium business sector. Think about how those marketing models have to evolve and all the work that has to go in there in terms of talking to a completely different audience. Both the companies have been used to talking to for a long time. That in itself is a massive, it's almost coming up with marketing for a brand new company with a tremendous amount of reach. Think about the capability from an end-to-end solution standpoint. That message has to say, because now we actually have the capability to bring all of that to bear. I mean, that's going to be super exciting. And when I say marketing, I'm talking about the core messaging down to the mark-com, the vehicle activation, the persona identification, the buyer journey identification, and all of those places. And that entire sales motion or customer buying motion needs to be re-taught through. And that in itself is a tremendous and herculean task. But hey, we're excited about this. We are all in. You got some work to do. Yep, we're excited about this. This is going to be fun. Garav, thanks so much for taking the time sharing your perspective. Great to riff with you about future marketing on theCUBE here. Well, I guess we'll put this under the future of social business, future of marketing here inside theCUBE at Dell World. Again, cutting edge, pushing the envelope. Thanks so much for sharing your insight. Thank you so much. Okay, we'll be right back more with more queue here at Dell World at this short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.