 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at EMC World 2016. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and expect to see them as I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of Silicon Angle. And we have a great panel of guests here talking about the total customer experience, changing the game on using data and technology to wow customers. Our guests include Bev Krayer, who's the VP of Data Center Group at GM Storage, at Intel, Karen Quintos, the CMO of Dell, and Carolyn Muse, who's the VP of Total Customer Experience at EMC. Welcome to theCUBE, thank you for joining us. So one of the things that we're really passionate about is new experiences, and this is something that we're seeing with mobile, iPhone back in the day, still a teenager, but with cloud, you're seeing words like agility. You're hearing with speed, data-driven, mobile first, video first, now we're seeing people talking about engagement, cognitive systems of intelligence, insights. These are new opportunities for marketers and professionals to provide value. So one of the things I want to chat with you guys is that value proposition that's evolving, that the consumers want, your customers' customers are changing some of the ways they practice. So Bev, you're at Intel, we have EMC, we have Dell here, Dell and EMC are coming together, Intel is the center of all this. Talk about your relationship with EMC and Dell, and how do you guys work together? Because you have joint customers, but the customer wants one unified experience. So we've been in partnership with Dell and EMC for a long, long time, and a lot of the work that we do with them is really understanding our shared customers, understanding where it is that we're going together, and building the next generation architecture that's actually going to solve those problems. Right now we're working really closely with EMC, and we did on the flash work, and a flash is huge here at the show this week, and so we worked really closely with EMC to make sure that the systems, the CPUs, the 3D NAND, and all of the technologies that we have coming forward are there and available, and actually solve those end customer problems. We've been doing the same thing with Dell for a long time as well, and we expect that partnership to continue moving forward. Karen, I want to ask you, because Dell has had a longstanding experience with social data, listening to customers, and you have a lot of best practices, but on stage yesterday, Joe Tucci, current chairman and CEO of EMC, and then Michael came on, they talked about the industrial revolution concept that we're seeing now, a complete sea change of how the relationship between the consumer, customer, and all the way through to the vendors and suppliers are changing. What, and you have done millions and millions of interactions with customers, but yet it's going to change again. What's your thoughts on this, and how are you guys using the data, these interactions, because it's a virtual experience, it's physical, that's information, do you pile it up, do you come back to it, what are some of the things that you've done? Well, you know, there's no question that the way customers, whether they're consumers or even CIOs are the largest customers, our largest customers, there's no question they are changing the way they're finding out about products and solutions. I mean, the statistic that 70% of CIOs are learning about our products and our solutions before they even want a Dell account rep to come and call on them. So this age of the customer, this all digital world is dramatically changing how and where we engage with our customers. I think Dell, and what you heard yesterday from Michael on stage is so uniquely positioned because we still have a consumer business. And we have a very, very large, you know, G500 business. EMC brings even more strength than kind of that upper end. And I think we're seeing through technology that these worlds of kind of CIO by day, consumer by night are absolutely going away. And people are bringing their own devices. They want a partner like Dell to know who they are and where they are and what they want to learn about on their terms. And when we have all of this rich customer data that we can stitch together, it gives us a incredibly unique opportunity to talk to them. And one of the things that you guys have done at Dell with you has obviously been following Michael's so his whole career is he pioneered the direct business model. Now the internet and digital is the ultimate direct business model. You're going direct to the consumer online. And so as that evolved, and also Dell's also done well in the enterprise sales force. So how does direct on the internet relationships and sales, direct sales come together? What are some of the experience that you guys have done? Share with the folks some of the things that you can, that's been a best practice for Dell. Well, I think you talked about it, right? Well, we have a fast-growing channel business. Our direct business has been kind of quarter to our heritage. I mean, we have been in the social media, idea storm crowd sourcing type of engagement with our customers for well over eight to 10 years now. I think frankly the rest of the world is kind of catching up to the fact that you can get instant feedback on a product, a solution, a message, a new offer instantaneously and your ability to take that and mine through that data. Figure out what parts of the conversations you care about because there's a lot of conversations that are out there and what big data does in our all-digital world is help you prioritize the ones that matter. The ones that are top of mind with customers, the ones that you can turn into insights, ones you can push back into product groups, into the marketing teams across the board to do that and that's the world we've been living in for a while. Carol, I want to ask you because EMC has changed over the years and this is your latest annual report, Total Customer Experience. It's got some great charts in there. It's good literature. It's physical, trees were killed. I'm sure there's an online version but EMC has evolved as a company themselves to a federation prior to the merger announcement it's only going to become more of a focus conglomerate with Dell Technologies. You guys had to have present a unified front with Total Experience because you had VC over here, you had EMC and as you've grown, Jeremy Burton and the team has been thinking about big data for a while. Cloud meets big data as one of the themes years ago I remember. So what have you guys done with data? What is EMC doing with the Total Customer Experience and how has that helped customers? So what we've done with the program in the last couple of years is we've actually expanded our focus. Initially as the industry and our customers have always looked at it, how do you measure quality of products and services? But really what we do is we broaden the scope to say we want to focus on four key attributes. Voice of our customers, the voice of our partners, the voice of our field together with that operational quality data and look at it from a holistic end to end approach and understand how we leverage big data to drive innovation in technology, processes and governance as well as the culture and the employee engagement. And it's really about our model is we look at three things. The three, engage, enable and evolve. Technology, process and people, always. And that'll enable you to be able to provide the relevant value add solutions and services that our customers want. You heard today on the stage they announced the VMAX All Flash Array. But I'll highlight it, that customers helped us drive the development of that product. Ease of use, consumability, value add, optimal cost, efficiency at scale. The model of the way in which we consume technology will continue to evolve. And I believe that our program will enable us to continue to drive those improvements at every step. And it's really about the quality of every interaction with our customers, personalized based on their experience. You guys have been very successful. Congratulations. Bev, we were talking before we went on about total customer experience. Visa v 360 degree view of the customer. So I want to talk about this concept and I'm not saying mutually exclusive, but one thing we're seeing is there's two types of data. There's passive data and active data, right? So active data would be very engaging. Passive data would be either creepy or magical, depending on how you look at it. We've heard that on the view. But data has to be thought through. So let's talk about what's the difference between total customer experience is and this whole 360 degree view of the customer. And then Karen, how do you put it in practice? Because it's table stakes now. What's your thoughts? So that we were talking earlier, my sense of it is when you talk about the 360 degree view of the customer, right? It's actually somebody outside looking at the customer all around, right? Where the total customer experience is really having that engagement. And it's the customer's view of you that you're thinking about. And being able to go out, not just to your customer, but to their customer and engage them and enable your customers to create better services and better solutions for their customers. Because that's what keeps that value chain going. Right, so it's a combination of the two that I think is really going to be necessary for us to be successful. If you use the collective intelligence of the data with the 360 degree of the customer, you can create surprises for them and give value, and then they would engage. It sounds magical, Karen. So how do you put this in practice? A lot of marketers are thinking beyond just marketing. They're thinking about how they serve their customers for customer satisfaction, delivery, product sales, to creating a discovery model. This is now the future. How do you execute that? How does someone say, hey, I want to be like Dale, I want to be like EMC at Intel, I want to put some cracks in my company? Yeah, I mean, I'll give you a real live example that we rolled out across our service and support in our marketing teams three, three or four months ago. So, you know, we have this amazing data around our service and support model with our largest customers all the way down to all of these small and medium businesses. We can, through that data, figure out how to proactively fix and address some of our customers' issues before they even know that they have a problem. So one of the issues that we had was hard drive failures. Right? Your hard drive is about to crap out. You need a new hard drive. You need a replacement type of thing. Through our proactive and predictive capabilities, we can actually see that at a customer's environment before they can see it. So not only can we fix it, but then through the efforts of our marketing team, we can actually push a message out to them to say, we fixed this for you, John. We did it two months ago. You need to be thinking about, you know, in another kind of couple of months, how do you do that? So we take that personalized service and support data combined with our personalized marketing engine and push a personalized message out to millions of customers, basically telling them about their unique experience. In the past, what we would have done is done a Blitzkrieg email mass marketing that nobody ever opens to millions of customers. And now when you can make that personal and you can put a lot of their kind of data behind it and you can proactively fix something, that's true value for our customers. I want to get your guys' thoughts on this because you guys are experts. We have experience with real examples of success, but as we evolve fast, we hear Michael up there, it's going to be a 10X every five years kind of improvement, kind of a Moore's Law twist, if you will, on just overall the macroeconomic and user experience. What is the expectation of users today? Because you're seeing things like OmniChannel, which you're kind of pointing out, the social data. What are the expectations of customers? In these shifts, the expectations change. And so your job is to figure out how to align with that. And what are some of the big things that you guys see on the expectations? I don't know if the expectations have changed. I think the basic fundamentals still really matter. The difference is they're coming at you in an unbelievable fast pace. Our customers still expect us to deliver great products, make them easy to use, take the complexity out of, give me a great sales and support experience. Now how you do it is different. You do it in an all digital world, you do it in an all mobile world. But the basic fundamentals around what they expect from a company, I think part of the job of great customer experience, chief customer officers and marketers is to stay grounded on that, guide the organization that way, and help figure out how to enable it in new innovative ways in terms of how customers want to consume it. I don't know what, Evan. I'm with Karen on this one. I think the fundamentals are pretty fundamental. Ultimately what our customers need from us is how do we help them serve their customers better? How do we help them grow their revenue? How do we help them grow their business? That's ultimately what it's about and it requires that simplicity, that ease, that customer interaction, that expectation. I think the big difference and the speed difference is really that there's a ton more innovation happening out there and we have to figure out much better ways of actually integrating that innovation in a much faster pace. That's, I think, our challenge, right? All three of us have that challenge. Caroline, your thoughts? So I totally agree with all of it. I think that the framework is basically the same but as they talked about, it's really about enabling them. One thing I see as a true differentiator is we need to leverage customers more to drive our product solution and service portfolio, not opposed to we develop and then push it to the customer. They're actually, we should have trusted partnerships, very open, let them drive our business, spend more, it's more optimal, your OPEX will be more efficient, the platforms will be more consumable and in alignment with what their requirements are and it's a win-win-win for everybody. So I mean, I think that one of the key things is really building those trusted relationships and leveraging your customers to drive that transformation. As leaders in the industry in this area, how do you guys vet signal from the noise relative to the tools and technologies because I hear this all the time, there's a lot of promises out there, whether it's from an agency or from a tool supplier, platform supplier, oh we have something covered, it's going to be the next best thing since sliced bread. So you also have to balance innovating on the technology, mentioned analytics and yet delivering in real time some of these new experiences and to win the customers so they're not disrupted. How do you guys handle that and what advice would you give to the folks watching around how to, I'll say vet, but figure out where the BS is, basically. I think you have to have a culture where you stay true to kind of your core business and your core capabilities but you also have to have a culture of you got to be able to test and try some things. And I work very closely with our CIO in testing and trying a lot of the new marketing tools. So there is not an area that is exploding more than the area of ad tech. I mean, there used to be thousands of customers, thousands of vendors a month are coming on the scene. And how do you vet the ones that can really help? How do you create an environment where you can test and try throughout the ones that aren't really going to help you, keep the ones that are, figure out how to scale and integrate it. So I think it's really a combination of both of those things. I think they absolutely agree and the other thing I think is to continuously invest and be humble to yourself. I think you definitely need to try things but you need to learn to feel fast and know when to wrap it up and know when to continue to move forward. And I think- Like control POC- Exactly, pilot it, prove it. I always say nail it, then scale it. Prove it, then scale it. So don't go big because you might have to go home. So definitely go small, prove it. And then go big, that's right. That's when the adoption will grow. When you prove it out, people will come. And I think that that's one of our key options. My final question for you guys is really more about the future of the interactions of collaboration. They talk about collaboration software. You guys are three different companies, soon to be one company and then Intel. Collaboration is also the heart of how customers are interacting with brands and data. And so the barriers are kind of breaking down on the silos. As pros, how do you guys look at this collaborative environment to execute on the behalf of the customer experience? No, I'll give you another data point on our end. I think sharing our products and our solutions are still hugely important and how you do that in an all-digital, all-social way really, really matters. The other thing that we have found is there's still a human element to every customer that you do business with. I mean, we tell our teams that all the time. Behind every customer is a human. Behind every human is a face, right? And that's how you need to be thinking about it. We have found recently that the data that we have shared via social on our corporate responsibility platforms, platforms like sustainability, platforms like women in business, platforms like entrepreneurship, platforms like pediatric cancer that we can solve through our high-performance compute cluster. That content is shared, 5x, the more traditional product and solutions content. So sharing is huge. Sharing is huge, but there's a human side to sharing. It has to matter. It has to matter, right? Yeah, exactly. And it's not just relevant to the business, but it's actually relevant to the people. This is what we're seeing. What we're seeing is that it actually has to matter to the experience, right? The individual, the human, is who uses this stuff in the end, right? And if we're not actually engaging that human, right? If we're not actually talking about and dealing with those human problems like the pediatric cancer, like the cancer cloud, like the Fitbit, you know, there's all kinds of ways in which you engage humans, but ultimately that's really what it's about. I would say the other thing is leverage the culture and the technical expertise around the globe. None of us have all the answers. I don't know, I'm good, I'm not that good. So I think that what you need to do is understand and culture comes into play, employee engagement, statistically engaged employees, double digit improvements. They do, they make improvements because they want to. Great work connections and community and sharing. Not because you're paying them to, but because they want to, because it's the right thing to do. They raise their hand every day. Yeah, that's fun. Ladies, thanks so much for sharing the insight here and total customer experience and using technology to wow customers really appreciate your time. Thank you. And extracting the signals from the noise. The technology's changing and so are the experiences for customers and using technology is a great way to do that. Thanks so much. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE here live at EMC World 2016. We'll be right back after this short break. Looking back at the history of Dell, personal computers,