 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's third year at WTG Transform 2019, which is the Winslow Technologies Group, their user conference, a long time compelling customer, of course, compelling, bought by Dell, Dell, bought EMC. So it's now the Dell EMC user event, and to help me kick off a day of content where we're gonna be talking to some of the WTG executives, some of their customers, and some of their partners, is first time guest on the program, Joe Patista, who's a Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies. Joe, appreciate you making it all the way in from the suburbs to come here to downtown Boston in the shadow of Fenway. It was a long haul this morning, with no traffic at 5.30, quick 35 minutes in. Yeah, it's, as I say for the people at Dell, it's about the distance from Boston to where we live, as it is to go from Austin to Round Rock. So, you know, similar types of things. So, Joe, I have to start, Creatologist. Yes, sir. You know, I did a little bit of reading, and, you know, having watched your keynote, it's, you know, sparking that creativity. So I love the idea of it. You've had this title for quite a while, since before you were at Dell. Just give us a little bit of background of, you know, what you do, and, you know, why you're qualified to do it. It's kind of, it's a fun brand, but literally it sits at the nexus of business and technology, and my job simply is to help IT re-image the business, because now every company is a technology company. So what does that look like? So, I get involved in all sorts of really cool problems, opportunities that customers are facing, by re-imaging IT. Well, it's funny that you say re-image, because when I did my history, the oldest thing I found some article from the 90s, talking about somebody from Polaroid that had that title, and I was actually talking to some of the young people in the office, and they were like, everybody's using Polaroids these days, it's cool, it's retro, and they're doing it. So what's old is new again, you know, everything comes back together. Joe, luckily, you know, our industry, I mean, nothing changes, right? You know, it's the same now as it was 10 years ago, 100 years ago, you know, all just going to the factory and pumping things out, no? Still, you know, I've been around for a long time, and in the old days, we had swim lanes, right? You know, you thought about certain vendors, they were in swim lanes. Now, today, with the influx of cash, as I was talking about, and the level of innovation cycle time, and how the industry's become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity index has increased exponentially, and the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerated. So no, it hasn't gotten easier, it's gotten more difficult. Yeah, fascinating, actually, I just heard a segment on our national public radio station here at Boston talking about that one of the biggest changes and how people think over the last few decades is we're better at recognizing patterns. It used to be we could be an expert on something and do our thing, you know, we know the old trope is, well, you know, my grandfather, you know, worked at a company for 30 years and did his same thing today, things are changing constantly, you know, we didn't have the power of a supercomputer in our pocket, you know, 10 years ago, you know, let alone even older. So, you know, this is a user conference, so, you know, what are they to do? I mean, if I understand, if I'm, you know, making a decision today for my business, and oftentimes that decision is something I need to live with for a while, how do I make sure that I'm making the right decisions that's going to keep me, you know, you know, keeping up with the competition and keeping my business moving forward as things constantly change? Yeah, so there is no easy answer to that question. There's a couple of thoughts, and as I said in the presentation, you got to look at these vectors that impact the trajectory of the thinking, and I love the Peter Drucker code, right? If you're using yesterday's logic, you're probably going to get in trouble. You have to rethink the logic. In the example I gave was the high jumper and how we did high jumping before and after 1968. The Fosberg Fond, absolutely. So the question becomes, what are those vectors? And I went through some of those vectors to help people think about, okay, I do my analysis on technology, that's all good, and at Dell Technologies, we've got a huge portfolio of technology, but how do you think about the perimeter about how those things change over depreciation cycle? So I was trying to add a little bit more color in their thought processes. And I got a lot of post questions afterwards and a lot of engagement, so it seemed to resonate with the field. And I'll tell you what, the thing that they liked the most was the business conversation of IT. They're like, you know, we don't do that enough. Yeah, right, I mean, you know, when we look at the successful companies today, it is not, you know, we've been talking for years, does IT matter? Is IT just a cost center? And it needs to be, if IT isn't helping the business drive forward and responding to what the business needs, IT could be replaced. That's where we got shadow IT. It's IT can't be the know or the slow. It needs to be when the business says we need to go, get on board and drive. I love one of the analogies you used is, you know, in this world of complexity, there's so many things out there. You know, when I've worked with, you know, enterprises and small companies, you look at their environments and it's like, oh my God, it's this heterogeneous mess. You know, how do we standardize things? How do we make things easier? You had a fun little analogy talking about space. Maybe you could share that audience. Yeah, I always try to use visuals as much as possible. So I like what the challenge is. So the challenge was, oh, I actually have it in my pocket. So I pulled this out. And basically what it is, if you look at the international space shuttle, that's the only thing that they need to fix anything on the space shuttle. Seven, 16th inch socket or the millimeter version of it. I can't read it because I don't have my glasses on to fix anything. So imagine if IT had one tool to fix anything. That's nirvana. That's not reality because I have tool fatigue. So I need to get to that simplicity. It's glasses law. Remember every 25% increase in function is 100% increase in complexity. And that's public enemy number one for us. All right, so Joe, you hopped on board the Dell family relatively recently. When most people think of Dell, it's, well, Dell PCs, talk to my parents. They're like, they know Dell computers. They've used them forever. You talk to most people, oh, Dell servers and the like. You talked a lot about in your presentation, software is eating the world. So give us how, where Dell fits in that software is eating the world picture. Well, what I can tell you though is I was absolutely amazed when I did my due diligence about all the innovation that happens in this company. Phenomenal, not only about the hardware but the software. Jeff actually, Jeff said it best. I think we have more software engineers now that we have hardware engineers. So the pivots there, we're pivoting our talent to the software. But it's the innovation that's in this company. And I think I kind of rattled off a couple of statistics by how much we spend the quantity of IP that we have. And I think customers are amazed at that innovation. But the supercharger on is, okay, how does the innovation apply to the business mechanics of the company and what value do you extract from that? And that's where the whole language and conversation usually happens with us. I will tell you though, I'm really excited that Dell technology is kind of doubling down on business outcomes. They're really trying to change the culture and helping customers understand what the technology means. Yeah, one of the things that struck me, I've been to this event now for a couple of years and there's a lot of product discussion here. When you get down to the channel, it's like, okay, great, I'm doing a server refresh, I'm looking at things like HyperGenverge, what am I doing in my network? When you up-level things a little bit, when I went to Dell World, it's like, yeah, we hear about the venture, activity that's happening around and things like IoT coming down the pipe. But how does that trickle down to the customers that you talk at event here? It's great to talk about innovation, but I got to run my business. Where does Dell fit in that picture for customers? Well, as a customer, you got to do both, right? So there's got to be a shift because now I have to think differently, right? I know how to do feature analysis or benefit analysis of a point in time product. But what's the periphery of activities that is impacting, impacting that decision? Does that architecture scale? What are the economics around that? So you need to think about all those things and I think it's just a journey for not only us as a vendor, but also for customers as well. Okay, so you're relatively new in to Dell. I want to ask you, you gave a great quote in your presentation from Jack Welsh. He said, if the rate of change outside the company is greater than inside the company, the end is near. Yeah, well, I would say you're toast. So explain to us the pace of change inside of Dell technologies. Well, you know, that's a big question. I mean, pace of change varies by organization, by business unit. I really can't comment on individual business units, but I will say though, there's a definite desire to understand where customer centricity is there. So what's the customer trying to do and then how do we satisfy the customer request? As a matter of fact, I don't know if you know this and this is amazing because as with the customer the other day, you know, Stevie Awards, which are customer satisfaction, which we double down on customer satisfaction. We have a chief customer officer with Karen and we just won 15 Stevie Awards, which is about customer satisfaction. So I think there's a slow shift, but there's a real focus on customer centricity for us. The velocity will get there, but if you put the customer at the center, like we do, that's a winning strategy. Yeah, well, yeah. We know Karen Kintas quite well, you know, culture and working with the customers, you know, quite do. You talked about the portfolio of companies in Dell. We know Dell Boomi quite well. We've done their event in the team real well. And, you know, VMware's no slouch in the industry. No slouch. I've had one of the pleasures of my career is, you know, I started working with VMware when they were like a hundred person company to watch them grow. And Pat Gelsinger, I think was just named like the number one, number two, you know, CEO to work for, you know, by employees from Glassdoor. So, you know, no slouch on the bench of families. So congratulations to the Dell family on all that. Thank you very much. All right, well, very exciting. Joe Batista, thank you so much for joining me here at the WTG Transform 2019. Pleasure to catch up with you. I appreciate the opportunity. All right, so we're here with customers, the executives and digging into all the industry trends. Of course, check out the cube.net for where we will be and thank you as always for watching the cube.