 It's theCUBE and we're back. Day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. 2023 from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We've had, we always have great conversations. I always say that, it's my kind of default, but it's true. And we love having alumni come back talking with us about how customer needs and priorities are changing and what Dell is doing to respond. Yeah, shout out to John Furrier, who's got FOMO. He's at Red Hat Summit in Boston. I know he's kind of bummed, John, that you weren't able to interview Michael. But hey, we're thinking about you. And that's what happens when theCUBE is so busy. We've got multiple shows going on in the same week. We are pleased to welcome back two alumni with us. Doug Schmidt is here, President of Dell Technology Services and Satish Iyer is here as well. VP of Emerging Services, Dell Technology Services. It's great to have you both back on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Well, it's great to be back. Thank you for having us. So this event is, here we are day three. This room is packed. People are happy to be here. They've been hearing a lot of innovations, but we know, Doug, I want to start with you first. Customer priorities are changing in a lot of ways. From a services standpoint, what are some of the ways in which Dell Technologies is responding to this customer's priorities that are shifting? Well, I think maybe just a little bit about the services, what we believe some of our advantages are to help with those trends. We're over 60,000 team members, both direct and indirect in 170 countries. And we are able to service our customers in over 50 languages with an asset and stale base that we're servicing of over 250 million. The reason I bring that up before getting to your question on the trends, which is very important is it gives us very big ears, a very wide range to see and hear what our customers are seeing with the issues they're having around technology and how they want to use technology to deliver their outcomes. So when you stand back, we really just recently issued a forester research on what customers were seeing and hearing in their technology environments. About 71% said that what they're seeing is a speed up of these five trends. And the trends really start with basically what you're hearing security. You've heard that a lot here. I noticed just right behind us is a great security exhibit. So that'd be the first one. The second one would be around multi-cloud. Helping our customers deliver to this end to end is very, very important for us. So it's a big piece of where our customers want to go, whether it's coming down from the cloud into the back to the data center or the data center into the cloud. We can help our customers achieve that. The third one, the edge. You've heard a great deal about this. Look, this is all bringing it down to a retail store, for example, where we're helping our customers with what's stocked on the shelf, the cash registers themselves, our customers, us, walking through the store, being able to help them with specials is what's going on. That edge is real. And helping our customers deploy that so that they can get the outcome is important. The fourth trend that customers are dealing with is really around the hybrid work. That's still with us. And they're looking for someone like Dell to help them manage that PC laptop lifecycle. How do you get it to us already with the image loaded? How do you help us get it deployed? How do you help us all the way down to the asset recovery? And we can help them with that. The fifth one that's really important is be a trusted advisor and help us navigate this. And we're able to do that with the end to end services that we have everything from consulting all the way back down through the asset recovery side. Is that typically Doug, where it starts with that last one that you mentioned that we're going to start up front, do some planning, and then figure out which of these are your priorities? That's a very good question. The reason it's a good question is, that's what I actually, we thought as we were building out more and more of these solutions as the consulting side. I'll be honest, it can start in a lot of different ways. We had a lot of customers come to us during the hybrid work, during COVID, and they needed help right away on the client side and they saw what we could do. Then they come back and they want you to help you on a broader project. In the multi-cloud space, yes, I would say they're coming to us and they are asking for the help of cloud by design. I would tell you it's all, they can enter in many places on the services side. I'm actually surprised. Another key place, by the way, is security. When a customer needs help, they may not be using you in all the services we have, but once an incident happens and we're helping them, they're like, okay, we need to step back and design this. So different entry points in the journey, interesting. Yeah, very much so. Satish, comment, VP of Emerging Services, comment on what Dell is doing, how is it preparing to help customers meet future needs that they might not be able to forecast right now? Absolutely, so within Emerging Services, our focus is primarily to look at those strategic areas. Doc talked about the five core priorities in our services operate. So we are primarily focused on multi-cloud. You saw a lot of offers yesterday being announced on multi-cloud and Apex, that transformations are cloud for customers. We're also focused on telecom and 5G, so there's massive transformation within telecommunication ecosystems in terms of disaggregation. So Dell actually is participating in the network domain of telecom. And then lastly, everything is being automated. Our customers want outcomes, our customers want automation of the managed services. They want us to do the heavy lifting, right? So our focus within Emerging Services has been to look at all these growth strategic priorities between talking about the last two days, what does it mean in services? How do services need to change and adapt to those new things? And that's basically our number one focus in Emerging and that basically comes with talking to the customer and driving to the customer with the specific outcomes in these specific areas. I love the services conversation. I always say it's where the rubber meets the road, it's where the value is actually realized. The other area you mentioned is Edge, Telco. We were at MWC 23, World Congress, and the whole discussion was about the stacked disaggregation in Telco. It's going to take a long time because it's Telco, highly regulated, it works, and so they don't want to disrupt that. But what's the state of that? Are you getting dragged into a lot of engagements? Is it more in the planning phase? Or is it, are there, you see some disruptors that are doing some things like dish networks that are maybe a little bit, you know, leaning in. What are you seeing in that whole space? Go ahead, Satish, she's got back from Mobile World. Yeah, so just continue our conversations we had in MWC. So look, like you rightfully said, the rigor and the diligence in Telcom space is really, really critical. It's a very standardized approach. In terms of what's happening, the way I think about this is cloud is coming to the Telco world. So Telcom companies are learning from the cloud world how they can actually pick the best in class and then make sure that actually drives an outcome. So this disaggregation, they are not licking them what really end-to-end monolithic systems they used to in the house. They're saying, who brings the best compute? What kind of specialized compute I need? If I want to go to open ecosystem, open Telcom ecosystem is what we call. Then I want to have the best in class radio. I want to pick the best in class core. I want to pick the best in compute all over myself. I want somebody to bring it all together. So I think that's happening and that transformation is already starting, right? And we talked about DISH Networks. It's one of our strategic partners in the US. DISH is building out the next generation 5G network and they will be done with 7% by FTC mandate by middle of June, right? And we are a strategic partner for DISH so we are working with them. So to me, I mean, it's a journey, right? We are in it to win it and we think it's a massive opportunities for Dell to be that strategic advisor and the player as Telcom companies transform and I think we have a great start. So it's obviously, it's the year of AI, LLMs and generative AI and GPTs and so forth. It may be the decade or the, I don't know, century. We'll see. How much of the conversations in services are around? I mean, I'm sure a lot of the sales folks are talking about it for sure. Exploration and where can we apply? How can Dell help? But what are you hearing from services, engagements in terms of LLMs and AI? There's two angles to that for us. First one is what we're actually doing internally with our services team. And then as you're asking about what are the customers then asking, and you know, we have, we've learned a tremendous amount over the last three to four years. We've really started working on the data science, the pulling of the data together, leveraging that, digitizing our processes to pull our mold data down, and then actually analyzing all of that through BI, business intelligence to know exactly where our errors are at right away and feeding that back to our team members right away. Then with the telemetry we're pulling down with our customers, you know, through all of the things that the systems are using, what we're seeing is they're asking, what it's going to drive is additional outcomes that the customers want. And what I mean by that is, I think you're going to see intelligence as a service. So it used to be probably just five years ago that edge example I gave you, we would go in and deploy the cash register, we would deploy the handhelds, the Wi-Fi, all of those things, and you're, you know, the optiplex, everything you need to run it. Well now they're coming in saying, well you have all the data of when people are running the cash register. Tell us when we need to staff. Intelligence is, the data is there, I think generative AI to your point is going to speed all that up and people are going to actually say, we want you to help us identify what we need to be running better in our business model, not just the technology side. So your companies, I mean IBM, there's a big news, I'm going to defer, I guess, I don't really know exactly whether it was, they were going to be able to cut, I think it was through attrition, 7,200 people that AI would replace, it was interesting, it wasn't Watson AI, it was AI, so anyway it's kind of a snarky analyst comment but throw that away. Are you seeing, I mean, IBM more of a services company really than a product company? In your world, are you seeing a similar dynamic or is it more, hey we're going to be able to redeploy those people for, you know, new strategic areas, how do you think about that? That's a good question. And look, we've been scaling with AI BI inside services literally for the last five years. It's not new to you. It's not, it's in Dell's nature to really look at those, how we can be efficiently delivering what the customer values and remove the things that the customer does not value. And, but look, I do think what we're going to find is for service people like myself and Satish and the other 60,000 of us, it's going to be a great tool to get in front of the customer more. We spend a great deal of time today. Think about somebody writing a services RF response back for an RFQ. Any of these things that are going on, getting the data to help a customer, the data logs, instead of data logs, you're getting immediately what's wrong. So the answer is we will scale with that but I think what you're going to find is generative AI is going to be an excellent tool to allow us to spend more time in front of the customer instead of gathering the information. Satish, comment on the customer loop. Doug was talking about the breadth and the size of the reach of Dell Technology Services and the big ears, I love that analogy. Talk about though, the customer, share with us how are customers involved in providing that feedback to help determine what some of those emerging services are going to become. Yeah, I mean, look, I'll give you two examples, right? One is, you know, Doug talked about Dell services, especially being that advisor, that trusted advisor and partner. You know, Trident Proposal Management is a company, a customer of ours. Very, very small, right? They help other small companies get federal contracts, right? So as you know, if you need to bid for federal contracts, it's a quite complicated process if you're a small company. So it's a small company helping a lot of other small companies. So they come to us, so they are very small, they're very distributed across the country, right? So they come to us and say, look, for them, they wanted, you know, technology, a provider, a trust advisor, for them to be able to do ITS. They don't have their own IT department, they want ITS as a service. So they leverage Apex Devices as a service from Dell, right? So what that enables them to do is basically simple stuff, but it keeps all their employees up to date on technology in terms of their IT assets. It also gives them the security because they are dealing with a lot of federal contracts, a lot of security postures. They don't need to worry about all of that stuff. It's fundamentally, I think, taking some of that pain away from the customers so that we can actually bear and drive that, right? Sorry, Doug. Go ahead, please, Satish. No, the other extreme, and I want to add to what Doug was talking about in the AI space, right? So one of the things, if you see the announcements yesterday with Project Helix, we did with NVIDIA, right, is a lot of customers are going to look at these infrastructures, these things which are custom made for these, you know, generative AI solutions. They're going to deploy it on-prem. They're going to deploy it in color, right? So we are going to play massively in that space with NVIDIA. Managing and developing these models are quite complex. They are not simple, right? We talk about how much developers are going to spend time creating these new models versus managing that ecosystem of this model-building model management. That's where services can help, right? So we actually have managed services where we actually can take the entire machine learning DevOps cycle, the complexity away from that, right? Just like the Trident example, how do I make sure, this is much more complex ecosystem, but how do we make sure that we give that customer the choice so that customers can worry about building and taking those models out rather than worrying about the complexity of governing those, right? Those are two extreme examples, but I think that's kind of where I think Dell, now we can actually help our customers. Maybe just, this may be two nuts and bolts, but I love nuts and bolts on getting down into the business. To answer your question, even more specifically one level below that double click is every week we look at the, what the customer are sending to us for what they want for a solution, right there. The second thing we're doing is we talk once a week with all of their consultants of what they're working on and what they're seeing the customers need or want. And then we combine those two and we literally rank them. Something is new, something is wow, we're seeing more of this volume and it moves up to where we productize it even more. And that's just a cycle, so we're constantly getting that feedback. Literally weekly. And then working with PG as well on the product side with that. And that's just part of Dell's DNA from what I understand. It is, we love it. How much of a problem, how much of a priority is it for your customers right now in this day and age, given the macro environment, all the other things that they got to worry about, cyber, et cetera. How much of a priority is fixing their multi-cloud problem? And for those customers where it is a priority, are there any patterns, are there any industry or a situation where it's more acute that you've noticed? You want to? Yeah, sure. Go ahead. So, I mean, look, multi-cloud by design, right? We talked about it. We know from the get go, we want our customers have a choice. And one of the things that we talk about is we are multi-cloud by design that means our customers also want to know where, what workloads to put where, right? What makes sense where, right? Do we do this in on-prem? Do we do this in Colo? Are these things better for public cloud, right? So, at the end of the day, it's all about having the right solutions for the customers to be able to support in that journey. That's as simple as it gets. Multi-cloud, to me, it also may cause for some interesting architectures in terms of how our customers view their outcomes. And that's another area where, you know, customers have choices and they have implementations. But when you marry that with what is already there, right? A lot of our customers, especially the global 500s and 1000s, have massive, you know, they have a lot of complicated implementations today. How do you basically adapt those? How do you transform those into this new design? That's a big opportunity and that's also another area where they are talking to us quite a bit. And I do think those trends, to follow up on that we talked about earlier, the economic environment we're on right now, I believe will speed those trends up to your point. That tends to be what we see is our customers are leaning into technology, the digitalization of the multi-cloud because it helps them get to their end result faster. Have, I guess I haven't, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Have customers figured out the sort of future of work, the hybrid work, still tweaking it, the model, Dell itself is still figuring out, right? Is that a fair thing? It's like the pen is a little sort of. The amplitude is maybe getting less, but it's still a little tweaking going on. I think that's very fair. I mean, look, we, this all happened globally. If you would have asked me before, if this could have happened, it would have been something out of a sci-fi movie. I mean, literally overnight. I think it was actually. Yeah, not one that I want to watch again. True, don't watch The Terminator. Yeah. So it happened overnight, and I think now we're finding what the new normal is, and you're right, it's a journey. And it's tweaking with what works for all of us and listening to our team members really. This is really listening to what they want, what they need, and how are we finding the best solution to make that happen? So what is the impact? Cause for a while I thought, wow, this is going to be permanent. And it still is in many cases. I mean, you look at the vacancy rates in San Francisco and even New York. So it is quasi-permanent. And so that forced a march to remote and it changed a lot of things. Cyber, you guys, it's been well discussed. And then the headquarters were underfunded. We saw a big spike. We sort of came back. And let me ask you this. For the ones that are settled on their hybrid, we got Taco Tuesday, we got cheaper healthcare and they're getting people to come in on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, let's say. For those guys, have they settled on their infrastructure or are they still trying to harden it in a way that is optimized for this future of work? Well, first of all, yes they are. And I think back to those five. Security, we just launched what we call our managed detection 2.0, which is helping our customers manage their endpoint security. So yes, and we're seeing them, they love that service by the way. So that becomes, security becomes as you get more distributed as you know that gets to be even more important. And then on the hybrid specifically, when you talk about desktops, notebooks, getting people enabled to do their work, what customers are now asking us for, wait, this is managing all this when it's this distributed, help us Dell. And that's what we have with our Apex as a service, which you saw launched, but also now our lifecycle management. So you can get connected provisioning. So if somebody pops up their PC, you're not doing second touch anymore. And all the way to helping them, we, meaning helping the customer manage that all the way to the asset end of life. So I think what you're seeing to get to your question is, is that they're not finding value in managing that day to day and they do know it's distributed and they're asking Dell to help them do that. They're helping Dell to do that. Good business opportunity, right? I mean, it's, as always, right? It's a heavy lifting that they don't want to do and happy to let you guys do it because you're doing it better and more efficiently. Yeah, well, yeah. And better experience for their team members as well. So, right. Satish, wrap us, take us home with your crystal ball or maybe it's a magic eight ball. I like both. About what's coming next for services, for Dell Technology Services? I think one, we are absolutely going to be focused on our core strategic priorities, right? We are very focused on basically making, helping and being a trust advice for our customers. That takes various shapes and forms in terms of, you know, return to work, hybrid work, like we talked about what does that mean for our customers? What does that mean for the journey? It also means adopting and driving to the new technology areas. And that talked about in AI, like, what does it mean for us, right? What do we do? And where do we start, right? I think some of this stuff, again, it also applies internally to us in terms of how we can actually take advantage of these technologies to be better. But that's also more important to say, where are these customers in their journey and how do we help them? Multi-Cloud is another example, right? And there are products and assets and portfolios which we are working with our product teams on. But it's also about what do I have in my current customers' estate, right? What do I have in my IT estate today? How do I actually make them cloud-ready, right? So we talked about some of the offers like Managed Dev Cloud and Managed Services, where we are actually developing this capability, say, we can actually help you take your existing base, existing infrastructure, and get it up to a level where it feels like cloud-like, right? So I think it's a mix of bringing new assets, new products, new services to the market, but it's also helping our customers bridge the gap in terms of some of these market transitions we talked about. Yeah, and helping them help enable their customers. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, talking about how customers' priorities are changing and those five key ways in which Jella is responding. We will definitely keep her eye on Dell Technology Services. Thank you so much, Doug and Satish. Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having me, guys. Thank you, appreciate it. All right, for our guests and Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. We have a short break, but after the break, Ash McCarty's going to join us. Going to talk about all things multi-cloud, from default to design, and how VxRail is adding sustainability specifically for edge use cases. We'll see you after a short break.